Last night I participated in Smallpressapalooza, Powell’s Books’ annual celebration of super small scale indie publishing. Out of a breathtaking variety of readings, most of them awesomely good, I was the token non-literary reader (my rendition of this essay was surely informative for all, if comfortable for few). The guy before me had a multimedia […]
Tag Archives: Bikenomics
Guest post: Transitnomics: The real cost...
Posted onThis 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 ...
Posted onThis 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 […]
Looking back at the year in bikes
Posted onIn 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 […]
Bikes and the candidates, round one: Oba...
Posted onIn 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 […]
What do conservatives want (from bicycli...
Posted onEarlier 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
Posted onBicycle 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 […]
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 […]
Cycling's gender gap, explained
Posted onI’ve written about why there is a gender gap in cycling in the U.S., and have struggled to explain that it isn’t because women are so damn womanly but rather because we’re an economic underclass and our transportation choices are more constrained than those of our male peers. So it was great to read a […]
Bikenomics zine -- new edition
Posted onThings got a little hectic in the lead-up to tour this September. I forget exactly how it happened, but I ended up sitting on a comfy couch in Provo, Utah, while our friendly hosts and their 3 year old daughter helped me hand-number and mail out an impromptu, photocopied edition of 160 of the Bikenomics […]
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 […]
Parking and the percents
Posted onFree parking and one of its not-so-hidden costs – induced demand. From an Atlantic Cities interview with a city planner who’s trying to help cities wean themselves from free parking, as good as an explanation as I’ve ever seen of the class divide underlying the economics of transportation – and what we can do about […]
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 […]
My preoccupations
Posted onAs the Occupy movement grows, I’ve been thinking more and more about a topic that’s already been on my mind for some time – how do we build a viable economy on a human scale? At the same time, I’m still struggling to build a viable living on a household scale. As I work and […]