Links for the week of November 26th, 2010

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Winterbike Workshop Notes

My Trusty Steed in Snow

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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Being Car Free in Boulder

Slushy Boulder Bike

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.

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Thoughts on the TVAP and Junction Place Village

Boulder Transit Village Before and After

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.

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Links for the week of October 19th, 2010

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Links for the week of September 28th, 2010

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Links for the week of September 19th, 2010

If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of September 19th, 2010