Yellow Tent Adventures

Twenty-six seconds.

That was the elapsed time between the delivery of our “Dex” phone books and their arrival in our recycle bin.

It has been a couple of years since any phone book has made it into our house from the front porch. Pounds of paper wrapped in a plastic bag. I used to bring them in out of some bizarre sense of guilt. Trees had been sacrificed. Gas used to delivery them. All sorts of compounds went into the ink for the bright “the phone book’s here” colors. But there they would sit in my office, gathering dust for several months before they ended up in the recycle bin.

The time has come. The time for citizens to be given the option to “opt out” of receiving physical phone books. Or even better, an “opt in” policy.

Fortunately, that time maybe coming sooner than later. Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien has been pondering the value of physical phone books and their impact on our city.

Mike says in his post:
“So what do we do next? I’ve decided to take up a collection. If you receive unwanted phone books, I encourage you to bring them down to city hall and drop them off for my office, and I will store them here as we ponder what to do next. It would be even better if you attached a brief story about your unwanted phone books: Do you not use Yellow Pages at all? Do you use Yellow Pages, but feel you can go without multiple copies? Do you have a favorite brand? What steps have you taken previously to stop receiving phonebooks and did it work? Or maybe you feel the existing phonebook system works well for you? If you don’t want to lug your unwanted yellow pages into city hall but have a story to share, please post it here.

As we continue to formulate our policies on reducing waste, I look forward to hearing from you.”

Read Mike O’Brien’s whole post here.

So here is your chance to help stop the delivery truck-to-porch-to-recycle bin tango. Go to Mike’s office with your unwanted phone book or go to his page above and leave your comments.

Maybe if we can’t convince the industry to give us an “opt in” policy … maybe each residence can at least opt to have their phone books delivered directly into their recycle bins.

That tandem-thing we tried for a few years wasn’t quite our bag, but when you put 7 people on a bike, suddenly it’s a party.

Pure fun to pedal the Seattle Pride parade route and support two causes near and dear to my heart. It gave new meaning to the phrase “On your left!” and the idea of “Share the Road”.

Thanks to the Bicycle Alliance for inviting us to the party!

The Seattle BikeExpo was last weekend, and by the look of it, the bike scene is all about flashy sport gear, big organized rides, exotic tours, and power-sport-energy-nutrition-gonzo-bars. I nibbled a few bars, but I was really at the BikeExpo to attend a forum on “Bike Culture”. My general assumption was that the five panelists would talk about the integration of bikes into our modern, urban culture — the headway and the roadblocks.

The gender makeup of the panel, 4 men and 1 woman, was disheartening, even if it was an accurate representation of the cycling gender divide. It was an obvious example of how small of a voice women have in the bikiest of bike cultures — the Bike Expo. Looking around the Expo in general, you would get the impressing that to be a cyclists means suiting up in bright, shiny moisture-wicking, synthetic fibers, clicking your high-tech specialized shoes into your pedals, and riding your ultra-tricked out machine really, really fast. Sure, some cyclists do that—both men and women. Some ride for speed, endurance, endorphins and bragging rights, but that whole mentality is counter-productive to bringing bike culture into mainstream culture. What struck me about the BikeExpo in general was how little effort was made by vendors to show bikes as a way of life. Bikes were represented as a leisure/sport activity that is done on the side of life.

I’ve been thinking about how we get more people riding bikes as their everyday short-trip vehicle of choice and think that targeting women is a key ingredient, and the marketplace in America has neglected this segment of potential riders and shoppers. Fewer bikes are made to fit women’s bodies and the majority of the gear sold at bike shops (and BikeExpos) does not address the needs of running the quick and easy errand, but instead continues to focus on the sport rides in spandex. When the time comes that you walk out of your house and automatically ride your bike to the grocery store in your neighborhood instead of hopping into your car to get the quart of milk or bottle of wine for dinner, then we’ll have an integrated bike culture.

The panel discussion nibbled around the edges of this lack of women representation, but fortunately the lone women of the forum, Amy Walker, is the publisher and creative director of Momentum magazine. I can only imagine the charge I would get out of 5 Amy Walkers talking about how we live life — get to work, shop for new clothes, meet for lunch, run errands, get to community meetings, go to the dentist, arrive at a dinner party, take our kids to school, enjoy a date night, transport our pets to the vet — on two wheels.

“Momentum magazine provides urban cyclists with the inspiration, information and resources to fully enjoy their riding experience and connect with local and global cycling communities.” So says their web site.

Momentum is dazzling eye candy for women like me who want my bike to be an extension of who I am and how I choose to live, shop, work, and play. Momentum does for people on bikes what Dwell magazine does for lovers of modern, urban architecture and design. It makes me want. It makes me want to consume with its ads for beautiful city-geared bicycles, stylish bike bags, and life-style spotlights on people living — and making a living — as part of the two-wheeled culture. The fashion and stories show beautiful people living a dreamy life that I want to cultivate.

Which begs the question then, if BikeExpo had a large component of bikes and bicycle accessories for women living a cycling lifestyle, would more of those weekend trail riders want to integrate cycling into regular life? Could the bike-fashion-lifestyle trend grow and entice more women on bikes, which would lead to more awareness of bike riders, better safety measures, improved bike parking, calmer traffic, and ultimately utopia?

A girl can dream… And I dream of a day that my friend Michele wants to meet me at the bakery in Ballard on her bicycle. We will wear cute shoes.

I just received an invitation to a meet-up with the makers of Pandora (the Music Genome Project)  held at Seattle’s downtown public library, and it was all well and good until I got to this:

Parking: Pandora will provide complimentary parking for attendees at the Seattle Public Library parking garage on Spring Street between 4th and 5th Ave. The entrance is mid-block on the south side of Spring St.   Please bring the ticket from the machine to the meeting and you will be given a coupon that you can present to the parking lot attendant after the event.

Really? Pandora is going to pay people for driving to downtown Seattle? That just strikes me as an old, tired way of thinking which I didn’t expect from such an exciting new company and our über modern library.

So this was my response to their invitation:

Hi Tim,
It would be wonderfully  progressive if Pandora gave an incentive for arriving by public transportation, foot or bicycle instead of rewarding people for driving a vehicle to a downtown urban center. You want to change the way we listen to music. I want to change the way we live in our communities.

Does the Seattle Public Library and Pandora really want people to drive to the event? They offered drivers a carrot…

The gray days of winter are here. The kind of days that look like it’s perpetually 4pm even when it’s 11 in the morning. Saturated to the point the ground no longer drinks in the pissing rain, we are steeped in grayness. These are days that test the carfree.

But I’m itching to move, and with new walking shoes and an adequate rain jacket I go out to breath in fresh air, clear my head, and pump up my heart rate. And it’s working. I’m rewarded by flashes of color that brighten my day.

Wide load

It is amazing what you can strap on to the back rack of a bicycle.

Passengers exit light rail at the airport station

Life on Beacon Hill just got a little bit better yesterday. We can now ride light rail to the airport. Kat and I boarded the train around noon and ran into neighbor Andy Sodt and his son Lee. Twenty-two minutes from the Beacon Hill Station to the airport station. From there it is a 4-5 minute stroll to the terminals. The walkway that is separated from the parking garage leads you to the far north end of the terminals.

Andy and Lee check out the new ride

Kat strolls over highway 99 on the ped bridge

I’m sure there will be those who will complain about the walk. But it doesn’t appear to be that much longer than the walk from the bus station at the extreme south end of the terminals.

The pedestrian bridge from the station over Highway 99 to the kiss-and-ride parking lot is worth checking out for the fun piece of public art.

The ride back from the airport all the way to Westlake Station took 38 minutes.

The long wait is over … and now a new countdown begins. We look forward to riding light rail to Capitol Hill and the U-District in 2016.

This is part one of a project of photographing our small city garden for a year. Life without a car means living closer to home. At times we miss jumping into our old Subaru and heading out for a hike on the spur of the moment. But we’ve also loved the fact that we’ve learned to appreciate our neighborhood and our city at a slower pace. So rather than heading up to the Cascades or the Olympics for a photography tour, I stepped out my front door and into our garden, day after day. What a pleasure to visit such a small and beautiful world so intensely. On my knees or on my stomach, straining to get the tripod in just the right position.

I also hope that this exercise in extreme local travel will help make me a better world traveler. How often I’ve been thousands of miles away in an exotic location, only to have my eyes and ears not truly take it all in. Wasted opportunities passing me by.

The photos in the show were all taken in our small city garden with no flash or filters. Take some time to soak in the beauty, then go out and take a walk. Travel is a state of mind and is only a few steps away.

Portland Saturday Market

I love the soundtrack of a city. It is a hodgepodge of sounds. Sometimes harmonious. Sometimes just noise.
The above photo was taken at Portland’s Saturday Market. On the left is a street preacher. On the right is a street musician.

The musician

The preacher

The audio clip above was recorded and not mixed. Give a listen. At first I thought these two were at odds, trying to drown each other out. But the more I listened, the more they seemed to fit together–as if the musician was providing the urban soundtrack to the sermon. You also get an AMTRAK train and a street drummer across the street into the mix. Harmony? Noise? You decide. It is all part of the eclectic sounds of the city.

Beacon Hill sidewalk (Seattle, WA)

In the United States our city streets are so auto-oriented that we rarely think of what the alternative could be.  Consider the sidewalk. It is rarely continuous. If you are lucky enough to have sidewalks in your neighborhood, they are block-long segments, interrupted by the asphalt roadway. Every block, you cross through the the right of way of the autos to get to your next section of sidewalk. The law says that you, as the pedestrian, have the right of way. A car is supposed to yield to you. But everything about the physical environment says that the auto has the right of way. The road or street is a continuous flowing stream, while the sidewalk is chopped up into little segments.  That’s just the way sidewalks are.

Really?

Bogotá sidewalk (Bogotá, Colombia)

What if your city planners thought outside the “norm”? What if the sidewalk was a continuous stream, while the roadway was chopped into small segments? The above example is from Bogotá, Colombia. The pedestrian or cyclist continues through the intersection on a clear, smooth path—while the autos have to negotiate a ramp up and then down again. Visually and physically, it is the auto that is crossing the sidewalk, rather than the pedestrian crossing the street.

Believe me. It makes all the difference in the world. I’ll take the physical right of way over the legal right of way anytime.

Now THAT’S a sidewalk!