It Is Always Better to Ride than Not to Ride
The tough part of 30 Days of Biking for me isn’t the workdays–those rides are long-established habit. The tough part is the weekend. That’s the point, really. It’s easy to settle into habits of whatever kind and committing to doing something every single day will shake things up. Setting up any kind of challenge, whether it’s [...]
5 Behavior and Culture Hacks to Get People to Ride Bikes and Walk
Serendipity gives me lots of blog fodder, in this case the coincidence of reading a piece on GOOD about how to get people to eat less meat within 24 hours of being directed to the elevators inside the Cannon Office Building on Capitol Hill during the 2013 National Bike Summit.* Let me ‘splain, Lucy. (Source attribution: [...]
On a Roll with Michelle S, Olympia
The occasional “On a Roll with” series started with women in Spokane since the blog originally focused on biking in Spokane. Now that I have a statewide role at the Bicycle Alliance of Washington I’ve expanded the geography to feature women from all over the state. If you have a woman to nominate (and please do nominate yourself!) drop an [...]
Looking Back, Looking Ahead
An article in the New York Times on the psychology of change got me thinking about how the belief that we won’t change might set up the belief that we can’t change and how that affects our transportation choices. They are choices, you know. Just because we’ve all gone through the rite of passage that is the [...]
A Small Moment
At a certain point in late spring a couple of flowering trees on my usual route home fill the air with sweet perfume. They stand in a most unlikely spot on Sherman Avenue just north of the freeway overpass. Not a scenic location, not a spot where a lot of pedestrians pass by to appreciate [...]
When I Get Older: Why I Believe in a Multimodal System and Complete Streets
I’ve been dealing for over a decade with issues created as my parents aged, including transportation problems. My mother, who’s 90, has vascular dementia that has worsened over the past 12 years and my father is now showing signs of some type of dementia as well. One of the early triggers for recognizing my mom’s [...]
Getting Started Bike Commuting: A Blogspedition inside Bike Style
The blog now stands at over 170 posts after a year of writing. Lots of advice is sprinkled throughout every post, along with my ponderings and miscellany on bike policy, infrastructure creation, and other aspects of becoming a bike-friendlier world. This post serves as a categorized round-up of many of the posts you may find helpful [...]
30 Days of Biking: Why Week 1 Doesn’t Have 7 Days of Riding in It, and why that’s OK
The ride reports for 30 Days of Biking hold me accountable, but they can’t change what life throws at you, so I’m not going to ride 30 days in April. And you know what? I’m okay with that. When I set a goal—for the first time ever—of riding a certain number of miles and a [...]
Unmindful Biking by Yours Truly
At times I try to approach biking as a genuine mindfulness meditation. The immersion of self into the experience feels really wonderful when I get there. At times, though, I’m immersed in something more like dumb-ass-ness. Herewith, three stories of times I was not 100% mindful on the bike (all of which took place some time ago [...]
Mindful Driving, Mindful Biking, and “Accidents”–Part II
This post is Part II, continuing yesterday’s diatribe meditation on use of the word “accident” to describe a preventable negative interaction between a driver and a cyclist or pedestrian. The conversations I often have after someone on a bike is hit tend to circle around the premise that riding a bike is an inherently risky choice of transportation. [...]
Mindful Driving, Mindful Biking, and “Accidents”–Part I
This post has its origins in my brush with fate this week, and before that in fall 2010, when two things happened within a few days of each other: Arleigh Jenkins AKA Bike Shop Girl (a blogger whose work I read) was hit by a car, then Matthew Hardie, a young rider in Spokane, was hit. He spent [...]
