travel

Three guidebooks for a dream vacation at your dining-room table

Eat your way around the world, without leaving home. If you had to choose one place in the world to go for a summer break, where would it be? For me, it would be a place I stayed once in Puglia, at the heel of Italy’s boot. In 2003, my friends and I spent a […]

How to green your vacation

Wherever you go, there you are … still having an impact. Everyone needs to take a break from the stresses of life, and environmentalists are no exception. After all, vacations are a necessary part of any sustainable lifestyle. And while vacation time itself can be hard to come by, your getaway needn’t be hard on […]

Greenpeace takes Heathrow

Today, Greenpeace UK held a peaceful protest against the proposed expansion of Heathrow Airport in London (the addition of a third runway). The activists managed to walk out onto the tarmac and up onto the tailfin of a plane, where they hung a huge banner: This effortless breach of security at one of the world’s […]

New certification in the works for green hotels

Saw a passing reference in a piece on travel trends about a new certification scheme for green hotels. Supposed to be developed in the next 90 days, says Joe McInerney, president of the American Hotel & Lodging Association. AHLA’s site, meanwhile, has a list of hot green hotel progress, ranging from Motel 6 using sensors […]

Tourism and carbon neutrality

This story is critical -- another datum showing that the global jet travel binge is both global suicide and homicide all at once, complete with pre-flight thuggery from the TSA* and a side dish of helping-promote-coal-to-liquids on the side (there was another story today about the U.S. (Ch)Air Force's new plan for dealing with peak oil: burn liquified coal / natural gas mixtures).

How much global warming results from air travel?

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to pull together some data on how airplane travel affects global warming, as part of a broader project on transportation and climate change. My stunningly obvious conclusion: it’s complicated. Worse, different calculation methods yield wildly different results. Take, for instance, this brilliant chart (below) from the Stockholm […]

The NYT gets its hands dirty

In Italy and France, people don’t love small farms just for the delicious food they produce. They also prize them for their looks — small-scale diversified agriculture is pleasing to the senses. So city dwellers often head out to the country on the weekend and hang out on farms, and support them with their tourist […]

Umbra on planes and cars

Hi Umbra, Which is less harmful to the environment when traveling long distances, flying or driving? A jet puts out a lot of exhaust, but since it carries a lot of people, maybe it’s less than having everyone drive themselves? Craig Denver, Colo. Dearest Craig, Jeepers it was fun to find out the answer to […]

Business travel, Bike Friday, and the Spokane airport

Confession: I have long coveted a Bike Friday. What cyclist wouldn't? A folding bike that fits in a suitcase -- and the suitcase becomes a bike trailer! Pedal to the airport or train station, take your luggage out of your trailer, fold your bike into the trailer, check your luggage (including your bike), and at trip's end, reverse the process. Ingenious!

So I danced a jig when a founder of the Eugene, Ore.-based company offered to let me try the new Tikit model this summer, to use on my public speaking trips around the Northwest. The question that interested me was whether a folding bike can meet the challenges of urban business travel.

The answer is a provisional yes, but the real revelation is the Bicycle Neglect at airports.

First, to get it out of the way, my product review: The Tikit is not a performance bicycle. Compared with a well-fitted road bike, it's, um, foldable: it's slow, handles indifferently, and flexes in worrisome ways. But that's the wrong comparison. The question is whether, when a regular bike is impossible, a folding one is a viable substitute, and the Tikit passes that test. It's a sweet ride for something that collapses in seconds and fits in your Samsonite: