“Bike-u” journal chronicles local rider’s Trans-Am ride
While out filming this weekend I ran into Judy Martell, who this summer completed her Trans-America bike adventure. From Oregon to Colorado, she rode her locally-built recumbent for 31 continuous days to complete the final stage of a journey she began seven years ago. I last mentioned Martell in these pages in an Outspokin’ Cyclist column from 2005. Martell chronicles her Lewis and Clark-ian ride over at crazyguyonabike with a haiku and photo for every day of the ride.
I cross the threshold
that lies between when and now
and I begin to ride.
photo and haiku: Judy Martell Teton Range, Wyoming
Congrats Judy!
the bus bike rack rap
I’ve gotten familiar with the bike rack on the front of TTA Triangle Transit buses over the last few years. Having bike racks on the front of all buses is a common sense move that many municipalities have made. In fact, when I travel somewhere and see that their city buses do not have bike racks (for many years, my hometown in SC was this way), I’m taken aback. Why not?
For a city, mounting bike racks on buses is one of the cheapest ways to expand multi-modal transportation options for residents. Bus-mounted bike racks invite people to ride to bus stops from distances greater than they will walk; it just makes bike commuting (and sometimes just taking that first step to start bike commuting) a little easier.
And for the Research Triangle Park — where the suburban landscape aesthetic meets Cold War-era privacy concerns in a sprawling, regional employment hub — Triangle Transit’s bike racks make it feasible to bus to work. Bikes help make busing more reasonable while buses with racks help make biking more reasonable — you might even say they work in tandem.
All local bus systems (Raleigh’s CAT, Chapel Hill Transit, and Durham’s DATA) also have bike racks. And they are of a style that most transit systems use. Easy to use and surprisingly secure (given how quickly you load and lock your bike), the racks allow you to bike even when, for reasons of health, time, etc, you can’t bike all the way.
But when I think back to my first attempt to load my bike on a bus (back on college), I remember it being a little awkward to figure out. I could have used a simple “how-to” before I pulled up and stared at the folded metal, wondering how to secure (at the time) my precious new mountain bike.
Looks like the Transit Authority of River City (TARC) of Louisville, KY had the same idea. Instead of merely demonstrating how easy it is to use (once you know where that release latch is), they’ve produced a video to teach you with style.
Mark Dessauer, Communications Director of Active Living by Design (seen here piloting the “bakfiet”), tells me that (TARC) is one of ALBD’s grantees. To encourage folks to try the bus system, TARC put together this instructional. “The project director (Mamma Jamma aka Nina Walfoort) wrote the lyrics, the rapper is a bus mechanic, and the dancers are bus drivers,” says Dessauer. “It was cheap to make and is a big hit locally.”
Enjoy.
Triangle Transit? DATA? Who’s next?
Duke trike
Find more videos like this on Duke Digital Initiative
Duke Engineering students Irene Tseng and Derek Juang recently won a student design contest sponsored by the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA). Their project was a shoulder-steered tricycle for a boy with TAR syndrome, which results in very short arm length.
Quake City Rumble
XLR8R TV, in conjunction with Revision3, has a new video of this year’s Fourth of July weekend Quake City Rumble. Using footage from the race, the video explores the phenomenon of alleycats generally. Highlights include an odd pedal-powered playground ride, kid-bike tandem race, and a demo on how to elude the police (hint, go slow). I had fun riding the hills of LA on my fixed gear bike, but I can’t imagine tackling San Francisco with one magic gear ratio.
Bike Emory: students encouraged to bike the campus
In the Autopia of the east coast, another university encourages students to adopt bikes as daily transportation.
Emory University, in suburban Atlanta, is launching Bike Emory — a program offering a full line of new Fuji bikes to students at discounted purchase prices. Unlike Duke and UNC’s bike-share programs, Bike Emory equips students with their own bike. And unlike Ripon College’s Velorution project, Emory students have to buy their own.
The partnership with Fuji, who in turn has developed something it calls Fuji University, bodes well for the future of bicycles in academia. Bicycles have historically been disproportionately represented as valid transportation options on US college campuses (compared to the post-college lifestyle). Now, if universities could find a way to encourage students to adopt life-long cycling habits.
Colleges peddle bikes to car-loving students
Associated Press - August 10, 2008 2:04 PM ET
ATLANTA (AP) - Emory University hopes to make a bicycle the must-have back-to-school accessory this fall.
Emory is selling discounted bicycles to students and faculty, adding bike lanes to campus roads and stocking bikes that can be borrowed for free.
The university in Atlanta is pushing its $250,000 “Bike Emory” initiative, launched a year ago, in hopes of convincing students and faculty that the eco-friendly bikes are a better alternative to gas-guzzling vehicles.
While students still prefer cars, cycling already has a foothold at many colleges, where hefty parking fees, sprawling campuses and limited roads make it tough to travel.
For more about Bike Emory or Fuji University, click here.
a special place in hell for bike thieves
“A Special Place in Hell for Bike Thieves”
Phillip Barron
published in Urban Velo, Issue 8 (download the whole issue or read it online)
A neighbor recently posted a note to the neighborhood listserv that his daughter’s bike was stolen. The bike was unlocked, leaning against another (adult) bike, which was locked. Both were on a semi-enclosed front porch; one could have determined that the kid’s bike was unlocked only if (s)he had seen someone park the bike without securing it, or (s)he walked up on the porch to find out. Either way, this is a pretty bold move for a community where, as my neighbor says, “our neighborhood doesn’t feel to me like the kind of place where…” he needs to lock his bike.
Don’t waste your breath (nor your keystrokes) calling him naive. Regardless how fashionable cynicism is these days, it’s worth lamenting that we live in a world where we can’t leave a bicycle in a front yard without it becoming a target
for thieves.
Nevertheless, bike thievery is a unique moral and criminal transgression. Theft of one’s bike has been known to rile the wrath of even the most otherwise placated pacific souls. Indeed many in the cycling community have noted that there must be a special place in hell for bike thieves.
To know whether there really is a place in hell reserved for bike thieves, you have to turn to Dante Alighieri. Dante is not just the only person who claims (with some authority) to have been to hell and back. He is also famous for relaying that there is a special place in hell for just about every sort of miscreant. And sure enough, according to Dante, between the grafters and the gamblers, there is a circle of the inferno reserved just for people who steal bicycles.
You might have noticed that Dante’s comments on bike thieves didn’t make it into the original edition of The Divine Comedy. Dante’s journal tells us that the omission resulted from his editor’s fascination with more complicated technologies: carts put before horses and what not. Disappointed that mention of his velophilia didn’t make it into his magnum opus, Dante later published the Canto concerning bike thieves independently under the title “Tractatus di Ciclisma.” A rare copy of the Tractatus recently resurfaced during an excavation in Florence.
In an effort to correct his editor’s mistake, we republish the text for the first time in seven hundred years.
Then my guide said to me, “Now it is time to quit the wood; see that you come behind me. The path I shall lead does not burn, and you would do well to follow close behind.”
Once our feet resumed their path, the tormented continued their ancient wail. My guide, the Poet, beseeched me to view the next pit with cautious eyes. I surmised that, like the ones before, this pit’s walls were steep so that climbing out is prohibited by design. In the center there rose a summit with strata of endless undulating paths encircling the conical mount.
The Poet advised that I look more closely at one of the layered paths. On it, a most peculiar sight did move before my eyes. What appeared to be a bicycle was actually a party of five fools bonded together for all eternity.
They formed themselves, two apiece, into the wheels of fleshy bicycles. Hands grasped ankles in a human wheel at the sight of which I might have laughed had not such exultations of pain carried through the air. The fifth and most rigid among them clasped the hands of the wheel-men, whose thrice wound palms and fingers formed axles. Together they rolled. Each wheelman’s spine was repeatedly subjected to the gnash and grind of the rocky path.
I asked my guide, Virgil, what these violators had done to be sentenced as both man and machine, dehumanized and beaten by the weight of their own movement.
My guide said merely that I have not yet looked closely enough. And as I returned my eyes to the tissue and sinew that tore at every revolution, I saw one of the bicycles become unsteady. Rolled away from its lane beside the mountain it did, and an explosion of noise filled the pit. A grand team of one-hundred and eighty horses sped from behind the unstable human bicycle to trample the five punished souls.
On the uneven path pocked with holes, the five wheelmen — although bloody and weak — quickly reassembled their velocipedic form and continued their roll within the narrow confines of their path.
My guide revealed to me subtle tortures which my eyes did not independently perceive. The cyclists’ — if that they can be called — path was one of many unending undulating surfaces, alternating between climb and descent. Both were designed expressly to insure that neither climb nor descent is of such length that a traveler might gather momentum. Instead, the wheelmen are frustrated by the sharp curve of the path in descents.
Whether the onslaught of horses gains mastery over the velocipeds depends upon their position within the path. If their machine of marrow strays away from the mountain to which their path is bound, the horses’ authority is summoned. With no appropriate markings delineating the bicycle’s space, the cyclical men have taken to riding so close as to grind their shoulders against the escarpment solely to prevent an equine trampling.
“Who then dear guide,” I pleaded, “are these sufferers who ride the shoulder of the path to avoid an explosion of horse power?”
And Virgil answered, “the contortions you see before you are the eternal humiliations of those who sought to misappropriate a bicycle from the world of its rider. They did so disrespect the joy and utility of the world’s greatest contrivance that they spend eternity in futile and dispiriting detour.”
Critical Mass and bike movies, Thursday
Once again, it comes time for the monthly celebration of countersteering, gyrpscopic, and centrifugal force. Critical Mass, Durham’s monthly leisurely-paced group bike ride through town, starts at 5:35pm on Thursday. As always, meet at Major, the bronze bull statue downtown. Confessions of car-addicts will be heard in the Port-o-fess.
After Mass is observed, two-dimensional representations of bicycles can be seen projected on the wall outside Bull McCabe’s. Yes, that’s right, an impromptu film festival of two wheeled life will liven the streets at Five Points.
At 8:30pm or sunset, whichever comes first, local musician and filmmaker Eleni Binge will premiere her latest film, Backpack Drumset. The film is a brief documentary on a car-free drummer whom many of us know — Dave Zielinski.
He is an engineer, musician, and dedicated Durham Bike Co-op volunteer. Four years ago Dave Zielinski gave up cars and embarked upon the self-described “all bicycle lifestyle.” Backpack Drumset explores how life on two wheels, even as a drummer with a kick drum, snare, and more, to transport, is not only possible but a joyful end in itself. The documentary, 12.5 minutes long, features footage and songs from Dave’s band, All Your Science, where he not only plays but masters the Backpack Drumset.
To add to the bike-themed cinematic evening, we’ll also be screening two of my short films, Bull City Bicycles and What is Critical Mass?. Come join us outside Bull McCabe’s for a beer or three plus the reel life on two wheels.
In September, Binge embarks on a nationwide tour with her husband/bandmate Rob playing gigs as Beloved Binge and screening her documentary Seeing Through the Fence. More information on Binge, her documentaries, and Porch Life Productions can be found on her website.
Download the flyer if you need to carry around a reminder.
David Byrne’s bike racks
Thanks to Adrian for pointing this out
Biking Autopia
In his 1973 essay ”Autopia,” Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom wrote that Los Angeles ”mixes images of vulgarity and vitality” and ”conveys the feeling that it stretches to all sides around you, but never looks down on you or presses you down, an open world that forms itself as a unity despite its fragmented appearance.” (NYTimes)
Enjoy these photos from a recent trip, with my bike, to Los Angeles. Words to come later.
pump it
CHANGE
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nicomachus.net is the virtual representation of Phillip Barron, who is responsible for all of the writing and photography, unless otherwise credited. Want to know more?
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