The Socialist Case for Separated Bike Lanes

By

Eric Gabourel

“Socialism can only arrive by bicycle.”—José Antonio Viera-Gallo (Socialist Party of Chile)

In New Orleans and across the capitalist world, the fight for separated bike lanes is often dismissed as a lifestyle preference or aesthetic concern. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the terrain of struggle. Separated bike lanes are not merely about traffic—they are about class, power, and survival. They represent a demand for collective ownership of urban space, a rejection of fossil fuel domination, and a step toward socialist control over the built environment.

This struggle plays out acutely in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana, where the consequences of climate collapse, environmental racism, car dependency, and oil extraction converge. Here, the dominance of petro-capital is not an abstraction—it is concrete, visible in the disappearing wetlands, the smoke stacks of Cancer Alley, and the car-dominated infrastructure that leaves working people dead in the streets or stranded without options.

The car is not a neutral machine. It is the preferred vehicle of capital because it individualizes and commodifies mobility. Car-centric infrastructure is a tool of capitalist hegemony—rooted in fossil fuel interests and designed to extract labor, fragment community, and preserve racial and class hierarchies. In this context, the separated bike lane is not a utopian gesture. It is a line drawn against capital’s domination of movement, space, and the climate.

I. The Bourgeois City: Who the Streets Serve

The expansion of New Orleans’ infrastructure after its swamps were drained in the 20th century was designed to serve the private automobile. This transformation was not inevitable—it was engineered through racist zoning, redlining, highway construction, and disinvestment in public transit. One of the most devastating examples is the construction of the Claiborne Expressway (I-10) in 1966, which cut directly through the heart of the Tremé, one of the oldest and most vibrant Black neighborhoods in America.

Claiborne Avenue had been a thriving corridor of Black-owned businesses, lined with oak trees and home to social clubs, barrooms, and cultural life. The highway destroyed over 120 businesses and displaced hundreds of residents, replacing communal space with concrete pillars and on-ramps. This pattern was repeated nationwide: suburbs were subsidized as white enclaves, while Black communities were carved up and isolated by six-lane expressways in the name of “progress.”

The car is not just a mode of transit—it is a mode of class control. Streets were transformed into speedways for the privileged while the working class was pushed to the margins—geographically and economically. Every pothole-ridden road, every missing sidewalk in a working-class district, is a reminder of whose movement is prioritized and whose is denied.

The automobile is the private property form of transit; the separated bike lane is a step toward its socialization. It invites collective use, ecological consciousness, and community infrastructure. It redistributes public space in favor of those who do not want to—or who cannot—own cars. That is precisely why the capitalist class refers to separate bike lanes as “Woke” infrastructure.

II. Car Culture and Capital: Oil as the Lifeblood of Imperialism

Nowhere is the relationship between cars and capital more direct than in Southern Louisiana. The region is a colony of the oil and gas industry, which dominates not only the economy but the very logic of political and physical infrastructure. From Lake Charles to Plaquemines Parish, entire communities have been sacrificed for refineries, pipelines, and export terminals. Wetlands have been obliterated, coastlines eroded, and air poisoned.

This is not merely environmental degradation—it is a racialized system of extraction and death. Cancer Alley exists because it is politically acceptable, under capitalism, to kill Black communities so long as profits flow. The car is both the justification for and the consumer of this destruction.

Globally, oil sustains the U.S. imperialist project. Wars are fought to control it. Regimes are toppled to protect it. Domestically, car dependency ensures demand for it. The continuation of this system is not based on need but on maintaining capital’s dominion over energy, labor, and territory.

To ride a bike is to defy the logic of oil capital. It is to say that another world is possible—one that does not require war, extraction, and ecocide for mobility.

III. The Class Politics of Transit

In a capitalist society, transportation is a classed experience. Cars are marketed as symbols of success, independence, and masculinity. To not own a car is to be stigmatized as poor, failed, or undesirable. Yet for millions, especially in New Orleans, car ownership is an impossible burden. And so they walk, bike, or wait on unreliable buses—risking injury, arrest, or worse.

Separated bike lanes, then, are not a luxury. They are a demand for safety, dignity, and autonomy for the working class. They allow people to move without a car note, without a gas bill, without debt. They reduce the unpaid labor of commuting and the time stolen from workers each day to feed capital.

Separated bike lanes shorten commutes, reduce danger, and decommodify transportation—making it easier, safer, and more equitable for people (especially working-class people) to move through the city without needing to buy or maintain a car. The working class has the right not only to movement, but to safe, communal, and sustainable movement. This is not just a transportation issue. It is a question of how we organize life under capitalism, and who that life is organized for.

IV. Reclaiming the Streets: Separated Bike Lanes as Collective Infrastructure

Separated bike lanes represent an ideological and material shift. Unlike highways or parking structures, they are non-commodified infrastructure. They do not produce rent, sell ad space, or require a monthly subscription. They are open, collective, and accessible.

This is why they are under attack—not because they are ineffective, but because they work too well. They offer a glimpse of a different city: one not built for speed or consumption, but for sustainability and solidarity. They provide freedom without fuel, movement without motors, mobility without money.

Electric vehicles and autonomous cars are the capitalist response to climate catastrophe. They change the form, but not the function. They perpetuate extraction, privatization, and sprawl. Separated bike lanes, in contrast, are a transitional demand—one that doesn’t resolve all contradictions, but which shifts power toward the people.

V. Revolutionary Urbanism: The Role of a Socialist Movement

The fight for separated bike lanes cannot be isolated from the broader struggle against capitalism. It must be embedded in a mass movement of workers, renters, students, climate activists, and the urban poor. This coalition must demand:

• Municipalization of transit infrastructure, under worker and community control.

• Taxation and regulation of the oil and car industries, to fund free, safe, and green transportation.

• Reparative investment in BIPOC and working-class communities, who have borne the brunt of car violence and climate disaster.

We must build the bicycle as a symbol of liberation, not austerity. We must organize Critical Mass NOLA not merely as a spectacle, but as a powerful statement of collective ownership and resistance—a declaration that the streets belong to the people.

Conclusion: Movement Is a Revolutionary Right

In the words of Rosa Luxemburg, we face a choice between socialism and barbarism. To continue on the path of car dependency, oil extraction, and capitalist sprawl is to choose the latter. To fight for separated bike lanes, and the world they prefigure, is to take a step toward socialism.

This is not simply about bikes. It is about power—who has it, who moves with it, and who dies for it. Separated bike lanes challenge the capitalist domination of space, energy, and labor. They reclaim what is public. They resist what is poisonous. And they affirm that movement—like housing, food, and water—must belong to the people.

There is no socialism without the transformation of how we move, live, and share the earth. As we work towards a socialist reality let ride together, toward liberation.

—Eric Gabourel