Bikenomics came out a year ago on December 1st. It’s hard to believe it’s been such a short time. The book has sold 7,000 copies, sparked friendships, taken me all over the US and the world, and in at least a few instances has helped to genuinely change a few communities for the better. Here’s […]
What happened to Portland’s bike scene? Maybe first it would help to envision what it used to be. There was this booming, diverse, vibrant DIY bike activist and bike fun scene that transformed this city, from Critical Mass to Shift to any number of wild initiatives popping up. Any night of the week, there was […]
A while back I wrote a fact-check of the $308 figure that gets bandied about as the annual cost of bicycling in the US. As I discovered, the number is entirely false; it’s based on an old data entry error that quietly persisted until it became taken for granted as a fact. I found (as […]
During 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 […]
Way 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 […]
View 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 […]
While 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. […]
Quick 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 […]
Another week of Bikenomics news! I’ll try to do this every Wednesday—with the greater goals of getting back into the habit of blogging, and continuing to talk about stuff that has come up since I finished writing the book in July. (Side note: The book doesn’t come out til December 1st… but it’s been printed! […]
Bikenomics is coming out in just a month and a half. And I’ve got a kickstarter project running to fund the book and a tour. But I stopped making edits months ago, and the ideas and conversations in the book have already been continuing in my head. Once you read it, they’ll be continuing in […]
In my late teens I got a job in a video store in Hamden, Connecticut and worked there on and off for five years, standing behind a computer and renting movies. It happened to be the only good video store in the region, so we had a lot of customers make the 4 mile drive […]
Well, it’s happening. Bicycles are changing U.S. culture, infrastructure, and economy at a remarkable rate. I’ve been on a mad dash for years to try to keep up with all the instances of amazing work, community, and change going on around bikes. Along the way, I’ve been writing about as much of it as I […]
My next book, Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy, comes out December 1st. I gave a talk at the Portland Art Museum on July 14th as part of a panel on the topic—here’s a version of what I read, an edited excerpt from the book. The American Automobile Association publishes a report every year […]
Submission guidelines for Taking the Lane, and the sliding scale pricing gap for the ninth issue, Disaster!