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: [...]
Wednesday Words: Quotations on Bikes, Cars, Drivers and Roads
Many thanks to QuickRelease TV for quite a few of these quotations. I’ve been saving for a while so I no longer know the sources of all of them. An engineer designing from scratch could hardly concoct a better device to unclog modern roads – cheap, nonpolluting, small and silent… –Rick Smith, International Herald Tribune, [...]
Your “Right” to Speedy Travel Doesn’t Exist
Originally I planned to write this post as the second part of my response to Bike Shop Girl’s piece We Are the Problem. One of the underlying assumptions in her post that I take issue with is the idea that if it weren’t for bikes traffic would flow merrily along with no bumps or wrinkles. [...]
If Bikes Were Cars and Cyclists Were Drivers
Video pretty much sums it up. Sharing is karma–pass it along!
We Engineered Ourselves into this Mess. Now We Need to Engineer our Way out of It.
There’s a problem in our debates about how streets are funded, a problem that lies partly in the assumptions about who pays and who benefits, with a root cause in the effects of design on how people use a transportation network. I pay through several mechanisms for local streets and roads and consume far less [...]
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 [...]
How to Be a Good Guy/Gal on the Street
This post that you should share with all your friends via email, Facebook, Twitter, and personal conversation in (gasp!) real life was inspired by several influences. I’m modeling very directly on the first post so a shout-out to Anna North at Jezebel for providing inspiration and an outline to follow. Herewith, my source material, which [...]
Meet Spokane’s Newest Complete Street: Martin Luther King, Jr. Way
Not that I cheated and rode on the street before it was really, really complete or anything…. But on May 31 I had the joy of being the first rider on the officially opened Martin Luther King, Jr. Way on the south edge of the Riverpoint Campus where I work. The size of the crowd despite [...]
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 [...]
It Pays to Pay Attention
Back in the saddle again after almost a week in New York City, where people on bikes share streets with New York cabbies and millions of people, and what happens? Tuesday morning I have possibly my closest call ever with a moving vehicle, reinforcing yet again the importance of mindfulness for safe riding. The scenario: [...]
