2020: A Year of Bicycling Backwards

The corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic has had many devastating impacts, from death or long-term health issues for too many, to economic hardship, as well as some supposedly “silver lining” effects. Among the latter, one was an observed trend in a number of places around the world of increased numbers of people bicycling. Violinist Christian Adam, …

Zipper-merging & traffic as a system

Northbound on US Interstate 75 near the Ohio-Michigan border last week, I came to a stretch of highway where road repairs necessitated closing all but the right lane. Cars in front began finding openings in the already slowing lane to my right, and all of a sudden I found myself alone with an empty lane …

Çatalhöyük & a line from Kōbō Abe

In the Neolithic town at Çatalhöyük in what is now south-central Turkey, "The houses were ... built so close to each other that it was impossible to pass between them. ... It's thought that the roofs of the houses provided the paths and sidewalks to traverse the community." This description by Prof. Steven Tuck in …

A Vienna bicyclist – epilogue

After 8 months of regular and sometimes intensive bicycling in and around Vienna - even through the cold months of winter - my number came up: I was hit at about 7:30 a.m. on April 28 by a car making a right turn on a red light (legal in Virginia). The rest of the details …

Reflections of a Vienna bicyclist

For various reasons, I've been doing a lot of bicycling over the last few months in Vienna. No, not that Vienna (dream on), rather the one in Virginia, not too far from Washington, D.C. This has me thinking about a number of things: transportation, energy, environment, sociology of bicycles, etc. In this season, bicyclists really …