Posts under ‘Opinion’

No Friday Film Fun today. Instead, I cannot resist posting this auto ad brought to my attention by Copenhagenize.
The ad which ran in Canada a few years ago was a more radical departure from the automotive industry’s usually more subtle attempt to make alternative transportation less appealing than throwing down tens of thousands of your [...]

Critics of bike blvd make factually incorrect statements in calling for delay or removal of bike boulevard. Plus an update on the free swim policy at Barton Springs Pool.
Tuesday night, the City of Austin Urban Transportation Commission met to review the current progress on plans to create Austin’s first bicycle boulevard on Nueces Street. [...]

More to learn from Copenhagen on making a city bikeable for all
I have spent a lot of time in my professional life trying to sell Texans and Austinites on a vision of life that does not center around the car. Whether it was sharing cars, using a bike for everyday errands, or riding rail, I’ve [...]

Inspiration for the Copenhagenization the rest of the world
With the Climate Change Conference, Copenhagen remains very much in the news especially on the bike front. As a city with a dominate car culture until the 1970s, Copenhagen pulled back from the gasoline induced sprawl most of the Western world embraced and now has 37% of [...]

Thoughts on where we’ve been and where we are going ahead of tonight’s Bike Boulevard Open House
As Austin prepares to experiment with the concept of bicycle boulevards, it is important to remember where bicycle infrastructure has been and why bike boulevards are really important in the goal of creating a city where large numbers of [...]

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, we loaded up the car (rental car in our case) and headed to Lubbock to see the in-laws. During this trip, I began reading “$20 Per Gallon“, a book about how our world will change with the inevitable rise of oil and gasoline prices in the coming years. I’ll do a [...]

A recent Scientific American article suggests that if we want to get serious about getting more people riding bikes for transportation we need to focus on the needs of one group in particular: women. The article quotes several reports that show cities and countries with high bicycle usage also have a near equal male/female usage [...]

UPDATE: Wytze van Mansum, a Dutch engineer who created this concept in conjunction with Cannondale, contacted me to let me know more about it. The photos from Carlton Reid are the initial prototype which is evolving with development (including the eventual inclusion of a kickstand.) The riding position is a little more variable with handlebars [...]

If you read this last week’s Austin Chronicle article about Copenhagen, you’ll realize how primitive Austin’s environmental initiatives are. While earlier this year Austin began a pilot program testing a single bike locker, Copenhagenizer is reporting Copehhagen is introducing lockers to accommodate cargo bikes.
If you’ve ever ridden a bakfiets, Xtracycle, or Madsen, you know they [...]

BikePortland recently reported on a study published in Environmental Health that aggregated the results of 23 recent English language reports on bicycle crash data. In contrast to what some (including the [update] former Dallas Bike Coordinator) say, the report found that bicycle infrastructure such as bike lanes and bike paths were safer for cyclists than [...]