Tag: bicycle

Rush Hour in Portland: Almost All Bicycles

Streets Bloog has a great video about rush hour in Portland and how bicyclists have to ‘endure’ bike jams. I thought it was crowded on College Street in Toronto during the summer, but even the traffic on College can’t compare to Portland’s Hawthorne bridge. Unfortunately I can’t find a way to embed the video here so you’ll have to watch it on their blog.

As Greg Raisman from Portland’s Bureau of Transportation pointed out: 20 percent of all traffic on the Hawthorne Bridge is bikes, while the number of cyclists in Portland has risen 600 percent in the last 15 years and shows no sign of letting up.

Parents: Forget the station wagon or SUV

Bicycles are key to a vibrant city and parents shouldn’t fear taking their children along on a ride. Over at the Spacing blog there’s a short post on riding with kids with a good discussion about bikes in Toronto that the post spurred.

No need to hesitate – put the fun between your legs! Go out and ride 🙂

Either enjoying the ride on their parent’s bike or following behind on their own bike, children are as much a part of urban bicycle commuting as anyone else. Contrast this with Toronto where you rarely see kids riding on a main street and parents who tow their children in bike trailers often receive disapproving looks or concerned stares from passersby. Granted, there are reasons for this. But don’t blame the weather. Note the bulky jackets and scarves in the above photo – temperatures are regularly dipping below zero in Amsterdam. Not as cold as Toronto – and minus the snow – but it doesn’t have to be warm and sunny for Amsterdammers to get on their bikes. It is true, though, that Toronto roads don’t feel nearly as safe as Dutch roads for cycling.

Bicycling in the Winter is Fun

Here’s a nice article talking about winter cycling in Ohio, trust me winter riding is fun and it’s good for the planet. Yay bikes!

Shaffer bikes for the health benefits and to reduce gasoline consumption, save money and clear his head. He bikes even when he has community activities after work; he just rides his bike home afterward.

Lisa Houser, 24, bicycles all around Columbus to substitute teaching jobs.

“It’s a good way to start the day in general and it keeps my blood flowing,” said Houser, who sold her car before winter began and has taken the bus only once since then. She started riding five years ago while living in Florida; this is her second winter in Ohio.

“I just kind of threw myself into it,” said Houser, who lives in the south end of Clintonville. “It saves my conscience from worrying about environmental destruction.”

As of yesterday, Houser and other die-hard bicyclists had peddled through 13 days of below-average January temperatures, including four when the mercury plunged to zero or lower.

Creating a Bike-Friendly Sustainable Society in the USA

The New York Times has an article about a Oregon congressman who has been promoting bicycling and sustainable living for 20 years. The article goes into his hard work and how what he has been promoting has become really popular.

But Mr. Blumenauer’s goals are larger than putting Americans on two wheels. He seeks to create what he calls a more sustainable society, including wiser use of energy, farming that improves the land rather than degrades it, an end to taxpayer subsidies for unwise development — and a transportation infrastructure that looks beyond the car.

For him, the global financial collapse is “perhaps the best opportunity we will ever see” to build environmental sustainability into the nation’s infrastructure, with urban streetcar systems, bike and pedestrian paths, more efficient energy transmission and conversion of the federal government’s 600,000-vehicle fleet to use alternate fuels.

“These are things that three years ago were unimaginable,” he said. “And if they were imaginable, we could not afford them. Well, now when all the experts agree that we will be lucky if we stabilize the economy in a couple of years, when there is great concern about the consequences of the collapse of the domestic auto producers, gee, these are things that are actually reasonable and affordable.”