With Plenty of Cycle Chics, Where are the Cycle Boys?

Yesterday, Libby Maxim at Biker Chicks of West Chester posted a long-overdue critique of the proliferation of blogs that glorify women biking in heels. (Examples here, here and here.)

Sure, it may be easier to bike in heels than to walk, and it makes sense if that you should be able to bike to work or around town in what your street clothes. But Libby points out that you don't see a myriad of blogs with photos of men looking seductively fuckable riding around in non-athletic wear.

The vast majority of biking and transit advocacy blogs are written by men and focus on more substantial issues than whether your stilettos match the flowers in your hand basket. To see the female cycling community represented by these bike-porn blogs is a disappointment.

(My apologies for the photo - try to find sexy pictures of men on bicycles online. It's a real challenge).

Bicycle Imprinting

My mom was going through old photos and emailed me this one to me a few minutes ago.

God, how I loved this light blue Schwinn with its terrifically sexy white tires. I'd fallen in love with it the second I saw it in the bike store, and I did extra chores around the house for what seemed like eternity until my parents finally agreed I had earned it.

Seeing this reminder of how much I loved biking when I was little resonated with what Imagine No Cars wrote today about how getting kids hooked on biking can lead to more sustainable transportation choices in adulthood.

It worked on me.

After Dooring Incident, A Win in Small Claims Court

Last March, as I was riding my Peugeot folding bicycle to the Metro North train station in New Haven, I was doored by a motorist and my bike was totaled. I contacted the police, and Jan Piorkowski , the driver of the vehicle, was ticketed for a traffic violation.

Image 1: Diagram from the police report.

Assuming this unfortunate incident was nearing a conclusion, I contacted his car insurance provider with a copy of the police report, asking them to pay for the damages to my bicycle. But, his car insurance was expired, and when I contacted Piorkowski to explain this, he refused to reimburse me personally and threatened to make me pay for what he claimed were damages to the vehicle.

Wanting to see justice served, I filed a case in Connecticut small claims court. A week later, I received a letter from the People's Court inviting Piorkowski and myself to have our case heard on the show. I was a little conflicted about agreeing because I worried that my visual impairment would be held against me, but ultimately I decided the opportunity to educate the public about a bike safety issue was worth this risk. However, since the People's Court is technically arbitration, both parties have to agree to go on the show, and Piorkowski declined the invitation.

Image 2: Invitation to appear on the People's Court.

Six months later on October 5th, Piorkowski and I finally got our day in (real) court. After taking the day off work and taking the train up to New Haven, I was worried he wouldn't show up, leaving me with no real recourse to get reimbursed even if the judge ruled in my favor. But
Piorkowski was there, and we were sent into a judge-ordered pre-trial conference. Although he initially flashed around a stack of photographs documenting the "damage" I did to the paint job of the car, after I pointed out his precious vehicle happened at the time of the incident to be completely uninsured, Piorkowski agreed to settle for the full amount I was asking, delivered to me in cash as soon as we went downstairs to find an ATM.

A small victory, and in retrospect probably not worth the drawn-out process, but in the end, I figure every step we take towards creating safe, shared streets is worth reporting.

Reporting from the Evergreen State

I want to apologize for my prolonged absence. Over the past six weeks I've been working overtime on a project for a referendum that's on the ballot in Washington State this November.

(You can read more about the project here, and here are links to the videos I produced.)

Image 1: Filming on the FDR Reservoir (above the Grand Coulee Dam) in Washington.

But I'm back to blogging now, and I have some exciting news regarding my small claims case against the driver who doored me in New Haven last spring, which I'll be posting over this weekend.

But although my attention over the last six weeks has been focused on protecting Washington's domestic partnerships, I didn't completely forget about transit policy and land-use issue.

My filming schedule had me traveling 1,700 miles in five days throughout rural parts of Washington State, a task that my lack of driver's license would have made insurmountable had my partner not decided to take a week vacation to be my personal chauffeur. (I briefly contemplated piecing together a transportation plan based around the Greyhound and my Brompton, but the lighting and camera equipment would have made that pretty difficult.)

Driving through broad stretches of wilderness and ranch land in Eastern Washington, I was reminded how, as much as I like to imagine that my non-driving self could manage anywhere on my bike, life in these parts of America really does require auto ownership.

But when we got into some of the small towns on the east side of the Cascades, I was happily surprised to encounter physical evidence of a biking infrastructure. Downtown Spokane
featured demarcated bike lanes, and in the center of Washington's apple country, the community of Yakima has constructed a 10-mile greenway bike path that stretches along the Yakima River . From the view out my hotel window, I saw numerous cyclists using the path, which connects suburban communities to downtown Yakima.

Image 2: Spokane bike path map.

On the west side of the mountains, where I grew up, planners and politicians in the greater Seattle area have finally begun to construct a mass transit network. It was thrilling to be stuck in traffic on I-5 and catch a glimpse as the new light rail train whizzed past. The first segment of this light rail link opened last July and it will eventually connect Seattle to the SeaTac airport. (The connection is anticipated to be completed in December.)

And now Sound Transit offers rail service (although some what limited in schedule) between Everett and Tacoma. When my dad travels to meetings in Seattle for work these days, he drives up the I-5 to Tacoma and hops on the "Sounder" for a traffic-free ride into the Emerald City.

It warmed my heart when I was poking around the Sound Transit website and found their map for planned transit developments. Although not quite the spider web of transit options that I'm used to here in NYC, it's beginning to look like the greater Seattle area might actually be moving towards a system that allows for alternatives to automobile use.

Image 3: Planned transit development in the Seattle area.

Could new images make Atlantic Yards look any less pedestrian friendly?

Check out the new Atlantic Yards stadium design images.


Clearly, crossing the six lanes of speeding traffic will be a breeze for you and your tots.

NYPD: You were asking for it (so don't expect us to help)

I got punched in the face on my commute home today. I had just crossed the Manhattan Bridge and was biking south on the bike path on Jay Street. The traffic was backed up, but the bike lane was open. Right in front of me, a car peeled out of the traffic and began to cruise up the bike lane.

At Willoughby, the light was red so the car stopped. I tapped on the trunk to let the driver know that I was trying to pass. As I squeezed past her driver’s side door, I told her she shouldn’t be trying to bypass traffic by driving in the bike lane.

On hearing this, she got out of her car, screaming at me for trying to tell her where she could drive and for touching her car. She started to come towards me and I got off my bike. Before I knew what was going on, she swung at me, punching me in the side of my face. I lifted up my bike to protect myself as she continued to scream at me. At this point, pedestrians pulled her away and a building security guard called the NYPD.

I was a little woozy from the punch but I told her she couldn’t leave the scene because I wanted to press charges.

The cops and an ambulance arrived. I was directed into the ambulance to check my head. I’d blacked out for a second – the impact of the punch had really freaked me out as this was the first time I’d ever taken a punch to the head.(Luckily everything seemed okay. Since the impact was to my lip and jaw, I declined to be driven to the hospital for a cat scan.)

After they had heard her version of events, the cops came and interviewed me. The head officer said that she told him I had punched her first, through her driver’s side window as I was biking past. I told him this absolutely was not true and asked if any of the witnesses on the street had seen this (as many people had seen her slug me). He said the only people who were asserting that I’d attacked first were my assailant and the other occupants of her vehicle, but as far as he was concerned it was my word versus hers. Therefore, if I wanted to press charges, she could also press charges against me.

I had been in too much shock after getting punched to try to find witnesses who would wait around for the cops to show up. I had seen one woman who identified herself with a badge come up to the security guard who was at the scene first and describe to him that I had been attacked, but she wasn’t still around by the time the NYPD was interviewing witnesses.

I asked the cop if it mattered that she had been illegally driving up the bike lane to avoid traffic at the time she assaulted me. He told me that it didn’t matter because “people violate traffic laws in the city all the time.”

Thanks for the support, NYPD. Yes, people do break the law all the time, but I’d like to believe it’s the job of our police force to keep our communities safe by actually enforcing the rules.

What about the disabled? A response to Urbanophile

As I’ve mentioned before, I was born the visual impairment that causes my eyes to wiggle, thus reducing my visual acuity and preventing me from getting a drivers’ license. Some cities are well equipped for people like me – cities like New York or San Francisco with functional metro and regional transit networks where many people who can afford to own cars chose not to.

But most cities are not. According to the Brookings Institution's Robert Puentes, 54 of the largest 100 metropolitan areas in the U.S. lack both a rail or subway system and a functional bus system.

As someone who can’t legally drive, I agree with Urbanophile’s recent assessment that not owning a car in such a city is isolating, and I concur with his assessment that residents of such cities who live in the downtown area and choose not to own cars are willfully segregating themselves from the suburban members of their larger regional civic community.

However, for many folks, car ownership isn’t a choice. Not only for the disabled, but low-income families, undocumented immigrants, youth and the elderly often are left to navigate America’s vast suburban and semi-urban wasteland without the protective cocoon of a personal automobile. According to the 2001 National Household Transportation Study, nearly a third of our population doesn’t have drivers’ licenses (total population 2.77 million, total drivers’ licenses 1.9 million).

The isolation caused by not owning a car was something I experienced acutely while living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and working for a certain (unmentionable) presidential candidate. The campaign was headquartered in Southern Village – a suburban enclave south of Chapel Hill. As I’ve discussed earlier, the problem with Southern Village was its only transit connection to downtown Chapel Hill and the rest of the Triangle area’s sprawling suburbs was a six-lane highway.

Chapel Hill did offer a free shuttle service around the core downtown area surrounding the University of North Carolina, and on weekdays until 8 pm, the NS bus ran once every hour between Southern Village and downtown. However, if you couldn’t sneak out of work till 9 or 10 pm, and then needed to get to the drug store before it closed and back in front of your computer in less than an hour, the free shuttle service wouldn’t get you there. Nor would it, at 11 pm, shuttle you downtown to grab a quick drink with co-workers. And if you needed to go anywhere on the weekend, you’d better wear comfortable shoes. None of the bus routes to Southern Village ran on Saturdays, and, God bless the South, the bus system shut down completely every Sunday.

One dark and rainy Tuesday evening late in January, when moral on the obviously failing campaign was particularly depressed, I’d caught the NS downtown to run an errand thinking I’d finish in time to catch the last bus back to the “Village.” The checkout line was longer than I’d hoped, and I’d had to sprint the final block to the bus stop only to see the bus taillights disappear down the hill. Cursing, I was standing at the bus stop, catching my breath and steeling myself to walk home when a CCX bus pulled up at the stop.

The CCX, short for the Chatham County Express, ran later than the NS and, though it wasn’t technically supposed to make a stop at Southern Village, it passed right by it on it’s way to the Chatham County Park ‘n Ride a few miles down Highway 15-501.

The doors opened. I weighed the risks – if the conductor refused, I’d end up down the highway five miles south of Southern Village. But if the conductor would make an unscheduled stop, I’d be home in a hot shower in 10 minutes.

I got on the bus. As we merged onto the highway, I walked to the front of the bus and asked if the bus driver could drop me off at the Southern Village exit.

“You know this bus don’t stop there,” she said.

“I thought it could stop at night,” I lied.

“Well, it don’t,” she said. Silence. We were approaching Southern Village. I started to cry, and I wasn’t faking it. I was exhausted and miserable at the thought of jogging five miles in the rain back up the dark country highway.

“What are you gonna do?” she asked.

“Guess I’ll have to walk back up the highway,” I replied.

“Well, what are you gonna give me?” I was confused. Was she asking for a bribe? I didn’t have any cash on me. There were just two other passengers on the bus and they were watching our exchange with interest now.

“A gold star in heaven,” I said, watching as my bus stop approached. The South is getting to me, I thought, now I’m invoking religious guilt to get home. The bus slowed.

“Don’t tell anyone I did this, okay?” the driver said. “I’ll get in trouble.”

“I won’t tell anyone. Thank you so much,” I mumbled, pushing through the doors into the damp suburban quiet.

I survived North Carolina carless for another month, and then, after the campaign finally imploded, I moved back to New Haven to live with my partner. Now I had the Metro-North commuter train to get to and from my job in New York, and I could rely on my partner to drive me to the suburban Stop 'n Shop to pick up groceries on the weekends.

If I hadn't had my husband to drive me, navigating New Haven's suburbs on foot or by bus wouldn't have been much easier than North Carolina, which brings me back to the point of how we, as a society, can assure that people without drivers' licenses have some degree of mobility outside of major metropolitan areas.

Of course, ideally the zoning density and transit systems in small and mid-sized American cities would improve to the point that cars wouldn't be the only really practical modes of transport, but this isn't going to happen overnight.

If we're willing to blantantly subsidize car ownership with federal tax dollars, perhaps there could be a parallel "cab voucher" program for those unable to obtain driver's licenses. Such a program would not only make transportation more accessible to those without cars, but it would also create demand for cab and car service providers to expand in smaller urban and suburban communities.

Stressed biking (and the ego of the dedicated commuter cyclist)

On Thursday I returned to New York and to urban commuter cycling after a month-long yoga training and retreat in Connecticut. As I coasted down 2nd Avenue from Grand Central to my office building downtown, I realized something was wrong. Instead of soaking up the lazy hum of NYC's late-August doldrums, I was stressed.

Every metal grate and lip of the manhole cover signaled impending doom. Every cab was attempting to sandwich me into the giant churning wheels of a tour bus. In every parked car lurked out-of-towners waiting to obliviously open car doors into the traffic stream. It was a clear, sunny morning and I was miserable.

It's not that there weren't days when I dreaded getting on my bike before my break, but usually as soon as I'd start to ride, the adrenaline would kick-in and I'd feel great. Now something was different. I wondered if after a month of yoga and meditation, my stress tolerance skills were out of practice. But then I realized that the real trouble was that I was finally being honest with myself about how stressful riding in the city can really be.

I didn't ride my bike every day because it was always a pleasant and enjoyable experience. I rode because I had some notion of toughness tied up with my ego telling me I needed to ride even when it was icy or raining or late at night and I was exhausted.

I'd hardly had time to go online over the past month and so it was with great anticipation that I logged on to Streetsblog on Monday to catch up on the latest transit and biking news. The top post, however, was a sobering piece about the death of James Langergaard, an experienced NYC cyclists who was killed by a car while crossing Queens Boulevard at 69th Street.

I'm always a little troubled after hearing about a cyclist's death, but usually I can manufacture a reason why I'm a safer cyclist than he or she was. However, James had years of city cycling under his belt and was a committed bike advocate who had spent countless hours helping other cyclists learn how to ride safely in the city. This time there was no rational for my own survival - only good fortune.

Shortly after I'd read about James, a coworker approached me in the office kitchen and said she is inspired by my commuting and was considering starting to bike to work as well. It would save her a lot of time, she said, but she'd never tried because she had a lot of fear about riding in the city.

Before, I would have vociferously encouraged her to overcome the fear. It's not as bad as you think it is out there on the streets, I would have urged. You'll feel terrific.

But now, having just been reminded of our tenuous mortality, I acknowledged that biking in the city is scary and stressful. Sometimes, I told her, that little bit of fear is terrific - it makes you feel alive before you plop down in front of a computer monitor for the next eight hours. But you have to weigh that juiced up feeling with the risks of the endeavor, and if you really don't feel safe, it's just not worth it.

The progressive intent of (some) urban redevelopment schemes

At a birthday party a few weeks ago, after the latest incarnation of the new Atlantic Yards stadium design was discussed with no uncertain degree of derision, conversation shifted to the history of other large scale developments in the city.

Walking through the Lower East Side, my Jacobian sensibilities had always been appalled by the scale of the Coop Village, but when I shared this opinion, an acquaintance at the party challenged this opinion. It turned out that my friend currently resides in one of the Hillman Houses and likes it because his apartment is relatively spacious, well designed and pleasantly quiet because the building is set back from the street. Photo, Coop Village, courtesy of the Coop Village website.

After growing up in the pre-bistrofied East Village, this friend was less inclined than I have been to glorify New York's prewar building stock, and recommended I watch Naked City (1948) to see what the LES looked like in the era shortly before its massive redevelopment. (He also recommended the low-budget film Mixed Blood, which filmed in Alphabet City in 1985 for an reality check about what all those adorable walk-ups looked like 20 years ag0.) Photo, movie poster for Naked City (1948).

While I'd known that Coop Village provided affordable housing to many low and middle-income New Yorkers, many of whom were at one time union members, I also hadn't realized that this housing project were organized by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (both grandparents to the labor union that my partner works for today, UNITE-HERE) as a way to provide affordable and decent housing for their members.

Which got my started thinking about the progressive intentions behind many urban redevelopment schemes. While trolling around the internet the other day, I came across an audio recording of Richard Lee, who served as New Haven's mayor from 1954-1970 and oversaw the city's large scale attempts at urban redevelopment. I highly recommend listening to the clip, in which Lee describes with great optimism his vision for a "slumless city." The fact that even with the best intentions for public welfare, New Haven's urban redevelopment projects were a massive failure should provide a healthy dose of reality to anyone who attempts large-scale reengineering of the urban fabric. Photo, Mayor Lee with his model for New Haven, courtesy of New Haven Oral History Project.

The rhetoric about the public good of Atlantic Yards seems to have become more muted in recent months. In his original plans for Atlantic Yards, Ratner said that 30 percent of the 6,000+ apartments would be priced for low and middle-income households. While this, and the promise of construction jobs, seems have bought the support of ACORN and some local politicians, as plans for most of apartment towers are axed, it has become a greater stretch to describe the project as a benefit to the public.

And aside from the project's escalating cost to taxpayers, there's also concerns about a project of such scale will affect the livability of the existing neighborhood. When I first moved to New York in 2005, I lived off of Flatbush Avenue, a few blocks from the apartments designated for demolition. Crossing Flatbush or Pacific to access the subway at the Atlantic Terminal was always a pedestrian nightmare, and I'm certain that building additional high density housing and the sports arena will only worsen the traffic as well as the risk to non-motorists at that intersection.

That being said, I'm not unilaterally opposed to development, even large-scale development that changes the character of neighborhoods. But it seems that project of this scale that requires this much taxpayer subsidization should provide more public benefit than two-thousand market-rate luxury condos.

Out of the Spinning class, on to the tarmac

Today's City Room post on the lack of female urban cyclists in New York got me thinking about a comment I received on my earlier post about the possible causes of the biking gender gap.

Peter Smith of Google Map's Bike There had suggested I check out the research of John Pucher, the Rutgers Professor referenced in the City Room post whose research shows that men make three times as many trips by bicycle than women in the United States.

Peter steered me towards video clip from a presentation that Pucher gave at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University in May 2008, where he talks with great enthusiasm about the number of female cyclists in Denmark and other parts of Europe and how the research clearly shows that if you create safer biking facilities, more women will bike.

I'm starting to think the whole argument about women not biking because they can't be fashionable is baloney. First of all, it's easy to be fashionable and bike. As Barbara Ross points out in City Room, "riding to work in heels is easier than walking...”. Secondly, having to wear "unfashionable" clothing to go to the gym or a yoga class doesn't seem to dissuade a disproportionate number of my gender from participating in those activities. Saying that women's fashion sense is the reason there are so few female cyclists seems like an easy way to deflect responsibility for improving our biking infrastructure so that we reduce the real physical danger bicyclists face when they are forced to share the roadways with irresponsible and aggressive drivers.

I have faith that as advocates from across the country continue to win bicycle infrastructure improvements, more women will start biking. Data from the 2001 National Household Transportation Survey shows that on average, women's daily trips are "notably" shorter than men's. Shorter trips are easier to bike. Once our roads feel safe enough, I think we could see even more women on bikes then men. I'm also hopeful because every Spinning class I've been in has been disproportionately female. When I get angry about how few women are on the road, I look at all my sisters pedaling away in the gym and hope that some day, they'll feel safe enough to hit some real pavement.

Gas taxes: too regressive to be a good idea?

To encourage a decrease in American oil consumption and to "smooth out oil's spikes and plunges" the Financial Page in the June 22 New Yorker argued for a phasing in a fluctuating gas tax. The article makes the argument that America's economic wellbeing is closely linked to cheap oil: "Blame for the current recession can be laid in part on the spike of the price of oil between June 2007 and July of 2008," the article stated, noting that not only did higher gas prices decimate demand for Detroit's gas-guzzlers (resulting in bankruptcies and layoffs) but that these prices also may have "magnified the housing bust by making long commutes to the overpriced exurbs less attractive."

Because of the scale India and China's increasing demand for oil, future oil prices will largely be out of our control, the New Yorker cautioned, and as a consequence America's long-term economic stability hinges on our ability to decrease our demand for oil. "Rising gas taxes is, of course, a solution that politicians - and voters - hate," the article stated. "But perhaps another oil shock or two will change that."

To support democracy in the Middle-East, Thomas Friedman also argued for imposing an immediate "Freedom Tax" of $1 a gallon on gasoline in a recent NYTimes Op-Ed. Friedman maintained that this tax increase would not only stimulate demand for energy efficient vehicles, but it would also "reduce our oil imports in a way that would surely affect the global price and weaken every petro-dictator."

I've had a few conversations of late, where I've tried to argue to my friends in the labor movement that higher gas taxes are a good thing, but I've had a difficult time refuting arguments that it would be a regressive tax increase.

Friedman suggested a gas tax rebate for the poor and elderly, which would seem like a pretty decent way to mitigate the tax burden on lower-income households, but if it were handled to the Earned Income Tax Credit, the out-of-pocket expenses could still put a strain on folks.

Figure 1: Increases in vehicle miles traveled via StreetsWiki.

One alternative to a higher gas tax would be taxing vehicle miles traveled (VMT), which would increase incentives for denser communities and shorter commutes. Though, just like the gas tax, a VMT tax would penalize America's rural poor as well as families who live in the cheaper outer exurbs. (In February, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood suggested transitioning to VMT to help fund transportation spending, but it appears the White House is opposed).

Additionally, a VMT tax would require the installation of new tracking devices in vehicles to count millage, and it also raises larger privacy concerns surrounding the collection of such information. As John Jensen of Seattle Transit Blog notes, environmentalist's have also expressed concerns the VMT tax doesn't provide incentives for hybrid or electric vehicles because it fails to distinguish between gas guzzlers and cars that have great millage.

"Perhaps a VMT tax should be in addition to the gas tax (perhaps a lower gas tax)," Jensen suggests. "But a gas tax isn’t just a fee to use gas, it’s a fee to use our public roads. Having electric or hybrid cars pay for their share of the transportation grid makes sense. Charging additional VMT taxes on heavy trucks that damage the roads more — well, that makes sense too. But charging a gas tax on one hand, and mandating that cars use less gas on the other — that’s good for the earth but a very bad way to fund roads and transit."

Which brings us back to the question of whether the primary purpose of a gas tax should be to decrease oil consumption or whether its more critical to raise federal transportation funds. The White House has decided to delay the transportation funding debate until after the 2010 elections, which will postpone the "politically volatile" debate over whether we should continue to rely on the gas tax.

But this decision by the White House to hoard its political capital for health care reform may in fact eventually make higher gas taxes more palatable. If families are no longer struggling to pay insane premiums and deductibles, or stuck without any medical coverage at all, than perhaps having to spend a few more dollars at the pump will seem like less of a financial burden.

The true cost of car ownership

Infrastructurist and Urban Omnibus recently posted an interview with the co-founder of Zipcar, Robin Chase. If you have the time, the full interview is an excellent read, but what struck me as particularly compelling was what Chase said about the cost of individual automobile ownership:

"...according to the National Households Consumer Survey, across the nation it costs $24 per day on average that people are spending in America on their car, day in and day out. If I were to tell you that it was going to cost $125 a week to go to work, you would say, no way, I’m not going to do it. But we are doing it - we just don’t realize we’re doing it."

In the early part of this decade, I worked as a union organizer for SEIU in the Silicon Valley and many of the low wage immigrant families I was working with considered car ownership an unaffordable luxury. In the current recession, and with gas prices starting to creep up again, I started to wonder if a significant number of Americans, despite a lack of practical public transit options, are having to give up on individual automobile use.

The most recent national statistic I could dig up on household car ownership was from the 2001 National Household Travel Survey, which found 8.7 million families in the United States did not own cars (8.1 percent of all households). But that percentage of car-less households is probably on the rise. Felix Salmon notes on his Reuters blog that car sales have dropped precipitously in recent months (see Figure 1 - via the NYTimes and Figure 2 - via PeakVt). Salmon explains:

"...for most of the past decade, every group of 1,000 people bought about 60 cars a year and ended up with about 3 more vehicles at the end of the year than they had at the beginning. So what happens when they’re only buying 35 cars a year? Even if they manage to hold on to their old clunkers for a bit longer than they otherwise might have done, the total number of cars per 1,000 people is likely to fall quite dramatically..."

I would argue that this decline in new car sales, as well as the choice of the 8.7 million households to remain "car-free," is based more on economic necessity than a desire to use green transportation. The National Household Travel Survey didn't provide household income or demographic data, but Smart Growth America estimates that African Americans households are about three and half times more likely not to own a car than white families, and Latino households are two and a half times less likely. As our economy falters and the price of oil continues to rise, car ownership may become an unaffordable luxury for even a larger number of Americans.

Chase's new project is GoLoco, a website that facilitates ride-sharing, She is enthusiastic about the project because it will help working families who are struggling to afford car ownership, but must rely on a car to commute to work. She says in the interview that, "Ride sharing is going to be significant while we transform our infrastructure to be less car-dependent. While we have such a high cost of car travel in such a car-dependent country, I don’t see another solution.”

According to Complete Streets, in 2001 when the price of gas was closer to $2 a gallon, an average American family already spent 18 percent of their income on transportation. The relative cost for lower-income Americans was even higher - 36 percent of the income of the poorest fifth of American families went towards transportation costs.

But let's not forget, even shared car ownership is beyond the means of many working poor in our country. In the audio clip "Struggle for Transportation" included with Barbara Ehrenreich' recent NYTimes Op-ed, Too Poor to Make the News, Ehrenheich describes how with the recession, even the cost of public transit has become too much for some working families, resulting in a larger number of late-night cyclists along major Los Angeles thoroughfares. (The larger article describes the recession's effects on the lives of America's working poor who were struggling long before the derivatives bubble burst, unlike the formerly wealthy and middle class "Nouveau Poor" that have snagged most of the hard knocks press coverage.)

Like universal health care and a living wage, affordable public transportation should be accessible to all working families in our country. Government polices that promote individual car ownership over investments in public transit are not only bad for the environment, but they fail to serve working families to whom car ownership is a large financial liability if not an outright impossibility.

Safer to take the Lexus (responding to a "bike jacking" in New Haven)

On weekends, my partner and I usually bike the Farmington Canal Trail that stretches a dozen miles or so parallel to Whitney Avenue through Hamden and Cheshire. The paved trail used to begin near the Stop and Shop in Hamden, but more recently, the trail has been extended further south towards the New Haven Green.

The canal path north of the Stop and Shop is so crowded on summer weekends that if you don't go early in the morning, you'll spend most of your ride dodging joggers, roller-bladers, dog-walkers and kids learning how to ride their first bikes. After biking this section last weekend, Maris and I decided to head home through the new stretch of trail runs south through the Newhallville neighborhood towards New Haven. Oddly, the new stretch of the trail through Newhallville was deserted, which I assumed was because it was relatively new and people weren't used to using it yet.

Photo of the end of the canal path pavement around Goodrich Street.

The only people we encountered on this section of trail were a group of teens who had spread out across the trail with their arms linked, forcing us to slow. At the last minute the group, laughing, separated and the let us pass through. I didn't think much of the incident at the time, but then last Monday, a (white, middle-aged) Yale administrator was 'bike jacked' on this section of trail.

According to the New Haven Independent, Robert Harper-Mangels was attacked by a group of teens on the way home from work, who knocked him off his brand new mountain bike and made off with it. The Independent reported that Harper-Mangels "usually drives between his home in North Haven to Yale" and that this was his second time commuting to work by bike. Since the attack, Harper-Mangels said he would "think twice" about biking on the trail again.

In the online comments section to the article, many readers blamed Harper-Mangels for thinking it was safe to ride the trail in the first place. Other commenters criticized the extension of the bike path through Newhallville, describing it as an "invitation to crime" and expressing concern that the new trail connects "a bad neighborhood" with the northern part of the trail.

Lisa Fernandez, the president of the Farmington Canal Rail-to-Trail Association, fought back against these reactionary instincts, urging scared residents to continue to use the trail because "users move abusers out." Some members of the Elm City Cycling listserve are adopting this approach and instead of abandoning the trail, have started coordinating efforts to find biking partners for commuters who are afraid to use the trail alone.

I hope Harper-Mangels can find a cycling partner and overcome his reluctance to use the trail, instead of returning to his routine as yet another rich, white suburbanite who hops on the I-91 to get from his home to his job downtown, bypassing any interaction with the lower income residents of his community.

Because as much as Yale and the elite it services would like to envision our community as the new Darien, the reality is that New Haven’s per capita income is $16,393, with 24.4 percent of the population living below the federal poverty line. For this reason, I welcome the extension of the bike path because it establishes continuity between communities that were formerly physically segregated by suburbia, freeways and ghettos.

Secure bike parking - from dream to near reality (thanks TA)

I started commuting by bike in New York in February a few years back. The first time I biked in from Red Hook apartment to my job it was bitter cold, the wind chasing newspapers down the avenues. I arrived at my building numb and aching to get my hands around a hot cup of coffee. I walked my bike into the lobby toward the elevator, planning to keep it in my cubicle for the day.

Having worked at law firm in the financial district in San Francisco where almost every cubicle stored a bike, I assumed I'd have no problem bringing my bike in the building owned by my employer at the time, SEIU Local 32BJ.

Photo: Stolen bike, courtesy of the Broken Bike Blog.

But the security guard stopped me. “No bikes in the building,” she insisted. “It’s a fire hazard. You have to lock it outside. See the bike rack out there?”

She gestured to one of the city bike racks where two skeletons of former bikes were chained, their tires and bike seats stripped, their frames twisted. I watched a bus barrel past, centimeters from the rack. I was not prepared to condemn my bike to that fate. Fuming and chilled to the bone, I rode to the café where my cousin worked. After listening to me rant about the pro-obesity fascist policies of my office, she offered to keep an eye on my bike if I parked it in front of the café window. So I became a regular customer at Le Tarte in exchange for secure bike parking.

At my current job, we share a building with Sullivan Cromwell, so I had no illusions I'd get a bike through our vaulted, marble encased lobby. We do fortunately have an outdoor bike parking rack located in the covered smoking plaza at our rear entrance. While the smoke can be nauseating, the fact that at pretty much any time of the day there is a least one person standing around on their cigarette break is a definite theft deterrent.

The NYC Department of City Planning found that lack of secure bicycle parking was the most common reason 'would be' bicycle commuters gave for not biking to work.

This fact alone should justify the passage of the Bike Access to Building Bill in our City Council. The bill is headed into its second reading on Monday, and Transportation Alternatives is encouraging folks to turn out and testify. If the hearing goes well, TA anticipates that the bill could be passed by the end of the summer. The new law would require building owners and managers to provide reasonable ways in which employees may access their building with a bicycle.

From Transportation Alternatives:

What: Hearing on Intro. 871, The Bicycle Access Bill
Where: City Hall, Chambers.
When: June 15th, 2008
Time: 10:00am
RSVP to Peter, peter@transalt.org and let him know if you can come and testify. Testimony should be short and to-the-point. Please print out 25 copies so every committee member has a record of your statement.

Building a better bike helmet

While I applaud efforts to make biking sexier, I don't believe a fear of lycra is a serious factor in preventing would-be bikers from getting on the road. That being said, there are certain accessories that I think could be better designed to fit the needs of urban commuter. And with the number of bikers on the rise, designing and marketing practical bike accessories is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to tackle an emerging market.

One accessory I'd like to see improved is the helmet. For the last couple years, I've been using a basic Bell helmet that I painted neon yellow for increased visibility (Photo 1). But when I switched from riding a cyclecross bike to the Brompton, I started jonesing for more fashionable head protection.

For guidance, I turned to the recent NYTimes fashion spread on urban cyclists, but not a single helmet appeared in the glossy photos of Dutch bikes and male models clad in impossibly white suits.

I definitely wasn't prepared to give up the helmet - in fact there are days when I wish I had full-body Kevlar protection. I ultimately settled on a BMX/hipster style Bern helmet (Photo 2), but not before wondering - since horseback riders have a range of options, from velvet covered eventing helmets to the helmet hiding cowboy hat (Photo 3) - why there aren't a wider selection of bicycle helmet designs.

In my quest for new helmet styles, I came across a European helmet company Yakkay that designs helmets with interchangeable hat-like covers. Not exactly my aesthetic (Photo 4), and not available at U.S. retailers, but I applaud the effort. I'd personally prefer a helmet that looks like the old Italian "hairnet" helmets, but that actually offers adequate head protection (Photo 5).

The other biking accessory that I find extremely cumbersome is my bike locking system. Living in NYC, I'm afraid to use anything but a Kryptonite lock and heavy-duty chain, which weigh a lot and leaves bruises and scrapes on my hips when I bike with it. Maris suggested I should get a Rottweiler, but I'm convinced there's got to be a carbon-fiber light yet indestructible enough to deter bike thieves NASA-invented material that's just waiting to be utilized in bike-lock technology.

A rant from the second wave (but seriously folks, we have a gender problem)

I looked at my blogroll yesterday and realized that all the blogs I regularly read for the most part, written and edited by men. Being a former feminist studies major, I’ve decided to try to remedy this situation. Maris is a regular reader of CopenhagenCycleChic, so I’ve added that blog to my regulars. But while I think it’s important to make biking look sexy, I’d prefer to read blogs that actually dig a little into transportation policy and politics.

Maybe the problem stems from the perception that transportation policy belongs under the purview of road construction and engineering (scary math eek!), and as more people like myself get excited about the changes that progressive transportation policy can bring to our communities, the gender divide will disappear.

But it’s not just the progressive transportation blogosphere that’s male dominated. From my experience commuting to work on my bike in New York, there are far fewer female bike commuters than men, and I’ve yet to encounter a female bike messenger or take-out delivery rider.

I’m still trying to find the stats for New York City, but I recently came across the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s “2008 State of Cycling” report, which found that women make up 49 percent of San Franciscans, but only 23 percent of frequent cyclists* in the city.
*Bicycling on average two or more days per week.

The fact that women made up less than a quarter of frequent cyclists in a city as athletic and progressive as San Francisco was shocking. It really doesn’t make sense to me why so few women are on bikes. Is it a fashion issue? Are women more scared than men of riding in urban traffic? It would be interesting to see if women cyclists tend to use protected bike lanes more frequently than men.

Stay tuned – you’ll be hearing more from me on this topic.

Photo: Vogue fashion spread. (Sexy, but from personal experience I've discovered it's pretty much impossible to bike in form-fitting knee length skirts without effecting severe material damages.)

Talk back! (comments enabled)

I've received emails from a couple of folks informing me our blog wouldn't allow them to post a comment. After finally coming to the conclusion that everyone couldn't be technicality incompetent, I sat down and figured out the glitch in our settings that was blocking comments.

So now everyone should be able to comment - regardless of whether you're registered with the blogger program. We look forward to reading your feedback - and thanks for reading

So let us know what you think - and thanks for reading FiftyCarPileUp!

Photo: Me and my first bike.

It's difficult to be a new urbanist at an Extended Stay

I’ve stayed in a few Extended Stays over the last couple of years. The one thing that you can count on when staying at “the Stay” is that you will not be at the center of all the action. You will need a car to get anywhere. This should come as no shock as the Stay is always found somewhere in the suburbs, and they generally pop up where land is cheap, and easy access to a highway is a marketing plus. A bit over a year ago, I spent about two months at one in Temecula, a town in California’s “Inland Empire.” (I think history will remember the great empires as Mayan, Byzantine, Roman, Ottoman, Ming and Inland.) When I first arrived to the hotel, best as I could tell, Temecula was a shopping plaza that extended for about 3 or 4 highway exits.

After exploring Temecula for a couple of weeks, my initial assessment seemed to be spot on. You could get anywhere you needed to be, say one of the local taco establishments (Taco El Gordo, Del Taco, Los Amigos Taco Shop, La Casa Del Taco), by navigating any of the 4 or 6-lane plus center turn lane arteries, and taking careful note of which overpass is nearest should you need to be on the other side of the interstate-bisected town. Some of the main drags in town even feature double left-turn lanes. Ahh, California. You could theoretically walk around Temecula, but no one does. When streets are intended for highway like volumes of cars and there are oceans of ample surface parking surrounding whatever taco shop oasis is your destination, why would one possibly walk? Turns out that large parking lots are no places for pedestrians with the intra-shopping plaza traffic. I nearly lost a limb crossing a “parking lot thruway” where a truck was doing what felt like 40 mph judging from the gust of wind.

Photo: Temecula, California.

More recently, I found myself at a Stay by the Philadelphia Airport. The highway sign for the exit affectionately refers to the area as Cargo City. And the DOT seems to have accurately described what the area is best suited to - a collection of discount hotels in one direction, and airport support services and off-airport parking in the other. There was just about nothing, save for a Ruby Tuesdays, accessible by foot from this Stay. After checking in late one evening, I drove around looking for a convenience store or deli or some place where I could pick up a snack and a beverage. The nearest such place was about 2 ½ miles away. A few days later when I found a grocery store, I stocked up on no-preparation food, coffee, and even managed to find those little tiny filters that fit a hotel room 4-cup coffee maker.

Though Philadelphia is a big city, it’s the kind of place where it seems everyone still has a car. Everyone in this case means 87% of households. I’ve only spent a couple of days at a time in Philadelphia, but it does seem that with a bit of planning, getting around with SEPTA, trains, and trolleys could be quite convenient. I even spotted an abundance of bike lanes, though I’ve been warned that the snakes of active and inactive trolley tracks require that extra operator attention be given.

Just as I was heading out of town, I realized the R1 train could have dropped me off not too far from my Stay. Perhaps next time I’ll have to inquire if there’s a courtesy shuttle that can take me to a bar in the airport food court for a late night snack…

Photo: Philadelphia subway system.

"Dangerous"

To replace my beautiful vintage Peugeot that was destroyed in a dooring incident, I recently purchased a Brompton folding bicycle off of Craigslist. It's a lovely piece of engineering, and it folds up small enough to sneak it through the security checkpoint at my office (the building security maintains that they won't allow any type of bicycle, even of the folding variety, past the entryway).

Because of its amazing compactness, I don't have to fret about leaving the Brompton locked outside. It's small enough to carry into grocery stores or coffee shops – I even sat it under that table at Spitzer's in the LES one night. And it's an amazing conversation piece. I'm stopped on the street at least daily by folks who want to know what it is and where to buy one.

While the Brompton has received an overwhelmingly positive reception from people who in most cases probably don’t consider themselves pro-bike, I did have one stunningly negative response from a group of fellow train-riders. My primary reason for getting the Peugeot, and then the Brompton, is because Metro North still doesn't allow full-sized bikes on most trains.

When I have the Brompton with me, I sit in one of the end rows and, since the folded Brompton is smaller than your average roller-bag carry-on suitcase, it fits comfortably in the gap between the seat and the aisle.

Last week, on my way into work in the city, a group of women boarding in Milford edged into the three adjoining seats. As she tugged at her too-tight khaki capris, their ringleader glared at the Brompton at my feet and commented to her fellow commuters how it was “dangerous” to allow such things on the train

Refusing to make eye contact with me, her friends proceeded to agree that it was risky to allow such an item on the train and how upset they were that the conductor didn’t ask me to take it off.

Their conversation then shifted to how awful the traffic was these days and how one of them had spent an hour yesterday in her SUV stuck in traffic on Route 34.

In no way was my folded Brompton posing any risk to this group of women, and the vitriol in their reaction shocked me. I guess it’s a good reality check about the extent of anti-bike bias that persists in our country, a highly illogical and emotional reaction that that continues to thrive despite the well-established truths that biking is good for your physical health while increased driving results in traffic and pollution.

Photos: Profile of a folded Brompton and a birds-eye view of a folded Brompton (from the Brompton website).

Subsidizing homeownership (and the lobbying efforts of the National Association of Realtors)

Last year, after our friend bought a condo in New Haven, we realized that technically we too could afford the downpayment for a home. Swept into the we should really be building equity mindset, we found a real estate agent and looked at a couple of places. But in the process of poking around closet space and fantasizing about tearing out carpets and knocking down walls, I came to the realization that I didn't want to sacrifice the ability to move where my career projected me for the satisfaction of being able to install marble counter tops in the kitchen.

Richard Florida’s recent Atlantic article, How the Crash Will Reshape America, discusses a study by economist Andrew Oswald that showed that places with higher homeownership rates also suffer from higher unemployment. Oswald’s results went as far as showing that homeownership is in fact a better predictor of unemployment than rates of unionization or generosity of welfare benefits.

In his article, discussed on Steetsblog and Greater Greater Washington, Florida argues that “America’s tendency to overconsume and under-save has been intimately intertwined with our postwar spatial fix—that is, with housing and suburbanization,” and that the solution “begins with the removal of homeownership from its long-privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy.”

Incentives for homeownership extend far beyond the cultural premium placed on the creation of the perfect suburban domestic space. Not only does public funding for road and utility construction subsidize the cost of building suburban communities, but our tax code and federal government programs have, both historically and in the present day, have primarily subsidized single-family home ownership, thanks to influence from the real estate industry.

Since its inception in 1908, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) has sustained an active role in shaping federal housing policy. During the Great Depression, NAR successfully lobbied the President Hoover and the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) to stimulate housing production through loan guarantees for mortgages for single-family homes. Thanks to NAR’s efforts the FHA originally excluded multi-family from the program.

NAR also successfully lobbied for a mortgage interest income tax deduction. This “mansion subsidy” is an extremely regressive tax, as the amount of the deduction increases with the size of the mortgage. In her 2003 publication Building Suburbia, Yale urbanism scholar Dolores Hayden estimates that this tax break costs the federal government $100 billion a year in lost revenue, and almost half the tax break goes to the top 5 percent of taxpayers – households with income over $100,000 a year. Since 1997, homeowners have been able to write off the first $500,000 from sale of home before capital gains tax, and since last year, first-time homebuyers have been eligible for an $8,000 tax credit.

In February of this year, President Obama included in his budget proposal a provision that would reduce the amount of mortgage payments families earning over $250,000 can deduct from their federal taxes. NAR, of course, is “100% opposed” to the provision and has vowed to “use its formidable array of resources against its enactment.” NAR’s power should not be underestimated: it is is America’s largest trade organization with 1.3 million members, and NAR’s PAC spent over $17 million on federal lobbying in 2008, ranking it the 11th largest PAC in the U.S.

Let's hope that as President Obama's attempts to win Congressional support for his tax reforms, transit advocates will seize the opportunity to counter the lobbying power of NAR. And let's continue to discuss the merits of universal homeownership and whether federal incentives for homeownership, incentives that have been extensively shaped by the real estate industry over the last hundred years, are in actuality beneficial for our country.

Photo: Martha Stewart, undercover lobbyist for the NAR?

It takes a (Southern) Village: New urbanisim in North Carolina

The weak beam of my bike headlight was no match for the dark of the Highway 15-501. Although I could usually see the white stripe delineating the shoulder from the rest of the road, I couldn't distinguish the dark silhouettes of roadkill from the black asphalt. The landscape to the south of Chapel Hill was patchwork of woods, empty fields and McMansion developments, so it wasn't uncommon to encounter deer carcasses or the bodies of squirrels or some other slightly larger and usually very putrid rodent-like creature flattened along edge of the highway. I had visions that the front tire of my bike will hit some bloody thing and slip on the rotting carcass. I'd lose control and sprawl out across the pavement, roadkill for the next semi plowing along the highway.

I moved to North Carolina to work on Edwards’ presidential campaign which was headquartered in Southern Village, a suburban enclave located off Highway 15-501 a few miles south of Chapel Hill.

Photo 1: Map of Southern Village, located off Highway 15-501 a few miles south of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Fortunately, for my sake, the planners who had designed this particular suburb had taken to heart new urbanist principles and had centered the development around a small commercial district. Southern Village's "Market Street" included a church, movie theater, gym, spa, luxury linens store, florist, a few restaurants, and what made possible my survival without a car in North Carolina, an outpost of the community owned grocery Weaver Street. They forgot, in their master plan, to include a drug store, so when I needed to get a prescription filled or buy a box of tampons, I found myself navigating the unlit shoulder of the freeway that separated the suburban paradise where I lived and worked from downtown Chapel Hill and Carrboro.

While I applaud the architects of Southern Village for choosing to include some commercial space in the enclave, a better plan would have been to actually integrate their new construction into the preexisting city structures of Carrboro or Chapel Hill. Instead, they chose to an "exclusive" isolated community separated from the more racially and socio-economically integrated urban structure. (Try and find a single non-Caucasian person featured in one of the photos on the Market Street promotional website). Although "SoVo" lacked a physical gate, it had the barrier of the highway to out keep less desirable elements.

Photo 2: Downtown Southern Village's big box construction disguised by faux historic storefront details.

No parking on the dance floor

There are a lot of policy wonks out there. Heck, this blog does a lot of flapping its gums. For a while, the mayor of New Haven, John DeStefeno, has been talking about transit-oriented development (TOD) as the guiding light for the city’s future. And rightfully so. New Haven had a bit of a rough period when manufacturing jobs fled in the second half of the last century. So, while the renaissance of New Haven in the last 20 years may have something to do with the hundreds of millions of federal research dollars that come to Yale, it also surely has to do with it being connected to rest of Connecticut’s shoreline cities and, of course, New York City by commuter rail. Those rails now leave New Haven poised to be a major business and transit hub as density continues to increase.

Photo: Union Station and surrounding areas from New Haven Parking Authority.

DeStefano has made the pitch for TOD in a slideshow he was taking around town last year that addressed both short term and long term development priorities, as the city sees it anyhow. Anyone who has taken the MetroNorth to New Haven’s Union Station knows that there’s a lot of room for some smart growth around the train station.

While it’s only a 10 or 15 minute walk to downtown or the New Haven Green, it’s not a pretty walk. Outdated concrete bunker housing projects, the brutal NH Police Station, some highway off and on-ramps, surface parking lots, and the not-so human scale edge of downtown greet any takers. There’s vast potential for not only making this walk a friendly one, but for putting these areas to better use. I wouldn’t be surprise if Donald Trump were to buy up some land around the station to build a residential high-rise in the next decade. There’s the serious question of what will become of the low-income housing as there have been some blunders in New Haven’s past, but most people will agree that the Church St South projects are not very hospitable and impenetrable by foot traffic in their current form.

This is all a long preamble to DeStefano and United Illuminating, the local power company, going at it during a press conference last week.

The mayor’s primary goal was to criticize the planned electricity rate hike. However, it got real interesting when the mayor tried to call out UI for planning to abandon their New Haven offices and move to the suburbs in 2012 when their current lease expires. He was joined by the usual Connecticut political suspects in criticizing this “dumb growth.” Some UI execs crashed the party and it turned into a shouting match. DeStefano let UI know he was displeased, especially given that UI had essentially abandoned an old plant in 1999 that remains a brownfield site.

UI argued that employee parking in New Haven was too expensive and, of course, the cheap real estate in Orange would be able offer ample parking for its employees. Why does almost everything in New Haven come down to parking? Homer Simpson may call parking “the cause of, and solution to, all of New Haven’s problems.”

Arkansas: A study in the effects of accelerated depreciation

I was really looking forward to Arkansas. From the year I spent in North Carolina, I gained a certain affection for the South, and so as soon as I heard that my colleague and I would have the opportunity to film there, I started fantasizing about escaping the damp end-of-March New York chill and enjoying some good barbecue and fried catfish.

But most of my experience in Arkansas could have been re-created on any strip mall in America. To their credit, Fayetteville and Little Rock did have small historic downtown areas, but the vast majority of the state appeared to be a continual repetition of the same twenty stores you'd encounter on the Connecticut Post Road or on any other suburban commercial development in America.

In this wasteland of national chain stores, I was excited when we finally encountered one small example of localism - a Chick-Fil-A near our hotel in the strip outside of Fayetteville. But as we were enjoying our sweet tea and chicken sandwiches, my colleague informed me that there is in fact a Chick-Fil-A in the NYU food court, erasing my last hope that we'd found something attributable to the fact that we were south of the Mason-Dixon line.

I recently finished reading Building Suburbia by Yale architecture and urbanism professor Dolores Hayden. In the chapter on "edge nodes" she explains how not only were the creation of suburban commercial strips subsidized by federal dollars for highway construction, but additional federal commercial real-estate tax breaks also created incentives for the construction of cheap, suburban commercial sprawl at the cost of older businesses and building stock in historic downturn urban areas.

In 1954, the Republican controlled Congress re-wrote the tax code to permit a seven-year "accelerated depreciation" period for greenfield income-producing property. Previously, the tax code only allowed "straight-line" depreciation, but this new accounting method allowed companies to defer corporate income taxes by reducing taxable income in current years in exchange for paying increased taxable income in future years. This created a huge incentive for companies to sell the property after the first seven years to another owner who could then repeat the accelerated deprecation cycle.

Hayden writes:

"Commercial real estate became a tax-shelter, and venture capitalist were attracted to it, accelerating the turnover of cheap building. Each new round of accelerated depreciation led to another set of profitable losses. After several rounds, structures were abandoned in favor of new buildings in more distant sites. Nothing could have been more damaging to older business in both big cities and small towns."

The accelerated deprecation tax break was created by the Eisenhower Administration as an incentive to encourage more construction and growth, and it served that purpose quite effectively. By the time the Tax Reform Act of 1986 eliminated the incentive, there was a huge glut of cheaply constructed strip mall commercial real-estate.

The development of commercial development further and further from urban centers created a world where individually-owned automobiles have become an absolute necessity. I like to imagine that with a bicycle, rain gear and a pair of warm gloves, I could manage to get by pretty much anywhere in America. But with a vast majority of its commercial buildings located along the interstate, Arkansas is the kind of place that life without a car seems, even to me, pretty much unfeasible. There is even a certain pride in the car dependent lifestyle: as my colleague, who was born and raised in Arkansas boasted, in the Razorback state you drive ten feet to the end of your driveway to pick up your mail.

Other than an increase in the price of gasoline, I'm really not sure what could create the kind of incentive needed to encourage urban density. As long as we a have steady supply of cheap gas and undeveloped rural acreage, it seems inevitable that strip-mall development will continue to consume Arkansas and the rest of rural America.

Photo: Entering Bentonville, Arkansas, the birthplace of Wal-Mart.

A little personal space (the separated bike lane)

While the number of people commuting by bike has risen over the last few years - in New York City, commuter cycling grew 35 percent between 2008 and 2007 - a fear of accidents prevents many potential commuters from venturing onto the roadways.

The danger is real. In 2007, 698 bicyclists were killed. This may seem small, considering how many people are killed in car accidents every year, but proportionally bike riding is more dangerous. While two percent of traffic fatalities are bicyclists, less than one percent of all transit is made on bikes, so cyclists are killed more frequently.

My father is an example of someone who is too scared by traffic to commute to work. I asked, him, last time I was visiting my parents at home in Washington State, why he prefers to take the bus or carpool with my brother. With lovely and spacious bike lanes, extremely courteous drivers - at least by New York standards - and relatively mild weather, wouldn’t it make sense?

It just wasn’t worth the risk, he told me. In the last few years, a number of his acquaintances had been hit while cycling. While no one was killed, all had been injured pretty seriously and one had been hospitalized for months.

Later that visit, I was in the car with my mom driving through the Evergreen State College campus parkway. Formerly a four-lane drive, the college had recently spent a good chunk of taxpayer dollars converting one of the lanes in each direction into a bike lane, separated by a curbed and grassed divider from the traffic lane.

“Waste of money,” my mom commented. “There was already a huge shoulder.” That was true, the parkway did have an ample shoulder. But cars traveling on the parkway, which connected the college to Highway 101, were often traveling 50 or 60 mph, and from my previous experiences biking there, had no qualms about using that generous shoulder as a passing lane.

I'd never been on a truly separated bike lane before - the one on New York's 9th Avenue hadn't yet been built - so I borrowed my dad's dusty mountain bike and went for a ride to check it out.

It was incredible. I felt invincible. And I started to fantasize, imagine how many more people, people like my father, would feel safe enough to bike to work if every street was like this, if every bike lane was clearly marked and separated from speeding and reckless drivers?
Photo: The separated bike line on Everygreen State Parkway, Olympia, Washington

Courtesy vs Safety, or Getting Shot At vs Getting Run Over

In the bicycling portion of my brain, wedged between the Daredevil Lobe and the This Is Good For Me Cortex, there exists much neuronal traffic dedicated to picking a line of travel that keeps me alive. It can be a fine line between being courteous to other traffic and being run off the road. Between making sure motorists are aware of your presence and intentions and causing a flare up of road rage. Nothing like a middle finger fully deployed from a truck revving its engine that then whizzes by you leaving only an inch or two of clearance so that you ruminate the 20x difference in mass and 40x difference in inertia between the Ford Excursion/EnviroDestroyer and you to really make you feel alive.

If I could, I’d always bike in a way that is unobtrusive as possible. I’ll be over as far right as possible on the tarmac to let autos pass. However, there are times when hugging that line will make one’s path of travel quite erratic. Pictured in the photo is an example of the physical narrowing of a roadway, which can happen for all sorts of silly design or design fault reasons. The portion of the road in the foreground has allowance for parallel parking on the right hand side, giving just about enough room for there to be proper bike lane if the city were to put some paint down. Is that a good idea here? Maybe not. It would certainly be a “door” lane (sorry Anna, and RIP Peugeot), and as you can see, it would come to an abrupt end where the road narrows ahead.

One option is to follow the yellow path, hugging the right side the entire way. While this may allow more drivers to pass more easily, it also results in the biker jutting out into the lane resulting in A) car swerving over the yellow line to pass, B) car hitting the brakes, C) bike running into curb, telephone poll, trip to ER, getting $7,000 bill in the mail because hospital missed a number on your ID number, etc. As much as an adventure as C is, sometimes I have prior commitments.

I like follow the red line and make my move to where I’ll have to be riding in the narrower road ahead gradually and early enough to leave some buffer. I like to think this makes cars more conscious of both you and the upcoming change in the roadway. If I know there’s just one car behind me and about to pass, I’ll sometimes hug the right until the road narrows. Aren’t I nice guy? But that’s only if I’m certain there’s just one car. If not, sorry cars. I’ll take my chances on a bird flying out the window.

Urban highways: tearing down the legacy of Robert Moses

My apartment in New York overlooks the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and at our place in New Haven, the traffic on I-91 is a constant murmur. Over time, you stop noticing the noise, and I try not to contemplate the car exhaust residue I’m inhaling, But with the trip upstate last weekend, I was really looking forward to sleeping without the rumble of the highway, and so I intentionally booked a hotel in the downtown area, picturing I’d fall asleep to the gentle sounds of a small downtown.

Little did I realize that I-81 cuts directly through downtown Syracuse, and our hotel, most likely constructed on a sweetheart land deal after the area was cleared for the highway, was located immediately beside it.
Photo: I-81 cutting through downtown Syracuse.

When I got back, I started Googling and discovered that the elevated portion I-81 that runs through Syracuse is structurally deteriorating and that the NYDOT and Syracuse Metropolitan Transit Council have determined that it must soon be replaced or torn down. This part of the highway was built in 1957, destroying what was once an African American community.

The Onondaga Citizen’s League is pushing for I-81 to be torn down and replaced by a boulevard, which would reconnect the decaying downtown to University Hill, where the regions two largest employers - SUNY Upstate Medical University and Syracuse University - are located.

Interstate 81 in Syracuse is number six on the Congress of New Urbanism’s top ten list of national prospects for highway teardowns. Number four on the “Freeways without Futures” list was the Route 34 connector in New Haven, another stretch of impractical engineering that formed part of our route to Syracuse.

In the late 1950s, the Oak Street neighborhood in New Haven, once again a historically African American community, was razed, clearing the ground for what was intended to be a freeway providing access from northwest Connecticut to New Haven. The Route 34 connector was never completed, and now community members are working with New Haven’s mayor to remove what remains of this ‘freeway to nowhere’ and recreate the street grid in the area that was demolished.
Photo: The east-west path cleared for the Route 34 connector.

There is a growing movement to combat the legacy of Robert Moses and replace elevated urban highways with boulevards. In 1973, the teardown of the elevated West Side Highway in New York was the first major reclamation. Since then, Portland, San Francisco and Milwaukee have successfully reclaimed waterfront areas by replacing highways with on-street boulevards. In my home state of Washington, plans to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel were approved by the state legislature on April 22. Instead of wantonly rebuilding existing urban freeways, let's hope that other states take advantage of the funding and momentum from the federal stimulus plan to rethink whether these relics of an earlier era actually deserve to be brought into the future in their current incarnations.

In the great north woods (finale)

Day 20

We arrived in Prince George today, my final destination. While the rest of the group will continue south to Yellowstone, I have to return to the office. While I cannot wait for a twenty-minute hot shower, a real bed with clean sheets, to cut my fingernails, shave my legs and have a fresh salad and a real cup of coffee, if I could stay on the road, I would. I contemplate possible excuses involving moose and bears and a missed flight that would warrant a three-week late return, but nothing seems credible.

I don't see another car on the highway in route to the airport. It's just me and my cab driver gliding through the foggy silence. My cab driver is a bit gruff at first when he arrives to pick me up at 4 am. After watching me lift my bike box into the cab, he wants to know what sort of crazy person would buy a bike in Prince George and fly it back to New York.

I tell him about the ride, and he wants to know what sort of wildlife we saw along our route. Lots of bison, I say, and some caribou and a couple of black bears. Any moose, he asks? Just a dead one, on the side of the road, I reply. He tells me that’s because hunting season starts next week and they've all gone into hiding. He’s excited though, that it’s almost the season, because this year he bought a permit for one bull moose.

I tell him how much I enjoyed the moose stew we had one evening, cooked from moose shanks that a supporter in Watson Lake had given us. Moose is delicious, he agrees, and then goes on to explain to me all the best ways to prepare caribou and bison. Bear is tricky though, he warns. You have to boil the heck out of the meat for it to be edible. And you should be warned, he cautions, bear skin looks just like human skin after you remove the hair. Which just drives home the point that humans are really just another large mammal. As the advocates of ecosystem based management argue, when drafting policies for environmental stewardship, we must recognize that humans are components in every ecosystem.

The fog seems to thicken as we approach the airport. You won't be leaving anytime soon with the fog like this, he warns me, and he is right. Five hours late, the sun burns through and my plane finally lifts off.

From Prince George, we follow the power lines that run from the Peace River dams all the way to Vancouver. The size of the city – mile after mile of urban grid stretching from the base of the Coast Range to the Pacific Coast – feels immense compared to the human settlements further north. As we make our final descent, we bank steeply over the Fraser River. The surface of the water is barely visible under the platoons of log floats and I wonder if some of the timber that passed us on logging trucks on the highway has made it here already. Every mile of urban infrastructure is evidence of Vancouver's dependence on natural resources extracted from up north.

Until we are able to figure out how more effectively and sustainably manage our natural resources, what we define as wildlife and wilderness will always be endangered. Even if we are to set aside wilderness corridors and protect these areas from logging or mining or farming, they will still be impacted by human civilization. Wilderness areas are not immune to climate change, nor are they protected from air pollution, the invasion of non-native species or the contamination or depletion of water tables. The beetle kill we encountered along our route is only one example.

My father, a marine ecologist for the State of Washington, has commented on the futility of proposals calling for the designation of specific ocean regions as “protected areas.” You can’t expect pollution or marine animals to stay within their designated protected areas, he grouses. And it’s an unspoken license to destroy the rest.

In creating protected areas, are we tacitly admitting that we have given up on creating sustainable land use principles for the rest of the planet? While we struggle to establish wildlife corridors and national parks, vast other areas of undeveloped land will come under heavy and unsustainable use as a result of our unbridled energy consumption. In northern Alberta, surface mining of the oil sands has already destroyed over 180 square miles of boreal forest and muskeg swamp, and the Canadian government has already given oil companies the right to surface mine on an area roughly the size of the state of Maryland. In the U.S., politicians from both side of the aisle are pushing for the surface mining of oil shale deposits in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

Wilderness corridors and preserves represent one extreme of how we choose to coexist with our planet, but in order to address the underlying barriers to environmental health, we must adopt a much more comprehensive approach towards conservation that reckons with climate change, land use and our unsustainable burn rate of natural resources.
Photo: Rest stop (Isan Brant)

In the great north woods (part 9)

Day 16

The landscape now feels so tame compared to the Yukon and further north in British Columbia.. We pass farmhouses with cattle and hayfields, and the road is hemmed with power lines. The rain clouds that move across the sky so quickly, transforming the warm morning sunlight into grey blustery afternoons, no longer seem so threatening. If we get wet and cold we could pedal the next ranch entrance and beg for hot tea and shelter from the storm.

As we ascend out of the Peace River valley, we start to see beetle kill in the hillsides above us, as if the pine trees were turning for fall, their reddish-brown hue covering huge swaths of forest. The beetles that kill the pines are indigenous to North America, but previously the cold winters would thin out their population enough to prevent the wide scale loss of trees. Now, with climate change there are less frost days every winter and forests across the northern interior are turning red. Have we, just like the pine beetle, become so populous that we are depleting the natural resources we survive on at a level that is not infinitely sustainable?

Day 17

We biked in the rain today once again. What started as a gentle mist as we ascended to Azouzetta Lake had transformed into a steady downpour by the time we reached camp. We saw our first cottonwoods that had begun to change yellow in the cold. Tonight is warmer though and all our wet gear is spread around the campsite. Steam from wet gear that's warming over the fire catches in the beams of our headlamps. In the morning it’s damp and foggy and our gear still hasn’t dried out. The peaks of the Rockies around us are hidden in a cold mist that makes the thought of stripping down into bike shorts undeniably unappealing.

I discovered the dangers of DEET today. The bugs were terrible and I sprayed DEET around my head. Taking off the helmet later I felt like I'd stuck my hand into black sticky sap where the plastic had melted from the bug spray. I still don't have any bug bites though, so I’m going to stick with my regimen of coating myself in this toxic stuff.

I feel myself getting less and less analytical as the days go on. My mind has become occupied with the simplest of tasks. When will this hill end? When is the next meal? Is that rain cloud moving this way? It's not that we're entirely disconnected from civilization here – there are occasionally payphones at the outposts and a steady stream of vehicles pass us on the highway, but it’s taken us three days to find someone who's seen a recent weather report and the other news that normally permeates my life through Gothamist and Drudge has become completely muted. I know nothing of who Obama picked as his vice presidential running mate, nor how many gold medals American athletes won in this Olympics. And it doesn't matter. Instead I'm thinking about what we're going to have for breakfast tomorrow morning.

The wind shifts and is blowing smoke into my laptop. Little flakes of ash are landing on my keyboard. The fire is starting to go out and I'm already wearing every layer of clothing I brought, so I guess that means it's time to get in my sleeping bag. It's amazing how fast the days go. Wake up. Stretch. Eat breakfast. Pack. Ride. Lunch. Ride. Find camp. Unpack. Make dinner. Clean up from dinner. Write. Go to bed.
Photo: Campfire (Alex Applegate)

In the great north woods (part 8)

Day 12

I’m tired during the last stretch into Fort St. John. It's cold and the sky is overcast. It was sunny when we started, but a storm is building in the south and so we bike towards the dark gray of the storm on the horizon.

Small signs of civilization start appearing as we approach the outskirts of town. A school bus stop warning sign. Cows in a mowed field. The smell of wood smoke. I have never been so happy to see a Super 8 Motel billboard. We hit the first traffic light 10 kilometers from downtown and the Alaska Highway is joined by frontage roads cluttered with the sprawl of oil town industry.

We sleep inside for the first time in almost two weeks. Tony, from the local environmental group, has agreed to host us. It rains all night, the temperature hovering around three degrees Celsius. In the morning I wake up and wash my face with hot water and feel wonderful.

The Peace River Environmental Association, as the group is called, is trying to stop the BC government from building a hydroelectric dam across the Peace River. The Peace River Valley is already a bottleneck in the wilderness corridor that stretches between the Yukon and Canadian provincial parks further south because of its heavy agricultural use, and if the dam is built, I am told by Melody, one of the bright-eyed local activists, the resulting reservoir would only further restrict the migration of moose and other large wildlife through the valley.

Because the valley is a microclimate, the dam will also destroy an irreplaceable habitat, Melody tells me. When big storms are coming, she explains, the wildlife migrate down into the valley to stay warm, and in the spring, the south facing banks of the river are the first place the moose and other large herbivores can find fresh plant growth.

Brian, an ecologist and long-time Y2Y activist, pulls out a map and shows us how the Peace River is the only river that transects the Rockies east to west along the proposed Yellowstone to Yukon corridor. He traces the river’s path through the Rockies and north into the Mackenzie and into the Arctic Ocean. It’s strange to think of a major river flowing north, but Bryan explains that unlike in the U.S., where there are two main drainages off the Continental Divide, the rivers from the Northern Rockies drain three ways: north to the Arctic, south through the Missouri, and west through the Columbia and Skagit rivers.

They prepare us a potlatch – vegetarian and non-vegetarian chili. I have two bowls of the meat one, and comment Melody how deliciously meaty it was. She looks appalled and I quickly discover she has recently become a vegetarian for ethical reasons. I don't want to have to murder things so I can eat them, she tells me as I scrape the remains of hamburger bits from my chili bowl.

The following day the Peace River activists arrange for us to tour the Peace River. We pile into two small “riverboats” – overpowered jet skis with Teflon hulls that can coast over sandbars and skim rocks and logs in mere inches of water. Hugh and Lee, our boat pilots, are local farmers in their mid fifties, but they rooster-tail and lobster-roll like seventeen-year old boys. I cling to the front railing as we plowed through whirlpools and jumped cliffs of current.

When Hugh slowed down enough to allow me to release my white-knuckled grip from the railing, I did begin to appreciate the beauty of the river. The water had eaten away the packed sandstone sides of small islets, leaving narrow birthday-cake like slices of sandstone islets with a tree or two struggling to maintain a grip on the topsoil. All this will disappear, Hugh informs us, sunk under the placid waters of the reservoir.

The next day as we ride we see herds of cattle and fields of hay planted in the rich alluvial soil of the Peace River valley floor. It's haying season, and we pass a field of wheat that has been mowed in stripes, the gold of the tall wheat contrasting with the green of the mowed shoots. Occasionally, we pass placards nailed up in trees or attached to signposts marking the water level of the reservoir if the proposed “Site C” damn is built. The government-run hydroelectric company originally proposed the idea in the 1960s, but local opposition kept the project at bay. Now, with the rising cost of energy, BC Hydro has renewed interest in completing the project. The engineering evaluation should be completed by 2009, with construction beginning in 2011.

Opposition to the project is not universal, even in the Peace Valley. BC Hydro is one of the major employers in the area, and Hugh admits he is getting income from renting a house to a BC Hydro engineer. Later, at a presentation about our bike ride in Prince George, a reporter for the Prince George Citizen points out that hydropower is renewable power. The truth is, he says, despite the steps we’ve taken to conserve, British Columbia needs more energy. And we need it not only for our own use, but because your country, the United States, wants to buy it from us. When the choice is between building the Site C dam or surface mining in the Alberta oil sands, flooding a few miles of river valley that’s already being used for agriculture and ranching seems like the less environmentally destructive option.
Photo: Water (Isan Brant)

In the great north woods (part 7)

Day 11

We're within 80 kilometers of Fort St. John and the landscape has flattened and become considerably more worn. There are frequent road signs marking truck crossings, and the ranks of RVs have been augmented by trucks hauling timber and natural gas and heavy natural resource extraction machinery as well as dusty pickups transporting workers to and from the extraction sites.

For lack of a better spot, we're camped next to an old dump tonight and the yellow flares of natural gas wells dot the horizon. Many of the gravel pull-offs we passed today were marked with signs warning visitors of poison gas. We find out later that poison gas is unrefined natural gas. Before the hydrogen sulfate is extracted, natural gas is highly toxic to humans: just a few parts per million of hydrogen sulfide is enough to kill someone.

The land further north around Ft. Nelson was used for drilling as well, but mostly in the winter when the muskeg swamps had frozen and were passable. With the rising cost of energy, the oil and gas companies have started to use “floaters,” large floating sections of road laid on top of the water to allow vehicles to pass through the swamps.

A global consensus exists around the notion that our current levels of natural resource extraction are not sustainable and that, to ensure the continued survival of civilization, we must learn to better manage these natural resources. But beyond sustainable resource management, the protection of wildlife and wilderness as is its own objective seems to be a more controversial idea.

As the enlightened few, do environmentalists have the right, and obligation, to guard what remains as untouched wilderness from use by the rest of global society? Would this conservation be in the long-term interest of everyone else and they just don't know it yet, or will only the global elite ever benefit from the existence of untouched wilderness spaces?

We, with our Patagonia gear and fabulous plans for outdoor adventures, are not the ones that suffer when the increase in the price of fuel results in a doubling of the price of the rice they subside on. We are not the ones that have had to sell our cars in rural Mississippi and hitchhike to work. We are not the ones forced to choose between paying the heating bill and buying groceries in the middle of February.
Photo: Power Lines (Isan Brant)