Subways and yellow taxis may be the icons of New York transportation, but it is the bicycle that has the longest claim to New York’s streets: two hundred years and counting. Never has it taken to the streets without controversy: 1819 was the year of the city’s first bicycle and also its first bicycle ban. Debates around the bicycle’s place in city life have been so persistent not just because of its many uses—recreation, sport, transportation, business—but because of changing conceptions of who cyclists are.
In On Bicycles, Evan Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of cycling in New York City. He uncovers the bicycle’s place in the city over time, showing how it has served as a mirror of the city’s changing social, economic, infrastructural, and cultural politics since it first appeared. It has been central, as when horse-drawn carriages shared the road with bicycle lanes in the 1890s; peripheral, when Robert Moses’s car-centric vision made room for bicycles only as recreation; and aggressively marginalized, when Ed Koch’s battle against bike messengers culminated in the short-lived 1987 Midtown Bike Ban. On Bicycles illuminates how the city as we know it today—veined with over a thousand miles of bicycle lanes—reflects a fitful journey powered, and opposed, by New York City’s people and its politics.
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Translator's Introduction: Modernity and Time
- In Place of a Preface
- Introduction
- PART 1: The Categorial Framework of a Systematic Theory of Social Acceleration
- 1. From the Love of Movement to the Law of Acceleration: Observations of Modernity
- 1. Acceleration and the Culture of Modernity
- 2. Modernization, Acceleration, and Social Theory
- 2. What Is Social Acceleration?
- 1. Preliminary Considerations: Acceleration and Escalation
- 2. Three Dimensons of Social Acceleration
- 3. Five Categories of Inertia
- 4. On the Relation Between Movement and Inertia in Modernity
- PART 2: Mechanisms and Manifestations: A Phenomenology of Social Acceleration
- 3. Technical Acceleration and the Revolutionizing of the Space-Time Regime
- 4. Slipping Slopes: The Acceleration of Social Change and the Increase of Contingency
- 5. The Acceleration of the "Pace of Life" and Paradoxes in the Experience of Time
- 1. Objective Parameters: The Escalation of the Speed of Action
- 2. Subjective Parameters: The Pressure and the Experience of Racing Time
- 3. Temporal Structures and Self-Relations
- PART 3: Causes
- 6. The Speeding Up of Society as a Self-Propelling Process: The Circle of Acceleration
- 7. Acceleration and Growth: External Driving Forces of Social Acceleration
- 1. Time Is Money: The Economic Motor
- 2. The Promise of Acceleration: The Cultural Motor
- 3. The Temporalization of Complexity: The Socio-Structural Motor
- 8. Power, War, and Speed: The State and the Military as Key Institutional Accelerators
- PART 4: Consequences
- 9, Acceleration, Globalization, Postmodernity
- 10. Situational Identity: Of Drifters and Players
- 1. The Dynamization of the Self in Modernity
- 2. From Substantial A Priori Identity to Stable a Posteriori Identity: The Temporalization of Life
- 3. From Temporally Stable to Situational Identity: The Temporalization of Time
- 11. Situational Politics: Paradoxical Time Horizons Between Desynchronization and Disintegration
- 1. Time in Politics - Politics in Time
- 2. The Temporalization of History in the Modern Age
- 3. Paradoxical Time Horizons: The Detemporalization of History in Late Modernity
- 12. Acceleration and Rigidity: An Attempt to Redefine Modernity
- Conclusion: Frenetic Standstill? The End of History
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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