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RNC: View from the bike lane (Part I)

Yesterday, I devoted my day to checking out what the RNC means for the Twin Cities. As an admitted urban cycling fan, I wanted to look out over handlebars to see how the freewheel!n borrow-a-bike-free program is working - and to see if I, or delegates, or anyone else could really use it as a way to get around Minneapolis and Saint Paul. As the Freewheel!n website says, “why wouldn’t you choose to pedal your way the 4 or 6 blocks from your hotel to the convention center, or from the light rail stop to your office or, well, anywhere else?”

My plan was to try out bikes at stations in both Minneapolis and Saint Paul to see whether bikes were being used, and just how user-friendly the program is.

I had high hopes and significant concerns about whether or not this pilot would prove as successful as in Denver.

My hope comes from seeing so many cyclists in cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam wearing suits, getting to work, hauling kids, and grocery shopping. The program sounds really cool. Freewheel!n provides bikes, helmets, locks, directions, towels, water, and anything else you might need for your ride - all for free. Plus, Humana is donating $10 to Gustav relief for every mile ridden during the RNC.

My concerns arose the instant I saw the map of where the stations were going to be located.

In Minneapolis, the locations seemed reasonable: a couple near hotels and the convention center (not the one hosting the RNC), and a couple on the edge of downtown in beautiful parks. They had the potential to get people to useful places as well as recreational ones.

Bikes awaiting riders at the Loring Park (Minneapolis) bike station location. Photo credit: Janne K. Flisrand

But in Saint Paul, none of the stations is near anything useful. All are in beautiful locations along the Mississippi River — at the bottom of a the steep bluff. Downtown Saint Paul and all the RNC activities are at the top of the bluff. One station is directly below the convention center hosting the RNC but cut off by a security perimeter inside which bikes are banned, a second is several miles west of downtown, the third is to the east across a former industrial zone and a couple of highways. Why was no station put in downtown proper?

The downtown bike station location, a bluff’s-height below downtown Saint Paul. Photo credit: Janne K. Flisrand

Given the challenge of events being located in two downtowns 12 miles apart, and this odd choice of locations, I wondered: was there any hope the Twin Cities could match the 5,555 rides taken during the DNC in Denver? Or match the approximately 26,000 miles a freewheel!n volunteer said were ridden?

Would it be possible to navigate a mostly-closed downtown Saint Paul? Would I get to see any RNC Welcoming Committee activities?

Stay tuned for the next post.

• September 2, 2008 by Janne K. Flisrand
• 0 comments

• tags: bicycles RNC

RNC: View from the bike lane (Part II)

Monday, I started out at 9 am to see how the freewheel!n borrow-a-bike-free program was working.

I visited three stations, two in parks ringing downtown Minneapolis, and one down the bluff from downtown Saint Paul (and the RNC).

My hunch about less-than-ideal bike station locations was on target. Two stations I visited were quiet, and the 8-10 volunteers all wanted something to do. Highlighting the dearth of riders, as I left the first station, a Humana-hired film crew asked whether I’d ride around the park while his crew took video. He didn’t want to wait for new riders to come along! I saw no one visibly RNC-related at any of the three stations. In Saint Paul, the few other cyclists I saw seemed to be leaving the protest.

The stations ran smoothly. The volunteers were well-trained, and 15 minutes after arriving, I was on a bike, borrowed lock in the bag, heading out on an errand. Easy.

It wasn’t perfect, though.

The check-out equipment wasn’t as slick as on the freewheel!n website - staff struggled to get the bar code readers to work (but thankfully didn’t insist on giving me a pink bike.)

One of the three bikes I rode didn’t have a quick-release seat, and the volunteers lacked the tool to adjust it. Nor could they tell me how to get around or even to downtown Saint Paul on the bike, given the blocked-off streets. When I asked, they suggested I ride along the Mississippi (so much for Freewheel!n’s suggestion to “pedal your way the 4 or 6 blocks from your hotel to the convention center, or from the light rail stop to your office or, well, anywhere else.”)

Security perimeter on Chestnut Ave., downtown Saint Paul. Photo credit: Janne K. Flisrand

I give the bikes a mixed review. On a 90 degree day, somewhere to keep a water bottle would have helped. Of the three bikes I rode, only one had a properly functioning computer. (One didn’t work at all, and a second was upside down and read 40% too fast - good for Gustav relief!) Two of the bikes were nice to ride, but one was hard work to pedal. If the hope is to get people who haven’t ridden in years to ride more, people who try out a bike and think, “this is hard work!” don’t help the cause: they’re gonna jump right back in their cars.

The problems could be easily fixed - and since some of the bikes will be left behind, I hope they will be. Relocate stations, spend a little time making sure everything works, get freewheel!n kiosks instead of volunteers, and wait for the RNC to pass.

Is this effort greening the RNC or greenwashing it? Greenwashing, as I see no evidence of RNC attendee use. But, with some luck it will green the Twin Cities.

As for my other questions, the entire excursion gave me an opportunity to roll and thread my way through standstill traffic in downtown Saint Paul, with an excellent view of two large crews of riot police, smashed plate glass windows, police officers trying to get a massive cement trash bin out of the road, and people laying down in front of a bus and being pepper-sprayed by police.

• September 3, 2008 by Janne K. Flisrand
• 1 comments

• tags: bicycles RNC

The case of Trek: Can an ambitious green initiative still be greenwash?

Yesterday, I got into a bit of a debate with my boyfriend. He was showing me a cool site, 1 World 2 Wheels, a Trek initiative with a goal of increasing cycling five-fold by 2017. They’re supporting advocacy organizations who promote bicycle-friendly communities in the US. We both love this program!

But - here’s the debate. I called it greenwash. He disagreed.

I think Trek is trying to get green cred by tagging a great project with a vague environmental theme (1 World) to throw a green shadow on the entire company. The initiative is great, but supporting an environmentally great initiative does not make for a green company.

Hoping to move the discussion along, I went back to the Six Sins of Greenwashing report from TerraChoice for a definition.

Trek is asserting biking is the answer to many environmental and societal problems, but they aren’t making specific claims - what I call the “green shadow.” It looks like The Sin of Irrelevance to me. Because biking is green doesn’t mean Trek is green.

For Trek to be an environmentally-friendly company, they’d need to examine their production practices, their printing, the buildings they use, how they transport product, human resources policies, sourcing policies - the whole CSR package.

The question goes right back to what’s Trek’s intent: Are they trying to give the entire company a green sheen with 1 World 2 Wheels? Or using savvy promoting to increase demand for their product and brand awareness?

My gut says the first, my boyfriend’s says the second. Got a tie-breaking opinion?

• September 19, 2008 by Janne K. Flisrand
• 8 comments

• tags: sin of irrelevance Trek

Even a financial crisis has a green lining

Wow, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch just fell in the blink of an eye. And other institutions may yet fall in the months ahead.

How can we climb out of this financial crisis — the worst since the Great Depression? While I can’t claim to know the whole recipe, I do believe I know one of the crucial ingredients: energy efficiency with a dash of renewables.

In case you haven’t noticed, Americans’ super-sized personal debt didn’t catch up with us until energy prices skyrocketed. Over the last few years, oil’s price has quadrupled, coal has tripled, and natural gas nearly doubled. We now pay more than a trillion dollars for energy every year, with hundreds of billions in new expenses due to these higher prices. It was hard for many Americans to keep up with their mortgage payment after gas bills went through the roof. While our struggling economy has helped to lower prices from extreme highs this past summer by lowering demand, supply constraints worldwide and robust demand from emerging economies dim hopes that energy costs will fall much further. And the fact is, if we try to emerge from the current economic downturn with a business-as-usual energy approach, oil and other fossil fuel prices may knock us back into the recession ditch as they rise along with our demand.

However, if we employ a sustainable energy revolution that creates green-collar jobs, then our economy can grow unrestrained by the physical limits of oil extraction and we can regain global leadership in the marketplace. These green-collar jobs can retrofit old inefficient buildings and design and manufacture state-of-the-art appliances, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels. This new growth would allow us to lower energy costs and carbon emissions at the same time as we increase our GDP. Such products have a reliable and growing base of demand worldwide as other countries share the goal of reducing their energy bills and climate pollution.

It’s clear that we can’t compete with China’s labor costs. But we can compete with their energy costs as long as we mobilize public and private innovation toward a sustainable energy revolution. The most effective first step is to become the leader in efficiency — something that Big Three automakers ignored far too long at their own peril.

But the story isn’t over for the Big Three and the rest of our country. We are reducing our oil consumption in 2008 and wind power is growing faster than anyone had imagined to now surpass oil as a source of domestic electricity. We can rise like a phoenix out of these financial ashes and be a model nation that inspires the world again. Rather than “drill, baby, drill,” a sustainable energy transformation based on efficiency and integrating our tremendous wind and solar resources can bring an end to the recession ahead. I hope the crash of such large institutions will help people wake up to the new reality: green is the only way to grow long-term.

• September 15, 2008 by Dennis Markatos
• 3 comments

• tags: green energy Lehman Brothers Merrill Lynch oil solar wind

Just like Wall St., the Earth is overdrawn (two weeks ahead of '07)

Today is Earth Overshoot Day. I’m not certain about the marketing savvy of this phrase as my immediate association is playing basketball at the YMCA and overshooting the basket and hitting some unwitting guy in the head. Perhaps Secretary Paulson will recommend a bailout of the planet, but hurry up because we only have a week to decide.

Just like AIG and a collection of Wall Street luminaries, we, as planetary citizens, are 140% overdrawn today. This means that if we measured all the resources that Mother Earth starts to produce on January 1st— such as oxygen, food, medicine, drinking water, forests, mineral ores, energy resources and acceptable climate,— well before Halloween is upon us, we are overdrawn, using more resources than have been generated. But “resources” is a very bad word — because its abstraction masks the fact that they are human lifelines.

The Earth Overshoot site is replete with resources and an astounding array of over 75 organizations as partners in its pursuit to measure our ecological footprints and collectively reduce them. It’s hard not to notice that there is not one business organization on that list. Go figure.

Three things come to mind when reading this: all are inextricably tied to almost every system problem I can think of:

1) Most of us have no direct feedback loops: If we directly, immediately and rudely experienced the outcomes of what it means to destroy or contaminate ecosystem gifts (water, food, air, medicines, livable climate) we would quickly correct our behavior. You don’t see Mountain Apes paving over their food supply!

2) Businesses and NGOs are siloed: Despite our best efforts at corporate social responsibility and stakeholder relations, we still tend to plan, execute and gossip in our own silos. This means our objectives are misaligned and we continue to pretend what we do at work doesn’t affect us at home, including our own children’s health and long-term future.

3) Marketing failure: As a behavioral junkie, I know that doom and gloom do not sell, period. Neither does spewing gigabytes of data. To change people, we need to become better storytellers, make the solutions easy, sexy and non-partisan and yes, we all have to go on a diet.

I can’t speak for other countries but on every count, America is overdrawn in a 50 year decline in self accountability, discipline and a deep and abiding recognition of what really matters in life. Wake up and smell the planet or you may not get your morning coffee next year.

• September 23, 2008 by Heidi Siegelbaum
• 3 comments

• tags: Earth Overshoot Day ecological debt Footprint Network marketing

Portland, OR tops 2008 eco-friendly city rankings

(Image courtesy of SustainLane)

I love the annual SustainLane City Rankings, and the 2008 results came out this week, with Portland, OR at the top of the list.

I dug in to check out their methodology, and I have to say that the academic in me is pretty impressed. Overall, it’s very well thought out.

But I can quibble with some of the details. For example, I’m unconvinced that LEED is really the best way to evaluate green building. What about Energy Star, which arguably has a larger effect because of its accessibility and scale — and easily accessible data? How did Austin, Texas end up at #9 when they have one of the strongest green building programs in the country?

Some of the categories seem to double-dip - Metro Transit Ridership, City Commuting, and Metro Street Congestion are nearly the same thing. They are largely a function of Planning and Land Use. And, Air Quality is a function of all of them combined. Still… hanging out with friends I’d argue that the importance of Planning and Land Use deserves extra weighting. Looking at Atlanta’s details, it’s easy to see how these are all connected (if you remember that sprawl leads to congestion, and congestion encourages transit and carpooling.)

I then went to skim the overall rankings and the more interesting specific category rankings, in particular using my egocentric perspective of “How’s Minneapolis rank?” Now, I’m really curious about our low water quality ranking, as I was under the impression it was really good. More homework. The highlight of the rankings - the stories at the bottom! I’m off to visit one of them (the Common Roots Cafe) to work now!

• September 25, 2008 by Janne K. Flisrand
• 5 comments

• tags: Atlanta Austin green cities Minneapolis Portland SustainLane

Congress: Please save my Main St. job, not that fat cat's Wall St. job

I got that call today.

The one no one wants to hear from their CEO — that it’s possible the company I work for will run out of money for my part-time position and have to let me go. But, unlike some investment bank officials who got a similar call, our solar energy company didn’t do anything wrong.

We are just prisoner to the waiting game that Congress keeps us in by not renewing the green energy tax credits that help our country deal with the energy crisis.

A recent study showed that 440,000 new people could join me as workers in the solar industry if the tax credits are renewed. And wind power is set to be the key emerging source of electricity for our country if renewal occurs. Yet for these past several months, Congress has failed to act.

The oil crisis that brought record gasoline and diesel prices to our pumps again this summer did not ignite Congress. The gasoline shortages that now cripple communities across the Southeast has not yet closed the deal.

And now many members of Congress are instead considering bailing out a financial industry that has acted recklessly and twisted rules to gain tremendous, unsustainable profits. After bankrupting our federal government by cutting taxes and fighting overstretched wars, the Bush Administration asks to borrow money from our children’s hard-earned living to help banks that were doing the equivalent of playing in the casinos with our life savings. No thanks.

I’m glad the Senate finally passed a renewal of the green energy tax credits this week. Will the House step up and do the same before they focus (even more) on getting elected? Or will they decide, rather, to concentrate their energy on giving big banks cash for trash?

Here’s hoping Congress prioritizes saving millions of green Main Street jobs so we can get our economy back on sound footing and our climate won’t self-destruct on us.

• September 24, 2008 by Dennis Markatos
• 0 comments

• tags: bailout Congress energy crisis green jobs solar Wall St. wind