Talkin' 'bout my generation: sustainable mobility edition

In the earlier entry, "Understanding why Upper Northwest DC residents don't buy into the sustainability mobility paradigm," there are a lot of comments. And recognize that entry is a follow on entry to "Car culture and automobilty: 5 stories of inside the box thinking." Anyway, one of the commenters forwarded a link to the "Understanding" entry (not the earlier one) to the Chevy Chase e-list, and note that it was a re-post from that list forwarded to a neighborhood e-list is what generated all my posts to begin with.

So a person responded, which was copied into the comment stream. She summarized her response thusly:

In short, it seems to me that his entire thesis relies far to much on all residents being young, able-bodied people who have the time to shop daily in small quantities and who only ever need to go someplace close to a subway station or who could realistically bike or use a tiny car sharing service to meet their needs.

The funny thing is that I checked it out, and I am pretty sure the writer, Susan Conklin, is one to two years younger than I.

For what it's worth, Jan Gehl of Denmark is in his 70s, and he and his wife bike regularly as their primary mode of transportation.

I met the people pictured at left almost 7 years ago.  They live around Potomac Avenue Metro and bike to many places around the city.  When the man retired, he biked all the time.  Eventually he realized that he biked alone.  So they got a tandem bike and started biking together.

And some retirement communities and senior centers have active biking clubs, although these clubs are more focused on biking recreationally, rather than biking as transportation.  The couple pictured above rode to the grocery store, recreation center, and other places.  I didn't think to ask them how much use they made of cars, and whether or not they owned one.