It’s cold. And I dislike snow. So I’m spending the day inside. Getting lots done! Here’s some news from the CenterLines newsletter: -> From now until the start of the National Bike Summit in early March, you will be hearing a lot about Federal transportation legislation. The Senate, House, and Executive Branch are all signaling [...]
Once again I’ll be participating in Bicycle & Pedestrian Day at the Capitol in Jefferson City this Tuesday. It’s become something I look forward to because it’s important to get face-to-face with legislators and lobby for what you want. You’ll find a list of issues on the MoBikeFed website. Let’s take a look at them: [...]
Grit In The Gears. Just how successful is the London bicycle hire program? A peak of 24,000 daily trips in the summer sounds very good to me. Symbolism In The Transit World: Helping You Find Your Way. For transit geeks Burning Man And The Metropolis. Oh, yeah. Gotta do this some day The Business Reasons For [...]
NPR reports that the price of oil is going up. Of course it is. One big reason: China is using more energy, and it is the world’s third-largest net importer of oil. As we enter the era of peak oil, we can expect price jumps and crashes. But the day is coming when it will [...]
STAR Team chairman Bruce Adib-Yazdi wrote an op-ed for the editorial page of the Springfield News-Leader today about alternative transportation. It’s also a promo for the Ozarks New Energy Conference that will be held October 7-8 at Plaster Student Union at Missouri State University. I’ll be part of a panel discussion on alternative transportation on 7 October at 2:15 [...]
A new Gallup study suggests that long commutes are bad for your well-being. I don’t find that surprising. What’s disappointing about the study is that it doesn’t take mode into account. I don’t think I’m going very far out on a limb to claim that long car commutes can drive you crazy — like what [...]
So the Chinese are now driving more than ever. And the results are predictable. China will eventually regret its growing love of the automobile. From the story on the traffic jam: “Insufficient traffic capacity on the National Expressway 110 caused by maintenance construction since August 19 is the major cause of the congestion,” a publicity officer with [...]
See if you can spot the problem (from montrealgazette.com): A 2003 study published in the Injury Prevention Journal by Peter Lyndon Jacobsen concluded: “A motorist is less likely to collide with a person walking or bicycling if more people walk or bicycle. Policies that increase the numbers of people walking and bicycling appear to be [...]
Tom Madigan, writing for National Journal, asks 10 experts if efforts to accommodate bicyclists and pedestrians risks squeezing out cars. On first blush, considering the overwhelming odds in favor of cars (numbers plus massive subsidies), the question seems absurd. Read the whole thing. Very interesting. Several of the respondents do not like the question because, for example, the situation [...]
Rational Choice Theory is a useful idea as long as we don’t get too hung up on the word “rational.” Rational choice theorists use a slightly different concept that claims individuals seem to balance costs against benefits (the “rational” part) in order to make choices that maximize personal gain. The problem with this idea is that [...]
Today, Springfield, Missouri is a bronze-level Bicycle Friendly Community, according to the League of American Bicyclists. I am especially proud that we earned this award without painting anymore bicycle lanes. This award partly represents the hard work of a the STAR Team of Ozark Greenways. And we’ve been encouraged by enlightened leaders in our community [...]
From All Things Considered on NPR: Technorati Tags: bicycle advocacy, bicycle culture, bicycle infrastructure, bicycle politics, cycling, transportation, Transportation Planning
Last week I introduced a “new” idea called Keep A Bicycle At Work. Or, rather, not so much new as it is a just name for something that I suspect might help more people throw bicycles into the transportation mix. This idea is related to the 1-mile Solution. Basically, there are some people who cannot [...]
Image via Wikipedia One of the participants at the last transportation committee meeting tried to patiently explain to me that the reason people want to move to southwest Missouri is to have that house-on-three-acres lifestyle. This is part of what explains why Christian County is growing so fast. The towns of Nixa and Ozark offer [...]
We spent much of our time in vision exercises during the strategic plan transportation committee meeting yesterday. Our goal was to imagine what role transportation should play in creating the kind of community we want to live in by 2035 (when I’ll be 78 years old). We did an overall visioning exercise and a series [...]
