The neighborhood I live in, Hampden (slightly north of Baltimore proper), has been feverishly pumped for a few years now as one of the “it” places to live if you’re an up-and-coming quasi-progressive person with enough money to plunk down in a neighborhood so that poorer white people have to move out of it. But either way, it’s not such a bad place to live - for me right now. I’m having a good time of it. But seeing the many tendrils of gentrification annoys me, even if I am arguably a part of it (although, I don’t know how gentrified I really am considering I live next to a small-scale sewage treatment facility). Anyway, the city or some-fucking-body recently has been on this pro-bicycle frenzy. Everyone is suddenly acting like Baltimore is this crazy magical place to have an amazing time on a bicycle. Down at the Inner Harbor they have put in these full-size welded almost-bike looking, I don’t know what to call them, sculptures? They just look like a bike that is stuck in place. I guess the point is you could lock your real bike to it - if you wanted - and like, feel better about something or other. Likewise, in Hampden, they recently installed a bunch of small posts with a metal circle and a depiction of a bicycle in them. Now, if you actually ride bikes on a regular basis and are used to locking up to something, these new bike posts are kind of useless on account of their small size and weird height. But the thing is: they work. The same day they installed these things, somebody I know was like, “You know, I think I might start riding bikes.” He didn’t of course, but the point is, the city installed things which LOOK LIKE bikes to actively encourage people to actually ride and use a bike and live that lifestyle. It’s a good life-style, don’t get me wrong. When I got to town, the Strategist set me up with a nice fixed gear and I have been rocking it ever since. The other thing I love is there is this one lane on the edge of a commercial district in Hampden. It’s just a regular narrow two-way road. But on one side of the yellow lines, they painted these symbols right in the middle of the lane, indicating that it was a “bike lane.” Except, it’s totally not. It’s just a picture on a road. You don’t get extra space on the side or the shoulder to ride your bike. It’s just a picture of a bike. But this is how the game is played, I think. In order to motivate people to action, you have to insert lots of subliminal cues into an environment: images of bicyclce, representations of desired behaviors, and people pick them up and start modeling them. People are big imitators. The Great Apes. We copy things around us. We don’t usually know why.