Step 1: receive a big box from UPS
Step 2: strap the box to your bike
Step 3: ride home
Step 4: stop making such a big deal out of it
How to carry big boxes home without a car
Alt Transportation
I’ve started a new Flickr set for the unusual modes of transportation I see around Davis.
Coming from the east coast (and the South), I’m amazed by the number of people who use longboard skateboards as actual transportation. And then I was shown the skateboard parking rack outside the ARC (the university gymnasium). Um, I’d never seen that before. Before coming out here, I knew Davis was a bike-friendly town — arguably the most bike-friendly town in the country and easily the town with the longest history of bike-friendly planning. But it’s not just about the bikes anymore. It’s a multi-modal town, where — in a addition to biking — people skateboard and rollerblade to class, to the café, to the post office, to the grocery store.
Many of the bikes, too, are unusual in themselves. I’ve seen recumbents and trikes, but then again I used to see a number of recumbents in Research Triangle Park (where commuters channel Christopher Walken in Brainstorm, filmed in RTP). But I also see a number of four-wheeled “bikes,” plenty of DIY trailers and add-ons, and an abundance of trail-a-along bikes with child-trailers in tow, making for bicycle-driven minivans on their way to school or soccer practice. But enough describing.
I’ll stop gawking and starting being more handy with the camera.
Standing Start, a brief review
Standing Start, a 12-minute documentary short-film on track bicycle racing, uses narration adapted from Homer’s The Odyssey to frame the significance of training, pursuit, and competition.
Like Douglas Gordon’s Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, this riveting film from the Scottish Documentary Institute looks at the some of life’s larger questions through an intimate and aesthetic portrayal of sport. One man stands for all men through most of the film, and only in the sparse scenes of a multi-person race are we reminded that this struggle for strength, explosive strength, has meaning because of the community of others whose training is just as steadfast.
Track racing is a beautiful marriage of the human and the machine. In contrast to the stories of judgment and salvation told in the Terminator films, Standing Start presents a story about the very human use of machines to realize full human potentiality. Instead of humans-vs.machines, it is a story of humans with machines.
I was able to view the film, which is still on the festival circuit, last summer at the Los Angeles Bicycle Film festival. If you get a chance, check it out. It’s among the most carefully measured 12 minutes of film you’ll ever watch.
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.”
$17,000 for a Chanel bicycle
Although the tires on this bike have inverted tread, and thus are able to handle both roads and moderately uneven compact dirt, the Chanel commuter is ideally suited for riding on travertine marble smothered in foie gras while starving African children look on.
 |
From PurseBlog
When I reported on the $3,500 Hermes bike two weeks ago, I had the feeling that we had not reached the pinnacle in cyclist decadence just yet. Karl Lagerfeld to the rescue! This Limited Edition Chanel Bike is the ultimate in two-wheeled novelty. With only 50 made and less than 20 available in the US, this creation retailed for $17,000, with reseller markups hitting $28,000 already.
At it was the case with the Hermes bike, it is thanks to our fantastic Purse Forum member vernilover that I can present some detailed snapshots of this exclusive piece to our readers.
The Chanel bike aims to impress with very fine detail, like the quilted leather handles, seat (made by the legendary Brooks Brothers), pant guard, even the bike pump is covered in Chanel’s signature quilted leather. The bike also features two quilted flap bags and a jewelry roll behind the seat, all of which are detachable and can be used as individual shoulder bags.
Maybe Karl Lagerfeld will donate any unsold bikes to Bikes for the World.
Thanks to Bryony for the tip.
The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Mountain biking helps Durham youth stay focused
WAKE COUNTY — “This is my first race, and I got third place,” says Edgar, a sixth-grader at Brogden Middle School in Durham. Out of breath, Edgar just raced a mountain bike through lakeside trails of Harris Lake County Park at the TORC Spring Skills Clinic
He wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Andrea Hundredmark.
Hundredmark, a science teacher at Brogden Middle, launched this school year the Triangle’s first chapter of Trips for Kids. Trips for Kids, she says, is a program for disadvantaged youth. Whether you call it drop-out prevention or leadership development TFKT is a way for teachers and volunteers to identify kids who need a little something extra to see school in a positive light, then take them mountain biking.
According to the program’s national website, Trips for Kids is a non-profit that sponsors mountain bike outings and environmental education for kids who would not otherwise be exposed to such activities. With lessons aimed at personal responsibility, achievement and environmental awareness through fun, “the mountain bike is a conduit to a lot of positive interactions,” says Hundredmark.
Aaron, also a sixth-grade student at Brogden Middle, is originally from Chicago. He says he’s ridden bikes his whole life but had never mountain biked before Hundredmark asked him to join Trips for Kids. Aaron says mountain biking is “fun, exciting, and hard work, but the hard work pays off.”
How does it pay off? “Because you get to go mountain biking again,” he says.
Prior to the TORC sponsored race, John Miles and Brian Bergeler, members of Bull City Cycling, shared insider mountain bike racing tips with the Trips for Kids students. Miles and Bergeler also accompanied the students on a seven-mile warm-up ride that included the advanced loop at Harris Lake.
“It’s great to see these guys out here and to see how quickly they’re picking up the skills,” says Miles.
Aaron’s fellow student Ahkeem has been mountain biking a total of three times. In that short period of time, he’s learned good riding posture, how to change gears, how to use the brakes, how to control the bike and share the trail. “Before, I used to just ride around the block,” says Ahkeem, “but Ms. Hundredmark told me about this.”
TFKT joins a network of more than 30 chapters nationwide. With Mountain Bike Hall of Fame inductee Gary Fisher on Trips for Kids’ board of directors and such celebrities as actors Peter Coyote and Robin Williams and musicians Bonnie Rait and Huey Lewis raising awareness for the non-profit, the Durham-based chapter benefits from the national organization’s exposure and experience.
Individual chapters, however, are financially autonomous. This means that while riding mountain bikes is the focus of TFKT’s activities, learning how to sell and repair bikes is the key to the program’s sustainability.
TFKT plans to open a full service bicycle repair shop this summer. Grassroots Bikes will sell and repair bikes, with all proceeds going to support the TFKT mission. Students will volunteer this summer, learning the technical skills of bicycle repair and cycling etiquette. Hundredmark thinks of learning as something more than just what happens in traditional classroom settings and conceptualizes the shop as an ongoing educational experience. “Other successful TFK chapters across the country also have a similar set-up, where the bike shop doubles as an after school program for the TFK kids,” she says.
Steve Levine, owner of Cycling Spoken Here, is helping TFKT get off to a strong start. He recently donated a $2500 BMC Trail Fox to TFKT so that they could raffle off the a full-suspension mountain bike. “I have kids, and [kids] are the future of our sport,” says Levine. “For me, Trips for Kids is about giving anybody the opportunity to go back and enjoy the most simple thing, and that’s the bicycle.”
TFKT raised $3500 from raffle ticket sales.
“I hope I do learn how to build trails and fix bikes too,” says Aaron. Aaron grasps quickly that the essence of mountain biking is about more than fun; it is also about taking responsibility for your ride as well as the trails on which you ride.
If kids are the future of mountain biking, Trips for Kids is doing its part to ensure that mountain biking’s future is bright.
From left to right: Steve Levine, Aaron, Marcee Vanore, Ben, Sam, Ahkeem, Andrea Hundredmark, Edgar, Margaret Feilds, Curtis, Tristan Fuierer, Terence O’Neill, Stewart Bryan
Obama rides bike with the family before heading to Raleigh
 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., goes for a bike ride in Chicago, Sunday, June 8, 2008.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon) |
from the AP article:
Barack Obama joined family and neighbors for a bicycle ride along the shores of Lake Michigan on Sunday.
Obama, who last week claimed the Democratic presidential nomination, capped his victory with a quiet, long weekend at home in Chicago.
The Illinois senator and his wife, Michelle, rode to a neighbor’s house with their daughters, Malia and Sasha, on Sunday and the group then headed out for the ride along the scenic lake shore. But the outing was cut short by a downpour.
Obama’s brief respite from the campaign was scheduled to end Monday with a speech in Raleigh, N.C., and an evening fundraiser in St. Louis. The speech will launch a two-week tour of the country focused on economic issues.
Earlier in June, when asked with whom they would rather spend a day cycling, most chose Obama. Backpacker magazine reports that poll respondents were asked the question…
“You are lost in the woods and a storm is coming, who would you choose to lead you to safety?” Of all respondents polled, 22 percent felt Obama was the best choice, followed by 19 percent for Clinton and 18.5 percent for McCain.
President Bush came in last place with 12.1 percent, a full 4.7 points behind Homer Simpson. I’ve never seen Ol’ Georgie work a topo and a compass, but it can’t be a good sign when people choose to trust the route-finding skills of a fictional character — and a notoriously bumbling, animated one at that — over yours.
When poll respondents were asked who they would rather spend a day-long bike ride with, Obama cleaned up yet again, this time earning 30.2 percent of the vote over Hillary’s 29.2 percent. This time, John McCain fell to the back of the pack, garnering only 13.8 percent support. If elected, the 71-year-old McCain will become the oldest U.S. president ever — certainly not an ideal drafting partner, but a harsh assessment nonetheless. Luckily for him, neither time trials nor sick singletrack skills figure into any of the presidential debates.
But perhaps they should…
— Ted Alvarez
The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Women’s liberation through bicycling
For many, the nineties were a time of political advancement and financial success. The economy was doing well, failed policies from previous administrations were being turned back, manufacturing was on the increase, and progress was the buzz-word in board rooms and parlors.
This national excitement had something, more than a little, to do with the fact that the 1890s were also the height of the bicycle boom in the United States. In 1897 alone, approximately three hundred manufacturers in the US sold more two million bicycles, doubling production from the previous year.
The bicycle had been invented only thirty years earlier, and the constant stream of improvements to its design was a celebrated sign of progress. The bicycle’s adoption by women of the era made the bicycle literally and metaphorically a vehicle of social change.
In the 1930s, local newspaper columnist Wyatt T. Dixon wrote a few articles reflecting on bicycles’ popularity in 1887. B.L. Duke and Company’s furniture store rented high wheelers (the kind of bikes with a front wheel nearly as tall as the rider and much smaller rear wheel) for ten cents an hour. If you could afford it, renting bicycles and learning to ride the wobbly contraptions was a popular form of entertainment in 1887. Watching the cyclists fall off the bikes was equally entertaining for the crowd that formed every weekend.
Cycling, as Dixon reports it, was a man’s activity.
Between 1887 and 1890, the number of cyclists in the US doubled. “The vast majority of new purchasers, many of whom were women, favored the new ‘safety bicycle,’” says David Herlihy in Bicycle: The History
In a photograph dating to roughly 1895, young Durhamite Mamie Dowd poses proudly with an Overman Victoria bicycle. The Victoria, Overman’s drop frame woman’s model, was a fixed gear safety bicycle outfitted with solid rubber tires. According to The Smithsonian Institution, “the drop frame bicycle was developed so that women could ride while wearing a long skirt. It’s adoption greatly increased the popularity of the bicycle, and helped make cycling a popular sport for women, as well as, a means of transportation.”
Peter Zheutlin echoes the point in his biography of Annie Londonderry, the first woman to bicycle around the world; “a woman with a bicycle no longer had to depend on a man for transportation.”
No wonder then that in 1896 Susan B. Anthony said that bicycling had done more than anything else to emancipate women.
Photo from Dowd claimed to be the first woman in Durham to own a bicycle, though the authenticity of her claim is challenged by another photograph. In the second, two men and a woman pose in front of the Durham Electric Lighting Company in 1890. The two men stand in suits and top hats, while the woman wears a Victorian dress and hat. Notably, she is sitting astride a bicycle. The photo itself is a celebration of two major innovations of the time: the bicycle as well as Durham’s first electricity provider.
We know from accounts that conservatives of the time saw the bicycle as a symbol of unwelcome social change. While it was a celebrated technological innovation and an admirable source of amusement for men (and even boys), the bicycle’s role in women’s liberation kept it mired in controversy.
In his 1901 memoir, traditionalist James Battle Avirett reminisces antebellum values and derides the bicycle for ruining “the grace of woman’s attractive movement.” His comments parallel a June 6, 1895 article in Statesville’s daily, The Landmark, which notes that while “the number of women who ride bicycles is growing with great rapidity… even in the best and prettiest of costumes, no woman looks dignified while riding a bicycle.”
For conservatives, what was unwelcome about women cycling had as much to do with the resulting changes in women’s clothing as it had to do with these so-called ‘new women’ traveling on their own.
Zheutlin explains that “cycling required a more practical, rational form of dress, and the large billowing skirts and corsets started to give way to bloomers.”
In short, when it came to women, “cycling, and the dress reform that accompanied it, challenged traditional gender norms,” says Zheutlin.
Durham embraced the progress perhaps more easily than other cities its size. Women were working in tobacco factories as early as the 1880s, and local historian Jean Anderson notes that in 1896 “continuing efforts toward independence” led Durham women to create their own literary and social clubs, splintering away from male-dominated groups.
A third photograph from the era, this one also from 1895, shows a young boy and girl straddling bicycles in the driveway of the Morehead House on Duke Street.
Despite its high cost, the bicycle’s popularity transcended class. “Hundreds of thousands in the United States,” says Youth’s Companion magazine in the summer of 1896, “saved ‘every spare penny’ to buy a wheel,” and to the detriment of other businesses. As these photographs of turn of the century Durham show, bicycle fever transcended age and race as well.
Although it is unclear whether Dowd was the first woman in Durham to have a bike, later in life she did become the first judge of Durham’s Juvenile Court. Whether her bicycling days had anything to do with her later successful social reforms is up to you.
| The photographs mentioned in this column are part of Bull City Bicycles, a month-long exhibit of bicycle related photography on display at Bull City Arts Collaborative, 401 Foster Street. Visit http://www.bullcityarts.org/ for more details.
This column is part of a ongoing research project into the history of Durham’s cycling community. If you have anything to share (photographs, memoirs, family lore, or personal stories) about cycling in Durham, I would love to hear from you. |
The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Driving the kids with a bicycle
Four days a week, Teddy Salazar takes his son Theo to school just like most parents. Instead of a car seat, however, Theo rides in a trailer towed behind Salazar’s bicycle. Weaving around potholes and climbing hills along four miles of west Durham’s streets, Salazar tows his son to and from pre-school. Hard work though it may be for Salazar, “it’s actually lots of fun,” he says.
“We wave to people on their porches on Carroll Street. We get all sorts of comment like, ‘Look at that!’ or ‘How cute!’ when we ride by Duke. It’s really easy to stop for coffee, a snack or a potty break. It’s a long commute after all.”
Theo rides in a Burley Solo, a single seat trailer crafted by one of three major bike trailer designers. Burley joins bicycle manufacturers Giant and Trek to offer trailers that are designed specifically for hauling children.
Salazar and his wife Sarah chose the Solo because its seat doesn’t push the helmet forward over Theo’s face when he sits back, buckled-in. The Solo attaches to the quick-release skewer of Salazar’s rear wheel. And aside from keeping their speed under 15mph, the trailer seems stable enough not to require the cyclist to do anything special, says Salazar.
On my ride home from work one October evening, I ran into Reuben Stob along the American Tobacco Trail. Behind him, his son Arie was singing and bobbing along in a Burley D’Lite. Stob said he had just moved to Durham from Lithuania and used the trailer to carry his son home from daycare.
Later that same evening, I stopped Anga Pohlers on Erwin Rd to ask her about her trailer. Even before Erwin Rd was repaved and striped with bike lanes between the Duke Hospital and Ninth St, Erwin was wide enough to ride with a trailer behind, Pohlers said.
Aside from variations in color, the trailers all looked the same to me. So, I stopped by The Bicycle Chain for some help understanding the differences. Chris Phillips walked me through two of models they had in the store.
First up is the Trek Doodlebug, a lightweight aluminum alloy trailer ($280). It holds up to 100lbs, and comes equipped with two seats. Each seat has a “three-point harness with one point between the legs and shoulder straps over each shoulder,” says Phillips.
“If you’re going on a picnic, going to the store or to the neighborhood pool,” adds Phillips, “there are small internal side pockets and storage space behind the seat.”
Salazar’s goal is to make Theo comfortable. “Parents who want to try towing their kids should be aware that” the kids will closer to the road — something to think about in summer heat — and closer to automobile wheels — something to think about in wet or dusty conditions.
On warm sunny days, the mesh covering that comes stock with the Solo or Doodlebug will suffice, but Salazar says he rolls down the Solo’s plastic shell for rainy or windy days. The rain fly costs extra on the Doodlebug.
The Doodlebug, like most trailers mounts to the rear axle of the bike. It comes with a longer replacement skewer for the rear wheel; the new skewer holds the rear wheel of the bike in place and connects to the ball-and-socket joint that tows the trailer.
The ball-and-socket hitch design allows the trailer to pivot at most any angle so that the bike can move laterally independent of the trailer. Many parents choose to use trailers over bike-mounted child seats, says Phillips, since the trailer won’t be affected if the cyclist loses balance.
The Burley D’Lite ($450) has a few safety features the Doodlebug lacks. It comes standard with bars on the trailer’s sides that deflect trees or bollards around the trailer’s wheels. If you’ve misjudged the the width of a trail’s entrance, you might appreciate those bars. There’s an integrated rain fly, a parking brake, and a unique hitch-mount design that doesn’t require you to replace your skewer. The hitch clamps to bike’s chainstay instead. For storage, the D’Lite also folds down smaller than Doodlebug.
Tim Griffin, a research fellow in Duke’s Bioengineering lab and a member of the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission, tows his two daughters in a Burley D’Lite.
“I’ve found that drivers are pretty considerate when you have a bike carrier,” says Griffin. “In fact, the first morning I took the carrier to work with me cars were giving me wide clearance.”
Other considerations for first time trailer haulers are the extended turning radius and the additional width that trailers add. For being seen on the road, each trailer comes with an orange flag, “but we also recommend blinkie lights if you’ll be riding after dark,” says Phillips.
Salazar recommends taking it to the store for hauling groceries or running some other errand first. Before strapping more precious cargo in those seats, “find out how long it takes to clear an intersection, what stopping is like or going up hill. There’s a strange rubber band effect when trying to accelerate fast.”
All of the people interviewed for this article also noted that they found their trailers through either Craigslist or the Herald Sun classified ads.
The Outspokin’ Cyclist
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