disobey

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Bike to Earth Day

Kim Cumber of the State Archives pointed me toward this wonderful photo from North Carolina’s first Earth Day celebration. It’s part of the Archives new Flickr photostream, which if you haven’t checked it out, you should. At least, check out the rest of the Archives’ Earth Day photos to get you psyched up for this weekend.

Bikes at NC's first Earth Day
Earth Day 1970, April 21-22, 1970, NC State or UNC. From Carolina Power and Light (CP&L) Photograph Collection (Ph.C.68), North Carolina State Archives.

Durham Earth Day Festival 2008

Date: Saturday April 19, 2008
Time: 12 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Location: Durham Central Park
Theme: It’s Easy Being Green

I have seen the light…

and so has the City.

Ninth Street bike rack

The City Racks bike racks are finally being installed. The one pictured above sits just outside The Regulator Bookshop. Look for one near you.

The Durham Bike and Ped Advisory Commission website has some photos of a few others.

Anyone who’s happy about this can email thanks to Dale McKeel,Durham’s bicycle and pedestrian transportation planner.

Asheville’s bike racks

Below are two photos of Asheville’s city-wide bike rack design. The racks range in size (width) from supporting six bikes to two, each with an “ordinary” on top. While these are not the most functional design for bike racks, they are beautiful, well-used (it was rare to see one without a bike locked to it), and complement the sense of history and community that downtown Asheville imbues.img_7938.png
outside the Battery Park Hotel

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outside the Orange Peel

Dale McKeel, Durham’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Transportation Coordinator, says that installation of Durham’s city-wide bike racks begins tomorrow, April 8th. Read more about Durham’s City Racks program here.

Durham’s bike racks

The second in a series on Durham’s unique bike racks, here are two photos of the bike rack that sits between Morgan Imports and Parker and Otis.

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Speaking of bike racks, the Durham City Racks bike parking program is a year and a half behind schedule. I spoke with Dale McKeel of the City’s Transportation department last week, and he says, “I hope to visit Ninth Street and the other locations over the next two to three weeks and finalize the locations. The contractor will then be contacted to do the installations, and this will be dependent on his workload. My goal is to have the installation completed by mid-March.”

Keep your fingers crossed.

Durham’s unique bike racks — the first in a series

Frank Hyman won’t let Columbia, SC show up Durham. So, when I posted a photo of a bad ass bike rack I saw down there, he wrote in to remind me of the Biker Bar. In his own words… (edit: this at 101 E. Geer St)

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photo courtesy of Frank Hyman

Called “The Biker Bar”, met the size requirements (4 bikes) for the permit and gets used by at least one staff person. It’s all the way in back of the parking lot, at the far end of the building if you’re ever over that way. It was up 6 ft. in the air in the basement, so cut it loose with a sawzall blade (the wrong tool for every job), turned it over 180 degrees with ropes and poles, lowered it to the floor and 4 helpers carried it up a flight of stairs out of the basement. Cut holes in the pavement to cement the legs into the ground, capped the pipes with PVC caps painted black and coated it with Penetrol at Al Frega’s recommendation (he made the metal railings at Morgan Imports/ Fowlers).Voila! A homemade bike rack.

Now I want someone to commission me to make a bike rack out of cannibalized car parts! :-)

His isn’t the only unique bike rack in town. So, over the next few months, I’ll make a point of visiting and photographing them. When I do, I’ll share those photos here.

Anyone interested in contacting Frank can learn more about him on his website, FrankHyman.com

bad ass bike rack

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Bike rack in a shopping plaza parking lot, Columbia, SC.

Ninth Street

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Still no bike racks.

The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Don’t fret, downtown getting bike racks

Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun

Durham Rising brought a lot of people downtown on Saturday — 12,000 by some estimates. A surprising (yes, even to me) number of those folks were cyclists. So, if you walked around downtown at all that day, you surely had to step around some of their bikes. There wasn’t a lamp-post, street sign, or sapling that didn’t have a bike chained to it. Outside Bull McCabe’s, the new Irish pub replacing Jo and Joe’s, signs and lamp-posts secured two and three bikes a piece.

Where were the bike racks?

I left downtown that day feeling disgusted, and no, it wasn’t from gorging on Locopops.

The city of Durham spent more than sixteen million dollars on its Downtown Improvements project as the civic investment in re-energizing downtown. They developed a new central plaza, realigned streets, and marked pedestrian crossings with stamped brick designs. But no bike racks? I was incredulous.

Turns out, bike racks were on their way. They just weren’t installed yet.

Hopefully, you’ve been back downtown since June. As of the end of August, one city program installed bike racks downtown, and one will continue to install them throughout Durham.

First, the streetscape project did include bike racks; they simply couldn’t be installed by the Durham Rising event. Ed Venable of the City says that bike racks were installed in eight locations in July. See them outside the Professional Center, the Empowerment Center, and the CCB Plaza among other spots inside the loop.

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Second, the CityRacks program secured funding from the state and federal governments to install bike racks all over Durham. Under a Congestion Mitigation for Air Quality (CMAQ — often pronounced see-mack) Improvement Program, Durham will be installing bike racks all over the city. CityRacks, as the CMAQ funded program is called, will install “inverted U” bicycle racks on city-owned property. Look for them to start popping up this fall.

There’s a common story told on many college campuses (whether myth or fact doesn’t matter) about how it was decided where sidewalks should go. It usually goes something like this. Suppose you want to lay out a campus, and you want to put in sidewalks only where the students will use them. The best way is to wait a few years to see what pathways the students wear into the lawn, and put the sidewalks there, because those are the pathways students use to get from building to building. Otherwise you’ll have sidewalks, and then you’ll have pathways across the lawn where the students actually walk.

The CityRacks program takes a similar strategy with bike racks. By letting citizens (cyclists) request where racks should go, the City ends up installing racks where they will be used.

Dale McKeel, the city’s new Bicycle and Pedestrian Transportation planner, says that the first bike racks were installed downtown in August at locations selected more than a year ago. Before the 2007 year is out, a total of sixty seven racks will be installed at parks, commercial districts, museums, universities, and libraries. For those of us cyclists, that means we will no longer have to lock a bike to a No-Parking sign outside Brightleaf or Ninth St.

Piedmont Parks, Inc. of Greensboro won the $48,000 contract to install the racks, and the upside-down U design was chosen by the Durham Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission, who says this style bike rack is the most secure.

In 2008, the City Racks program will focus on installing bike racks at public schools throughout Durham. And in 2009, the public will again be invited to request bike racks at locations around Durham.

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Jim Reingruber, using Google Maps, has started a website noting all of Durham’s bike racks — at least, all the ones he can find. Check it out at http://www.durhambikeracks.com/

For the full list of all planned bike rack locations, see the pdf available at http://www.durhamnc.gov/departments/works/bikerack_form.cfm

functionless bollards

why couldn’t these have been bike racks?

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