In mid-September, Mark Bittman announced in his New York Times opinion column that he was leaving the Times to join a startup. As he wrote:
Here are those details: Bittman has joined Purple Carrot, an already up-and-running meal delivery service based in Boston. It's like Blue Apron, or Plated, but vegan. Subscribers get the recipes and all the ingredients for two or three meals a week. The company went public Monday with the news that Bittman was joining, and also took the opportunity to announce that it's expanding its service to the West Coast.
I met Bittman at the house he's renting in Berkeley, Calif., to find out why he was leaving the Gray Lady for the Purple Carrot. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Q. So you are joining a startup -- can you give me the elevator pitch?
A. Yeah, this is a meal kit company with a mission. And the mission is not to convert everyone to veganism, but to expose people to plant-based foods and allow people to eat plant-based foods more easily. My sense -- and this is not market research, it's me talking -- is that people know they should be eating more plants, and a lot of people don't know how.
If you look at Sunbasket or Blue Apron or any of these meal delivery services -- a lot of it is very much the way I represented cooking for many many years: If you grill a piece of meat and you make a bunch of rice and steam some broccoli and have some salad, you have a pretty easy meal in 20 minutes. Vegan food is more complicated than that. Plant-based food is harder.
Q. When you cook meat, the butcher does your chopping for you ahead of time.
A. Well there is that, you also have this concentrated lump of protein -- you put salt on it and it tastes pretty good. It's hard to say that about tofu. It's very hard to argue that a cauliflower steak is as satisfying as a beef steak. I wouldn't argue it.
Vegan recipes need to be more creative, or complex. Our job is to simplify that complexity so I ship you something that you can put together in half an hour that's vegan, really satisfying, really delicious, that makes you happy.
That's like a 40-story elevator pitch. With a few stops in between.
Purple Carrot
Q. Do you know how many of these meal delivery services there are?
A. There must be like 20 -- do you know?
Q. No, I certainly couldn't name 20. It seems like a big part of finding the winner will be whoever figures out logistics.
A. I think there are multiple winners. Blue Apron is valued at $2 billion -- that makes them a winner. I doubt Purple Carrot is ever going to be valued at anything like that, but I think we are a winner if our customers are happy and we are making some noise as part of the food movement.
Q. At the Times you've been in a position to counsel people through their ecological anxiety about food. I'm wondering if you see this as the next natural extension of that. You've written cookbooks -- you've given political advice -- now the hands-on approach?
A. I hope so. I will keep writing. For instance, we're debating putting nutritional information on the meals, and I don't want to. I'm saying: Look, this food is good for you. If you ate nothing but this food, you would thrive. That's nutrition. Everything else about nutrition is kind of stupid. You don't need to know how much calcium is in your food, you just need good food. We do provide nutritional information right now, but at some point I'm going to have an argument with my partners about that, and I'm going to write a blog post. And that blog post will read like a Times column, is my guess. We're going to be GMO free, not because I feel like GMOs are so scary or horrible but because it's not unreasonable to be GMO free. And I would blog about that.
I hope we can put good food in the hands of more people and I can talk about it. So maybe it's the best of both worlds.
Q. There is a big hurdle between reading a recipe in the Times and going out to buy the ingredients to put it together.
A. Yeah, when you talk to people who have ordered meal kits, they do complain about the packaging, and as soon as they get over that they say it's unbelievable. I didn't have to think about it, I didn't have to shop, I barely had to chop.
Q. That's the pattern? People complain about packaging then rave about convenience?
A. Welllll, a lot of people talk about the packaging. It's a big box, it's undeniable. I don't want to make light of it. When I first sat down with Andy Levitt, our founder, I said, I don't like these meal kits, it's just too much packaging.
Q. I did a little thing about Blue Apron because they have these instructions for how to recycle your packaging. And it's essentially ...
A. Bring it to the dump.
Q. Bingo.
A. I think at launch [on the West Coast] or soon thereafter we are going to include a return label, and it costs you $5 a box to send it back. That is a big loss, but I share recycling with a neighbor, and this is too big to throw away. The ideal, of course, would be to have packaging that you could recycle in your backyard, or that is somehow more compressible so you can fit it into your weekly recycling. There are people making packaging out of mushrooms that you could just put in a pile in your backyard -- when it rains it's gone.
Q. It fertilizes your garden.
A. Or it's dog food. Or it's like a mushroom kit! I don't know.
Q. And maybe if you actually did the energy comparison it might be just as climate friendly to throw it out as it is to mail it back, but there's also the hassle. It doesn't feel good to have this bulky thing and have to break it down.
A. Right. Put a label on that and put it on the porch. That's very convenient. No one has an excuse not to do that. The other argument is that there's less food waste. You are only shipping the amount you are going to cook.
Andy Levitt and Mark Bittman.Purple Carrot
Q. Can you give me the back story of Purple Carrot and how you got involved?
A. Andy Levitt founded it a year ago out of his garage in Boston. He was sitting around readingVB6 and watching Forks Over Knives or whatever, and said this is what I'm doing -- a vegan meal kit company. He found an investor, a guy named Dave Mayer, and Dave came to me and said this looks like it will be up your alley. We had a great meeting and I thought, this really is the right idea. Then Andy and I talked for two hours a day for a week and I said, don't pay me, I'm not ready to leave the Times. That was May and June, and by July, I was really in up to my neck and I told the Times I was going to leave.
Q. I think I've asked this already in a different way, but for my last question: Why leave journalism, the greatest job on Earth?
A. Ha! How much older am I than you? How much longer have I been doing journalism? I do love journalism. And I don't see myself not doing journalism. But I started in 1980. The weekly deadline thing was just hard. I felt like I didn't have anything new to say. When I started I thought there were three things that were low-hanging fruit: antibiotics, marketing junk food to kids, and CAFOs. I did the column for years and none of that changed appreciably.
Q. I do think we are seeing some movement on antibiotics. But maybe the bigger point is that, in journalism, you are sitting on the sidelines, criticizing or observing, and not doing or making.
A. Well, that's how I feel with Purple Carrot. Here's an opportunity to really get the kind of stuff I believe in to the hands of more people. And I do think I made a difference -- I just wanted a steeper learning curve and something different. To be an opinion columnist for the New York Times and lead food writer for the magazine at the same time -- that was great, but five years of that was also plenty.
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Monday, November 2, 2015
Mark Bittman’s plan to make you fall in love with vegan food
Royals win World Series, rally late and beat Mets
by Rikki Jo Holmes |
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NEW YORK (AP) -- They worked all season to take one more step in the World Series.
Eric Hosmer wouldn't wait any longer.
A daring dash by Hosmer tied the score in the ninth, and those bound-and-determined Kansas City Royals rallied yet again to beat the New York Mets 7-2 in 12 innings early Monday for their first championship since 1985.
One agonizing win from ecstasy last year, this time the Royals reign after their latest incredible comeback and a go-ahead hit in Game 5 from Christian Colon, maybe the most unlikely player in uniform.
So go ahead and crown `em, Kansas City! The job is finally done.
"From Day One, there was no doubt in my mind that they wouldn't accomplish it. There was no doubt in their mind that they wouldn't accomplish it," manager Ned Yost said. "It's just a special, special group that doesn't come around very often."
Down 2-0 in the ninth, Kansas City fought back against two of the top arms on the pitching-rich Mets: Matt Harvey and Jeurys Familia. And the Royals won it not with power at the plate but instead an aggressive sprint home by Hosmer on a groundout, a three-run double from Lorenzo Cain, a couple of crucial steals.
Consistent contact, keep the line moving.
"I couldn't have written a better script," Yost said.
That's how Series MVP Salvador Perez and the Royals became the first team since the 2002 Angels to come from behind in all four World Series wins, according to STATS.
That's how they washed out the bitter taste of last year's Game 7 loss to San Francisco at home, an October heartbreak that drove the Royals to their singular focus all season.
Never waver. Win it all. Wipe away the pain.
"Kansas City is No. 1. Who cares about what happened last year?" Perez said.
To get back where they were last fall -- 90 feet from tying the Giants in the ninth inning -- the Royals played more than 50,000 pitches of baseball and flew nearly 30,000 miles while crisscrossing the country.
Now, this group of homegrown favorites who revitalized a floundering franchise, Mike Moustakas and Alex Gordon and Hosmer to name a few, can finally rest and rejoice.
Not to be forgotten, major contributions from new additions assembled by general manager Dayton Moore like Ben Zobrist, Johnny Cueto, Kendrys Morales, Chris Young and Alex Rios.
All together, they take their place in Royals history alongside Hall of Famer George Brett, Bret Saberhagen, Willie Wilson and those unexpected champs from 30 years ago.
"It's kind of good that these guys have their own identity," said Brett, a team executive. "It's going to be fun comparing the two teams."
Next up, Tuesday's parade in Kansas City to celebrate the club's second title, capped with a party at historic Union Station.
With no margin for error, Harvey put the Mets' last hope in his hands and hung on as long as he could. After eight scoreless innings, he pushed to pitch the ninth and finally faltered.
"Obviously, I let my heart get in the way of my gut," manager Terry Collins said. "It didn't work. It was my fault."
New York slugger Yoenis Cespedes exited with knee pain but Curtis Granderson hit a leadoff homer, his third long ball of the Series, and the Mets managed two runs against heavy-hearted Royals starter Edinson Volquez, pitching one day after returning from his father's funeral.
But for these resilient Royals, no deficit was too large, no time too late.
"We never quit. We never put our heads down," Perez said. "We always compete to the last out."
Perez looped a leadoff single in the 12th off losing pitcher Addison Reed, and pinch-runner Jarrod Dyson stole second. One out later, Colon stepped in as a pinch-hitter for his first plate appearance since the regular-season finale Oct. 4.
Hardly rusty, he lined a 1-2 pitch into left-center and pounded his chest at first base.
"He's a winner," Yost said.
Alcides Escobar added an RBI double, and Cain's bases-loaded double off Bartolo Colon broke it open.
Royals reliever Luke Hochevar, drafted No. 1 overall by the team in 2006, pitched two hitless innings for the win.
All that was left was for Wade Davis to close it out. He threw a called third strike past Wilmer Flores to end it and tossed his glove high in the air as the Royals rushed toward the mound to celebrate.
Out in the Midwest, fireworks popped from Missouri to cities all over Kansas. Thousands of fans crammed into the Power & Light District, partying as though it was New Year's Eve.
At Citi Field, hundreds of Royals fans dressed in blue descended toward the Kansas City dugout to cheer their champs. Perez received his MVP award after the catcher hit .364.
Later, the Mets came back onto the field to salute a smaller pocket of fans who stuck around for one last chant of "Let's go, Mets!" The team remains without a World Series title since 1986.
It was the eighth comeback victory for Kansas City this postseason, matching a mark also held by the 1997 Marlins and 2002 Angels, STATS said. The tenacious Royals trailed by at least two runs in a record seven of those games -- including when they staved off elimination by overcoming a 6-2 deficit in the eighth inning of an AL playoff game in Houston.
Fired up all night, Harvey was at 102 pitches following a 1-2-3 eighth and stalked briskly back to the dugout with one purpose in mind. There, cameras caught him telling Collins -- in no uncertain terms -- he was going back out for the ninth.
Collins relented, and a huge roar went up as Harvey bounded off the bench and sprinted to the mound, looking for his second complete game in the majors. But he walked Cain on a full-count slider, and Hosmer hit an RBI double.
"I wanted it bad. The way the game was going, the last thing I wanted to do was not finish what I started," Harvey said. "I poured my heart out and gave everything I had."
Harvey was pulled for Familia, and Hosmer advanced on Moustakas' groundout to the right side.
Sound fundamentals, a Royals staple.
So up stepped Perez with the potential tying run 90 feet away, same as last year when he fouled out against Giants ace Madison Bumgarner to end the World Series.
This time, Perez got jammed and hit a slow grounder to third baseman David Wright, who froze Hosmer with a glance and threw across the diamond for the second out.
Hosmer, however, bolted for the plate when Wright released the ball. First baseman Lucas Duda fired wide of catcher Travis d'Arnaud -- a good throw probably would have been in time -- and Hosmer made a headfirst dive home with the tying run.
"As soon as I saw his head turn towards first, I just decided to take a chance," Hosmer said. "It's a lot easier to take a chance when you're up three games to one, so just felt it was the right time."
"There's no fear in anybody on this team," he added.
Hosmer was greeted by excited teammates, while Familia was saddled with his third blown save of the Series, though two were the result of shaky defense.
"They definitely put their foot on the gas the entire series on the basepaths, and this is just another example," Wright said.
TRAINER'S ROOM
Cespedes fouled a pitch off the top of his left kneecap in the sixth and crumpled to the dirt in pain. He couldn't even run to first base when he popped out, and was replaced in center field by Juan Lagares.
UP NEXT
In an unusual bit of fortuitous scheduling, the teams open next season with two interleague games at Kansas City.
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Helping ‘economic migrants’ could help stop others becoming ‘refugees’
With the prevalence of reports documenting the worrying conditions faced by individuals within Eritrea, and the huge numbers leaving the country, one might ask: who remains in the country and why?
Conversations with colleagues and friends within Eritrea last year often turned to people discussing why they had decided not to leave. For many, their rationale was simple: because somebody they knew already had. Those who had left constituted the “lungs” whose remittances kept those within the country alive. The question then is what would happen if that flow dried up.
All of their dependants, whether brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children, friends and wider relatives, would have to rethink the feasibility of remaining in Eritrea. Many reasoned that the only solution would be to themselves cross the border and leave their country. The country of 6.7 million is located in the Horn of Africa.
For many reasons, leaving Eritrea is an intimidating prospect. Every stage of the onward journey carries danger, and no certainty of employment. Those who leave Eritrea forfeit their automatic right to return and their rights to assets within the country. It potentially places their relatives and friends at risk of being accused by the government of assisting their escape.
For others, love for their country runs deep and they do not wish to abandon it after its hard-fought struggle for independence. Their desire to stay put is nonetheless linked to the ability of others around them to move.
Beyond the contribution that gold and mining make to the Eritrean economy, the World Bank says that “economic conditions remain challenging”. Government policies have impoverished those surviving in Eritrea without external support. These include:
Many of the those individuals that are stopped from entering Europe, barricaded in camps in Calais, or ping-ponged between European member states on an increasingly frequent basis, are therefore part of complex transnational coping strategies.
Futility of ‘migrant’, ‘refugee’ debate
A distraction from understanding the problems faced by individuals in Europe and at its frontiers right now has been the obsession with how to categorise them. This is done purely according to their status in the immediate “here and now”.
Why people move is always a mixture of voluntary and involuntary factors. The compartmentalisation of people into economic migrants or refugees therefore obscures the fundamental ways in which these two groups are intimately related.
[pullquote]In Eritrea, 'economic migrants' who leave protect their families from becoming refugees themselves.[/pullquote]
As is so clear in Eritrea, to mitigate against the worst effects of the state and its market, those individuals who can leave become “economic migrants”. What is important is that they do so precisely to protect their families and friends from becoming refugees themselves.
Plans by the EU to reduce the numbers of individuals leaving Eritrea throughdevelopment aid thus epitomises the inability of policymakers to join up the dots between those leaving the country and those staying behind. Proposals such as these are weak for at least two reasons:
Role of remittances
Policies that deny people the opportunity to provide financial support to friends and relatives outside of Europe, by seeing “migrants” and “refugees” as discrete groups of individuals, are self-defeating. We should rather support individuals to work in Europe, thus enabling them to send remittances to those who may not wish to undertake that journey themselves.
Allowing certain individuals to stay in Europe for work prevents whole families having to cross militarised borders, board ramshackle boats or pay huge fares to be smuggled in appalling conditions overland. Remittances provide a lifeline, both to individuals who remain within countries that are experiencing high degrees of violence, persecution and state failure, and for those who wish to remain in refugee camps near their country of origin.
Evidence abounds about the importance of remittances and the value of facilitating these global flows of money. The celebration of remittance economies nonetheless seems to have remained detached in the popular media from the broader debates on migration and asylum.
Remittances are not only quantitatively greater, but also qualitatively more effective at assisting local populations and catalysing their development.
Linking the importance of remittances to the debate about whether people are economic migrants or refugees is critical. Images of young women or men sitting on fences at Melilla or boarding trains in Europe often invoke the label “economic migrant”, as if to dismiss the critical importance of their journeys.
On the contrary, and alongside the fact that on too many occasions this label is wrongly applied instead of granting asylum, in certain situations it is entirely because of these “migrants” that other individuals in their families are not forced to become “refugees”.
Allowing people to come, work and send back remittances preempts the need for more people to leave their homes to escape the devastating effects of war, violence and economic collapse. In building fences, bombing boats and blocking borders, however, we undermine these strategies and contribute towards forcing certain people to leave their countries and claim asylum elsewhere.
Regardless of the labels used, it seems naive and counterproductive not to join these debates and movements together.
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The story of “ghost bikes”: How a bike memorial in St. Louis sparked a global movement
The story of “ghost bikes”: How a bike memorial in St. Louis sparked a global movementby madeleinethomasgrist |
You’ve probably seen a ghost bike. Maybe its skeletal white frame, locked to a street sign on a busy corner, blended into the madness of a hustling urban backdrop. Or perhaps the makeshift memorial emanated its phantomly presence chained to a single lamppost along a lonely country highway. No matter the location, ghost bikes turn an indiscriminate patch of road into a solemn reminder: A cyclist was killed here.
These bikes represent a sobering reality. From 2000 to 2013, rates of commuting via bike have increased more than 100 percent in some parts of the country. Fatalities and injuries have increased, too. In 2013, roughly 48,000 cyclists were injured. More than 740 were killed in crashes with motor vehicles. And that’s just accidents reported to the police. Biking, be it in a metropolis or a whistle stop, can be a continuous flirtation with death if you’re not careful. Cities aren’t off the hook when it comes to making streets co-habitable for both bikes and vehicles. Ghost bikes remind city planners as well as cyclists and drivers that simple mistakes can result in dire consequences.
For those who haven't seen one: A ghost bike is a memorial for a bicyclist who was either killed or seriously hit while riding. The bike is typically put up at or near the site of the accident. Making a ghost bike is pretty simple. Many are resurrected from old junk bikes and stripped of any parts that could be stolen, like cables or breaks. Each memorial is painted white and locked to a street sign at the site of the accident. Ghost bikes often become shrines of sorts, adorned with flowers, votive candles, or other mementos from loved ones or fellow cyclists in tribute.
The very first ghost bike was erected in St. Louis around 2003. According to ghostbikes.org, in 2012 there were thought to be over 630 ghost bikes in more than 200 locations throughout the world, from the Texas Panhandle of Amarillo, Texas, toMinsk, Belarus, in Eastern Europe.
To illustrate how, and just how far, ghost bikes have spread, we talked to some of the major players who helped the movement go viral, and to others with personal accounts of bike accidents or urban cycling experiences. We also crowdsourced photographs of ghost bikes from our Grist readers. The stories (edited and condensed), as well as images from around the world, are below.
St. Louis
In 2003, when Patrick Van Der Tuin was in his mid-20s, he saw a car drift into a bike lane and hit a female cyclist from behind. Her injuries were minor, but the incident stuck with him. The accident was about a block from his home, some place he rode his own bike daily. So he got his hands on a bunch of junk bikes, painted them white, and started combing police reports for locations of bike accidents and fatalities. Originally titled 'Broken Bikes, Broken Lives,' Van Der Tuin’s call for cycling reform across St. Louis sparked the ghost-bike movement. Now 36, he serves as executive director of St. Louis BWorks, a nonprofit that provides free bikes to kids in exchange for learning about bicycle safety and maintenance.
Patrick Van Der Tuin
It could have been any color, but white was more powerful. The first [ghost bike] didn’t last 24 hours; it was taken down.
It's become more acceptable, so we do have a couple that have been up for pushing two years, three years at this point. The families maintain them, which I think is incredible. They were never designed or intended to become permanent memorials, but that’s what those families have turned them into.
The disappointing thing for me was it never became a real tool in St. Louis. Unfortunately, in the last year and a half or so, we have had a horrible rash of fatalities in and around St. Louis. [Ghost bikes] are picking up again.
I don’t think anyone does something like this with the intention of it becoming a model that is repeated and taken around the world on such a grassroots level. I think that’s pretty amazing. I was up in Michigan and I was in what I thought was a very rural area, not anywhere near anything, just camping. I’m driving down the road at 50 miles an hour, this little two-lane road, and my wife is like, 'Did we just pass …?' In the middle of nowhere, there's a ghost bike. I went to New York for a conference and got off the subway, and there's a ghost bike.
I have a Google Alert set up for ghost bikes, and I will literally every morning read of a different city and read about some individual and some horrific accident. I read about accidents that don’t get ghost bikes all the time, too, but the hope is that the families are getting something out of it. I don’t know whether it’s a memorial or a finger to the municipality that doesn’t want to prosecute the driver, but I hope it’s giving them some voice.
L-r, photos by: @Moonbat (253 Broadway in Manhattan); Aengus Anderson (22nd St. and 2nd Ave., Tucson, Ariz.); Kemp Thomas (Baltimore)
Pittsburgh
Broken Lives, Broken Bikes began in St. Louis, but the term ‘ghost bike’ was actually coined in Pittsburgh. Eric Boerer was part of the small group of people who picked up the movement from St. Louis, got it on its feet in Pittsburgh, and kept the momentum running to New York City. Boerer was running a community bike cooperative called Free Ride at the time. He and his crew registered the domain ghostbikes.org and started placing white, beat-up bikes at intersections and street corners with known fatalities and injuries, mostly accidents their friends had been in. According to Boerer, bike lanes were few and far between at the time; no new lanes were installed between 1982 and 2007. Since then, Pittsburgh has been named one of America’s most bike-friendly cities, and the city is actively installing a system of new protected bike lanes. Boerer had just been hit by a car on his own bike when he started erecting ghost bikes around Pittsburgh back in the early 2000s.
Eric Boerer
My leg was broken pretty horribly. Someone brought up this thing that was going on in St. Louis called 'Broken Bikes, Broken Lives.’
We had a meeting around a picnic table, basically drinking beers and trying to brainstorm ideas on this project. Someone mentioned ‘ghost bikes,’ because of the connotation that the bikes are gone and they’re ghosts of bikes. Part of it also was that we kind of thought people saw through us, almost looked at us as ghosts on the streets, like they didn’t really pay attention to us. We were almost invisible in a way.
I was just going straight and a guy made a left turn into me. He was in a minivan and he hit me from the side. His bumper broke my leg in half. My lower leg. I rolled up on the hood, smashed his windshield with my body, and slid down. I was in a cast for about four or five months. I had two surgeries, a titanium nail put in to keep my leg straight. I couldn't wait [to get back on a bike again]. I love cycling. It's a thing that connects me to my city more than anything.
I remembered feeling pretty excited to put up [a ghost bike] in the spot I was hit, partly in the hopes that the person who hit me drives past it daily and would see it. Part of it was just in the hopes that the city would notice and would do something about the state of cycling in the city. I remembered feeling very determined to be the one to put that bike out and be the one to lock it, carry it out there, and just look at and be like, ‘Goddamn this person for messing up my year and messing up my life.’
This was sort of pre-crazy internet, you know, it was like 2003, so it was a wild moment for a lot of us to see something go viral before there was a term called 'going viral.'
I've personally seen ghost bikes. I saw them in Mexico City. I saw them in Santiago, Chile. It’s kind of amazing to even see that in person around the world. I'm sure just about every big city in the world has one at this point, at least one.
You see how important they are to their family members, who may not have ridden bikes, may not have cared about bikes, but they knew cycling was really important to their family member. Now it’s important to them, too.
North Carolina
Aimée Argote was driving home from a concert the night of Sept. 19, 2013 with her partner, Taylor. They were near Chapel Hill, N.C., on a well-traveled, four-lane highway divided by a median that connects Durham, Chapel Hill, and Pittsboro. The speed limit wasn’t much higher than 45 or 50 miles an hour. The weather was clear. Suddenly, they came across two lumps in the road. It was Alexandria Nicole Simou and Ivin Levander Scurlock, two victims of a hit-and-run. Scurlock died on the scene, while Simou later died at the hospital. For a while, Argote, a touring musician, couldn’t drive at night. In the two years since the accident, she’s barely ridden her bike. The ghost bikes she helped erect for Simou and Scurlock have since been taken down, and the case regarding their accident still hasn’t been solved.
Aimée Argote
I just thought garbage bags had flown out of the back of a truck. But then we saw these two bicycles in the middle of the road.
It was hard to recognize that he was dead because he was so warm and we [were] checking for breaths and stuff. There was somebody else right next to him who was clearly alive. She was unconscious and in a big pool of blood and just wheezing out blood. I was just hugging her and asking her to stay with us.
Their bikes were smashed together so tightly that it looked like one bike.
The first cop showed up and started freaking out, waving her flashlight around. It was pretty obvious that she had never seen a dead body before. One of the policemen, this was one of the most bizarre parts about it, came up and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to inspect your car.' It was the most frightening thing. He had to make sure it wasn’t us that had hit them.
They were wearing bike lights and they were wearing safety vests. Their bikes were smashed together so tightly that it looked like one bike.
Taylor and I both realized that the best way to honor them was to remember them with warmth and love and not fear. And to become a better driver and figure out what it means to be a better driver. So many times in the van, [I see] somebody is driving and they’re texting. I had texted and driven before and I was just like, ‘Never again.’
My friend Jason runs a bike shop and he was actually the person who suggested the ghost bikes. He has a bunch of old bikes and so he got the bikes ready. They took the bikes down after, like, three or four months. The year following, we organized a ride that started at [Jason’s] bike shop, and we rode down to the spot with two new ghost bikes and just encouraged people to bring flowers or Mardi Gras beads or anything colorful to decorate the bikes with. Then they took the bikes down again.
We pretend like cycling is a privilege for people who want to put on racing shorts and buy $3,000 bikes. I think it’s an important reminder to the city: What are you spending your tax dollars on? Can you please spend it on protecting people who are just trying to get home, just trying to get to their kids, just trying to get to work? Before the accident, when I would pass a ghost bike, I would just take a moment to become more present in my vehicle. I always passed it and thought, ‘Oh, somebody died there.’ It was a fleeting thought sometimes, but I always had that thought. Now that I’ve been a part of an accident, I pass them and I think, ‘Thank God, I’m not the only one who remembers.'
L-r, photos by: Nausheen Husain (Chicago); Gloria Anton (Pike and Boren, Seattle); Megan Renee Douglas (Queens)
Seattle
Scott Kubly had been on the job as director of Seattle’s Department of Transportation for roughly a month before a cyclist was killed in a notoriously dangerous bike lane. Sher Kung, a 31-year-old attorney and mother, was riding down Second Avenue in the heart of downtown Seattle last August -- a stretch once described by a Rutgers University bicycling scholar as “death-defying” -- when she was hit by a left-turning box truck. Her death took place less than two weeks before a new protected bike lane was expected to be completed. Over the next five years, Seattle hopes to install more than 35 miles of protected bike lanes, and eliminate fatal and serious collisions within the next 15 years -- all part of the Seattle Bicycle Master Plan. But one of the city’s biggest challenges overall is the antagonistic attitude between drivers and cyclists, says Kubly. A ghost bike was erected in Kung’s honor at the site of her accident.
Scott Kubly
I think that for whatever reason there is an antagonism between bicyclists and non-bicyclists in this city that is probably stronger than in any other city that I’ve been in. It’s really actually shocking. It’s a real angry kind of dialogue. We're coming out of what, locally, people call 'the mode wars,' where people of different modes [of transportation] were kind of fighting amongst each other and not really recognizing that we actually live in a multi-modal city where all the things need to work well together.
The riders I see here in Seattle are really different than riders I’ve seen in other cities. I think they ride more aggressively here than in other cities, I really do. If you go to D.C. or Chicago, where the bike-commuting culture and the bike-riding culture is a much calmer riding culture, you see a lot fewer people in spandex and a lot more people in regular street clothes.
People who don’t like bikers are going to say, ‘Look at how obnoxious that biker was,’ and people who ride bikes and get frustrated by cars are going to say, 'Look at how obnoxious that driver was.’ It’s so funny because Seattleites are so nice in so many other ways. I truly can’t figure it out.
Whenever we have a traffic fatality, I’m aware of it, and we're doing everything we can to minimize them. When I get a traffic crash report across my desk that shows that somebody died, personally, as a DOT [department of transportation] director, and I’m not saying every DOT director is this way, but I don’t need a ghost bike to let me know that doing work to improve safety is critical. I think where they probably serve a purpose is a reminder to the general public that somebody died unnecessarily.
Sadly, I would say [of the cyclist fatality on Second Avenue in Seattle] that it’s not the first time something like that has happened. And it’s not going to be the last.
When I was in Chicago, we had two crashes that were really similar in circumstance. There was a person who was riding their bike down Wells Street [and] they were traveling in the door zone. A car door swung open, so they swung out of the door zone to avoid getting doored. They happened to get caught up under a truck and they died. It was a matter of weeks before the street was [going to be] repaved and we were putting in a buffered bike lane, which would have had a buffer in the door zone, but not for a couple weeks. There was a kid named Bobby Cann, who worked for Groupon, I believe, and he was riding down Clybourn Avenue in Chicago. We had been as a city DOT going back and forth without getting permission to put a protected bike lane on Clybourn Avenue. This is three years ago, four years ago at this point, but it’s finally going in right now. This kid gets hit by a drunk driver and it severs his leg, and he dies right there on Clybourn Avenue. If the protected bike lane had been there, he would have been alive.
New York
The urban biking movement is slowly reversing the last 50 or 60 years of automobile culture, says Doug Gordon -- the blogger and biker activist behind Brooklyn Spoke. Ghost bikes, part of that movement, draw much needed attention to serious problems like road rage, poor street design, and lags in transportation infrastructure. But ghost bikes aren’t the only -- or most effective -- PSA to promote bike safety. In fact, Gordon says they could inflate how dangerous biking really is.
Doug Gordon
I recognize how important and how impactful a ghost bike can be. I think if a person dies, it's understandable to want something tangible, something concrete at the site where they were killed.
They also can do a really great job in drawing attention to a pretty serious problem, which is the deficiency of design on our streets, road rage, poor driving choices, whatever it is. I think they can be really good at grabbing the attention of an elected official. No one would want the distinction of having the most ghost bikes in their district.
My fear of ghost bikes, sometimes, is that they can make bicycling seem more dangerous than it is. The statistics probably don’t spell out that fear as being completely reasonable, but when you put [a ghost bike] there in front of people, it does run the potential of scaring people off from biking and choosing biking. They’re not necessarily the best tools for talking to people who don’t already consider themselves cyclists or who don’t already ride a bike on a regular basis.
I don’t think there’s any kind of prescriptive like, 'Here's what you can do to promote biking, or to convince people that it’s safe.' There’s no sort of prescriptive measure you can take to do that.
For some people, getting involved with a ghost-bike project is their entry into more general bike activism, and in that regard then the ghost-bike project really is serving a fantastic purpose, it's energizing them and getting them more involved. I don’t know a single person who is involved with a ghost-bike project who sees spray painting a bike white, putting it up with some flowers, and holding a ceremony as the start and end of their bike advocacy.
It used to be that the 'bike people' were seen as fringe. Maybe you had a buddy who went to Amsterdam and told you how great it was, or someone moved here from Long Beach or Davis, Calif., which have been really good bike communities for a long time, and told you, ‘Oh, there’s a better way.’ I think with the rise of social media, Facebook, Twitter, we're able to share best practices from around the world and say, ‘See? This is how it works over there. Why can’t it work here?’
I have a very low threshold for risk. I have two kids and I ride with them, too. With biking, I know the statistics and I know I’m pretty safe overall. I also know generally which streets on my commute to work, for example, are best to avoid. I’m not saying I never run red lights, but I’m certainly not going to do it at a huge intersection where there are tons of cars and lots of people crossing. I also ride a big clunky Dutch bike, probably heavier than a city bike, so I’m not racing through the streets on my fixie or a racing bike. I’m always traveling at a predictable speed. Sometimes, I probably feel more exposed in New York City when I’m crossing in the crosswalk. I’m more afraid that a driver is going to speed around the corner and hit me as a pedestrian than I am riding my bike.
L-r, photos by: Elisa Lala (Philadelphia); Tracey Lindeman (Montreal); Stephen Johnson(Cedar Mill, Ore.)
Portland
According to Jeff Mapes, bicycling is an indicator when it comes to judging the health of a city. Mapes, a senior political reporter for The Oregonian, is also the author ofPedaling Revolution, in which he chronicles how biking is creating a “new society on the streets.” He lives in Portland, one of the most bike-friendly cities in the country. Approximately 6 percent of the city’s commuters bike to work -- about 17,000 people --which is the highest percentage of bike commuters in any large city across the country. A longtime bike commuter, Mapes says there are tons of bike safety campaigns throughout the U.S., but perhaps nothing as impactful as a ghost bike.
Jeff Mapes
I think [biking] has contributed to cities becoming lifestyle places. It's a sort of chicken-and-egg kind of thing. I think the bike movement is both a cause of that, and also a result of that. One reason people want to move downtown is because it’s more doable and more interesting to bike, and that in turn puts pressure on cities to be more bike-friendly. You’re seeing a virtuous cycle in many ways.
I think bicycling is in someway an indicator species almost for the health of the city.
There is some added risk to cycling than most other modes of transportation, I think. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. In the Netherlands, they’ve really concentrated hard on bike safety and almost nobody wears a helmet there and they have very positive safety records. So clearly it goes way beyond encouraging helmet use.
I’m 60 now, and I have to say, there's a lot of 20-somethings who go flying by me and I think, “Man, they feel like they’re immortal.” I do ride more cautiously.
Everybody has drivers training, very few people have cyclist training.
In my experience, when you’re in a bike lane next to vehicles that are going much slower than you, you’ve got to really watch it because you’re in danger of right hooks. I once saw a guy get his collarbone broken. He was flying down a bike lane and a car saw an opening in the traffic and stepped on it, and he just came flying through and smashed right into the cyclist.
Nobody really teaches you how to ride a bike in city traffic; you just learn how to do it. One thing I learned researching the book that I was very interested in, is that there are smart ways to ride in city traffic, but nobody teaches it to you. At least when you’re in high school, you take driver’s ed to get a license. Everybody has driver’s training, very few people have cyclist training.
There are certainly lots of safety campaigns. The Netherlands, one thing they do every year, they do a big safety campaign getting [bikers] to use their lights when the fall starts because it starts getting dark earlier. That, they say, is a huge cause of many crashes: cyclists without lights. Certainly, here in the U.S., we have the “share the road” signs and bumper stickers and posters and things like that, but they probably don’t have the visceral impact that a ghost bike does, that's for sure.
Through the years, I think there's been some feeling about ghost bikes portraying cycling as a dangerous activity. One could argue [they] certainly send the message to a lot of people that cycling is very dangerous.
I do think it’s sending a message that cyclists’ lives matter, so I think that’s important. I think a lot of times, for people who don’t cycle, it’s easy to say ‘Well, that won’t happen to me.’ Ghost bikes do help send the message that, ‘Yes, this does matter.’
L-r, photos by: @aeviljoen (Bakoven, Cape Town, South Africa); Just Galen (San Francisco); Tracey Lindeman (Montreal)
Los Angeles
Biking, according to Adonia Lugo, is much more than just a weekend hobby, or a trendy, spandex-clad exercise fad. Lugo, an urban anthropologist currently teaching a course on urban infrastructure at Antioch University Los Angeles, studies how transportation -- biking in particular -- can be a transportation-justice issue. Throughout the course of her studies, Lugo has noticed that the connection between biking, race, and class isn’t as apparent to some of her fellow scholars and activists as it is to her. For them, she says, the real goal is about making sure everyone has access to greater mobility, like cars and better transportation networks. To Lugo, the issue is a bit more complicated than that.
Adonia Lugo
Within bicycle advocacy or the bike movement broadly, there is a longstanding tension between direct action and more institutional avenues for promoting bicycling. On the direct-action side, you have kind of a long history of street theater related to bicycling, like the group in New York, Time's Up. Decades ago, they started doing street theater, trying to call attention to vulnerabilities on the street. A really good example is the rideCritical Mass, where people get together and use their bodies to actually disrupt space and say, ‘We deserve to have access to this road.’
I see ghost-bike memorials fitting into that sort of direct-action tradition in the bike movement, because they are there to serve as a reminder about the ongoing vulnerability of people who are using bicycles in that area.
A lot of people I know, myself included, who get involved in bicycle activism are motivated by a very personal experience of feeling marginalized in the streets. We're coming at it from this very visceral, personal knowledge that we're not necessarily safe in these car-dominated streets.
The idea of public memorials is more culturally accepted in some groups than in others. For example, I’m from a very Latino part of southern California, and it’s very common where I’m from and where I live now in L.A. to see cars that have memorials that say, ‘Rest in peace,’ and somebody's name and their birth and death year. There are murals all over town that memorialize people, and then of course we're all familiar with highway roadside memorials.
I see ghost bikes fitting into that genre except that what's unusual about them is that those sorts of memorials are usually very personalized, they have to do with a family or a community that lost somebody, and ghost-bike memorials can be personalized. But they’re also trying to tap into this larger pursuit of bicyclists being more vulnerable.
I think the ghost-bike memorials probably play a greater role in giving people a common cause than they do in increasing the perception that cycling is unsafe.
Car culture creates all sorts of enmity between different car users
Something that’s not often talked about as one of the pillars of why we have suburban sprawl today was that desire to get away from social undesirables. The fact is that access to driving and being able to be inside a car is a huge status symbol.
Sometimes, I think that when people are saying [biking] is unsafe, what they mean is that it’s not very respectable. They’re also expressing a total lack of embodied knowledge. Car culture creates all sorts of enmity between different car users, so if you’re accustomed to just being in the car and seeing how recklessly some people drive, I think it makes sense that you would assume I’m safer in my car then I would be out there, unsheltered on my bicycle.
I’m mostly interested in accessing bicycle users who are very low-income or who are people of color; people who are doubly marginalized are already more vulnerable out in public space, and then they also are riding a bicycle.
When you talk about these transportation choices, you’re getting into a really complicated world of how we express our social status.
What I’ve learned through studying and participating in bicycle advocacy is that there are a lot of people out there who are not that familiar with these issues, because they themselves have not known what it’s like to not have access to a car. If you do know what it’s like not to have access to a car, it can be very embarrassing and very shameful.
Have your own ghost bike story? Share it in the comments below, or tweet it to @gristwith the hashtag #gristghostbikes.
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