New Amsterdam

From my recent photo shoot for de Volkskrant, a Dutch newspaper. The pictures accompanied a commentary about NYC's evolving bikescape, this one was used as the lead (a layout PDF is here, look on p.4-5 for a couple of extra photos).

Part of the article's emphasis was on the 'rocky transition' and the 'uneasy coexistence' between bikes and peds and cars. Dunno, all seemed pretty right with the world, but I suppose the detente could have been due to the Memorial Day weekend.

And man, is NY doing an incredible job of taking public space away from cars and giving it back to people. Examples are all over the place. That was almost more striking than the bike lanes.

Morning commute

V Street

This great-looking Kronan utility bike was parked in front of the newish American Ice Company bar one afternoon recently. Nice details and apparently they are relatively inexpensive for an upright bike, in the Electra/Public range, but see this 2008 blog post with quite a range of comments about the build quality etc.

Bike Century

Like Bike-to-Work Day? Well, Copenhagenize - with tongue apparently at least partly in cheek - has tried to up the ante with their Bike Century campaign.

Not sure it's more than a half-joking branding exercise, but hey, one more way to plant your flag for a bike-centric future.

You can join the FB group here.

14th and T

Georgetown

Better for drivers and peds too

Complete Streets: It’s About More Than Bike Lanes

Streetfilms decided to look at three of NYC’s most recent re-designs — Columbus Avenue, First and Second Avenues, and Prospect Park West — and show how pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers benefit from safer, calmer streets.

Radar love

So I'm driving down 14th Street yesterday and my 5-year-old daughter says 'look daddy, that woman is riding a bike with high heels, take a picture!' Plenty of other bikers out and about, yet her radar was tuned to the citizen cyclist.

Pinwheel revolution

Introducing a new green bike accessory that harnesses the awesome power of wind as you ride.

You see, the faster you go, the faster it spins, though I can't make scientific claims as to its propulsion capabilities. This is merely a prototype. Haven't figured out how to turn it off either, you park your bike and it keeps on spinning.

As you can see it's actually partly green. And kind of shiny, so it's a safety device as well, making you more visible.

This technology, like many great human advances, was stumbled upon inadvertently. In this case, when I picked my daughter up from school on the bike and she didn't have a free hand to hold her pinwheel.

(Ok, seriously now, who wants to invent a pinwheel-powered bike light? There's an idea for you right there. You're welcome.)

 

When in Wien

My friend Andre, a recent convert to DC's CaBi, sent some pics of the bikeshare in Vienna. Anyone ever used it?

Cool coup

From The Atlantic:

Washington, DC: Making Bike Commutes Cool

How a stylish, convenient bikeshare program catapulted the District into the ranks of America's elite biking cities

So cool that - as touched on in the article - these days you're not guaranteed to find a bike at popular stations in rush hour. Like this morning, the station at Petworth was empty (first time it's happened to me), so I walked to Columbia Heights and got a bike in front of the Giant. Then when I dropped it off on the west end of Calvert Street bridge, the guy in the photo was happy to snatch it up, as that module was empty too.

Not a complaint, I love you dearly, CaBi. You're the best thing, babe, perhaps in all of the North American bikescape at the moment, the only real competition being Montreal's Bixi and NY's bike lanes.

What I love the most is that it has basically institutionalized the citizen cycling model, with its bike-as-you-are mindset, upright/slower ride, A-to-Bism, and designing it as integrated transit, not 'bike rental'.

And the chainguard of course. I still say the revolution starts with the humble chainguard.

Tipping point

I read somewhere on the Twittersphere that biking levels in DC have seemed to be at a tipping point as spring weather breaks out, with cyclists '15 deep' reported at one stop light.

I don't get out enough, but if it's true then three of the factors are in this photo from this morning: 1) normal DC suit figured out that biking is the best way to get to work, and didn't require special gear or an alternative lifestyle; 2) all the new bike lanes; and 3) Capital Bikeshare.

Red menace

The ArlingtonGOP blog had an interesting post the other day, County yanks parking spaces in Rosslyn, which sure sounds alarming but you know, funny enough, it was actually about expansion of the popular Capital Bikeshare (which operates in Washington DC and parts of Northern Virginia, for those reading non-locally).

What? Oh, sorry, I mean it was about 'the seizure of valuable on-street parking spaces for an under-used bike service'.

Yeah, and you know what else? You know some of those underused sidewalks in Arlington, that are empty pretty much all the time, except during lunch, or maybe some old person? I can’t BELIEVE those haven’t been converted to parking spaces, or hell, a new lane of traffic. Pedestrians aren’t really using ‘em, and what are they doing walking around in the public realm anyway?? The public realm is for cars and drivers! Pave, baby, pave!

I heard those RED (hmm, coincidence???) bikes are pretty popular over in the District. But this is Virginia, we D-R-I-V-E. Why do those damn Dems keep frustrating motorists with annoying alternatives?

Ok, sorry, couldn't help it. I mean, really. I believe the breakdown was losing eight parking spaces total in three locations, gaining three bikeshare dock modules of approximately twelve bikes each. WashCycle has a full and sensible rebuttal.

'ello Guv

While driving home this evening I spotted ol' Arnold Schwarzenegger cruising west on the Pennsylvania Avenue cycletrack, right below the Capitol. Caught up to him on Constitution to make sure I had a clear shot from the car. I know, Citizen Paparazzi. Apparently the former governator had a meeting earlier in the day with Obama about immigration reform.

Build it and they will ride

Great to see this, sent in by the National Building Museum's Patrick Kraich (who, as it happens, is photo number 19 in the sidebar slideshow... I do recall photo-stalking him and his Electra). Tickets and event info here.

DC Builds: Build It and They Will Ride

During the past ten years, Washington, D.C., has seen an increase in the number of people bicycling as their principal form of transportation. One of the reasons for this growth is the conception and implementation of creative bicycling infrastructure throughout the city.

The District of Columbia has created over 50 miles of marked bike lanes, built the architecturally daring Bikestation parking structure at Union Station, installed more than 1,000 outdoor bike parking racks, and launched the successful Capital Bikeshare Program, the nation’s first and largest bike sharing program which serves all of the District of Columbia as well as Arlington County, VA. 

How can D.C. continue to build on these successful efforts? How does high-quality bicycle infrastructure assist in reaching the city’s goals of providing sustainable, multi-modal transportation options, reducing congestion, and decreasing pollution?

The National Building Museum convenes a panel of experts to answer these questions. The panel discusses future plans for Washington, D.C.’s bicycle infrastructure as well as potential challenges, including ease of use, safety, connectivity, and how the economic downturn affects planning, design, and construction of new bicycle facilities.

This program is presented during May in celebration of National Bike Month.

Panelists include:

Jennifer L. Toole, AICP, ASLA, principal, Toole Design Group

Shane Farthing, executive director, Washington Area Bicyclist Association

Jim Sebastian, supervisory transportation planner, Active Transportation Branch, District Department of Transportation.

Dupont Circle III

Dupont Circle II

Dupont Circle

Connecticut Ave

Ah spring. Even the citizen (uni)cyclists were out today. I was thinking, wow, they're so friendly and funky for DC…

Yep, they were from Baltimore.

Kunstler part II

Following up on yesterday's post, my friend Mike sent me this video of James Howard Kunstler's TED talk from 2004. If you don't know Kunstler it's a great intro. If you're already a fan, you'll remember why. A few brilliant laugh out loud lines, woven into his trademark deconstruction of the American Way. At least, our Way of building places and spaces over the last few generations.

What do his urbanism concepts have to do with bikes? I'd argue 'everything'. Bicycling goes hand in hand with the holistic world we create, or more precisely, the world we choose to live in. The world of, say, the pre-1960s naturally gave birth to a cycling mindset that today we might refer to as citizen cycling but then was just cycling.

Today, what North Americans typically think of as normal biking - faster, longer distances, hunched over, often with recreation or sport in mind, wearing specialized clothing and gear - was born of our very different world. People live farther apart, farther from work, in a more fractured and sprawling physical landscape, with time only on the weekends to ride for exercise or sport.

I always say biking is not just about bikes. In fact I actually don't care much about bikes themselves or biking per se as most people think of it these days. I care about cities, and the quality of life that a well-designed built landscape creates. A humane landscape that, incidentally, not only allows for more civilized biking but encourages it. Bikes, like birds or butterflies or good cafes or people walking around in a relaxed way, are a result, a symptom - when you see more bikes around, and people look happy, not grim, riding them, it means your city or town is doing many things right in creating a vibrant and harmonious human environment.

I happen to believe that a massive increase in biking - meaning getting non-bikers to consider getting on a bike - would cure a lot of what ails us. I think promoting the citizen cycling model is a good way to do that.

Better biking > better cities. Better cities > better biking (Copenhagen has a lot of bikes because it's a great city, and is a great city, in part, because it has a lot of bikes).

And no one is more about better cities than James Kunstler.

Clusterf--k nation

I always liked James Kunstler. I saw him speak at the National Building Museum years ago. His cutting and intelligent (even witty, at least never boring) books, particularly The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, resonate totally with my visceral feelings about suburbia versus quality urbanism, among other things. He's become somewhat of a ranting gloom-and-doomer about peak oil and our national obsession with not facing reality about where we're headed as a country. But that doesn't make him wrong. More like the only one in the room willing to say certain things.

I usually read his, ahem, 'Clusterfuck Nation' blog pretty regularly via RSS. Here's a sample bit from the most recent post. A lot of his recurring themes, nothing about bikes per se but still has everything to do with a national dilemma that bikes - ok ok, yeah, along with a fundamentally revamped national physical landscape and a mass conversion away from suburban sprawl and auto-dependency - would go a long way toward helping to solve. (I actually find his general silence about bicycling puzzling, since I believe he bikes around the town in upstate NY where he lives...)

-----

Here's something to chew on: we run about 250 million cars in the USA. Let's say we ramped up an electric vehicle fleet of 10 million cars - which, by the way, is a purely hypothetical and wildly optimistic number. Do you think it might be a political problem if 10 million lucky Americans get to drive electric cars while everybody else either pays through the nose for gasoline, or can't even afford to own a car anymore?

There are a few things you can state categorically about the US energy predicament and the national conversation we're having about it - including the leaders of that conversation in government, business, and the media. One is that we are blowing a lot of green smoke up our collective ass. None of these schemes is going to work as advertised. The disappointment over them will be massive and probably lead to awful political consequences.

Another is that we are ignoring the most obvious intelligent responses to this predicament, namely, shifting our focus to walkable communities and public transit, especially rebuilding the American passenger railroad system - without which, I assure you, we will be most regrettably screwed ten years from now. Mr. Obama had one throwaway line in his speech about public transit and nothing whatever about walkable neighborhoods.

The reason for this obvious idiocy is that it's all about the cars. That's all we care about in the USA, the cars. We can't get over the cars. We can't talk about anything except how we'll find magical new ways to run all the cars. This is a very tragic sort of stupidity and if we don't change our thinking about it, from the highest level on down, history is going to treat us very cruelly.

Windsor and Odin

Shockingly warm coming home from work today. A perfectly normal spring morning gave way to a breezy summer-like afternoon. Spied this Windsor chainguard-and-fenders number parked rather fetchingly. The owner, Andrea, was nice enough to indulge me and so was Odin. Good boy, Odin. I've never heard of the Windsor brand and neither had Andrea, she said she just found it online and liked the way it looked. Good enough reason.

Aveiro dreaming

Saw this on Copenhagenize, it's just a beautiful, dream-like little film showing bicycling in Aveiro, Portugal.

Another reason why CaBi is cool

It's very cool that Capital Bikeshare has workers on these Danish Christiania cargo bikes going around doing regular maintenance at the stations. Nice touch. No, I've no idea why the other guy has a regular bike on his back. Maybe helping out with a little impromptu redistribution?

Bike of the Day - Linus Dutchi

Spring is here! Told you I'd be back. I probably won't be able to keep up the posting fervor of last fall, I'll try to find a more manageable pace. No time for photos today but I hope to get out there this week.

Warm day today in DC, though historically we bounce around anywhere between cold rain and warm sunshine between now and May. Spring and fall in DC are second to none, though while fall seems to linger forever, spring too often can be a little twitchy then jumps right to oppressive summer.

Guess it means it's that bike-buying time of year. We know you're thinking about it. When I was in the market a few years ago for my first bike in ages, the Electra Amsterdam was the only Dutch-style bike available around here. Meaning a true upright ride with a chainguard and fenders, not so much to ask, right?

The city's bikescape has definitely changed somewhat for the better, though still too many bikes of the brutally functional variety out there for my taste. Linus bikes, including the Dutchi 3 (shown) are sold at Bicycle Space downtown. I've been seeing some around. I don't know how durable they are but they're attractive, seem to have the geometry right (though not as upright as the Electra), and I recall they're not terribly expensive.

The Bike Rack at 14th and Q Streets can get you on various Batavus models, though you'll need to ask, they don't keep many (sometimes none) in stock. Brands like Schwinn and Globe and even Trek have been getting into the upright game too.

Other suggestions? Or hey, for a mere 75 bucks per year of course there's always the mighty Capital Bikeshare, heading into its first spring bloom.

Japan and bikes II

The Urban Country (see previous post) came up against the sentiment, at least on FB, that it was poor form to be perceived as using tragedy to advance the biking cause.

Today Copenhagenize also has a post about bikes and their current role in devastated Japan, with a comments thread debating whether such a post is in bad taste or not.

What do you think?

Japan and bikes

Good post by James Schwartz over on The Urban Country:

Japan Earthquake & Tsunami: Role of the Bicycle

CNN was reporting on bike shops being sold out in Tokyo as people scrambled to figure out how to get home to reunite with their family and friends.

Our thoughts are with the people in Japan. Just found out a childhood friend of mine who lives over there is safe. He said on FB that when the quake hit he thought he was going to die... he's still trying to reunite with his wife who is in Tokyo.

Calvert Street

Ok, I'm a little rusty, but I like her angle. Lots of CaBi's out there already, especially when the temperature creeps up a bit like today. I have a hunch in a month or so the red bikes will be THE way to get around the city.

AMS > NYC?

And this from the other coast, via The Church of Sit-up Cycling's FB page:

After biking in Amsterdam, New Yorker comes full cycle

Elegant Dutch ways prove hard to stick to on fast-paced Big Apple streets

The writer sort of wavers between seeing the light:

Who knew that urban cycling — which I find mostly exhilarating and joyous, but occasionally a grim struggle for a sliver of pavement — could also be elegant? [...] Once I started slowing down, I became a more polite rider.

And going a little wobbly, snapping back to North American reflexive attitudes on helmets, speed, heavy bikes, the whole yeah-but-you-can't-do-it-here thing, etc. But always good to see this kind of article, even imperfect, percolating through the mainstream media.

California dreaming

Woah, look at LA thinking big. Fingers crossed on follow-through.

What L.A.'s New Bike Plan Means For Cyclists—and the City

The 2010 Bike Plan […] is perhaps the most ambitious pro-cyclist action in L.A. history, designating a 1,680-mile bikeway system and sweeping new bike-friendly policies.

full article