Hadas Madrinas en Bici Programming Guide

I am very proud and excited to present the Hadas Madrinas en Bici (Fairy Godmothers on Bike) Programming Guide. This is a programming guide to the big sister/little sister program stared by the Carishina en Bici collective in Quito Ecuador. This past summer, with the help with a grant from the Davis Projects for Peace Foundation, I was able to return to Quito to help work with this project, and I am really proud of what Carishina en Bici has created. This guide is intended for any type of organization/collective/non-profit/group of friends who sees a need in their community to mentor inexperienced cyclists, and is looking for a structure or an idea of how to fill that need.

The basic idea of the program is to pair together one experienced big-sister cyclist with an inexperienced (ranging from no experience on a bike to recreational biker) little sister cyclist. Ideally they will live in similar parts of the city and will work together weekly on everything from learning how to ride a bike to learning how use their bike as a form of transportation. All you need is some time, volunteers, and people who want to learn!

In the guide I wrote about how we have organized this project, but there are many ways to organize this, and we would love to answer questions and hear your feedback. We treat this project as a constant work in progress, and we’re always working to improve the structure. So far this project has had some pretty incredible results, and created many more confident female cyclists in Quito. We think that working in pairs creates a sustainable, decentralized project that can be replicated in a variety of contexts.

Please help spread the word, and circulate the guide to anyone you know who might be interested!

Hadas Madrinas Guide english

Video by LaPulgada of El Sur en Bici, Quito, Ecuador

This last summer I made a video and wrote a blog post about the geography of Quito. I talked a bit about how a mountain in the middle of Quito acts as both a physical and social barrier between the north and the south.  In the past a lot of bike organizing in Quito was concentrated in Northern Quito, but in the last year a new collective called El Sur en Bici (The South by Bike) have been organizing a variety of events around biking. They organize rides, bike polo, and alley-cats always with an eye to being as inclusive across race, gender, age, and class as possible. They are an awesome group doing amazing organizing to help bridge the geographic gap in bike organizing in Quito. This video shows off what they are doing, and how much fun they’re having.

A Weekly Bike Pilgrimage

There are many things I respect and admire about the bike community in Jogja. I think the bike community here is a great example of a democratic, diverse, and horizontal bike culture. There are all sorts of bike communities, all doing their own thing, but occasionally they’ll come together for simple events – such as a weekly bike pilgrimage to Warung Ijau.

Every Sunday morning, starting around 5 am, the cyclists begin the slow journey uphill from Jogja towards the Volcano Merapi in search of snacks. Well, not just in search of snacks, but towards one snack shack – Warung Ijau. Some groups bike on the main roads, others through the small towns, and others take a winding network of dirt paths and single tracks uphill the 15 km to one tiny snack shack. Between 5 AM and 8 AM hundreds and hundreds of cyclists bike through to eat boiled bananas, and fried tempeh among other nomz. After stopping at Warung Ijau some people turn back to Jogja, and others continue further on towards other bike adventures.

The coolest thing about Warung Ijau (because I need a good reason to get up at 5 AM in the morning – and the snacks are good, but not 5 AM good) is to see all the different types of people and bikes there. Although there are many diverse and distinct bike communities in Jogja doing their own thing, at some point everyone will end up biking to Warung Ijau.

I think having events like this are important for bike culture in any city. I’ve been trying to think of examples from where I’ve  organized around biking (Minneapolis and Quito) that are similar to the experience of Warung Ijau – an event where everyone from the various bike groups show up, but so far I haven’t been able to think of anything that expresses this same experience. The Ciclopaseo is Quito is the closest I can think of – but a lot of active people in the bike community don’t attend the Ciclopaseo. The Greenway in Minneapolis is another close comparison – it’s a space where all cyclists bike through at least once in a while, but it’s not the same experience when it’s a place, not an event. I’ve been spending a lot of time recently trying to think about how to replicate this type of informal event in other bike communities, because I think it’s really awesome. I’ll let you know if I think of something helpful.

Anyways – this is a very short video I made this morning while I was sitting on the sidewalk eating some boiled bananas and watching the cyclists go by.

Ora Masalah and Jogja Last Friday Night Ride

This last weekend was full of lots of cool bike stuff going on.  The only bad news was that some of the events overlapped so I couldn’t make it to everything (#watsonfellowshipproblems). Friday night I got to check out the infamous Jogja Last Friday Night Ride.  The last Friday of every month there is a huge ride through Jogja with around 1000 people attending each month.  The route changes, but it always starts by the stadium and ends by the Kraton.  Now this might sound familiar, and remind you of Critical Mass, but the organizers are quick to distinguish the two. As one of the organizers put it (I’m paraphrasing here) – we’re not trying to make a political statement, or make any demands to the government with this ride. We want this space just to be a fun space where people can come enjoy riding their bike. The political stuff is for other spaces, Jogja Last  Friday Night Ride is just to get people out riding.

And they succeed in that goal. The streets were packed, at times making it difficult to move, with tons of people riding bikes and having fun. It was one of the most inclusive bike gatherings I’ve seen. The bikes alone spanned from downhill, fixed gear, restored classic bikes, broken down classic bikes, the largest gathering of tall bikes I’d ever seen, cruisers, low-riders, step-throughs with front baskets, and many more.  The people spanned from tweens to elderly folks (although I would say the majority were closer to the teenage side), and it was cool to see so many people united by enjoying biking. The ride wasn’t characterized by antagonism towards cars, however a group of 1000 people riding through small streets is going to disturb traffic regardless.

Some of the same organizers of Friday’s ride also organized a ride on Sunday. However, this ride was an explicitly political ride as part of the Ora Masalah (No Problem) campaign. The Ora Masalah campaign really kicked off about a month ago in response to a change in policies with the new mayor of Jogja. The previous mayor was a big bike advocate and did a lot to advance both biking infrastructure and culture in the city. He made every Friday “Bike to Work” Day and all government employees had to arrive to work by bike. He also created bike boxes at intersections around the city, and took significant steps towards bike lanes. But when the new mayor came into office he stopped all of this progress. He stopped Bike to Work day, and has started paving over previous bike lanes and bike boxes.

In response to the new mayor, the bike community in Jogja began the Ora Masalah campaign.  The slogan of the campaign – No Problem – is meant to keep the campaign on a positive note to say to the mayor and the government that we don’t need you. We can do this on our own. Sunday was the national Youth Pledge Day, celebrating when in 1928 a group of youth declared Indonesia to be one motherland, one nation, and one language during Dutch colonialization (which is problematic in its own way considering that Indonesia is a nation of countless languages, and ethnicities, and the idea of an Indonesian motherland is also tricky but that is not really the point…). So a group of cyclists went for a bike ride with banners that said “I pledge by Bike, No Problem.”  The idea is that this group is going to ride on every national holiday and co-opt slogans from that holiday.  We met up, went for a ride around Jogja, stopped at the Mayor’s house to show him that the cycling community is strong and watching him, and all in all had a good time.

There are a lot of things that I can appreciate about seeing the contrast between Last Friday Night Ride and the Ora Masalah ride. I often think there are three main ways that biking can help people empower themselves (well really there are countless ways, but I’m going to divide this into three main categories): personal, political, and economic empowerment. And sometimes these things need to be explicitly worked at separately, even if in the end these are all inextricably linked.  So even if you have a fun Friday night ride, I still think it’s personally empowering to people, and can get them excited about biking just because it’s fun. Then the political and economic stuff might come later, or vice versa. But you might get more people involved at the beginning if it’s not explicitly political.

I think it’s important to have events that attract a diverse group to participate, perhaps because an event doesn’t have its politics spelled out, because I think that having a diverse group together participating makes for a more deeply democratic space. One of the organizers and I chatted for a while about the need for both radical and, as he termed it, “polite” organizing in the bike community. I think in a lot of ways it has to do with getting as many people as possible involved in bike organizing with the ultimate goal of making safer, open, and democratic streets. I think you just have to approach it from lots of different angles to make that happen because each perspective might be doing something different or better or worse, but ultimately is something we can all learn from.

Ok. So that’s my bike sermon of the day. If you have thoughts on that I would really love to hear what you have to say.