Toban Black

[In this post I am following up the previous one, which also was about health and mobility issues]

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A patch that was made by Rachel, a local artist

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A Streetfilms video -
“Stop the pollution, pick a solution” (from July)

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“No Impact Man” makes some points that should be more obvious -

“If you walk instead of drive, you use more calories.

Walking and cycling is healthier for people than driving. Walking and cycling is also healthier for the planet than driving. Use cars less and you get to reduce global warming and be less fat. What an amazingly wonderful synergy.”

(Obviously he is referring to the Earth’s biosphere when he uses the word “planet.” The thing is, that “planet” language implies that people don’t live in the biosphere — which just isn’t the case.)

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A sign that I used to display on my bike during critical mass rallies

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Automobile branding

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Little drivers

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Andy Rowell on the Oil Change blog  -
“Big Oil Front Group Fights for Tar Sands” (in October)

Leo Hickman in The Guardian -
“CO2 is Green: The TV Advert Making Viewers Choke” (in September)

Anya Kamenetz on a Fast Company site -
“Head in the Tar Sands? The New York Times Runs Anti-Peak Oil Op-Ed” (in August)

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Coal industry PR

Amanda Terkel on Think Progress -
“‘Let’s Learn About Coal’: Industry Front Group Distributes Coloring Book On The ‘Advantages’ Of Coal”

Amanda Terkel on Think Progress -
“University Of Kentucky Approves New $7 Million Industry-Funded Dorm Named After ‘Coal’” (in late October)

“Sparki” on The Understory blog  -
“The Real FACES of Environmental Extremism” (in October)

Rob Smart on his blog -
“Food Marketing: Impacts on Consumer Choice”

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Jim Hightower on recently introduced “Smart Choice” labelling -

“The industry says that this seal of approval is all about helping today’s busy shoppers save time. No need to read those tedious lists of ingredients on the backs of food boxes, bottles, jars and cans, for the simple green checkmark is your one-glance reassurance that you’re making the smart nutritional choice.”

“You know, smart choices like Froot Loops, Fudgesicle bars and Frosted Flakes. Yes, all of these sugar-saturated concoctions and many more have received the industry’s good-for-you checkmark.”

“What we have here is yet another corporate PR scam. This supposedly independent nutritional certification program was created and is paid for by such purveyors of unhealthy sugars, fats, salt and chemical additives as Coca-Cola, ConAgra, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Kraft and PepsiCo. Each of them pay fees of up to $100,000 a year to get to use the Smart Choices label, and the fees are based on the total sales of products that bear the label.

This means that the more food items certified by the Smart Choices program, the more money it collects, which gives it an incentive to apply the label liberally. Thus, we get such absurdities as this: ‘light’ mayonnaise, which contains less fat than regular, has been granted the better-for-you check mark; but so has regular mayonnaise!

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In London, Ontario, Canada

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Blaine Harden (in this article — late last year) -

“In the United States, with the exception of a handful of cities … car-centric transportation policies and suburban sprawl continue to make bicycle commuting rare, arduous and relatively dangerous. Although millions of Americans recreate on bikes, they ride them for just 0.4 percent of their trips to work, according to the U.S. Census.”

“In recent months, bike shops across much of the United States have been flooded with new customers fed up with high gasoline prices.”

“Yet without major changes in U.S. transportation policy and infrastructure, an earnest desire to save money on gas is not enough to turn American bike owners into everyday cyclists who ride to work, according to [some] urban planners, transportation experts and bicycle company executives.”

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Some relevant statistics -
- According to a 2009 survey, 88% of Americans consider cars necessities (source)
- “Canadians and Americans use bikes for fewer than one in a hundred trips - although in Vancouver … it’s a bit higher, at about 2.3 per cent. Compare that to the 20 to 35 per cent of trips taken by bike in the European Union and 50 per cent in China. (Unfortunately, the trend is reversing in China as the country embraces car culture.)” (from a 2008 source)
- “Germans are 10 times more likely than Americans to ride a bike and three times less likely to get hurt while doing so.” (from the same 2008 article quoted above)

Of course, cycling is just one transportation alternative. Although I’m focusing on cycling in this post (as I have in other blog entries here, in the past), I also think that rail and bus systems are two more important alternatives to cars, trucks, and vans. I’m not going to try to summarize all of the constructive alternative transportation possibilities (right now, anyway); basically I’m just questioning the entrenchment of automobiles — while looking at cycling, as one positive alternative.

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(Photo by Matthew Blackett)

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David Chernushenko’s perspective on two European cities (specifically, Stockholm — “a northern city that has plenty of ups and downs, and cold”; and Freiburg — a city “bordering on Germany’s Black Forest mountains”) -

“What strikes the Canadian visitor is just how ordinary cycling seems to be in the lives of the locals. It is not a big deal to choose to ride somewhere. It does not involve special clothes, helmets, gloves and fancy bikes. Herds of children roll by on their way to school together. Couples head off to work. An older lady rides by with a load of groceries in the rear panniers, and a lapdog in the front basket.”

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Matthew Blackett on the Spacing Toronto blog -
“Bike traffic in Copenhagen”

A stop-action animation which Matthew made out of a collection of photos.

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Andreas Rohl (quoted in this article) -
“Riding a bike is like brushing your teeth in Copenhagen. It’s just a part of our everyday life”

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Aaron Naparstek (in this blog post) -

“In Copenhagen I saw people using cargo bikes to cart their kids all over the place. I rarely saw an adult wearing a helmet. It made an impression on me. This lack of protective headgear — or any special bike gear, for that matter — is one of the things that, to my eye, made biking in Copenhagen seem so remarkably convenient, casual, safe and part of regular daily life. It didn’t matter what you’re wearing. In Copenhagen you just hop on a bike and go.

The sheer sense of normalcy conveyed by streets filled with helmetless, kid-toting Danish cyclists seemed to me to do more to encourage bicycling and promote safety than any personal equipment or piece of infrastructure I’d ever seen back home. And the numbers back that up. Somehow, despite the lack of headgear, Danish, German and Dutch cyclist injury and fatality rates are a fraction of our own [in New York].

We know from the work of Peter Jacobsen that one of the most surefire ways to make urban bike transportation safer is to increase the number of cyclists on city streets. There are a lot of proven and effective ways to encourage more people to get on bikes. Compelling everyone to strap a styrofoam shell to their head is not one of them — at least not in the world cities with the safest streets for cyclists.”

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“The nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it”
- Barack Obama
(in his first address to a joint session of Congress)

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(Photo by “dno1967“)

A General Motors car dealership along the side of a road in Florida

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P. Sainath (in this article — late last year) -

“It’s unfair to call the US auto industry dinosaurs, as some now do. It’s certainly unfair to the dinosaurs. The ‘Terrible Lizards’ did not lay the basis for their own extinction or that of myriad other species. The original dinosaurs (who scientists now tell us were neither all that terrible nor lizards), were great examples of success and adaptation, good enough to rule the planet for 150 million years. The US auto industry is the opposite. It’s not just that the Terrible Metal Lizards opposed fuel efficiency standards. Of course, they did. They also promoted gas-guzzling SUVs as a lifestyle must. They cranked out cars many did not want to buy. They wielded heavy clout in Congress, and were able to sponge off public funds in the name of saving jobs as they have yet again. Having received $ 25 billion earlier, their hats are in their outstretched hands again.”

(As I said, that was written last year.)

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“Hot Wheels” and “Power Racer” cars

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“You can’t be sexy without consuming.”
- Julie (in this Feministe blog post)

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In London, England

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Three posts from Lisa on the Sociological Images blog -
- “The Economics of Beauty”
- “Sexualization and Adultification of Young Children of Color”
- “The Beauty Industry: Spending And Routines”

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(Photo by Orin Optiglot)

In Melbourne, Australia

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That image is an altered version of a poster for an event that was about global warming (more than other issues). That event was held in London, Ontario, Canada about two weeks ago.

(If you click the image up there you can look at a larger version of the altered poster.)  (Higher quality copies of the original poster are online here.)

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I’ve posted some photos from the event -
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobanblack/sets/…

Here are a couple of thumbnails  -

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On a suburban street in London, Ontario, Canada

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Ben Fried at Streetsblog -
“Streetfilms: New Yorkers Walk and Ride for Safer Streets”

Brad Aaron at Streetsblog -
“Memorializing Pedestrian Victims in Portugal”

Brad Aaron at Streetsblog -
“Safety in Numbers” (October, 2008)

Monika Warzecha at the Spacing Toronto blog -
“Think of the children” (November, 2008)
“In the district of Greenwich in London, England, a lot of the speed limit signs in residential areas have pictures beneath them drawn by children.” …

Ben Fried at Streetsblog -
“Horns, What Are They Good For?” (November, 2008)