Taking back Los Angeles by bike

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Author: Ella Fornari

A man with a curled ginger mustache, bandana around his neck and brown wool hat atop his head holds onto his bike and surfs the ebb and flow of the L.A. Metro train. Everyone else in his car sits. At the 23rd Street Expo-Line stop, he walks his bike out of the Metro, pauses, turns his bike lights on and pulls out of the station.

His left arm sticking out to traffic, the man drifts behind a car to make a turn. As he changes directions another car tries to pass him and honks loudly on its horn. The man slows down to shush the honking car, sticking his index finger in front of his lips in case the car did not hear his loud shhhhing.

This mustached man with the bandana and brown hat, Joe Taylor, is among the small percentage of Angelinos who use bike and Metro routes in their daily commute. According to the L.A. Department of City Planning and Transportation, nearly 66 percent of commuters in Los Angeles drive alone in their cars, 11.2 percent take public transport and about 1 percent bike. Taylor and the other 1 percent of Angelinos who commute by bike experience L.A. in a fundamentally different way than the majority of people in Los Angeles.

Usually Taylor bikes to his home in MacArthur Park from the Expo-line Metro stop downtown but on this night he went to Highland Park to meet with a group of bike-obsessed friends building a bike-powered music machine.

The group calls itself Movable Parts and consists of Taylor; Wendy Hsu, a post-doc at Occidental; Carey Sargent, head of Instruction and Research at Occidental; Linda Wei, a bike mechanic and prominent figure within the L.A. bike community; and Steve Kemper, who has his doctorate in computer technology and music composition. Moveable Parts is a partnership between Taylor’s brother’s woodworking studio, The Knowhow Shop, Occidental College’s Bike Share program and Occidental’s Sustainability Fund. The project also involves local bike shops in Highland Park: the Bike Oven, Bikerowave and Flying Pigeon. Movable Parts’ goal was to have a version of their bike powered music project ready to display for the April 21 CicLAvia.

With more than 150,000 bikes in attendance, the April 21 CicLAvia closed more than 15 miles of streets from Downtown Los Angeles to the Venice Beach boardwalk for bike riders. CicLAvia is a part of the cycling tradition of taking back the streets from cars that originated more than 30 years ago with Ciclovías in Bogotá, Columbia. Closing down the city streets every Sunday and on holidays from 7 a.m. until 2 p.m., Ciclovías take over almost 120 kilometers of city streets in Bogotá. Along the way, musicians and athletic instructors offer pleasant breaks from pedaling. It is estimated that roughly two million people participate in Bogotá’s weekly Ciclovías.

Ciclovías take place in cities throughout the United States and in countries worldwide, including Israel, Australia, Belgium, Canada and Brazil. The first CicLAvia took place in 2010, shutting down seven miles of traffic from Boyle Heights to East Hollywood so that bikes and pedestrians could safely take to the streets of Los Angeles. Other cities in the U.S. partake in this international phenomenon, including Cambridge, Cleveland, Tucson, Baltimore and numerous others. The mission of CicLAvia and all Ciclovías worldwide is simply to take back the streets from the car traffic that ordinarily controls movement in the cityscape. The event is free for participants, and L.A.’s next CicLAvia will be held on June 23 and will be fall under the theme of “Iconic Wilshire Boulevard.” After that, Los Angeles will host another CicLAvia event on Oct. 10 with the theme of “Heart of L.A.”

Kemper came up to L.A. from San Diego a few weeks before CicLAvia to lead a workshop in interactive electronic music for Movable Parts and students at Occidental. At the workshop which took place in the Brown Lab in the library, Kemper projected his laptop screen showing a musical computing program that is connected to various sensors on the bike. The Beastie Boys’ “Shake Your Rump” is played, and the sensors on the bike one on the left break and another on the right were activated. He encouraged a student to push down on the break, bending the sensor and causing a loud distortion over the track.

“Pushing on the break is essentially the effect of pushing on a wah wah pedal,” Kemper said. Taking ideas from the students in the room, the group decided to go ahead with the distorters and added a system that altered the tempo of the music with pedaling speed. With this set-up, the bikes were the power and the DJ.

With their interactive bike-powered-music machine, Movable Parts added whimsy to this idea of taking back the streets.

“I’m the type that always needs a project,” Taylor said of Movable Parts.

Taylor had built bike-powered generators before and, in 2010, was the technical director for the Seattle Bicycle Music Festival. Due to the combination of an old overheating VW bus alternator with no fan and melted rubber, this bike generator project was technically not ideal. The generator still worked though, powering musical acts that ranged from grungy teen-girl bands to old men singing the blues.

For Movable Parts, the music is also spiritually and culturally rooted. When Taylor and Hsu first started talking about the idea for a bike-powered music machine, Hsu said it reminded her of the Nakashi street music tradition in Taiwan. Nakashi was a street music movement that influenced the Taiwanese community to come together and take back their streets after Japanese colonialism. Movable Parts adopts the spirit of Nakashi in engaging the community and publicly reclaiming the streets through music.

After a month of building and planning, Movable Parts did a trial run at the reception after the Founders Day dedication for Occidental’s new Solar Array. In an attempt not to bother the donors at this reception, the group decided to just try out the generator and not the interactive music element of the project. With three bikes supplying ample voltage for the speakers, the generator component of the rig was successful. This demonstration made the group more excited to show off their full project to the L.A. bike community the following day at CicLAvia.

On the morning of CicLAvia’s “Ride to the Sea” themed journey, about 40 bikers gathered outside the Flying Pigeon bike shop in Highland Park for a feeder ride to the Downtown Hub marking the start of CicLAvia’s closed-off route. Even though the roads were not closed off from Highland Park to Downtown, the space the bikes took up dominated the road.

Most of the bikes took off, leaving the Movable Parts group behind as Kemper, Sargent and Hsu gathered the rest of their equipment. They rode the three clunky generator bikes with USB cables carefully tucked between the spokes. Taylor and Wei rode their own bikes and hauled the audio equipment, which was precariously strapped onto both sides of their bikes with bungee cords. Wei commented that even though they tried to balance the equipment, she had to shift her weight to keep the bike upright and balanced while riding.

When Movable Parts reached the L.A. River other bikers started appearing, and together they all made their way to the start of CicLAvia. Many rode by the decked out Movable Parts bikes and asked about the gear attached to the bikes.

When the group arrived in Pershing Square, it was so crowded that they had to periodically get off and push their bikes. What should have been a short ride from City Hall to MacArthur Park took about an hour. The bike congestion at CicLAvia was a new form of L.A.’s infamous traffic.

After cycling through the crowds, Movable Parts finally arrived in MacArthur Park and set up in a corner of the park intersecting the designated CicLAvia route. When they finished setting up, a man stopped by the three-bike rig blasting music and naively told his girlfriend, “Hey look, you can charge your phones off those bikes.” Taylor quickly jumped in and explained the actual project. “The bike powers the battery, the battery powers the music, the music powers your happiness,” Taylor said.

Throughout the rest of CicLAvia, Movable Parts attracted riders taking a break from the chaos of the CicLAvia route. The members of Movable Parts took turns pedaling on the stationary bikes, explaining how the machine worked and encouraging passerby’s to come dance. They brought the party and quickly drowned out the noise of a radio station in a booth set up nearby.

Along with the other 150,000 bike riders at CicLAvia, Movable Parts successfully took back the streets of L.A, and in their own home-built-tech-savvy way, demonstrated that biking can be more than a way to get from point A to point B; biking can be a party enroute.

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