This paper examines People Protected Bike Lanes, a series of interventions in the governance of city streets. Participants put their bodies on the line, quite literally, standing in traffic to temporarily create safer spaces for cycling. Over the past six years, the practice has spread from San Francisco to other cities in America and beyond. People protected bike lanes work to challenge and disrupt the system of automobility that dominates so many city streets.
Drawing on performativity and legal pluralism, I argue that bodies are important to the force of the claims made through People Protected Bike Lanes, and to the nature of those claims. Echoing the gendered claims made in street activism such as Reclaim the Night, People Protected Bike Lanes enact a more inclusive form of urbanism. My interest in these practices flows from ongoing work on public participation in city-making: who gets to have a say, and how. A central concern is the interaction between formal and informal planning systems, recognising the contingent and socially constructed nature of the rules that structure the city.
By putting their bodies on the line, participants make claims not just about particular streets, but more general claims about their rights as citizens. Participants engage in subversion – making visible and uncomfortable the unequal mobilities and citizenship practices that result from car-oriented infrastructure. They also go beyond this, providing a material demonstration of how streets could be different, how a citizenship decoupled from automobility might look and feel. The bodies on the line are often female, and pay particular attention to women, children and more vulnerable road users. People Protected Bike Lanes create spaces in which cycling is accessible not only to the brave, but to everyone: joyful spaces of community, care and inclusion