Last semester when I caught my first glimpse of Berkeley, I knew that Berkeley was a considerably large city and not having a car would be a setback to my enjoying Berkeley and its surrounding area. I decided to bring a bicycle up as a cheap mode of transportation. Upon bringing it up, I faced my concerned mother who insisted that I be careful when I am bicycling in the streets of Berkeley. Her list of warnings, ranging from watching out for crazy drivers to rabid squirrels, created an imprint on my mind that the Berkeley streets were dangerous. A whole month past and I did not ride my bicycle in Berkeley. I feared being hit by cars or by the animals roaming the streets. Suddenly, riding a bicycle in Berkeley became a risk I did not want to take. .
When I received this field project, I decided to take this as an opportunity to learn more about the risks and dangers associated with bicycle riding in the streets of Berkeley. In this ethnography, I will present my findings on the different risks and dangers that Berkeley bicyclists are prone to face, how they deal with it and what the city does to minimize those risks for the bicyclists. .
Since Berkeley is a large city, I confined the parameters of my field site observations to two streets, Channing and Milvia. Channing and Milvia are located southwest of the UC Berkeley campus and they intersect at Berkeley High School. These two streets became bicycle boulevards on Earth Day 1995. The two streets are alike in that each is narrow allowing for parking on one side of the street only. Thick outlines distinctly mark the bicycle boulevards. This allows the bicyclists and motorists to be aware that the streets are in fact bicycle boulevards and that the bicyclists have the right-of way. The two streets are in residential areas with reduced traffic as opposed to being in commercial areas with heavy traffic all around. In my field site, there are only two traffic signaled intersections; one on Martin Luther King Jr.