In the City of Bikes

Author: Pete Jordan
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062100645
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 446

Book Description
Pete Jordan, author of the wildly popular Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States, is back with a memoir that tells the story of his love affair with Amsterdam, the city of bikes, all the while unfolding an unknown history of the city's cycling, from the craze of the 1890s, through the Nazi occupation, to the bike-centric culture adored by the world today Pete never planned to stay long in Amsterdam, just a semester. But he quickly falls in love with the city and soon his wife, Amy Joy, joins him. Together they explore every inch of their new home on two wheels, their rides a respite from the struggles that come with starting a new life in a new country. Weaving together personal anecdotes and details of the role that cycling has played throughout Dutch history, Pete Jordan’s In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist is a poignant and entertaining read.

City Cycling

Author: John Pucher
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262304996
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Book Description
A guide to today's urban cycling renaissance, with information on cycling's health benefits, safety, bikes and bike equipment, bike lanes, bike sharing, and other topics. Bicycling in cities is booming, for many reasons: health and environmental benefits, time and cost savings, more and better bike lanes and paths, innovative bike sharing programs, and the sheer fun of riding. City Cycling offers a guide to this urban cycling renaissance, with the goal of promoting cycling as sustainable urban transportation available to everyone. It reports on cycling trends and policies in cities in North America, Europe, and Australia, and offers information on such topics as cycling safety, cycling infrastructure provisions including bikeways and bike parking, the wide range of bike designs and bike equipment, integration of cycling with public transportation, and promoting cycling for women and children. City Cycling emphasizes that bicycling should not be limited to those who are highly trained, extremely fit, and daring enough to battle traffic on busy roads. The chapters describe ways to make city cycling feasible, convenient, and safe for commutes to work and school, shopping trips, visits, and other daily transportation needs. The book also offers detailed examinations and illustrations of cycling conditions in different urban environments: small cities (including Davis, California, and Delft, the Netherlands), large cities (including Sydney, Chicago, Toronto and Berlin), and “megacities” (London, New York, Paris, and Tokyo). These chapters offer a closer look at how cities both with and without historical cycling cultures have developed cycling programs over time. The book makes clear that successful promotion of city cycling depends on coordinating infrastructure, programs, and government policies.

Bike City Amsterdam

Author: Marjolein de Lange
Publisher: Nieuw Amsterdam
ISBN: 9059375475
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Book Description
The book Bike City Amsterdam, How Amsterdam became the cycling Capital of the World , by Fred Feddes and Marjolein de Lange, is the first comprehensive inside history of sixty years of successful bicycle activism, policy and culture in Amsterdam. As any visitor knows, the bicycle is omnipresent in the streets of Amsterdam, in the rhythm of its people's lives, and in the city's image. To many outsiders, Amsterdam comes close to being a cyclist's paradise. It wasn't always that way. As in many other cities, bicyclists came under pressure due to the rapid increase of car traffic in the 1960s. It was through a unique combination of grassroots activism and municipal policy, supported by advantageous circumstances and driven by smartness and perseverance, that the bicycle managed to make an astounding comeback. Bike City Amsterdam recounts the story of this long-term transformation of a city that made way for the bicycle, while the bicycle in turn helped make the city liveable again. It highlights the accomplishments of the bicycle city, as well as its setbacks and its counterforces. Its story ranges from the everyday bicycling culture, to policy choices and street design, to the notorious battle for the Rijksmuseum bicycle passageway. Written from the inside, Bike City Amsterdam acknowledges the uniqueness of the Amsterdam bicycle city, but it does so without romanticizing, analyzing its success with a keen eye on all its imperfections. By telling a detailed case history of Amsterdam, it allows its international readers to distinguish the universal lessons from the local specifics, and to draw inspiration from both. Finally, it looks ahead to the next half century in which Amsterdam can contribute to tackling global urban issues as a 'bicycle laboratory'. More information on: https://bikecityamsterdam.nl

The Cycling City

Author: Evan Friss
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022675880X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
As Evan Friss shows in his mordant history of urban bicycling in the late nineteenth century, the bicycle has long told us much about cities and their residents. In a time when American cities were chaotic, polluted, and socially and culturally impenetrable, the bicycle inspired a vision of an improved city in which pollution was negligible, transport was noiseless and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country blurred. Friss focuses not on the technology of the bicycle but on the urbanisms that bicycling engendered. Bicycles altered the look and feel of cities and their streets, enhanced mobility, fueled leisure and recreation, promoted good health, and shrank urban spaces as part of a larger transformation that altered the city and the lives of its inhabitants, even as the bicycle's own popularity fell, not to rise again for a century. --Publisher's description.

Bike NYC

Author: Ed Glazar
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1628730021
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
With an average of 236,000 New Yorkers biking per day, Bike NYC is the definitive guide to bicycling culture in the city’s fastest growing mode of transportation from the authors of the popular BikeBlogNYC.com. Part guidebook, photo essay, history and human-interest story, this book offers instructions for a dozen rides led by seasoned tour guides through all of the five boroughs. Rediscover the city and its biking culture through: • A scenic trip up the Hudson during the peak of the fall foliage • A Halloween night ride through the brownstones of Brooklyn to the parallel universe of the Kensington mansions • NYC bike clubs such as the Classic Rider • Front row seats to the Alley Cat races With extras such as maps, safety tips, bike shop rankings, public bathroom locations, accessories, and fashion dos and don’ts, Bike NYC is the essential guide for urban cyclists.

Building the Cycling City

Author: Melissa Bruntlett
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610918797
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
The world is rediscovering the bicycle as a multi-pronged solution to acute, 21st-century problems, including affordability, obesity, congestion, climate change, inequity, and social isolation. The Netherlands has built an accessible cycling culture that cities around the world can learn from. Chris and Melissa Bruntlett share the incredible success of the Netherlands through engaging interviews with local experts and stories of their own delightful experiences riding in five Dutch cities. Building the Cycling City examines the triumphs and challenges of the Dutch while also presenting stories of North American cities already implementing lessons from across the Atlantic. Discover how Dutch cities inspired Atlanta to look at its transit-bike connection in a new way and showed Seattle how to teach its residents to realize the freedom of biking, along with other encouraging examples.

Pedaling Revolution

Author: Jeff Mapes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
"From traffic-dodging-bike messengers to tattooed teenagers on battered bikes, from riders in spandex to well-dressed executives, ordinary citizens are becoming transportation revolutionaries. Jeff Mapes traces the growth of bicycle advocacy and explores the environmental, safety, and health aspects of bicycling. He rides with bicycle advocates who are taming the streets of New York City, joins the street circus that is Critical Mass in San Francisco, and gets inspired by the everyday folk pedaling in Amsterdam, the nirvana of American bike activists. Chapters focused on big cities, college towns, and America's most successful bike city, Portland, show how cyclists, with the encouragement of local officials, are claiming a share of the valuable streetscape."--BOOK JACKET.

On Bicycles

Author: Evan Friss
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
Subways and yellow taxis may be the icons of New York transportation, but it is the bicycle that has the longest claim to New York’s streets: two hundred years and counting. Never has it taken to the streets without controversy: 1819 was the year of the city’s first bicycle and also its first bicycle ban. Debates around the bicycle’s place in city life have been so persistent not just because of its many uses—recreation, sport, transportation, business—but because of changing conceptions of who cyclists are. In On Bicycles, Evan Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of cycling in New York City. He uncovers the bicycle’s place in the city over time, showing how it has served as a mirror of the city’s changing social, economic, infrastructural, and cultural politics since it first appeared. It has been central, as when horse-drawn carriages shared the road with bicycle lanes in the 1890s; peripheral, when Robert Moses’s car-centric vision made room for bicycles only as recreation; and aggressively marginalized, when Ed Koch’s battle against bike messengers culminated in the short-lived 1987 Midtown Bike Ban. On Bicycles illuminates how the city as we know it today—veined with over a thousand miles of bicycle lanes—reflects a fitful journey powered, and opposed, by New York City’s people and its politics.

Copenhagenize

Author: Mikael Colville-Andersen
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610919386
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
Urban designer Mikael Colville-Andersen draws from his experience working for dozens of cities around the world on bicycle planning, strategy, infrastructure design, and communication. In Copenhagenize he shows cities how to effectively and profitably re-establish the bicycle as a respected, accepted, and feasible form of transportation. Building on his popular blog of the same name, Copenhagenize offers entertaining stories, vivid project descriptions, and best practices, alongside beautiful and informative visuals to show how to make the bicycle an easy, preferred part of everyday urban life.

Walkable City Rules

Author: Jeff Speck
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610918983
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
“Cities are the future of the human race, and Jeff Speck knows how to make them work.” —David Owen, staff writer at the New Yorker Nearly every US city would like to be more walkable—for reasons of health, wealth, and the environment—yet few are taking the proper steps to get there. The goals are often clear, but the path is seldom easy. Jeff Speck’s follow-up to his bestselling Walkable City is the resource that cities and citizens need to usher in an era of renewed street life. Walkable City Rules is a doer’s guide to making change in cities, and making it now. The 101 rules are practical yet engaging—worded for arguments at the planning commission, illustrated for clarity, and packed with specifications as well as data. For ease of use, the rules are grouped into 19 chapters that cover everything from selling walkability, to getting the parking right, escaping automobilism, making comfortable spaces and interesting places, and doing it now! Walkable City was written to inspire; Walkable City Rules was written to enable. It is the most comprehensive tool available for bringing the latest and most effective city-planning practices to bear in your community. The content and presentation make it a force multiplier for place-makers and change-makers everywhere.