Cover Story continued

The secret life of bicycles

The first rule of bicycling in Honolulu is you do not talk about bicycling in Honolulu.

by Ragnar Carlson | Feb 4, 2009

Dated

Fri, Feb 27

Operation Outdoors

We wanted to do a story about bicycling issues on Oahu. “That’ll be good for our outdoor-themed issue,” we thought. “No problem.”

As luck would have it, Honolulu Weekly’s calendar section last week showed a listing for the island version of Critical Mass, a loosely organized, more-or-less nationwide protest/phenomenon in which bicycling activists, political activists with bicycles and two-wheelers in general converge on city streets for a once-a-month stop-the-traffic solidarity ride.

We went down to the State Capitol, waited from 4:30 until 5. Nobody showed up.

We e-mailed various people who had sent us (under assumed names) calendar listing information over the years and eventually got hold of one guy who agreed to talk to us. Sort of. He wouldn’t let us quote him by name, citing heavy police interest in stamping out Critical Mass in Honolulu. We will refer to him as “Deep Gear.”

He said the local Critical Mass effort was hampered by the fact that it draws more police than riders. Deep Gear had a point. While waiting for all the riders to show up at the Capitol on Friday afternoon, we did see a sheriff’s deputy folding the flag.

So why didn’t any riders show up? Specific to last week, Deep Gear pointed out that Critical Mass depends on college students, whom he felt certain were still on vacation.

Another problem, he said, was Honolulu’s ethnic make-up. “The Asian political culture is a lot less in your face than what we get on the mainland,” he said. “And there’s nothing wrong with that.” Right! Then Deep Gear said some kind of harsh things about the Hawaii Bicycling League, for example that it doesn’t work for more and better bicycling solutions in rural Oahu and other places Deep Gear said most needed them.

We called the folks at HBL, the mission of which is “to promote cycling for health, recreation, and transportation through advocacy, education, and events,” to see what they had to say on that and other subjects. They didn’t call us back.

Bicycling story = not going well.

Then we found out about Chris Sayers, who is the Bicycling Coordinator for the City & County of Honolulu. We have a bicycling coordinator! Story saved. Sayers sounded like a nice guy who would be happy to talk about bicycling. Which was great, if not totally unexpected, him being bicycling coordinator and all. Except Sayers isn’t actually allowed to talk about bicycling. At least not to us. He said we needed to get permission to talk to him from his department head. We called Sayers’ department head.

He didn’t call us back.

Chris Sayers did helpfully forward information on the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Bicycling. It meets at noon on the second Tuesday of every month in the 3rd floor conference room at the Frank F. Fasi Municipal Building. The public is encouraged to attend.

The Hawaii Bicycling League’s Web site is at [hbl.org]

Critical Mass is scheduled to take place the last Friday of every month, 4:30pm at the State Capitol.

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