The first movie is Motherload, which was filmed by Liz Canning, a California mom with two kids who was discovering in 2013 that cars were stifling her and her kids physical activities. I came across Liz talking about her film project on Facebook back when it was named "Less Car More Go". I sent her a donation and she put a picture of the first ebike I had built, (a bakfiets with a solar panel on the cargo box), in her fundraising book along with those of a hundred other cargo bikes and their people. As she kept filming and her kids grew from being just big enough to climb into the cargo bike to running around, the movie metamorphosed into Motherload and Liz interviewed Dave Cohen of VBike in Brattleboro for the movie. The movie has been shown in theaters around the world, and now you can watch it on Youtube:
The second movie is From Rails to Trails, a one hour long PBS special. It tells the history of the struggle to convert abandoned 1960's rail lines to Rail Trails. Although the film does include a history of the federal legislation that enabled rail trails as well as a few other trails around the US, one of the highlights is the section about the Burlington Bike Path/Island Line trail. One of the founding team members Attorney Rick Sharp has connections to Bellows Falls and is now working on the Route 5 bike corridor. We have started the group "Friends of the Connecticut River Valley Trail" to move the trail along from the original VTrans bike corridor study (2023) into a bike/ped route on par with trails in surrounding states. The movie is available for streaming on PBS:
contributed by Karl Kemnitzer
