A Bicycle Safety Parable
I. The Artful Advocates and the Fair City Once upon a time in the land of the Massachusett, the streets of the Fair City of Cambridge were dominated by great an...
Category: Bikeways
Unsurprising Surprises on the new Comm Ave
The new “protected” bike lanes (between the parked cars and the sidewalk) on Commonwealth Avenue along Boston University are finally (mostly) usable...
How Protective are Protected Bike Lanes?
Protected bike lanes are popping up everywhere in the Boston area and around the country. These newfangled facilities, where the bike lane is separated from tra...
Lessons Not Learned
[Note: This post was originally written in 2013 but never completed until now.] I first came across the tragic story of Alice Swanson when reading this letter t...
The More Things Change
the American biking community itself split, violently, in the eighteen-nineties, between those who were in favor of dedicated bike paths and those who mistruste...
Lessons from Tragedies
Peter Furth is spreading the misinformation (as has Pete Stidman before him) that I prevented the installation of bike lanes in Boston. This is absolutely not t...
Out of The Frying Pan
In a recent column, Derrick Z. Jackson of The Boston Globe makes this observation about city cycling: “But for the most part, the streets still belong to ...
Save the Bike Lanes on Concord Ave!
Concord Avenue north of Fresh Pond in Cambridge has perfectly nice, five-foot bike lanes. They’re not even in the door zone, since there is no on-street p...