Addicted to darkness

Ever since my Down Low Glow lights arrived, I've become completely addicted to nighttime cruising. I've always been a night person, and I love being outside at night, particularly on nights like tonight, when the air is like silk and the stars are out clearly, even in the city.

Night riding is completely different from daytime riding, and not just because it's dark. You see things in the city at night that you can't see when the sun is out. It's been my experience that most cities have two populations -- the folks who inhabit the office buildings by day and retreat to their pockets of suburban safety during the night, and the people for whom the city isn't even open until about 9 or 10 p.m. That's a broad-brush statement, of course, so please don't take offense.

I recently moved to Albany, NY, a small city with fewer than 100,000 people. Despite its size, the center of the city and the neighborhoods immediately around it resemble similar spots in most of the larger cities I've lived in. Folks sit out on stoops in the warm night breeze, relaxing with a drink and grilling mouth-watering food on small hibachis or on grills much too large for their porches. Professionals, many still dressed in their work clothes, walk dogs of all sizes, many of whom bark in what I believe to be admiration as my brightly lit bike passes.

Tonight I rode to Buckingham Lake, a small pocket of countryside right in the heart of Albany. Nestled at the end of several city streets, Buckingham Lake (which is really a small pond) has been a relaxing oasis for Albany residents since the colonial era. I went there for the first time the other day. In the sunshine, the lake was filled with ducks and geese. Mountain bikers rode around the one-mile trail that surrounds the lake, and families of all sizes and kinds walked along the shore or played at the playground.

At night, it was very different.

For one thing, it wasn't as dark as I'd hoped. There were quite a few lights on tall lamp posts around the edge of the lake, and the streets on both sides were lit up, too. I hopped on the gravel trail and passed two high-school-age couples walking the trail and -- to judge by the smell -- smoking pot. A businessman stood on the playground in front of an expensive car, talking on his cell phone. One picnic table was occupied by four or five people talking and laughing. Around the first bend in the trail, the light poles stopped and I got a bit of darkness. The far side of the pond was the brightest area, and then the trail dropped down a few feet to kiss the water. Here I actually needed my headlight to see well enough to avoid a late-night swim.

Leaving the lake, I rode around the circular roadway the surrounds New York State's Harriman Office Complex, and then headed over to cruise around the University of Albany. Given the gorgeous weather, the campus was surprisingly quiet. Maybe everyone was studying for finals. I did pass one large group waiting for the bus, and heard several comments about my glowing Xtracycle. ("That's sweet!" "That's f***king hot!" "Cool bike!" "You're going the wrong way!" That last one turned out to be true, but only for a few hundred feet.)

On the way back to my house I passed three young guys crossing West Lawrence. "That's a hot bike," one of them said to his friend. "I like your bike, man!" the friend yelled, raising one fist in the air. I thanked him and headed home.

I'm not a cool guy. Despite having several careers that people might consider cool -- including salsa and funk musician, radio DJ, foreign correspondent and hip hop label producer -- those cool vibes have never really rubbed off on me. I just got my first tattoo (a chainwheel with a peace sign in the middle), but I still look more like the Pillsbury Doughboy than a rebel without a cause. But at night, on the Xtracycle with the Down Low Glow, even I get a little taste of the hip life. And I'm not gonna lie, I dig it. I mean c'mon -- who wouldn't like to ride around with people actually cheering for your bicycle?

So I highly recommend some nighttime cruising on your bicycle. Just make sure you've got a lot of lights, and choose your route well. And be careful -- once you get out there at night a few times, you'll become addicted, too.

Jason Crane is a union organizer, jazz broadcaster and action dad. Find him online at RocBike.com and The Jazz Session.

Cycling toward the future

(Originally posted at FortOrangeCycling.com)

So.

Over the next weeks and months, I'm probably going to write here about my wife's and my attempt to get back to the values we started with as a married couple. Ever since we had our two lovely boys, I think we've been sliding away from the course we had charted as we are being slowly but surely co-opted by modern cultural "norms."

For months now, I've had this really positive, hard-to-pin-down feeling that something good is coming. I told Jen then other day that I feel like I'm simultaneously riding many tributaries on the way toward a great river, and that once I hit the main body of water things will be clearer and brighter and better. I think the way to get there -- the way to find the river -- is to take intentional action, not just to be swept along by the current.

One intentional action we're going to take is to severely limit our car usage on the way to eliminating it entirely. I have a car that's provided by my work (as I've written about here and here) and we also own a 2001 Subaru Forester that's a year from being paid off. I think we're going to get rid of our car and park my work car except when I need it for work, which is very seldom. In addition to the workers I represent in downtown Albany, I also represent two hotels in Schenectady. I discovered that it's a fairly easy bike trip to Schenectady if you go straight there, so that cuts out another need for the car. And I can take my weekly trip to Saratoga Springs by train and then walk a mile to the office.

Anyway, I don't have this all fleshed out in my mind yet. But good things are afoot. Positive change is happening. Life is starting to come into focus in a way it hasn't before. And bicycling is part of this new world.

Whenever I want to remind myself about the beauty of the bicycling lifestyle, I ride my bike. And I watch this:

More on unions and personal transportation

Once you start thinking about a topic, you often see it pop up more and more often around you. For example, I rarely noticed cyclists until I became one, then I started seeing them everywhere -- on the streets, in movies, in ads, etc.

In a recent post here on Veloquent, I wrote about my life as a union organizer and the intersection of that work with cycling. I also mentioned that I thought it was cool to strike a blow for environmental justice at the same time as I'm working toward economic justice. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not ascribing any huge impact to my decision, but I've come to believe that most successful change starts out locally anyway.

Today, writer and labor commentator Jonathan Tasini wrote a piece on "Clean Air and Labor Rights" that talks about a combined campaign for air quality and unionization at the Port of Los Angeles. While this campaign will still end up with drivers, not cyclists, it's an important step in the labor/environmental alliance.

This morning, I watched a short film called Matamoros: The Human Face of Globalization, which was on this month's DVD from Iron Weed Films, a wonderful progressive film club that I just joined. The documentary showed scenes from the maquilladora zone in Mexico, where hundreds of U.S. companies produce goods with cheap labor and little or no environmental standards. One of the chief products? Car parts.

Yesterday, I rode my bike to a union rally at Albany's Channel 13, where the workers have been without a contract for 6 months. One of my coworkers asked my if I used the bike for work. I said yes, and he decided right there on the spot to start taking the bus for his Albany shop visits. "Most of my members take the bus to work, and there's no reason I shouldn't do the same thing," he said. It serves two purposes -- he'll see many of his members on the commute, and he'll also be using one less car for that part of his job. He also mentioned getting a bike, and I'll certainly encourage that.

All of this to say that I think there's a real space for creative work where labor rights and transportation choices meet. My experience in Rochester was that the majority of cyclists were urban poor, and that seems to be holding true here in Albany. Many of those folks are among the workers we'll be trying to organize in the coming years. It's also the case that many of our members get to work without a car because they don't have -- or can't afford -- their own car. Why not do something to convert some of these folks into cyclists?

It seems to me that the more people start to broaden their view of economic justice -- for example, connecting petroleum use with environmental and economic exploitation -- the more we'll be creating a real labor movement in this country. Given that most of the newly organized workers these days are immigrants from countries where bicycles are more common than they are here in the U.S., my guess is that introducing personal transportation as a topic will be fairly easy.

Is this the answer to all our problems? No. But in a world where transportation is a large piece of the race to the bottom that American and multinational companies are engaged in, it's time for a real conversation about how to make smart choices for the good of our brothers and sisters around the world.

Rock (Me) Hard Place

Last summer, I became a bike commuter. I'm an organizer for the labor union UNITE HERE during the day, and I host a jazz podcast by night. I was covering the Rochester International Jazz Festival last summer. Parking ain't great for the festival, so I decided to do it by bike. That was so much fun that I just kept pedaling through the summer and into the fall, when I was transferred from Rochester to Albany.

Let's take it as read that very, very few people who do what I do for a living do it without a car. For front-line organizers (which I am not these days), that's almost unthinkable, because so much of the work involves visiting people's homes. Except in the most densely packed urban areas, doing that work without a car is just too slow. In fact, cars are so much a part of the job that our union provides them to us. As the organizing director for upstate New York, I was able to bike a fair amount and resorted to the car when necessary.

Now, though, I'm doing a different kind of organizing, mostly focused on strengthening our existing union shops among Albany's hotels, restaurants and cafeterias. Most of my hotels and other shops are packed into a very small downtown area. I live about 2 miles outside downtown. It's eminently bikeable.

But I still have a company car.

When I was transferred here, I was living 40 miles away in Saratoga Springs, and that -- combined with a wider turf to cover -- made the car a necessity. Since then, my area of responsibility has been changed to be almost exclusive to downtown Albany. I can see some of my shops from the house I'm renting, for Pete's sake!

But I still have a company car.

Last week, though, I decided that the company car would be just as wonderful parked in the driveway as it is on the road. I got back on the Xtracycle and did my first day of bike commuting since November 2007. (You can read about it here.) It was a blast! I'm still figuring out how to dress nicely (which I now am required to do) while keeping to the cycling lifestyle. My "commute" is less of a commute than a route or circuit. I travel at various times to different hotels and then return to my home office. So I have to wear my snazzy clothes while biking, because I have nowhere to change when I arrive at my destination. Thus far, it hasn't been much of a problem, and I'm looking forward to the warm weather, when I can combine my bowtie with my bike helmet for that true wanker look.

As it turns, out, I'm not really caught between a rock and a hard place after all. I can do my job effectively and efficiently while not only striking a blow for workers but also for their environment. And, unlike most union organizers, I can probably do it while getting healthier, not fatter and closer to a heart attack.

Is this a bold new chapter in the Labor Cycling movement? Stay tuned!

Jason Crane is a union organizer, jazz broadcaster and action dad. He is the founder of RocBike.com and FortOrangeCycling.com, and also host and producer of The Jazz Session.