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Framing the debate.

The power of tooting your own horn

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Last weekend in Seattle I was lucky to participate in a roundtable discussion consisting of two of the other Expo presenters, Amy Walker and Ulrike Rodrigues, and women on the staff and board of the Cascade Bicycle Club – all of us leaders in the bike movement, as Kathy McCabe, the CBC’s deputy director and […]

This is not an International Women's Day...

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The Internet reminds me that today is International Women’s Day. It’s a day when many of the sites I frequent will highlight the accomplishments of prominent women, or pay special tribute to participants in various aspects of the bike world who are women. This is better than nothing, I suppose, but seeing these posts is […]

Bridging the bicycling gender gap

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The gender gap in cycling is alive and well, both in transportation and sports (I may have mentioned this a time or two in the past). Fortunately, there are always plenty of inspiring people ready to disregard the obstacles, tear up the stats, and bridge that gap. Two such stories broke this morning. The first […]

Guest post: Transitnomics: The real cost...

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This guest post is by Brian Morrissey, hailing from Chicago. He tackles social and economic transportation issues on his blog, Commuter Age (or is that Commute Rage?) and on Twitter. Here, he takes a close look at the economic implications of the federal transportation funding shakeup on Chicago’s transit system. He has also written an […]

Guest post: Carfree families: Doing the ...

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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 […]

Jobs and the Transportation Bill

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The 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 […]

What's right under our nose

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When biking – or, particularly, driving – about our daily lives, we pass through many spaces that are meant only to be passed through on the way to someplace else. Stopping to watch for a while is often enlightening. The video below was taken by a volunteer bike counter at the intersection of a busy […]

Looking back at the year in bikes

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In January, 2011, I made some predictions about what was in store for the year ahead in bikes. Now that those 12 months have gone by, I thought it would be interesting to look back and see what actually came to pass. Bike sharing I predicted that 2011 would be the year that “bike sharing […]

Photos of freeways

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Being 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 […]

Hey bike industry, we aren't Barbie doll...

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An excellent post on the excellent blog Sociological Images today pointed out a number of spot-on examples of ways companies assume that men are their standard market, but label products marketed to women as such. For example, you can often choose between a small t-shirt or a women’s small t-shirt; at my long-ago high school, […]

Bikes and the candidates, round one: Oba...

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In the last Presidential election, looking for bicycling connections with any of the candidates led only to that photo of Mr. Obama riding with one of his daughters on city streets, helmeted, earnest, and a little dorky, especially in comparison with then-current President Bush, who liked to lycra up and go for adrenaline-producing mountain bike […]

How not to lock your bike

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I 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 […]

What do conservatives want (from bicycli...

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Earlier this week I attempted to make “the conservative case for bicycle transportation.” Before writing it I spent some time thinking about political discourse in the U.S. and trying to put myself in conservative shoes. And responses have been mixed — completely all over the map, actually. Two people wrote comments in right off the […]

The conservative case for bicycling

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Bicycle transportation is a truly bipartisan issue, or should be. Back in 1971, it was Republican politicians in Oregon who passed our landmark “Bicycle Bill” which is partly responsible for funding the infrastructure that has allowed bike culture to flourish in Corvallis, Eugene, Portland, and around the state. Today’s the bicycle caucus in Congress is […]