Misha Glouberman on commute priviledges

There’s also a kind of class blindness in this. Some activists talk about cars and bikes as if cyclists and pedestrians are the oppressed underdogs. But in a lot of ways, the ability to get around the city by foot and bike represents something of a position of privilege. It means you live close to downtown, and you don’t have a crappy job that you have to commute to. So the reality of who actually cycles in the city is that it tends to be a somewhat privileged class of able-bodied people who can afford to live a certain kind of life in a dense downtown core. That’s great, but to make motorists into the enemy, you have to understand that in a lot of cases you’re talking about working-class people who don’t get to live downtown, who have families to support. It’s not like Kensington Market is full of sports cars and Mercedeses.

2019