Archive for Ponderings & Miscellany
Give Your Power to Truth: What Story Are You Writing for Your Life?
I had the honor of delivering the closing plenary at the 2018 national bikeshare conference presented by the Better Bike Share Partnership and the North American Bike Share Association. This is a lightly edited version of those comments taken from the video embedded below. Other takeaways from the conference also appear below and Better Bike […]
13+ Reasons Bicycles Are Perfect for the Zombie Apocalypse (and Other Disasters)
Halloween provides the perfect excuse to make jokes about the zombie apocalypse. That isn’t the only potential — or real — disaster we face as a species, however. From hurricane relief to earthquakes, bicycles serve as a flexible, convenient utility vehicle perfect for disaster relief. Or escape. Every disaster movie ever made: Our hero can […]
Event Planning 101: It’s Transportation + Accessibility Information, Not Parking Information
We showcase our assumptions, biases, and default settings every day with the words we choose and the choices we present to others. Sometimes we can’t see it when we’re looking straight at it. Here, for example, is how not to wrap up the date/time/location section of your event, meeting or conference invitation (taken straight from a […]
Day Three: Port Townsend to Port Angeles
“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them…. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country […]
Surgeon General Warning: Bicycling Can Be Habit-Forming
When I started riding my bike to work I did so only on the days that I deemed “perfect” for bike commuting. Back then in the long-ago, this meant: No rain, no wind, no snow, no fog, no excessive heat, and no forecast predicting any of the above (essentially the opposite of what everyone believes to […]
Why 30 Days of Biking? (Or More)
You may think that by pledging to 30 Days of Biking you’re helping yourself form a healthy new habit. That may be the case — but it may take more (or less) than 30 days. Heaven knows I’ve taken enough runs at it, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. I have a bike habit but it doesn’t […]
Bike, Transit, Car: Three Transportation Perspectives from Seattle
An earlier version of this post compared my transportation experiences in Spokane. After living in a much larger population and a more urbanized environment for over five years, I wanted to revisit the topic of why you might find biking and transit better choices than driving, once you make the mental shift. Seattle is currently […]
Slice and Dice Data Rant: Who’s Really Number One?
If you haven’t read A Bit of a Rant on Data and Data Rant Continued, they’ll provide additional context for this. You wouldn’t think a place would vie for the title “Most Dangerous Intersection in the US.” But somehow a place in Hawaii took that spot away from Pennsylvania. Or did it? You’d sure think […]
Data Rant Continued: What a Tangled Web
I like a good infographic as much as the next person. They’re eye-catching, they get passed around a lot, they’re more readable than dense academic papers full of footnotes (sorry, academics). So when I saw one highlighting “the most dangerous intersections in the US” I fell for the clickbait. My first reaction on reading the […]
A Bit of a Rant on Data
I’m a wee bit active on Twitter, where I find many resources, experts I can quickly question on a fine point of transportation policy or design, and inspiration. By now we all recognize the dark side as well — the ease and speed with which bad information spreads, particularly if it’s packaged with a catchy […]
Travel Takeaways: Policy Ponderings from a Long Bike Tour
A week after wrapping up the longest bike travel effort I’ve ever undertaken, what’s going on mentally, physically, and professionally? (since I took a vacation that relates to my work life) The policy aftereffects– Biking in a different part of the country gave me insights and ideas I can take back to work. The signage! The […]
