My heart goes out to the neglected bicycles of Humboldt County. Some are left unsheltered from winter storms.  Others, ridden through muddy puddles, aren’t cleaned or oiled, and their moving parts grind grit.  Lamenting audibly, their rusty stiff chains squeak in agony. 

An unlubricated chain causes poor shifting and wears itself, the chain ring, and rear sprockets quickly. And it saps power from your legs.

Show your bike a little love with two minutes of maintenance. Cleaned and oiled, it will run smoothly for thousands of miles.

The Humboldt County General Plan Update has just passed a milestone. The draft plan has been written. The Planning Commission has heard public comment on each chapter as they became available over the last 8 months, and now it’s decision time. This plan directs land use, transportation planning and most everything else the county does for the next twenty years. How will they tweak the plan to accommodate projected growth for the unincorporated areas of the County? They have three basic choices: Alternatives A, B, C and D.

There has been a lot of focus on the Eureka Arcata Humboldt Bay Trail as the main thing that is needed to improve bicycle infrastructure in Humboldt County. With all the wrangling over how this trail can finally get done, we don’t want to lose site of a larger vision, trails connecting all of our major communities and providing route options within our cities. Imagine a region where you can walk and ride to almost any neighborhood without battling motorized traffic. This is the vision we’d like to share with you.

Download your own KML file of this map to view, pan, and edit in Google Earth! Google Earth is a free download.

Winter is here, but don’t let a little rain and lack of sunshine stop you from riding. Instead of huddling indoors, make a few adjustments to your bike and throw on some rain gear to enjoy riding. As I like to say, there is no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes. Here are a tips for biking in the winter.

Peter Jarausch, an engineer at Winzler & Kelly Consulting Engineers in Eureka, uses commuter checks to buy transit tickets, allowing him to apply his pre-tax earnings to commute expenses. Peter says he’s “happy to save money and support local transit at the same time.” Plus, he adds, “Commuter checks are really easy.”

Commuter benefits are IRS-speak for when an employer offers transit passes or tickets as a pre-tax benefit for employees. One common approach is for an employer to offer their employees the option of deducting an amount from their paycheck to be applied to the purchase of transit passes or tickets. Both parties win: the employee saves on their income taxes and the the employer reduces their payroll taxes, worker’s compensation costs, and the expense of providing parking.

This semester I more than doubled the number of times I have taken the bus (4 times this semester, 7 times in the last five years). Why this explosive growth in my personal bus travel? Could it be those sleek new hybrid buses? Perhaps. Could it be a wavering in my love for the bicycle? Absolutely not. I attribute my increased ridership to the Jack Pass, Humboldt State University’s universal transit pass.

Carrie Wolski’s first memories of taking the bus were from when she was three years old. Twice weekly, Carrie and the other children enrolled in Humboldt Educare would board an Arcata & Mad River Transit bus to take field trips to places like the Judo Hut (the former home of Humboldt Community Television), the Fire Station, Arcata Community Recycling Center, and the Arcata Co-op. Instead of always remaining within a playground and classroom/daycare area, Educare staff reasoned, why not bring these young minds out to explore more of their community? And in this sense, the bus was as much a destination as a means to get there.

This article is by Chad Johnson and Alissa Fogg

Does sharing a gallon of Rocky Road ice cream with 12 other cyclists on a quiet road in Mendocino County sound like heaven to you? How about hopping back on your bicycle and pedaling towards the ocean after savoring your sweet treat? A two-wheeled traveling revolution has gripped many of us at Green Wheels and we’d like to share it with other intrepid bicyclists.