IdeaWave

Bike Project: Making Bicycles Work in an Urban Setting

Paula Johanson

The genesis of the “Bike Project” was a panel discussion on “Green Futures: not the Soylent Green variety” at V-Con 34 conference in Vancouver, October 2009. An audience member addressed the panel to general applause: “We already know how to recycle and make our own choices to live greener,” he said. “What we want is to know how we — the hundred people in this room — can fix the things that other people, corporations and government, are doing wrong, and help them do the right thing.”

The “Bike Project” is a response to this mandate, collecting resource material into a format accessible to ordinary readers. This resource material will have information intended to empower people to make their communities places where bicycles can and will be used. Readers will know how other people have succeeded in increasing bicycle usage and safety, making bike lanes and bike paths, building mountain bike tracks and velodromes and skateparks, and operating shared bike programs. This project is not an exhaustive encyclopedia; it will be a pocket toolkit to get readers started on their own projects without re-inventing the wheel. The “Bike Project” was awarded a Community Researcher Fellowship at UVic for 2011.

About Paula Johanson:

Paula Johanson works as a writer and editor. Her nonfiction books on science, health and literature include Jobs in Sustainable Agriculture and World Poetry: Evidence of Life. Her novel Tower in the Crooked Wood is available in print and as an e-book. She was shortlisted twice for the Prix Aurora Award for Canadian Science Fiction Writing, while raising gifted twins on an organic-method small farm. An accredited teacher, she has edited curriculum educational materials for the Alberta Distance Learning Centre and eTraffic Solutions. Johanson rides a Norco Parklane delta tricycle and owns six kayaks.

2011 IdeaWave