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June 25, 2007

COMMENTARY: Bikes on the Rails
Making Room for Bikes on Trains (and Everywhere Else)

By Julia Hirsch & Jim Motavalli

Traveling across Connecticut during rush hour can be beastly. During a typical afternoon on Interstate 95, cars crowd the road, crawling along at 30 miles per hour or less. Drivers, often solo and on cell phones, dangerously crisscross the lanes and slam on brakes, just to nose a few inches ahead. All the while, they waste fuel and spew dirty emissions. Traffic is not only an inconvenience, but also a symptom of our fuel dependence and environmentally irresponsible behavior. But what are the alternatives?

Recently, a group of concerned citizens have been trying to ease the way for a bicycle-friendly form of train transportation. Biking to work can reduce one’s carbon footprint and help de-clutter the highways. And the distance one bikes to work can be extended when used in conjunction with a commuter rail service. Transportation Alternatives, a New York City-based nonprofit group working to promote bicycling, walking and public transit, advocates this combination, citing that it is often faster, cheaper and more environmentally sound than driving.

Bicycle commuters traveling on the Metro-North line between New York and its suburbs have been hampered by cumbersome regulations. In order to bring a bicycle on a Metro-North train, one must have a bicycle permit. This regulation alone discourages potential commuters. In addition to the permit regulation, bicycles are not allowed on trains during peak hours, obviously the most convenient for commuters en route to work. Finally, many of the cars on the Metro-North line have minimal bicycle parking and storage, limiting the number of bicycles allowed per car. All of these regulations work to discourage bicycle commuting.

At a recent Metro-North Commuter Council meeting, Richard Stowe and other members of the Connecticut Rail Commuter Council circulated petitions advocating the deregulation of bicycle travel on trains. Although most of the issues are still pending, there was discussion of removing the bicycle permit requirement. Another issue that the Council plans to address is the safety and convenience of bringing a bicycle on the Metro-North trains. Some argue that bringing bicycles on trains is dangerous to other passengers and may crowd and inconvenience an otherwise smooth commute. Stowe argues that designated bike parking would eliminate the safety concern and help integrate bikes into the daily commute. The Commuter Council’s strategy is to persuade Metro-North to include bicycle parking on its new train cars (which are slated to begin service in 2009).

America by Bike

The movement to promote bicycle commuting in conjunction with train travel is growing all over the nation, but fighting for bicycles remains a guerrilla action in car-crazy America. While the U.S. has the highest per-capita bicycle ownership in the world, according to the League of American Bicyclists, automobiles are used for more than 95 percent of our trips. Only three million Americans say they ride their bikes “frequently,” meaning more than 14 or 15 times a year. According to Alex Campbell, a spokesperson for leading electric bicycle maker Zap, as many as 120 million bikes sit forlornly on flat tires, waiting for riders. In the U.S., bicycles are overwhelmingly used for recreation and exercise, not for commuting.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition fights for urban pathways, encouraging traffic-calming policies and lobbying on behalf of bike-friendly legislation. “Providing safe streets for bicyclists is like making a grant of $420 (a year’s worth of bus passes) to thousands of people with limited incomes,” the group proclaims. “That would improve the quality of life for the one-third of San Francisco households who do not have access to a car.”

San Francisco is also home to a monthly event called Critical Mass, in which thousands of bicycle riders take to the streets, many of them in colorful costumes. “We wanted to celebrate the bike and dominate the streets for a change,” said one spokesman for the loosely organized group. Police broke up a 5,000-strong Critical Mass ride in 1997, and arrested 100 people for blocking traffic, but there were ultimately no convictions. In 1999, state judge Sue Kaplan ruled that the arrests were illegal, and Critical Mass has operated without harassment since then.

People are finding innovative uses for bicycles. Joan Stein and Jim Gregory own and operate the pedal-power Fresh Aire Delivery Service in the small town of Ames, Iowa. Fresh Aire has transported furniture, lumber, even a children’s playhouse. No less than two bicycle delivery services were launched in Berkeley, California, run by Pedal Express and Berkeley Youth Alternatives.

The Colorado-based Bicycle Transportation Systems (BTS) has an idea that makes a crazy kind of sense, combining pedal power with an innovation in mass transit. It’s a kind of two-way tunnel in which bike riders are pushed along by a constantly moving column of air, reducing air resistance and allowing speeds of up to 25 miles per hour. The company claims its system is 90 percent more efficient than normal cycling, and bikers can travel six miles with the energy it would otherwise take to travel one. The system can reportedly be used to move freight as well as bike riders, but it would require an expensive and fully enclosed dedicated bikeway. Only a city intensely dedicated to bicycle transportation would even think of building such a corridor.

Bike racks are sprouting up all over. According to the International Bicycle Fund, 3,000 have recently been installed in Santa Cruz, California, and 1,600 in Seattle. In Portland, I saw some ingenious bike lockers, which make the enclosed bicycle nearly impossible to steal.

Perhaps it says something about America that our anti-car campaigns are couched in the positive rhetoric of encouraging the open-air sport of bicycling. Like motherhood, bicycling is very hard to oppose, even though our traffic regulations discriminate regularly. The rock band bicycle (with a small “b”), led by bike activist Kurt Liebert, toured from Portland, Maine, to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2000 entirely by bike.

If we want to tackle our fuel dependence and carbon emissions head-on, we need to encourage the responsible use of public transportation on a national scale. Back in Connecticut, Stowe spoke of a movement to convince Congress to implement a high-speed rail service from coast to coast, as well as another line stretching across the Southern regions of the U.S.

If this is achieved, shorter high-speed rail corridors and commuter rail lines would easily feed off these larger lines, making train travel more accessible and efficient across the nation. Stowe predicts that this will have a positive effect on the fuel dependence and energy waste engendered by suburban sprawl.

So where do we go from here? In terms of the local struggle, Stowe suggests contacting New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell to advocate the removal of bicycle permits and restrictions during peak hours. Reducing our carbon footprint can start at the individual level, but in the end, it requires a greater structural change. A solution may be found in improving access for both bicycle commuters and their non-biking counterparts on the railways.

CONTACT: National Association of Railroad Passengers

JULIA HIRSCH is a student at Vassar College and an intern at E.
JIM MOTAVALLI is the editor of E.

Add to extra day to Memorial Day weekend to honor Rachel Carson

New Canaan Advertiser, Thursday, May 24, 2007 Page 7A

Ecoman
A holiday for Rachel Carson

By Richard M. Stowe

Born on May 27, 1907 to a nature-loving mom, the youngest of three children, in a simple, quaint farmhouse near Springdale, Pennsylvania, 15 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, an area now covered by modern artifacts such as the Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills and Pennsylvania Turnpike, Rachel Carson, in her 56 years, grew to be one of the America’s most influential citizens.

Ms. Carson attended what is today known as Chatham University, just twelve miles from her birthplace. She studied English, Creative Writing, majored in Marine Biology and graduated magna cum laude in 1929. On scholarship at John Hopkins University, she received a Masters of Arts in Zoology in 1932.

Hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to write radio script, Ms. Carson became the first woman to take and pass the civil service test and second hired by the Bureau of Fisheries for a full time professional position. In 1936, Rachel Carson was a junior aquatic biologist; in 1949 she rose to Editor-in-Chief for all U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service publications.

In 1951, Oxford University Press published Ms. Carson’s first commercially successful book. The Sea Around Us remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 86 weeks, won the 1952 National Book Award and was subsequently adapted as an hour-long Oscar-winning documentary film.

With newfound financial security, Rachel Carson became a full time writer. She summered north of Portland, Maine at a seaside cottage on Southport Island, whose beach and tide pools became the subject of her 1955 book, The Edge of the Sea.

But it was Silent Spring, published in 1962, in which Rachel Louise Carson summoned the public’s conscience in a way that no American female author has done since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published one hundred ten years earlier.

In January 1958, the Boston Herald published a letter by Olga Owens Huckins, in which she expressed outrage at the aerial spraying of pesticides over her family’s private two-acre bird sanctuary in Duxbury, Massachusetts in 1957. The goal of spraying was to kill mosquitoes; the lethal result - many dead birds. Ms. Carson attributes that letter, forwarded to her by Ms. Huckins, as her deciding factor to write Silent Spring.

It was while writing Silent Spring, a book that criticizes the reckless application of pesticides, that Ms. Carson was diagnosed with breast cancer.

In a National Women’s Press Club speech on December 4, 1962 Rachel Carson glowed, “Early in the summer as soon as the first installment of the book appeared in the New Yorker, public reaction to Silent Spring was reflected first in a tidal wave of letters - letters to Congressman, letters to government agencies, to newspapers…”

But Ms. Carson also acknowledged pesticide industry and trade association-sponsored “masters of invective” who personally attacked her and her work in an “unquiet autumn” public relations strategy to “designed to protect and repair the somewhat battered image of pesticides.”

The language in Silent Spring was prophetic; read the opening paragraph of the closing chapter.

Whether you reflect on the emerging pollinator crisis or challenge of climate change, her words are timeless.

In December 2006, a list of the 100 most influential Americans of all time appeared in the Atlantic Magazine story entitled They Made America. A panel of ten eminent historians ranked Rachel Carson number 39. Among women, only Elizabeth Cady Stanton (30) and Susan B. Anthony (38) placed higher.

The premiere Environmental Protection Agency conference room is the Rachel Carson Room, but she deserves greater recognition.

As the centennial of her birth passes on Sunday, it’s time for Congress to dedicate her birthday as a Federal holiday, a first for a woman or an environmentalist. Her birthday would be celebrated on either Friday or Tuesday of Memorial Day weekend creating the nation’s first four-day holiday weekend.