Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Planet Mia Birk (with Joe Kurmaskie) Cadence Press, 2010, 224 pages

Joyride tells the story of how Portland, Oregon got started on the path to becoming the Copenhagen, the Amsterdam, the bicycling mecca of the United States. It focuses on the years from 1993 to 1999 when author Mia Birk worked as the city’s Bicycle Program Coordinator. Portland in the early 1990s was car-centered like most American cities. It had stripped out its streetcars, built suburbs and freeways, and left little room for bicyclists on its roads and bridges. It also had its share of skeptical and hostile community members who responded to the idea of adding bike lanes by writing nasty letters, shouting and hissing at public meetings, and forming opposition groups with names such as “Save Our Boulevard.” Yet Portland overcame these obstacles and now boasts a 300-mile bikeway network, hundreds of yearly bike-related events, and 14% of its city traffic on two wheels.

To bring about a transformation like this, it helps to have a city council member who is a bicycle advocate as well as a savvy politician. It also helps if you have traffic engineers who have first-hand experience of city cycling from biking to work. It’s an added bonus if any of these people have spent time in bicycle-friendly cities in Europe. It also helped that Birk, in her twenties at the time, was energetic and super determined. She held dozens of public meetings to let people air their concerns about local transportation while planting the idea of biking as a fun, healthy alternative. She rode with street cleaning crews at night encouraging them to sweep the bike lanes multiple times until all the broken glass had been removed. She continued pushing for bike lanes and bike racks despite being harassed by hate mail.

A self-described “car-addicted chubster” from Texas, Birk started bicycling during graduate school in Washington D.C. using a ten speeder she borrowed from her brother. She lost eight pounds in the first two weeks. She got in shape for the first time in her life and got hooked on the feeling and freedom of riding. She eventually sold her car, moved to Portland and made urban bicycling her career.

Birk is an upbeat narrator as she recounts the struggles and coalition-building along the way to victories such as hosting a BikeFest on one of the city’s bridges and changing the rules to allow bicycles on the light rail. The book loses focus two-thirds of the way through when the Bicycle Program is downsized and Birk, by then a new mother, starts consulting part-time for a California-based planning firm that specializes in bicycle and pedestrian transportation projects. She recounts several of these projects in other locations but it was hard to stay interested. I was longing to hear more about Portland. What happened, I wondered, during the early 2000s leading up to 2007 which seems to have been a break-through year for Portland. Its bike friendliness was featured on the TV show “Big Ideas for a Small Planet” and was written about in the New York Times and numerous magazines. Jonathan Maus’s pro-bicycling blog at bikeportland.org was getting tens of thousands of hits by that time. Unfortunately two deaths that same year also spurred changes. After two art students were killed by right-turning vehicles, the city installed bike boxes (painted bike-only areas) at certain intersections to safe guard against similar crashes. Despite these senseless deaths, Portland had emerged as the leader in bike-friendly US cities.

Joyride is one of the most hopeful books I’ve read about urban transportation. It reminds us that Portland once was a car-dominated city and that significant changes qre possible. This book provides a blue print for moving a city forward in terms of bike-friendliness (including four pages of resources at the end) and resounds with the message that yes, our streets can change.

– Book Review by Kelly Nelson

Obesogenic environments: complexities, perceptions and objective measures. (2010), Lake,Amelia A, Townshend,T.G, Alvanides,Seraphim, Wiley-Blackwell.

“When you design streets solely for cars, people die as a result. The underlying conditions that are responsible for those deaths are rarely or never challenged. The victims often get blamed for their own injuries or deaths.”ⁱ

The above quote refers to the case of Raquel Nelson, a US Atlanta-area mother who was recently convicted of vehicular homicide. But not for driving a motor vehicle. She was crossing a busy road with three children when her 4-year-old son was struck by a car and killed. The road did not have adequate pedestrian crossing facilities.

Such examples highlight the impact that the design of our built environment can have on our lives. But for some readers, linking street design, road deaths and obesity may seem unwarranted. However, the growing levels of obesity in the United Kingdom suggest that the design of our streets, neighbourhoods and cities are helping to kill us – maybe a little slower but just as surely.

The Health Survey for England (HSE) data shows that nearly 1 in 4 adults, and over 1 in 10 children aged 2-10, are obese. In 2007, a Government-commissioned Foresight report predicted that without actions being taken, 60% of men, 50% of women and 25% of children would be obese by 2050.ⁱⁱ

The likely health consequences of the rise in obesity levels have also been well documented. The US Surgeon General Richard Carmona stated, “because of the increasing rates of obesity, unhealthy eating habits and physical inactivity, we may see the first generation that will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents”. Obesity has been linked to various chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, and certain types of cancer. In 2000, poor diet and lack of physical activity were indicated as the second highest causes of preventable death in the United States; just behind tobacco.ⁱⁱⁱ Unfortunately, where the US has led, the United Kingdom and other countries are following.

There are many well-documented factors that influence obesity. At the simplest level, obesity is caused by not doing enough physical activity and eating too much food. But obesity is actually an extremely complex issue. Our built environment and how it encourages, or prevents, us from making healthy lifestyle choices is now recognised as an under-researched area.

For all those not familiar with the term, “obesogenic environment” refers to “an environment that promotes gaining weight and one that is not conducive to weight loss” within the home or workplace.^iv Or put another way an obesogenic environment is one that makes it difficult for people to include physical activity in their everyday lives.

As Tim Townshend, one of the book authors, commented:

“We need to think seriously about what kind of environment we are creating for ourselves and have a sensible debate about what’s acceptable and what’s not in our towns and cities. Health needs to be back on the town planning agenda before it’s too late.”

The government and the food industry are keen to stress individual responsibility for health, diet and planning issues. They are also very keen on ‘light touch’ and ‘self’ regulation for the food and drinks industries. The “market”, it would appear, knows what is best for us and gives us what we want.

But the built environment and food policy are too important to be left to the market and to individual “choices”. The current situation is that the unhealthy option is the easy one. Society has to create environments where people are encouraged and supported to take the healthier options.

The book has fourteen chapters (*) which provide an introduction to obesity and its implications for health and wellbeing, and also cover key themes such as eating behaviours and food environments, physical activity and the environment, the urban environment, methods, policy and future research directions. By bringing together many disciplines including nutrition and dietetics, policy, epidemiology, environmental sciences, medical sciences, town planning and urban design, transport, geography and physical activity, this book helps demonstrate the multidisciplinary approach to public health needed to reshape our built environment to encourage and support people to make healthy food, transport and lifestyle choices.

As co-editor, Dr Amelia Lake, commented “Our research shows that it is as much the responsibility of an urban designer as it is a nutritionist to reverse the obesity trend.”.

This book is not an easy read and not for the general reader. However, one of its strengths is that it helps demonstrate that obesity, just like road deaths, cannot be blamed on individual responsibility. There is such a thing as society and we needs to work collectively to plan better and healthier environments.

— by Pete Abel

Source: http://manchesterclimatemonthly.net/2012/02/27/book-review-obesogenic-environments/

Endnotes

Stop Signs is probably the most comprehensive assessment of the power of the automobile I’ve yet read. It’s a history lesson on the car, and its rapid evolution and a field guide to Homo Automotivus. As the subtitle suggests, it focuses on the economic, social and environmental, but also neatly summarises topics like health, psychology, race, advertising and planning. It looks at the environment in which the car has flourished most, the United States, where it dominates the landscape.

All these are contained in the deceptively lightweight format of a whistle stop tour, to borrow a term from an age when the car was not so dominant. The book takes us on a long, tour of major U.S. cities by long distance bus. Thus, the book sounds like a travelogue of the key economic, social and environmental issues around automotivism.  

“Should I drive to get that loaf of bread, or can I walk? That decision amplified and repeated by many millions results in impossibly overloaded freeways and ridiculously expensive and unsustainable patterns of movement.”

If you are solidly or fervently in the carfree camp, this book might exasperate you. Despite the edgy first word in the title, this book is not edgy – it’s gentle. While it offers suggestions for changing the “car system” in America, it does so in a polite, muted way: “We need to rethink what we truly need and reclaim the control and freedom we like to imagine the car has given us.” They are not calling for radical change. Instead, these sisters, who lost a cousin and a close friend in car crashes, write about lessening the negative aspects of cars while still owning a car.

The book is well researched and includes many stick-in-your-head details: the average American spends 18.5 hours a week in their car, all the parking spaces in the USA could fill the state of Georgia, car makers spend the equivalent of US$630 on advertising per car sold. The chapters focus on describing the current car system, addressing the downsides (money wasted, lives lost, kilos gained, social inequities created) in a gently relentless way. I enjoyed chapter 2 the most, where they looked at the stories Americans tell themselves about cars (they give us freedom, individuality, status etc.) and poked holes in each myth. Each chapter ends with a suggestion for change, though it’s made quickly and without much detail, such as: “The one thing we can do today to help keep our families healthy is to make the conscious decision to drive less.” The final chapter presents an array of suggestions such as log your driving miles, sell your second or third car, delay your teen’s driving, shop on the Internet and support transportation advocacy groups. I appreciate that they address multiple approaches to changing car culture from buying smaller, used cars and driving less to making driving safer and getting politically involved in transportation issues.

Folks who live without a car are not portrayed in flattering ways. “Carless adults,” they write, “cope with the anxiety or guilt of relying on others for rides or the shame of seeming somehow immature, inadequate, or incompetent.” Riding a bike or walking instead of driving is suggested as a possibility but only for short trips when the weather is nice and the air quality is good. (I wouldn’t leave home for weeks at a time if I followed these guidelines!) But they didn’t write this book for me or anyone else carfree. They wrote it for the millions of people who haven’t given much thought to how they could get around differently. The reviewers on Amazon lauded the book as engaging and thoughtful and noted that it had altered their perspective. Perhaps then this book, in its own way, is radical. It might just sneak up on some unsuspecting drivers and jump start them into rethinking their car.

Reviewed by Kelly Nelson

Though Bicycle Diaries is a great title, this is certainly not the non-motorized version of Che’s famous diaries. It is Byrne’s experience – having carried his folding bicycle on the plane – of cycling in cities such as San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Manila and Berlin, and more so about his reflections on art and artists in those cities.

There is plenty to find fault with in this book. Some of Byrne’s arguments are weak or incomplete. In discussing violence on TV and in video games, he seems to feel satisfied with the fact that murderous scenes did not cause him to become a psycho killer…but of course the question isn’t the effect of such wanton violence on the majority. When writing about an anti-beauty aesthetic – the belief that it is somehow silly, inconsequential or sentimental for art to make people feel good – Byrne fails to relate such attitudes to the horrors of modern architecture that he so poignantly describes elsewhere in the book. If art and theory provide excuses to create inhospitable landscapes, they deserve far sharper critique than his.

The book is a lot more about art, music and people he works with than about cycling, and not all his stories are particularly enthralling. But where Byrne does talk about cycling, he gets it right – and his focus sharpens towards the end of the book. He cycles where he travels, he explains, because one sees and experiences far more: “I felt more connected to the life on the streets than I would have inside a car”. Rates of cycling, he accurately observes, are influenced by the built environment and traffic mix, not by weather and hills.

Byrne devotes decent space to describing changes in his home of New York City, and helpfully suggests good routes. He includes some truly wonderful, place-specific bicycle rack designs that he made and that were actually used by the city. And his description of an event he organized, complete with Jan Gehl, musicians, photos of awful bike lanes, and valet bike parking is enlightening; I for one never knew that David Byrne was helping to make NYC better for cycling.

His vision of the future is compromised by his allowance for cars, yet surely his self-confessed eccentricity would allow him easily to envision streets full of a variety of cycles, some with three or four wheels, with an infinite variety of carriers and carriages attached, the image complete with some trams and lots of pedestrians and people just enjoying the car-free ambiance. Maybe Byrne is more mainstream than even he realizes.

But while I failed to find the book a truly great read or particularly inspirational, as a Talking Heads fan I couldn’t help but love the fact that he has written it. The book isn’t preachy, professional, or academic in the least; he uses slang and casual phrasing. His descriptions of how low architecture has fallen in some religious belts is devastating. And like some other books reviewed on the pages of Carbusters, this one has the tremendous advantage of having the potential to bring some of the unconverted on board – if not to carfree cities, at least to the exciting possibilities of the bicycle as a means of transport and the need for urban transport planners to prioritize cycling. Without efforts to bring on board the unconverted, our work will truly be a “road to nowhere”.

Or to cite the lyrics from that song (road to nowhere): “And we’re not little children/and we know what we want./And the future is certain/give us time to work it out. … There’s a city in my mind/come along and take that ride…And it’s very far away/but it’s growing day by day…” Kudos to David Byrne for helping us (in however limited fashion) take that ride to the city in our mind, that inevitable car-free city.

Reviewed by Debra Efroymson

Car Troubles is a collection of 13 academic essays, all but two written by professors at universities in Canada, UK, USA and New Zealand. The editors make a distinction between the system that supports car travel (vehicles, roads, gas suppliers) and the personal experience of car travel (freedom, frustration, thrill, rage). They signal this distinction with a hyphen: “automobility” for the system and “auto-mobility” for the personal experience.

The essays in Part 1 analyse the content of automobile advertisements, present a cultural analysis of transportation infrastructure, and describe the drag racing community in Vancouver, Canada during the mid-20th century. The essays in Part 2 discuss the changing discourse around auto-safety, argue for the integration of technology and social behaviour for improving car safety, and present how parents in Auckland, New Zealand think and talk about a walking school bus for their children. Part 3 includes a case study of the political and social discourse around hypermobility in Atlanta, USA an examination of the political and economic context of mobility in Chile, and a discussion of the pragmatic conditions and constraints that make driving seem compulsory. While the entire book is critical of cars and car usage, the essays in Part 4, titled “Beyond the Car”, may appeal most to the carfree minded.

Todd Litman, the head of Victoria Transport Policy Institute, writes about cars as “positional goods,” items that confer social status on their owners. He uses this framework to discuss the many downsides to car-centred transportation systems and policies in North America. He offers a list of six policy strategies to reverse these negatives, yet devotes only a sentence or two to each idea. I wish he had expanded on these. How can we raise the prestige value of walking and bicycling and public transit? How could we devalue the status of car ownership? He suggests these can be done, in part, through promotion and marketing, but what would that look like?

Sociologist George Martin compares patterns of motorisation in North America and Western Europe with those in Asia and Eastern Europe where car ownership is surging. He says there is a chance that cities in less developed countries may evolve into what he calls “soft motorisation”: cities built around multi-modal transportation where cars are smaller, powered by alternative fuels and often shared. I hope he’s right.

The book closes with a thoughtful discussion by sociologists Kingsley Dennis and John Urry about how the current car system will likely, but unpredictably, change during the 21st century such that “the steel and petroleum car system will finally be seen as a dinosaur”. Some combination of technological and sustainability turning points will usher in a post-car system, they say, though it’s impossible to say when or how this will take place. This article is more optimistic about the future than their co-authored book After the Car (reviewed in Carbusters #39).

The practice of building landscapes and lives around automobiles is thoroughly and repeatedly critiqued throughout Car Troubles. In much shorter supply are ways forward: how could we make changes in how we think, how we live, how we get around? While the book is slow reading, with academic language and many in-text citations, it does offer multiple frameworks for thinking about cars and the problems of car-centredness. It’ll be up to you to find ways to use this information to move forward and make a change.

By Kelly Nelson