We’ve spent the last couple of days in lovely Bucks County, PA, mostly in-and-around the charming little town of Doylestown. The area is oozing with history, the architecture is absolutely stunning, and the people have been warm and friendly; it’s a wonderful place to ride bikes and snap photos. The absence of CA-style sprawl and strip malls has been sooo refreshing. We have to say goodbye this evening, but we hope to return someday and explore the area in more depth.
We burned a year’s worth of carbon for two people today. Yup, we got on a big-ol’-jet-airliner and flew coast-to-coast. This was a big deal for us because we’re pretty much homebodies most of the time, staying close to family and work, staying out of the car and off of airplanes, takin’ it easy on Mother Earth, etc. …LOL. We’re super-excited to be on this trip though; we’re doing a photo shoot for one of our favorite bike companies for their 2010 catalog. This will be Alan’s first official gig as a “professional” photographer (we’ll use that term loosely). We don’t have any idea where this adventure will lead (not this little adventure, the larger adventure of capturing images for compensation), but we’re having fun and stepping through a door that’s been opened for us. Stay tuned — we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program in a few days.
I’m sorry, but the wrong-headedness of this is mind-boggling. From Streetsblog:
As schools across the country open their doors for another year, Robert Ping of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership says students are increasingly facing “bans” against walking and biking to campus.
Even though they have no jurisdiction over students prior to their arrival at school, an increasing number of school administrators are discouraging students from riding or walking to school, some going so far as to remove bicycle parking facilities. Reportedly the concern is liability, but this also appears to be yet another symptom of our tendency in America to over-protect our children, while actually causing harm in the process. I wonder if it dawned on any of these over-zealous administrators to look at the statistics? If they did, they would be encouraging biking and walking and discouraging parents from driving their children to school.
Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), wrote an interesting piece for Slate titled What Would Get Americans Biking to Work? (Decent parking).
Bicycle parking is an overlooked, and often serious problem in many places where bicycle use is on the rise. Even in world-famous bike-friendly cities such as Copenhagen, bike parking is not meeting demand. From the article:
Of course, even in a bicycling paradise like Copenhagen, bicycle parking is hardly ideal. “Parking is the last great challenge in a bike culture,” as Mikael Colville-Andersen, who writes the Copenhagenize blog, told me. In its 2004 “Traffic and Environment Plan,” the city of Copenhagen, noting that bike parking wasn’t even assessed until 2001 (when it was found there were 2,900 spaces in the historic center), declared: “Only one third of cyclists are satisfied with their options for parking their bicycles and other road users, particularly walkers, are increasingly annoyed by parked cycles.”
Bike commuting rates have been directly linked to the availability of secure bike parking, so it’s imperative that bike parking is given serious consideration along with other infrastructure improvements. In many cities across the country, bicycle parking is not tied to the actual number of potential bike commuters in the area, so availability can be extremely spotty. Fortunately, we’re starting to see a few cities look at the problem more seriously, with Portland leading the way (no surprise). Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Los Angeles (among others) also have plans in the works to improve their bike parking facilities.
As important as it is, bike parking is only one piece in the bike commuting puzzle. We also need more and better separated facilities, comprehensive training programs, better integration with transit, and work-related transportation benefits on the level of what we see for motorists and transit riders.
Our Independent Fabrication Club Racer project bike is essentially complete. Specs are as follows:
Many thanks to Rick at Gold Country Cyclery for all of his work on this project. If you want to work on a build like this with one of the most knowledgeable mechanics around, give Rick a call.
The League of American Bicyclists’ recent policy research report, The Economic Benefits of Bicycle Infrastructure Investments, contains some real gems. Here’s a sampling:
The full report is well worth a read.
The Economic Benefits of Bicycle Infrastructure Investments →
Here’s a real beaut’ fresh out of the Violet Crown shop. Sweet.
