Tim and Cindy Travis have been on the road on their bikes since 2001. They checked in with Bikescape when they passed through San Francisco. Here's the interview.
Visit Tim and Cindy's website to stay in touch with their travels and order their books here. The first chapter of The Road That Has No End is available in audio format!
Last Halloween I met with video documentarian Clarence Eckerson of Street Films and Bike TV and we had a great and sprawling discussion about the role of internet-based video and blogging in transportation activism. Street Films is a part of Streets Blog, both of which are produced by The Open Planning Project.
After our chat Clarence went out and shot this, the definitive film about Critical Mass, capturing the essence of the ride on a balmy San Francisco Halloween.
As the exurbs transform into slumburbia PBS's Now produces an excellent piece about the collapse of sprawl. It connects with real people as it dawns on them that the often overlooked nexus between the high cost of energy and the housing crises means they need to change their lives. While they still look at driving as their ticket to freedom and they don't want to sit next to others on transit, they sit as prisoners in their mcmansions, unable to finance a full tank of gas.
For contrast, host Peter Brancaccio showcases car-free and car-lite Pasadena urbanists show that yes, its possible to have a full life in Southern California without becoming a slave to the gas pump.
In this episode we ask the perennial Bikescape question: What is a street? Is it a place to travel through to to go to? For thousands of years streets have been a place for friends and strangers to meet, a place where the threads of community are woven, the commons. Somewhere along the way, around the time of the rise of the automobile, the purpose of the streets narrowed and they lost their sense of place, becoming instead a conduit for traffic, where each person passes through without consideration of the space, cocooned in his warm leatherette pod.
At best. At worst, its a dangerous battle zone or an inhospitable, unhuman world.
Fortunatly, as the post-car era dawns, cities are waking up to something new, yet as old as the first village - streets where anything can happen. The first modern car-free streets or ciclovias appeared in Bogota twenty years ago. There, over ninety km of urban streets close to cars every Sunday for a few hours. Now, we are seeing the meme progress into Paris, Portland, New York and, at last, San Francisco.
Bikescape, rides and walks the first Sunday Streets experiment on a lovely San Francisco day to see what develops.
I tracked down Frederic Choiniere. He's the film maker who presented his work at the pedicab workshop during the Towards car-free Cities Conference in Portland. Here's his film about the politics that swirl around New York's pedicab industry.
As every cyclist knows biking creates community. Instead of sitting in a tin can, cyclists are out in the world, reacting to their surroundings and interacting with the friends and strangers they meet along the road. Imagine the effect of even a small Critical Mass ride in a country that has been stultified by dictatorship for forty three years and robbed of its civil society?
In another in a series of podcasts from the Towards Car-free Cities Conference in Portland, we attend a talk by Brazilians Thiago Benicchio and Eduardo Green about how it is to ride a bike in their country. The slide show that accompanied the talk can be seen here and here.
As Commissioner of Parks, Sports and Recreation Peñalosa initiated Bogata Columbia's trailblazing Ciclovias, where each Sunday ninety one km of streets are returned to the commons for non-motorized use. 1.5 Million people use the ciclovias each week as the practice migrates to Paris, Portland, New York and San Francisco.
The opening event at the Towards Car-free Cities Conference in Portland, Oregon was the depaving of a 3000 sq foot parking lot. In its place will grow a community garden along with bike parking and a water catchment system. We cover the asphalt removal, then go on a tour of past depaving sites.
Bikescape was there to cover as much of the rest of the conference as one little podcaster could. Stay tuned for many more posts on this important get-together.
The closing song, Chicken or Beef was written and performed by Reptet at the bike art show at Portland City Hall.
I traveled with two San Franciscans who are blogging about the conference. Steve Jones is with the San Francisco Bay Guardian and is posting on their politics blog and Brian Smith runs the excellent Car Free USA blog.
Bikescape goes to a community meeting of the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Authority as the city solicits public input about the stalled bike plan. We encountered vociferous opposition from parents at three schools on Broadway who feel they must drive their kids to school each day. This begs the question: Why are double parkers considered "stakeholders" and why are their dangerous and illegal actions considered a "reality we must deal with" while all the while demanding harsher enforcement for "scofflaw bicyclists."
Bikescape revisits the March killings of Kristie Gough and Matt Peterson during a training ride in the Bay Area by a sheriff's deputy who crossed onto the wrong side of the road and hit them head-on.
We speak with bicycle lawyer and Velo News columnist Bob Mionskie about police bias in this case and toward cyclists in general. Next, we meet with San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum to get to the bottom of the shameful blame the victim attitude taken by the mainstream media and how we can shape public attitudes.
As Bikescape marks its third birthday, Victor Weinreber sets out on a bike trip around the world that will take at least that long. We meet up with him as he finishes his warm-up trip across the USA and prepares to start the actual trek which begins and ends in San Francisco.
Podcasts are on hold while I my ibook goes through a permissions nightmare. In the meantime, this film from 1992 by Ted White that inspired the name for Critical Mass should keep you occupied...
In this episode I collect all of the random recordings I made over the year but failed to include in any shows. We spend some time at last summer's Shake your Peace Festival where we met the B:C:Clettes, a bike ballet troupe and listened to a bicycle-based musical device called Antsy Pants.
Then we meet up with Critical Mass at (Peewee) Herman Plaza as the crowd gathers to discuss whether the ride is still relevant after fifteen years. We also check in with my six-year-old as she learns to ride on two wheels.
Next, we get updates on the Bay Area Air Quality Management District's embarrassing memo from HR that forbade employees from riding their bikes in the course of their duties, as well as lots of other news from the two wheeled world.
The song, Bicycle by the band for kids of all ages the Jellydots can be downloaded here.
Tim and Cindy Travis have been on the road on their bikes since 2001. They checked in with Bikescape when they passed through San Francisco. Here's the interview.
