Government Policy & Politics

10 Things I Loved about Living & Bicycling in Sarasota, Florida

To wrap up National Bike Month, I’m doing a little series on what I loved about living and bicycling in the various places I’ve lived and bicycled. (But don’t worry, even after this month, I’ll do plenty more writing about bicycling as well.)

To start with, I’ll start with the first city I lived in, the city where I started bicycling as a main mode of transport and gave up my car. Living in Sarasota, Florida from birth until the age of 22 or so, I know that city better than any other.

Berlin — Bike Paradise

I recently took a short little vacation to Berlin (just about 5-7 hours away by train from where I live). While I had noticed when I visited the first time (2 years ago) that it was a tremendous bike city and put it at #7 in my bike city photo tours series, I didn’t bike around the city on that visit. Additionally, it was rather cold and rainy, so biking wasn’t in full bloom there.

This time around, we (my partner Marika and friend Salah) were set on biking, a bit at least. The weather was nice and our friend got us some bikes. We ended up going on a bike ride that lasted 5 hours or so on our first full day there.

DIY Global Village Construction Set

DIY Global Village Construction Set

This is cool. A group of DIY enthusiasts led by Marcin Jakubowski, Open Source Ecology, have come up with a Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). The group’s official vision: “A world where every community has access to an open source Fab[rication] Lab which can produce all the things that one currently finds at a Walmart cost-effectively, quickly, on demand from local resources.”