Author: Richard Masoner

Bikes for Lake County fire victims

Richard MasonerOctober 7, 20151 Comment on Bikes for Lake County fire victims

Burned bicycle in Middletown CA after the Valley Fire

On September 12, 2015, Middletown, CA, population about 1500, suffered a devastating blow when the fast-moving Valley Fire swept through town and destroyed city blocks, commercial buildings, and an apartment complex. Those who escaped with their lives lost everything in the fire.

Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition are collecting bicycles, scooters and skateboards that they will deliver to the town of Middletown, CA this weekend to help the residents get around as they rebuild and recover.

Of 400 employed adults who live in Middletown, a quarter of them of them drive 10 to 15 minutes to jobs in nearby towns or to the nearby geothermal power facilities, while another quarter drive the 50 to 100 miles to jobs in Napa, Santa Rosa, and San Francisco. Tourist attractions just outside of town no doubt provide some employment for the locals.

While the US Census American Community Survey shows a big fat goose egg for the proportion of workers who bike to work, most of the kids bike or walk to school, and the significant population of retirees also bike around town along with many other residents. The ACS says 7% of employed residents don’t have access to a car in 2013. That proportion is evidently much higher right now.

Murph is organizing a similar bike-collection from San Francisco. He writes about what he saw:

Lake County has a very high bike to school rate, and bike around rate. Especially now since a lot of people lost their vehicles in the fire, even if they have homes.

I was in a rental car place the other day … and the place was loaded with people trying to rent cars because they were finally allowed home and their cars were destroyed. Some couldn’t because, well, they had no ID, and some because well, Lake County isn’t the Ritz and is a little “off the grid” and they don’t have credit cards. For many, the car was marginally insured and they are scraping up food money let alone buying a car.

Scooters/Skateboards even just as a “get around” thing for kids, Middletown is a pretty old school place where kids just roam. Maybe they lost their house and are staying with friends.

If you’re in the north part of the Bay Area, consider dropping a donor bike or skateboard off at the Bike Sonoma office in Santa Rosa.

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Road rage repeat offender in Santa Barbara bike crash?

Richard MasonerOctober 6, 201511 Comments on Road rage repeat offender in Santa Barbara bike crash?

Road rage driver from 2014 may be responsible for Monday’s serious injury collision in the Hope Ranch area of Santa Barbara, California.

In April of 2014, professional sports photographer Carson Blume was riding eastbound on Cliff Drive with a friend in coastal Santa Barbara County, California when he says he was assaulted by a man driving a white pickup truck.

Carson white pickup truck attack

(more…)

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Bike League releases “Where We Ride” report

Richard MasonerOctober 1, 20151 Comment on Bike League releases “Where We Ride” report

The League of American Bicyclists (LAB) released their third annual “Where We Ride” report yesterday in which they crunch the numbers from the 2014 US Census American Community Survey.


League of American Bicyclists annual "Where We Ride" report with cover photo shot by Yours Truly. Read it at http://bikeleague.org/content/where-we-ride-2014-analysis-bike-commuting #cycling #Bicycle #bike

As LAB report notes, “There are at least two limitations to the data: 1) it only measures how someone usually gets to work in the last week before the question was asked, and 2) it only captures the mode used for the most distance. These limitations mean that occasional bike commuters and multimodal commuters who use bikes are unlikely to be captured by ACS data.”

In San Francisco, for example, the ACS data comes nowhere close to counting all of the people who ride bikes to work. Thousands of people either bike in from neighboring counties, or they bring their bikes onboard transit services from those other counties.

The other weakness is the ACS data does not capture all bike trips. If you bike to school, to the cafe, to the store, or for recreation, your trip is not captured in this survey. You have to find this other travel information at either the National Household Travel Survey, which captures travel with multiple modes for all reasons at the national level, or the California Household Travel Survey for California. Both of these are large, occasional surveys; California, for example, collects statewide travel data once a decade. Perhaps a clever data scientist has found a way to predict actual bike usage from the ACS data by finding correlations with the travel survey data and the handful of city traffic counts that now include biking information.

With all of those disclaimers out of the way, I think the data is useful to capture large trends. You can read the report here.

To encourage you to read the report, I’ll have a trivia quiz with a GIVEAWAY tomorrow. I’ll have one simple question that I will post Friday late morning (California time); the first to answer it correctly wins a copy of the brand new Horton Collection book Shoulder to Shoulder: Bicycle Racing in the Age of Anquetil or an Amazon gift card if you live outside of the USA.

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