Remember When Lance Armstrong Was On Arthur?
Before he admitted to doping and leaned into his role as cycling's most toxic jock, he appeared on the show to talk about the importance of bike lanes.
Leg Day is a newsletter about the pursuit of joy as a city cyclist. Today, we’re talking about everyone’s favorite aardvark.
Those who know me know how much I love Arthur. I constantly reference the show’s many memeable moments—”That sign can’t stop me, I can’t read!”—but also more esoteric ones. For example, do you remember the episode where Buster finds a human-shaped sweet potato and names it Yamlet?
More recently, I had the vague recollection of an episode where Binky tries to get Lance Armstrong to help him advocate for more bike lanes in Elwood City. “Room to Ride” aired in October 2008, the second episode of season 12. The timing is quite interesting—Armstrong had just announced he would be returning to the sport after a three year break to try and win the 2009 Tour de France—but I couldn’t remember any specific details. Maybe that’s because after details from the USADA investigation into his role as the ringleader of the “most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen” broke in 2012, PBS stopped airing it. On a lark, I decided to rewatch it this week.
The catalyzing event of our story is Binky wiping out on a pothole. After his mom tells him she doesn’t want to ride on the road anymore, he runs into Francine’s dad, another cyclist. Mr. Frensky tells Binky there’s an upcoming election about whether the city should install more bike lanes. Binky thinks it’s a no-brainer, but Mr. Frensky points out that a lot of people don’t care about bike lanes, and plenty of people who do don’t vote1.
Binky recruits Arthur, Buster, and The Brain to establish the Bike Lane Brigade. But they have very little luck convincing people to vote for their cause. Mr. Crosswire, crooked seller of a used cars, is an obvious no. He literally runs away as Brain tells him riding bikes is good for the planet and your health. But even Mrs. MacGrady, the kid’s affable lunch lady, doesn’t seem that interested.
Mrs. MacGrady: “Bike lanes? Do we really need those?
Binky Barnes: Well yes, the streets are unsafe and full of potholes. Look what happneed to my knee while biking the other day.
MMG: “Hmm. That is a red tomato. But I still don’t know if bike lanes are the answer.
BB: “But biking is really important to me. It’s how I get around!”
MMG “Never really took to it myself. And I guess I’m too old now.”
[Proceeds to walk away from a politcally engaged ten year old who then has a nightmare that bikes lanes not only lose the election, but that bikes get declared illegal and his bike is smashed into the back of a garbage truck.]
Later, Muffy, recruited to improve their pitch, bemoans the fact that the Bike Brigade couldn’t get a celebrity endorsement. Casually, Buster asks why she didn’t ask Lance Armstrong, who is literally outside. Binky rushes to intercept him, but not before Armstrong has zoomed away. Binky chases him down, eventually intercepting Armstrong at the crest of a hill and then proceeding to fall over and scrape his knee again. Thankfully, Armstrong has stopped and offers to help. “I always carry a little antiseptic with me,” he says.
We never get another look at what else is in frame bag. And interestingly, Armstrong doesn’t offer to publicly support the bike lane laws, even if he can recognize the roads are terrible2. Binky and friends manage to make a pretty good commercial anyway that gins up enough support to help them win the election. Happy ending!
Of course, cyclists rarely get these kinds of wins in non-fictional America. In New York, cops have decided to terrorize cyclists with criminal summonses for relatively minor traffic infractions, despite the fact that motorists commit a much larger percentage of these infractions and receive face infrequent penalties.
When confronted about this, something I’ve seen several cyclists do in videos they’ve posted to Instagram, cops just seem to hand wave off the inconsistent enforcement. “Never really took to it myself,” they might as well be saying.
Why Is the NYPD Summoning Cyclists to Court?
Leg Day is a newsletter about the pursuit of joy as a city cyclist, which is often made much harder by the police.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of apathetic attitude, which is a pretty understandable response to the deluge of straight up evil we’re being forced to confront in our country on a daily basis. Our executives are gleefully spurning ICE to lock up immigrants for writing op-eds about genocide, eliminating environmental protection laws, and accepting obvious bribes from authoritarian states where homosexuality is a crime, with limited pushback from the most powerful members of our oppositional party.
I am heartened, however, to see that there has been some ground-up opposition. There are people at Telsa dealerships around the country every weekend, trying to make the case that people should stop putting money in the pocket of a person intent on kneecapping the government’s ability to do anything but drop bombs and cut taxes for the wealth. There was a Freeze the Rent rally in Brooklyn yesterday that drew pretty big crowds, despite being kicked out of its original location just a day earlier by its host (a Cuomo sympathizer)3.
I bet a lot of the people at these events watched Arthur. They got to experience television that could be created without the same pressure to glue kids to screens, just so that some executive could place more expensive ads from cereal companies. Before Spongebob SquarePants, before Paw Patrol, before Cocomelon. They experienced TV that actually tried to make them better humans4.
Unsurprisingly, Trump is trying to cut funding for public television, specifically cancelling grants that are going to support educational children’s television, which an admin official referred to as “woke propaganda.”
At the same time, Sean Duffy, the secretary of the Department of Transportation, is actively suing the New York DOT over congestion pricing (which has reduced crashes AND increased moving speeds) and trying to re-cast extremely in-demand infrastructure improvements as a “war on the working class” (The median person who commutes into Manhattan’s central business district makes at least $100,000 a year, says Streetsblog.)
These things might not feel connected, but I think they are. I see so much more of New York on a bike than I can when I’m on foot, but also have to engage with it more fully than on the rare occasions I find myself in a two-ton box of steel sealing me off from people I could plow over. I find myself clocking more details about my environment—the places I once frequented that have been replaced by hollow corporate replicants, the people in distress being harassed by cops, and indeed, every single pothole that almost bumps me out of the saddle.
Still, I often find myself returning home happier than when I left. Cycling brings me a childlike glee, but also the childlike sense I can actually do something to fix the problems I’m seeing.
Since I’ve become a city cyclist, I’ve become so much more locked in on local issues. I’ve subscribed to The City and Hell Gate. I’ve learned who my local representatives are—s/o to Phara and Chi and (to a lesser extent) Yvette—and have developed strong thoughts on who should be our next mayor. I’ve also started attending the monthly meetings of my community board’s committee on Environment, Sanitation, and Transportation. (See you there in two weeks?)
There’s a possibility all of this could have happened if I had not become a cyclist. After all, I’ve always cared about cities and the people that choose to live in them. And now that I’m older and a bit more settled in my personal and professional life, I actually have the time to spend three hours at a heavily procedural meeting where people can yell at the MTA for moving a bus stop across the street.
But I think becoming a cyclist has accelerated this for me. The majority of folks at these meetings are much older than I am. They’ve lived in the neighborhood for longer, and probably know more about the city than I do. When I do see a younger person at these meetings, though, they almost always have a bike helmet with them. Or, in one case, a "#BanCars” sticker on their laptop.
Maybe next time I see them, I’ll ask if they’ve seen the episode of Arthur where Binky asks Armstrong to help him advocate for more bike lanes.
The folks at PBS and NPR have created a webpage that allows you to easily ask your congresspeople to save public media funding. Here’s a link.
If you live in New York City, please please please do everything you can to try and convince your neighbors not to rank Andrew Cuomo. Not only is he a sex pest, he also has no interest in making our city better. The man literally Chat GPT-ed his housing plan! His HOUSING plan!
He’s of the Vehicular Cyclist mindset, I guess.
Per City and State, the event had to be moved one day before it was scheduled because the Abyssinian Baptist Church says it didn’t want to host a rally. “When Abyssinian agreed to the event a few months ago, it was a nonpartisan community town hall which Abyssinian was happy to host,” said Abyssinian spokesperson LaToya Evans. “However, the details of the event were changed very recently, and given the church’s nonprofit, religious organization status, they are not able to hold partisan rallies and events favoring a particular candidate.” Guess that policy doesn’t apply to Andrew Cuomo, who spoke at the church on March 30th.