Jon-Paul Bail knows every cop on the island. He’s lived in Alameda his entire 36 years, and boasts there’s nary a badge in town he hasn’t yet greeted. “They all know me, sure,” says Bail, a cotton beanie pulled down to his eyelids as he surveys the occasional skateboarder popping in and out of the bowl at Cityview Skatepark — where he regularly tangles with police. “But I can just tell they don’t like giving me the ticket. You look in their face, and they look so … unenthusiastic about the whole process. But, you know, they gotta do what they’re told.” To date, Bail has been the recipient of seven citations. At $52 a hit, that’s a total of $364 for riding where he is forbidden.
Despite his bleached-blonde hair and baggy shorts, Bail isn’t a skateboarder. He’s a BMXer — BMX being shorthand for bicycle motocross — and around here, that distinction goes beyond having a pair of handlebars and two wheels too few.
Back in 1997, Bail was among the first batch of locals pushing the city of Alameda to build a cement park with hips, jumps, and bumps at Alameda Point, the site of the old Navy base. He and his BMX buddies envisioned a park that would serve as a multi-use area, allowing skaters and bikers to ride freely, side by side and unsupervised.
Bail was perhaps the project’s most dedicated advocate. The original clay model for the park’s design, he says, was crafted on his living-room floor. And staffers at the city’s Parks and Recreation Department thought so highly of Bail’s civic-mindedness that they recruited him to mentor an Alameda High School leadership class on how things get done the right way in a local democracy. When the city came up short on funds for the project, Bail contributed $4,000 of his own cash and helped organize some 450 volunteers — many of them bikers, he points out — to level the site and help pour concrete in June 1999. “We did a community build, Jimmy Carter-style,” he says, proudly.
Finally, in the two weeks required for the concrete to dry at this 15,000-square-foot playland with breathtaking San Francisco views, Bail and his dog, Pork Chop, camped out in their RV, pulling a 24-7 security detail to thwart any thrasher who just couldn’t resist an early ride.
But one day that summer, shortly after Cityview opened to rave reviews from skaters, bikers, police, politicians, and parents alike, a city worker planted a new sign at the park’s fringes that read, to Bail’s horror, “No Bikes.” The BMX crew was locked out.
The city’s problem, not so surprising in this culture, was the three L’s: lawyers, lawsuits, and litigation. Alameda’s city attorney feared a surge of liability actions if bicyclists were to get too aggro at a facility the city had officially christened a “skateboard park.” The concern was that bikes could fly out of control and slam into defenseless skateboarders. “This is exactly why, from day one, every time we talked about the park we said it was a multi-use for both bikes and skateboards,” says the frustrated Bail, “and why every piece of literature we printed said the same. It was so the city wouldn’t get confused.”
Bummer, dudes. The city did get confused. And Alameda isn’t alone. All over California, local officials are trying to figure out what to make of local BMXers who are drooling over the prospect of dropping in at city skateparks. “When we design parks in Oregon and Washington, they just tell us to build it and that’s it,” says Steve Rose, a principal at Purkiss Rose R.S.I., a Southern California firm that designs and builds skateparks. “Californians tend to want fences and supervision. And they’re much more concerned about the risk management of bikes colliding with the skaters.”
Not long ago, it was the skateboarders who faced such municipal skepticism. Prior to 1997, local pols routinely shunned hopeful boarders after being advised that s-k-a-t-e-p-a-r-k spelled l-a-w-s-u-i-t. Fortunately for the young thrashers, the state legislature passed a bill that year that shields cities from liability. The legislation — AB 1296 — deemed skateboarding a “hazardous recreational activity” and reasoned that anyone who engages in such activities at a city-built skatepark is on his own, legally speaking. It made no specific mention of the trick bikes, which at the time were considerably less common than their flat wooden counterparts.
The law’s timing was ripe. Skateboarding’s incredible popularity was wreaking havoc in many a downtown. Store owners were tired of having kids practice grinds on their planter boxes, cops were tired of dispensing tickets, and teenagers were tired of getting them. The parks were a humane answer: No longer could local kids bitch that they had nowhere else to skate, and local cops would have the advantage of knowing where kids were congregating. As soon as the new law went into effect, the facilities began sprouting like weeds; according to the Skateboarding Association of America, some two hundred municipal skateparks across the state have since opened, or are in planning or construction stages.
Alameda’s park was one of the first to appear. After rumors about a skatepark proposal reached the city’s top cop Burny Matthews, the chief dashed off a gushing memo to Parks and Rec boss Sherry McCarthy, offering his department’s full support. “While the development and implementation of a skateboard park is not the solution for the youth of our community, it certainly is a huge step in the right direction,” Matthews wrote.
But like many of his colleagues at city hall, Matthews heard only the word “skateboard” and deleted “BMX” from his thought process. Bikers represented only a small portion of potential park users. They too, however, were young, in need of a hangout, and growing in number: There are currently about four million bike tricksters nationwide, according to the Skate Park Association of the USA.
Sam Pederson, an Alameda rider and founder of advocacy group Bmxriders.org, says California’s proliferation of parks is a blessing for his sport — but only if the ban is lifted. “In the rest of the world, this just isn’t an issue,” Pederson says. “But in California, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because we have more lawyers.”
Or at least lawyers with conflicting interpretations of the skatepark law. Riled by Alameda’s bike ban, Bail and Pederson together formed a group called BMX Riders Organization (BRO) and enlisted attorney Gina Mariani to challenge Alameda’s lockout of BMXers. In a letter to Alameda City Attorney Carol Korade, Mariani argued that “bike jumping” is already considered a “hazardous recreational activity” under the state’s health and safety code, and therefore should be allowed at skateparks.
While Korade has yet to budge from her no-bikes reading of the state law, officials across the bay in Daly City have wholeheartedly agreed with the BMXers. And in April the city of Piedmont, prompted by heavy lobbying from BRO and local riders, approved a trial period that includes bikes-only sessions at its park.
These cities, however, are in the minority. According to BRO, only seven out of California’s two hundred or so skateparks explicitly allow bikes. Those that ban them may not be protecting themselves from much of anything. Rose, who has been designing skateparks since 1994, says he is unaware of any successful lawsuit stemming from a skatepark injury.
Yet separating the sidewalk athletes, as Piedmont has done, may also be a good way to avoid rivalries that have little to do with lawsuits or city hall. It’s the timeless story of the old school trying to guard its limited turf against newcomers: Skiers scoff at snowboarders, hikers sneer at mountain bikers, water skiers look down on jet skiers. And down in Santa Cruz, a rivalry between surfers and sea kayakers competing for prime spots has at times turned violent. In this case, skaters complain that speedy bikes make for painful collisions, and that the bike’s metal pegs chip the concrete. And some, of course, offer this tidbit of less-mannered criticism: BMXers are dorks.
The bikers, on the other hand, view themselves as the up-and-comers, the ones who’ll be accepted once the mainstream catches up. Minor tensions do exist at Cityview, Bails says, but those tend to be exaggerated. “Every once in a while you see one person acting like an asshole, but that’s just that person acting like an asshole,” he says. “At our park, we live in harmony. Our skaters know that bikers helped build this place, so everybody is mellow. You don’t get that kind of harmony at a Raiders game.”
The bikers also feel persecuted is by what they view as patchy and uneven law enforcement. At Cityview, which draws some 200 to 300 young people daily, including a couple dozen BMXers, the police initially ignored the bikers. “It was like we were gays in the military,” Bail says, “a don’t-ask-don’t-tell thing.” But last fall, the cops suddenly cracked down. Most months, according to police records, cops would dole out about a dozen citations — to skaters for not wearing helmets, and to bikers for just being there. But last September, there were more than a hundred tickets, and almost all went to bikers. The ticketing dwindled back to a few dozen a month, but then, in February, the Alameda police issued nearly fifty tickets to bikers and just two to skaters, and have since slacked off again. At the height of the crackdown, bikers protested at the park with signs that read “Let Us Ride,” and, modifying a favorite slogan of their skateboarding counterparts: “BMX Is Not a Crime.”
Alameda police lieutenant Jim Brock says the wavering enforcement is the result of a complaint-driven process. The park is hardly a priority for beat cops, he says, but they respond when a worried mother or a peeved skater calls to say the BMXers are crowding the park. The city, Brock adds, is attempting to revitalize surrounding areas of the base for future commercial development — and when the cops catch heat from the council that the area is falling to vandalism, they enforce the rules. “Increased complaints,” he says, “equals increased enforcement.”
Regardless, the BMXers’ plight is gaining momentum. In the May issue of the trade rag SkatePark magazine, editor Greg Bennett used his column to rally for a peaceful BMX-skater coexistence. “The BMX riders are kids — just like the skateboarders or in-line skaters — and should be treated as valued members of the community. Not as some lawbreaker that looks to rebel against authority.”
On the contrary, Pederson and Bail are still looking to work with authority. In a perfect world, both say a BMX-only park would end all debates neatly. While that’s probably a half-pipe dream, the trick-bike advocates at least want the city attorney to either reconsider her decision or return the city to a permanent don’t-ask-don’t-ticket policy.
In the meantime, they are proposing an insurance policy for BMXers, underwritten by the Boy Scouts of America. If the plan works out, BMXers would pay a $45 annual fee for insurance. Even though Bail helped create the policy, it still peeves him. “Why do BMXers have to get the insurance? Why not the skaters?” he complains.
The duo is set to present its insurance proposal to the city within the next few weeks. But for his part, Pederson would rather skip all the politicking and get down to the riding. He says he’s witnessed a million wipeouts — and has heard of zero lawsuits. In these kinds of sports, the athletes say, there’s an ethos: If you’re injured, you ride back to your house, not to the courthouse. “Bikers and skaters are able to work out a solution on our own,” Pederson says. “But when we leave it to the city? That’s when the problems come in.”
