What’s BikeSexuality all about?

May 16, ’12 5:28 PM


What the heck is BikeSexuality? Something different for everyone, surely. “Primarily attracted to other people who ride bicycles” is one definition, but like most such summations it’s hardly the final word.

One way to find out is by helping fund my latest publishing project — a zine that covers a staggering (and surprisingly un-smutty) range of human sexual expression as it relates to bicycling.

This is Taking the Lane #7, and like every other issue it started off as a fully formed idea and turned into something awesomely different and better. I figured I would get an inbox full of soft porn thinly disguised as nonfiction; instead I got a flood of well-written submissions that were difficult to choose between. The final cut contains pieces that are silly, serious, and both at once; it has brash voices of experience, joyfully flawed youthful experimentation, and several flavors of hearty lust; it all adds up to something far, far cooler and smarter and more fun to read than I expected — just not as smutty.

So — if bikey smut is what you’re after, that’s well covered elsewhere (or uncovered, I guess). For something just as interesting, complicated and undefinable, but with less nudity and moaning, fund this zine!

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On tour: Lack of infrastructure can’t stop cyclists in Mobile, Alabama

May 16, ’12 11:52 AM


Mobilians on Bikes on a group ride. (Photos by Ben Brenner)

There’s a chicken and egg question I keep coming back to — which comes first, the bike infrastructure or the bike riders? There doesn’t seem to be any single answer except the frustrating non-simple one that you need both at once and that they tend to build on each other. This dynamic is played out — or not — differently everywhere. In several stops on tour, we saw places that offers bicyclists little official accommodation but a lot of grassroots encouragement. Mobile, Alabama, was one of them.

In Mobile, a gorgeous, 300 year old small city with a ton of charm, we stayed with Dan & Amy Murphy for two nights. They entertained us with homemade beer, stories of their travels and the other travelers they’d hosted through Couchsurfing, and unstoppable, contagious good cheer.

The Murphys are brand new to bicycling — they started in November, 2011. “I was looking for a way to exercise that I did not detest,” Amy explained. They’d seen other people biking around town and they looked like they were having a lot of fun, so they made a trial investment in two cheap department store bikes.

It paid off — they both fell in love with bicycling right away, and both began riding regularly to their jobs downtown. “It makes me feel like a nine year old kid!” said Amy.

But, the Murphys told us, Mobile is not a very safe or comfortable place to ride. It’s a bit sprawling, summers can be brutal, wheel-eating potholes abound, and people in cars do not necessarily see people on bicycles or yield to them. The city’s only bike infrastructure consists of a few, not always clear, signs that mark the route that both Murphys use to commute.

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Moneyball for bikes: Can we use data to win the transportation game?

May 15, ’12 9:01 AM

Here’s a new kind of Bikenomics — What if we could increase bicycle ridership not through general encouragement or infrastructure or culture change, but through strategic, targeted tweaks aimed at identifying potential bicycling demographics and tipping them? Or, to put it inversely, what if we could quantify barriers to bicycling and use that data to kick holes in them?

On the train on the way home from tour, we watched Moneyball. It’s a movie about the revolution in professional baseball management. The old way of picking players for teams was to try to choose the ideal player for each position; the Oakland As hired a Harvard economist who shifted their strategy to instead looking at the aggregate stats among all players to build up a team designed to, overall, produce the highest score. The theory was that a crappy first baseman that other teams didn’t want might still be a winning pick if he always got on base when he was at bat. It worked, and the As won a record 20 games in a row that season.

We got home to the long-awaited news that the brilliant Walkscore has expanded their realm to bicycling. BikeScore ranks every address in a city by its proximity to stores, schools, parks, workplaces, and transit — rated in terms of bicycling distance along bike-friendly roads. It’s an imperfect tool but from reports I’ve heard so far everyone seems to think it’s hitting home runs as far as their own neighborhoods go.

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Guest post: Looking back on Portland’s Golden Age of bicycle advocacy

May 8, ’12 8:00 AM

This is a guest post by Rex Burkholder, who represents parts of Portland on the council of Metro, our area’s regional government. He is one of the founders of Oregon’s statewide bike advocacy organization, the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, and served as the organization’s first policy director. After reading my Bikenomics zine, in which I discuss some of the economic implications of Portland’s “low hanging fruit” style of bicycle advocacy, he got in touch to set the record straight about how things were done in earlier times. Below is his take on how and why Portland became such a bike-friendly city … and how far we have yet to go.

Three Bridges dedication ceremony
Photo © Jonathan Maus / BikePortland

Portland has always been a bike friendly place….right?

Lots of people have heard of the “Bike Bill,” passed way back in 1971 during the frenzy of good stuff pushed by Republicans like land use planning, clean air and bottle deposits. The bill required that 1% of state-funded transportation projects be used to build bicycle facilities.

But the real story is actually one of constant struggle and advocacy. It didn’t really didn’t take off until the Bicycle Transportation Alliance was founded in late 1990, almost 20 years after the Bike Bill became law. The intervening years had little to show for them (bike trails along freeways, mostly) in the Portland region. There were no bike lanes on major streets, no safe bridge crossings on the Willamette, no bikes on buses or light rail. And cyclists had no power at Portland City Council, Metro or any of the three counties.

Bicyclists, and there weren’t many, were left to their own devices which sometimes meant your fists, ’cause the cops would never take the cyclists’ side in confrontations with motorists. I remember being ordered off of NE Broadway by a police captain as he idled beside me, even though he couldn’t cite a reason.

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Bike infrastructure — how not to do it

May 8, ’12 7:25 AM

not the way to do it

I’m not entirely sure where I took this photo — Atlanta, maybe? [Thanks to the first commenter below for discovering that this is Athens] But it strikes me as a fine counter-example for bike infrastructurists to heed. I’ll leave it to y’all in the comments to provide a thorough critique, but I reckon we can all agree that this is not actually better than nothing. Or perhaps we can’t — let the discussion begin!

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On tour: The battle of Baton Rouge

Apr 27, ’12 2:52 PM
baton rouge

In Baton Rouge last week, our event was on the same night as a big vote on transit funding. The vote was a big deal — a yes outcome would infuse over $10 million into the area’s struggling transit system, lowering average wait times from 75 to 15 minutes, increasing the number of routes, and installing amenities like signage and shelters at bus stops.

A no vote would pretty much spell the end of public transportation in Baton Rouge.

It was close.

Towards the end of our event, after 8, when the polls closed, I looked up the results. One news station was calling it for the “no” votes. That was the expected result, someone at the back of the room said. It’d never pass.

But later, after we’d cleaned up and gotten back to our host’s house, it turned out that call was too soon — it was a narrow yes, with 54% of voters sticking up for public transit.

The transportation system in Baton Rouge is fraught in other ways as well. Here’s one illustration of the problem:

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Bikes and fashion (and me) meet in Blacksburg next week

Apr 27, ’12 2:08 PM
austin

The lady in this photo is Sheilanova Molina y Vedia, our host during our brief stay in Austin two weeks ago, looking chic as she headed out to her office, by bike of course. Though we stayed at her house, we only saw her for a few minutes; she was busy organizing a bicycling fashion show. Her philosophy, she told us, is that “Every woman can look beautiful riding her bike — and also sort of Mission Impossible. That’s my vision.”

Clothes and appearance have not often been at the top of my mind, and especially not in the last few years. But I have unexpectedly had a few opportunities to reflect on bicycling and fashion in the last month of tour.

Before we left on this tour, I asked my friend Ellee Thalheimer, who is from Little Rock, Arkansas, for tips on how to comport myself here in her native South. For starters, I needed to look nice, she said. It would put people at ease and make them more receptive to my message.

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Photo contest: Bad streets for bicycling

Apr 24, ’12 1:22 PM
vegas

I recently posted a link to my coverage last year of our trip to Las Vegas. I believe Vegas may be the worst city for bicycling in the country, and I attempted to capture some of those terrible bicycling conditions in photos. The photo above is one that I snapped of a street where we actually saw somebody bicycling.

My pal P.J. countered with a photo he took in Lake Oswego, Oregon — a suburb of Portland.

I argued that my Vegas photos were much, much worse. P.J. didn’t take that sitting down. I figure there’s something to be said for a lot of places being bad.

In this spirit of friendly competition, I am announcing a contest that surely nobody wants to win: The Bad Streets for Bicycling Photo Contest.

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On tour: Is Houston the next bicycle capitol of the US?

Apr 23, ’12 8:00 AM
Houston

“Houston is the sleeper — the next big bicycle city that nobody knows about yet,” Tom McCasland told us on Thursday.

I was, of course, skeptical. My impression of Houston so far was all potholes, unpredictable driving, the chaotic geography of a city without zoning, and only a few sightings of hardy bicyclists. A conversation the night before with our host, a bike advocate, hadn’t altered that impression much. Besides, aren’t Southern cities, big and grey and built for cars, supposed to be harder to “green”?

But McCasland offered to take us on a bike ride to prove his point, and Joe and I weren’t about to turn him down. While Joshua cooked up some magic in the basement of Georgia’s Market (downtown’s only, if fancy, grocery store), we set off.

The thing that sets Houston up for success, McCasland told us as we drove out of downtown, is that the business community, including the oil companies and airlines that are the city’s biggest employers, is all for it. Quality of life is the reason, a lure for energetic, young new hires. As things currently stand, “it’s a tough sell to bring people here.” But there’s hope, in the form of cheap right of way around the city’s many bayous and a plan to transform an existing piecemeal trail system into a world class bicycling network.

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Introducing “Pedal, Stretch, Breathe”: a bicycle yoga zine

Apr 20, ’12 6:07 AM

It’s an exciting day here at Taking the Lane Media’s mobile headquarters (currently located on a futon in a living room in midtown Houston, Texas). We’re publishing our first title that is entirely by an author who is not me.

The zine is Pedal, Stretch, Breathe and is an illustrated guide to yoga for bicyclists and to bicycling for yoga-ists. The author is Kelli Refer, who teaches yoga in Seattle and maintains the Yoga for Bikers blog.

She drew a one-page comic for Our Bodies, Our Bikes (that’s Taking the Lane #5) showing two yoga stretches to do with your bike, at a stoplight or before riding. I encouraged her to make more of them, she said she was thinking about it; one thing led to another and the idea for Pedal, Stretch, Breathe was born.

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