Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities
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Overview
"A growing number of Americans, mounted on their bicycles like some new kind of urban cowboy, are mixing it up with swift, two-ton motor vehicles as they create a new society on the streets. They're finding physical fitness, low-cost transportation, environmental purity-and, still all too often, Wind West risks of sudden death or injury." -from the IntroductionSynopsis
In a world of growing traffic congestion, expensive oil, and threats of cataclysmic climate change, a grassroots movement is carving out a niche for bicycles on the streets of urban cityscapes. In Pedaling Revolution, Jeff Mapes explores the growing urban bike culture that is changing the look and feel of cities across the U.S. He rides with bike 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. Mapes, a seasoned political journalist and long-time bike commuter, explores the growth of bicycle advocacy while covering such issues as the environmental, safety, and health aspects of bicycling for short urban trips. His rich cast of characters includes Noah Budnick, a young bicycle advocate in New York who almost died in a crash near the Brooklyn Bridge, and Congressman James Oberstar (D-MN), who took to bicycling in his fifties and helped unleash a new flood of federal money for bikeways. Chapters set in Chicago and Portland show how bicycling has became a political act, with seemingly dozens of subcultures, and how cyclists, with the encouragement of local officials, are seizing streets back from motorists. Pedaling Revolution is essential reading for the approximately one million people who regularly ride their bike to work or on errands, for anyone engaged in transportation, urban planning, sustainability, and public health and for drivers trying to understand why they re seeing so many cyclists. All will be interested in how urban bike activists are creating the future of how we travel and live in twenty-first-centurycities.
The New York Times - David Byrne
…for those of us who occasionally find ourselves on the defensive, Mapes provides names, dates, facts and figures. He details how cities from Amsterdam to Paris to New York to Davis, Calif., have developed policies encouraging cycling in recent decades, and how other towns are just beginning to make way for bikes. He lays out in an easily digestible way a fair amount of material on trip patterns, traffic safety and air pollution. He quotes the relevant studies and shows how those studies have been either heeded or ignored. All this information is great ammunition for those of us who would like to see American cities become more bike-friendly but may be a tough sell for the people on the fence
Editorials
David Byrne
…for those of us who occasionally find ourselves on the defensive, Mapes provides names, dates, facts and figures. He details how cities from Amsterdam to Paris to New York to Davis, Calif., have developed policies encouraging cycling in recent decades, and how other towns are just beginning to make way for bikes. He lays out in an easily digestible way a fair amount of material on trip patterns, traffic safety and air pollution. He quotes the relevant studies and shows how those studies have been either heeded or ignored. All this information is great ammunition for those of us who would like to see American cities become more bike-friendly but may be a tough sell for the people on the fence—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
In a time of climate change and car-worship, bicycle riding has become a political statement and a policy issue, with its own grassroots movement working "to seize at least a part of the street back from motorists." After a dry but brief history of the bicycle and its political significance (Susan B. Anthony said bicycles have "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world"), Mapes reports from the world capitals of bicycle culture. Mapes explores Amsterdam, marveling at the ease with which cyclists, motorists and pedestrians share the road. In San Francisco and New York City, he finds cycling groups at their most hip and radical, and joins them on a "Critical Mass" protest, in which cyclists take to the streets en masse to block traffic and take over rush hour streets; they've caused siginificant headaches for the NYPD, especially during the 2004 National Republican Convention. Focusing largely on the cyclists themselves, Mapes puts a passionate and pragmatic face to the "new urban bike movement" while connecting the dots between cycling culture and a host of quality of life issues.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Library Journal
As Americans consider how to solve the problems of global warming, traffic congestion, high gas prices, and health problems linked to physical inactivity, bicycles have received a lot of attention. Mapes (senior political reporter, the Oregonian) provides a deftly drawn portrait of contemporary bike culture and politics, together with a concise history of the bicycle's roots and its early influence on American society. He profiles bicycle use and transportation policy in Amsterdam, Portland, New York, and Davis, CA, to illustrate how regular bicycle riders, transportation officials, politicians, and grassroots activists have attempted to promote cycling as a way to calm traffic, boost inner-city development, aid public health, and decrease pollution, among other things. The book is readable and engaging, but perhaps the most compelling sections are the chapters on the safety and health aspects of bike riding and on efforts to encourage cycling among kids. Here Mapes weighs various methods of measuring traffic fatalities, considers the complex social effects of kids cycling to school, and details various theories about whether it is safer for commuters to ride in the street with cars or on separated bikeways. Highly recommended.
—Emily-Jane Dawson