Author name: Zach

is the director of CleanTechnica, the most popular cleantech-focused website in the world, and Planetsave, a world-leading green and science news site. He has been covering green news of various sorts since 2008, and he has been especially focused on solar energy, electric vehicles, and wind energy since 2009. Aside from his work on CleanTechnica and Planetsave, he's the founder and director of Solar Love, EV Obsession, and Bikocity. To connect with Zach on some of your favorite social networks, go to ZacharyShahan.com and click on the relevant buttons.

The Poor Subsidize Middle Class Free Parking — $440 Million From Car-Free Renters

You know the line: “nothing in life is free.” It’s not my favorite line, since it’s not completely true, but it does help to highlight the often illogical attraction we have to “free stuff.” By and large, people probably have a positive view of “free parking,” but the parking really isn’t free … not even …

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The Fascinating Way Bicycling Brings Us Closer Together

In each society, there are differences in how we treat personal space. Even from one person to the next, there are differences, but for the most part, each society has some norms. Seattle-based landscape architecture student Peter Cromwell, in the fascinating presentation below, shows what distances are normal “public distances,” what are normal “social distances,” what are normal “personal distances,” …

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14 Options For Better Bike Lanes (Infographic)

It’s long been a debate between “hard-core” American bicyclists and European-style American (and European) bicyclists: protected bike lanes (and even bike lanes, in general) vs on-road bicycling mixed with automobile traffic. But the masses clearly prefer protected bike lanes, and plenty of research (including my own) has shown that protected bike lanes are safer and encourage …

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Amsterdam Rocks It So Hard (VIDEOS)

Amsterdam is perhaps the best large city in the world for bicycling and bicyclists. It probably is, but Copenhagen is also always in the running. Furthermore, there are better bicycling cities than Amsterdam in the Netherlands, but they are smaller, so I’m not sure if they are in the same class. Anywho, if you haven’t …

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DIY Electric Bike Book Flies Past Kickstarter Goal

Love the idea of electric bikes but don’t want to dish out thousands for one? Love to lifehack and make your world a better place in the process? Love DIY projects? Then this Kickstarter is for you*. Micah Toll built his own electric bike (ebike) years ago. Then he started building them for others. Then …

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Will Self-Driving Cars Make Our Cities Better Or Worse?

When you talk about the future of transportation*, some of us think about more bicyclists and bicycling, and a more bicycle-friendly world. However, for the average Joe, I think the main thing that comes to mind these days is self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are actually getting much closer to commercial reality than many of us …

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Biker Lands On Mattress After Bike Knocked Out From Under Him By Said Mattress

This looks like a stunt or a fake video or something, but apparently it’s not. A Brazilian bicyclist was minding his own business when a guy driving a truck (quite fast, I might add) saw the bicyclist at the last minute, swerved, and delivered a mattress to the bicyclists backside… after the mattress swooped in …

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Second-hand bicycles: Buying online vs. buying in store

These days, more and more people are choosing bicycles as their preferred means of primary transport; understandably, as they provide various health and economic benefits as well as being an environmentally friendly alternative to getting around. Aside from that, riding a bike improves one’s cardiovascular fitness and is great way to keep in shape and exercise while getting …

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Cycling Panties For Women (Crowdfunding Campaign About To Surpass $25,000)

The Gas2 repost below features some pretty cool- …errr… hot-looking panties for women cyclists. I’m afraid that the ladies might be pulled over in some places for riding around in public in these things… or is such a use just for the Kickstarter crowdfunding photos? Anyway, these are hot — within just about 5 days, …

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Vélib Celebrates 6-Year Anniversary (Infographic)

Vélib, Paris’ groundbreaking bike-sharing program that one could argue is responsible for the boom in 3rd-generation bike-sharing programs in major cities around the world (I would argue that), has now been around for 6 years. (Wow. Time flies….) To commemorate the anniversary, the Vélib team created the wonderful infographic below (h/t The Bike-sharing Blog). Check …

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Top Bike Share Programs… In An Infographic

Obviously, we’re big fans of bikes here. I realized several years ago that the common line and piece of advice “stop to smell the roses” matched bicycle transportation excellently. You see and smell and appreciate so much more on bike than in a car. I’d say that you do less so than on foot, but …

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Volvo’s Cyclist Detection Technology Sort Of Misses The Point

Awhile back, Volvo Car Group announced that it was introducing the “world’s first Cyclist Detection with full auto brake.” At first glance, that sounded great. However, when I looked at it closer, it basically just said that “if a cyclist swerves in front of your car,” the car will stop. Hold on a second — …

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NYC Bike Share Launches — Thoughts From NYC & The Interwebs

New York City (NYC) has finally rolled out the beginnings of its large bicycle-sharing program, Citi Bike, with 6,000 bikes and 330 bike-sharing stations hitting the streets on Monday. The stations are initially located in Manhattan and Brooklyn. It’s far from the largest such project at the moment, but it’s the largest in the US, …

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Where Bike Commuting Grows Fastest (Infographics)

The League of American Bicyclists recently created some cool infographics about bicycle commuter growth across the country. In general, bike commuting has skyrocketed, doubling from 1.7 billion in 2001 to 4 billion in 2009. However, the growth has occurred to a much greater degree in cities and towns that have been designated as Bicycle-Friendly Communities by …

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Better Bicycle Facilities, Off-Road Bike Paths = More Bicycling

More or less, bicycle infrastructure policy and its relationship to riderships was the topic of my 2007 master’s thesis. It’s been obvious to some of us for a long time that bicycle infrastructure policy needs to change in order to give bicycle ridership a big boost, and public health would of course improve from that, …

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Holland Video — Biking Is A “Way Of Life” (The Original Cool)

Below is a fun (& funny) video about Holland. Of course, biking is highlighted a bit. Biking makes life so much cooler, easier, more relaxed and carefree. It is used in (non-car) advertisements of all kinds simply to stick a cooler and more positive image on the product being sold. With bicycling at the center …

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How Bicycle Friendly Communities Are Evaluated (Infographic)

Several years ago, I was the director of an organization in the Charlottesville, Virginia region that got Charlottesville designated as a Bicycle Friendly Community (BFA). There were great guiding documents that the League of American Bicyclists supplied as part of the application process, but it certainly would have been nice to have this infographic* below …

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Super Bike-Friendly Cafe In Zurich

This is certainly the most bike-friendly cafe I’ve ever seen: Using Google Translate, here’s the description under the video (translated from German): The city of Zurich presents the first Velokafi under the program Urban Transport 2025. The bicycle drive-in allows the coffee enjoyment, without getting off the bike. Idea, design, implementation: Serranetga AG Pretty cool. …

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