May is Bike Month

Eric Fredericks • Thursday May 1, 2008

Don’t forget to log your cycling miles this May… it’s once again time for Bike Month. Those biking in the Sacramento region can log them in at MayisBikeMonth.com. We fell just short of the 1,000,000 mile goal last year.

Sadly, I’m only pledging 100 miles so far because I need a new bike. My current bike is an older retro Peugeot road bike and is just too uncomfortable to ride for long distances. I’m in the market for a folding bike (I think) so if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know!

I shot this photo at the Santa Monica Beach bike path in Southern California. This is easily one of the best places to bike in the world.

 

Category: Bicycling •• Region: General •• Comments

Do the Test

Eric Fredericks • Thursday March 27, 2008

DOTTHETEST. Brilliant!

 

Category: Bicycling •• Region: General •• Comments [1]

My TV Interview With Perils for Pedestrians

Eric Fredericks • Wednesday March 19, 2008

The video embedded above is Episode 139 of the television program Perils for Pedestrians, produced by John Wetmore. John interviewed me in this episode on the topic of walkable neighborhoods. My interview appears approximately 7:35 into the episode. The program appeared last night on DISH Network Channel 9411 — The Universityhouse Channel. Perhaps it will air again sometime in the future. You also may catch it on some local public access channels or online at Google Video.

I really want to thank John for the opportunity to give the interview. He threw some interesting and unscripted questions my way. John shot this video last September on a Sunday morning just across from my neighborhood park—beautiful Capitol Park in Downtown Sacramento. Most weekdays there would be many more pedestrians, bicyclists, and vehicles passing by.

I was very nervous at the beginning of the shoot for some reason—even though I had done much longer television interviews in the past. Maybe the sun was affecting me as it was shining directly into my eyes :)

The most interesting part of this experience to me was the opportunity to talk with John for a while after the shoot about his television program. This program he puts together is simply amazing despite the few resources he has to work with.

This is also the first time I have revealed what I look like on this website, which is a little significant to me. Some of you may be surprised to find out that I’m pretty young. I have experienced age discrimination several times in my career already, so many times I end up having to prove myself twice as much as someone that is older than me. Thus, I have been a little bit apprehensive about posting my image on the website. However, my full-time jobs have been nearly solely focused on walkable neighborhoods for over 4 years now, and I have additional smart growth-related job experience and education beyond that. So, I wouldn’t discredit my experience based solely upon my age. I’m sure most people would be pretty knowledgeable after dedicating their life to an issue for 4 years.

The age issue just motivates me to work even harder to make sure I know what I’m talking about. Having some background in civil engineering also doesn’t hurt, because many of the questions and concerns about walkable neighborhoods are raised by engineers.

Anyhow, enough ranting. Please check out the other interviews in the video as well. The interview following mine is with a Sacramento bicycle advocate, Tom Schefflin, who I believe works for the California Air Resources Board.

 

Category: Interviews •• Region: General •• Comments

Crude: The Incredible Journey of Oil

Eric Fredericks • Sunday March 2, 2008

Today, I watched the film Crude: The Incredible Journey of Oil. The film has been showing on the History Channel, but I just found the entire film available for watching on the Australian Broadcasting Company’s website.

The film is broken into three sections: the origin of crude oil, the discovery of uses for crude oil and our subsequent addiction, and the future of oil. I found the film to be interesting, but nothing in the film was too shocking to me, as I try to keep up with oil-related issues. The most informative part for me was the part on how crude oil forms and why there is such a large reserve in the Middle East. There are some other key takeaways from this film that make it an important film to watch:

- One obvious point mentioned is that crude oil took millions of years to form, but within 150 years time since the demand for crude oil skyrocketed (originating from oil drilling in Pennsylvania), we will have depleted most sources of crude oil. At least we will have depleted enough of it to where extraction cannot come close to the amount demanded.

-The film also drove home the point that there is virtually nothing that isn’t made from oil. Our oil addiction goes far beyond driving vehicles and delivering goods. If the price of oil skyrockets, there is not one commodity that won’t be affected by the rise of oil prices. >>Continue Reading This Article>>

 

Category: Peak Oil •• Region: General •• Comments

Renovate or Replace Community Schools?

Eric Fredericks • Tuesday February 12, 2008

The Pennsylvania Department of Education released a report titled Renovate or Replace? The case for restoring and reusing older school buildings. [PDF] Smart growth expert and report contributor Thomas Hylton said it was nearly a miracle to get all of the cabinet secretaries to approve the document. Walkability guru Dan Burden had this to say about the report:

This is an excellent report on how to restore and resplenish a community school, versus tear it down and move children into a mega school that is unwalkable, unhealthy, and cruel.

Tom Hylton worked on getting this process underway. On a more local level Tom got five members of the school board booted off when they planned on shutting down five of Pottstowns schools in order to build an 1800 student mega-box for elementary school age children. The new board supporting renovating the neighborhood schools came on with an 82% plurality vote.

I feel this report, and Tom in particular, deserve a national award for excellence.

Make it so.

I concur with Dan. By the way, Thomas Hylton also put together an excellent documentary called Save Our Land, Save Our Towns.

 

Category: Smart Growth •• Region: General •• Comments [1]

Welcome to neighborhoods.org

Eric Fredericks • Thursday January 10, 2008

I want to welcome you to our new website, neighborhoods.org!

Some of you probably already guessed that this was the new website, since I had to effectively put the website up live a few weeks ago. There are still some technical issues that I’m dealing with behind the scenes. Plus, the site design and layout is not completely finished, so you may see some changes over the next few months. I’d appreciate your feedback on the new look.

The old domain, walkableneighborhoods.com, is still in the process of transferring to my new web host. This transfer should be completed next week. Within a few weeks, hopefully all of the old pages will redirect to the new pages at neighborhoods.org.

Those of you that subscribe to the feed (including those by e-mail) probably noticed some glitches and old articles posting over the last few weeks. I apologize for those—I was working out some of the kinks with the feed. I believe all of the kinks have been ironed out (for those that are interested: the Feedburner feed address has not changed, it has been updated with the new website feed). And—I think we finally have author names in the e-mail subscriptions!

Why the Change?

You may be curious why I decided to make the change. After getting some feedback from web experts and the public in general, I felt that the old domain name was too long. I was graciously given the opportunity to purchase neighborhoods.org at a reasonable price, and after some long consideration, decided to purchase. I felt that the neighborhoods.org name is much easier to remember, and can be used as a better branding identity. I can just simply say “I run the website neighborhoods.org”. Much easier than explaining the whole Walkable Neighborhoods thing.

We will not be moving away from the topic of walkable neighborhoods—this will still be the site’s main focus.

In fact, I have started working on a project that I’m hoping will shape the face of walkable neighborhoods in the United States. It’s going to be a terribly challenging project to implement, but it’s something I feel compelled to do. In order to effectively do this project, I also felt I needed to switch to a web host that could handle the type of processes and the potential traffic load I expect this site to someday reach. I have big expectations, but can’t really reveal anything more at this point. So stay tuned.

Photo Changes

If you ever visited the photo gallery at the old site, you saw that I had several thousand photos from all over the world related to walkability. I used Coppermine software and hosted all of the photos on my host’s server. While I certainly liked many aspects of running my own gallery, I had many problems with it: A security hole in the software once led to me being threatened with a letter from an attorney at a major company, comment SPAM was hard to combat, and photo tagging and categorization was cumbersome. Plus, I was running out of space to store my 10,000+ photos.

So, I’ve decided to switch to Flickr as my host. I now have unlimited photo hosting and robust tagging and categorization capabilities. I am in the process of uploading all of the photos. I have not released many to the public yet, but you can view the ones I have uploaded here. I plan to allow for free downloading and usage of the photos (under a Creative Commons license). I know there are other walkable-related galleries out there, but most place many restrictions on photos. I really just want people to have an arsenal of photos at their fingertips to use in presentations and reports so that we can keep preaching the good word on smart growth and walkability. As time permits me to do so, I will be tagging my photos with as many categories as possible so that you can easily find an example of any type of walking, biking, or smart land use related facility.

Other Things to Watch For

I plan to get back to more article writing once these technical issues are addressed. I really got away from frequently posting for a while. I was extremely busy and traveling a lot toward the end of last year. I also moved five blocks to Midtown Sacramento. Plus, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with these websites, and so I took a bit of a break. Now I’m fairly certain where I want to go with this new site.

I will also be adding links to other useful websites and resources to the new site.

I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year! I really appreciate all of the readers that have stuck with us through this transition. Hopefully this will be a great new year for us and those of you involved in the fight against global warming, obesity, air pollution, and oil consumption.

 

Category: Site News •• Region: General •• Comments [2]

Public Engagement Through Web 2.0

Eric Fredericks • Tuesday October 23, 2007

A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation with Dustin Luther of Move.com and Rain City Guide at the annual conference of the California Chapter of the American Planning Association. Last week, I gave a similar presentation for the Caltrans Division of Transportation Planning. The topic: Public Engagement Through Web 2.0. I have uploaded my presentation from the CCAPA Conference in PDF format for download here (2 MB). I will also share the original PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org presentation file upon request.

I really enjoyed giving the presentations, as I had never spoken in public on this particular topic before. I think it is something that I’ll likely continue doing considering the positive feedback we received. Communities and agencies are constantly looking for new ways to reach out to the public. I figured that the Web 2.0 topic would scare many people away, or that we’d only attract a 20-something aged audience. This was not the case. We had several planning directors and heads of private companies in the room. That tells me that agencies and individuals that are not necessarily technology savvy are ready to take the next step in internet public engagement.

Dustin Luther did a fantastic job presenting. He brought a really interesting perspective to the presentation—from the real estate angle—demonstrating how much of an overlap there is between industries when it comes to Web 2.0.

Dustin discussed our presentation in a recent article: social networking around geography . In this article, Dustin brought up a question that came up during our question and answer session— if we set up a blog to communicate to our constituents, how do we reach the 30% or so that do not have access to the internet? I think the easy answer to this question is that blogs and internet public outreach should only comprise one part of your public outreach. In fact, I wouldn’t want to be the agency that only used the internet as its form of outreach… and was consequently sued. They’d probably have a strong case against us. Any public process should have multiple methods of outreach. >>Continue Reading This Article>>

 

Category: Web 2.0 •• Region: General •• Comments [3]

My Presentation from the Walk/Bike California Conference

Eric Fredericks • Sunday September 16, 2007

I apologize to my regular readers for my recent hiatus. I’ve been battling a stomach illness for quite a while now and have barely spent any time in front of a computer screen the last couple of weeks.

I was able to attend the Walk/Bike California and APBP Professional Development Seminar last week in Davis. I gave a presentation titled Is Walkability and Bikability Really Better in California than the Midwest? All in all, I think it went pretty well considering I wasn’t able to practice much due to my illness, I only had 20 minutes, and my slide notes would not print! You may not get much out of the presentation considering I don’t use a lot of text in my slides—I prefer pictures and talking instead. However, I figured I would share it anyway. You can download the presentation here. [PDF – 4MB]

I will also be speaking at the California Chapter of the American Planning Association Statewide Conference in San Jose next month. I will be on a panel with Dustin Luther, the Director of Interactive Marketing for Move.com and founder of the Rain City Guide. Our panel is on Public Engagement through Web 2.0.

 

Category: Presentations •• Region: General •• comments [2]

More Articles...

www.flickr.com

Visit our Photo Gallery

Post a Job!
$25 for 45 days