Phillip Barron The Herald Sun WAKE COUNTY — “This is my first race, and I got third place,” says Edgar, a sixth-grader at Brogden Middle School in Durham. Out of breath, Edgar just raced a mountain bike through lakeside trails of Harris Lake County Park at the TORC Spring Skills Clinic He wouldn’t be here [...]
Phillip Barron The Herald Sun For many, the nineties were a time of political advancement and financial success. The economy was doing well, failed policies from previous administrations were being turned back, manufacturing was on the increase, and progress was the buzz-word in board rooms and parlors. This national excitement had something, more than a [...]
Phillip Barron The Herald Sun In Ghana, the availability of a reliable bicycle turns a 2 hour walk to school into a 25 minute ride. In Guatemala, it means that someone who previously could not carry their wares to a market now has a way. In Namibia, where specially equipped bicycles become pedal-powered ambulances, it [...]
Phillip Barron The Herald Sun When Martin Luther King said that true peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice, he had in mind the idea that lasting, real peace is possible only when we actively take responsibility for it. Marv Axelrod is tired of hearing promises of peace [...]
Phillip Barron The Herald Sun Four days a week, Teddy Salazar takes his son Theo to school just like most parents. Instead of a car seat, however, Theo rides in a trailer towed behind Salazar’s bicycle. Weaving around potholes and climbing hills along four miles of west Durham’s streets, Salazar tows his son to and [...]
Phillip Barron The Herald Sun Willetha Barnette, of Durham, rode her bike in traffic for the first time on October 4th. Encouraged by her friend Cynthia Ferebee to join the Critical Mass ride, a monthly group bike ride through the streets of Durham, Barnette said that she enjoyed the freedom to ride on the streets [...]
Phillip Barron The Herald Sun September 14th marked the 108 yr anniversary of first pedestrian death at the hands of an automobile in the United States. On September 13th, 1899, Henry Bliss stepped from a streetcar on Central Park West, in New York, and was struck by a taxicab. He died of his injuries the [...]
Phillip Barron The Herald Sun Durham Rising brought a lot of people downtown on Saturday — 12,000 by some estimates. A surprising (yes, even to me) number of those folks were cyclists. So, if you walked around downtown at all that day, you surely had to step around some of their bikes. There wasn’t a [...]
Phillip Barron The Herald Sun On a recent Sunday, while I was dropping off some donated wheels and frames at the Durham Bike Co-op, two of Durham’s newest taxi cabs stopped by for repairs. MarcDreyfors parked his cab on the sidewalk, jacked up the front end to remove the front wheel, and brought the wheel [...]
Phillip Barron The Herald Sun David Hartgen’s plan to repave the state of North Carolina might be accepted in some towns, but not in Durham. Hartgen, a professor at UNC-Charlotte, recently released a study of transportation planning that looks at urban areas around the state. His conclusions simply amount to statistically backed reasons why urban [...]