Bike Style Life

Transportation Poems Again

Barb from Bike Style — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:00:50 +0000

Transportation as metaphor or memory, transportation as transformation or realization, transportation as time and distance. Poetry gives us all of these and then some.

“The Mindfulness Bell”
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

And so today when the very slow driver
in front of me starts going ten miles
over the speed limit right when we get
to the passing lane, I imagine
my frustration is a bell.

“Return”
Sara Michas-Martin

I walk to make certain I was ever there.
To find the car I once discovered

buried in the pines. As if it were left
for the mushrooms to affix. For crows

to pull batting from its seats.

“The Sting”
Maya Stein

Businesses had suffered from the loss in revenue. A few had closed.
But now there were new sidewalks and ornamental light posts and
planter boxes filled with seasonal foliage. The Senator didn’t say this part.

“Commuter Tanka”
Tarik Dobbs

What iteration
of events will we live through
at sunrise on Highway Ten?

“What If This Road”
Sheenagh Pugh

What if this road, that has held no surprises
these many years, decided not to go
home after all; what if it could turn
left or right with no more ado
than a kite-tail?

“Slow Down”
Michelle Weiger

What if driving slowly
is the only way
to live my best life,
to keep from running so fast

that I go right past myself?
Running by the small child inside
who seeks to fill herself with wonder,
passing up the chance for rest,

“An Indian Girl’s Guide To Driving”
Urvashi Bahuguna

I want to drive like my father
fast, steady, fearless in roadside brawls. No matter how soft I cradle

the steering wheel, I know I am tentacled around it. Fear is as
natural to me as spit. All I want is to be swashbuckling,

to reign my fear with the sweep of a seatbelt, to have my dashboard
light up like a siren, to make my own way through the world.

“The Message”
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

In amber lights, the electronic display
on the highway message sign read:
Slow down … for the unknown.
And I did. All day. I drove slower.
Walked slower. Typed slower. Ate
slower.

“Traveling at Home”
Wendell Berry

Even in a country you know by heart
it’s hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.

“The Road Goes Ever On”
J.R.R. Tolkien

The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,

Related reading

Bike Delights

Barb from Bike Style — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 20:01:55 +0000

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Riding my bike always makes me happy. Always.

Among my daily habits or near-habits (hey, pobody’s nerfect), I keep a journal. Each day I put a heading at the top of a portion of the page, “Today’s delights—”. Because here’s the thing: We find what we seek. If I expect to find delights in the day, I will, simple as that.

Bike rides are among my surest route to delight, along with going for walks and paying attention. A recent ride gave me delight after delight within around 3 miles or so and I just have to share.

First, it was dry as I rolled out in spite of a forecast of rain, so that’s always great.
A driver pulled up next to me at a stop sign (which is usually not a good thing, as it blocks my view of oncoming traffic and I needed to make a left turn). She rolled down her window and said happily, “I just got my bike back from the shop! I’ll be riding soon!” to me, a total stranger to her, knowing that I could share her happiness.
Riding along the inlet on a sunny day with birds doing their bird things tree to tree and what I refer to as “my corvid escorts” swooping along and cawing overhead. (Not that I recognize individual crows, just that they’re always there.)
Riding through our downtown and hearing a friend from improv call out “Hi Barb!” and yelling back “Hi FirstName! Hi YourBoyfriendsNameBecauseHesStandingThereOnThatcornerWithYou!”
As I neared our state capitol, seeing a few, then dozens, then hundreds of people gathering with signs to protest cuts to veterans’ services and feeling my heart absolutely swell with civic joy, ringing my bike bell madly as I passed them and calling out in support.

Being open to experiences like these on my bike is 100% always a joy, always a delight. None of these could have happened inside my car the way they did on my bike, where I’m right out there in the midst of life, living it.

What has brought you delight by bike lately?

Thoughts on Community Engagement Thanks to Picking Berries

Barb from Bike Style — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 02:50:05 +0000

Working in the yard, much like walking or riding my bike, frees my brain to run wherever it likes. Last July it brought me to a list of insights into the ways that community engagement is a lot like growing and harvesting berries. I started off with a few of these and each time I picked berries again more of the thoughts ripened enough for me to pick them.

If you practice engagement as part of your work these should resonate for you as a “gardener” hoping to harvest a sweet crop of ideas and input. If you participate in civic opportunities, you might think about what it’s like to be the berry or the cane.

You have to prepare the ground so the plant can flourish long before it bears fruit.
You have to be patient—you can’t rush a plant much. Even if you do, perhaps with fertilizers, it still has to unfold its processes its own way.
Picking a berry before it’s ripe just yields something that’s hard to swallow and leaves a sour taste in your mouth.
Berries ripen at varying rates, not all at once and not on any schedule, especially not on yours if you’re the one doing the watching.
A berry picked a bit early still has flavor, but not as much as it would have if you had trusted the ripening process.
When you first look at the bush you’ll see the berries out in plain sight. Many more hide from view. You have to move the canes—gently, or they’ll break—to see more.
You may think you’ve found all the berries but if you start your looking in a different place you’ll find more.
This is even more true if you position yourself below your usual vantage point and look up. Many berries are hidden from a top-down view.
There may be thorns. If you move with haste or impatience you’ll snag on these. If you move with awareness of how the plant grows and with care, you can get to the berries without harm to yourself or the plant.
An overripe berry may no longer appear perfect but it still has a lot of flavor to add.
I grow golden raspberries and red ones together in the same bed. A ripe golden raspberry may masquerade as a red raspberry that’s at a different, earlier stage of ripeness and vice versa. You have to be able to recognize what you’re looking at, which requires being familiar with the plants and their growing habits.
The golden ones ripen earlier but they’re not as flavorful. As novelist Wallace Henry Thurman, an early figure of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote, “the darker the berry the sweeter the juice”.
If you live with the bushes and pick berries often you’ll know where to look.
Sometimes when you go back to a patch you thought you knew that you picked just yesterday, you find ripe or nearly ripe berries you didn’t even know were there. Looking again and looking harder often pays off.
Very ripe berries are fragile and need to be handled with care. They’ve been left a bit too long without being recognized for what they are.
Returning to the same place is rewarded with more berries.
Sometimes you don’t spot a berry until it’s far past its edible stage. It’s going to drop to the soil and nourish the plant that will then produce more berries in the future.
If you tromp around breaking the canes the berries grow on, you’ll pay for it with fewer berries in the future.
Your town can choose to encourage more growth by sponsoring places for people to show up and help make it happen.

Do any of these ring true for you in how community engagement plays out? Does anything in the berry metaphor shift your thinking about how you might approach working in a community?

Related Reading

Moving Right Along: Transportation Poems

Barb from Bike Style — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 02:25:31 +0000

Serendipity: What happens when you’re paying attention.

Serendipity: My method for finding poems for the various collections I curate.

Oddity: How often someone who walks, bikes, and takes transit for the majority of her gettin’ around runs into poems about driving worth saving.

“You can only see as far as your headlights shine, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E. L. Doctorow

“One Driving Home” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
(A haiku so this is the whole poem, but visit Rosemerry’s site anyway and browse through her wonderful work)

long grey hem of highway
each yellow dash a stitch
I’m ripping out

“Slow Dancing on the Highway: The Trip North” by Elizabeth Hobbs

We do a slow tango as we change lanes in tandem,

gracefully, as though music were guiding us.

“December” by Michael Miller

I want to be a passenger

in your car again
and shut my eyes
while you sit at the wheel,

“Driving Through” by Mark Vinz

Tell yourself it doesn’t matter now,
you’re only driving through.
Past the sagging, empty porches
locked up tight to travelers’ stares,

“Driving Across Utah in the Dark” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

But all I see beyond pavement
and white and yellow lines,
is thick black night and
a memory of years ago,
driving this same highway,

“Double Rainbow” by Ravi Shankar

Speeding, without destination, after dark
torrents have poured & been returned
at home, the skies above mirror my mood,

“Lana Del Rey on Country Roads” by Tamsin Moore

Long, empty roads stretching as long as the gas tank is willing—
Sixty-seven dollars left from last summer’s job, but that doesn’t matter with
the windows rolled down, her hair blowing back; she doesn’t push it behind
her ear, her hand is busy holding mine.

“Pedestrian Crossing, Charlottesville” by Rita Dove

A gaggle of girls giggle over the bricks
leading off Court Square. We brake

dutifully, and wait; but there’s at least
twenty of these knob-kneed creatures,

“The Solidarity of Landing” by Leslie Dianne

There is always
an awakening
when the flight
reaches New York
no one wants to miss
the descent

Related Reading

My Bad—Or Was It?

Barb from Bike Style — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 17:09:44 +0000

I recognized the move because I’ve made it myself: You rear (pronounced more like “rare” in some regional dialects) back on your heels, throw your hands in the air, and give the offending person The Look. It’s the look that means “You just broke the law or did something irresponsible that made me feel threatened by you and your vehicle.” Most often employed by people walking somewhere dominated by other people inside vehicles not noticing the people outside the vehicles, it’s an appropriately righteous look in my book.

It felt different from my spot in the saddle, rolling through an intersection.

The scene: I’m riding south on Columbia Street in downtown Olympia, in the block where the Olympia Center stands. I know this building well; I take a fair number of classes there and often ride this street, which also provides the quieter option for getting through downtown to the capitol campus. At the crosswalk from the east side of the street—the far lane from where I’m rolling along—a white-haired older woman has just stepped into the street. (I’m sharing her age because I observe people, not because I had any particular feelings about her age other than knowing that as we age we become a bit more breakable and we’re also less prone to make unpredictable moves in the street the way a child might.)

A driver headed north has courteously (and as legally required) stopped in the lane to give her the right of way that is hers. This happens to be a marked crosswalk, although under Washington state law all intersections are legal crosswalks (with a few exceptions). We’re a “stop” state, not a “yield” state, meaning that drivers must not only yield to pedestrians, they must stop for them. I appreciate both these aspects of state law.

I gauge all of this as I roll toward the intersection, and I keep rolling. She’s a few feet into the far lane, I’m at the right side of my lane, and there’s plenty of real estate between us. My approach speed is such that I’ll clear the intersection well before she reaches my lane. We’re negotiating in a shared space and it will all work just fine.

I absolutely would stop if she were closer to my lane or if I were driving. On my bicycle I’m not carrying the mass or speed that represent the likelihood of a severe or fatal impact. I’m one of the soft-shelled creatures like her, not a hard-shelled creature. I’m also very space-efficient, so plenty of lane width remained available to her to keep moving across while I moved ahead. I’ve often been in this exact same scenario with people who slowed their walking pace to wave me on and I’ve smiled and commented that we can both keep moving and it all works out. I also often say, “You have the right of way!” when I stop for them because I’m close.

I analyzed all this in a flash, as one does, and kept rolling. She reared back, threw her arms out, and yelled, “I have the right of way!”.

I immediately felt bad. We’re in this together! I’m on your side! I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you! I know you have the right of way, ma’am!

At the next intersection I sat at a red light for a while, wishing I’d stopped to talk with her. As the light turned green I circled back onto the sidewalk (appreciating the flexibility of being on a bike) and rode back toward the intersection, thinking I’d find her to apologize and to explain my reasoning (not that an explanation makes anything okay for the other person, more to let her know that I had seen her).

I couldn’t find her. She’d been wearing all black clothing and no one in sight was dressed that way. She’d apparently disappeared into a vehicle in the lot across the street, one of the nearby buildings, or maybe the boardwalk along the waterfront.

I dropped back into the street, sat again at that same red light, and went on my way, wishing we could have talked. I’d rather be a human she’s interacted with than an anonymous “cyclist” she likely told people about for the rest of the day.

Next time I’ll slow down and let whoever’s crossing wave me on. This woman might well have done that if she’d seen me clearly acknowledging her presence. The opportunity to have human interactions is one of the major advantages of moving around without a soundproofed steel box and tinted windows cutting you off from those exchanges. I didn’t take full advantage of the advantage in this scenario. Wish I had.

Related Reading

Actions You Can Take for Active Transportation: Following a Bill

Barb from Bike Style — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Legislative sessions have their own pace. There’s often a flurry at the beginning as bills are filed. No worries, you have time to catch up on the reading before it gets down to crunch time. It’s okay if you didn’t do all the homework or connect with legislators in advance; paying attention and contacting them to let them know you care about a bill will always matter.

Take a civics refresher. If you’re of an age to remember Schoolhouse Rock you may remember the one about how a bill becomes a law. It’s talking about Congress but it isn’t a bad starting point for understanding that a proposal has to go through a committee process in both House and Senate* and then be signed by the executive.

In my state of Washington the legislature has an information page that lays out the pieces. Your state may have a similar page. It describes how to sign up to receive information on committee meetings and bills and how to testify.

Identify bill(s) of interest. Once you have a bill number, in Washington you can sign up on the bill’s information page to receive updates about it.

In Washington state bills often get introduced in both a House version and a Senate version referred to as companion bills. At some point one or the other becomes the one that’s making its way through the process. Follow both and pay attention to whether they pick up different or competing amendments. These are all going to have to be reconciled for a final version to make it through to the governor’s desk.

As I noted in my piece on homework as prep for the session, here’s where being a member of an advocacy organization with policy experience will come in very handy. They’ll have someone(s) doing analysis and identifying anything that may be either really exciting or problematic.

Read the bills. I’m not going to cover everything about how to read the bill, but do read it! Follow cross-references to other laws and definitions so you understand how it fits into existing law.

Don’t take for granted that everyone involved has actually done this, either. I remember when I left the Idaho state legislature (which is to say, lost my re-election bid) a fellow senator from the other party said to me, “We’re going to miss you. You read the bills.”

So okay, okay, a couple of tips on reading statutory language:

Pay close attention to use of “may, “should”, and “shall”. Of these three, “shall” is the only word that means it has to happen. “May” and “should” are advisory, not directive. Not that a state agency will ignore them, but “shall” is unambiguous.
You may be most interested in something that changes a law, like making it easier for your city to lower speed limits without a traffic engineering study. If you’re interested in something that requires funding then you may be following two bills, one that establishes a new program and the other the transportation budget, or all of that may happen in one bill. Budget bills have a lot of negotiation and your governor is going to play a role here too. I’m not going to get into that in this post.
Understand the role of legislative intent language, which may be introduced with a phrase like “The legislature finds that…” or “It is the intent of the legislature that”. It often says some of the things you really care about. It provides context for the agency or entity charged with carrying out the sections below the findings. It may not directly tell an organization or agency to do something. It’s more a statement of the reason that they’re going to direct that something happens in the sections that follow.
- As an example, read the language that established the Sandy Williams Connecting Communities Program in Washington state. Compare section 1, the legislative findings, with section 2 that establishes the program and defines its purpose, and section 3 that tells the state department of transportation the criteria to consider in selecting locations to receive investments under the program.**

Getting a bill introduced for printing is the easiest step in the whole process. It may sit there and never move another step. But if it does….

Contact legislators. It does matter. Enlist your friends to contact them too.

Which ones?

The ones who represent you. As soon as the bill is available, whether you support or oppose it you can reach out to your legislators and express your opinion. Keep it short, make it personal, be clear right up front what your position is, make yourself a resource for more information.
The ones who will be the first to take action on the bill. It’s most important to contact the legislators in the house of origin. That is, if it’s a House bill contact your state representatives; if it’s a Senate bill, contact your senator. You can definitely contact all of them; they just may not pay as much attention to bills in the other house until/unless they make it through and come across if this is a bill that was only introduced in one house.
Bill sponsors. Somewhere in the bill information you should be able to find who’s sponsoring the bill. Contact the sponsor(s) as well. Special note for those companion bills: Contact the sponsor(s) of the companion bill in the other house, too.
Committee members. Contact the legislators who serve on the committee the bill has been assigned to.

Keep it up as things move and change. As the bill starts to move it may get amended. Re-read it; amendments can change a lot of the meaning. You may need to contact legislators to explain what’s good or bad, right or wrong from your perspective about the effects of the amendments.

Don’t lose hope. Your bill may not make it all the way through in one session. Some of the things that might happen:

Maybe it gets resurrected in the second session, if that’s how your state treats bills. In Washington state a bill introduced in the first session (the one that takes place after an election when the legislature has newly elected members) is still alive in the second session. After that because a new legislature is seated after an election all the bills that haven’t passed are dead.
Maybe it comes in another door, as an amendment to a different bill.
Maybe you don’t get an entire new program established, but you get funding for a study that will help shape the new program in a future session, or a pilot instead of a full statewide effort.
Maybe this idea is before its time and you and other supporters are going to have to back up and do a lot more homework, relationship-building with other people and organizations to get more support for the concept, and connect between sessions with your legislators and the governor’s policy advisors.
Maybe you started with your idea without ever talking to anyone who would have to implement it and come to find out some agency actually has really similar plans in the works. (Hint: This is where doing some homework would have helped. It’s not too late.)
Maybe this isn’t actually something that needs a state law to make it happen at all, or getting your city or county to try it out first would let you make a better case because you’d have proof of concept.

Enjoy singing that Schoolhouse Rock tune softly to yourself as you click through legislative agendas and read bills. Fair warning, it’s an earworm.

*The bill needs to pass both House and Senate unless you live in unicameral Nebraska.

**The division I direct for the Washington State Department of Transportation oversees the Sandy Williams Connecting Communities Program. I guarantee you we read the whole thing and take it all very seriously. In following sections 2 through 5, we’re seeking to address the problems the legislature laid out in section 1. You can read stories about some of the places that received funding in our 2024 legislative report. Since I’m sharing links to items associated with my work I’ll remind you that this is a personal blog and I’m not writing this in my role as a state employee.

Actions You Can Take for Active Transportation: Contacting State Legislators

Barb from Bike Style — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 14:45:00 +0000

When I served in the Idaho state legislature I quickly learned that many people didn’t really understand what level of government I served in (“Are you home from D.C.?”). If they thought about state lawmaking at all they thought about it when we were in session and thus were in the news. By that point things were in full swing, our days were packed with committee meetings and session, and we didn’t have much time to sit down with constituents and listen to their concerns in depth although I held “coffee with Barb” weekend gatherings to be as accessible as possible.

Surprise! You can actually contact a state legislator any time of year. When they’re in session you’re behind the power curve. Your state representatives and state senators have likely already been thinking about bills they want to sponsor and hearing from constituents throughout the year. Doesn’t mean you can’t get involved during session—you can and you should because it really does matter.

Whether you’re doing this mid-summer or just as the session is about to start, these tips should be helpful.

Learn who your legislators are. You may already know your district or may need to use a tool on your state legislature’s website to look up the number. Unless you’re in Nebraska with its unicameral legislature, you’ll have two representatives and a senator. The site may have a contact form to use or their email addresses.

Establish a connection. Sign up for their e-mail newsletters so you know what they care about. If they hold an open house, Zoom call, phone town hall, or any other connection point, take advantage of those.

Know your own story. Why do you care? Why are you there? Can you explain that in just a couple of sentences that land with some oomph they’ll remember? Better if you can do that than if you need to tell an entire story that takes 15 minutes so if you get the chance you can look a legislator in the eye, introduce yourself, and say, “Here’s what I care about. Here’s why.”

That doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Practice definitely helps. Try writing it, try telling a friend or family member, try recording it like you’re planning to put it on YouTube and playing it back to listen to it as if it’s someone else. It’s fine to be nervous! That’s real, that’s human. But if you’re rambling at length to someone who needs to meet a lot of other people at an event you’re not going to get your point across.

Plug into existing systems. Check with your local or state advocacy organizations to find out who the bike-friendly legislators are, what bills may be coming up to fight for or against, how well your state funds pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure. Maybe they have an action day planned at the state capitol. Do your homework.

Don’t overlook non-bike-related groups and systems! Explaining to any and all of these why your topic is important gives you good practice for talking with legislators and expands the network of people who have at least some awareness of your issue.

Does your local Chamber of Commerce advocate for transportation projects? (The answer is yes. It’s always yes.) Have they added a local trail project to the list of projects they’re hoping to bring home funding for? How about the tourism promotion/destination marketing organization? They may be marketing how walkable your downtown is; have they added the need for sidewalk funding or complete streets to their legislative agenda? Is your school district offering bicycle education and if so, how is it funded? Does it need support at the state level? Does your public health district do anything related to active living environments? Maybe they have programs you want to support.

Be a resource. If you’re contacting legislators around the session you’re probably thinking about bills. Any time of year, though, you can connect. A few ideas:

Invite them to try to walk along or cross the street near your child’s school so they understand how important it is to support Safe Routes to School. You’re giving them something they can talk about, maybe a photo op for a local story or their own newsletter.
Take them on a bike ride (geared to their level of experience; this is a no-drop ride!) with stops selected to highlight the value of past investments and the potential for new ones. Again, story fodder.
Before you try to ride your bike to a town hall meeting they’re holding, contact them in advance and ask if there will be bike parking or if you can bring your bike inside; that’s a message of its own about transportation and accessible event planning. If it isn’t accessible by transit ask if they can choose a different venue.
In the fall invite them to participate in #WeekWithoutDriving. It’s a firsthand learning experience if they’ve only used driving to get around. Maybe you can act as their bus buddy or lead a bike ride for them and other constituents to go to an event.
At any/all of these or as a standalone action, share a fact sheet you’ve compiled about your town’s infrastructure (existing and needed), track record on safety, investment or lack thereof, and demographics that indicate reliance on active transportation, all of which you may have from an advocacy group or be able to prepare based on some homework. This makes a great resource so update it every year or so. (Share with your city council members and mayor while you’re at it, all those groups you’re connecting with, and reporters who cover transportation.)

Don’t make it partisan. Everyone needs to cross the street. Everyone’s a pedestrian at some point in their journeys. Everyone knows someone who has been affected by traffic violence or who has kids walking to school or who’s getting older and aging out of driving so they need other options. Don’t assume that one party or the other is the only one that cares about your issues. You always want to be able to talk with the people in power, no matter who’s in power and no matter how good or bad they are on other issues that matter to you.

Taking on even one of the items on this list of ways to connect puts you ahead of everyone who stays passive and doesn’t reach out to plug into the process. Your voice matters.

New Year Ahead

Barb from Bike Style — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 14:30:00 +0000

Objectively speaking if we step away from human-made calendars then every day is New Year’s Day. Which is to say, on any given day a whole year of days stretch out in front of you, just waiting for you to make choices about how you live in those moments. I deliberately didn’t write how you use those moments or spend those moments; I wrote how you live them. Time isn’t something you can keep in a bank. A moment may pass, yes, and here you are right smack dab in the middle of another one. And another one! What a gift.

And yet there’s something about a physical calendar, the clean, empty pages waiting to be filled with a word that captures that day in memory, a special date, an appointment that matters a lot. So okay, let’s treat January 1 as a reset and spend some time thinking about how we’re going to move through the year ahead.

Are you going to walk more? I recently read the book Do Walk: Navigate Earth, Mind and Body. Step by Step.* Author Libby DeLana went for a walk one day. And the next. And the next. She’s continued her MorningWalk practice for years now, walking every single day whether it’s a short walk around the block or a walk of several miles that serves as centering, grounding, thinking, creating, moving time.

Maybe you can’t walk. She does note at one point that the choice of route may have barriers for someone who’s using a wheelchair so she’s really talking about moving your body through space outside, however you do that. I definitely walk a lot more now that I live in a genuinely walkable/rollable neighborhood, and walking gives me many gifts.

Will you start or expand use of transit for transportation? If you’re not living near a transit stop this may be more of a bike + transit equation, which expands the reach and usefulness of both modes. One of my coworkers hops on a bus to take her down to the end of a nice long trail, then bikes home. You could plan that the other way, too: Ride your bike as far as you feel like going, with a stopping point somewhere in the vicinity of a transit route, then let you and your bike both catch a ride back.

If you’re not familiar with transit in your area (or at all), I can’t help but advise you to get good at using it. You can’t assume that if you drive now you’ll always be able to drive. Having multiple modes available that you know how to use to get where you’re going is the ultimate in transportation freedom. Otherwise when age or disability or both remove you from behind that steering wheel, you’re trapped by auto-dependency.

Are you going to ride your bike more? That can apply no matter what “more” means for you. Years ago guest blogger Betz set the resolution to ride her bike at least once a month year round, whereas she’d been more of a fair-weather rider up until that point.

Are you going to change up your riding in some way? The realm of riding isn’t a spectrum from fewer miles to more miles. It’s more like a big fun fizzy fuzzy ball of possibilities radiating in every direction and dimension. Ride a different bike? A different route? A different time of day? A different time of year? With other people if you usually ride alone, alone if you usually ride with others? To work if you’ve only been riding weekends? For a midday brain break and ‘splore, as Pooh would say, or for errands if you’ve mostly been commuting? As your primary transportation for a bike travel vacation whether that’s a weekend getaway or a multi-day tour?

If you made a list of the things you do in your life how might you add a bike ride to any of them? Map out your usual destinations and how long it would take you to ride there, and you may find new ways to work more bike into your life. Maybe you stop or start tracking your mileage or time on the bike. Or use that time to muse on how riding adjusts your perception of speed, your sense of time itself and whether being “productive” is all it’s cracked up to be. Make a life list of things you want to try that involve riding and work your way through a few of them this year. Design your own version of a triathlon. Or, y’know, ride your bike to ride your bike.

Related Reading

#BikeIt: What’s On Your List?: Lots and lots of things related to riding, some of which you may want to try.
Independence and Freedom, Courtesy of the Bike: So many ways it sets me free!
Commitment, Bite-Sized and Tasty: Introducing the idea of “joy snacks” on my personal blog, and a bike ride makes a perfect snack!
Surgeon General Warning: Bicycling Can Be Habit-Forming: A celebration of my shift from occasional riding to a steady habit, along with some of the advantages bicycling gives me
5 Behavior and Culture Hacks to Get More People to Bike and Walk: Trying to form those habits? A few research-based suggestions.
Looking Back, Looking Ahead: Are you the same person you were 10 years ago? What are you doing today (or thinking you might start/stop doing) that shapes the person you’ll be 10 years from now?
Setting My Own Pace: How time passes and the quality of that time are different mode to mode.
It’s All in the Attitude: More on the way that riding changes my perception of time.
Biking as Downtime and other Musings on Overproductivity: Why you need the meditative space a bike ride provides.
Zen and the Art of Bicycling: Not original to me, too good not to capture.
One Word for 2014 Bicycling: Maybe what works for you is setting an intention you can capture in a word or a phrase. (Yes, it’s an old post, but the premise holds up.)
An Easy New Year’s Resolution: Write It Down: I still write an old-fashioned actual pen-and-paper journal and record my riding.
Keep that Streak Going: #30DaysOf Something that Matters to You: On my personal blog I dig into the nature of commitment.
Why a Cyclist Needs a Pedometer: An older post but I’m still tracking my steps and I still need the reminder to move.
Hassle Factor: Biking vs. Driving: Think driving is easy? Easy is what you make it.
When I Get Older: Why I’m Counting on a Multimodal System: Trying new things or forming new habits isn’t just about bicycling.
How Am I Going to Get There? Why We Need Each Other: Some thoughts on aging, transportation policy, and the importance of community and collaboration.

*You should support, cherish and thank your local bookstore if you have one. Same goes for your local library. If you don’t have easy access, you can use the Bookshop affiliate link to order DeLana’s book. If I ever get any commission through such links I’ll donate the proceeds to organizations that support equity and accessible active transportation.

A note on the typeface in the “2025 Ahead!” image: Designed by Dulce Salazar, the Bicycle typeface shapes are intended to suggest the shape of a penny farthing bicycle.

How Many Minutes (by Bike) Is Your Neighborhood?

Barb from Bike Style — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 21:32:01 +0000

I don’t live in a 15-minute neighborhood or a 15-minute city, one in which I can meet the majority of everyday needs in a 15-minute walk. I find that an imprecise and unimodal measure, though, and implicitly ableist as well.

Imprecise: One of my keystone destinations is the local bakery, 0.8 miles from my house. Google Maps tell me it takes 18 minutes to walk there but I do it often enough that I know my walking pace these days moves me faster than they assume (possibly motivated by the heart-shaped hazelnut shortbread cookies or the almond croissants). There’s a little mini-mart place across the street so if I needed fill-in items like milk or eggs I could get those in that same walk, although in summer I’d be walking right past a local farmette that often has eggs in their tiny stand by a bus stop.

Ableist: As Anna Zivarts points out in a Bloomberg piece, the concept of the 15-minute city embeds ableist assumptions about the ability to get around. I’ve experienced temporary disabilities that affected my transportation use. I expect my body’s abilities to change over time so today’s 15 minutes aren’t my 15 minutes in 10 or 20 or 30 years. Nor is my 15-minute circumference a universal constant applying to all y’all. Whether your neighborhood has any sidewalks at all, let alone ones with ADA-required accessibility features, will also affect your route and the time it takes to travel from one point to another if lack of good connections imposes detours that cost you energy as well as time.

Unimodal: Instead of measuring by walk time, I measure by bike time. Early on in my bike commuting I learned that things I thought of as “far away” weren’t necessarily all that distant in time or place. It was the frustrations of driving that made things feel farther than they were. If instead I rode my bike, enjoying the movement and the feeling of freedom, getting some exercise, looking at things along the way because the pace allowed me to, I enjoyed the trip. The time itself was qualitatively different and better. Time is different on a bike.

One more thing: What destinations are assumed and included? Some things are true for everyone. We need to eat, for example. That makes it easy to measure your access to sources of food. But if you have specific requirements not met in the closest grocery store, the store being a 10-minute walk away doesn’t do you much good. Each person’s map is personalized so the utilities that let you check whether you live in a 15-minute neighborhood or city won’t give you results designed just for you. Hence the need to draw your own circle, do your own mapping.

Try this exercise: Open your favorite online map and check the bike time to get to the destinations you go to most frequently. What’s in your 15-minute neighborhood?

My calculations below don’t factor in the time savings on my e-bike. The list of things I can reach in a given time frame would be even longer if I turned on the juice, although I generally save it for hills and headwinds. Think of this as my acoustic bike list.

My 15-minute neighborhood by bike includes:

Small park: 2 minutes (so I’d walk)
Local bakery: 5 minutes
Elementary and middle schools: 5 minutes (I don’t have kids in them but if I did, they’re right there)
Community theater: 6 minutes
Big forested park: 7 minutes (I walk there because I go there to go on a walk)
Paint store where I got the paint to redo bedroom and office: 11 minutes
A full-sized locally owned grocery store that includes a postal center: 12 minutes (and they donate to the annual Bike Community Challenge)
Farmer’s market: 13 minutes
Community center where I take classes through Parks & Rec: 13 minutes
Downtown with 3 bookstores, shopping, restaurants including vegan comfort food, local coffee, live theater, indie movie house, hardware store, secondhand stores, parks, and the waterfront boardwalk with public art illustrated in the image at the top of this post: 13-15 minutes depending on which end of town I’m aiming for
Favorite weekend brunch restaurant: 13 minutes
French pastry place: 13 minutes
Local yarn shop: 14 minutes (a block past the pastry place)
Library: 15 minutes
Post office: 15 minutes

An extra 5 minutes by bike feels like nothing. In a ride of 20 minutes or less I can be at:

Food co-op: 18 minutes
My healthcare provider: 20 minutes
My office, should I decide or need to be in the building instead of teleworking: 20 minutes (with secure bike storage and also the ability to bring my bike right into my office)
A bunch of other things I haven’t needed in the four years I’ve lived here

A 25-minute ride pulls in:

My dentist: 23 minutes, with a trail for much of the distance that makes it such a nice ride
A national chain hardware store: 23 minutes
A bigger chain grocery store: 24 minutes
Yet more places I haven’t been but could reach if I needed to

30 minutes:

An entire shopping mall, including a big movie theater: 27 minutes
A bunch of other destinations, from restaurants to parks to shopping, and yet more bakeries

35 minutes:

Nordstrom Rack: 31 minutes
My hairdresser, who does a great job with my fine, straight hair: 32 minutes
Yet more parks, grocery stores, shopping, blah blah blah

Farther out:

Amtrak station that I use roughly once a month: 51 minutes, much of it on a trail (and passenger trains in Washington have dedicated bike racks in the baggage car)

Transit: I don’t measure my neighborhood in terms of transit time. That’s harder to pin down because total elapsed time will depend on when I need to start in order to get to my destination if transfers are involved, and it will depend on whether it’s a weekday (30-minute service until 8pm) or weekend (60-minute service until 8pm). This means bike time is often faster than transit time.

I do love my fare-free service and use it regularly. One of my favorite multimodal combos isn’t aimed at transportation time efficiency at all: Walk with my sweetheart to downtown, going along the water so we can watch the birds and look for seals. Go to the farmers’ market, maybe get coffee or brunch, maybe I pick up a book I ordered that’s waiting for me at the bookstore. Time this so we can catch the bus home; there’s a stop five minutes from our house. This was one of the location attractions when we bought this place since we’re planning ahead to maintain our transportation independence when we age out of driving.

All of this is to say that thinking and mapping in terms of time rather distance and the modes that work for you will help you draw your own map of 15, 20, 25 minutes. You might decide you can try shifting a trip or two to experience a different kind of time travel.

Related reading on the blog

Related reading in other spaces on the 15-minute city or neighborhood

The 15-Minute City (99% Invisible)
A universal framework for inclusive 15-minute cities (Bruno, Melo, Campanelli, and Morelo, 2024)
The ‘15-Minute City’ Isn’t Made for Disabled Bodies (Anna Zivarts on Bloomberg)
Exploring the 15-Minute City Concept and Its Potential for Communities of All Sizes (National League of Cities)
7 Rules for Creating “15-Minute Neighborhoods” (Strong Towns)
The 5-minute neighborhood, 15-minute city, and 20-minute suburb (Congress for the New Urbanism)
CityAccessMap (doesn’t have results for all cities; my town isn’t in the database)
Why so many Americans prefer sprawl to walkable neighborhoods (Washington Post; includes a mapping app and my town is analyzed in this one)

Actions You Can Take for Active Transportation: Homework

Barb from Bike Style — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Being an advocate or activist can feel so, so exhausting. You phone and email and call. You show up for the events. You donate and volunteer. Change is slow, progress incremental, sometimes you feel as if you’re going backward rather than forward, or taking the long way around the mulberry bush.

Or maybe you’ve never done any of these things and you’ve decided that you’re going to take action and make a difference. Where to start? Anywhere, really. I’m going to step through a variety of things you can learn and do, one chunk at a time. (Why read my writing on this? Refer to note at bottom.)

Sure, you can accelerate this and stack them up. Will that burn you out? Are you the type to bike or walk straight up a steep hill, or are you going to climb a bit at a time? Pace yourself because you need to be in this for the long haul, and a very long haul it is.

It would be screamingly obvious to start with some kind of activist resolution in January but here’s the thing: You can start any time. Every single day is the first day of a whole new year of 365 days. Happy New Year!

You can take action at any level you’re interested in and willing to engage with, from a local school to Congress. This post tackles the state level to get grounding that’s helpful context for change at the local level where you walk and ride every day. It will also come in handy when you contact a congressional office.

Mindset notes: I could write a whole post just on this, and maybe I will. Do some personal homework first, some internal examination with a big helping of honesty.

Characteristics you’ll find helpful:

Patience
Commitment
Persistence
Diplomacy (if everyone already agreed with you there’d be no need for your efforts)
Enough courage to show up
Appreciation for what people do even if it isn’t as much as or exactly what you’d hoped for
A welcoming attitude for potential allies
Willingness to learn (and to admit!) what you don’t know

Characteristics you won’t find helpful over the long haul:

Anger (You may feel angry inside, sure, but being an angry advocate doesn’t win over people who disagree with you, and it isn’t good for your personal health to stay in the red zone)
Entitlement
Ego or self-importance: Be happy because there’s a win whether or not your name is on it
“Everything bagel” advocacy: You probably care about lots of topics. Are you going to email and show up every day, at every city council or legislative committee meeting, on every single one of these? Sorry to be the one to tell you that you’re going to lose effectiveness. Pick a few and count on other people to work on the other topics, at least publicly, so you can focus and build consistency and reputation.

“You have very little morally persuasive power with people who can feel your underlying contempt.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

State legislatures go into session in January the majority of the 50 states (per Ballotpedia). Even if yours doesn’t start until March or April you can start legislative contacts any time. Doing some homework about state-level policy, funding, and advocacy efforts will help you prepare. Things to check on:

Advocacy organizations: Does your state have an organization advocating for active transportation? Poke around and find out. It may be a bike-focused organization, maybe one working for trails, maybe an entity like Disability Rights Washington that has been speaking up for accessible active transportation so everyone can have transportation freedom. If they’re out there, take advantage of the work they’ve been doing, plug in, engage.

Join them if you don’t already belong; they’re working for your interests.
Ask about their legislative agenda. Review it and ask questions.
Do they hold any kind of advocacy events in your town or in the capital? Are you able to participate?
Ask them what they know about your state representatives and senators. Champions? Opponents? Never paid any attention to this topic before? Are they on the transportation committee or one that deals with appropriations? Very useful seats!
Think about how your personal story connects to the topic(s) on the list. Pedal Love has some great resources on effective storytelling for policy change. Doing this will help you remember what you’re learning and your ability to tell a story will make you a more effective advocate when you call, meet, or write.

Find out what your state is doing now: You can actually contact state employees for information! The Federal Highway Administration requires your state to have a state bicycle/pedestrian coordinator. How much of their time is devoted to this varies state to state. In some states they’re “the only” and this is one of several responsibilities. In other states they’re full-time on this, and in still others they’re in luck because they have colleagues, support, maybe even a role in recommending how funds are spent.

Wait, though. Before you email them with “Tell me all the things”, check the website. It’s so easy to do this and yet in my day job doing this kind of work at a state transportation agency my colleagues and I get emails asking things that are answered right there on the web, accessible using the same device they used to write the email. You want those taxpayer-funded employees to spend most of their time doing things to make conditions better, so be judicious in how you ask for information.

Maybe they’re already compiling it and you just need to find it. Do they have an overview of activities in your state, or any kind of email newsletter you can sign up for? Annual reports of some kind? A plan they should be working to implement? Once you’ve reviewed what’s available you have some context for your questions. That advocacy organization may also have done some analysis; ask them.

Some of the things you want to know:

How does your state compare to other states on funding levels?
How does your state compare to other states on traffic safety?
- You’ll learn the term “vulnerable road user”, referring to people made vulnerable when they walk, bike or roll due to a lack of complete, connected, comfortable networks that give the same door-to-door experience that drivers take for granted. Every state is required to produce a Vulnerable Road User Safety Assessment. Find your state’s and read it.
- You’ll find national comparisons on these stats in places beyond your state DOT. Among the sources:
  - Smart Growth America’s “Dangerous by Design” publication analyzes pedestrian data.
  - The League of American Bicyclists puts out rankings and scorecards on Bicycle Friendly States.
Does your state apply analysis based on equity or environmental justice indicators? This could be done to direct funding toward places that have been disinvested from in the past or could highlight disproportionate numbers of serious and fatal crashes in certain neighborhoods. If you know you live in a state where the word “equity” isn’t going to produce results, ask if they do any kind of demographic or geographic analysis of crash data. If your state isn’t doing it the advocacy organization or a national group may be doing it.
- If you haven’t yet encountered the term “redlining” read up on it. Kea Wilson on Streetsblog covers research on the connection between redlining, health and pedestrian safety. To go deep read Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
Does your state provide funding to local governments for improvements? How do they compare to other states in this? This may be state or federal funds or both. How is your city, county, or tribal government doing in applying for and receiving these grants?
Is the state leaving money on the table? Some states don’t take full advantage of the federal funds available to them for pedestrian/bicyclist projects. They turn those funds back and other states (like mine) that are on top of things get to do more. You’re going to be asking why that is. Spoiler alert: Political culture is going to play a big role in this answer. You’re helping shift that by caring enough to ask.

You now have a pretty good understanding of how your state stacks up, how at least some of the funding is handled, and who the players are. You’ve connected with other advocates and activists so you can focus your efforts where they’ll do the most good. Your voice as a constituent is powerful. Use it.

Note: If you’re a regular reader you may already know my bio. This is JIC you don’t. These fairly brief summaries rely on my lifelong career in public policy that started with holding elected office and my journey from volunteer bike advocate to advocacy professional running a statewide nonprofit to leadership in this realm within a state department of transportation. In other words, I could write a lot of TL;DR on these topics. Some of this is “I wish I’d known”, some of it is “I wish others would”. It isn’t everything by a long stretch.