JP Bikes Spring Roll

From JP Bikes

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Just a reminder that our main annual event of the year, the Spring Roll!, is coming up this Sunday. Looks like the weather will clear up and warm up by the weekend, so you’ll want to spend it outside with us.

The Spring Roll! is a rolling bike party through Jamaica Plain and will take place this June 10th at the South Street Mall (at South and Carolina). Meet up at 10 am for bike decorating, some light refreshments, a music soundtrack from the “stereo bike”, and more. Families and riders of all ages are welcome. At 11 we’ll all roll up Centre through Hyde Sq, over to Jackson Sq, down the Southwest Corridor bike path all the way to Forest Hills, and then up South St to our starting point, accompanied by the stereo bike soundtrack, and safely escorted by the District E13 community service officers on bikes (of course). The whole ride is less than 4 miles and will be done at a leisurely bike parade pace.

Please RSVP to our Facebook event at this link and tell all your friends!

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The Social Life Of Small Urban Spaces

From JP Bikes, looks like a good time.

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Come to the Connolly Library in JP on Monday Jan. 9th at 5:30 for this excellent documentary and forum on how people use public spaces. It’s especially relevant given all of the local efforts to rework local street networks into more pedestrian and bike friendly environments.

more info

Description

The Boston Cyclists Union, JP Bikes and LivableStreets Alliance invite you to watch and discuss with an expert forum the classic 1980 one-hour documentary “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” by the witty journalist William H. Whyte. This documentary surprised everyone with its revelations on how people actually use public spaces, and what makes them use some more and some less, and it’s super fun to watch. If you’ve ever enjoyed people-watching on a sunny day—this is the ultimate version, early 80s style.

Afterward, discuss the movie and the future of place-making in Boston with three renowned experts in different aspects of the built environment, Dr. Walter Willett, Aaron Naparstek, and Peter Furth. These three speakers come at the built environment from the fields of public health, medicine, transportation engineering, community organizing and journalism. It should be a very interesting evening!

Dr. Walter Willett MD DrPH is the Fredrick John Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition, and Chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and also a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is considered one of the world’s experts on nutrition. Willett is the principal investigator of the second Nurse’s Health Study, a compilation of studies regarding older women’s health and risk factors for major chronic diseases. He has published over 1,000 scientific articles regarding various aspects of diet and disease and is the second most cited author in clinical medicine. In the public eye, Willett is perhaps best known for his 2001 book Eat, Drink and Be Healthy, which presents nutritional information and recommendations based on the currently available body of nutrition science.

Aaron Naparstek is the founder of Streetsblog (an online publication providing daily coverage of transportation with blogs in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Washington DC. Launched in 2006, Streetsblog has played a significant role in transforming New York City transportation policy as well as cities all over the world. Based in Brooklyn, Naparstek’s advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bike network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

Peter G. Furth is a professor of engineering at Northeastern University and the author of “A Greenway Network for the Boston Area,” a study of the possibilities for an interconnected system of off-street paths in Boston, as well as several other studies regarding improving transit, bicycling, and walking conditions. His work led to the experimental sharrow (bicycle shared lane marking) with guidelines on Longwood Avenue in Brookline, and several other improvements for biking and walking in Boston and neighboring towns.

More on the movie: In the late 1970s, William H. Whyte, author of “The Organization Man” and the first to publish Jane Jacobs in Fortune Magazine, took a leave of absence from his job there to study one of the issues he’d always cared most passionately about: cities. He started with a simple topic: public plazas. His hometown of New York City had recently begun giving developers incentives to build public plazas to give people some breathing room in the crowded city and he decided to investigate which plazas worked. He took to the task like a scientist, setting up time-lapse cameras with digital clocks and making charts and graphs and notes. And the conclusions he came to surprised everyone. The result was this movie “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” and a book of the same title.

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JPBikes Sundae Roll

from the email, I love everything about this idea, check this out.

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Sundae Roll – evening neighborhood cruise from JP Bikes (jpbikes.org)

Time: Sunday, July 24, 8-10pm

Location: The Monument, Centre Street and South Street, Jamaica Plain, MA

Meet your fellow bikin’ and cyclin’ neighbors for a weekly evening cruise around JP, taking advantage of the cool temps and quiet streets! Bring your mountain, commuter, cargo, tandem, tall, short, chopper, mixte, fixie, road, or cross bike. We don’t care, as long as it’s in good repair and you’ve got a front and rear light; slap a bell on for extra credit and fun.

We’re going to wander around the back streets of JP for a while, and then get ice cream at JP Licks! This is not a ‘critical mass’ or protest ride: we’ll follow the traffic rules (we stop for red lights and pedestrians in
crosswalks, for example.)

If it’s a success, we’ll do it again the next week, and the week after that…

Our goals:

-socialize and catch up by slowin’ down
-encourage the people in our lives to use their bikes more, if only for a
goofy ride (bring a friend, lover, neighbor, coworker, date, roommate…)
-meet your neighbors! You know, those people that live near you!
-make new friends (and more?)
-find people to ride with
-rant and rave about bikin’ and cyclin’ in the area

Little ones are welcome as long as they’re in seats, trailers, trail-a-longs, cargo bikes, etc. with you.

Please come helmeted, and we humbly suggest water and moolah for frozen concoctions. Cameras are good too!

Note on the starting time: we’re aiming for early enough that we won’t spoil bedtimes for those with early mornings, but not so early that we won’t interfere with dinner plans and whatnot. We can discuss this more
after the ride!

Info at https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/event.php?eid=241245302565970

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