My home city of Calgary made waves last year by installing an entire downtown network of separated bike lanes, all at once. Here’s a spin through the city a year later, to assess its success.
In the past decade, Peter Walker has seen a fundamental change in London, the city in which he lives. In that time, Walker, a writer for The Guardian who has for years penned the paper’s popular bike blog, says people on bikes have gone from a marginal place on the city’s streets (he says he …
Read more “This British writer just wrote a totally convincing argument in favour of urban cycling”
It was while screaming downhill, past hundreds of other cyclists who were slowly climbing in the opposite direction, that the thought crossed my mind. “Huh,” I thought. “This is a thing.” That was on the weekend as I happily rode the Highwood Pass for the first time, a local highway that, for a few weekends …
Read more “This temporary car-free haven shows how people on bikes flock to safe routes”
Maybe it was the news that Tesla is now the largest U.S. carmaker by market cap, or maybe it has been the uncertainty around the price of oil, but there has been a flurry of futurism lately centred around looming changes to our transportation systems, specifically around autonomous electric cars. Autonomous, electric vehicles are about …
Read more “The future of transportation is already here, but everybody is missing it”
We live in a world of bad bike racks. Poorly designed or haphazardly placed, bad bike racks do more than bring a tear to the soul of urban riders: They are a thief’s best friend, a repair shop’s dream, and are a blatant reminder to cyclists that society doesn’t care enough about them to simply …
Read more “A gallery of bad bike racks making your cycling life worse (and some good ones too!)”
On Bike to Work Day, I asked people a couple of straightforward questions about their chosen commuting mode. Here’s what they said. Take note of how many who said they ride for environmental reasons, for ideology, or because they hate cars (hint: none).
A reader recently asked a question recently that got me thinking: If conditions are ripe for cycling, why bother adding bike infrastructure? The question came out of my recent post from Yellowknife in which I mused about the city’s potential as a great bike town thanks to its wide streets, slow traffic and hearty residents. …
Read more “Increasing number of dead pedestrians are a reminder that bike lanes matter”
“Big grocery.” That is a slightly tongue-in-cheek suggestion about how to make cities more bike friendly by Ontarian Lana Stewart, who speaks and writes thoughtfully about the fixation of urban cycling advocates on commuters, despite statistics showing that a huge percentage of car trips are elsewhere, such as running errands, shuffling kids to activities and, yes, getting …
Read more “Do bike lanes marginalize people in the suburbs?”
For years, I’ve ridden the same winter commuting bike, which I affectionately, but sometimes derisively, refer to as my p.o.s.: a crappy 20-year-old mountain bike whose best days were in the last century. While I do have a soft spot in my heart for this bike, that spot often grows hard. The machine is an …
Read more “My perfect winter bike really exists, and I just bought it”
“Postholing” is a new cycling verb I learned this week, defined to me as I lay prone in three feet of light powder at -26 C in the sub-Arctic taiga of northern Canada. For the record, the word describes what happens when your foot sinks deep into snow, as any showshoer (sans snowshoe) knows. When …
Read more “Here’s why people are riding bikes in one of the world’s coldest cities”