A couple months ago, a man explained to me that he believes in the fashionable biking movement because it allows women to still feel feminine while they ride a bike, thus demolishing one barrier to getting around on two wheels. I’ve heard this from women as well in the past and thought “well, to each […]
Biking like a woman
What does sci fi tell us about feminism?
Posted onUpdate: The Kickstarter for the third Bikes in Space book, Pedal Zombies is live through August 4, 2015. (And yes, you can request a feminist analysis on this one, too.) When I ran the Kickstarter project for the original Bikes in Space zine, it included some funny rewards. One of them allowed the backer to […]
Aftermass is coming! To Portland and the...
Posted onFive years and a few weeks ago, some guys came by my office to see if they could interview me for a documentary the next day. I said sure. Then I didn’t show up. Fortunately, they were persistent and came by again the next day, and I sat in front of their camera for an […]
Why teens often have trouble driving saf...
Posted onDuring the frenzied final days of writing Bikenomics, I decided I needed to add in some extra facts about teenagers in the chapter on safety. I performed—mea culpa!—a hasty google search and incorporated what I found in (this is the really embarrassing part) an article in Auto Observer into the text. It turned out to […]
Zooming into the future, with kids on sc...
Posted onSupport the Kickstarter project for Zoom! through March 24th Jen and Randy Charrette approached me last fall about a children’s book they’d been developing. The book is a short, full color story for toddlers about pretty much the cutest thing I’ve ever witnessed: Balance biking. Balance bikes are tiny bikes for tots without pedals—they propel […]
Why we need a women's movement in bicycl...
Posted onIn the wake of the 3rd annual National Women’s Bicycling Forum in DC last week, there’s been some buzz online—does it make sense to have a separate women’s event? Does it help or does it segregate? Is the women’s forum the reason that the ensuing National Bike Summit was largely populated and led by white […]
The publishing revolution will be femini...
Posted onIt was Bec, a fellow feminist bicycle revolutionary who I met last March in DC (and who later wrote the first essay in the new Religion issue of Taking the Lane), who insisted that I sign up for the Tech Ladymafia, a listserve of women in tech. But I’m not in tech, I protested. She […]
In 2014 I take to the streets, roads, ra...
Posted onWay back in 2013 I made my new year’s resolution in advance: In 2014, I would travel to talk about bikes and Bikenomics. Talk about setting myself up for success….maybe too much success. At the end of January, I kicked off this year of travel with a book event in Detroit, where the book begins—and where […]
Call for Submissions: Grief and Healing ...
Posted onYou are invited to contribute to issue number 14 of Taking the Lane. Essays, artwork, fiction, and poetry that explore ideas around grief and healing (through the lens of bicycling, and in a feminist manner) are being sought. Love and loss, injury and recovery, and crimes of a property or planetary nature are all relevant—as […]
Traffic is a gas
Posted onView Bikenomics: Traffic is a Gas from Microcosm Publishing on Vimeo. This new Bikenomics animation explaining the concept of induced demand was produced by my publisher. I wrote the script, inspired by a 1997 letter to the LA Times from Peter Jacobsen (of Safety in Numbers fame), which I found when chasing references in a […]
Call for Submissions: Bicycling and repr...
Posted onEver since the original Our Bodies, Our Bikes zine came out, I knew that any future edition would need to talk about reproductive rights. In the past year, the connection has been very much on my mind, as the women’s bicycling movement has taken off in a positive direction at the same time as women’s […]
The future of digital media: Or you coul...
Posted onAs I was getting ready to send the twelfth issue of Taking the Lane to print, a friend forwarded this fascinating article about the future of digital media, storytelling, longform journalism, or whatever they’re calling it this week. One quotation jumped out at me: “The reading experience is built on long-form content, delivered to the […]
What's your #bikenomics?
Posted onWhile researching and writing the multitude of topics that would eventually collide in unexpected ways to become the Bikenomics book, it seemed like I could hardly walk down the street or have a conversation without stumbling upon another example of bikenomics in action. Each of these examples reminds me: Bikenomics is more than a book. […]
Is bicycling a civil rights issue?
Posted onQuick answer: Yes. But make sure your actions are actually on the side you want them to be. I’ve been writing for some time about bicycling and gender. Being female is a condition over which I have little control, and as a result of it I’ve had some funny and tough experiences in the course […]