bicycles - American Dirt.

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26 articles

Age-restricted bicycling: double-wheeled rules for the single-digit phase in life.

September 5, 2019 2 Comments

As bicycling becomes an increasingly acceptable—and even fully integrated—mode of transportation, sharing our car-dominated streets, we should expect some enforcement of standards that better facilitate this integration. We’re not there yet—not even close. Plenty of heavily urbanized spaces have yet to acknowledge bicycling as a viable alternative to cars through the provision of infrastructure, even

Colorful commemorations: what do painted bikes mean to the unschooled?

January 27, 2019 6 Comments

Nearly four months had passed—a long time for me—since my last visit to Pentagon City in Arlington County, Virginia, home to a big, well-situated, and (as malls go) prosperous mall, a booming multifamily housing sector, numerous key big-box retailers, and a variety of office complexes—all within walking distance of the none-too-pedestrian-friendly Pentagon. The area is

Portland: the apex of bike-friendliness—by American standards.

November 18, 2018 2 Comments

During my first visit to the West Coast in many, many years, I encountered the following sight on an unseasonably cold Friday morning in the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood of Portland. It might not seem terribly striking to readers of this blog from other countries—just a normal street scene. And even Americans may see nothing

Two lanes diverge on a road, and I took the time to blog about it.

March 31, 2018 15 Comments

Generally, when I stumble across an unusual bit of infrastructure, I can figure out what’s gong on after some careful scrutiny. But bicycle and pedestrian markings have gotten so variegated and complicated that, more often than not, I’m left scratching my head. I pondered the rationale for a weird crosswalk in Baltimore a few months

Lightweave: Washington DC attempts to replicate (and improve upon) Indy’s stalled Swarm Street.

February 11, 2018 No Comments

My latest article just posted in Urban Indy, despite the fact that it’s fundamentally about a new project going on in Washington DC. What’s the rationale behind this? Well, take a look. Here’s the underpass in question in Washington DC: And here’s the proposed art installation, known as Lightweave:Those attuned to urban development in Indy

Green street in Seattle: over the long term, will it put the City in the red?

January 27, 2018 16 Comments

By this point, the term “green building” has more or less entered common parlance: even if a sizable majority of people don’t know exactly what it entails, they can form a reasonably well-educated guess from the adjective. And, extending those contextual cues, they can speculate with similar accuracy on “green design”, since it loosely applies

From the highest rooftops, a call to gimme shelter.

April 30, 2015 No Comments

The urbanist blogosphere is chock-full of rants on how new developments compromise pedestrian connectivity—not so much in terms of the final product (where I’m equally guilty of such tirades), but even during the construction process. These days, most mid-sized and large metro areas are gorging on the fruit, born from seeds planted long ago, through

Sharpening the Cut.

November 14, 2013 No Comments

My latest appeared at Huffington Post a few days ago, but thanks to persistent wifi problems, only today have I been able to link it. Sorry about that. It focuses on the Dequindre Cut, a high-profile rail-trail conversion in Detroit, whose Phase I (extending about 1.2 miles, from Gratiot Avenue to the Riverfront) has been

Movable, misunderstood apparitions.

October 21, 2013 8 Comments

In certain subcultures, it’s become a meme. But it took me a little while to catch on. Only after driving past this curiosity for three consecutive days did I realize what it was. It’s not exactly showy, but that’s the point. Look slightly to the left of the center of this photo, and it should

When egalitarianism rests on two wheels.

September 19, 2013 6 Comments

With scores of urban advocacy blogs out there, I find it hard to imagine that I have much to add to the conversation on the defining characteristics of Mackinac Island, Michigan. Even if the northerly island in Lake Huron—a former Jesuit mission, Ojibwa sacred site, and strategic military encampment—elicits little more than a head-scratching among

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