Photo credit: Florida Keys–Public Libraries / Foter / CC BY

Last month, my neighbor got drunk, got behind the wheel and got into a crash. He blew .08. His driver’s license was suspended for 6 months. His lawyer told him that driver’s license restoration getting his license back was off the table, that the county prosecutor throws the book hard at anyone who blows a .08.

Dude’s a wreck. He has to go car-free until January and has no idea how to do it.  Naturally, he turned to me for help. He thought he could carpool with me or something.

I told him that I hardly ever use my car. In fact I only use it for trips that are more than 50 miles. I told him if he wanted my help, he was going to have to learn to live car-free. Readers, you should have seen his face. It was the same mixture of shock and terror that a kid gets when you tell him he has to eat liver for dinner or go to school on a Saturday.

To be fair, I couldn’t blame him — this is Florida, after all. It’s not built for car-free living. We have a lot of work ahead of us if we’re going to retrofit our cities to make them bikeable and walkable. Sprawl makes biking a daunting task. But it’s not impossible. I gave him my tips for going car free in Florida. And here they are:

• Suck it up: Relying on a bike in Florida often means biking over long distances. Biking 30 or 40 miles in a day is a lot for people who aren’t used to biking. But the sooner you accept it and start pedaling, the better off you’ll be.
• Ride a little slower: Yes, this means you’ll have to add extra time to your commute. But it also helps prevent you from being sweat-drenched once you reach your destination.
• Get good gear: When you have to ride for long stretches, you need decent bike shorts. Bike shorts help prevent saddle sores, which are no fun at all — and common to people who ride a lot. Also, being that this is Florida, you will definitely want a good water bottle and a mounted bottle cage.
• Get creative with routes: Ride around. Do test runs. Find the streets that you’re most comfortable biking on. Figure out how to connect to trails. Avoiding busy/dangerous roads might make your commute take longer, but it’s worth it to spend extra time, especially if you’re not confident in traffic.
• Learn to love it: Car-free ain’t easy. If you want to make a go of it — especially in Jacksonville – you’re going to have to embrace everything about it.

As far as I can tell, my neighbor hasn’t started biking. I think he conned one of the other neighbors on our block into letting him hitch rides.

Gee. Do you suppose my tips for biking in Florida scared him off?

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This is totally rad: Suwon, a city in South Korea, carried out a pretty crazy experiment. They banned cars in the one of the city’s neighborhoods for a whole month. They removed all the cars, handed out bikes and taught people who didn’t know how to ride. The result? They gave the people of Suwon a taste of a car-free future.

The city of Suwon partnered with a company called The Urban Ideal, which helped them make this car-free month thing happen. The Urban Ideal is headed to Johannesburg, South Africa to do the same thing they. The company looks for mayors who, erm, have the balls to do something like this. What are the odds that The Urban Ideal could make this happen in Jacksonville?

Who am I kidding? There would be riots.

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As cyclists, infrastructure should be very important to us. If we want better bike infrastructure, we have to support other types of infrastructure as well, public transit in particular. Sometimes I like to think what our country would be like if different decisions had been made after World War 2. Why? Because the car-centric, suburban developments that led to widespread alienation and fluorescent lit shopping malls are the result of decisions made after World War 2.

When the war was over, the US economy had been pulled out of the shitter and suddenly we had all this money. What did we do with it? We bought cars. We built monotonously-similar houses in the suburbs and we started commuting 40 miles to work each day. People were told this was the patriotic thing to do. According to whom? The CEOs of Ford, Chevrolet and Chrysler, I assume.

But what if we had not done this? What if, instead of building those crummy, alienating suburbs and exurbs, we reinvested in our cities? What if we had made sure that every city had an efficient subway, light rail or streetcar system? What if, instead of building all these roads that led out of cities and into exurbs that used to be farmland, we poured all that money and engineering into a high-speed rail system? Seriously, how great would it be to hop a train and go from Jacksonville to Richmond, VA, in 2 hours? Pretty freakin’ sweet.

If we had not made this ludicrous decision to build suburbs at the expense of cities, we could have modern, efficient modes of transportation, streets and bridges that aren’t crumbling, and large swaths of farmland and forest untouched by so-called progress. We also would have bustling commercial centers in downtowns, rather than dead suburban shopping malls.

How great would that be?

I know, I know, I’m a dreamer. But, hey, I’m not the only one.

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Minneapolis Stone Arch Bridge. Bikers cross it every day, year round. Photo credit: Jvstin / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

“You know I have heard many people say that this place has good bicycle infrastructure or that place has good bicycle infrastructure. It got me wondering what is good bicycle infrastructure? What does that look like exactly? What do they have that we do not? I have only ridden in Florida and only North East Florida at that. I know it’s a loaded question and I think I will post this question on other websites and see what answers I get.”

Great question, Johnny K! I’ll do my best to answer it. The place in question, of course, is Minneapolis, a city that has vied with Portland for the “Best Biking City” crown for the past few years. Here’s what bike infrastructure in Minneapolis looks like.

Bike Trails

Minneapolis has miles of bike trails. Many them are scenic, such as the trail that winds along the West River Parkway and gives you a great view of the Mississippi or the Cedar Lake trail that edges one of the city’s many bodies of water. But many others are like freeways for bikers. The Greenway stretches from St. Paul to St. Louis Park (a suburb) and sees traffic from bikers, runners, skaters and skiiers year round. In just about any part of the city, bikers can connect to a trail that provides a safe, traffic-free option that will get them to their destination.

Bike Lanes

Throughout the city, bike lanes give bikers designated space on the road. Many of these lanes are on busy thoroughfares that cross through Downtown Minneapolis, enabling bike commuters to speed from point A to point B.

Bridges

The Stone Arch Bridge was originally a train bridge. Eventually, it was converted into a bike and pedestrian bridge, connecting Downtown with Northeast Minneapolis. A friend of mine who lives in Minneapolis told me that she crossed this bridge every day when she commuted to a job in the suburbs. Sure, you have to put up with the occasional bridal party hogging the bridge to take photos — the bridge is very scenic — but it’s lovely to cruise over in the morning. Or evening. Or whenever.

In addition to the Stone Arch bridge, there is the Sabo bridge that allows bikers to cross over a busy intersection without having to navigate it. Many people who commute from Minneapolis to St. Paul (or vice versa) cross this bridge every day.

Community

There’s a very strong and vocal bike community in Minneapolis. People from the community host events like Winter Biking Skill Shares, where bikers teach others the best way to dress, ride and care for their bikes during the snowy months. There are also races, “No pants” bike rides, and other events that happen year round. The city council even has a “bicycle advisory committee.”

Transit

The Light Rail trains have bike racks built in, so that bikers can switch from trails to rails without stressing about what to do with their wheels.

What bike infrastructure looks like, in a nutshell, is a multi-faceted system that incorporates not just one, but all of the different things that making urban biking possible. And, it can’t happen without a strong community to back it.

That answer your question, Johnny K?

The post What is Bike Infrastructure? appeared first on Bike Jax.

Suburbia is so ugly. Photo credit: _boris / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

Watch this hilarious TED Talk about how suburbia sucks. Seriously, watch it right now. I’ll wait.

Though he doesn’t mention bikes and biking specifically, I think many of us who want better bike infrastructure can get on board with what James Howard Kuntsler has to say.

His point: after WW2, we destroyed the American city in favor of suburban bedroom communities, and since then, suburban sprawl has gotten bigger, uglier and more impossible to maintain. In the (very near) future, he says, we will “have to live closer to where we work, closer to each other, and grow food close to where we live.” And he goes on to say, “The days of the 3,000-mile Caesar salad are over.”

It’s brilliant. Simply brilliant.

And as bike activists, we should be in agreement, because denser communities makes for better bike infrastructure. If more people live within biking distance of their workplaces, more people will bike. As the number of bike commuters grows, so will demand for better bike infrastructure. And once we have strength in numbers, we can make changes to our cities, so that we can be more like the Dutch.

In the TED Talk, Kuntsler argues that the “hydrogen” economy is never gonna happen, and we need to just forget about that happening, like, ever. He doesn’t mention that bikes are the obvious solution to fill in that gap, but we all know that they are.

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Seriously guys. Why aren’t we living in the Netherlands? First, I posted that video that shows “rush hour” in the Netherlands as mostly people on bikes. And now this: the Netherlands is opening a “solar bike path.” It’s a bike path made of solar panels, and is expected to provide enough electricity for three homes. The panels make up a section of the bike path — not the entire thing. But it’s part of a grander plan to turn roadways into harnesses for solar energy. That is so, so rad.

What’s even more rad? There’s a possibility of something similar happening here in the United States. A couple in Idaho raised money via Indiegogo to create solar panel roads. CNN reported:

[T]hey joined forces with researchers to develop a super-strong textured glass that would offer cars the traction they require. Then, they fitted LEDs road markers to avoid destroying the cells by painting highway lines over them and heating to warm the surface and keep the system working.

Wouldn’t it be great if all of our pocked, decaying asphalt highways could be replaced with panels like these? The hope is that solar roadways like these could help power electric cars — we could not only reduce emissions by turning roadways into harvesters of solar power, but by making electric cars more feasible.

That’s so cool. Is that Indiegogo campaign still going? Can I donate? Can I give them extra money? Can I form a political action committee to generate funds to send them to Washington? If there’s anything I can do, I’ll do it. I’m just really excited that something like this is happening stateside. It gives me a glimmer of hope. It will be a long, long time before we ever see solar paneled roads in Florida. but the fact that we’ve got engineers in the U.S. who are working on it means we might see it, some day.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to go live over there…

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Photo credit: Takashi(aes256) / Foter / CC BY-SA

What does that mean for bikers and bike infrastructure? I really like the idea of car ownership becoming a thing of the past. But Uber-ing everywhere doesn’t necessarily translate to improved bike infrastructure or improved public transit.

However, if people don’t own cars and aren’t dependent on their own cars, then they will be more likely to bike or take public transit if they decide not to hop into an Uber car. Technologies like Uber are the catalyst for a big changes that could easily spill over into bigger changes that have a positive impact on cyclists like us.

Of course, this is all 20 years away. And who knows how it will all turn out. But we can dream, can’t we?

The post Is Uber Killing Car Culture? appeared first on Bike Jax.

Photo credit: mattaudio / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

From the article:

Decline isn’t a result of poverty. The converse is actually true: poverty is the result of decline. Once you understand that decline is baked into the process of building auto-oriented places, the poverty aspect of it becomes fairly predictable. The streets, the sidewalks, the houses and even the appliances were all built in the same time window. They all are going to go bad at roughly the same time. Because there is a delay of decades between when things are new and when they need to be fixed, maintaining stuff is not part of the initial financial equation. Cities are unprepared to fix things — the tax base just isn’t there — and so, to keep it all going, they try to get more easy growth while they take on lots of debt.

Go read the rest — it is fascinating.

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Photo credit: Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

This should come as no surprise to absolutely no one, but a recent article shows evidence that people who walk, bike or take public transit to work tend to have less body fat than people who drive. As someone who once lost 25 pounds in one summer just from biking to work each day, all I have to say about this article is “Well, duh.”

To be honest, I find articles like this frustrating. It’s a no-brainer that biking (and walking and being car-free) is good for health and for weight loss. And yet, in spite of our nation’s much-bemoaned obesity epidemic, so many cities are lagging behind when it comes to improving transit, making cities walkable and creating infrastructure for bikes.

How many more articles like this will have to be written before people in power wake up? Hell, maybe it’s a generational thing. After all, many of the people who are in power now grew up in car culture’s golden age. They were fed the notion that the patriotic thing to do was to live in a bedroom community and drive 40 minutes to work every day. They were told a lie that every family needs a car and they swallowed it, hook, line and sinker.

Real change will happen when people of our generation — people who prefer walkable cities and bike commuting — start to gain influence. Who wants to help me run for state senate?

Just kidding.

I have no interest in tossing my hat into any political anything. However, I want to see changes happen. I want to see Jacksonville start ranking on those “best cities for biking lists.” We should be right up there with Portland and Minneapolis.

Ok, how about this: Bike every day and keep track of your weight. If we all lose weight from biking, maybe we can impress the powers-that-be with our “before” and “after” pictures. Maybe if biking brings down the cost of health care, we can convince people to put some of that savings into biking and transit infrastructure.

Well, I can dream, can’t I?

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A Baltic taxi cab with bike racks on the roof. Riga, Latvia.

Bike Taxis in Jacksonville?

How long will it take to get bike taxis to come to Jacksonville? Probably a good long time, I’m afraid. Like I mentioned in my last post, we have a long way to go to improve bike friendliness around here. And I think bike friendliness will come before bike taxis — taxi companies will need to see a market for it before they implement this type of service, and there won’t be a viable market until we make Jacksonville a more appealing place for biking.

Life in Latvia

I’ve never been to Latvia. I remember reading about it in an AFS Exchange Program brochure once, and it made me want to go there. Some girl wrote about falling asleep to the sounds of trolleys clattering over cobblestones, and it sounded very romantic, Old-World style. The cobblestone streets might not be particularly easy on bicycle tires, but if you have a blowout, you can take a taxi! Win-win-win!

If You Go

Take a bike taxi and take pictures of the bike taxi. First hand experience and evidence thereof is one way to convince taxi drivers here in the United States to follow the Latvians’ example. (Brainstorm! Maybe Uber can launch a bike-version of its ride-sharing app? Note to self…)

Photo credit: Ģirts Raģelis / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

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