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Here comes the sun (May 2009 column)
"I think of my bike as a very small bus," my wife told me shortly after we met. She meant that she viewed it as a form of transportation, and nothing more. That's changed substantially in the years since, and despite my own long-standing affection for all things two-wheeled, I recently needed a reminder from my wife that bikes, before all else, are fun. It's felt like a long winter and I've been pretty pragmatic about my bike. The reminder I needed came in the form of a brief and perfect weekend trip my wife planned to Buckhorn Springs.
We...
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Among the hooves of warhorses (April 2009 column)
Most of you will understand this immediately, but it honestly took me years to figure it out. Riding my bike home from work one afternoon some years back, I slowed approaching a downtown stoplight, and seeing no cross traffic, carried on through the intersection. When traffic caught back up to me, I was taken completely off guard by the earful I got from a driver in the adjacent lane.
It didn't make any sense! I hadn't cut her off or given her a dirty look. I wasn't wearing a shirt with a self-righteous message. It seemed pretty clear that I...
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Gleanings from the shoulder of the road (Mar 2009)
Commuting is like no other part of the week. I have a tendency to count it as time lost on the way to places I want to be, but in fact I'd be poorer without that half-hour each morning and evening. At various times, I've commuted by foot (both with and without a wheelbarrow of tools), by car, and by public transit. These days most of my trips are by bike. Each kind of commute has something going for it, and below is an assortment of things I've learned getting to and from work by bike in the last year.
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Looking a gift horse in the mouth (Feb 2009 column)
This new $825 billion stimulus package puts me in mind of winning the lottery: we'll probably blow most of it and there's a real danger we'll sink ourselves in the process. And like the lottery, someone else will be footing the bill for every penny we spend.
News reports have emphasized the transportation infrastructure component of the stimulus, but it turns out that roads, bridges, and public transit come to just over 5% of the package, or about $42 billion. Oregon's expecting roughly $420 million of that. By the time that filters down to Jackson County it's not even a...
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An immediate campaign of urgent self-improvement (Jan 2009 column)
There's a certain kind of person—and I include myself—who gets a little antsy this time of year. We've made our holiday trips, used our vacation days, and rationalized a whole season of indulgences. The next paid holiday isn't for five months. In short, we've run out of distractions and there's nothing for it but to confront life, with its waking up, going to work, and the whole bit. The obvious response, for those of us of a certain temperament, is to invent a new distraction as quickly as possible. The louder and more dramatic the better, so it's hard to...
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Location Location Location (Dec 2008 column)
We have it on the authority of Thoreau that the best zoning laws are those which zone least. And after nearly a century of modern zoning practice, that concept has at last caught on with our nation’s land use planners and in our collective thinking. After all, it took the aggressive zoning of the last century to give us certain absurdities we now take for granted, like swaths of family homes whose residents can't reasonably leave the neighborhood without a car. Or equally vast commercial areas without a single human resident, equally unnavigable by foot.
Before the era of zoning...
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No Car — Will Travel (Nov 2008 column)
Ever since our car broke down in February during our move from Kentucky, my wife and I have been threatening to shed it entirely. Though we're both favorable to the idea, our conversations about it have centered mainly on objections. Do we tell Mom and Dad to get a taxi from the airport? Can we bike home with three sheets of plywood for the shed? No spontaneous midnight movie trips? But of all the things we would lose in giving up our car, the hardest to swallow might be the quick one-night getaway. The refreshment we both find in a...
