Good morning, #a2council! I had terrible insomnia after last night’s Council meeting, so I wrote this thread about moms and bicycles and also Philadelphia, somehow. It's more personal than I usually get in public, by a lot. Here goes. 1/
My mother (may her memory be a blessing) was a pediatric radiologist. She spent most of her career at an underfunded children’s hospital in North Philadelphia, reading x-rays and other scans of sick and injured kids. 2/
Growing up, a lot of the rules we had around safety were the direct result of her work, where she became intimately familiar with the mundane, everyday ways that kids get broken. 3/
Many, MANY of those rules were about protecting us from cars. North Philly didn’t have a lot of safe places for kids to play, so they played in the street. My mother saw, from the inside out, the horrific damage that cars inflict when they collide with a child’s body. 4/
So she kept us close in parking lots. Held our hands crossing the street well past the normal age. Required helmets for all wheeled activities. And absolutely did not let us ride our bikes in the street until we were mostly full grown, and then only in our quiet neighborhood. 5/
I did not grow up in North Philly. I grew up north of Philly, in an old, inner ring suburb with beautiful parks, excellent schools, and very little pedestrian or bike infrastructure. We drove everywhere. 6/
I’m sure it would have been much safer for me to ride my bike in my neighborhood than it was for the kids in the neighborhoods near my mom’s work to ride theirs, but that didn’t matter. We only biked in places without cars. Places we drove to with our bikes strapped on a rack. 7/
And we biked a lot! My mother loved biking. She never thought of herself as an athlete but she trained for multi-day charity rides and planned entire vacations around cycling. I have so many happy memories of bike rides with my mom. 8/
A lot of those rides were Sunday mornings on West River Drive, the original Open Street. (Yes I know there were probably others, don’t @ me.) A normally busy road, closed to cars every Sunday morning, flowing with cyclists and runners instead. 9/
We didn’t have to wait for some once a year event, or a pandemic. Any old weekend, we could park at the museum & have a beautiful ride, the Schuylkill River sparkling with Boathouse Row just beyond, quiet enough to chat, and absolutely no cars (except the one we drove there). 10/
They’re such happy memories, but now I understand that they’re also a little sad. Until I was 26, I believed that if I wanted to bike, I had to drive somewhere first. When I moved to Ann Arbor for grad school, I had never biked for transportation. 11/
It was a revelation. That joyful flying feeling I got on my bike, I could have that every day? Just, getting to class? Amazing! Ann Arbor was the bike friendliest place I had ever lived, one of the only things I could find to like about it in those early, homesick years. 12/
I don’t remember if my mom and I ever biked together in Ann Arbor. Probably not, because she never got comfortable riding in the road, even with bike lanes. But we continued to take rides together whenever I visited, even after she got sick and switched to an ebike. 13/
We were very different, my mother and I, but we always had our shared love of bicycles. She would have been so excited when I joined the Transportation Commission, and so proud when I was elected chair. 14/
Because I realized recently that this obsession with making streets safer, especially for kids, I think it must come from my mother. Even though she didn’t do gruesome lessons or detailed horror stories, she transmitted to me her bone-deep understanding of the damage cars do. 15/
She also passed on her commitment to tikkun olam, repairing the world. She wasn’t particularly religious, but she lived her Jewish values of justice and service every day. I try to do the same, to make her memory a blessing by carrying on the fights she’s not here to wage. 16/
I think that’s why, when I talk about safer streets, I become so painfully earnest. This is not an intellectual exercise for me. Every road death, every car-inflicted injury, is a political choice. We know how to do better, and we're choosing not to. 17/
Our entire transportation system is unjust. Nationally, state by state, and even here in “bike friendly” Ann Arbor. It privileges the privileged and fails to protect the vulnerable. Mishnah and my mother taught me that it's my obligation to keep fighting until it’s fixed. 18/18
