March 2010

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May’s going to be a good month.

March 31, 2010 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

Hundreds of bike lights: check

Free 30-day transit passes, coffee cards, bike fenders, bike racks, B!KE memberships, umbrellas, leg bands, ice cream: check

Big posters: check

I hesitate to use the word ‘legendary’, but…ok. Seriously. I’m going to do it: this month will go down in Peterborough History.

You get incredible stuff for free, so long as you do fun, affordable, healthy stuff in return. Tough deal, huh?

We’re giving out useful, quality tools for biking, walking and public transit. This saves you real money, and gives you a damn good reason to try getting to work – even just once – by using one of those methods.

We’ll even pay for your cab ride home if you, say, walk to work and need to get home in an emergency because your kid gets sick.

Shifting Gears is a good program and we try really hard to give you options, tools and incentives to get around in a smart way.

But at the end of the day, what we do here at SG HQ is entirely dependent on you choosing to try something different. Exercise your free will, that exciting unique quality of being human, and leave familiar driving routines at home. We could go on with the tired reasons about how this builds community (it does), repairs air quality (it does), improves your well-being (it does), saves you money (it does), etc.

But all those reasons amount to nothing without a simple choice – your choice – when you walk out the front door.

Enjoy the big picture. Get to work differently.

Swag

March 26, 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments

In May, Shifting Gears goes wild, and the city takes up sustainable transportation en masse.

I frenetically criss-cross the city by bike, pulling a stylish trailer full of giveaways.

Every workplace that participates gets a visit, and most folks are gleefully excited to be recognized for their efforts.

The other upside, of course, is the swag.

I just took shipment of a mondo-sized box of MEC turtle lights. Marvelous glowy LED lights for people travelling by bike or foot. I used one that lasted for roughly a year, with near daily use.

These are one of several useful giveaways that Peterborough Shifting Gears participants get all month long.

And, wait, did I hear something about free bike fenders?

Recruiting Workplaces for Shifting Gears: the Cold Call

March 19, 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments

Well, the big email has gone out to the 70+ workplaces that participated in last year’s Shifting Gears — a record-smashing month that took Peterborough by storm! We quickly started drumming up interest in those folks and have around 15 eager workplaces signed up already. Their enthusiasm is infectious, particularly regarding some of our new additions.

Now comes the big job: getting in touch with as many employers in town as we can. The cold call isn’t a particularly ego-boosting way to spend your day, but we’ve got a pretty stellar pitch:

  • A Guaranteed Ride Home program for participants who use sustainable transportation to get to work, then need to go home in an emergency (sick kid, rideshare driver suddenly has to work late, etc). The GRH is a tremendously exciting and groundbreaking initiative!
  • Amazing free incentive kits to participants who register before May 1st. Seriously, these are going to be talked-about giveaways for years to come. The include complimentary
    • bike rack with installation
    • bike fenders with installation
    • 30 day unlimited transit pass
    • high-quality umbrella
  • Workplace visits by SG Ambassadors with instant giveaways (that’s my job!)
  • Huge media profile (online, in print, and on tv) for participating workplaces. This is a great reason to sign up especially if you’re a small business!

So ease our work a bit here and reduce our cold call list: Sign up now and reap the benefits!

Shifting Gears 2010 is Coming: Sign up Now!

March 17, 2010 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

[This is a sticky post, scroll down for the latest updates to the Shifting Gears blog]

What is it?
The Shifting Gears Peterborough Workplace Transportation Challenge is a month-long competition and campaign in May that encourages people to use sustainable ways to get to work. Participants sign up as workplaces and track their trips at least once a week with the online tool. All month long, the Shifting Gears team puts on events, gives out tons of useful gear and prizes, and visits workplaces to rally the participants.

SIGN ME UP NOW!

Anything new this year?
Well, imaginary questioner, I’m glad you asked! This year, we’re super proud to be initiating a Guaranteed Ride Home program – think of it as insurance for sustainable commuters, where Shifting Gears pays for the cab ride home in case of emergency/sick child/etc. Full details are here.

We’ve also expanded the already generous range of complimentary incentive packages. Eligible Peterborough participants who pledge to improve their use of sustainable transportation can choose kits like complimentary bike fenders + installation, a B!KE membership, a 30 day transit pass, and more.

How do I make this happen at my workplace?
Simply register your workplace here. The Shifting Gears team will be in touch with all the information and promo materials you’ll need to get your co-workers involved. It’s a great way to bring in the summer – for our health, wealth and community.

If this gorgeous weather isn’t enough of an incentive already to walk / bike / bus / carpool to work, how about joining Shifting Gears to sweeten the deal?

People for Bikes.org’s Wonderful “Why I ride” short

March 12, 2010 in By Bike, Community Transportation | 1 comment

YES! Just…yes. This is it, this is perfect, this is exactly where I’m coming from. Community, engagement, friendship, fun, affordability, hands-on, family, responsibility, and health.

A gentle answer to the far more prevalent and patronizing advertising everywhere else.

One of my favourite elements is the subtle use of “bikes” and “biking” vs “cycle” and “cycling”. The connotations of “cycling” seem pretty steeped in the spandex roadie culture, whereas “biking” just sounds like so much fun!

From peopleforbikes.org

The Sustainable Transportation Straw Man

March 11, 2010 in By Bike, By Bus, By Foot, Community Transportation | No comments

In this intensely awkward commercial – awkward for the stomach churningly bad acting and contrived ‘viral’ intention – Mercedes does the same thing as two other car companies in recent memory (blogged about here and here).

The  ad suggests that urban cycling is an adrenaline filled, semi-legal sweatfest of danger and chaos — compared to the sweet, groovy-jazz, butt-warmer experience of driving an overpowered car on a busy freeway. Both images are fallacious and stupid.

Are we starting to see a pattern yet? Set up the sustainable transportation Straw Man and knock him down! Draw on all the stereotypes that have been crafted by a culture unfamiliar with anything but the dominate single-occupant-vehicle mode of thinking, and use those to scare people back into their cars (or keep them from ever leaving).

In some ways, it’s actually kind of exciting to see sustainable transportation – public transit, walking, carpooling, cycling – as the new focus (albeit the ‘bad guy’) in car ads. It shows that there really is a movement happening, a sea change of interest and concern among people everywhere. It means that car companies are – surprisingly – taking seriously the perceived threat of people choosing transportation alternatives. I suppose what riles me about these ads most is they set up a false dichotomy – it doesn’t have to be car OR bike, car OR bus, etc. An intelligent marriage of both is by far the more realistic and responsible expectation of both sides of the argument.

As the always quotable Mikael @ Copenhagenize (Denmark’s Bicycling Ambassador) says,

Unless we start learning from the car industry’s marketing brilliance, as they once learned from the bicycle industry, the battle is lost before the foot hits the pedal. Marketing urban cycling for regular citizens like we market every other product – positively. At every turn.

Begone fearmongerers and nanny-state PSAs. Let’s sell this properly. For more liveable cities, for the public health, for The Common Good. (link)

Viva pedestrians! Virginia puts moratorium on new Cul-de-Sacs

March 10, 2010 in By Bike, By Bus, By Foot, Community Transportation | No comments

From the Washington Post,

Virginia is taking aim at one of the most enduring symbols of suburbia: the cul-de-sac.
The state has decided that all new subdivisions must have through streets linking them with neighboring subdivisions, schools and shopping areas. State officials say the new regulations will improve safety and accessibility and save money [...]
Early 20th-century development was generally in a grid format, which spread traffic out. It also made for walkable, transit-oriented communities. (link)

What a victory for multi-modal, human-powered transportation!

Cul-de-sacs create dead-ends in development, forcing people out to major arterial routes to run short errands that could otherwise be walkable or bikeable on quiet streets. They also are inefficient no-go zones for public transit. These features contribute in a big way to the already heavily vehicle-centric design of subdivisions.

Hopefully this moratorium becomes widely adopted.

CC licensed photo from flickr.com/ableman

Two-Way Bike Lanes in Hamilton

March 9, 2010 in By Bike, Community Transportation | No comments

I was in Hamilton for the weekend and had the chance to spend several hours walking around. On walks everyone has something they look at; an aesthetic eye for plants, or lettering on signs, or architecture, or pedestrian outfits.

I look at multimodal transportation design – specifically, bike and pedestrian infrastructure. I also like handmade handbills with their fluttering phone numbers, the design of independent storefronts, and the same/different/same experience of walking through old neighbourhoods in different cities.

Walking along Main St, I was pleased to see lots of bike lane. Even better, some elements of it are protected with small columns. This is a great (and cheap) way to make bike lanes a viable incentive for new cyclists. Bike lanes are very contentious among cycling advocates; I sit pretty squarely on the fence in that debate. I feel comfortable riding with traffic and, to borrow a far cleverer blogger’s phrase, think of dedicate lanes as relaxing lazyboy chairs for riding.

But wait! Two-way bike lanes on one side of the road? Huh?! Talk about incoherent infrastructure — there are lots of other one-way bike lanes in the city! Cyclists traveling in one direction (the side closest to the vehicle lane!) are traveling against traffic. I think this is bad practice: it normalizes erratic cycling behaviour for both cyclists and drivers.

My most surprising experience came a little before the above picture. Just past the downtown drag, a highway cuts the city in half. Strolling along a busy pedestrian / runner / bike lane thoroughfare, you abruptly find yourself at the mouth of a very busy highway on-ramp. To continue on to the other side of the city, you have to run across the on-ramp (the two-way bike lane and sidewalk both require this dangerous move). I’m sorry I didn’t get a picture of it; I was too occupied with preserving life & limb!

Here’s one of the world’s saddest bike racks.

Did you know that there’s a planning guide that assesses the different designs and installation methods of racks? The rack pictured above is the least desirable in that it offers very poor support for the bike (you shove your front wheel in the spaces and hope no one knocks your bike over).

Most of Hamilton’s racks had advertising integrated into the top of the racks – an interesting addition that surely offsets the purchase/install/upkeep cost of the racks. In Peterborough, we were very fortunate to get a huge run of racks installed by the city this summer. I had the pleasure of scouting locations for those racks & offering them to workplaces.

Any particularly excellent or thick-headed multi-modal planning in your city?

Mumbai, notorious traffic city, sees its first Car-Free Day & Bike Share.

March 4, 2010 in Car-Free Living | No comments

From TheCityFix – ahead of Toronto and many other Western cities, it looks like Mumbai is now running a bike share program & car-free day. This from a city legendary for its automobile traffic problems — trucks are only allowed to enter the city at night so as to reduce the nigh-intractable daytime gridlock!

There’s no doubt about it: a bicycling culture is budding in Mumbai. All in the past month, TheCityFix Mumbai reported on the city’s first Car Free Day, which coincided with the city’s first “Cyclothon and a group of long-distance cyclists riding from Bangalore; and the new trend of evening cycling. Now, Mumbai has joined the growing group of cities around the world with bike-sharing systems. Two bicycle-sharing programs have just been launched in the northern part of the peninsula – Cycle Chalao and FreMo. Their stories are very different – the former was started by a group of students, the latter by a former financial CEO – but they’re both after the same goals: fighting climate change, improving mobility and making Mumbai a better place to live. (Link)

I celebrate the signs of a slow global change towards supporting alternate transportation, and, implicitly, questioning the logic of using massive, unwieldy vehicles to transport single occupants in cramped urban environments.

On the other hand, it’s frustrating to see that the cities I frequent are really struggling to get on the right track – Toronto’s proposed Bixi Bike Share program is teetering on the edge…

Framebuilding Wrap-Up

March 2, 2010 in By Bike | 3 comments

To avoid an overdose of esoteric information, I’ll wrap up the framebuilding review by posting two pictures:

1. Finished frame! Here you see a very tired me mustering up a smile to celebrate the completion of the frame & fork. This was the end of working over 13 hours straight (OK, I probably took 10 minutes for lunch). In any case it was exhausting!

2. Three frames! This shot is really interesting because it shows the affect of body measurements on frame geometry. We designed each frame to blend three elements: fitting the the person building it, accommodating the kind of riding they planned to do, and adding stylistic elements to reflect aesthetic preferences.

The result is three very different frame/fork combos. I built a lugged sport-touring frame, Josh built a fillet-brazed “go-fast” bike, and Daniel built a lugged frame designed for a unique wheel size (650b) and low-riding front panniers.

I really enjoyed learning this craft, and am committed to doing more building now that I’m back on my own turf. I think that the absence of available classic, beautifully designed city bikes and touring bikes isn’t a sign that there is no public desire. Instead, I think mass manufacturing has basically inverted the signal-to-noise ratio of cycling aesthetics. We get bling, unnecessary obsessions over lightness on bikes in every category, excessive and crass branding, and a glut of racing and mountain bikes instead of comfortable, useful and attractive bikes for regular folks. Hopefully I can contribute to shifting this.

In other news, Green-Up assembled a small team to run in the YMCA’s 5k fundraiser race. I jumped in on the fun and somehow came first in my age category!