Chris Carlsson
Recent Posts
StreetUtopia North Beach
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View southeast across North Beach from Russian Hill. StreetUtopia is a new community organizing effort centered in North Beach. Launched by Hank Hyena and Phil Millenbah at an inaugural event in early January, they drew upwards of 150 people to an empty historic storefront at 1 Columbus Avenue, where they showed Streetfilms, had a small […]
Sign on, Root in, Branch Out
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Imagine the Wiggle as fully green bikeway, with agriculture and an open creek instead of cars! He skirted Market Pond and made his way up to the Wiggle. Passing through a green arching gate he rolled along next to a long aging wall that had seen better days. On the other side of the wall […]
Guanajuato: A City for Flaneurs and Loiterers!
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2010 is a big year for Mexico! I just completed another visit to Mexico, once again starting in Guadalajara, but then doing a 9-day driving trip through the heart of the country. This new year is Mexico’s bicentennial and centennial (independence from Spain and the revolution, respectively), and signs denoting the historic routes of the […]
A Lost Decade for San Francisco’s Critical Mass?
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Critical Mass rolls down Lombard Street, July 2007. Photo by Chris Carlsson Well, no. We’ve had a great run in the 2000s. Averaging between 750 and 3000 riders on any given month, the birthplace of Critical Mass keeps going strong, in spite of the total lack of promotion or organizing during this past decade. But […]
Hopenhagen or Carbonhagen, We’ll Still be Cycling Regardless
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Cycling chic in Copenhagen, and this is a cold day in December! I caught Mikael Colville-Andersen’s inspiring talk on urban cycling from the Copenhagen context at San Francisco’s SPUR on the last Friday of October. I suggested we could do an interview when I came to Copenhagen in December and he graciously agreed, stepping outside […]
Free Public Transit?
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A crowded moment in the Tunnelbana, Stockholm, Sweden’s efficient and easy public subway system. In Stockholm, Sweden, a fascinating political intervention has been taking place during the past few years. Starting originally around 2000-2001 in an anarcho-syndicalist youth organization, Planka.nu is a surprisingly innovative and effective transit activist group. Today it is still an entirely […]
Back to Civilization
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A wet late afternoon on Norrebrogade in Copenhagen… bikes fill the lanes on either side of the street and a bus is in the near background. Not many cars!… Returning to Copenhagen after some years away is always a pleasant shock. Few cities in the world feel as properly scaled as this lovely old Danish […]
Take Two Peaks and Call Me in the Morning!
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View from top of south peak in February 2008. With the rain falling in late November, and soggy unemployment statistics haunting our lives too, the idea of Depression lurks just below the surface. Depression has multiple meanings like so many concepts in the English language; in this case, I’m taking two of them: 1) mental […]
The Copenhagen Moment
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October 24, 2009, Bay Street in San Francisco: Riders traverse one potential future shoreline I’ll be leaving in ten days for Scandinavia, and will be sending reports to sf.streetsblog on the upcoming Climate Change conference (known as COP15) and the massive demonstrations that are expected to surround it. I’ve been to Copenhagen (my mother was […]
What We Don’t See: China Miéville’s ‘The City & The City’
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Invisible people are all around us! Once you start thinking about it, what we don’t see is a much bigger category than what we do see. But what we don’t see ON PURPOSE is a really interesting category. When you add to the mix mobility, walking or riding or driving through city streets, not seeing […]
Nature’s Unsung Helper
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Stephen O’Brien, gardener at Transbay Terminal since 1958. Stephen O’Brien has been coaxing an oasis out of a most unlikely environment for a long time: the small green patches at either end of the ground level Mission Street frontage of the Transbay Terminal. He started back in 1958, when the old Key System train tracks […]
A Cycling Congress in Mexico
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Respect me: I am also traffic! Guadalajara, Mexico was host this month to the 2nd annual Congress of Cyclists in Mexico, a national gathering of bicyclist activists from around the country. I was invited to give a speech, which I somehow managed to do in Spanish (thanks to my media naranja for translating and coaching […]