A wonderful little social patterning, guerilla marketing experiment, in which a bicycle occupies automotive space, and replicates. And a larger version, in which bicycles have their own designated replication space.
Tag: bicycle
The Bicycling Orchardist
My friend Kerry is putting in some fruit trees, and we decided to make a trip out to the CreekSide Tree Nursery on 61st St. near Pearl by bike to pick the first of them up. It’s fun to serve as a kind of “proof by existence”. Look, I’m doing it, and I’m smiling, so it’s possible, and it’s okay. The tree probably weighed 25 kg (50 lbs) and so did the trailer, which even when added to the weight of my bike, is less than my own mass. Just avoid any serious hills if you can, make sure you’ve got some low gears, and maybe have a snack afterward. I think 3-4 trees this size would have been totally doable, but then I probably would have broken a sweat!
Bicycle Grocery Shopping Made Easy
In our recent survey of Boulder bicyclists, one of the most common reasons people cited for not biking more was that they have too much stuff to carry. Based on the photo bicycle counts I’ve done around town, I suspect a lot of people find the idea of carrying cargo daunting because they’re trying to do it in a backpack — backpacks and messenger bags are far and away the most common kind of cargo I see, with baskets and panniers a distant second place, and hardly any trailers or dedicated cargo bikes. It’s not the weight so much that makes riding with cargo challenging — even heavily loaded, your bike and cargo will generally weigh much less than you do. Touring in Wyoming recently, heavily loaded, my bike weighed in at about 90 lbs.
One of my fellow travelers (above), weighing in at under 100 lbs herself rode a bike that weighed 75 lbs. We’re not heroic athletes. We didn’t train. You just go slow and make the weight as comfortable and stable as you can, and it’s all good.
A week’s worth of groceries for 2 people doesn’t come close to being that much stuff. If you’re shopping for a larger household then sure, you might have to go more than once a week, but this isn’t really a big hassle. In Europe it’s common for people to go shopping nearly every day, even if they’re driving. It just becomes part of the routine, and it’s fine. Pleasant even. How often do you end up going out for that one little thing you forgot to grab anyway, even when you try and plan ahead?
My around-town bike has a rear rack that I use panniers on, and a front platform rack. Sometimes people see it and comment on what a burly cargo bike I’ve got… but I think this is a very reasonable amount of capacity to have on hand at all times around town. I definitely think of it as a city bike, not a cargo bike. It will happily get me home with 50 lbs of food and sundries, with the weight split between the front and back ends. I ride at a leisurely pace, and arrive home comfortably and generally without breaking a sweat, which certainly wouldn’t be the case if I took my backpacking pack shopping instead.
I was happy to discover a trick recently that makes the shopping experience even easier. It’ll work with most panniers which attach to the rack via hooks at the top. You just pretend that the edge of your shopping cart is a bike rack, and hook the panniers on there for checkout:
This makes it quick and easy to pack the bag inside the store, in a way that will work for riding, instead of doing it all again outside, or having the bagger pack for you (which never seems to go well, unless they bike too), and it makes it clear that you’re using your own bag from the get go, so you don’t have to have the “Oh, I don’t need a bag” back-and-forth, which is nice. Then you can either just lift the pannier off at the door and leave the cart behind if your bike is nearby, or you can wheel all the way out to your ride, and simply lift the pannier off the cart and onto your rack.
Another feature which I can’t recommend highly enough for utilitarian cycling is a no-nonsense kickstand. Something that can hold your bike upright even when it’s fully loaded. No scraping up your bike on walls or railings, no precarious toppling load, just a bike that can take care of itself, like a grownup:
How Boulder’s Twitterati Got My Bike Back
A short story about the bright side of the Citizen Surveillance State we live in today. A bike was stolen, but the theft was photographed in progress, and there were enough people plugged in to the local social media scene that after it was announced and publicized, the thief was followed and apprehended in short order. Creepy and awesome at the same time!
Have Spraypaint, Will Bicycle
Every year, Boulder organizes a fun ride called the B360 in June to help familiarize new riders with the bikeways, and to highlight newly added paths and lanes that those of us who ride every day might not know about (especially if The Google hasn’t yet been notified of their existence…). If you ride here at all you’ve probably seen the faded little stencils all over town saying B360 and B180. Well, this is where those stencils come from!
CycleTracks for iPhone and Android
The San Francisco Transportation Authority created a mobile app to collect bicycle route/usage data called CycleTracks. It’s open source, and we’re thinking it might be fun to adapt for use here in Boulder (and elsewhere) to better understand how people really get around by bike.
Commuting in style
The San Francisco Chronicle has noticed that some people ride bikes without any funny clothes. I’m happy about this, but at the same time, it’s a little strange that it’s news. Hopefully in another few years, it’ll seem so normal, nobody notices.
State DOTs may be forced to return millions in bike/ped funding
The Alliance for Biking & Walking is sounding the alarm on another round of crippling rescissions heading for state and local transportation agencies. A rescission is when the Feds say “Hey, you know that money we gave you? We want it back now.” This happened in 2010 as well, and then 44% of the money returned to DC came from bike, pedestrian, and air quality funding streams, even though they together make up only 7% of federal transportation funds. Yet another example of why local transportation should be funded locally, and why as a cyclist or pedestrian, you should evade your federal taxes whenever possible.
Bicycles, Transit, and the Last Mile
Transit agencies have a problem called the Last Mile. It’s especially problematic in lower density communities, where convenient, high frequency local feeder bus, light rail, and trolley lines are unlikely to be economically viable. Many US communities have this problem. The most common solution is the Park-n-Ride — a gigantic surface lot or parking structure adjacent to a regional mass transit line. People drive their cars a few of miles and park them all day — usually at very low cost to the driver, and often for free (though of course, parking isn’t actually free). There are lots of problems with this model. Parking lots take up a lot of space. Structures are very expensive ($10k-$25k per parking spot). What do you do when you get where you’re going? If the transit line doesn’t come within easy walking distance (500 meters?) of your ultimate destination, this model probably isn’t attractive. It also assumes that you’re going to own or have access to a car, even though you’re taking transit, which precludes you from reaping most of the economic benefits of not driving, as they only accrue when you get rid of the car completely.
I bring the Last Mile problem up because I just came across a study entitled Bicycling Access and Egress to Transit: Informing the Possibilities. Combining bicycles and transit instead of cars and transit can help with a lot of the above issues. The cost per bike parking space is at most a couple of hundred dollars, not $10,000 or more, and for a given area, you can park ten times as may bikes as cars, making a bicycle park-n-ride much more economical in both dollars and space. It’s also possible to take at least a few bicycles along on transit vehicles, which can solve the problem of getting to one’s final destination on the other end, though not generally for everyone since bicycle capacity tends to be limited, especially on buses.
Bike Transport in Switzerland and Austria
A pleasantly surprised American cyclist commenting on bike infrastructure in Switzerland and Austria, in particular Basel and Innsbruck, two European cities that aren’t particularly big (166k and 120k respectively), and which do have some weather and topography, not so different from Boulder. Basel’s bike mode share is 17%, about double Boulder’s, and their bike infrastructure is fantastic. If we get another 9% of our trips by bike, can we have that too please? Or maybe the causality is the other way around.