Saturday, December 22, 2007

Janette Sadik-Khan

If only our RTA had a boss like Janette Sadik-Khan who was appointed to be the commissioner of New York's Department of Transport in April.

According to Sadik-Khan, New York streets should be brimming with activity, not cars. She wants to see broad sidewalks filled with people and elegant street furniture, public plazas with places to sit and chat, and bike lanes where children feel safe on their bikes. “Whether you’re cycling and you lock up to a fanciful bike rack,” she says, “or you’re a pedestrian and you come across a fabulous open space that makes you want to linger—that, I think, defines the quality of life in cities.”
Getting there means “we’re going to have to do some things a little differently,” she warns. “We’re going to have to get people out of their cars.” To that end, Sadik-Khan is rolling out pilot programs as fast as she can—new public plazas, wider sidewalks, a bike-rack design competition. Her mission, fundamentally, is to remake the real estate between buildings by, as she puts it, “reclaiming the street from cars.” In traffic-management circles, such a statement is practically heresy.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Janice Turner - Radical superhero of the streets


Cyclists, meanwhile, are anarchists, irritating, irrelevant, ill-disciplined individualists. And while political fashion dictates that Ken must celebrate the proliferation of cyclists, you just know he’d love to put them down brutally, as Lenin and Trotsky did the Kronstadt sailors.
No doubt Ken will have his prejudices confirmed by the Department for Transport report that reveals the richest fifth of the population, predominantly white and middle-class, are the most likely to cycle. But it is not the expence of cycling that makes it the preserve of the privileged, but the arrogant sense of entitlement necessary to ride the urban mean streets.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

The wonderful Mona Caron



Swiss-born and Car Free all of her life, the talented Mona Caron has been biking to her work as an illustrator and muralist in San Francisco since 1996. She does some fabulous bicycle activist art but her website is worth exploring for anyone who appreciates good art. I especially loved her illustrations for children and this picture titled Cafe

Most people will probably recognise her from her fabulous Critical Mass posters.
I recently spotted Mona at work in this photo on a Brazilian website Apocalipse Motorizado

You can buy prints of Mona's work here and you can hear Mona talking about her bike and her philosophy here.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Black Rider


My shirt a black flag

Dropping fast down Bedford Street

Floating on the wind