I didn’t make it to the big Pro Walk/Pro Bike advocacy conference and the National Women’s Bicycling Summit that were down in Long Beach last week; but I did follow it closely via Twitter and other outlets. From all the news and opinions I’ve read, four things stood out. I share them below in case you missed them too.
Mark Gorton’s calls for radical reform
Mark Gorton, the web entrepreneur and financier behind Limewire, Streetsblog, and Streetfilms, gave a keynote that brought the house down. Gorton has recently launched a global initiative dubbed “Rethinking the Automobile” and his speech certainly seemed to meet that goal. Channeling one of his inspirations, former Bogota Mayor Enrique Peñalosa, Gorton exclaimed, “Birds fly, fish swim, people walk,” and he said walking is a “human rights violation.” Cities have become so auto-centric that Gorton believes, “We have crushed the ability of children to move about their own world.” To thwart the dominance and negative impacts of cars in cities, he suggested that, “We should not be building any new automobile infrastructure.”
How can we push for such dramatic change? “We [people] are the majority. Cars don’t vote,” Gorton said. He also called for a new campaign to change the way people think about transportation.
For more on Gorton, and to follow his work, check out RethinkTheAuto.org.
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To read the whole story, visit here: http://bikeportland.org/2012/09/18/four-takeaways-from-pro-walkpro-bike-from-someone-who-wasnt-there-77487
