Motorville

From the Washington Post

Want more bikers? Build more bike lanes.

Posted by Brad Plumer at 10:24 AM ET, 04/16/2012

Is there anything cities can do to encourage cycling? Portland, for instance, has twice as many bike commuters per 1,000 people as Washington. But maybe that’s just because Portland has nicer weather or more young people. It’s not clear that there’s an actual policy issue here.

A bike lane in action. ((Photo by Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post))

Yet in a new study (pdf) in the journal Transport Policy, Ralph Buehler and John Pucher suggest that cities might actually be able to influence how many cyclists are on the road. Perhaps all they have to do is — and this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise — build more bike lanes and bike paths.
Buehler and Pucher found that the presence of off-road bike paths and on-street bike lanes were, by far, the biggest determinant of cycling rates in cities. And that’s true even after you control for a variety of other factors like how hot or cold a city is, how much rain falls, how dense the city is, how high gas prices are, the type of people that live there, or how safe it is to cycle. None of those things seem to matter quite as much. The results, the authors write, “are consistent with the hypothesis that bike lanes and bike paths encourage cycling.”
If that sounds overly obvious, the authors do note that previous research was somewhat scattered on this question. A few studies had found that more bike lanes in a city were associated with more cycling, though it was unclear which was causing which. Perhaps cities were building bike lanes because they already had a group of devoted cyclists. And this causation question still hasn’t been fully settled, but Buehler and Pucher’s regression analyses — going through a dataset of 90 of the 100 largest U.S. cities — suggest that the relationship between bike lanes and cycling is quite robust. (Previous studies on biking had often just looked at single cities in isolation.)
The question, they note, is an important one because of a “mounting body of evidence” that encouraging bike commuting can improve health, reduce pollution, and other fatalities.
Note also that the United States is still very different from Europe in that regard. Portland is the most bike-friendly major city in the United States, but just 4.2 percent of commuters in that city bike to work. In Copenhagen, Denmark, that number’s hovering around 37 percent. And Copenhagen gets a fair bit chillier than Portland for part of the year, consistent with Buehler and Pucher’s hypothesis that weather doesn’t seem to affect cycling rates very much.

Next American City » Buzz » STUDY: Americans Driving Less, Especially the Young

Next American City » Buzz » STUDY: Americans Driving Less, Especially the Young

Do we want to keep doing the same old, same old?
Or as a community, can we choose to see the writing on the wall and look toward the future?

Anything for cheap gas?

from the infrastructurist...

The Daily Dig: Can Americans Make the Switch from Driving to Biking to Work? | INFRASTRUCTURIST

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How much can your family save by commuting by bike you ask?

The True Cost of Commuting | Mr. Money Mustache

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Why the Post-Industrial Landscape Works as Places of Play

25 August 2011

from Rust Wire

Recently I have written a lot about physical abandonment and loss, or how vacancy can be a dispiriting and anger-provoking bit of sightliness: a skull at the societal banquet. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. As in abandonment there is also an opportunity to play.

To play is to ultimately recreate. To recreate monotony into entertainment—to recreate passivity into a kinetic interchange with the physics around you—to recreate what otherwise is into what could be through an outside molding of one’s inside imagination. To that end, play is the perfect medium to be thrown into abandonment if only as an act asserting life.

This perhaps helps explain the more recent phenomena of turning the bones of the post-industrial landscape into the limbs that make up a killer recreational spot. See below, a few…

The Whole Story

This entire series has been brilliant!

Bikenomics

Grist Mobile

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How many gallons of fuel per 350 Miles?

Well I thought you would never ask.
Here is a link that shows what eash form of transportation needs.
Notice the two at the bottom.

http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/transparency/web/trans0209gettingaround.html