Tiny Computers: 4 for $100
This would be an awesome exhibit for LinuxFest Northwest 2012: small usb computer kit.
April 30: Bellingham Bike Swap
Matthew Velguth’s The Bike Shop program in Bellingham is putting on their annual Bike Swap on April 30. You know I’ll be at LinuxFest Northwest of course. However, if you’re not interested in nerding-out that weekend, the bike swap need volunteers:
April 30th is the date of this spring’s TBS bike Swap and this is the call for volunteers. We welcome help with set-up and intake on Friday, April 29th from 4 to 8pm and Saturday morning from 7 to 10am. Then the sale takes place from 10am to 4pm. Any time that you can put in to help out The Bike Shop is great!
…writes Matthew. I attended last year to sell some bikes and bike parts. It is a noble cause and an inexpensive way to get a bike for yourself or your kids.
Buy every person in our state a bike! (Seattle Bike Blog)
Sad but true:
…spend $300 per state resident to build a tunnel that would only help 47,000 car drivers while causing injury or death to an unknown number of people walking or bicycling in downtown Seattle.
Instead of a tunnel, let’s buy every person in our state a bike | Seattle Bike Blog.
What is the Carbon Zero project?
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1910818917/carbon-zero-a-short-tour-of-your-citys-future
Bike Lanes on Northwest (Bellingham)
This was forwarded from Dan who organized the recent meeting at city hall:
Good day, here’s a little update on what’s happening around getting bike lanes on Northwest Ave., Elm St. and Dupont St. and three simple things you can do to help make it happen.
The short version of how you can help:
- Send an email to the four addresses below. Let them know you support cycling in Bellingham and want to see the Northwest/Elm/Dupont corridor improved THIS YEAR.
- Spread this email far and wide. Get as many people as possible to do item 1 at least, and hopefully item 3 as well.
- If you can make it, come to the open house that Public Works will host at Shuksan Middle School, Wednesday, March 23, 7-9pm. Tell someone from PW why you’re there.
That’s it. So simple. Please, send one short email to these four addresses. Let your desires be known to our local policy makers. We need to impress upon them that there is a large constituency of citizens who want this. They need to hear the message in big numbers.
Send your message to: mayorsoffice@cob.org; ccmail@cob.org; tcarlson@cob.org; bbaldwin@cob.org
And use the subject line: Northwest/Elm/Dupont Bike Lanes
The long version (’cause I just love to type):
Bellingham City Council has proposed installing bike lanes on Dupont St., Elm St. and Northwest Ave from downtown to I-5. This could be one of the biggest bike projects ever in Bellingham. But it is not a done deal. You can help make it happen. Mayor Pike and Public Works would prefer to put the project off until 2012 and expand the scope and cost of it significantly beyond bike lanes. Details of what else they want to include are not yet available, except that Public Works is seeking $20,000 for the design work alone. I can only speculate that additions might include bus pull-outs, cross-walks, and bulb-outs at intersections. Those would be good additions in the long run, but striping bike lanes thissummer does not preclude building these other elements next summer. And, most importantly, I think, is that there is no guarantee that following this fall’s election we will still have the relatively bike-friendly mayor and council that we do now. I hope we do, but as they say: elections have consequences. Putting this off for another year may mean it doesn’t happen at all, especially as the price grows to a politically unpalatable scale in tight times. A different mayor and council next year may say “Too big, too expensive” and cancel the whole thing. The bike lanes alone are very inexpensive and easily engineered. This much can be done this year without limiting what can be added next year.
A few other random talking points:
- $4/Gallon.
- The only viable cycling route from downtown to Whatcom Community College, Bellis Fair, and Cordata. Give Northside residents an alternative means to come into town finally.
- Some say the climate is changing.
- Six schools along this route and childhood obesity.
- Good for the local economy (gas money leaves the community immediately, money NOT spent on gas is more likely to stay local).
- Good for NW Ave businesses (cyclists are statistically more likely to stop at the businesses they pass than to go out of their way).
- It is in the city’s Comprehensive Plan.
- Approved by the Birchwood and Columbia Neighborhood Associations
They need to hear the message. In big numbers. Send the emails. Please. And have a great ride today. Thanks -Dan
Transport and Health (TheCityFix)
Here is a post talking about the World Health Organization putting together a body of evidence that cities that invest in active transportation maintain healthier citizenry.
Every year, 1.2 million people die in traffic crashes each year. And physical inactivity is responsible for 3.2 million deaths and 19 million healthy life years lost annually.
Dr. Carlos Dora continues to describe the problem:
Contrary to popular belief, more road space actually leads to more congestion, not less. This creates a “vicious cycle,” Dora said. He gives the example of parents who fear that their children will be hurt on their walk to school, so they drive them by car, instead, but this makes congestion even worse, and children become even more physically inactive and obese, thereby exacerbating the public health problem.
via Transport and Health: Measuring the Link | TheCityFix.com.
Bicycling Keeps Cash in the Local Economy (Grist)
Money paid for petrol doesn’t stay in the local economy. It doesn’t really even stay in America. This Grist article describes how riding a bicycle instead of a car helps improve the economy. Not just from reducing petrol purchases, but by bolstering local bike mechanics and shifting the trend away from drive-thru fast food to local food-cart. Check out rad graphic at the end.
Computing in a Post Peak Oil World?
I’ve been paying some attention to the notions of community, local economy and self reliance in the face of rising gas prices. Oil shortages and actually, any resource shortage, can also affect how we use computers. High energy prices makes computing more precious. Lack of resources to construct platic, rare earths for constructing magnetic componentry, all of these things can make the cost of computers, and our use of them, spin on a dime. This episode of The Commandline podcast takes a sharp look at post peak resource computing. I think it’s a great episode, and Thomas really pulled together some topics I had not considered related.
No-weld homebuilt recumbent? Cruzbike!
I was reading this EcoVelo post on multi-modal bicycling and there were a shower of comments about this recumbent called Cruzbike. Not only are there stock models, but there is also a build kit that you can take a y-frame full suspension mountain bike and turn it into a ‘bent. Some Cruzbike discussion on bikeforums. Why would you want a ‘bent MTB conversion? For starters, you can place it on a bus bike rack, (can’t do that with any long frame bikes). Also, an average recumbent listed on craigger’s is often hundreds of dollars. This is relatively quick and much more affordable way to put a used MTB into service as a commuter.
Homebuilt MTB recumbent conversion
Inverviews on Peak Oil
Below is a 20 minute video featuring interviews with Noam Champsky and Bill Mckibben and others on why the US seems legally bound and why CEOs may be too frightened to honestly confront peak oil and climate change.
Sara Salo and her School Food Bicycle Tour
Let’s not take for granted what our kids eat in school. If you’ve actually looked at a school menu, I think you’d be distinctly disappointed. It’s filled with white flour and sugar: juice, cookies, and some combination of pizza, hamburger, grilled cheese or the like. By some standards that’s a nutritional nightmare.
I am fascinated by this bike tour, promoting school nutrition and bicycling.
Statistics
I quote a comment wrt to the proposed Oregon child bicycle law:
According the CDC ( http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/childpas.htm ) :
“In the United States during 2005, 1,335 children ages 14 years and younger died as occupants in motor vehicle crashes, and approximately 184,000 were injured.”
Accordining to http://www.helmets.org/stats.htm , which sourced it’s data from http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pubs/811156.pdf :
2008 data shows:
“Bicyclists 15 and under killed: 93. Injured: 13,000″
Based on Greenlick’s reasoning to save just one kids life, it makes more sense to first ban children in automobiles.
Ten times more are hurt in cars. Every new bike on the road makes driving safer by putting fewer cars on the road.
Brown Cycles makes stoker-forward kid tandems
I love these designs, putting the kids forward is a great idea!
Great points re: proposed OR bike law (Totcycle)
Here’s a post covering a number of good points about why outlawing children under 6 on bikes or trailers is sheer inanity.
http://totcycle.com/blog/family-cycling-outlaws.html
Yes: obesity epidemic, heighten fear of cars, avoid traffic reduction, avoid slower speed limits, lets use sketchy data from a single survey to pass another law! Lets make it illegal to bike our kids to school and to parks and their play dates. All hail nannytopia!
Baby on your bike at six months? (guardian.co.uk)
When your toddler nods off on a bike ride with their head lolling forward…apparently that’s just fine. (Trailers are mentioned.) I don’t like the rear seats on bikes, but I’m eager to try out a handlebar front seat on a bike.
When can you put your baby on your bike? | Sam Haddad | Environment | guardian.co.uk.
Women’s Domestic Freedom…from Cars
This article by Elly Blue describes a confused world full of sexism, angry drivers and confused cyclists. I often forget about the strong sports and athletic emphasis in the cycling world–mostly because I don’t really pay attention to the sports side of it. Women are still touted as sex objects in the cycling world. Sports seems to cloud the mind, obscuring a greater issue: it is still not safe for women in children to bicycle alongside auto traffic.
It’s hard for people to live without their car if they only feel safe getting around by cars. Do we actually need to drive a car because we assumed everyone was affluent enough to get everywhere by car? How close is the day when 55% of our income goes into travelling by car? Does that status extend to $10/gallon gasoline?
Will the price of gas out-pace our ability to build separated bike lanes so that citizens can safely cycle without fear of being hit by a 3500lb rain-suit? Are the only cyclists going to be brash, fearless men who would rather chase down cars on their bikes and knock on driver-side windows to tell motorists how they nearly murdered a bicyclist? What does it say of a society that we allow civic infrastructure to remain intractably oligarchical, when a growing number of families can’t afford the gas to use it? Will it force us into vigilante civic infrastructure?
As a father, Elly’s article speaks to me of family life–getting groceries–safely. Civil rights, and the freedom to travel unharmed with your children in public. By walking or biking. I am increasingly convinced that the transportation revolution, like the nutrition revolution, is to be won by women with children voting for safer bicycling infrastructure. We have to pay taxes to get that done. We have to enroll corporations (like grocery stores) into encouraging their customers to get their groceries by walking and bicycling. This is a domestic freedom. Women need to stand up for their right to not travel by car.
Why are we irate and defensive about our right to drive? (Planetizen)
This is a engaging short essay on discussing irate and defensive points of view owned by many auto owners that tend to blame bicyclists for making roads and taxes worse. Are they…we…so defensive about the cost of driving be cause it can consumes over 25% of our salaries?
http://www.planetizen.com/node/46570
Are Workplaces Incentivizing the Ride? (Commute by Bike)
I’d like to think that bike commuting would be that much more obvious for businesses to encourage.
http://www.commutebybike.com/2010/12/01/how-workplaces-are-incentivizing-the-ride/
Comparative Spending on Cars, Class
I hate to say “interesting”…eye opening.
http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php/701899-Cars-Class-Warfare
Is Living Simply Anti-Modern?
My wife was tentatively offered a Kindle for Christmas, with the added note that, there are plenty of public-domain works you can download for it.
“Why would I want a Kindle when all the books I do read are in the library?” was her response.
Walking to the library is a healthy activity. It keeps the kids active and occupied. It supports and validates our right to have libraries in general. A Kindle keeps you at home, distracts you from the kids, and teaches your kids that owning a gadget is more important than visiting the library or going for a walk.
A decade ago, I would have loved to have a Kindle, because I read avidly, especially technical publications that I really now should give away to people and resent having to store on my book shelves. A lot of these technical books are not appropriate for libraries or even book stores because they are essentially obese technical periodicals typically lacking enduring value. I’d rather not buy technical books any more, I’d rather be part of an online technical community like StackOverflow that maintained living knowledge of these technologies.
Is refusing a Kindle being a Luddite? Luddites objected to textile industrialization and its exploitative child labor practices. Modern Luddites refuse to give up the value of traditional means where gadgets rear up. Do Kindles, iPads, and other electronic book substitutes erode literacy? Probably not. Erode community? If you consider that if e-books are cheap enough to lull people into not to funding their libraries…yes. Did we see the same with cars? The value of parks, sidewalks, and downtowns across America all changed when we started driving every where, and considered that convenience more important than funding the simple safety of sidewalks.
People who live with gadgets end up throwing the gadgets away. People who have Internet tend to stay home instead of go out, or get less sleep to use it. Cars are an example of a gadget that people make you fat, pollute and kill people regularly. Most of us own lots of gadgets and they probably don’t make us healthier. They also tend to isolate you from your community. We are fools for technology. I know I’m one. As I age, I find that technology shows me what a sucker I have been, too. Staying healthy and living more simply does not require much technology. Biotechnology isn’t necessary for simple food.
If we don’t end up with a Kindle, that’s fine with me. Some gadgets are pretty handy, I admit: smart phones rank in my book…I appreciate those technologies which allows me to be active and social.
800 Million parking spaces have an environmental impact (ABC News)
Everyone takes parking spaces for granted. What if they were used for something…green? Productive? More shops with MUP trails to them? Article discusses interesting concept about impact of how many parking spaces per car there are.
