Need a Car-Ectomy?

It’s like a parasite – a tapeworm taking over your intestines, a leech lapping your vitality like so much vitamin water. It’s emptying your pockets, it’s making you fat; it swallows your time and hacks it back out in your face.

It’s your car, man, and it’s killing you slowly.

You need a car-ectomy.

The blog carectomy.com is a good place to start.

It began last year as an offshoot of ecogeek.org, another blog dedicated to reporting on environmentally-friendly technologies. Carectomy is dedicated specifically to “the noble goal of removing cars from the planet.” It features all kinds of interesting articles, bike related and otherwise. (Yesterday, the blog had a great piece about the Aqueduct Mobile Filtration Device, a bicycle that harnesses pedal power to boil and filter dirty water.)

“I come from a cycling background – in addition to racing, I’m also a cycling advocate, so we kind of took it from there,” said 34-year-old editor Josh Liberles. He spoke with the Bike Blog over the phone yesterday, from his home in Albuquerque.

“There’s a lot to do with politics too, and the way communities are designed, urban planning. And of course where the money goes and what gets subsidized.”

At the moment – somewhat to Josh’s surprise – the blog is an almost-full-time job for him (he freelances on the side, as well.) “The idea is grow this into a successful enough site where somebody could make a living being an editor,” he affirmed.

So far, so good – they get about a thousand views a day, from people all around the world. Recently, he was contacted by a British man who had started a project to bring bikes from Great Britain to South Africa to improve village-to-village mobility -- it’s a cool story.

There’s plenty more as well, so check out the site on your own. Thanks to Josh for the chat; happy weekend to all and to all, a happy weekend.

-- Isaiah Thompson