This guest post is by Sarah Gilbert, a Portland writer and blogger. She’s also the mom whose story of being turned away from a local burger joint with her three young kids led to the chain retooling their drive-thru policy and signage to actively welcome people on bikes. Even in dreamy Portland, carfree parenting isn’t […]
Tag Archives: Carfree
Jobs and the Transportation Bill
Posted onThe news of the moment is that federal transportation money is in a tough spot, and Congress is currently batting around various transportation bills. One of them will eventually pass, and it is pretty much guaranteed to include lots of money for new freeways, new regulations that allow heavier trucks, a mandate to drill for […]
Photos of freeways
Posted onBeing a (mostly) carfree person in (relatively) freeway-lite inner southeast Portland, my encounters with freeways are limited. Whenever I do spend time on or near them it’s an occasion, like visiting the ocean, and I try to take photos. Here are a few of the freeways I’ve met in the last few years: On a […]
How not to lock your bike
Posted onI have half a draft of a write-up filed away somewhere with directions for locking your bike well. But there’s honestly no single right way to do it, and no truly secure way to do it … and just writing about how it’s done bores me to tears. Reading it probably wouldn’t delight you much […]
People reclaiming the streets and other ...
Posted onThere’s a lot of bad news in the world right now, so I’ve been trying to think instead for a day or two about the news in the past year that’s been most inspiring and hopeful. The best of it has involved people around the world stepping up and making public spaces their own, joyously […]
Why bicycle transportation will save Por...
Posted onPortland is undergoing a process to create something called the Portland Plan, a guiding document aimed towards achieving an ambitious list of environmental, educational, and economic goals by 2035. I wrote the letter below the jump as testimony to the importance of bicycle transportation in achieving the plan’s economic goals. It’s not exactly smooth reading […]
Bikes on the base
Posted onPhoto courtesy of Minnesota Air National Guard Earlier this month, I wrote a short column about the historical use of bicycling in the military. While I was researching it, I chatted with Justin Haugens, who is the only person he knows who commutes by bike to the military base in Charlotte, North Carolina where he […]
Can hitchhiking save the economy?
Posted onThe folks at Freakonomics don’t always nail it, but they I love the way they tackled the economic benefits of hitchhiking, debunking the myth that it’s a huge risk, and suggesting we bring it back into the mix as a part of getting our financial feet back under us. I hitched a lot during my […]
Biking big, thinking big
Posted onMy latest column over at Grist is about bicycling when you’re big. It was going to be quite a different piece. Krissy Durden, a Portlander and fat-acceptance activist (who publishes a zine on the topic called Figure 8) connected me with the woman featured in the column. Durden also gently steered me away from the […]
A news roundup for the carfree at heart
Posted onI’m trying something new – a weekly roundup of the kind of news I follow closely but don’t otherwise have an outlet for compiling. This will be similar for the Monday Roundup, which I’ve been doing for more than two years running at BikePortland. That used to be a general transportation/bikes/urbanism selection of weekly news […]
Biking for both of us
Posted onI wrote about disability and adaptive bicycling for Grist this week in part because, this last winter, the topic hit home. One day, shortly after the new year, my partner fell suddenly and mysteriously ill. For three months, on most days, he was barely able to get out of bed and walk across the house. […]
Carmageddon -- Bring it on
Posted onDream freeway. In Los Angeles, where apparently they haven’t yet been briefed about the reality of induced demand, they’re spending a billion dollars on widening an eleven mile stretch of freeway across town, the overwhelmingly congested I-405. This weekend they’ll be shutting it down to traffic entirely, and savvy city officials have dubbed the event […]
Biking to the airport
Posted onMeghan and I like leading bike rides, though it’s not part of what we do with PDX by Bike. Instead, we empower people to explore Portland by bike in the way that suits them best, whether that’s through one of our city’s fine tour providers or on their own. To that end, we partnered with […]
Car-freedom, purity, and guilt
Posted onA year ago I decided to start a blog called “Going Carfree” about just that. It never got off the ground but I thought a lot about it and wrote some test content. This essay is the one piece I didn’t want to let go. Rereading it now, it makes me think of the spreading […]