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”
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?”
“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”
Back in 2013, after seeing the Finnish city of Oulu for the first time, I wrote a post called Never Mind the Plows. The idea was to focus on things that can improve winter cycling beyond the basics. Any by basics, I meant plowing. Well, five years later, as much of the winter world has …
Read more “Why boring old unsexy plows are the key to urban cycling in winter”
Monday was a big day for Calgary. After an 18-month pilot project testing out a downtown network of separated bike lanes, city council voted to make the project permanent. It was a squeaker of a majority vote that approved the pilot project in the first place, so its permanence was never assured. In the end, …
Read more “The unlikely success of Calgary’s bike-lane network has these lessons for other cities”
Examining all the proposed reasons for bike licencing one by one.
Less than three months ago, everyone sounded ready to give up on making the Canadian city of Edmonton more friendly to cyclists. Even the city’s bike loving mayor. In July, Don Iveson, who was elected in 2013 as a young, forward-thinking, bike-riding urbanite, gave an interview to the Globe and Mail in which he basically …
Read more “How one city went from scrubbing bike lanes to building an entire network in weeks”
A few weeks ago, I criticized cities for failing to build sensible connections between existing bike lanes. Then I rolled over a relatively new piece of bike infrastructure in my city, and had a bit of a moment. “There,” I thought. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Here’s that new piece of infrastructure. https://www.instagram.com/p/BK2ClNDAamW/ (Just …
Read more “Here’s how little connections can make big improvements to bike friendliness”