USED TO BE THAT GIG WORK­ERS were those cool cats blow­ing a mean sax into the wee hours. After the show they’d be sip­ping Cana­di­an Club with the quar­tet until sun­rise. Now even the tone deaf can get a gig. All you need is a car and the will­ing­ness to shop for some­one else’s gro­ceries, deliv­er car­ry­out, or chauf­feur ran­dom strangers.

“We do not intro­duce a speed lim­iter!” Euro­pean Par­lia­ment mem­ber Róża Thun said emphatically.

Although aca­d­e­m­ic his­to­ri­ans of the last gen­er­a­tion have giv­en voice to new per­spec­tives and the­o­ries of his­tor­i­cal change around Ford, the text­book view has not strayed far from the nar­ra­tive con­struct­ed by Ford’s biographers.

I don’t pre­dict, but I hope, that we move for­ward inten­tion­al­ly, with a vision of how we build a trans­porta­tion sys­tem to serve the soci­ety as we want it to be.

The work­ers who rides these for­bid­den e‑bikes are most­ly Chi­nese and Lat­inx, many of them immi­grants, some undoc­u­ment­ed. When offi­cers nab a rid­er, they issue a $500 fine and impound the bike.