A new bike adventure

gone but
not forgotten!

Today marks my last official day of work until September 1, 2010. It was a balmy September afternoon when I sprung the idea of an eight month sabbatical on my boss as we biked back to the office from a downtown meeting. She was reluctant but willing to listen. I presented a detailed plan for how my duties could be carried out during the proposed leave. I would like to think my well thought out proposal convinced her to agree, but the prospect of forgoing most of my salary in the upcoming tight budget year probably played a role as well.

So writes Michael Burton, fellow biker and the guy who got me my new gig at Bickerdike. He, his wife Gin and son Miguel are all on their way to join another scion of The Windy City's bike community, Jim Redd at his Eco-Hacienda in Ecuador!

Both Jim and Michael were rather influential in getting me into the bike community; the former by his example and the latter by his enthusiasms. Even though he and his family will be returning, it's sad to see them go. It marks yet another small generational turn among those who've made biking here fun. On the other hand though, their departure on a new adventure is hardly surprising. Having contributed to the ballet of the streets for nearly a decade, I think they've earned it. Besides, it's time for some others to influence the folks coming up ...

Michael, Gin & Co.
Good Luck & Bummel On!!!

Cities for Cycling

think national
build local!

The National Association of City Transportation Officials just launched this new project to share best practices on developing and maintaining world-class bicycle transportation systems. As cities and towns increasingly pioneer new designs it will assist local officials by promoting state-of-the-art innovations that ensure safe traffic conditions for all modes of transportation!

Journey of discovery

just 6 miles
from home

A few weeks back, Roger Cohen wrote about The Big Apple's local peculiarities in his NYTimes op-ed column. He pointed out something that I've also noticed about The Windy City. You only have to go a few blocks in any direction and the city completely changes both in terms of culture and economics. I've been aware of this lately because og my shift in work from the high-rise Loop to the low-rent near North Side. Cohen experienced the same thing when the NYTimes moved its Times Square offices a couple of blocks southwest into the Garment District. As he describes it,

The former headquarters was trapped in the neon tentacles of Times Square, a once seedy part of town re-imagined as the tourist-filled set for a movie called “New York,” a place where people from out of town loiter six-abreast gazing at the flashing lights while New Yorkers try to dodge the phalanxes of flesh.

The new premises, as I’ve gradually learned, placed us just within the garment district, an area where zoning laws have protected apparel manufacturing space and so held off the developers who would otherwise have turned clothes factories into condos and created yet another gentrified district bereft of seediness, tawdriness, community and that strange high-low alchemy essential to any great city’s mystery and charge.

Unlike Cohen's, my new digs are defined less by industry than by ethnicity. It's the heart of the city's Puerto Rican communities which are generally much poorer than my former workplace just off North Michigan Avenue. However, like Cohen's Garment District, it's an incredibly vibrant area, despite carrying more of the weight of our current economic crisis.

It's an area I knew little about beyond the usual fears and prejudices of your typical Northsider. To be frank the first few weeks were a shock. I take regular smoke-breaks along the street next to our building. Most of the buildings opposite are abandoned or inevitably for rent. There's a city ordinance sign on the corner reminding me and my fellow citizens that its illegal to solicit prostitution in public (I guess then it's OK in-doors?).

But like I said, much of my initial shock resulted from being in a strange, new part of a very large, diverse city. I've started to discover all kinds of hidden, fascinating facets. Hopefully, I'll be able to write more about this as the months go by. For now, I've got to finish this year's Annual Report.

Shrine of the Vélotariat

blessing the bike

On 2 November, The Oregonian reported that St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in downtown Portland has

become the nation's first church with a permanent indoor shrine honoring the Madonna del Ghisallo, who is the patron saint of cyclists. An entire section of the 80-year-old wood-and-stone sanctuary will be set aside for bike commuters to contemplate their travels and remember those who have died while cycling.

A painting of the Madonna del Ghisallo (above) by local artist Martin Wolfe will hang above bike parking and a nave where travelers can light candles or sit in reflection.

3 cheers for Dansk vélopunk

The Voice of the Globe 1937
rolls in Copenhagen

From James A. Fitzpatrick's
Traveltalks

The American documentary film director specialized throughout his career in travel documentaries. Besides directing, he also wrote, produced, and narrated. As well as The Voice of the Globe, MGM distributed a series of his travel films under the umbrella title Fitzpatrick Traveltalks. Paramount also distributed his series, Vistavision Visits. Their hallmarks were Technicolor photography and stolidity.

Bike abuse

and
cattle mutilations?

Barry Neild wonders aloud in Thursday's Guardian about a worrisome trend in street vandalism. Since returning from the States, he's seen more taco'd rims, slashed tires, and busted lights on London's parked rolling stock. Bike theft is bad enough; but why are some folks sorely temped to take their post-modern angst out on somebody's ride? You might be able to understand the casual abuse of those high-end, composite-framed models favored by the Lyra-clad weekend warrior set. As Barry writes,

...the trend might be dismissed as the cycling equivalent of dragging a bunch of keys across the paintwork of a Porsche: bitter acts of vandalism aimed at punishing the overtly wealthy.

Unfortunately, Lycra Louts aren't the only victims.

...more often than not, the victim is some poor elderly beast replete with industrial chain guard, rusted Sturmey Archer gears and a tragically jaunty child's windmill attached to the handlebars.

Tongue firmly in cheek, this trend reminds him of the horse and cattle mutilations that so electrified UFO enthusiasts, Satan worship worriers, and amateur psychosexual obsessives back in the 1960s. Perhaps though Occam's Razor would be more helpful. Some folks are big, fat douche-bags ... especially when they're drunk!

Pedaling Revolution

how cyclists
are changing
American cities

Over at the NYTimes, David Byrne reviews Jeff Mapes's new book, Pedaling Revolution. Byrne highlights two fascinating points. First, biking won't truly take off until more women join the Vélotariat. This is especially true with celebrity women such as actress Jennifer Aniston and model Agyness Deyn. Second, the challenge of getting women on bikes is the crazy, contradictory attitudes most Americans have about biking. On the one hand, bikes are viewed as bright, shiny toys. Angry cagers typically demostrate this when they yell at street bikers to get back on the sidewalks. On the other hand, bikes are aften associated with extreme sports. As Byrne writes,

For decades, Americans have too often seen cycling as a kind of macho extreme sport, which has actually done a lot to damage the cause of winning acceptance for biking as a legitimate form of transportation. If your association with bikes is guys in spandex narrowly missing you on the weekends or YouTube videos of kids flying over ramps on their clown-size bikes, you’re likely to think that bikes are for only the athletic and the risk-prone. Manufacturers in the United States have tended to make bikes that look like the two-wheeled equivalent of Hummers, with fat tires and stocky frames necessitating a hunched-over riding position that is downright unsafe for urban biking and commuting. But that’s been changing for at least a few years now. Whew.

Whew, indeed...

City of cylicists

Copenhagen
(early 21st Century)

from
Colville Andersen

Fat Lad's 6th Riders Writing Cycle

Evangelise!

You have 120 words to convince us of why where you ride is the best place in the world to ride (even if you don't belive that to be true...)

Chicago is the best place to roll.

I must confess that I found it a bit overwhelming when I first got here. But I soon learned that for a big city it’s neither impersonal nor alienating. As a city that works it attracts people who don't quite fit in back home.

Miles and miles of small, distinct neighborhoods, 100s of coffee shops and bars, museums, music venues, as well as lots and lots of public space in the form of parks and beaches provide enough refuge for even the most peculiar personalities.

It also attracts and keeps them because of a hell of a lot of cheap bikes, the strong bicycle culture, our tolerant mayor, and the usually accommodating cops.

More on Chicago rolling here, here, and here!

New Spokesman at The NYTimes

before hitting the road
on two wheels

The paper's City Room Blog launched Spokes today. This new feature will regularly cover a wide range of topics about biking in The Big Apple. Today's post, by Sean Patrick Farrell, celebrates spring by highlighting the growing popularity of biking as an alternative means of transport. Although new bike sales have yet to respond to the rising costs of gas and mass transit, New Yorkers have been

...clearly dragging their old steeds out of storage and getting them tuned up. Some of these bikes seem to date to the late 1970s, and there was even a run on that era’s 27-inch tires, a size that has not been seen on new makes since the Carter administration.

Farrell then describes the options for getting all those beaters up and rolling. He suggests online resources for finding bike repair shops but warns that the warmer weather will inevitably lengthen repair and tuneup times. For the congenitally impatient there are numerous bike repair classes, covering everything from fixing flat tires to full tuneups. The post is direct and conversational. I wish Farrell luck and applaud The NYTimes' initiative.

Put your money where your pedals are? Part II

Representation
without taxation?

Last Thursday I posted about Oregon House Bill 3008. Proposed by State Rep Wayne Krieger (R), it would require all bikers to register their trusty steeds and purchase $54 licenses every two years. Not surprisingly the bill has sparked a pretty heated debate within the vélotariat. Perhaps it's my advanced age, but I don't think the idea of a bike tax is all that outrageous.

Indeed, it's quite common around the world. Many countries currently require bike licenses. And they've been doing it since the late 19th Century. The Netherlands issued the bike license above for 1932-33. Although not as stylish as its art deco predecessor, Switzerland continues to issue an annual red-metal license tag like this 1986 example to the right. And here in The States, many cities such as Los Angeles and Stillwater, in MN, currently require licenses. It would appear then that in all these instances local governments and their rolling citizens alike generally share the opinion first expressed by Oliver Wendell Holmes that Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. So for me then there are three big issues:

Is a bike tax unfair?
Is it unduly burdensome to bikers?
Will the generated revenues be used wisely?

More thoughts
later...

Put your money where your pedals are?

Oregon pols
propose bike tax,
part one

Embedded video from CNN Video

Wayne Krieger and three other colleagues in the Oregon House of Representatives are sponsoring House Bill 3008 to require all riders to register their bikes and purchase licenses. BikePortland covers the details paraphrased here:

The $54 licenses must be renewed every two years at the same price. Other fees include; $1 for transferring a license between bikes owned by the same person, $2 if you want a duplicate license, and $5 to transfer the license from one rider to another. Failure to register would carry a maximum $25 fine. Altering bike serial numbers or licenses would be Class D Traffic Violations with a maximum $90 fine. The resulting revenues will go into a Bicycle Transportation Improvement Fund that would then be used to fund bicycle related transportation improvement projects.

Needless to say, Portland's bikers aren't buying it. Their primary fear is that the license fee will discourage new bikers. Others feel that Oregon bikers already support the state's transportation system through their state and local taxes. They also point out that bike traffic doesn't even come close to grinding down the pavement the way cager traffic does. Still others have concluded that the bill is a not so subtle attempt to keep tabs on the presumably more politically confrontational vélotariat.

My thoughts
later...

Somewhere over the rainbow

with Contrail

Doobybrain posted this nifty device several weeks back. It

attaches above the wheel of a bike and covers the bicycle wheel with a layer of chalk. The chalk then creates a trail or mark on the surface of the road, turning the bike into a sort of large drawing utensil. The concept, developed by Pepin Gelardi of Studio Gelardi focuses around the idea of safety in numbers. By using this device, bicyclists will have a clearer path on which to ride safely and out of the way of vehicular traffic.

At the same time, as more bicyclists using the Contrail go over a line created by a cyclist before them, the line gets brighter allowing drivers to clearly see a marked bike path where there might be none. It’s sort of similar to what happens when a dirt path appears in a grassy field after lots of people have taken the same shortcut over a period of time.

A rackumentary

finding
David Byrne's
bike racks

David Byrne, an avid biker for almost 30 years, has been working with the NYC Department of Transportation and art gallery PaceWildenstein to unveil 9 arty bike racks he designed. They're installed in and around Manhattan and Brooklyn. Inspired by the city's bike rack design competition, Byrne submitted some original design named after specific locations and neighborhoods.

Budapest traffic taming

the Magyar Bycall

From the same country that gave us Nikolai Tesla comes Kitchen Budapest, a self-described spicy innovation lab. It's a new media lab for 20somethings who passionate about bringing together mobile communication, online communities and urban space. And they've created a little gadget that lets cagers know when bikers are near!

ByCall is a portable radio alarm system for urban bikers who want to warn car drivers about their presence nearby to avoid accidents. It is basicly an FM-transmitter fitted on the bike, which emits a constant audio warning in a 5-10 m range on all radio frequencies, so that when the biker gets near a car, the driver will hear the warning on his own car radio if it's turned on (which usually is). The beta version of ByCall will be made for the three most popular radio frequencies, but the final goal is to make a device which works on all available frequencies.

Velotarier aller Länder, Part II

Introduction to a Critique
of Urban Geography

Guy-Ernest Debord, founder and leading light of the French Situationists, was no biker as far as I can tell. But he did describe the amazing dynamics of the velotariat.

The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places--all this seems to be neglected. In any case it is never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis turned to account. People are quite aware that some neighborhoods are sad and others pleasant. But they generally simply assume elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor street are depressing, and let it go at that. In fact, the variety of possible combinations of ambiances, analogous to the blending of pure chemicals in an infinite number of mixtures, gives rise to feelings as differentiated and complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke. The slightest demystified investigation reveals that the qualitatively or quantitatively different influences of diverse urban decors cannot be determined solely on the basis of the era or architectural style, much less on the basis of housing conditions.

... the whole of life of those societies in
which modern conditions of production prevail
presents itself as an immense accumulation of
spectacles. All that was once directly lived has
become mere representation.

Bike Kill 2008

on the wacky, wacky streets
of New York City

The NYTimes once described it as

a carnivalesque assortment of voodoo top hats, orange jumpsuits, bunny ears, Mexican wrestling masks and a Pee-wee Herman doppelgänger waving from his Schwinn cruiser.

Whitnesses assert that it's the greatest, craziest gathering of misfit bike gangs and whimsical wheelmen/women. Over last weekend, the infamous Black Label Bike Club, hosted several hundred Situationists who participated in everything from tall bike jousting to six-pack drinking contests.

Bike speed test

is bike commuting
the quickest option?

It's commonly accepted wisdom here in The Windy City that getting around by bike is faster than driving or using mass transit. How much faster depends on the route, traffic conditions, as well as your overall willingness to flout city and state laws. Several weeks ago I did my own experiment when I put an out-of-town guest on the Brown Line at Belmont Avenue bound for Addison Street while I biked there. I showed up a good 10 minutes before he did.


Today, while rummaging around The NYTimes On-line Archives, I discovered a similar but decidedly more scientific experiment conducted here on 9 October 1937. It put up a biker against a taxi, The L, a private car, a horse, a bus, a street car, and a pedestrian. The course was a little more than a mile starting at Dearborn & Quincy and finishing at Halstead & Van Buren, southwest of the Loop. The results were impressive:

National Parking Day

City of Big Shoulders
19 September 2008

For the second year in a row, The Trust for Public Land hosted a one-day-only park next to the future Bloomingdale Trail, on the 1800 block of north Milwaukee Avenue. The trail will be Chicago's first, and the world's third, linear park converted from an elevated train line. The Park(ing) Day site was next to a future park and access point to the trail.


Additional Park(ing) Day sites included:

Avon Walk for Breast Cancer
1350 W. Belmont Avenue (Lakeview)
Chicago, IL
9am-3pm

CB Richard Ellis
(Walton Place) West of Michigan (Near North)
Chicago, IL
8am-1pm

Chicagoland Bicycle Federation
9 W. Hubbard Street (Near North)
Chicago, IL
7am-7pm

Method Home Products
2034 N. Halsted (Lincoln Park)
Chicago, IL
7am-7pm

The Trust for Public Land
1801 N. Milwaukee (Bucktown)
Chicago, IL
6am-1pm

City of Waukegan
Madison Street (West of Genessee)
Waukegan, IL
8am-2pm

Robotic bike parking?

only in Tokyo