Since we adopted EcoBucks in February 2008, we've been tracking the "mode shift" among the 40+ employees who work in the Columbus office of Calfee, Halter & Griswold, a 100+ year-old, Cleveland-based law firm. "Mode shift" is the term transportation engineers use to describe the shift from automobiles to bikes, walking and mass transit for urban transportation needs.

To put things into perspective, consider these stats: Columbus, like other auto-centric U.S. cities, has a meager 1% mode shift. Portland is tops in the U.S. with 10+%. Many European cities have 20-50% mode shift. Congressman Blumauer, who heads the U.S. Congressional Transportation Committee, aspires for the entire U.S. to achieve 10% mode shift because this would eliminate the need to import ANY foreign oil.

Drum roll, please................................................since adopting EcoBucks 16 months ago, our office has achieved 15-20% mode shift every month. Last month we hit 20% for the first time. We're doing it with a combination of alternate transportation modes: cycling, walking, taking the bus and carpooling. I'm very proud of us.

Several other CBus companies have adopted EcoBucks, including Edison Welding Institute, Manley, Deas & Kochalski, and TechColumbus. I'd be interested to know whether they're experiencing significant mode shift, too.

Let me know if you're interested in EcoBucks......I'd be happy to send the materials to you. It's really easy and doesnt' cost that much ($1 per day for each day an employee uses alternate transportation to get to work............it costs us approx $1,500 per year for our office.) Even if you don't have EcoBucks, please consider using "people powered" transportation to get to work or to make those short urban automobile trips (42% of the auto trips in the U.S. are 2 miles or less and 85% are 5 miles or less). You and our environment will be healthier for it! 

What do you get when you put the high tech community (aka peanut butter) together with the twowheeling community (aka chocolate)?  Answer: Reese Cups!

No, not really.............you get the first annual Hi Lo event. The weekend event starts next Saturday June 27 at 10 am from the parking lot of Progressive Medical in Westerville, where 50+ cyclists will ride 50 miles through the scenic Ohio countryside to the Morgan Farm in Knox County where we'll have a massive cookout, music (recorded and, we hope, live and even an open mic), and lots of adult beverages (courtesy of Steve Clark, the "beer meister" and Dale Crandell, the wine--er). Folks are welcome to bring their tents, camp out and join us for the 50 mile ride home on Sunday morning. If you only wish to ride one-way, there'll be plenty of vehicles to hitch a ride back to town Saturday night or Sunday morning. 

If you're not a cyclist, you're  welcome to drive your "box" to the farm to join us (but plan to be converted). Just contact me at dmorgan@calfee.com and I'll send you driving directions. (But, come to thinkg of it, if you're not a cyclist, what the hell are you doing on this blog?)

The motivation for Hi Lo is our hope and vision that in the not too distant future CBus will be the city with the most high tech jobs in the U.S., but we'll be using low tech transportation, i.e. bicycles, to get to them! We think this is a great vision for our community and we want to start to spread this vision at Hi Lo.

Please go to http://hilobikeride.wordpress.com/ to sign up for Hi Lo. This event is weather permitting. If per chance we get rained out on the 27th, we've reserved July 11 as the rain date.

We hope to see you at Hi Lo 2009!

Click on the comic strip below to see it larger. Or just move closer.

In either case, it's a wonderful strip this week from Stephan Pastis and his Pearls Before Swine.

Consider Biking, our local bike advocacy non-profit, is sponsoring a 25-mile bike ride this coming Saturday, May 2, to publicize and show support for the upcoming Metro Parks levy which is coming to a ballot near you!

We'll meet and leave from the Franklin Park Conservatory and ride a 25-mile loop to one of the local Metro Parks. Franklin Park Conservatory has generously offered to provide end of ride "facilities", i.e. a place for us to gather and a cash bar. If you join us, I promise to buy you a drink!

The biking community is supporting the levy because if it passes, Metro Parks will assume responsibilty for repair and maintenance of the city's bike paths. This is important given the severe City budget cuts that will make it difficult for City Recreation and Parks to keep this up.

You can obtain more information about the ride at www.considerbiking.org. Hope you can join us!

I'm sure many of you are familiar with "The Last Lecture", the absolutely amazing lecture delivered by Randy Pausch, the  46 year-old Carnegie Mellon professor, to 400+ students, faculty, friends and family after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and given 3-6 months to live. He died months thereafter leaving his wife, Jai, and 3 young children under the age of 6. You can watch Randy's last lecture at www.thelastlecture.com. It's been viewed millions of times.....it's uplifting, not maudlin, but have plenty of kleenex handy when you watch it.

The last lecture was also released in book form which I read over this past weekend. I intend to buy a copy for each of our 3 children for Christmas this year. Randy's last lecture is the best roadmap for navigating through life and making a difference, i.e. helping others achieve their childhood dreams, that I have ever come across.

Randy composed his last lecture on 53 long bike trips, by speaking to his co-author, Jeff Zaslow, over his cell phone headset. He rode his bike every day around his neighborhood, which was crucial for his health.

One chapter, entitled "Lucy, I'm home," bears on a topic near and dear to this twowheeler's heart--the appropriate role of "boxes" (aka cars) in our lives. One day while Randy was at work, Jai backs the car out of the garage and crashes into their mini-van. Both cars are dented and scratched, but still operational. She worries all afternoon about telling Randy about the accident and decides to make a really nice, romantic dinner to cushion the blow. When she breaks the news to him over dinner, he doesn't flinch. "Don't you want to go look at the damage," she asks. "No, let's just finish dinner," he replied. She offered to get repair estimates the next morning, but Randy replied that wouldn't be necessary.

He explained: "The dents would be OK. My parents raised me to recognize that automobiles are there to get you from point A to point B. They are utilitarian devices, not expressions of social status. And so I told Jai that we didn't need to do cosmetic repairs. We'd just live with the dents and gashes."

Jai was a bit shocked. "We're really going to drive around in dented cars?" she asked.

"My belief is that you don't repair things if they still do what they're supposed to do. The cars still work. Let's just drive 'em. OK, maybe this makes me quirky. But if your trashcan or wheelbarrow has a dent in it, you don't buy a new one. Maybe that's because we don't use trashcans and wheelbarrows to communicate our social status or identity to others."

I never met Randy Pausch, but I know him.  

If we can imagine it, it can be so.

Credit:
Sent to Two Wheeling by Artie Isaac who received CopenhagenCycleChic.com from Carol Harmon at The Columbus Foundation.

One of the joys of biking everywhere is that I get to really see and experience my community.....I mean REALLY experience it........in a way that's not possible when you're in a "box." It's hard to "connect" to your community when you're travelling 55-65 mph on a limited access highway and listening to the radio or talking on a cell phone.

When you're cycling 18-20 mph along High Street and pass folks standing at a bus stop, you can almost reach out and touch them. You can look in their eyes and sense a connection......through a smile, a nod, or just the look in their eyes.

Sometimes the experience makes your heart hurt.......like last Wednesday.

I had a 7 am meeting in the Ohio State University area with my friends, Catherine and Austin, to discuss our upcoming "Bike to Work Week" (if you haven't signed up, go immediately to www.b2ww.org) and other matters concerning the CBus biking community. Catherine heads up the University Area Enrichment Association that works on multiple fronts to make life easier for youth, seniors and families living in the University district, an area that behind the facade of Ohio State University sports an 80%+ poverty rate. 

Catherine has recently been advocating for the implementation of traffic "calming" measures along Summit Avenue to make it safer for children, seniors and cyclists who live, walk and ride in the neighborhood. Summit is a main traffic artery for folks that live in Clintonville and north Columbus to get downtown to work. The posted speed limit is 35, but autos generally seem to go much faster. Several pedestrians and cyclists have been struck by cars and even killed in this area. Catherine has made some progress, but it seems that traffic engineers may be more concerned about moving traffic through this neigborhood and accepting the collateral damage as just another "cost of doing business." (my words, not theirs......Columbus traffic engineers are good folks generally sensitive to biking and community concerns)

From my meeting, I headed to the Ohio State Bar Association in Grandview for a seminar that concluded at 3 pm. I headed for home along Northwest Blvd through Upper Arlington, just as school was letting out. Northwest Blvd is a main traffic artery through Arlington, but doesn't have near the volume of Summit Avenue. Nevertheless it has many more stoplights and I got caught at two of them along a 4 block stretch near an elementary school. The lights remained red for what seemed an inordinate length of time while the school children crossed the street, assisted by crossing guards. Then I noticed something I had never noticed before......the stoplights were red and halting traffic coming from all four directions. Perhaps this is now the law everywhere, but I had not experienced it before. It makes good sense as it stops all cars in the vicinity of where children are crossing the street. Is this true everywhere or just in Upper Arlington? Perhaps someone could enlighten me?

In any event, children in the University district and throughout our community deserve to be protected in accordance with the type of "best practices" being used in Upper Arlington. The TwoWheeling community is hoping to get more children walking and biking to school to help combat the childhood obesity epidemic raging in our community and we need to make sure that they have very safe routes to do this.     

Beth and I heard the former surgeon general, Richard Carmona, speak last week and he was something else. Pulling no punches, he admitted that the obesity epidemic has ALREADY caused the failure of the U.S. "sick" care system (he said we kid ourselves into thinking we have a "health" care system......it's a "sick" care system).

Dr. Carmona is an amazing individual.........the son of Latino immigrants, he was homeless as a child and had to scrape and claw his way through school, and then had multiple careers as a nurse, EMT, etc. before he got to medical school and became a surgeon in the army.

He explained that certain populations in the U.S. are particularly at risk to obesity--I was aware of the risk to the African American and Latino populations. But the most at risk population is our native Americans. Dr. Carmona explained that when we (the white Europeans) arrived in this country 200+ years ago, the native Americans were mostly nomadic and had a life expectancy into their 70's. After dispossessing them of their lands and forcing them into a sedentary lifestyle on unproductive land (with the aid of alchohol), the obesity rate among native Americans is currently 36-40% and their life expectancy has dropped into the 50's, i.e. 20 years LESS than it was 200+ years ago!!!!

Please support national "Bike to Work Week" during the week of May 11 through May 15. You can find more information at www.b2ww.org and at www.considerbiking.org.

We are making lots of twowheeling progress in CBus these days, but to be honest I'm tired and feeling a little down. We're doing it mostly grassroots and holding it together with duct tape and bailing wire. Beth and I ordered takeout Chinese tonight and when I opened my fortune cookie, here's what I got:

        "Commitment is the stuff character is made of the power to change the face of things."

Hmmmmm,suddenly....................I don't feel so tired. 

Last week, the Columbus Partnership, a consortium of the city's corporate executives, gave CBus a road map to improvement. The "Benchmarking Central Ohio 2009" report is the third annual survey comparing Columbus and central Ohio to 15 other metropolitan areas in more than 60 categories. The 15 comparison cities include Cleveland, Cincinnati and other similar Midwestern cities and also cities Columbus should aspire to rival, including Austin, Raleigh and San Diego.

As you might expect, Columbus ranks well in certain categories (logistics, unemployment rate, libraries and volunteerism) and not so well in others (poverty rate, the arts, small business startups and venture capital).

And in one category, germane to this blog, Columbus finished DEAD LAST.............obesity. That's right, Columbus has the highest obesity rate of the 16 cities surveyed. About 30% of adults in central Ohio are obese, up from 25.6% just two years ago. After all the exercise, dieting, wellness programs,  New Year's resolutions and gimmics like "The Biggest Loser," we keep going the wrong way fast.

This trend is disturbing on multiple levels. It will drive up local health care costs and drive away businesses. Given a choice, what company wants to locate in a city where its employees and their children have a 1 in 3 chance of becoming obese? We need to reverse this trend NOW!

Us twowheelers are convinced that alternate transportation is a big part of the solution. In cities around the world and the U.S. where citizens use alternate transportation, they are not obese. It's that plain and simple.  And alternate transportation has other significant benefits to the community and the environment.

Kudos to the Columbus Partnership for commissioning this report which tells the community what it may not like, but desperately needs, to hear. Hopefully, the significant efforts underway to promote alternate transportation in CBus will get traction and move the dial in the 2011 benchmarking report. 

As we continue to pioneer and promote twowheeling as a healthier, cost-saving alternative to driving a "box" (aka automobile) to get around CBus, we are often confronted with the question, "But biking is SO MUCH MORE DANGEROUS, isn't it?"

Well............is it?

Of course, any fool knows that if you're traveling down the street on a bike and get hit by a car, you will likely suffer more damage and injury than if you had been wrapped in 3,000 pounds of metal. But that doesn't really answer the question.

According to a survey of 7,596 cyclists by www.bicyclinglife.com, roughly half of those surveyed consider biking to be as safe OR SAFER than driving and only 13% consider biking to be "much less safe than driving."  You can see the results of this very detailed survey at http://www.daclarke.org/AltTrans/BikeSurvey/Results.html.

And that's not the whole story, either. As I ride down High Street and observe hundreds and thousands of people in their boxes, I notice that most of them are overweight or obese......and many of them are smoking cigarettes. They're not getting any exercise in those boxes and they often appear anxious and stressed (I've witnessed this erupt into road rage on more than one occasion).......I rarely see them smile. So I wonder, in the larger sense, which form of transportation is "MORE DANGEROUS?" 

Of course, efforts are well underway to make twowheeling in CBus even safer. The Bicentennial Bikeway Plan will add hundreds of miles of bike paths, bike lanes, shared lanes, etc. Education efforts, for both cyclists and motorists, will also help. And the more bikes we get on the road, the safer it is.

So come on, let's go! Help us transform CBus into the twowheeling capital of the U.S.!

P.S. You can also help the cause by taking the Bicycling Life survey at http://www.bicyclelife.com/survey.htm.