This is an interesting movie based on interviews with Mark Covington (Georgia Street Community Garden) and Toby Barlow (Team Detroit).

As you may recall, Toby wrote the New York Times opinion piece on the virtues of biking in Detroit. He again mentions bicycling’s role in a new Detroit within this short movie.

Here’s an interesting blog out of Toronto called Urban Country that we stumbled on via a Howard Meyerson Tweet.

The blog article in particular is about biking to work:

Here in Toronto, the City has been handing out awards to bicycle-friendly businesses since 2001. The 2009 Bicycle-Friendly Business Awards will take place on January 19th, 2010 at the Gladstone Hotel and we will find out who this year’s most bicycle-friendly businesses are.

The consulting company that employs me imason inc. is an example of a bicycle-friendly workplace, and I felt compelled to highlight my workplace in the promo video above.?imason allows employees to bring their bicycles directly into the 8th floor office, storing them at the back of the office, while also providing shower facilities for those who feel compelled to shower after cycling in to work.

Do you work for a bicycle friendly employer?

WXYZ ran a tech piece on a powered bicycle wheel:

Detroit of course, is the car capitol of the world, but what if everyone started riding bicycles? That’s the vision of a group of MIT engineers.

The Copenhagen Wheel turns an ordinary bike into a smart electric hybrid. It’s a tiny motor designed to make cycling easier.

So powered wheels are what’s holding Detroit back from re-embracing the bicycle? Oh please.

A third of Copenhageners use bicycles as their primary transportation choice. It’s a flat city not unlike most of Metro Detroit. They don’t need powered wheels to make cycling easier.

What they do have is road infrastructure that encourages safe cycling — something nearly all of Metro Detroit lacks. We’ve built a metropolitan area that discourages healthy transportation choices.

WXZY should know that. They’re located on West 10 Mile in Southfield, which is a terrible road to bike on.

Powered bike wheels aren’t going to encourage anyone to ride roads designed only for powered car wheels.

We need Complete Streets and bike lanes — and that’s the real story.

Here’s an older Streetsblog post and video about a New York City blizzard and how the snow helped redefine the streets for the better — albeit temporarily.

In February, PBS will be debuting a new transportation documentary with a focus on Detroit.

Narrated by Blueprint America correspondent Miles O’Brien, the 90-minute documentary asks whether it is time to fundamentally change the way Detroiters — and by extension all Americans — get around. Detroit is the crucible in which the nation’s ability to move toward a modern 21st century transportation infrastructure is put to the test. The documentary shows how investments in the past — beginning with the construction of canals in the 18th century –profoundly shaped Detroit’s physical layout, population growth and economic development. Before being dubbed the Motor City, Detroit was once home to the nation’s most extensive streetcar system. In fact, it was that vast network of streetcars that carried workers to the area’s many car factories. And it was the cars made in those factories that would soon displace the streetcars in Detroit — and in every major American city.

Detroit’s engineers went on to design the nation’s first urban freeways and inspired much of America’s 20th century transportation infrastructure system — from traffic signals to gas stations — that became the envy of the world.

But over the last 30 years, much of the world has moved on, choosing faster, cleaner, more modern transportation and leaving America — and Detroit — behind…

While this documentary looks interesting, there is some irony in their description. It was streetcars and bicyclists that were eventually displaced from Detroit streets often with the argument that the automobile was a more modern means of transportation.

On the transportation invention timeline, we’re not moving on by choosing bicycles. We’re moving back.

And moving back isn’t always that sexy, which is probably why those post-WWII transportation visions of the future had sleek cars on elevated super-highways and inexplainably-fit peds on moving sidewalks.

The Jetsons didn’t ride bicycles.

Now the Flintstones — they had active transportation (which really doesn’t help explain why Fred and Barney had higher BMIs than George Jetson.)

It seems the WALL-E vision for a transportation future without human-power and is more accurate.