Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save The Economy
Elly Blue
This is a short and entertaining book, mostly for people who like biking or maybe people who think they might like biking. In general it just reaffirmed my positive feelings about biking, but I did learn some interesting things that I didn’t know before. For example, as a newcomer to the Bay Area, I was very interested to learn the history of the Embarcadero Freeway, a San Francisco waterfront-covering eyesore that was mercifully destroyed, never to return, in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. (Thank you, earthquake, for the beautiful SF waterfront of today.) I was also interested to read about the divergent historical paths of the US and the Netherlands–in the 1970s, both countries had equally poor bike infrastructure, but the latter made a concerted national push to improve it, and is now one of the most bike-friendly places in the world.
Mainly, I’m mad that you can’t bike across the Bay Bridge!