I’ve been watching Twitter, Google Plus and the Blogs (remember them?) for reports from the U.S. National Bike Summit that started yesterday in Washington DC.
I see constant updates on Twitter via the “official” #nbs12 hashtag from numerous individuals including Ted of Commute By Bike, Jonathan from Bike Portland, Rich Kelly of Interbike, Mari Lynch from Momentum Magazine, Bike Snob NYC (for a book signing) and even U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.
Organizations tweeting from the Bike Summit include the Washington Area Bike Advocates, East Bay (SF Bay Area) Bicycle Coalition, Bike Pittsburgh, Austin Cycling Association, Bike Cleveland, and Omaha Bikes. There are dozens of people posting hundreds of tweets from the various meetings and sessions this week from the National Bike Summit.
From Google Plus, however, I just hear crickets. An occasional photo upload from Rich Kelly (thank you Rich!) and links to a few news articles about the bike summit, and that’s mostly it.
It’s fairly quiet around the blogosphere too. Amongst the bloggers I follow, I only see a handful of “I’m on my way to the Nation’s Capital for Bike Summit” posts, with the best updates probably coming from Bike Portland, with Tanya Snyder also posting updates to Streetsblog DC. Ray LaHood mentioned the National Bike Summit at his Fastlane DOT blog. You can also see a few updates from Biking Bis.
Mark Blacknell suggests that future Bike Summits should live stream the various sessions so those who can’t or won’t take a trip to DC can still participate remotely.
For some reason I just don’t feel much connection to the bike summit. I think there’s too much focus on the non-human side of biking – infrastructure, laws, and politics. What people seem to actually care about is things like 30 Days Of Biking and just plain enjoyable social gatherings revolving about bikes.
I got to this blog from Facebook (one of my friends posted it). After reading, I of course clicked Like then shared it myseld. More power.
http://www.totalclasscreative.com/
http://homeowner-insurance-florida.com/
You’ve got a funny HTML issue, but the Commute by Bike Twitter feed is: http://www.twitter.com/Commute_by_Bike
Sorry about that, Ted from Bike Portland 😉  I had a missing closing quote. Fixed now.
The big thing everybody has been talking about this morning has been yesterday’s session on women and cycling; it was very much about people, not facilities.
Ah, well then, I’m either bad at listening to them, or they haven’t been very vocal about that side of things.