Posts Tagged ‘bike infrastructure’

September 11, 2014

It’s Official – More Bike Infrastructure Equals Healthier People

by: Lucky Sharma

Tweet Today’s post is by contributing writer Lucky Sharma: I always thought that the better a city’s bike infrastructure is, the higher the number of people who bike and the healthier the general population is compared to its counterparts. I hypothesized this based on the innumerable observations I had gathered in my head while biking for hundreds of miles in cities within and outside the US. My intent was to confirm the hypothesis that establishes the correlation (if not causality) between the bike-ability or ease of biking in a city and the fitness of its citizens. Based on data from…

May 13, 2014

6 Reasons Why Businesses Should Favor Bike Infrastructure Over On Street Car Parking

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet When the city of Portland was getting community feedback on its 20s Bikeway Project, it ran into a lot of opposition from businesses along NE 28th Avenue, north of Burnside for adding bike lanes along that stretch. Their beef was with the fact that the added bike lanes would eliminate on-street parking in front of their stores, thereby putting off potential customers. Unfortunately, the mistaken business owners got their way and the new proposed route for the bikeway is two streets over on NE 30th. Be careful what you ask for I say, those very bike lanes they railed…

December 18, 2012

Is Boosterism Good for Phoenix?

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Boosterism: The enthusiastic promotion of a person, organization, or cause (in this case of a city) If you don’t have only good things to say about Phoenix and you purport to be an activist, you might be considered cynical or worse, a hypocrite, lazy or ineffective. But I think boosterism is dangerous to the progress of Phoenix because it leads to delusion, which may feel good now but isn’t conducive to moving forward. Knowing where you are now is the first step to making constructive change. The same goes for Phoenix. We have to know where we are now,…

March 21, 2011

Proposed Road Diet on Central Between Camelback and Bethany Home Road

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet On Saturday I attended the first Annual Bicycle Summit of Phoenix at the Burton Barr Library put on by the City of Phoenix. It was wonderful to hear about proposed bike infrastructure improvements, existing safety and traffic laws, and programs and events concerning cyclists. It was also a great opportunity for the biking community to get together and be heard. I commend the organizers – City of Phoenix bicycle coordinator Joseph Perez and traffic engineer Kerry Wilcoxon for making a concerted effort to listen to what the bikers of Phoenix need and want. Although the summit this Saturday was…

October 11, 2010

Biking Infrastructure as Sign of Modernity and Progress

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet “Bruges is a biking city” declared the woman at the information counter at the train station when we arrived from Brussels. I found out first hand that she wasn’t kidding. Biking is an integral part of the infrastructure in Bruges, which is a tiny city in Belgium that has gotten a few big things right. And one of those things is their bicycle culture. Right from the get go, when we walked out of the train station, I saw a sea of bicycles parked outside: The woman at the information counter would later tell me that locals bike to…