Cycles of Investment: Bicycle Infrastructure, Gentrification, and the Restructuring of the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

Bicycling for transportation in American cities has grown dramatically in the past twenty years, symbolizing the return of capital investment and commercial vitality to formerly disinvested urban cores. The cycling ‘renaissance’ taking place to the greatest extent in gentrifying neighborhoods has been noted, but the processes relating cycling and gentrification have gone largely unexplored. This paper examines the early role that bicycle advocacy organizations in San Francisco played in articulating the specifically economic value of bicycle infrastructure investment. This narrative is now commonplace, and widely applied both to neighborhood revitalization and urban competition for ‘talent’. This alliance of bicycle advocacy with the ‘livable’ turn of gentrification raises serious questions for those who would pursue a more democratic and socially just politics of the bicycle.