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.
Increase Public Awareness of Positive Air Quality Choices
Develop and Implement Protocol and Policies for Environmental Justice
They're the ones behind the "Spare the Air Days" when we all get to ride transit for free so we can all breath.
I wonder then how they can explain this memo that was sent to their employees who, in the course of their duties have to travel around the Bay Area.
I guess when the Board members have their own reserved parking spots in the private garage its easy to become divorced from reality...
In other news, I've recovered the lost sound files for the long promised BORP episode. They need about six hours to be edited but they're next up so stay tuned!
As a sleepy off-year election approaches, San Franciscans face a choice of adding momentum to its Transit First policy or gutting it to add 20,000 more cars to its streets, all in the quest for more parking. Bikescape goes to the Saturday mobilization, chats with Susan King of the Green Party and Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi. Then we head downtown to talk to Dave Snyder to get the big picture on the destructive power of unrestrained parking in cities.
Proposition A will add $26 million to transit yearly and give more remove politics from the budgeting and planning process. The full text of the measure is here. (pdf)
Proposition H will allow significantly more parking in San Francisco, a prospect that runs counter to the city's entrenched transit-first policy, which uses land-use regulations and funding priorities to discourage use of the private automobile. Here's the text of the measure. (pdf)
Bikescape takes the family on vacation on its first bike tour with the kids. We visit Sunnyside Piazza, a grassroots redesign of a neighborhood intersection. Then we meet Todd Fahrner of Clever Cycles, go for a ride on a Dutch cargo bike and look over the unusual merchandise in his shop. Finally we check in with Portland denizens Meghan Sinnott and Ken Southerland and talk about the deep bike culture thay has taken root in their city.
Your go-to place on the web for cycling in Portland is bikeportland.org
Clever Cycles is a most unique bike bike shop in PDX. They sell the Bike Friday Tickets and the Brompton folding bikes as well as the Extracycle. And they have already sold over forty Dutch Bakfiets cargo bikes this summer.
In this episode we look at biking in the United Kingdom. We chat with Jack Thurston of London's Bike Showon Resonance FM. Then we get Josh Hart on the line to talk about his take on transportation in the UK as an American expat student of urban planning in Bristol.
The North American Cycle Courier Championship brought messengers from around the world to San Francisco for this year's games. Bikescape was there to cover the action and put it in your ears.