Randall O'Toole got me to thinking...

*This needs some serious editing, but that's unlikely to happen soon.*

The WashCycle blog has a nice interview with Randal O'Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. While he rides a little to the right of the path I like, he makes some excellent points. One of his points is that bike-ped traffic enhancements are often intended to restrict or reduce automobile use, and he does not believe that this will be an effective strategy in the long run. He takes the point of view that planners are generally trying to funnel people's activities into specific channels: bicyclists here, cars there, pedestrians over here. In addition, he says, many traffic calming techniques actually make bicycling more difficult rather than easier and safer. In another article, he points out that planners are often trying to solve problems caused by previous the previous generation of planners. O'Toole is generally in favor of letting planner-free free-markets sort out transportation issues. At the moment, that means we need to build more and better roads. To be perfectly honest, he's right about a lot of things. This is painful to acknowledge, but the alternative, to maintain a comfortable fantasy, is clearly not the the right way to go. Now, we still need to keep our spirits high, and to do this, we have to have a goal. It's all to easy to build a Lego city where pedestrians rule the roads and bicycles are primary vehicular choice, but to the extent that New Urbanism looks like the Garden City movement, it ain't good. I keep thinking back to the beatified Jane Jacobs, who was something of an anti-planner herself. The Great Cities, she said, maintain a kind of mystical ordered chaos. They are dynamic, always changing, and they have a defiant quality. Cities are swarms of human activity. They are alive, and the metaphor of life can be drawn out further--a city can be healthy, sick, dying, or even dead. Cities are also collections of individuals, so the notion of health has two distinctive elements. One is the health of the collective: the ability of the city to sustain itself. Sustainability is a hip phrase these days, and rightly so. It is one of the distinctive features of life itself. Its importance depends on several assumptions related to life, the universe, and everything, so I'll just skip ahead. The second element of city health is the health of the individuals who make up the city. Here it is important to make sure our metaphor is based on life outside Kingdom Animalia, cities are more like plants or fungus or algae, rather than a person or dog. You can cut a city in half, and you get two smaller cities. They might die, but they might live too. And after a mashup like that, they are likely to change in ways we may not be able to predict. Anyway, I'd like to get back to the bike project. No time, no time. Rush rush rush.

Planning

• Metrobike
• Metrovation
• Project for Public Spaces
• Toole Design Group

Youth Bicycle Programs

• BICAS (Tucson)
• Bicycle Riding School (Somerville)
• Bike Works (Seattle)
• Chain Reaction [RIP]
• Community Spokes (NOVA)
• Cyclekids (Cambridge)
• Cycles of Change (Oakland)
• Recycle-A-Bicycle (NYC)
• The Community Cycling Center (Portland)

If you have a link to add, please put it in a comment.

Screen 'n Spokes

Hey, some folks had a great idea. They solicited a bunch of printmakers and poster artists to design bicycle-theme posters to raise money for the National MS Society. This hits lots of birds:

1. Inexpensive Original Art, one of my favorite things in the world.
2. MS stinks, and the medical community is often at a loss to help.
3. Bikes.

So, go buy some:

Screen 'n Spokes Blog Screen 'n Spokes Etsy Storefront Screen 'n Spokes MS150 Team site

The author is unaffiliated with the MS Societies or the S'n'S folks

Re: Starting a Youth Bike Program

I wrote this a while back, thought I should put it here, instead of tossing it... =================================== R. I. P. Chain Reaction Chain Reaction, a Washington, DC, community bike and youth program, shut down in 2006. It had been around for 10 years, give or take, and had become a genuine community resource. I have lots of strong feelings about this, likely because I spent a few years working with the kids there, a while back. If you're thinking about Bike/Youth programs, and you're starting with THE KIDS, then you're right on target. Recycle-A-Bicycle is a good resource. Karen Overton, their ED, has written two books on starting neighborhood bike projects. One is the mechanical side--teaching kids how to fix'em up. The other is about ride clubs--how to help them develop safe habits. She is a terrific person, and was happy to sit down with me and talk turkey, but I would start with her book One Revolution at a Time. There are lots of bike programs out there. I think someone started keeping a comprehensive list, but its tough, since they are usually very close to the ground (that is, grassroots). Some of my favorites are The Community Cycling Center in PDX and Bike Works in Seattle, there's a short list I've collected on The Practical Cyclist. I'm sure there is one nearer to you, though. If you can, visit a few of these places, or look at their websites. They're all unique, and it helps to see the different ways that folks have dealt with the various universal issues--some work in school systems, some stay independent, some have retail ops, some don't, etc. I strongly recommend that you should not start with the mechanical side of things. Chain Reaction was a "Youth Bike Shop," and while folks love the idea, and people would be banging down the doors to get us to fix their bikes, we ended up with a bifurcated program: one side for retail, on side for education. Retail, especially bike retail, is hard enough without having to teach as well. I've talked with Karen (from Recycle-a-...) a bit, and I think that she came around to the same conclusion, which is why she came out with the second book, One Revolution At A Time. The Ride Club is the ticket for maximum community involvement, and to maximize the "benefits of cycling" educational lessons, not to mention the love of bicycling. Now that said, be prepared to fix a lot of cheap, mistreated bikes. It's my opinion, however, that retail and education have fundamentally opposed goals (which are: do it right, do it quick v. make mistakes and learn from them). Bicycles, it turns out, are terrible vehicles [ha] for vocational training. It's one thing to teach a kid how to build a Hardrock from a box, and then have 'em repeat the process until they've got it down. It's somewhat different to give a kid a bunch of old bikes and help 'em work out the compatibility issues. Old bikes are a lesson in diversity, which is a good reason to love them, but makes them a difficult teaching tool. I mean really, do you want to give a bunch of disadvantaged kids a wacko bike obsession, or get them into a business (bicycle retail) that suffers from chronic unprofessionalism? (Not all, but certainly some. You know who I'm talking about.) Underserved communities, and especially poor kids, need to experience the joys of riding, rather than trauma of bicycle retail/repair. Bicycles are a fringe subculture in America. Poor kids don't need a subculture, they need access to mainstream culture. I know, mainstream culture means suburbs and SUVs and materialism and obesity. But it also means reasonable housing, nutrition, education, health, self-image... Safe Routes To School may be the only good thing in the Federal Budget. It is a program leveraging FHA funds for pedestrian and bicycle advocacy specifically focused on encouraging kids to walk and bike safely to and from school. Every state in the US has money designated for Safe Routes To School, and should have a Safe Routes To School Coordinator. Find them--efforts are multiplied when coordinated. There are several useful links at The Practical Cyclist. If there's an local bicycle advocacy group active in your area, they may have some ideas and resources, or a project up and running already. At the very least, they should be able to get you a couple dozen free helmets, which is a good place to start. The League of American Bicyclists is also a good resource, and as a member organization you can get some basic insurance coverage, which is not fun to think about, but even less fun to do without. I guess I'd been saving up for a good rant/rave.--d

We Ride in a Liminal Space

Here's one that was written a while back inresponse to some posting somewhere. I can't decide whether to call it "The American Pedestrian," or "A Cowboy Without A Horse," or something else. Without being explicit about it, this is the justification for cyclist violating traffic laws, like running stop signs and red lights, and why counter-cultures are important. There is more to say about this last bit though, because staying too long in the liminal space is tantamount to refusing to grow up, or being adolescent, or just naive. Paul Farmer and Susan Sontag, come on down...

We're all about radical acceptance and ruthless pragmatism now. That's the new thinking, and it really is different from the old thinking.

-----------------------------

Cars take up so many resources that all the other modes of tranportation get ignored. For peds, it's a bummer. A person walking is virtually defenseless, and really can't get very far, very fast. The American pedestrian is a cowboy without a horse.

A person with a bike, on the other hand, is perfectly scaled to the urban environment. She can get herself where she needs to go, squeeze through tight spots and traffic jambs, sprint out of harm's way, and generally have a good time doing it (and get a decent workout).

Cars are regulated because they kill people on a regular basis. When bikes start doing that, I'll be happy to pay my registration fee and sit for a license. It's nice to inhabit a liminal space. It is the traditional hang-out of the Other, and the locus of freedom in increasingly commodified culture.

And that's why bicycle culture is great.

That's the point: stop whining. Get a bike.

----- End forwarded message -----

Community Bike Programs

Hooray for a new bike project. Funny about the leadership vacuum, you get sucked right into the center, not that you shouldn't be there. That's terrific. I'll be happy to help in whatever way I can. I'm going to CC David Wilcox on this e-mail, because he is (a) a generally good person, one of the best I know, and (b) more experienced than I in the bike program universe.

(For David W: Hi there. I thought you might be interested, or have thoughts about this. I can't remember to what degree you and Kevin knew each other. Kevin was SEV/CR's spiritually serene IT and More volunteer. He lives in Indianapolis now.)

Lets start with the great bifurcation, and work toward re-unification: Bike Programs, more or less, come in two varieties: (a) those with a mission to work primarily with kids under the age of XX (13?), and (b) those started by activist youth, aged 15 to 30. Both are good.

In general, type (a) focuses on a particular underprivileged neighborhood and has goals more beyond the bike, providing a constructive activity for kids, safety education, social-skills/values/character building ("leadership"), exploration and exposure to diversity (for underprivileged kids, this means visiting "places of abundance"), mechanical skills building, and empowerment. Damn!

Type (b) is primarily interested in providing a resource for an established bicycling community, and maybe growing that community, and maybe recycling. This is often combined with other community projects, such as visual arts or music. The "Bicycle Punk" and "Bicycle Lifestyle" movements, if I can call them that, are examples of Type (b) at work. If they are programed at all, the programs grow organically, and have a collective governance model (something that doesn't work so well with a group of ten-year-olds; think Lord of the Flies).

I wrote the p-graphs below assuming your program is Type (a), then I went back and wrote the above bits. If your program is Type (b), I got nuthin, but I can refer you to some folks. IBF has links to lots of bike programs, Bicas in Tucson looks like a Type (b) program, as does North Portland Bicycle Works. Those are just ones I know about. I'm sure there are tons more. Are some programs both Types (a) and (b)? Certainly. Do (a) and (b) need different things? I think they do. Dave (W)?

Back to Type (a): Do you know about Recycle-A-Bicycle in NYC? Karen Overton was the director for a long time, and has written a couple of book on bike programs, very practical guides, both free, I think:

http://www.recycleabicycle.org/taxonomy/term/26

_Tools For Life_ is a bit dated, but is a guide to starting a program in the model of Recycle-A-Bicycle. Chain Reaction was started by a group of students using this as a manual.

_One Revolution At A Time_ is the more recent publication. It benefited from a lot of practical experience, and I think addresses some of the key problems with the first round of bicycle programs. This book recommends the "Ride Club" as the fundamental basis of a bike program, and is a guide to getting one going, and keeping it going.

The donation/repair/earn-a-bike stuff really ought to follow from bicycle use. Riding bikes, after all, is the point--it's fun, practical, and accessible to young kids. Also, you have to start with the safety and riding skills thing, otherwise you'll never catch up (you're left hold a helmet and they're two blocks away, riding against traffic...). When you have kids interested in the club who don't have bikes, then the repair part grows naturally.One recommendation that came from more than one program-director is to "programatize" tightly. That is, make sure the activities are well defined and structured. You can probably imagine the kind of stuff that is important here--having a beginning, middle, and end; specific goals for participants, and reflection on the experience; a sense of order, camaraderie, and belonging; blah blah blah. Beyond that, it really depends on the particulars of the programs you create.

Definitely find local resources: advocacy groups, neighborhood associations, city programs, local gov. folks (DOT), Safekids groups, local bike industry folks (nearby distributors, manufacturers, retailers), etc. The League of American Bicyclist has links to local and national organizations, and the Thunderhead Alliance is a hub for advocacy folks. Trips for Kids is a national organization with local chapters all over the country. They can help you get things rolling very quickly.

Like I said before, some of these links are on my goofy blog, thepracticalcyclist.blogspot.com.

In fact, I may put this whole message on my goofy blog. Maybe I should remane it "mygoofyblog."

--d

Postscript: I never got around to reunification. Next time perhaps. Also, the photo is shamelessly borrowed from the website of the Community Cycling Center, in Portland, OR.