Daily Score Blog

I recently bicycled from Seattle to Bellevue, Washington, across Lake Washington on the I-90 floating bridge. This trip is not complicated. Once you’re on the wide, well-shielded bike lane, you’d think that getting to Bellevue would be assured. You’d be wrong. First, you have to get across Mercer Island.

On the island, the bike route leaves the freeway and vanishes into a labyrinth of branching paths. They’re beautiful bikeways, no doubt: wide, separated from traffic, well-graded, gracefully curved for smooth cornering—a pleasure to ride. But they’re almost entirely unmarked. Where there are signs at all, they only say “Bike Route.” (All of them are bike routes. Duh!) Imagine traveling in a city without street signs – or with ones that only say “Car Route.” Next time you see a sign like the one above that says “Bike Route,” remember, it’s a symptom of Car-head. (Photo by orangejack on flickr.)

Ending bicycle neglect—with all the benefits that would bring—means providing for two-wheeled navigation. Many Cascadian cities, including Portland, and Vancouver, BC (both the city and the metro area) now have reasonably good cycling maps. On Mercer Island, I was carrying this one. Portland also has an online bicycle trip planner, and Thurston County , Washington has a nice online biking map.

But maps aren’t much use without reference points on the ground, as I learned while wandering Mercer Island, looking for markers amid the atheletic fields and cul de sacs.

[Alas, this is super-intern Justin Brant's swan song -- his last Daily Score post before he moves on to bigger and better things...]

Reader Jonathan Shakes came up with a great idea in response to Clark’s blog post on the absurdity of the paper-vs-plastic debate. Says Shakes: “I'd love to see an illustration from one of the data geeks just why the bag contents matter more than the bag itself.”

Well Jonathan, this data geek accepts your challenge.

Assuming that a grocery bag holds one day's worth of food for a family of four, the choice about what to put in the bag is about 186 times as important as the bag itself. (For an illustration, see the graph to the left.)

This number was calculated using the concept of embodied energy -- the energy used to produce,  transport, and dispose of a product over its entire lifetime. For food this includes making fertilizers, processing, transportation, storage, and cooking.