While I wouldn’t say that going green has quite made the mainstream, it sure as heck is becoming more commonplace. Even rock bands on tour, typically associated with crazy consumption and smashing hotel rooms, have gotten in on the act. But no one has quite gone to the lengths that the Pleasant Revolution has.
The mission: a 5,000 mile Rock n’ Roll road tour – from North San Juan, CA through Baja, Mexico, and then over to the Yucatan of Mexico – all by bicycle. Instruments, equipment, gear, are all loaded onto Xtracycle Sport Utility Bicycles - a modification that extends the backend of the bike’s frame to enable the rig to haul up to 300 pounds of gear.
The Ginger Ninjas, fresh off of headlining New Belgium Brewery’s bicycle-themed Tour du Fat, hatched the bike-tour-cum-social-mission plan. San Francisco’s roving Bicycle Musical Festival inspired the initiative. Shake Your Peace, whose frontman, Gabe Dominguez, helped to create the tour's bike-powered PA system, didn’t need much convincing to come along. Cellojoe, a band fronted by Joey Chang, the "wildest beatboxin' cellist in the west," rounds out the eclectic package. And yes: He's biking deep into Mexico carrying a cello.
Video of Cellojoe, the mad bucket drummer in todos santos, baja, mexico:
Wow, not sure how I missed this one. Here's a mainstream ad, entitled "Alternative Fuel," that both carectomy patients and cheap beer drinkers can get behind - from Miller no less!
If even the macrobrewers are promoting a decrease in oil consumption and automobile usage, these ideas must truly be creeping into the mainstream.
Even more surprising to me than Miller's progressive stance in this ad (albeit in the guise of ultra-manhood) was my new discovery that renowned documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, etc.) directed this spot along with a slew of other Miller ads.
Walk Score is a website that rates a neighborhood’s walkability. Google Maps provides the backbone of the service; Walk Score maps out all of the amenities nearby and calculates a numerical score. An area’s Walk Score ranges from 0 (Driving Only, your life is miserable) to 100 (Walker’s Paradise, ditch the car!). The site is intended for real estate agents, home buyers, and renters to assess the foot-friendliness of a new home. Real estate agents are encouraged to post a property’s Walk Score on the listing’s website to flaunt what’s available nearby.
From Walk Score:
Picture a walkable neighborhood. You lose weight each time you walk to the grocery store. You stumble home from last call without waiting for a cab. You spend less money on your car—or you don't own a car. When you shop, you support your local economy. You talk to your neighbors.
There are a variety of factors that improve a neighborhood’s Walk Score. Proximity of stores, public space, schools, and work places boost the score. Other amenities, such as pedestrian-friendly design, a town- or city-center, and dense development also weigh into the equation.
Walking-friendly neighborhoods promote health in the individual, in family relationships, and via social interactions with the community. Sprawl kills.
What’s unique about Erick and Rachel Cave’s decision to dump their car, as featured in a recent O.C. Register article, is that it was born of simple economics. The couple was sick and tired of dumping endless money into their aging Volvo for repairs, insurance, and fuel.
Most stories I come across about people giving up their cars relate to a calculated decision based on environmentalism or health concerns. These carectomy patients are sick of dumping smog into the air, or they realize that if their transportation involved some exercise that they’d be happier and healthier – both wonderful reasons to reduce car travel.
Erick had proposed the idea a few weeks before the vehicle’s water pump crapped out. They were figuring out if they could manage the daily tasks of grocery shopping, work commuting, and socializing as well as how to deal with possible calamities, like if their daughter got sick, when the water pump’s demise pushed the couple over the edge. They dove into a car-free existence.
I love multi-tasking. I’m also drawn to the impractical but eye-catching - especially concerning bikes. Well, Philipp Drexler’s Bikefast fits that bill perfectly. It’s an on-the-go food tray that clamps onto your bicycle’s handlebars.
An awkwardly translated poem/product description from Produktdesign:
Overslept?
Sometimes I do. Now you got to be fast. Dressing, brushing teeth, packing your stuff and
go.
Barking stomach, what about breakfast?
Not with me! I've got a bikefast!
Jump on your bike and put your breakfast on the tray. Enjoy your meal and don't be
afraid, because the cup fits into the tray and the edges provides your food, falling down.
While I’m sure our “slow” fans (Slow Food, Slow Cities, and Slow Travel) would find the behavior of dining while riding appalling, the Bikefast looks like a fun piece of hardware. And, if you’re smart enough not to contribute to urban sprawl and to live and work close together, you can munch your toast and jam and sip your coffee as you leisurely spin to the office rather than cramming your donuts / frappuccinos as you sit in traffic.
The Charles River Conservancy has proposed making a portion of Boston's Storrow Drive car-free on Sunday mornings. Unfortunately this busy east-west boulevard paralleling the Charles River won’t become a permanent thoroughfare for bikes, skaters, joggers, and walkers: but it’s a step in the right direction.
The plan is to close the westbound section to car traffic for a five mile stretch from April to November between 7:30 and 10:30 a.m. Memorial Drive, a road which parallels the Charles on the Cambridge side, has a 2-mile stretch of road closed on Sundays from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. for the same season. Memorial’s successful car-free day has been going on for over 30 years. The combination would give Boston-area residents some nice options to get outside, and out of their cars.
"It's a fabulous idea that helps jumpstart Boston's effort to be a more livable city," said Steven E. Miller, cofounder and former executive director of Hub on Wheels, an annual bike event. "And the best part is it disrupts almost nothing - you're leaving the inbound lanes open, you're not stopping any cross-river traffic, and you're not stopping anybody from getting to hospitals or any businesses that are open early Sunday morning."
In a recent article, Eco Chick nailed one of the most common pitfalls of “environmentalists” – the practice of buying a greener product, assuming the purchase will help to solve global warming and our environmental predicament.
The debate is over how green a Smart Car really is once manufacturing and materials become part of the equation. It’s similar to the recent explosion of chatter over whether a Prius is actually more environmental than a Hummer when intensive elements like the hybrid’s batteries are included.
From Eco Chick:
Buying a Smart Car is kind of like putting a band aid on a giant gash- technically, at a minuscule level, it’s helping- but if your concern stops at your purchase, you’re still going to bleed to death… and worse, you may begin to confuse consumerism with activism. Often, trying to change the world by buying things isn’t really creating the change that companies convince us it is.
Of course if you’re going to drive a car, buy the most fuel efficient and least polluting model you can find, and cram as many passengers in there as possible. The end message is largely a redux of Carectomy’s central message: The greenest car is the one you don’t drive. Or better yet, the one you don’t buy.
Cars are the most inconvenient convenience we have. We're required to have them, but increasingly, we dislike them. At Carectomy, we're trying to figure out how to extract cars from people.
The operation is a little bit painful, but life afterward is much more awesome. If you're interested in carectomies, sign up to our newsletter, or subscribe our RSS feed below.
In a recent 