Posts, email, and ideas related to bicycling and bicycle advocacy.
I post these mostly for my own convenience in being able to keep them archived and searchable, but if you get some use of them, more power to you!
Among other interesting items here is a fairly complete record of my involvement with the grassroots effort in support of the BikeKC initiative in the Summer of 2002.
You can find everything from press releases to letters to the city council to exhortations to other bicyclists to write letters to the editor. See what worked well and what caused us problems in the effort to pass BikeKC.
From my point of view, this was almost a picture-perfect grass-roots movement. The result was that BikeKC was passed on August 15th, 2002.
Now we have to work to make sure the plan becomes reality!
Most of that is in the 8/25/2002-8/31/2002 archive.
Subject: Re: "Bike-lanes do cyclists no good." Re: BikeKC Passed Thursday
> If most of those are used by kids, I'd guess a majority. They might ride up
> and down the same 2 or 3 blocks, but they do it all DAY...
I used to wonder about the bicycle mileage estimates, used to, for
instance, estimate accident risk. They seem awfully high. See, for
example, the section entitle "Accident Rate Per Hour" in
I live near a major street here in the "most bicycle un-friendly city
in the U.S.", and if we went by the proportion of autos to bicycles I
see there on a typical day, we would have to say that bicycles are
about .000001% of the vehicle-miles traveled in the U.S.
But every time I go cycling in the spring-summer-fall, I see *quite* a
number of groups of kids cycling in their neighborhoods. They never
*go* anywhere and they certainly never hit any major streets, but by
gad they ride and ride and ride and ride and ride up and down their
own neighborhood street for hours on end every day of summer vacation.
Add this up for every neighborhood in the country and there have got
to be some serious miles going on there.
BTW, around here they're invariably riding on the street, not the
sidewalk, since there is never a sidewalk to ride on.
