Winter poses special challenges to the utilitarian cyclist. Those who ride purely for fun and fitness tend not to ride when it’s dark and cold and snowy. If you consider the bike your primary form of transportation, you don’t necessarily have this option. You still need groceries in February, after all. There are three main differences between fair weather and winter cycling: more darkness, the cold, and snow and ice on the roads.
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Continue reading Links for the week of November 1st, 2010
Of the places I’ve lived in the US, Boulder makes car-free living the easiest and most enjoyable. For me, that means riding my bike. Yes, there’s a little snow, and a few times each winter bitter cold will slide down from Canada, and yes there’s a bit of topography coming out of the Boulder Creek floodplain. However, on balance the weather is very manageable with 300+ sunny days a year, and the terrain is varied enough to be interesting without daunting a healthy though unathletic cyclist. The city’s scale is also very accessible, with the longest possible trip taking about 45 minutes, between the northern and southern extrema. Most trips are 15 minutes or less. However, what really sets the city apart is the infrastructure and the burgeoning bicycle culture. Just watch Boulder Goes Bike Platinum from Streetfilms, and A Day in the Life of Community Cycles from Ryan Van Duzer.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but whereas being a dedicated cyclist in Southern California felt like a heroic or sometimes Sisyphean labor, and often felt lonely, using my bike to get around here mostly just feels wonderful. It’s convenient, fast, cheap, and feels relatively safe. They plow the bike paths when it snows. Something like 10% of commute trips are done by bike. We have climbing lanes paired with downhill sharrows. The separated 13th St. contra-flow bike lane is blissful. There are sometimes (gasp!) signs specifically for bikes, telling you where the path you’re on will take you. This fall we got a couple of bike corrals on Pearl. Our cycling infrastructure can and should continue to be improved, but I think it might actually be more important right now to get more people familiar with using it.
I’ve also talked to people who don’t currently bike for transportation, but would like to. These folks are often outside the usual American cycling subculture demographic, which tends to be skewed toward young to middle-aged athletic and/or rebellious spandex-clad and/or tattooed males without families. In Los Angeles, I never felt I could recommend living car-free without reservations. It was clearly possible — I did it for 11 years — but it wasn’t always enjoyable, at least not in the way I knew it could be from living in Japan and bike touring in Europe. In SoCal, we were happy if we could just get the Powers That Be to recognize bikes ought to be considered transportation instead of (or in addition to) recreation, never mind getting them to make investments of money and space. Here, the City has been making those investments slowly over the past few decades. There, I was only really comfortable advocating the car-free life and its many benefits to people I knew, and who had a temperament to deal with the associated trials and tribulations. Here, I feel like I can unabashedly recommend utilitarian cycling to just about anyone. Here the personal costs are much lower, and the benefits — economic, bodily, environmental, etc. — are as great as ever.
I am wearing a sweater. It was made in Italy, from some of the fuzziest sheepies on the planet. New it cost more than $100; I know because it had the original tags on it when I bought it, never worn. I got it for $3 at a thrift store, because it was irresistibly tasty to the ubiquitous keratin loving Tineidae moths — like some of my other woolens, it has a few holes. That doesn’t mean it isn’t soft and warm. Last night my friend Elana got a cute little Smartwool top for $6 that would have cost $60 across the parking lot at Neptune’s: another 90% discount courtesy of the insect world. This is a repeatable exercise. How do these things lose virtually all of their monetary value, while retaining so much of their sweatery goodness? The answer I think, is that we have imbued many material things with powers beyond their physical existence. A merino sweater is not just a way to stay warm and dry while riding your bike uphill. It is also a way to signal to the other hairless apes that you are of a certain class, or even ideological bent. Our things have become a means of communication, a way of transmitting information. These are some very expensive bits and bytes.
I realize that this isn’t news. We’ve been doing this kind of thing with shells and feathers for almost as long as we’ve been human. I only bring it up because recently, I’ve found that the information these artifacts transmit to me has been turned on its head. Having a thing only implies wealth if you have to pay for the thing ahead of time. In a debt based economy, having a thing means you have promised your future labors to the Rumpelstiltskin thing-brokers far away in their tall sky scrapers. Today, to have a thing more often implies a kind of indentured servitude. A poverty of time and flexibility. And what other kind of poverty is there, really? What other kind of wealth besides the freedom to choose how you spend your few remaining days on Earth?
Continue reading For Richer or for Poorer: How Much is “Enough”?
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Continue reading Links for the week of October 26th, 2010
Boulder has about 100,000 citizens, and about 100,000 jobs. Of course, a lot of us aren’t working. Some of us are climbing bums; some of us are four years old; and some of us are climbing bums staying home to take care of four year olds. 50,000 people commute into Boulder every day to work, and about 10,000 leave the city to go work somewhere else, for a net influx of roughly 40,000 workers, making up for those of us too old, young, lazy, or busy to have a so-called “real job.” (The kind you tell the IRS about). That’s a lot of people moving around, and a lot of lonely driving, since around 2/3 of those commuters are in single occupancy vehicles. If only there were more places to live in Boulder, especially more places that service employees could afford, maybe so many people wouldn’t need to move around. This is how the story goes anyway, and while it’s not quite that simple, I think it’s close to true given the 5:1 ratio of in vs. out commuters.
One of the few remaining large tracts of low-density land within Boulder’s borders is the light industrial area between 30th St. and Parkway, straddling the Pearl Parkway, between Valmont and Arapahoe. The northern portion of that area is now slated for redevelopment, following the 2007 Transit Village Area Plan (TVAP). The general idea of the plan seems to be to create an eastern downtown locus, and to eventually have an urban spine running through central Boulder along Pearl St. and Pearl Parkway, from 9th St. all the way out to Foothills Parkway, and to ensure that transportation within this urban core is functional by de-emphasizing the use of private cars and providing excellent connectivity to the rest of the city via transit, foot, and bike. Additional regional mass transit connections are also planned to this eastern core, including both BRT and rail. As a human powered urbanist, this idea sounds great to me, and much better than the ocean of asphalt and big boxes that 29th St. unfortunately turned into. I’d love for Boulder to accept the role of being a small city rather than a big town, while aggressively enforcing the existing well-defined geographical boundaries, and avoiding high-rise buildings. If we can pull that off, then we will have an interesting, beautiful city of intrinsically human scale, and I can’t think of a nicer kind of place to live. I haven’t been around for the years of debate leading up to the present situation, instead being preoccupied with graduate school, and unsure whether I would be staying long enough to actually see anything actually get built. But now I plan to be here, have the time to pay attention, and am interested to see what happens.
Continue reading Thoughts on the TVAP and Junction Place Village
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Continue reading Links for the week of October 19th, 2010
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Continue reading Links for the week of October 12th, 2010
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Continue reading Links for the week of October 5th, 2010
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Continue reading Links for the week of September 28th, 2010