Green Options

With bike weddings, bike parades, hundreds of naked bicyclists, bike fashion shows, popular & interesting cargo bikes, and travelling bike pubs, Portland is #3 on this great bicycle city photo tours list.

Portland has great bicycle facilities (colored bike lanes, bike boxes at intersections, great bike signs, off-road bicycle paths, etc.), a large number of people using the bicycle for transportation, and a bike culture that brings the fun of bicycling to another level.

As a result of these factors and more, Portland was the first large city in the US to achieve the Platinum level Bike Friendly award from the League of American Bicyclists (LAB) — the Platinum level being the highest level possible (above Gold, Silver and Bronze). It is truly a world-class bicycle city now, and the amazing photos in this photo tour help to show that.

Walkscore rates a neighborhood’s walkability on a 1 to 100 scale based on a number of criteria such as proximity to restaurants and grocery stores. Now, they’ve added a transit rating which takes into account a neighborhood’s public transportation options!

Awesome, right? The idea is to “measure how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle,” so adding a transit component makes sense. Maybe you can’t hoof it to the grocery store, but you can walk to a train station that takes you to a farmers market. You can still do your thing car-free!

So why do they need our help?

China just awarded Bombardier Sifang a contract to build 80 “very high speed trains” for the country.

These are super progressive trains that are energy efficient as well as lightning fast. China intends to invest a total of $300 billion in high speed trains by 2020.

My happy transportation moment of the week came when I stumbled across this most excellent song on the Muni Diaries. The rap was created for the Transit Authority of River City in Louisville, Kentucky to explain how to use the bike racks on their buses. The infectious chorus has been stuck in my head all week: “Bring it down, pull the bar, put it on, put it on, take it off, put it

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Streetfilms recently created a poignant and inspiring profile of Seattle PI blogger Carla Saulter, also known as “Bus Chick“. Carla writes about her transit experiences riding everywhere on the bus with her daughter Rosa (named after Rosa Parks) and her husband, Adam; Carla actually met her husband while they were both riding on the same bus together. This short film by