Bike Month Bash 2016
Kick off summer and celebrate the end of Bike Month with BikeSD at the Lafayette Hotel with a massive pool party following an easy townie ride. The annual Bike Month Bash will take place on June 4th, 2016, rain or shine, starting and finishing once again at The Lafayette Hotel in North Park, San Diego. Riders will have the opportunity to enjoy the complete Lafayette Hotel experience. The 15-mile ride will take riders through the historic neighborhoods of North Park, Hillcrest, Normal Heights & City Heights. Register online through June 2nd.
Wanna know why you should attend? Here is a personal story from member/volunteer Aire H. Thank you Aire for sharing your experience from last year’s ride.
When I first saw BikeSD’s Bike Month Bash last year, my first thought was, “Sign me up!” I was looking for a way to meet people who shared my interests and a fifteen-mile bike ride with a pool party afterwards seemed like the perfect opportunity to make some friends. So, I decided to volunteer for Bike Bash 2015. On the ride, I got to follow up with other riders, asking them about their experience riding bikes and riding in San Diego. Many were riding bikes for the first time in years and some had come with their friends from as far away as LA, while others like me had come in the hopes of making friends. We had time to talk and get to know each other without working too hard. Afterwards, the group enjoyed amazing drinks and food poolside at the Lafayette Hotel and while I definitely left with some new friends, I also left with an understanding of the need for bike lanes—not every cyclist gets to ride with 80 friends or can take the lane to stay safe.
Photos from Bike to Work Day 2016
Friday was San Diego's Bike to Work Day, the single-day, annual outreach effort by our regional planing agency, SANDAG, to encourage San Diegans to try commuting by bicycle. This year, SANDAG definitely tried to go all out. Billboards advertising Bike to Work Day were spotted throughout the county. Here are some photos I took at the pitstop we hosted at 28th and B Street. Much thanks to my board member John Anderson for his effort and enthusiasm all morning. Here are a few photos from the day taken at 28th and B Street.
Special acknowledgement to one of our supporters, Evan Schumacher who not only biked to work, but rode his son to daycare first prior to riding to work. Parents are definitely super heroes.
@BikeSD here's the proof #BiketoWorkDay2016 pic.twitter.com/r1J4GJ5PEe
— Evan Schumacher (@evschu) May 20, 2016
There are benefits to have an annual day to promote an activity that very few attempt on a regular basis in San Diego, but these benefits can be exponentially increased when the facilitation becomes part and parcel of our streetscape. While the city has made moves in striping more bike lanes, alongside road diets throughout the city - much more needs to be done.
If you're having fun riding to work and everywhere else this month, come celebrate Bike Month on June 4th and become part of the change that is shaping San Diego to be a safer more livable city.
This Weekend: Loads of Good Times with Festival of Funk, CRSSD Festival and CodeAcross
It's almost the weekend, and while you sit and procrastinate this Friday afternoon at work by clicking refresh over and over again on this site, we've got some fantastic events for you to attend. Hope to see you at one or all of them!
- Festival of Funk - Tomorrow, Saturday. Get tickets here by midnight tonight as no tickets will be sold tomorrow. Ride your bike or Decobike it down, we will valet your bike for you.
You are invited to experience The Funk at its highest level. The Festival of Funk is a celebration of sours, saisons, and all things funky, carefully curated from some of the most fearlessly innovative brewers in the world. We've put together a jaw-droppingly rad group of breweries and locked down one of San Diego's most legendary venues for a party of epic proportions.
Attendees will be baptized in the deep and diverse waters of funk, from the delightfully tropical to the intensely sour and everything in between, experiencing the truly amazing variety of flavors these exotic yeast strains and bacteria are capable of kicking out. The Festival of Funk will also a prime opportunity to pick the brains of some of the most talented and adventurous brewers in the world, so come prepared with your beer-nerdiest questions.
We'll have plenty of food options on site as well as water stations, an outrageously funky DJ mix from Peso, and a few surprises. We'll also have tons of ultra-sexy merchandise on hand, including a painfully fresh, limited edition Festival of Funk tee.
All proceeds from Festival of Funk will be benefiting the incredibly kick-ass BikeSD organization, a non-profit working to make San Diego a better place to live, work, and ride, and the Cleveland National Forest Foundation.
- CRSSD Festival - tomorrow and Sunday
Tickets have sold out, but if you're stressing out about parking - don't. Ride your bike down and we will valet it for free so you can enjoy yourself in a gorgeous downtown park. If you ride Decobike, note that the nearest stations are #61 located at Cedar St. & Kettner Blvd located east of the Water Front Park. and station 208 (on B St. Pier) located south of the park. Because of the festival, stations 52 and 68 will not be available. If you're struggling to figure out the best way to get downtown by bike, check out the Ride the City app, or google maps for the best routes.
Neither Amtrak nor the Coaster will be running tomorrow, so if you live too far away, do consider either carpooling or taking the bus down. Each MTS bus can accommodate up to two bicycles.
- #CodeAcross - This Sunday.
Bike riding software developers: rejoice. You are needed to help jumpstart a data driven approach to making San Diego streets safer for biking. 11am - 2pm |Origin Code Academy | 101 W. Broadway, Suite 1100, San Diego, CA
Open San Diego (OSD) has been working on a bike app that will send data about where biking infrastructure is needed directly to San Diego’s transportation planners. This Sunday, as part of CodeAcross, a global event for people who want to make their City work better, OSD wants your input on how to make sure the app leads to better experiences for San Diego’s cyclists.
Just like a data driven approach drove the adoption of Vision Zero, the WeBikeSD app can provide data to fuel decisions that make our streets safer. Learn more and let us know you’re coming by following this link: RSVP.
Lunch will be provided and you’ll meet new people who care about the things that you do. Don’t think you’re a CodeAcross kind of person? You’re probably wrong, but use this handy flowchart tool to figure it out for yourself.
Tonight: Celebrate Your Inner Foodie at the Boulevard Market
Today is Park(ing) Day, and both KTU&A, in Hillcrest, and the Downtown Partnership have creatively implemented some temporary changes to re-imagine the use of curbside parking spaces.
But if you're wondering what you can do after work, you should stop by the Boulevard Market tonight that begins at 6PM.
What is the Boulevard Market?
The Boulevard Market is an initiative by the El Cajon Boulevard Business Improvement Association to promote El Cajon Boulevard and all the goodness the boulevard has to offer. Under the adept hands of Marketing Manager Beryl Forman, the Boulevard is transforming from a seedy, speedy thoroughfare with failing business to a thriving destination with successful businesses where people go to see and be seen.
Forman describes the Boulevard market as a,"foodies paradise with music, a cocktail lounge and San Diego's best street food."
The event is open to the public, and all ages welcome. The event is held at El Cajon Blvd and Utah Street, so if you ride your bike from Park Boulevard, the bike lane will end where the market begins.
Below is a promotional video for the Boulevard Market:
If you drive, do be aware that parking is going to be a huge challenge and a source of (avoidable) frustration. But we will be at the Boulevard Market to provide you with free bike valet. So ride your bike to show that there is a demand for bicycle facilitation on the Boulevard!
Edit:
Below is a lineup of who and what will be at the Boulevard Market tonight
Throwback Thursday: Park(ing) Day
Tomorrow, Friday, is the third Friday of September which makes it Park(ing) Day. Three years ago, local urbanist, Howard Blackson made this happen:
Tomorrow, Downtown Partnership is planning on doing some events to celebrate Park(ing) Day at 4th and Market and 5th and Island. Stop by and check it out.
What is Park(ing) Day? It is a way to repurpose and re-imagine a metered parking spot for a few hours on a single day in September.
A metered parking spot is an inexpensive short-term lease for a plot of precious urban real estate. What is the range of possibilities for creativity in a space usually dedicated to the storage of a private vehicle?
The introduction to the Park(ing) Day manual begins as follows:
The vast majority of outdoor urban space is dedicated to the private vehicle, while only a fraction of that land is allocated to open space for people.
That range of repurposing the outdoor urban space is plentiful. By temporarily testing the range of possibilities, like on Park(ing) Day, we can demonstrate how much more we can do with our city's public spaces. For example, we can accommodate more commuters by converting curbside parking to bike lanes, we could put our roads on a diet and create parking protected bike lanes so that all road users can contribute toward a calming effect on our main streets instead of simply treating our main streets like speeding thoroughfares that are scary to walk or bike along. We can also repurpose vehicle parking spaces, our public spaces, into parklets that serve as gathering spaces for everyone instead of simply using curbside spaces as a storage spots for private vehicles.
Since that September back in 2012, San Diego has become home to two permanent parklets. The first one opened on August 2013 at Cafe Calabria, and the second by Mama's Lebanese last year, in September.
Repurposing curbside vehicle spots has also resulted in a handful of bike corrals, or bicycle parking spaces, such as on Adams Avenue by Cantina Mayahuel, in the College Area by Living Room Cafe, and another outside Modern Times Brewery at 30th and Upas.
But San Diego has so much further to go. The never ending demand for curbside parking defeated the louder demand for safe streets in Uptown earlier this year, and the city's desire to build a bypass bridge and a parking garage to facilitate even more vehicular traffic into the iconic Balboa Park, just got the green light from California's highest court.
I hope the photo above serves as an inspiration. Opening up public spaces for people, instead of vehicles, is a higher goal to aspire to. San Diego isn't ready to go there yet. But I hope it one day will be.