BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Bicycle Revolution, A Course On Wheels, Teaches Students About The Politics Of Social Change

This article is more than 5 years old.

Harvey Mudd College

In case you didn’t know, there is a bicycle revolution under way across the United States. And examining how and why some cities are embracing bicycle traffic, and others are not, can be a valuable lesson in how social change works.

Thousands of communities across the country have adopted policies and practices to ensure that their cities’ infrastructure promotes bicycling, walking and public transportation as well as automotive transit.

These policies and practices don’t just happen. They are the result of a coordinated and comprehensive approach by individuals and advocacy groups who want to provide safe and convenient access to school, work and public places for everyone regardless of age, ability, income and mode of transportation.

Toward that end, Harvey Mudd College Professor of Political Science and Environmental Policy Paul Steinberg has developed a unique course conducted entirely on wheels. Students in Bicycle Revolution ride bicycles throughout the Los Angeles region to explore the challenges of creating bicycle-friendly cities. Along the way, they meet with decision-makers, transportation planners and community activists and gain a window into the politics of social change in urban settings.

The first class offered in spring 2016 was documented on film as part of a broader effort to bring about change not only in the region but across the country. Fifteen students traveled over 150 miles and visited 12 cities from Claremont to Santa Monica. They talked with city officials and community leaders about what it takes to introduce new policies and build meaningful relationships.

I talked with Steinberg as he was making final preparations for the second Bicycle Revolution class, which he is teaching this spring.

Maria Klawe: How did you get the idea for the class?

Paul Steinberg: I’m an avid cyclist and know firsthand the difficulties and dangers cyclists can face on city streets. And as a professor who studies political policy and social change, I started thinking about how to teach a class that would help students understand what it takes to create change in their local communities using the example of working to implement bicycle-friendly measures in our local LA-area cities. I also thought it would be instructive – and fun - to create a class that takes place entirely on bicycles.

I have traditionally worked at the level of entire countries or the planet, trying to understand why some countries cooperate on global environmental issues and proactively address issues like climate change while others don’t. I’m very new to local politics, so this was an opportunity to take a lot of the same concepts from political science that I use to understand global social change and apply them to local change.

Klawe: What kind of legwork did it take to make the course happen?

Harvey Mudd College

Steinberg: In the course, we not only ride through cities to gauge their level of bike-friendliness but also meet with local government officials and community organizations to understand how people have worked and are working to cause change. The logistics for the course were daunting. I arranged for visits with city officials in about eight to 10 different locations throughout the Los Angeles region. This requires getting on the schedules of city council members, city planners and community activists. Typically they lead us on bicycle tours of their communities, so figuring out the logistics of where to go and how to do so safely with 15 students on bicycles requires a lot of thought as well.

To do the course, students need a good, dependable bicycle to ride from city to city at a decent speed. I undertook some fundraising to purchase bicycles for those students who didn’t have them, to ensure that the course is open to students regardless of their resources.

Klawe: What has been the students’ reaction to the class?

Steinberg: The students love it! It gives them an opportunity to engage with real world issues. There’s a lot of poorly defined problems and unclear relationships among the actors involved in trying to make local changes. It’s a puzzle, and I think the students enjoy the challenge of taking apart that puzzle and beginning to better understand who has power, who has decision-making authority, what the rules are and how change works. Coming into the class, students aren’t sure what to expect. They know they’ll be on bicycles. They know it involves politics. And that’s about it. So, it’s a learning experience for all of us.

Traditionally, I’m a control freak in the classroom. My lectures are carefully written out. My discussions are structured. The readings are chosen well in advance. This class, in contrast, requires a lot of improvisation because we’re interacting with dozens of independent influential people who are going to say and do what they want. It’s a great real-world learning experience.

Klawe: How are you planning on using the Bicycle Revolution film that you created about the course?

Steinberg: Bicycle aficionados are not typically politically savvy people. They enjoy riding; they often like education. They want bicycles to be something not just for people wearing Lycra pants and going 20 miles an hour but also to be a safe, environmentally sustainable mode of transportation to get to school and work.

But to make that happen, you have to organize politically. The Bicycle Revolution film is designed to raise awareness about what it takes to work effectively with local government. There’s a deeper message as well. Namely, politics is not just a game in which a win for one side is a loss for the other. Politics is not about demonizing the opposition. It’s not about refusal to cooperate with the other side. That’s certainly what politics looks like in Washington, D.C., these days. But when you talk to people who have been involved in local efforts to bring about change over the past quarter century, they understand that you have to work with people from a wide array of backgrounds.

Students in the first Bicycle Revolution course meet with Claremont, Calif. mayor Sam Pedroza.

Harvey Mudd College

We’re going to send a letter to more than 900 grassroots bicycle organizations throughout the United States along with links to our website that provides discussion questions and resources for communities that want to use the film as a mechanism for local conversations and local actions. We kept the film short at 48 minutes to allow time for discussion in community meetings. And, we have a Facebook group where bike enthusiasts can connect with other groups and exchange ideas.

Klawe: Is the course evolving?

Steinberg: The course will change radically each time I teach it. This semester, students are working in teams to collaborate with citizens’ groups and officials in the cities of Claremont, La Verne and El Monte.  In Claremont, they are sharing insights relevant to bicycle transportation in the city's draft Complete Streets policy.  They are interviewing officials in other cities who have implemented similar policies to distill lessons learned and share those with Claremont.  In La Verne, in response to a request from a citizens’ group, a team is measuring the economic benefits of recreational cycling for the community.  And in El Monte, a group of our students are undertaking an analysis of crash data to identify priority areas for safety improvements and to inform the city's infrastructure investments.

I hope the students are going to have a larger impact because we now have stronger relationships with the groups we visited during the first course, making it easier to find windows of opportunity for collaboration on policy and planning.

Klawe: What lessons do you hope your students take away from the Bicycle Revolution experience?

Steinberg: This course is an onramp for students to understand that healthy communities require a healthy dose of civic engagement and political activism. The course is fundamentally about empowerment. I want students to understand how social change works and their potential role in it. I want them to get a taste of political efficacy—what it means to work constructively with community leaders and elected officials to solve problems. My hope is they take these skills and these attitudes and apply them to a wide range of issues beyond transportation in their own lives in their home towns.

Almost none of these students had ever met with an elected official before this class, but once you get involved in local government, you see that these are just human beings. And that when it comes to setting policy, there are no easy wins just lying on the table for someone to pick up. These efforts require sustained commitment over a period of years. But I hope this course demystifies the process of local policy-making for the students. Local policy will be made with or without citizen input, so the question is whether we sit passively by and allow fundamental rules governing our everyday lives to be crafted by strangers without our input or whether we become active participants in governments.

For more information, go to Thebicyclerevolution.org.