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Making Sure Nobody Walks or Bikes 30

Making Sure Nobody Walks or Bikes
Photo courtesy of Who Killed the Electric Car I spotted this billboard while watching Who Killed the Electric Car the other day. I couldn’t find a better quality photo of it, so I captured a screenshot from the movie. The tongue-in-cheek billboard reads “Making sure nobody walks in L.A.”. Although catchy and probably effective for ...

We Are Addicted To Automobiles 18

We Are Addicted To Automobiles
Photo of a traffic jam by buzrael / Flickr In the Twelve Steps to recovery from alcoholism – first published in 1939 in Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism – the first step is defined as: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our ...

Making Bicycling Easy: 10 Things I’ve Learned 26

Making Bicycling Easy: 10 Things I've Learned
Father/Son/Velorbis by Gerry Gaffney on RateMyVelo.com I didn’t have the luxury of growing up in a bicycle-friendly culture like they have in the Netherlands. I grew up in North America’s car-centric society, and although I used my bicycle as transportation prior to attaining my driver’s permit, I nonetheless grew up loving cars. As a kid, ...

Americans Work 2 Hours Each Day To Pay For Their Cars 46

Americans Work 2 Hours Each Day To Pay For Their Cars
Cars & cycle path in Montreal, Quebec – April 2011 – James Schwartz / The Urban Country Imagine you could work 500 hours less every year. That works out to be an extra 12.5 weeks of vacation. Alternatively, imagine you got paid for an extra 500 hours of work each year, without having to work ...

Bicycle Infrastructure Is Good For Business 13

Bicycle Infrastructure Is Good For Business
Montreal bike infrastructure – by James D. Schwartz / The Urban Country A common misconception in North America is that businesses will suffer if we remove on-street surface parking and replace it with widened sidewalks or bicycle infrastructure. Car-addicted societies have a tendency to believe that people in cars spend more money than people who ...

Stick It To The Oil Companies 10

Stick It To The Oil Companies
Photo by Marc van Woudenberg / Amsterdamize Not happy with gas prices? Instead of sitting there and blaming everyone else for gouging you, do something about it. Stick it to the oil companies by not buying gas. Show the oil companies that you don’t need them anyway – and save $3,000 to $12,000 year-after-year. The ...

BIXI Toronto And The Public Bike System Company 24

BIXI Toronto And The Public Bike System Company
Photo by James D. Schwartz / The Urban Country BIXI bike-sharing is scheduled to kick off on May 3rd in Toronto with 1,000 bicycles at 80 stations in the downtown core. BIXI is operated by the Public Bike System Company which is based in Montreal, Quebec. Public Bike System Company is a privately held company ...

Brazil Critical Mass Update–Interview With Ricardo Neis 24

Brazil Critical Mass Update–Interview With Ricardo Neis
Ricardo José Neis runs down dozens of bicyclists – from YouTube video In late February, we covered the terrible Brazil Critical Mass mow-down, where a driver of a Volkswagen Golf indiscriminately plowed through dozens of people on bicycles participating in a Critical Mass ride. By some miracle nobody was killed in this incident, but at ...

Don’t Judge Canada: Velo-City Global 2012 Vancouver 66

Don’t Judge Canada: Velo-City Global 2012 Vancouver
Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson – courtesy of Velo-City Global 2012 Dear World. When you come to Vancouver next March for Velo-City Global 2012, please don’t judge all of Canada by what you see in Vancouver. Not all of Canada requires a shower at their workplace in order to ride a bicycle. Not everyone in the ...

Responsibility & Accountability On Our Streets 33

Responsibility & Accountability On Our Streets
Photo courtesy of Jorge / via RateMyVelo.com We spend a lot of time on here talking about improving bicycle infrastructure. Yes, bicycle infrastructure is important to help make bicycling in car-dominated cities more comfortable for people on bicycles. But one issue that gets lost in the push for better infrastructure is the discussion of responsibility ...