I recently was asked to participate in a bike-related event, and enthusiastically said yes. Then I learned more logistical details, which led me to have some second thoughts. I received several emails in response to my questions from several of the (all male) organizers, one of which concluded thusly: “We want women in this ride. […]
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New study: Fewer cars on the road won't ...
Posted onDo we need all this traffic to keep our economy afloat? Are lots of cars essential to the economy? It is a common assumption that they are, and this is one reason that huge subsidies for cars, roads, and fuel persist through tough economic times and ferocious advocacy for reduced government spending. New research out […]
Happy first birthday, blog!
Posted onNext week it’ll be the one-year anniversary of this blog. I started it after Caroline took me out for coffee and what may have been a pre-planned intervention-style conversation about the need to put all my projects under one roof. So I bought a theme, tinkered with it, named it after my zine, started to […]
Stuck on bikes!
Posted onSome new stickers just arrived at Taking the Lane Omnimedia world headquarters. I want to share them here partly to say “look, stickers!” but mostly to tell you about the artists who drew them. Update: You can now get your Proud BikeSexual stickers right here. One day a year or so ago I mentioned to […]
Street harassment: Anatomy of a pain in ...
Posted onWalking to the grocery store yesterday, I passed by two teenagers who were smoking and drinking 40s behind the taco joint next to the club across the street from my destination. As I got close to them, the one with his back to me glanced at me and then back at his friend, who took […]
Lines Beneath the Map prints are here!
Posted onAbout a million years ago (alright, three months ago), when Katelyn Hale and I were putting together the last issue of Taking the Lane, we decided that a supplemental work of art would be a great boost for the zine itself and for Katelyn’s nascent block printing enterprise. We put the print as an offering […]
Everything you wanted to know about bike...
Posted onA bike survey on the Hawthorne Bridge in 2009. (Photo by Elly Blue) Last week I wrote that if we want to see a major increase in bicycling in the U.S., we are going to need to get mathematical about it. (This morning provided some vindication for the idea in the form of an article […]
What's BikeSexuality all about?
Posted onWhat 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 […]
On tour: Lack of infrastructure can't st...
Posted onMobilians 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 […]
Moneyball for bikes: Can we use data to ...
Posted onHere’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 […]
Looking back on Portland's Golden Age of...
Posted onThis 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 […]
Bike infrastructure -- how not to do it
Posted onI’m not entirely sure where I took this photo – Atlanta, maybe? [Thanks to the first commenter below for discovering that this was taken in Athens, Georgia] 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 […]
On tour: The battle of Baton Rouge
Posted onIn 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 […]
Bikes and fashion (and me) meet in Black...
Posted onThe 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 […]