What Happened to the "Old Guard" and Bazaar of Cycling Advocacy?

Modern Bicycling Advocacy has reverted into a Dark Age, Part I of ?

About 15 years ago I started looking around the web for stories about what to do with bike lanes that appeared to end with no warning, what to do when a jerk motorists honks and swerves at you, and among other things, how to use the wonderful tool of the bicycle to further lower my environmental impact while maintaining health and fitness. I first dug deep into bicycling advocacy roughly ten years ago, and boy were things different back then. I spent hours and days reading through what was quite the rabbit hole of information and discussion that most people these days into bicycling never even know existed or would never be able to encounter them today unless someone showed them the way. Discussions were far more common on message boards , mailing lists , upgraded UseNet groups, and a variety of blogs where participants went back and forth often following an old set of rules called Netiquette. Lots of cyclists even ran and maintained their own websites, many with designs straight out of the mid 90’s. True relics. I even ran a blog for a bit (still alive). Now things have moved onto social media sites like Facebag, Twitter, Reddit, and presumably Instagram and even TikTok where discourse has been sacrificed on the altar of hot-takes, likes, shares, etc.

Related event. Artist Unknown.

Bicycling advocacy sees lots of people come and go over the years. Domain names are let to expire and people moved on. Blogs get hacked and replaced with spam or bots. The high speed environment and hot-take culture of social media sucks most people’s attention and incentivized a steep decline in long, thorough, and nuanced discussions. Fellow Substacker Bradley Cambell has called this the egregore.

This great library of useful cycling advocacy knowledge is becoming lost to many - especially the new folks who’ve jumped on board who are now being propagandized by mostly loud and obnoxious charlatans and their ilk. It took a great effort for one to do what is often nowadays called “The Work” back then and such is nearly impossible today.

And if you’ve still never read the great works of the late Ken Kifer, who was someone between a cycling version Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross, you’re in for a treat. Fortunately his work remains online but largely unknown to thousands, if not millions of cycling advocacy newbies.

Or if you’ve never seen the great piece, The Marginalization of Bicyclists , which contains a lot of information brushed under the rug by modern activists today. Or the immense library of graphics from IAmTraffic.org and CommuteOrlando which both eventually merged into becoming Cycling Savvy.

But it’s not just the decline of conversation, critical thinking, and the loss of some dude’s website or blogs: take for example, The League of American Bicyclists, who were once a huge legitimate and dependable ally for the rights of (most) cyclists. The League (or LAB) experienced an ideological capture nearly twenty years ago. The organization’s board became mostly a self-serving echo chamber and spoils system for cronies. They moved their headquarters to the center of the DC Swamp - K Street. They ceased defending people who were riding both safely and legally from biased cops, courts, and anti-cycling bigots who view us as pests on the road. They kicked actual engineers who understood traffic engineering to the curb. And they kneecapped a-lot of discussion on legitimately safe infrastructure in favor of whatever their new masters instructed them to do.

Streetsblog turned into the activist monster of a Corporate Press rag they are today - completely parasitized by pompous elitists. The academics who “research” in these domains are also captured and have their own agendas, as is typical in Fiat Academia. Legitimate experts with over half a century in advocacy work have been smooshed and since Social Justice politics (aka Wokism) began to parasitize the space roughly ten years ago, many Noble Elect advocates get away with dismissing these folks simply because many of them are old, a certain sex, and a certain race. And a lot of local bicycling advocacy groups have gone down similar paths too.

These tragedies hurt more than they help - especially for the newbies to the space.