Cities, Counties, and Countries

Well, no. We’ve had a great run in the 2000s. Averaging between 750 and 3000 riders on any given month, the birthplace of Critical Mass keeps going strong, in spite of the total lack of promotion or organizing during this past decade. But many of us long-time riders have been dismayed to see the persistence of silly, aggressive, and counter-productive behavior that makes the Critical Mass experience worse for our natural allies on buses, on foot, and even folks in cars who might join us in the future. Not to mention that it makes it worse for us cyclists too, to the point that many former regulars have stopped riding. Part of the frustration for us long-time riders is that we went through all these issues quite intensively back in the early-to-mid 1990s, and to see them cropping up again is a harsh reminder that we’ve done a piss-poor job of transmitting the culture, the lessons learned, from one generation to the next. Plenty of current Critical Massers were under 5 years old when we started it, and the ride’s culture has been more loudly and consistently transmitted by distorted representations in the mass media than it has by those of us who put our hearts and souls into it for years.

I caught Mikael Colville-Andersen's inspiring talk on urban cycling from the Copenhagen context at San Francisco's SPUR on the last Friday of October. I suggested we could do an interview when I came to Copenhagen in December and he graciously agreed, stepping outside into the drizzling snow at a December 10 awards ceremony he was hosting. (The title of this post is a quote from him when he was on stage at the ceremony, and is a new tag line on his blog too.) They were handing out prizes for the best new designs for the next generation of Copenhagen's bikeshare program. He is well known for his blogging at Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycling Chic. The photos throughout were taken by me in Copenhagen during the last couple of weeks there.

Tens of thousands of people from nearly every nation on earth have descended on Copenhagen this month for the UN climate summit. As the delegates try to piece together a framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, they're also absorbing lessons from one of the world's leading cities in sustainable transportation. In Copenhagen, fully 37 percent of commute trips are made by bike, and mode share among city residents alone is even higher.

Addressing a crowd of more than 100 people Wednesday, engineers said it could cost $40 million to $52 million to reopen the crumbling 125-year-old railroad tunnel between Mill Valley and Corte Madera for cyclists.

In Stockholm, Sweden, a fascinating political intervention has been taking place during the past few years. Starting originally around 2000-2001 in an anarcho-syndicalist youth organization, Planka.nu is a surprisingly innovative and effective transit activist group. Today it is still an entirely volunteer organization without paid staff, but they have a comfy office tucked on the western end of the Stockholm island of Sodermalm, just a hundred steps or so from the target of their activism, the Tunnelbana, or local subway system. 

Returning to Copenhagen after some years away is always a pleasant shock. Few cities in the world feel as properly scaled as this lovely old Danish capital. My mother was born and raised here, so I've been visiting off and on over the years. No doubt my own visions of what San Francisco could be, in terms of a bicycling city, have always been shaped by my experiences here in Copenhagen.

With the rain falling in late November, and soggy unemployment statistics haunting our lives too, the idea of Depression lurks just below the surface. Depression has multiple meanings like so many concepts in the English language; in this case, I’m taking two of them: 1) mental depression that results from bad weather, personal trauma, emotional turbulence, etc., and 2) economic depression. I have a good coping mechanism for both kinds! It’s to take our local K2, i.e. Twin Peaks, by bike!

City parking meters are a gold mine, and in Chicago, Morgan Stanley is rolling in parking riches. Secret company documents leaked to reporters show the company will rake in a 70 percent profit margin this year from its $1.15 billion, 75-year lease of Chicago’s parking meters. This profit is on top of the millions Morgan … Continued