BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

Nice to hear. Walkable is where it's at, if you can build a walkable community bikes will follow.

Also I guess try to remember that for every jagoff who is yelling for you to get off the road, there are probably hundreds who would like to be out there with you, if only...

quote of the day

Sticker opp? "Inside every car is a cyclist trying to get out". Eh?

not bad.... i feel like i've heard the same line, but with farts and turds.

@ edmunds -Thanks for posting this.

From the title, I was expecting another Kornbrain or "bike-lanes-and-golf-courses" report.

I look at biking and I'm astonished at how many people bike now, but occasionally I get reminded that biking could get so big that someday they might be saying "..the early 2010's, when almost nobody rode."

Mick

I saw 17? cyclists on my short commute to work today.

Awesome. Also awesome was the nearly 50/50 gender division amongst them.

Mick

I do not generally tend toward optimism, but I think that's where it's going. As I stumble around the web, I find advocacy groups all over the country in very unlikely places. Omaha, NE,, there's a Peoria Bicycle club, for goodness sake.

I was around for the '70's bike boom, and I think the next few years are going to crush that.

it's like minority groups going through the phase of, "hey, I'm actually being taken seriously now." It's kind of hard at first for people in the biking community itself to realize the change happening, but it's there. We are on that tipping edge of change - almost like how people felt when a black man was elected as president.

Yeah I just drew that comparison...maybe not exactly the same thing. I don't exactly understand my bike history though, what was the "bike boom of the '70's" edmonds?

did you guys see the recently released policy statement from the Federal DOT?

the secretary of transportation is showing up to our meetings now - i doubt they were showing up to stuff in the 70s, but i could be wrong.

i can say with full confidence that this would not have happened under bush

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/bikeped/policy_accom.htm

well. duh, it didn't happen under bush. i guess i meant if the bike boom....ahh never mind

This will lead to a better explanation than I can provide, as well as a fantastic site;

http://www.kenkifer.com/bikepages/lifestyle/70s.htm

I'm a geezer, so I can say a little.

My impression is that the bike "boom" of the seventies -at it's peak -probably had a similar number of riders to the mid-90s.

I'm trying to recall seeing an adult riding a bike in the 60's? - and I can't. I suppose that on college campuses and such, it happened.

You are more likely to see a 40 year-old on a skateboard today, than to see a 40 year-old on a bike in the 60's.

Forester talks about 50's. He worked at engineering firms in California - then, as now, a relatively non-conformist segment of corporate America. If management found out that he rode a bike to work, even on rare occasions, he would immediately be considered ineligible for promotion.

So the "boom" of the seventies was probalby a leap from maybe 0.005% of trips made by bikes to 0.05 or so. (just guessing)

Compared with todays 0.9% (according to my recollection of the stats in a recent Urban Velo article.)

If % of trips stayed level for a decade or so, then went up to, say, 12% or 15% of all trips, it would be hard to explain the excitement of the bike boom we are in now.

Mick