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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #239 - Jayriding

03.5.14

One or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives
for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities,
and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the
encounters they find there.

It's a bike ride.

Started by user nathansnider and user theroyalacademy.

It meets every Wednesday at 8:30pm
at California Donuts #21.
We ride at 9pm.
We'll endeavor to return before the last red line trains (around midnight),
but often it is not possible.

On this bike ride, you might expect:
- inconvenient passageways
- oblique strategies
- Oulipian constraints
- disorientation
- reorientation
- "cover" versions of other people's rides, performed with amateurish enthusiasm
- amateurish enthusiasm
- pool halls
- bowling alleys
- karaoke
- geocaching
- full moon picnics
- traffic median tea parties
- rivers that no longer exist
- smell tourism
- Couchwick v2.0

Furthermore:
- usually 20-35 miles
- usually some hills
- a medium pace (probably not for beginners; certainly not a hustle)
- few stops, short stops
- but we're not in a rush; we don't need to run every light
- victory donuts!

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This week:

Jayriding

In an effort to keep all of us safe, the good folks in charge of traffic tickets decided a little while back that it was time to crack down on the public safety scourge that is... jaywalking. Yes, for too long has the unruly mob has felt it their right to cross the cars' thoroughfares just any dang time and place they please! Don't they see the red hand flashing? It's flashing for you, pedestrian, because it cares about your safety. Otherwise you might hurt someone by gently slamming your body into one rapidly moving metal object or another.

Now, of course, "jaywalking" itself is a social construct of relatively recent advent. Before the motor age, streets were open to all. Pedestrians ambled, horses trotted, trolleys rolled, vendors hawked, children played. "Traffic" in the modern sense of congestion was not really spoken of because "traffic" was the nature of street life: it was a shared space of social traffic. Speeds were slow. Not that accidents didn't happen, but they could generally be legitimately called "accidents" rather than being simple physical realities of weight and velocity differentials that make most of today's automotive incidents hardly "accidental": the danger is by design. The only way to avoid those "accidents" is to avoid the offending vehicles (or, you know, remove said vehicles; just a suggestion). So the motor interests needed to reframe the problem. It wasn't that a dangerous new interloper was intruding upon a traditionally shared space, but that the other users of that space hadn't adjusted to the realities of modern times. They were hicks, bumpkins, yokels -- or, in the parlance of the time, "jays." And they walked like it.

In retrospect, however, we can view these "jaywalkers" as the ones who really knew what was up. The roads were theirs as much as anyone's, were a common good. They didn't talk about "complete streets," like the forward-thinking among us do now, because they didn't know any other kind. They were just "streets." We don't, however, want to over-romanticize the past. People also at one time used to throw their garbage more or less out their windows into those same streets. Some amount of a social contract in regards to the good of the individual versus the good of the group is necessary for safety, for hygiene, for justice. But we do think it might be worthwhile to reclaim the sobriquet of jay from its tarnished roots. Since that original implication of country backwardness is largely absent from its modern meaning, can we not do away with its negative connotation altogether? In short, if not following motor logic makes one a "jay," maybe being a jay isn't so bad after all?

Which isn't to say we're going to ride all rebelliously-like this week, breakin' the law, breakin' the law. No, we all know that isn't our style (and also doesn't really accomplish anything). But what if "jay" came to mean someone who (respectfully) disregards an illogical system or way of thinking? And, you know, a good bike ride is often a process of getting it wrong in all the right ways. Cycling in this city is supposedly dumb. It's supposedly crazy. Or, if you do ride, you're supposed to stick to the bike lanes, or the river and beach paths, or CicLAvia. Well, once again this week we'll prove our utter stupidity as we twist and wind our way down the city's streets.

(~32 miles; little elevation; no off-roading)

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All cities are geological;
you cannot take three steps
without encountering ghosts
bearing all the prestige of their legends.

Posted by theroyalacademy

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