J. Harry Wray

UNIVERSITY SPOKES MAN Wray has students at DePaul going head over wheels for his class.

To the average person, cycling and politics don’t exactly sound like a predictable pairing. But for J. Harry Wray, a poli-sci professor at DePaul University, the two are as perfectly matched as fixed gears and bike messengers. In his latest tome, Pedal Power: The Quiet Rise of the Bicycle in American Public Life (Paradigm Publishers, $16.95), Wray spins a yarn about the idea that the bicycle just might contain some of the answers to—among other issues— urban sprawl and global warming. With Chicago as his lab, he shares the stories of activists and everyday bikers. We caught up with Wray before he rolled off to the League of American Bicyclists’ National Bike Summit back in March.

Time Out Chicago: So how did you get into cycling?
J. Harry Wray: I kind of grew into cycling. I started doing it in North Carolina, where I was a graduate student. And it just became convenient for me to ride three or four miles on a bicycle into the campus. One thing led to another, and I ended up doing a cross-country bike ride. That took me from Chapel Hill to Los Angeles. I got to Chicago, and living in the city and this dense urban traffic really intimated me, so I stayed off of it for a while except to ride it on trails and that sort of thing. Gradually I learned more about how you ride a bike in the city. And then I also learned that there are other things going on that made biking easier. It wasn’t just me gaining personal knowledge about how one rides in a dense urban area, but it was that somebody was taking action to make biking in an urban area easier.

TOC: And that’s when the idea for the class came about?
J. Harry Wray: I started thinking about the connection between politics and biking, and I never really thought about that before, even though I studied politics, and that’s what I had written about and taught. I always thought of biking as this private part of my life, and after I’d been riding in Chicago I began to fuse those two interests.

TOC: Was there a particular ride that merged biking and politics for you?
J. Harry Wray: It was more organic. What happened was DePaul had “Discover Chicago” classes. You bring first-year students to campus a week early, and you go out into the area and spend all day with the students during what’s called an immersion week. In some way, this is connected to the larger subject of your class. So it occurred to me that I could do a course on biking and politics where we’d have these big rides—some of them are as long as 60 miles throughout the area. And then when the regular quarter begins, we can start talking about how is it this experience is really connected to politics. And so that was an idea I could make a course out of.... And I knew there was a book there because when I was looking around for reading material for the course [“Biking and Politics”], I couldn’t find anything. So I said, Well I guess I should write it.

TOC: How does Chicago rate in terms of bike-friendliness on a national or international scale?
J. Harry Wray: On an international scale, we’re not so hot. On a national scale...Chicago is probably the best big city.

TOC: Why do you think that is?
J. Harry Wray: One big reason is the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation...of all the local [bike] advocacy organizations in the country, it is the strongest. But a second, and equally important, influence has been Mayor Daley. He’s very pro-bike. And then you have a whole variety of other kinds of bike clubs that really help grow the base of the biking movement.

TOC: What’s your most convincing argument to ditch the car?
J. Harry Wray: Houston. Houston is the epicenter of the insanity of the automobile. You have a city that has basically disappeared under concrete. [Some say] OK, they have gone this way, but by golly, at least they’ve relieved congestion. The thing is they haven’t relieved congestion. Houston is just as congested now as it was 20 years ago, except it’s more depressingly congested because everything else is disappearing.

TOC: Is this still a fringe movement?
J. Harry Wray: When you have the chairman of the [House of Representatives’] transportation and infrastructure committee, James Oberstar [D-Minn.], at the epicenter of transportation policy, being an avid biker and an avid pusher of that, I don’t think you can say that it’s still a fringe movement. One of the things that gives the impression of biking being a fringe movement is that it’s an inherently local activity…you don’t really see what’s going on in the rest of the country. And I’ve tried to shed some light on that. It’s a movement that’s beneath the radar, but it’s very real. And it’s going to assume more and more influence. Rationality requires it to.