San Francisco-based muralist Mona Caron, whose work graces walls across California and throughout the world, has designed a limited-edition custom art bike for the California Bicycle Coalition. Caron’s first mural, the famous Duboce Bikeway Mural, has adorned that bike path since 1998, when the bikeway was unveiled as the city’s first bike path closed to car traffic. Since then, her “artivism” has taken her all over the world, where she has explored weeds as metaphors for social transformation, engaging with the climate justice movement.

The bicycle Caron has created for CalBike, limited to 50 bicycles, features dandelions and scattered seeds on a PUBLIC bicycle. Purchase this bicycle.

The Mona Caron dandelion bike. Photo by Orange Photography www.orangephotography.com. See more photos below.

We spoke with Caron last week, to discuss her design and her passion for the bicycle.

CalBike: Why did you choose to use the dandelion on this art bike?

Mona Caron: I like to use botanical metaphors to describe other things, especially the dynamics of social transformation. The botanical metaphor absolutely applies to the bicycle movement. I remember in the early days of Critical Mass, when I was very involved with the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, we were seeing more and more bicyclists appearing on the streets of San Francisco. It felt like this simple idea, a simple act anyone could do, was quietly spreading like seeds, and germinating city-wide.

Each social bike ride in the early days was like blowing the seeds of a dandelion puff: I swear, after each ride we’d notice more bike riders in the city. Like a dandelion seed, a single bicyclist in the city is a fragile, small, lightweight, quiet thing; but many people choosing to ride bikes can germinate powerful, paradigm-shifting changes.

Taken individually, each decision to ride a bike doesn’t seem like a big deal, but collectively it can really fundamentally change a city, change our assumptions about public space, our sense of possibility of what a convivial, human-scale city could look like. Just like a dandelion cracks the concrete, bicycling could change our society.

CalBike: Your first mural, the Duboce Bikeway Mural, is well-known to anyone who rides a bike in San Francisco. How do you see your work as fitting in with the bike advocacy movement?

Caron: When I started riding a bike and became friends with SF’s bike advocates and instigators, I started designing posters to try and entice more people to ride bikes and join social rides. I drew some in a fake-antique psychedelic art-nouveau style, as if urban bicycling was a time-honored thing, and some of my images got picked up and reused all over the world as the Critical Mass movement spread from SF to hundreds of cities worldwide. My bike-related artwork has been featured in publications of and about the bike movement on four continents.

More recently, I’ve been working on my mural and stop-motion animation project WEEDS, and I’ve been making artwork for the climate justice movement, where I’ve also used the dandelion metaphor. The idea is to sow resistance and spread alternatives, in a gentle but powerful way, just like these wild plants do in urban environments.

I attended and gave presentations at several World Bicycle Forums in recent years. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, we painted a dandelion mural, then rode around town disseminating its seeds, painting each seed puff carrying a tiny little bicicletinha, a little bicycle. We stenciled these little bicycle-seeds all over the city on allies’ walls, to spread the idea.

CalBike: You’ve mentioned the dandelion as a symbol of hope.

Caron: Yes, hope in the sense of a visualization of the dynamics of change. You know, It’s kind of hard to imagine some sudden big revolution changing the world and solving all our problems, and I doubt the changes we need will ever come that way, nor magically delivered by some illuminated politician we elect. Rather, I see things can and will shift through an increasing multitude of small-scale but widespread life-affirming acts, finding the cracks in the system and pushing them open, like dandelions do.

Sometimes our harsh reality feels like cement: it seems to be something so permanent, so hard, seemingly unchangeable. And yet all it takes is a little fissure, and somebody somewhere planting something different in it, doing something alternative, to start its breakdown. Because anything we do, you can bet we are not the only ones doing it. And if it is something life-affirming, and you spread it around, many will join in. So when you get on your bicycle, you know you’re riding with a collective force that will bring more oxygen to this world, literally and metaphorically.

I designed this bike to be a reminder of that.

Purchase this bicycle.

Photo by Orange Photography www.orangephotography.com.

Caltrans has a long history of working to make California a better place to drive. We’ve been pushing them to make our state better for people biking and walking for years, and while we’ve seen great progress, particularly in what they say they’d like to accomplish, we’re continuing to push them to walk the walk (or, if you will, bike the bike).

One big change we’d like to see is that every time Caltrans makes improvements to our state highways, whether it’s replacing a bridge, repaving a few blocks or a few miles of roadway, or even repairing drainage systems, they will always take advantage of those opportunities to make improvements to biking and walking infrastructure in the area to make more “Complete Streets.”

In our June CalBike Report, we told you about how an in-depth analysis by CalBike of the Caltrans State Highway Maintenance and Protection Program (SHOPP) has spurred a significant rethinking at Caltrans about how they should redesign state highways to be safe for people to bike and walk. Since that time, we’ve been working with our friends at California Walks to develop recommendations for Caltrans to improve their SHOPP project development process and take advantage of opportunities to make safety improvements as part of routine maintenance. We have received some initial openness from Caltrans to our recommendations, and anticipate more official feedback over the coming months.

We understand that it takes a long time and a major culture change at Caltrans to make a fundamental shift in the routine process of maintaining and redesigning our state highways, but we hope our recommendations will spur the agency to make it part of their normal, everyday process to consider people biking and walking as they plan their road maintenance projects. You can read the full list of recommendations to Caltrans in this document, but here are some highlights:

• Establish a new Division of Active Transportation at Caltrans with staff devoted to reviewing and recommending improvements to highway maintenance projects
• Involve local advocates and residents in the review and development of maintenance projects at the Caltrans District level early in the process to ensure they meet local needs
• Create minimum standards for walking and biking improvements on projects, based on the amount and speed of traffic, and a clear review process for any projects that can’t meet minimum standards
• Develop a meaningful, transparent public outreach and engagement process for planning future needs and improvements on all state highway corridors that prioritize walking, bicycling, and transit use

For too long, bicycle advocacy has been dominated by white middle class men. The advocacy agenda has for the most part reflected the interests of this narrow subculture. It’s limited our success and, in our increasingly diverse nation, such exclusion will halt progress completely. Other voices have been included, especially in the last decade, but it’s not hard to see how far we have to go to include people of color, women and low-income people in order for our movement to truly reflect the diversity of our communities. Too often, such voices are mere tokens of diversity and not reflective of genuine inclusion.

The Untokening on November 13 in Atlanta may be a watershed event for bicycle advocacy, as leaders and advocates, all of them people of color whose voices have been marginalized, gather to “address issues of mobility with the perspective of justice-oriented advocates as the starting point, not as a consideration.” It’s not for mainstream advocates to learn about equity, but for equity advocates to develop some “guiding foundational principles, definitions, frameworks, objectives, and even data that could help shape a larger vision of what equity and justice in mobility mean in theory and practice,” according to the event’s website.

To learn from the leaders present, and to share our own progress and challenges in pursuing equity, diversity and inclusion in the bicycle advocacy movement in California, the California Bicycle Coalition is sending board member Esteban del Río and staffer Norma Herrera. They will report in the December issue of the CalBike Report, and their learnings will inform our upcoming strategic planning process, as well as our 2017 California Bicycle Summit.

The Untokening takes place on Sunday, Nov. 13 following the “Facing Race” conference in Atlanta. Registration is open.