a few moments from last summer (Thanks Alice!)

Sadie, Seth and Greg in the back yard














Critical Mass!
Travis, Jeremy, Sadie, Eric, Emily, Seth, and Alice's Mom.






Greg, Sadie, and Seth in the backyard still...

Stuck Accelerators: Toyotas and the Fossil-Fuel Growth Economy

by Jan Lundberg
05 February 2010

From: http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=602&Itemid=1

The story of Toyota cars having accelerator-pedal and brake problems, causing out of control speed and possible crash death in a fireball, is a near perfect allegory for something far more serious: the burning of the planet with fossil fuels including gasoline for cars. The vehicle for the burning of the planet is none other than the fossil-fueled growth economy. The difference this has with the Toyota phenomenon is that we do have real brakes for the global vehicle of destruction, which Toyotas may not have ("News Alert: Toyota Says Prius Brakes Had Design Flaws" - New York Times, Feb. 4, 2010).

As a long-time car-free activist and defender of nature, I have had until now a reaction of boredom and disgust for what I see is a predictable, consumerist news story. I hate to see anyone injured by a car, especially pedestrian and bicyclist victims. Fiery crashes are tragic and avoidable if people would not buy cars. The drivers and passengers of any vehicle are taking great risk and do damage their health even without crashing, by virtue of sitting in a car excessively, filling up the gas tank, and causing psychic harm to themselves by driving in an age of known global warming. The animals crushed on the roads -- a million a day in the U.S. -- are never considered in government policy or corporate agendas. Instead, the effect of a recall of cars on stock prices is more real in the news.

It is doubtful that people will learn what they should from the Toyota fiasco: that driving cars is the problem, and that technology fails. When Ford Motor Co. calculated that Pinto cars could be made with gasoline tanks prone to rupture and explosion, just to save a few dollars per manufactured car, the news of this crime did nothing to get people to question the dominance of transportation by corrupt executives and stockholders. Lately, the problem of cell-phone chattering and texting has become a big deal, with New York Times editorials punctuating the apparent crisis -- when it is really the driving that kills people. Take away cell phones: over 40,000 U.S. citizens are still slaughtered per year in crashes, and another 100,000 perhaps from diseases from exhaust each year.

So can we finally question driving? Is our society incapable of reform, so that car-sharing and a preference for bicycling and mass transit can prevail? Not only would people be saved from crashes and disease, but they would save money and get more exercise. The average speed of the U.S. motorist is but five miles per hour, when adjusted for the time spent in traffic gridlock, in earning money to buy and maintain a car, to earn money for the fuel and insurance, etc. Unfortunately, the capacity to reform the system of corporate profit of dominant industries over human and animal life, and to protect our precious climate, is about nil.

That is because the accelerator of the fossil-fueled growth economy is stuck, and we are speeding toward the wall of resource limits and ecological degradation. Peak oil and overshoot of nature's carrying capacity have visited us before we had a chance to change land-use and work patterns. It is too bad President Obama is not an agent of real change, when preserving the big automobile companies and wars over oil take precedence over the welfare of the American people and the planet we all live on. The White House is more concerned over the Toyota corporation's and Wall Street’s reactions than the safety of drivers, when it wants Secretary of Transportation LaHood to never say again "Stop driving it." But let's not make the mistake of praising the Secretary, because his real policy is to keep four-wheeled global-warming coffins selling like hotcakes: he wants U.S. car companies to keep "getting their acts together.”

To take our foot off the accelerator of the fossil-fueled growth economy is to support local economies, stop commuting long distances, maximize local food production, establish cooperatives, engage in bartering and mutual aid, and love nature far more than accumulating dollars for hyper-consumption. These changes all have to come, but why smash into the wall at full speed when we can at least slow down and possibly lessen the impact? Is all we can do to avoid petroleum pollution is just step over the oil slicks on the asphalt wastelands of parking lots?

What can the average person do to gain some safety and to support local, ecological economics? Do not buy a car. If you must, buy a used one in order to keep money in the community. Don’t fool yourself that there’s a “clean car” to “help Mother Earth.” And, as the Transportation Secretary told Congress regarding the unsafe Toyota -- but applying his advice also to the fossil-fueled growth economy -- “Stop driving it.”

STUCK ACCELERATORS - by Erik Lundberg Scott
submitted to the New York Times byJan LundbergOil-industry analystPublisher, CultureChange.org(formerly the Auto-Free Times of the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium)Sail Transport NetworkP.O. Box 4347, Arcata, CA 95518 USA(215) 243-3144 jan "at" culturechange.org

Cut up your Driver's Licenses, Kids! (or just don't get them in the first place)

The following article, from MSN Money--of all places--looks at Lester Brown's Earth Policy Institute's recent findings on automobile purchasing trends. The cultural shift is in motion, folks.

"Better be careful, messing with the auto industry could take down the American Economy." -from a "pro-car culture" comment on the public response forum to the article.

The end of America’s car-loving culture?

The U.S. vehicle fleet shrank by 4 million last year, and fewer young people are getting licenses. Great news for parents, but what about automakers?

Posted by Money Staff on Friday, January 8, 2010 4:15 PM
By Anna Vander Broek, MSN Money

Facebook-loving teenagers and college grads strapped with debt could mean less work for automakers.

The U.S. vehicle fleet shrank by 4 million cars and trucks -- almost 2 percent -- last year. For the first time since World War II, Americans scrapped more cars and trucks than they bought. American’s dumped 14 million vehicles compared to the 10 million new cars sold, according to a recent report by the Earth Policy Institute.

One significant factor in America’s downshift is that fewer American teenagers are getting their driver's licenses. The number of young people with licenses peaked at 12 million in 1978 and is now under 10 million, says the same report.

Several factors, like young people socializing on the Internet, living in urban areas where cars are unnecessary and taking on more debt such as college loans, which can affect credit needed for a car, are decreasing the number of young car consumers.

Lester Brown, founder and president of Earth Policy Institute, writes that young people buying fewer cars is just one aspect of a larger cultural shift in America away from being a car-loving country.

All the unwelcomed woes of today -- the high price of gas, an unstable economy, rising parking fees -- are forcing Americans to take their foot off the purchasing pedal.

Mother Earth may welcome the reprieve, but this is just one more pothole for American automakers. 2009 was anything but easy for the auto industry with government bailouts, bankruptcies, major sales drops and many dealerships all over the country closing their doors.

Brown predicts this trend of scrappage exceeding sales will continue through at least 2020. He believes U.S. auto sales will never again reach the 17 million sold each year between 1999 and 2007, but rather expects between 10 million and 14 million vehicles sold per year.

black friday critical mass!
meet at coppertop church - 5:30pm
bring a helmet and your lights
don't wanna bike up the hill? bike racks are on the buses all year round!

Ride, Rally, and Teach-in for Climate Protection

On October 24,join Duluth Mayor Don Ness, Duluth Police Chief Gordon Ramsay, author Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer and hundreds of other folks from around the Twin Ports to rally and ride for climate protection!

Gather with your bikes at 3pm on Harbor Drive behind the DECC. After a few speakers we’ll head out for a group ride through Canal Park. Help us make it splashy… wear a costume, bring an instrument or noisemaker.

No bike? No problem. Walking is a great carbon-free way to get around, and we’ll have a pedestrian route, too! Mary Plaster’s Gaia and Green Man puppets will lead the way.
At 3:50, we will gather at Endion Beach for a group photo to send to the President and to Copenhagen delegates.

Start early by joining a feeder ride to the rally, and stick around after for a climate teach-in at Amazing Grace Bakery and Cafe at 4pm.

In early December, in Copenhagen, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change will convene. World politicians will continue to sign on to social and economic legislation that rapes the Earth and jeopardizes future generations--that is, unless the general populous' voice swells to be too loud to be ignored.

With this in mind, thousands of people around the world are involved in organizing events and demonstrations to support immediate and radical legislative action on climate change. Individuals and groups in the Twin Ports will be among the many. Check out what's happening

locally:
http://350twinports.wordpress.com/
globally:
http://www.350.org/

Why we folks at the Collective can't stand cars

The Heavy Costs of Automobile Dependence
by Alex Strachota
(Portions of text adapted from the charter of the World Carfree Network)

Soiling the Heavens: Globally, automobiles consume 37 million barrels of oil a day and contribute to half of our air pollution and one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions. The automobile-freeway-petroleum system is the most resource-intensive means of locomotion ever devised.

Mass Murder: Cars, whether ‘clean’ or ‘green’, kill four times as many people as wars per year, to the tune of 1.26 million per annum, or 3,000 people every day. And those are just the people dying on the roads. Factor in the automobile’s contribution to asthma, cancer, lung disease, and the health effects of a sedentary lifestyle (obesity being the most glaring result); add to the mix 10-15 million people disabled each year by road injuries; finally, consider the massive numbers of animals—from insects to mammals—whose lives are abruptly ended on our millions of miles of roadways, and it becomes obvious that widespread death is a major corollary of car use.

A is for Alienation: Automobiles distort the urban environment, creating cities that serve cars rather than serve people. The psycho-social impacts of car culture are tragic. Our lives are increasingly compartmentalized, separated, and disconnected from each other and the natural world. We trade prairies for pavement and fields of clover for cloverleaf interchanges. We lose walkable neighborhoods to sprawl. Our once-vibrant spaces for cultural exchange and social interaction are demolished for parking lots and wider highways.

Mobility Monopoly: Automobiles are a grossly inequitable technology. Cars dominate the transportation systems of the industrialized world, denying mobility to children, the elderly, the poor, and the physically handicapped.

The System is Rotten: No one is completely free of the automobile-freeway-petroleum system; we are all dependent to varying degrees. Nevertheless, a carfree world is not just possible—it is a world in the making. Let’s create it together.

A couple photos

Bike Cave Collective members circa Summer 2009: Seth, Greg, Sadie, Alice, and Alex

Thanks to everyone who supported us at our arraignment this week!

JOIN US!
September 15th at 7am for a free breakfast at Leif Erickson followed by a group bike ride at 8am to the courthouse where we'll plead not guilty.

Collective Members Receive Citations from Duluth Police

In a second, our summer had changed. The clatter of loose bones and unmovable iron rang out over the street; our friend Erin was flung to the pavement, her bike lay motionless behind a van door. Erin, miraculously, was not seriously hurt (cyclists being hit by the hastily-opened door of a parked car is an all-too-common severe cyclist injury/fatality) so after dusting off and calming our nerves we continued on our way--but we didn't get far. Not more than a block later the angry squawk of a police siren sounded behind us and we surrendered our forward progress to its call.

After a flurry of misquoted statutes and doughnut crumbs we reported Erin's accident and were issued summons to court for “impeding traffic”. Erin stood by ticketless and bleeding, her reward for riding where the self-described 'law enforcement' think all cyclists should ride: in the margins.

We thought this would be a chance happening, a localized occurrence of police harassment on our otherwise peaceful weekly bike-powered food run (where we collect food that can't be sold at our local co-op, use what we can, and distribute the rest).

Well go-fucking-figure. Two weeks later as we recited the bike statutes, pleading our case, the cops shook angrily as they scribbled out our second round of tickets. This time we were joined by our comrade, Alex, instead of Erin. We were told that the “correct” way to ride is weaving in and out of parked cars and turn lanes, which is not only illegal, but highly dangerous. As we finally mounted our bikes to leave, the cop had one last thing to say: “If you're really concerned about your safety get a reflector on that trailer.” We returned home dumbfounded and a bit excited.

Three of us now share five tickets. With three weeks left until our arraignment it's likely we'll rack up more. These are only the most recent episodes in a long saga of police harassment targeted at cyclists in Duluth. The police department exhibits an embarrassing degree of ignorance and disregard for laws written to protect and legitimize cyclists as road traffic.

In spite of past attempts, including meeting with police chief Gordon Ramsey to raise the issue and end senseless stalking of cyclists (who have more life threatening concerns anyway), the targeting has continued. Heckling and dangerous maneuvering by car drivers is a daily occurrence, and you'd think cops would understand that additional harassment is a laughable waste of time.

The meadow lark said to the sheriff : "excuse me, sir, I think you is straight outta line and best shape up right quick if you know one lick of what's good fer ya.” The meadow lark then dissolved into the horizon leaving the ephemeral echo of its words in the air, where they hung briefly and burned away, like morning mist in the rays of the rising sun.

We are traffic! Still we ride!

Join us for breakfast at 7am on September 15^th at Leif Erickson Park for a group ride to the courthouse and show your dissent. Want your own court date? Join us for Food Run Fridays, 10:45am outside Dorothy Day House, 1712 Jefferson St. Bring a camera! We weren't kidding when we said it was laughable.

Stay tuned to the Bike Cave blog for updates. (www.bikecavecollective.blogspot.com)

Women and Trans Monday Nights

Women and transgendered folks have been traditionally marginalized in the world of bicycling. As a collective striving for the empowerment and flourishing of all people, the Bike Cave Collective is now hosting evenings of open shop hours for women and trans folks. These evenings will provide a safe place for people to learn, share, and teach bicycle maintenance and repair skills.

Women and Trans Night open hours will take place on Mondays from 6:30-8:30pm.

To reiterate, these evenings are open to women and transgendered people ONLY.
No previous experience or knowledge is necessary. Please join us!

Bike-In Movie!

Thurs, July 2nd

The Bike Cave, 1712 Jefferson St.

8pm- Potluck

9pm- Film screening

Bike on down to the Cave for an evening of food and film! We'll be screening Veer, a new documentary film that follows five bike enthusiasts over the course of a year, illuminating their struggles and triumphs while depicting different aspects of today's bike culture.

Veer Trailor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jyv0JchtTpQ

Ride your bike, bring a friend, and bring something to share!

The Bike Cave Collective on Youtube

A Venture North short piece on the BCC. James McKian, Chad Schrandt, Greg Schultz, and Alex Strachota describe the way things work at the Cave.

The video also has some great shots of BCC tall bike-riding on Jefferson Street in Autumny Duluth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jERIT-VXkrI

Also, check out a short video on the October 2008 Halloween Critical Mass in Duluth , also put together by the kind people at Venture North:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMqreEsQGuk

my BIKE doesn't do this...

a few BCC creations: "3-tall", standard tall bike, ship bike, "gynecological fixie"

Bike Cave Fun(d) Raiser!

The Bike Cave is selling this gorgeous Schwinn Traveler to raise money to buy a truing stand for the collective's workspace. Interested?

More info: http://duluth.craigslist.org/bik/889082971.html

October CRITICAL MASS!

Come join us for October's CRITICAL MASS ride on Friday, Oct. 31, at 5:30pm. We meet in Leif Erikson Park by Leif's statue. Come in costume! Decorate your bike! Bring noisemakers! Invite your friends!

CRITICAL MASS is a group bicycle ride that takes place in cities throughout the world on the last Friday of each month. The ride is leaderless and organic; there are no true "organizers". Because of this anarchic structure, Critical Mass serves as many purposes as there are participants. Some ride to promote sustainable transport, some to celebrate their love of bicycles, some to network with other cyclists, some to raise awareness of the legitimacy of bike transportation, etc. After the casual ride through downtown and canal park, food will be provided by Duluth Food Not Bombs.

Hope to see you there!

"We're getting ready..."

Bike CAve Update!

The Bike Cave is whooshing and whirring along. The back yard is teaming with bike parts and frames. Tall bikes, small bikes, small-tall bikes, folding bikes, multi-passenger, and utility bikes litter the landscape of our town that is slowly being transformed into the mecca of our wildest dreams. We are resurrecting 10 to 20 bikes monthly, eccentrifying the Duluth Critical Mass ride and hauling ridiculous amounts of food, bike parts, people, and sometimes piñatas up and down the hill in that resilient old shopping cart turned bike trailer. One especially beautiful moment was the gift of a bike to a guest of ours who was recovering from a car accident. He could hardly walk more than a few feet but could ride the bike for several miles because of the low impact nature of the bicycle. His morale shot up tremendously and he was able to see the spring flowers bloom. In other news we are throwing together a little zine with hopes of having it completed by late summer. You are always invited to come play with us! A word of caution: if you are one to take yourself seriously we will most likely completely embarrass you. !Viva el ciclismo!

Message from Your Mother

I had a nice talk with Mother Earth the other day and, let me tell you, she was less than enthusiastic about how we Homo sapiens have been acting recently. According to Her, this whole "Automobile" party we've been throwing for the last century has to come to an end, and QUICK. There just doesn't seem to be a way to continue, she said, what with all this spewing out of partially burned hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and that ol’ ubiquitous CO2, not to mention the resource wars being fought over the black gold to keep the party goin’. The Good Mother, always concerned with the well-being of her children, also couldn't stress to me enough the ways in which our Car Party has negatively impacted our species psychologically and socially by alienating us from each other and the world around us. I mean, flying by one another at 70mph on an interstate doesn't allow one to appreciate the chirping of the crickets in the adjacent grasses, much less to say hello to a dear friend who has just sped past, unknowing.

The Good Mother did tell me that, despite all this, she retains a sense of hope for our species. We could really turn ourselves around, she thought, and it wouldn't be that complex. Like many solutions to problems on the grand scale, the answer may be very simple; however, that doesn’t stop groups looking for a profit from devising intricate, elaborate, and costly solutions. Contrary to what the automotive industry propagandizes, (namely that hybrid vehicles, hyper-efficient cars, or hydrogen fuel cells will be the future) or what oil companies fraudulently claim, (that oil reserves will magically remain robust with better “technology”) the truth is, every year the oil wells of our great planet are drying up and therefore any oil-dependent industry is categorically without a future.

The car and oil economies, knowing they stand on the verge of extinction, are spending exorbitant sums promoting the grandiose vision of a “greener”, “cleaner”, yet completely car-dominated future, specifically because industries with vested interest are doing their best to suck as much money as possible out of consumers before the whole lot of them goes bankrupt.

However difficult ending the Car Party may be, one thing is certain: feeding billions of consumer dollars into the very companies that have created the unsustainable car-culture in the first place will get us nowhere. Desperately trying to preserve these doomed industries will only crown more rich oil kings and will only exacerbate the violent conflicts erupting as the resource becomes more scarce and valuable.

It makes Mother Earth sick to see crass businessmen profit off her abundance. Luckily, the era of gross profiting from oil cannot last much longer, although it is sure to remain a very real phenomenon until the very end of oil itself.

The Good Mother’s great hope for our post-oil society? Namely, that we no longer let ourselves become addicted to a non-renewable resource, and that we no longer dole out endless cash to larger-than-life corporations to satisfy our transportation needs. Mother Earth wants us to EMPOWER OURSELVES, and to take responsibility for our interaction with the world around us.

As mentioned earlier, the transition to a new means of transport may be difficult (due to the habits we’ve formed) but it will not be complex. There is no need for sexy new technology or billions of dollars dumped into R&D because we already possess a technology nearly 200 years old that is arguably the most efficient mode of transportation ever invented: THE BICYCLE.

Using a bicycle is an act of solidarity with the earth and with other people on your block and around the globe. Replacing the current car-culture with a bicycle-culture would have innumerable positive effects, not limited to the improvement of our physical and psychological well-being, our interpersonal interactions, and the way in which we see our relationship to both the city and natural world around us.

In praise of the peaceable machine

By COLMAN McCARTHY

Seeking a positive, bracing, low-cost addiction that is beneficial to your heart, lungs, legs and soul, does not pollute the air or land and reduces the profits of Big Oil?

Try commuting by bicycle.

My own addiction goes back 35 years and some 80,000 miles ago, to 1973 when the West had its first energy crisis and some of us went from four wheels to two, from fast lanes to slow lanes, from imprisonment behind a windshield to liberation that inhales the wind.

Bicycling is a movable feast, engaging the spirit in all seasons and all weathers. It’s a connection with life. Go fast down a hill and you’ll savor the same sounds of rushing air that a flock of Canada geese hears when flying at 30 mph. Push painfully up a hill and you’ll find that doing something hard every day is good for the soul.

Bracing is the only word for my winter jaunts. At 6:50 the other morning, while leaving home for my daily 10- mile, hourlong round jaunt to and from a high school to teach a pair of classes at 7:25 and 8: 20, it was dark, windy and 18 degrees. Admittedly, I wasn’t joy riding.

What kept me warm, aside from a double layer of clothes, was remembering the enduring lines of Iris Murdoch: “The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”

While strengthening the heart.

For prime cardiovascular health, the National Institute of Health suggests an hour a day of exercise. Non-cyclists get in their hours the loony way: driving polluting cars to a health club to mount a stationary bicycle.

When added up, the cost of driving comes to 57 cents a mile, according to the American Automobile Association. A bicycle is less than a penny a mile. A 10-mile trip by pedal power, not oil power, means a savings of more than five dollars a day, $25 a week and up to $1,200 a year.

A peaceable machine, the bicycle is the first one we master as children. We ride through childhood on it until we are seduced by speed and the automobile. But not everyone is. Edmund Wilson, the literary critic, was a lifelong cyclist who never learned to drive a car. Tolstoy began bicycling at age 67 as a way to ease the grief of losing to death his 7-year-old son, Vanicka. Henry Adams was 50 when his wife died. He took solace by learning how to bicycle. Albert Einstein had his first thoughts about relativity while cycling. Reed Whittemore, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and Gene McCarthy all wrote lyrically about the joys of freewheeling. Has there ever been a stirring line of poetry written about the sooty combustion engine?

I wish I could report that after 35 years on the road I’ve noticed an increase in fellow commuters. All I see is more cars. Bigger, gaudier ones. The League of American Bicyclists states that less than one-half of 1 percent of the public commute to work on muscle power, a number that has remained steady for the past two decades.

No matter. Those of us who are head over wheels in love with the bicycle aren’t out to bring the motorized and polluting world to its senses. We are happy keeping our senses to ourselves: the sense of excitement when hopping on the bike, the sense of joy at self-locomotion while gliding through the daily gridlocks, the sense of living simply for a few unhurried moments of every complicated day.

We’re content to enjoy the line of Frances Willard, the 19th-century feminist and socialist who wrote in “How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle”: “I found a whole philosophy of life in the wooing and winning of my bicycle.”

Embrace that and you’ll never spin your wheels.