Within highly motorised societies a cycling identity must be worked at, and even in Cambridge cyclists can feel ambivalent about this identity... However great the diversity among cyclists, they are popularly defined as a minority group. As discussed above, they feel under pressure to define themselves as a ‘good’ or ‘deserving’ cyclist, within the context of often hostile media coverage. Of course, ‘good cyclists’ imply the existence of ‘bad cyclists’, and thus interviewees spoke critically of, for example, ‘fanatical cyclists … extremely arrogant and very dangerous cyclists with the high speed bikes, Lycra, helmets, often listening to something’. Another said ‘London cyclists are extremely aggressive’, and most commented negatively on dangerous cycling by ‘language school students’ in Cambridge. Where ‘bad cyclists’ exist, another option is to reject the struggle for ‘goodness’ and defiantly claim a deviant identity.
The ‘cyclist’ is thus ... a relatively exclusive identity, the take-up of which requires a very specific accumulation of cultural and economic capital. It is marked first and foremost by a distance from necessity. Cyclists ride, but do so out of choice. Cyclists could drive to work (and most likely also own a car), but for reasons both tangible (health) and abstract (politics), they choose not to drive. They have the economic capital to live relatively close to the workplace and to buy the expensive gear needed both to keep warm and, not incidentally, to signify their distance from the more proletarian riders on the trail. And they have the cultural capital to find larger political and social significance in a brisk ride to work and to communicate these values persuasively to others (i.e. riding as a fight against obesity, riding as a blow against global warming).[...T]his case provides a useful illustration of how leisure and recreation activities – typically viewed as individual choices or preferences – can become, through a contingent process of political articulation, condensed and powerful symbols of class inequality and antagonism within the urban political field. As one resident put it, the equation of ‘bike lanes’ with ‘Fenty’s folk’ and ‘the gentrifiers’ crystallised suddenly during the campaign, casting the newly painted lanes in his neighbourhood in a completely different light.
