It’s Still Time to Take Action and Contact Congress to Support Funding for Biking and Walking
It’s been a heavy week on Bike Style with pieces on street funding, the importance of transit, and engineering. We’ll soon return to the regularly scheduled programming with its mix of ride reports, cute gear, shopping, and other topics in addition to policy. But this is important. As recently discussed here, select members of the [...]
We Get to Complete our Streets!
Kudos to the Spokane City Council for the 5-2* vote last night to enact the Complete Streets ordinance. A round of applause and a bouquet of locally grown flowers for Kitty Klitzke of Futurewise, who rallied the troops, circulated the petitions, and kept reminding us when to write, sign petitions, and go testify. More flowers [...]
Evolution, Not Revolution: All Biking Motives Welcome, Part II
The first part of this mini-rant appears in Evolution, not Revolution: All Biking Motives Welcome, Part I. It was inspired by a post entitled Practical Cycling and “Lifestyle” Choices on the BikesideLA blog. I didn’t start riding a bike as a diehard year-round commuter. I didn’t start as a “practical cyclist” who was making a political statement through my choice of transportation. [...]
Evolution, Not Revolution: All Biking Motives Welcome, Part I
The question of what constitutes a real cyclist—or bike rider, or person on a bike—seems to come around in various guises again and again on bike blogs (for example, on Kent’s Bike Blog and on Mia Birk’s blog). As I’ve written before, I think labeling people who ride bikes in various ways divides unnecessarily and does us all a [...]
My Fan Girl Moment with Mia Birk
As I mentioned in a previous post, I got to meet Mia Birk in person last Tuesday. I’ve been a Mia fan for quite a while. I don’t know when I first heard about this woman who helped turn Portland into a bike-friendly mecca, but I’ve read her blog and followed her on Twitter for [...]
Don’t Settle for Incomplete Streets!
Some people are asking why we need complete streets. Let’s turn this question on its head: Why would we ever put in place designs, approval processes and funding streams dedicated to making our streets INcomplete? What possible rationale could anyone suggest with a straight face for designing streets that make it difficult to get to a bus [...]
Vote for Bikes!
On Election Day Eve, this is your reminder to vote—and to vote for bikes. By that I mean that if you haven’t already done so, you need to determine where local candidates for office stand on funding a complete transportation network that supports all modes, and doing so in a logical and cost-effective manner. In [...]
Making Soup–Er, Bike Networks
Mia Birk, the author of Joyride: Pedaling Toward A Healthier Planet who will be speaking at WSU Pullman next week, wrote a blog post a while back, “The Bikeway Network Recipe.” She describes several communities, all of which took different routes to achieve increased levels of bike infrastructure and bike use. Birk concludes that the specifics [...]
Wearing Real Clothes: A Radical Political Statement
Is riding your bike in an outfit from Tangerine Boutique, Carousel Vintage, or Nordstrom’s some kind of sellout? Some women bike advocates seem to think so. I feel the need to rant a bit after following links I found in a post by Cap’n Transit. He pointed to a series of tweets by bike advocate [...]
