Portland is much the same way, although to a lesser extent.  One thing that is for certain is that bikes get a lot of attention here, which is quite evident when you consider the $620 million Portland Bike plan.  Another really awesome aspect of Portland is the Providence Bridge Pedal, which celebrates both the city’s bike culture as well as it’s many iconic bridges.  One Sunday morning in August, the city shuts down all the bridges – including the highway bridges – and 20,000 people on bikes ride around on them for hours.  This year the route took us up and over the I-5 (Marquam) bridge, down onto the 405, and up onto the top deck of the Fremont Bridge, which reconnects the 405 with I-5 to the north of the city.  It was awesome!   And it looked something like this:

On the 405

Atop the I-5 Bridge

On the St. John's Bridge

Which is not to say that Portland does not also love other forms of transportation as well.  There’s the MAX, which is our extensive light rail system; the Street Car, which has hosted many groups from my hometown of Cincinnati for explorations of its success; the REAL train, aka Amtrak, which is an excellent option for going to and from Eugene all the way to Seattle; and of course, cars, which people don’t really drive that well here.  However, if people do have a car, and they are lucky enough to have a diesel car, they can go to this local garage that I just heard about called Green Drop Garage for a biodiesel conversion.  Apparently they are also in the habit of exchanging oil changes for vinyl records or craft brewed beer.  Or perhaps that was a one-time offer?  Nevertheless, it’s so Portland.

I’m still waiting for the Subaru I thought I was going to get for moving here!  Oh well, I still have Dorothy…

BTW, I think this picture represents the last time Dorothy was truly clean

All is not necessarily lost though… Abu Dhabi, as the article states, is in fact, loaded, so where there is not a way, there is a bank account to make a way.   Still, will the richest Emirate find tenants to actually move into Masdar?  I hope so, for the sake of this grand experiment, because I would like to see if it’s actually possible.  And since Abu Dhabi seems to be the only ones with enough money to make it happen, I’m rooting for them.

• 3,060 unique visitors
• 4,209 visits
• 13,765 page views
• visitors from 91 countries/territories!

Oh how I love statistics.  But let’s see what our top ten countries sending visitors were:

1. United States (duh)
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. China
5. South Korea
6. Malaysia (that’s a cool surprise!)
7. India
8. Australia
9. Spain
10. Turkey

Welcome to all my international visitors, wherever you live!  And to those of you who actually pay attention on the occasions when I post something of value, I’m going to give you a little bonus tidbit:

Check out this article on Treehugger about the zero-landfill Subaru plant in Indiana.  I know I’ve been threatening to write a post about used cars, and I probably will here soon, but reading this article about the Subaru plant gives me warm fuzzies and actually makes me open to the possibility of getting a new car at some point.  Of course living in Oregon means that if I bought a new Subaru, I’d fit right in.  Now just make it electric and give me a wind turbine to plug it into, and I’ll be all set.

I think that Daphne (my bike, above) and Ruby (Erin’s bike, below) would get along well, should they ever have the opportunity to cruise together in person.

Soooo, I know I said that LILAWAC was retired before… consider this post my official passing of the torch and an un-retirement party 

Please visit Erin’s first post here to wish her luck, and don’t forget to add LILAWAC to your RSS feeds!

A close-up of the new Seattle Bike Map by Erin W.

Erin did her first iteration of this bike map as part of her graduate thesis at the University of Washington.  Go see more of Erin’s awesomeness at her Web site and blog. And then ring your bike bell for green designers everywhere the next time you refer to this map!

Just to be clear, YES, I lived in Los Angeles for two years without a car.

And I did so intentionally.  Before I left the Midwest, I sold my beloved Volkswagen GTI, bought a bike, and moved to LA car-less.  I did the math – not having a car in LA for two years would save me an estimated $10,000, and when you’re living on a shoe-string budget and trying to put yourself through graduate school, every little bit counts.  And I’ve always been a big fan of public transportation and bikes, and since you can bike almost year-round in LA, I figured I would do just that.  Besides, I told people – I wanted to prove that it could be done.  I wanted to put the system to the test and see if my life was severely impacted by not having a car, in one of the most car-obsessed cities in America.

So how did I do? …You might be wondering.  Well, would it surprise you to know that this blog-happy cyclist started a blog specifically about my experiences in LA while car-less?  It’s called, ahem: Living in Los Angeles Without A Car. Original, no?  I called it LILAWAC for short, because that’s the abbreviation, and because it sounds cute.  Please feel free to have a look if you are interested in hearing more about the authentic LA car-free experience, from myself and a few other contributors … although I stopped posting well over a year ago (this little thing called a “graduate thesis” got in my way), it’s still up and public, and every once in a while I get an odd comment on there.

This bike got me around Los Angeles for two years!

Sooo… If you are moving to LA, or just visiting, and you’d like to try and do it car-free and carefree (ha), here’s a crash course for you (ha ha, crash course):

• Bookmark your LA Metro Bus and Rail Trip Planner. Even after a year of living there, I’d occasionally find a quicker way to go from point A to point B using this widget.  Check out my tips for riding the bus here.

• When possible, take the DASH buses.  They are awesome and only cost 25 cents.  Plus, they take pennies!

• Oh and don’t forget that Los Angeles isn’t the only city in the Southland… keep an eye out for Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus or the Culver City green buses, in case there are some gaps in your public transportation route.

• Trying to get from LAX Airport to anywhere in Los Angeles is daunting, but not impossible.  That is what the LAX Flyaway is for.

• Car sharing, on the other hand, is nearly impossible in LA.  At least, I found it troubling.

• If you’d rather go by two wheels instead of Metro, keep in mind these points:

1. Riding on the sidewalk is not only irritating, it is illegal.
2. Ride in the street when there’s not a bike lane, and when in doubt, take the lane. Yes, LA drivers are crazy, and yes, it’s scary riding on the same road with them.  But if you try to squish yourself in between a lane and the parked cars on the side of the road, you put yourself at a much greater risk of getting sideswiped or doored … better to just be IN the lane.  Very few drivers will straight out mow a cyclist down if you are in front of them.  (At least that’s what I tell myself so I can sleep at night.)
3. Cycling in LA can be tricky, but it can also be awesome.

Image courtesy of the Laist.com - that's me!

Now another thing you should know is, although I may be the only one with a Blogspot LILAWAC, I’m certainly not the only one who ever lived in LA without a car. In part because of my blog, I was approached by a very nice woman named Diane who decided to put together an exhibit of all our experiences. She’s a photographer by trade so the exhibit was sort of a pictoral essay, a series of short testimonials by 100 people like me, all of whom went car-less for various reasons. One of my quotes even made it into the exhibit (photo above).

I hear the exhibit is still making its rounds about Los Angeles! And although I am not still making my rounds about LA, and yes, I do now have a car (although one can hardly call it a big expense), I still look back on LILAWAC with fondness. I wish I could bequeath my old blog to some other car-less buddies still in the Southland who wouldn’t mind sharing their experiences for the benefit of all Angelenos. In fact, if you’re interested in being the face of LILAWAC for the new decade, leave me a comment! Just remember, car-bound people need not apply

And then there’s stories like this:  a former Asheville firefighter shot a cyclist after stopping to argue with him over the cyclist’s son, who was in a secured child seat, because apparently the firefighter didn’t like the fact that the child was on a bike in a busy street.  As the cyclist turned to walk away after their verbal exchange, the aggressor shot at his head… and the bullet luckily lodged in his helmet, so the cyclist is fine.

And the guy who shot him was just sentenced to 4 months in jail.

Yeah, you read that right, 4 months in jail.

Soooo…. this is disturbing.  Someone tries to murder a guy on bicycle in front of his family because he doesn’t like him riding around with his child on the back, and the guy ONLY has to serve 4 months in jail?  Why does it always seem like crimes committed against people who are riding bikes are somehow rendered justifiable in the eyes of our courts?  OK maybe not but situations like this are very, very disspiriting, at best.  (And at worst, a total failure of our justice system.)

Anyway, rather than ramble on vaguely about it, or post angry comments on Treehugger, I’m going to suggest, like I always do, that if this upsets you as much as it does me, you should take action on it.  Write a letter to the editor of the Asheville Citizen-Times to tell them that you think their justice system has failed the cyclist and his family.  Or to tell them that you won’t be riding your bike, or anything else for that matter, in North Carolina any time soon.  In fact, forget me, write whatever you want, but the point is… act on it.  Don’t let that community, or any other for that matter, bully cyclists off the streets.

I have to go write my letter to the editor now.  Have a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving, everyone.

From left to right, moi, Quilian from Archinect, and Jill from Inhabitat. Not shown are Barry, our instigator, Joel, our moderator who was actually in Phoenix, and Cameron, the founder of Architecture for Humanity, who was having some technical difficulties.

The panel, despite an audio delay and some serious bandwidth issues in all four corners, was more or less a success, if for no other reason than we conducted a nearly carbon-free conference session!  Think of all the carbon that was saved by all of us not flying to Phoenix.  This was a big incentive to doing this presentation, and if it was going to happen, GreenBuild was the place.

I do want to mention, however… when I get in situations like today’s panel, I have no idea what I’m saying. I was trying so hard to hear the questions, and to concentrate over the sound of the audio echoing, that my mental “filter”, which is usually fairly porous to begin with, was almost nonexistent.  Therefore I just want to say, once again, THANK YOU to everyone in the audience who sat through it!  I hope you got something out of it.  And I hope you can agree with me and my internet friends* when we say that the Web will certainly play a part in the way that designers operate going forward… even if it will take some time to work out the kinks.

*Speaking of my internet friends, Cameron was the only one that I’ve ever met in person, and it was a pleasure to see everyone else’s animated faces today!  Make sure you check them out on their respective sites:

Jill Fehrenbacher on Twitter @inhabitat and online at www.inhabitat.com…

Cameron Sinclair on Twitter @casinclair and online at architectureforhumanity.org…

Quilian Riano on Twitter @quilian and online at Archinect.com…

Thanks again, and see you all on my Google Reader 

The good news is, in the meantime, I’ve been able to upload and catalogue all of my photos from the event and add some commentary as well.  Feel free to check out my Solar Decathlon collection on Flickr, where each house has its own set of photos and my corresponding thoughts written alongside.  Note the overwhelming gray clouds in all of the pictures – made for some pretty gloomy photography :-/

Wow, that sky is ugly

I will now wax poetic on my favorite house in the Solar Decathlon, since I haven’t done it yet.   I want to talk for a moment about Virginia Tech’s Lumenhaus. This house was truly lovely, and I am at a loss to explain their 13th place finish.  I felt that this team used every sustainable system reasonably available to a residential customer to create a truly green, net-zero energy home.  And not only that, they did so without compromising on space – the interior of house was perfectly proportioned in its public versus private areas, with some extra special touches thrown in that really sealed the deal.  Case in point: the partitions in the bedroom that not only held your closet, but they separated to reveal a TV and in doing so, created a partition wall between the bedroom and the living space.

The rainwater collection system/awning over the front door

But I’m not going to stop there.  The exterior screens were cut steel and then bent by hand in a pattern that was meant to direct sunlight into the house but also maintain privacy.  The awning over the front door doubled as a rain scupper, and drained water into catchment basins under the house… which could be recycled in a closed-loop graywater system.  The skylight in the bathroom… the geothermal heating system in addition to the roof PV array… and if all this hotness weren’t enough, to move this house, all you needed to do was put it on a giant set of wheels and hitch it to the back of a tractor trailer, and you’re on your way!

Metal sunscreen and panel system as seen from the inside

I’m not the only one who thought the Lumenhaus was pretty great, however; the Virginia Tech team was approached by NBC during the Decathlon and the team is now in negotiations to move the house to Rockefeller Center so it can be on the Today Show, which may happen in mid-November.  Also, the team of bloggers at Inhabitat did a great write up of the house on their blog, which included some beautiful photos that I will now borrow to show you how nice the house is -  if only it had been sunny while I was visiting!

courtesy of Inhabitat

courtesy of Inhabitat

Everyone loves a section detail! courtesy of Inhabitat

Congrats to VT for such a job well done, and let’s hope they get some of their technology upgraded in time for the Solar Decathlon Europe competition next year – since they are the only team from the U.S. Solar Decathlon to compete overseas too!

courtesy of Inhabitat