ABSTRACT

New York City (NYC) affords its residents the luxury of ordering food to be delivered anytime, anywhere. This chapter explores how the pursuit of bike justice needs to account for how the public streets are often differently felt, used, experienced, and enacted by people based upon the social positioning, including that of race, class, and perceived foreignness. Immigrant food delivery cyclists are positioned as simultaneously invisible in bike advocacy and planning while visible as "bad" cyclists who trespass into white, affluent neighborhoods and thus threaten social order. Bike safety is therefore perversely transformed into safety from immigrant food delivery cyclists. This bike safety discourse ignores how "bad" food delivery cycling is produced by the time pressures of tip-based delivery livelihoods, unwelcoming car-based streets, and unjust policing. Public knowledge from marginalized cyclists such as food delivery workers can provide the foundation for counter-narratives and more equitable restructurings of the street and city landscapes in the pursuit of bike justice.