Green Options

Bike commuting is a rewarding way to reduce your carbon footprint and save some cash at the same time. Not only is it great for your body and your mind, riding that bike to work keeps one more car off the road and means spending less money on gas.

Unfortunately, riding bikes means occasionally dealing with pitfalls like bad roads, dangerous intersections, and theft. It would be great if drivers were more bike-aware, but this just isn’t always the case. Seattle-based BikeWise is looking to take some of the unknown out of bike commuting, providing a tool to “make biking safer and more fun by gathering good data on the things that sometimes go wrong.”

So how does it work?

London wants to allow cyclists to pick up one of 6,000 bikes at the 400 docking stations planned for the capital by 2010.

Londoners will soon be able to hire bikes in the centre of town for short journeys, under plans announced this week by the mayor, Boris Johnson.

In another case of Critical Mass road rage, the driver of a white SUV received nothing but a citation after ramming a cyclist during Washington, D.C.’s ride last night, according to witness accounts.

After the hit-and-run, bicyclists took off after the SUV, which tried to escape on the wrong side of the road. Police arrived shortly, and instead of arresting the driver, detained a cyclist who aggressively pursued the vehicle.

Yesterday Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office annouced they will be promoting Sunday Streets again this year, the wildly successful citywide effort to get people to go outside that debuted last summer. The campaign closed a 4.5 mile stretch of roads between Bayview and Chinatown on several Sunday mornings to make more space for joggers, cyclists, walkers and even yoga practicioners. Former arterial roadway, transformed recreational asphalt.

Here’s an idea that’s good for the planet and so much more: it’s a new blog I’ve just discovered called Stimulus Bike. Its mission? To “Improve the health of our economy, ourselves, our environment, and our wallets!”

Stimulus Bike says it wants to see economic stimulus funds work to promote cycling, something that could save us money over the long term (less gas money, fewer car repairs, etc.) and promote a healthier, more sustainable way of getting from here to there.

Now, under President Barack Obama’s currently proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the average citizen isn’t expecting to see a check in the mail a la last year’s economic boost effort (which didn’t work anyway). However, it’s possible you could benefit from reduced tax withholding in your paycheck. Stimulus Bike would like to see you invest those dollars in a two-wheeler of some kind:

23,000 cars will now be displaced onto the University of Pennsylvania’s campus and the surrounding neighborhoods.

Philadelphia’s South Street Bridge carried its last passenger on Monday morning, at least for the next two years. The decrepit structure, built in 1923, was declared “structurally insufficient” over twenty years ago, but has continued in operation under a close eye of weekly safety tests and vehicle weight restrictions.

The collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis last year heightened concerns about the integrity of our nation’s infrastructure. Chunks of concrete have fallen from the South Street Bridge into the river and onto the highway below, and the bridge was not expected to survive the winter months. The South Street bridge connects several residential neighborhoods in Center City and South Philadelphia with the University of Pennsylvania (the largest private employer in the city) and two major hospitals.

Pensacola’s not a big city, population-wise, but it’s spread out over a large area that’s more car- than pedestrian-friendly. So it’s nice to see that visitors now have a more eco-friendly option for exploring the historic “City of Five Flags”: pedicabs.

The Pensacola News-Journal reports this week that the city welcomed its first pedal-powered taxi service this fall with the launch of Foot Taxi. The business offers eight pedicabs in a service area that encompasses most of the old downtown area, including many of the city’s popular nightspots and restaurants.

[Image Credit: Timothy J on Flickr under a Creative Commons license]

Each year, community bicycle projects from around the country (and abroad) come together at the Bike!Bike! to talk shop and come up with ideas for making their communities more bicycle-friendly. Atlanta’s Sopo Bicycle Co-op is teaming up with Bike Collectives Network to bring this annual conference to the Southeast for the first time this January!

The green movement has espoused the use of bicycles as a carbon-neutral form of transportation. Health experts suggest bicycle riding can combat childhood obesity.

A new report reveals an estimated 389,300 children and adolescents 18-years and younger were treated in emergency departments for bicycle-related injuries, making bicycles second only to cars in consumer products that cause childhood injuries.

Even with mandated helmets and safety programs, children are experiencing contusions and abrasions (30 percent), lacerations (30 percent) and fractures (19 percent) mostly to their extremities followed closely by face and head injuries. According to the study, boys are 70% more likely than girls to be hurt on bikes. Tracy Mehan, a research associate at the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and author of a new study explains the results:

While the number of injuries decreased slightly over the 16-year study period, in 2005 an average of 850 children per day were seen in emergency departments for bicycle-related injuries.  The magnitude of bicycle-related injuries each year is evidence that prevention of these injuries needs to remain a priority.

Yesterday, I did something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: pick up my son from school using a bike and trailer instead of a car. It was exhausting (the last block home was the hardest), but I’m hoping to keep it up (even if my son complains, “We could be home already” — even though he’s the one who lobbied to ride in the trailer in the first place!)

With a gas-guzzling Blazer on its last legs, the only thing that’s been holding me back till now was the lack of an alternative. Stroke of luck number one came a few weeks ago, when I passed a house with an 18-speed women’s bike in the front yard with a sign that said “Free: Please take.” So I did.

Freshman entering the University of New England and Ripon College are given free bikes if they promise to leave their cars at home.  At Ripon College, 200 Trek mountain bikes, helmets and locks were given to freshman that signed up for the program. Dr. David C. Joyce, Ripon’s president and competitive mountain biker, explained, “We did it as a [...]