Bikenomics (2nd Edition): How Bicycling Can Save the Economy

Description

Elly Blue's Bikenomics provides a surprising and compelling new perspective on the way we get around, where we live and how we spend our money. The book provides an unflinching look at the real costs of transportation and roads, for households and society at large, and shares the success stories of people, businesses, organisations and cities that are investing in two-wheeled transportation. Whether or not you ride a bicycle, reading this book will forever change the way you see the world around you.

Elly Blue's writing about bicycle transportation has appeared in The Guardian, Grist, Bicycling.com, Streetsblog, Momentum, and BikePortland. She lives in Portland, OR.

Bikenomics will make you wonder how cities ever decided to plan for cars in the first place. Elly Blue makes a compelling case for reconnecting with your community in a very authentic way. And she does it with a witty, persuasive voice that makes this refreshingly jargon-free book a pleasure to read.--Alissa Walker, Urbanism Editor, Gizmodo Blue's book is rational, fully footnoted--and, in the main, persuasive. --Fast Company Blue's book helped me better frame my own reasons for riding, and got me thinking a lot about what a more bike-centered future could look like. It's a future, I realized, I'd really like to see. --The Portland Mercury "Elly Blue has written the Common Sense for the bicycling revolution. Like Tom Paine, Blue set out to show how truths we were raised to believe--streets are for cars, bicycling is an intrusion, cars predominate because they make economic good sense--are really assumptions that defy common sense. Bikenomics is fact-based but personal, serious but fun, well-researched but readable. It gives cycling advocates the talking points they need to show that the bicycle revolution is just common sense in action. -Peter Norton, author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City In Bikenomics, Elly Blue powerfully demonstrates the economic benefits of making streets complete again, especially by investing in infrastructure to support the bicycle as a mode of transportation. With a focus on equity, Bikenomics builds a case for bicycle activism and bicycle planning as tools that can achieve a range of economic and quality of life goals and serves as a call and guide to action by illustrating how the benefits of bikability can be shared among bicyclists and motorists alike (and those who use both modes of transportation) and across socioeconomic classes. --Julian Agyeman and Stephen Zavestoski, editors of Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities A thorough dissection of assumptions about cycling that has much to say about what streets are and who they're for.--JH Crawford, author of Carfree Cities