Do you need one more reason to register for Pro Walk / Pro Bike ® 2010? Register by September 1, 2010 and take 20% off the cover price of Joyride by Mia Birk when purchased at Pro Walk / Pro Bike ®. Read the synopsis below.

Joyride: Pedaling Toward A Healthier Planet
by Mia Birk

Synopsis

Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Planet is pioneering transportation leader Mia Birk’s 20-year crusade to integrate bicycling into daily life. With a table scrap of funding, she led a revolution that grew Portland, OR into the #1 American cycling city.

Through a panoply of hilarious and poignant stories, Birk takes readers on a 20-year rollercoaster journey of global and local discovery and education, while bringing into sharp focus some of the planet’s most pressing and hotly debated energy and environmental issues, policies, shortcomings, and solutions.

The journey begins in the heart of car culture U.S.A. with Birk’s car-addicted youth in Dallas, TX. As Birk breaks away from home and a typical sedentary American lifestyle, she settles in Portland, OR, where she and a cast of larger-than-life characters lead Portland’s transformation into the nation’s most bicycle friendly city. You’ll learn about the foibles, motivations, passion, and surprising compassion of the people who decide what a city will become, the battles they fought, their triumphs, failures, and results.

After leading the Portland revolution, Birk hits the road, spreading her vision from the California suburbs to the Cascade foothills, the beaches, plains, large cities, small towns, ex-urbs, and the heartland of rural America. Careening towards big obstacles, getting scraped and bruised by political glaciers, she overcomes old ways of thinking and finds ways to make communities – even Dallas – more human, healthy, safe, and splendid.

Written as a stylistic blend of memoir, rollicking stories, and lessons, Birk shows that bicycling can be a significant and incredibly positive means of transportation and an economic powerhouse for businesses who are realizing the health, safety, economic, environmental, and livability benefits of integrating bicycling and walking into daily life.

While many books today extol the pain of our world’s traffic congestion, air quality, and economic, safety, land-use, and health problems, Joyride is the antidote, offering hope to any and everyone interested in changing our world for the better, one pedal stroke at a time.

Joyride launches September 1st. Check out Mia’s keynote speech at The National ProWalk/ProBike ® Conference in Chattanooga TN, or at points beyond. See www.miabirk.com for upcoming engagements and pre-ordering information.