Introducing “Pedaling”, a gastronomic adventure on two wheels – New Culinary Cycling Adventure Series Features NYC in First Installment

This looks like my style of adventure cycling: A new series of videos beginning in 2010 to highlight the joy of eating and cycling at PEDALING.TV.

The PEDALING episodes will contain practical tips for urban cycling, including an inside peek at a professional bike fitting, traffic etiquette, and notes on where cyclists in the area ride, eat, and spend time.

First up in this series is PEDALING: NYC, a tribute to Gotham’s endless epicurean delights and vast landscapes—both concrete and green—from the cyclist’s perspective.

PEDALING: NYC will launch January 5, 2010.

A sorta new SF Critical Mass blog with do’s and dont’s of CM. Explanation of the reason for this blog at Streetsblog SF.

CM is on the last Friday of the month. That would be on Christmas Day this month.

In order to meet greenhouse gas emission goals, the city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands aggressively promotes electric cars. Amsterdam pays half the cost of plug in electric cars and gives free power to recharge the batteries. They are also considering free parking for electric cars in a city where space for any vehicle comes at a premium.

Amsterdam cyclists, however, predict they will be pushed aside as room is carved from existing facilities to make way for more cars.

The Netherlands breed bicyclists. The narrow streets of Amsterdam siphon legions of upright riders on heavy black bikes to work, pubs and retail stores. Long ribbons of them dominate roadways, passively demanding subservience from their outnumbered counterparts in cars.

Up to now, they have ruled. There are 180,000 parking spots for cars in Amsterdam, compared to 550,000 bicycles. Last year, 38 percent of transportation “movements” in the city were by bicycle, compared to 37 percent by car. In the city center, cyclists reached a critical mass of 55 percent of movements.

“We are afraid. If you add more parking spaces, you get more cars,” said Marjolein de Lange, a member of the cycling union Fietsersbond, which is concerned about the electric car program. “We think the cleanest means of transport is the bike.”

Read more –> New York Times: “A Pro-Bicycle City Faces Trouble Promoting Electric Cars.”

The Streetsblog Network and Seattle Transit tipped me off to a delightful resource: Low Tech Magazine (paradoxically published and probably made possible through the Internet, but never mind that).

Their premise: Low-tech Magazine refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution. A simple, sensible, but nevertheless controversial message; high-tech has become the idol of our society.

Last October, they published a primer to the low tech of wheeled transportation: the bicycle.

I disagree with part of their article — while roads can certainly be made much safer, I think they’re overstating things with the claim that “riding a bike is dangerous at the very least and plain suicide at worst” — but they present a radical idea:

We don’t need any new infrastructure, what we need is to clear the existing infrastructure of inefficient vehicles and replace them with efficient ones. In other words: give all streets, highways, cloverleaves and motorways exclusively to bicycles and all other human powered wheeled vehicles. Get rid of cars. Why make things so complicated if the solution is so simple?

What do you think? Too much too soon? Or the perfect solution?

Read more -> Low Tech Magazine: Cars out of the way. H/T Peter Smith.

I drove to work today for the 3rd time this year.

My wife is working today and my daughter is out of school for the holidays, so I planned to do the bus / train / bike trip together with my daughter. She’s accustomed to that so no big deal, but then last night the weatherman forecast rain for today.

I told my daughter to get her rain jacket out and pack a change of clothes (her bike doesn’t have fenders), when Sara suggested driving my daughter to the office. There’s a reason we use the acronym SWMBO, so of course I followed her suggestion, and besides it would allow us to sleep in an extra half hour and still get to the office on time.

Except a couple of cars flipped over on Highway 101 near Embarcadero blocking three of the four northbound lanes, and I stepped into the office an hour later than usual. My back hurts and my shoulders are stiff from sitting in the car for nearly two hours. And wouldn’t you know it, the weather is absolutely gorgeous this morning.

My daughter just told me, “Dad, we should’ve rode our bikes today.” Agreed.