One theme of recent transit spending--better late than never--is funding links from central business districts to airports, which are a huge source-point of carbon emissions from all those taxis, buses and cars feeding airplane passengers to the terminals--as well as taking them away to the ground destinations.

So, it's not surprising that the feds are handing out $1.58 billion to 27 transit projects, including a light-rail link from downtown Denver, CO to its airport--reducing the carbon footprint of that massive facility, the Environment News Service reports. Other projects including a New York rail connection from Long Island commuter lines to Grand Central station (the lines now go to Penn Station), further work on connecting DC to its Dulles International Airport, and a Minneapolis-St. Paul light-rail connection, which would (by implication) connect Minnesota's capital city to the Twin City's airport (MSP) via an existing link that runs from downtown Minneapolis to MSP.

By the way, rail links to LAX's (busiest airport on the west coast of North America) terminals are not even in the planning stage.

TRIPS Monday: Venus or Venice Blvd.? Both Are Hot as Hell

Faced with yet another temporary closure of a portion of the metro Blue Line in L.A. for Exposition Line construction, yours truly chose not to bike/shuttle bus the gap in pursuit of a beach bike ride in either Long Beach or the South Bay. Rather, I decided to see how far I could get in biking to the Westside beach area, with very little time available to me on Sunday. I used this L.A. County Bicycle Coalition map to find the the best, quietest, least traffic-filled route on a very sunny, hot afternoon, as well as this L.A. Metro Bike Map:  this map.

First Leg (train): Universal City metro to Hollywood and Highland....helped very nice mother and daughter British tourists, and took train one-stop to Hollywood.

Second Leg (surface streets...Hwood to Venice Blvd.): Exit and head west/south on Orange to De Longpre; west on DeLongpre two-three blocks to Sycamore; left/south on Sycamore a long way through beautiful pre-World War II apartments territory to 4th St.; right/west on 4th to Cochran, a few blocks down; left/south on Cochran to Venice Blvd....and that's as far as I got. Turned around and returned home. Hot and tired, and needing to get home to walk dogs, I made the trip back to home...

Third Leg....To Be Continued...Next time: proceed right/west/south on Venice Blvd. to the ocean.

FLEET-FOOT Fridays: Size Yourself and Map Your Path

When I want to size myself for a new bike I use this handy interactive tool.

Meanwhile, the number of cool mapping sites and tools are exploding. MapJack mashes the street-view functionality of Google Maps with the two-dimensional map itself, in a split screen that allows you to get both views at once. Very helpful; they cover a few U.S. locations like Vegas and San Francisco, along with some big cities in Canada--the bulk of their coverage is in Sweden, Thailand and Puerto Rico...go figure. The World Sunlight Map appears to be working, and is updated; run by a quirky group, but who cares...it's really interesting!

Dicey, but worth a look: Frappr appears to be a beta search engine that digs up mapping tools and maps; no other information available. Try it at your own risk.This site allows you to see campgrounds within a proximity to a U.S. location you choose.

WHEELS Wednesdays: A Special Report From LaneLand

Bicycle lanes continue to attract eyes: a University of Massachusetts think-tanker says they create more jobs than other kinds of spending (for building them, or the echo?) Still, lane miles grow. Burbank, Calif., re-did roughly three miles of Verdugo Ave., converting from a four-lane arterial (with parallel parking), to a two-lane, with bike lanes. Here's the master-plan.

LaneLand is still in turmoil, though: The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn., reports business owners along that cotton-trading hub's Madison Ave. don't cotton (sorry...) to a "road diet," which shrinks the four-laner to two, for bikes. They object that they started their businesses on a four-laner (and your point is what, exactly, given cars can't all park at the store-front?). TBD....

MULTI-MODAL Mondays: Griffith Park Loop

Sunday, I finally got back on my bike after patching my tire using this video from InTown Bikes in Atlanta (thanks); I'd already bought a patch kit and a new tube, but I didn't remember how to patch the old tire (I saved the new tube for later).

The trip: I biked over to Universal City Metro Red Line station, and took my bike two stops to Hollywood/Vine station; then I biked east on Hollywood Boulevard to Bronson, north on Bronson to Franklin, right near the Scientology Celebrity Center. In the little strip mall on the northeast corner of Bronson and Franklin is a little organic takeout place called Locali. I got a yerba mate tea and some sort of oat bar, ate that and continued onward. This is in Franklin Village, and there's a cool gift and magazine store, and some other cool stores--it's worth a look, if you ever get over there: Franklin a few blocks east of Gower, on the north side of the street.


I biked east on Franklin to Los Feliz Village, where I turned north on Vermont, observing a fender-bender aftermath on Vermont. Up to Los Feliz Boulevard, down to the L.A. River Bike Trail, north on that to the end at Victory Boulevard. Then, I biked north on Victory to Riverside, left/west on Riverside to Chavez St., up Chavez to Alameda, and back to Hollywood Way and the media district.

Fun!

Bicycling THURSDAYS: Used Bikes

After my Fuji Crosstown hybrid, circa 2000, was stolen last December, I proceeded to acquire three different used bikes.

The first, a very small Mongoose mountain bike, needed a lot of work, and after adding brakes and a shifter at the Bike Oven in Highland Park, L.A., I realized it was the wrong bike for me. It still needs better tires, and I'm used to a much bigger bike, even though I'm 5'4".

The second bike I acquired was a gorgeous Motobecane, year unknown, which lacked working brakes or a shifter, or a derailleur, but has a wonderful frame.

The third bike was a used MGT/MKS(or something), a heavy 12-speed Japanese racing bike that I got for free from a friend, because she bought herself a new bike. However, after leaving the front tire at a friend's outdoor parking lot elsewhere, I had to cannabalize the Motebecane's front wheel for that bike.

The hope is that I will finally get back to the Bike Oven, cannabalize parts from the Mongoose and the Japanese racing bike, and turn the Motebecane into a working bike. This weekend? Maybe....

HyPOTHeTrip WEDNESDAYS: Lake Loop

Credit: U.S. NOAA

So, the basic plan is: Start in Chicago, head up to Manitowoc, Wisc. by train and bicycle, hop the ferry across Lake Michigan to Ludington, Mich., and then bike to Amtrak at Holland, Mich., which takes you back to the Windy City. I'm frankly, not sure how many days this would be: assuming each of the two, roughly, 90-mile bicycle stretches (Milwaukee>Manitowoc/Ludington>Holland were divided into two days each, with one night at one of the two ferry termini, and factoring in the availability of trains, this could be as little as a three-day, two-night excursion, or as much as a five-day, four-night trip.


From Chicago, head on Amtrak to Milwaukee. There, a combination of trails will lead to--research shows--the Ozaukee Trail, which is a dedicated bike trail. Ultimately, this takes you near Manitowoc. Either you decamp here for the night, or grab the 12:55 a.m. ferry, and sail in the moonlight to Michigan. Once there, you can either hit the ground biking, or decamp again for the night. Holland is almost 100 miles south of Ludington, and it looks as if you can either follow the lakeshore, or head inland where you will find, a) the 22-mile Hart-Montague Trail State Park, a linear bicycle-friendly park/rail-trail through farmland, and b) a possible place to camp: the Huron-Manistee National Forest.

It's a very pretty part of Michigan. Who knew? I guess folks are grumpy there because of the long winters--but this is a summer trip. Once in Holland, Amtrak conveys you back to Chicago. Great side-trips might be Wisconsin's Door Peninsula, just north of Manitowoc, and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, just north of Ludington. Have at it.

TIPS+COOL SITE Tuesdays: U Need UNESCO

Ban Chiang - from Tourism Authority of Thailand

The folks who try to keep tabs on the heritage of planet earth, regardless of borders, offer a really cool interactive map to the nearly 1,000 sites designated as World Heritage Sites by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Some are near transportation, like the Generalife in Granada Spain. Others are more isolated and might require multiple buses, and long walks to access, such as the Ban Chiang Archaeological Site in Thailand.

MultiModal Mondays: Airport Stop Providential, Just Not For the Atmosphere

"Our father never did anything half so well as to cut off your mother's head," Queen Mary Tudor (Kathy Burke) tells her half-sister, the future Queen Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett), in Shekhar Kapur's 1998 film, "Elizabeth." The same could be said for how we view Amtrak as part of an integrated multi-modal transportation system. Headless wives, or half-funded transportation systems...which is more dead?

Case in point: last Monday was the sixth-month birthday of the T.F. Green Airport rail stop, just outside Providence, RI. The idea was to offer the busy, heavily used northeast corridor the same convenience and carbon-footprint-lowering effort there, as farther south at Newark Liberty Airport and Baltimore-Washington International Airport--Amtrak stops to convey travelers en masse, rather than en car(bon). No such luck in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (the state's official name, BTW). There, funding fell short of making the proper track to Amtrak's specs, and so Boston's MBTA commuter rail Providence line is serving the station alone...for now.

The problem with cutting off one's nose--or one's wife's head--to spite one's face, or one's enemies, is that, once the deed is done, there's no one around for companionship, no one to raise the kids, and things run very inefficiently, while everyone jockeys for power. By the way, after six wives, and innumerable military actions, the treasury was bare, by the time Elizabeth got to the throne. It took her decades to fix things; let's hope it doesn't take decades to create a transportation system that provides a real alternative to individual-servings combustion-engine locomotion.

Big Easy Makes Travel From Train/Bus Station Easier

New Orleans is running a streetcar line (i.e. light-rail) from its inter-modal train and bus terminal, the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal, to the Central Business District and Canal Street, via Loyola Ave. The big groundbreaking came this past week, featuring wonderfully inarticulate comments ("streetcars are coming back") by U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. Nevertheless, linking the city's ground-transportation hub with its CBD and other tourist destinations, such as the French Quarter and the Garden District, appears to be a priority, and is a highly traversatile decision, IMHO, that encourages fewer taxi rides, more density along transit routes--and perhaps will lead to more bike lanes. No word on whether you can take your bike on these puppies...


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NEWS: East Coast Greenway Expanding, Hiring

Talk about Traversatile! The East Coast Greenway--the biggest, longest trail you've never heard of--continues to elongate and grow, rivaling its better known competitor, the Appalachian Trail (ATC).  And they're hiring, apparently, at their headquarters in Durham, NC. The Greenway organization is attempting to plan, map, build and actualize a 2500-mile long trail from Maine to Florida, using both new and existing routes, rail-trails, roads, separated paths and much more. And, it's meant to be a path for many modes of low-impact transportation, from horses to recumbent bicycles to bikes to skateboards to walking.

Now, if only there was a West Coast Greenway.....Hmmmm.