Two Wheels, One Planet: Biking Toward an Eco-Socialist Future
Critical Mass Nola visiting Earth Seed Community Garden in the Seventh Ward with Black Men Build - Bvlbancha
The Greater New Orleans area is designed for the automobile — you can see it everywhere: the streets, the overpasses, the parking lots. This car-first model isn’t just a local issue; it’s the American export that’s reshaped cities around the world. We’ve inherited a design of wide, dangerous streets cutting through neighborhoods, sprawling distances between homes, schools, and grocery stores, and an endless loop of bridges and interstates shuttling people from suburban subdivisions to strip malls and office parks.
All of this enriches the auto and fossil fuel industries while costing us dearly — in our health, our safety, and our climate.
In most American cities, including ours, the majority of urban planning revolves around cars — whether they’re moving or just sitting in parking lots. In some downtowns, half or more of the land is devoted to parking. Think about the acres of blacktop around the Superdome, or the lots that swallowed up what used to be neighborhoods in the CBD and Treme.
All that pavement cooks the city. Here, where summer already feels like it’s turned the whole area into a giant pot of gumbo, dark rooftops and asphalt trap the sun’s heat, driving up temperatures by as much as 44°F. Unlike the bayou or the neutral ground’s patches of green, pavement doesn’t cool off at night. And during the heat waves we now see every summer, the toll is deadly. If we converted just 5% of our rooftops and asphalt to cooler, reflective materials, we could drop urban temps by nearly 2°F — a small change that could save lives.
A sustainable Greater New Orleans area would look very different. Imagine if housing, schools, jobs, health clinics, grocery stores, cultural spaces, and playgrounds were all within walking or biking distance. Imagine streets shaded with oaks and magnolias, with wide sidewalks, protected bike lanes, and accessible transit for anyone with mobility challenges. Picture gardens and fruit trees along the neutral grounds, community spaces where neighbors actually gather, and restored wetlands at the city’s edge that help store carbon and cool the air.
This vision shouldn’t stop at the parish line. Rural Louisiana deserves the same access to housing, health care, education, and culture. Imagine a high-speed rail connecting New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and beyond, making it easy to travel without burning gas. In areas where cars are still necessary, they could be zero-emission and shared by the community instead of sitting idle in driveways.
Critical Mass Nola and Black Men Build -Bvlbancha visiting Land Back Community Garden in the 9th ward.
We also need to rethink the suburban lawn. Across the U.S., it’s the biggest irrigated “crop” — and in our climate, keeping grass green means pouring out water and chemicals that run into Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf, fueling algal blooms and killing marine life. Instead, we could replace lawns with native plants like muhly grass, Louisiana irises, and milkweed that feed pollinators, hold water in the soil, and bring color to the block. Shared green spaces for sports and play could replace thousands of little lawns that nobody really uses.
Housing would change too. Folks living in more space than they need could move into smaller, energy-efficient homes, with shared spaces for recreation, socializing, and childcare. We could have neighborhood kitchens serving fresh Gulf seafood, Creole and plant-based options alike, using local produce from urban farms from the Hollygrove to the Lower Nine. Laundry, repairs, and cleaning could be organized at the community level — saving time, cutting costs, and reducing our carbon footprint.
Work wouldn’t be the same grind, either. No one would be locked into the same job for life unless they wanted to be. People could retrain, shift roles, and contribute in different ways over time. Some tasks — like cooking, cleaning, or gardening — could be shared on a rotating basis so no one’s stuck doing the same thing forever. And we’d all work fewer hours, with more time for the arts, porch talks, festivals, and Carnival.
Some will say this is “utopian,” that people are naturally selfish and won’t pull their weight. But for most of human history, we lived in cooperative societies where work and resources were shared. Capitalism forces us to compete for jobs, housing, and even health care, turning neighbors into rivals and making generosity rare.
But we’ve seen the other side — and we’ve seen it here. After Katrina, when the levees broke, people stepped up. Strangers rescued strangers. Neighbors fed each other. Musicians played in the streets to keep spirits alive. For a moment, cooperation wasn’t the exception — it was the rule.
That doesn’t have to be temporary. An eco-socialist transformation is about taking the best of our communal past — the solidarity that’s already in our culture — and making it permanent. It’s about building a Greater New Orleans area where cooperation is the norm, where the streets belong to people, and where we live in balance with the land and water that have always sustained us.
Every time we ride a bicycle, we take a small but powerful step toward that eco-socialist future. Choosing a bike over a car isn’t just about lowering emissions — it’s about rejecting a system that prioritizes profit, pollution, and private ownership of the streets over the health and well-being of the people who live here. On a bike, we move through our city at a human pace. We see our neighbors. We hear the music on the corner. We spend nothing on gas, and we create no exhaust. We claim space that car culture tells us we’re not supposed to have.
It may feel like a single ride is just a drop in the bucket, but drops fill oceans. Every mile we ride instead of drive is a mile closer to a New Orleans built for people, instead of for the profit of the auto and fossil fuel industries. Critical Mass Nola isn’t just a bike ride — it’s practice for the world we want. Together, we can pedal toward a city — and a planet — where cooperation, community, and care replace extraction, exploitation, and competition. That’s not just a dream. It’s a direction. And the ride starts now.
-Eric Gabourel
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