September 22nd is Car Free Day. Shift it into high gear, and enjoy your ride.
The Outspokin’ Cyclist – the book
I am a cyclist.
To say as much sounds strange to me. Not because it isn’t true, but because it is true. Riding a bicycle — for transportation, for errands, for joy — is something I do without thinking a whole lot about it. Pedaling is such a part of my identity that to call it out in the utterance “I am a cyclist” is to call attention to the idea that it could be otherwise. To say “I am a cyclist” when I choose to pedal a bicycle to work, to the grocery store, and along trails in the woods is akin to saying “I am a breather” or “I am someone who eats.” Both are true, but both are also trivially true. For either to be otherwise would convey that I am no longer alive. And once, I came close to knowing what it would be like not to be a cyclist.
In March 2008, I had a mountain bike accident that left me nearly unable to ride a bicycle…
So begins the preface to a new book gathering some of the columns I wrote for The Herald Sun between 2004 and 2008. Along with photography and a handful of writings on cycling previously published elsewhere, The Outspokin’ Cyclist offers a glimpse of what a newspaper and a city can do (and did) to support a growing bicycling community.
In 2010, my brother asked me what I thought about compiling some of my favorite columns into a book. At the time, he was starting up a new publishing house, Avenida Books. By reducing the costs of production and expanding the reach of distribution, new digital publishing tools are revolutionizing the print industry. I have been fascinated by this democratizing effect since the Internet’s early days, experimenting with blogging here at nicomachus.net since 2003 and managing an online journal for the National Humanities Center for the final two years I worked there. So when Andrew asked me whether I wanted to learn more about book publishing first-hand, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see for myself what it took to contribute an edition that would inspire public discussion and private reflection, to paraphrase Avenida Books’ motto.
The book covers topics such as the role bicycles played in women’s liberation, whether mountain bikers can call themselves environmentalists, and why it matters whether Tour de France competitors use drugs. It also offers tips on how to fit cycling into your everyday life.
To order a copy of the book, follow the link below the version you want to buy.
| Paperback | mobi (Kindle) | epub (Nook, Kobo, iPad, iPhone, Sony Reader) |
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If you’re a bookstore and you would like to carry a copy, please get in touch with me at pbarronATgmailDOTcom or Avenida Books at info@avenidabooks.com.
bike rack orbit
Few bike racks in Davis are topped with this symbol.
Ghost bikes and blue hearts, tragic symbols
The phenomenon of ghost bikes reaches worldwide. Even while I was still adjusting my understanding of Spanish to local dialect, the message communicated by the appearance of a ghost bike chained to a telephone pole in Quito’s Parque Carolina resonated fluently: a cyclist was killed here. Most likely, the cyclist was struck by an automobile, either a personal car or one of the high Andean capital’s many blue buses.
In my neighborhood is where I first noticed the blue hearts painted on the sidewalk. From a friend, I later learned that the blue hearts, like ghost bikes, are informal markers of tragically acceptable violence. This corazon azul (“blue heart” in Spanish) marks a spot where a pedestrian was struck and killed by an unaware driver. It is a memorial for family and friends as well as an exercise in traffic safety education.
Ghost bikes and blue hearts serve as daily reminders of the fragility of life, especially when we fashion our lives within the context of so much acceptable risk. A novelty in most towns, they are deliberately eye-catching messages, provocative in their simplicity. The unexplained symbol wedges its look in one’s mind so that only later, when one understands what it stands for, can one appreciate the invasive nature of the symbol. And then the inception is complete, the idea is in your mind, and you see the blue hearts and ghost bikes everywhere. The same as when you take a new liking (or disliking) to a style of clothing, you begin to see that style of clothing in every crowd.
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.
Saturday ride
Today’s ride was a wet one. I spent the earlier, rainier part of the ride trying to stay under the trees of west Davis.
View 10-30-10 in a larger map
My tow truck
It’s not quite towing a truck, like these guys (see below), but it’s handy to have a tow truck when you need one. Pictured here, my Xtracycle, which I usually refer to as my pick-up truck, doubles as a tow truck when I need to tow another bike to the shop.
Tow trucks towing a truck.
soy un ciclista
In a city where pedestrians and cyclists enjoy no respect, I dig this graffiti.
Photo taken in the neighborhood where I lived in Quito.
new handlebars make a bike new
This is just a quick post to thank Kevin at the Freewheeler Bicycle Center in Davis, who just today turned my couple-years-long experiment with drop-bars — which required me to lean too far forward — into a comfortable ride.
Dropped it off this morning looking like this
And picked it up after work looking like this
And already, the feeling is new.
zipping around by bike, again
I noticed today that the only time I make a point of sharing a transportation experience via social media is when I drive a car. At least twice now I have posted updates on Twitter (I really can’t bring myself to say I “tweeted”) about using a Zipcar. And for good reason. Zipcar is a magical program where, with the wave of a card over a windshield, I unlock a car — and so far, a different car each time — find the keys inside, and drive off. To paraphrase their motto, I use a car when I want to. The autonomy that Zipcar reinforces is palpable whenever I pick up a car and use it to run errands that are otherwise unmanageable by bike. And the fact that I have to reserve the car ahead of time means that I use a car only when I want to, not just when it’s convenient to do so.
Which brings me to what I was noticing. It is that I post updates about using a car, which has become an increasingly rare experience for me. In other words, I don’t post updates about how I get to work every day, how I buy groceries, or how I go pick up dinner. And, well, maybe the way I do those things is more interesting, since I’m doing all of that by bike.
Long time readers of this blog may not see anything odd about this. But just a few months ago, things would have been the other way around. That is, if I am inclined to post updates about what is novel, then I would have posted updates about biking, since that would have been more novel at the time.
After a 2008 mountain bike accident, the full effects of which on my bicycling lifestyle I won’t go into here, left me unsure of myself on two wheels, I started taking the bus to work. But after months of daily walking more than an hour to get to and from the closest bus stop, I reached the point of frustration. While I did enjoy catching up on This American Life and PennSound podcasts, I was spending so much time getting to and from work that I joked that I might as well move in to my office. Later, I worked out a routine catching rides with a friend, which in turn made my daily walk-bus-walk to the office seem epic by comparison. So when my friend’s fellowship year at the Center ended, I started driving myself to work.
A year after the accident, I still was not comfortable riding. And while I rationalized driving as necessary at first, I soon felt indolent, especially compared to my past self. Driving, however, remained my routine through the end of August.
Moving to Davis, California this summer has inverted my paradigm, restoring my sense of independence from the gas pedal. Moving here car-free has reinforced the pattern in my life that bike-reliance is itself cyclical. I’m delighted to be on the side of the cycle in which once again driving is the aberration.
Davis, by design, makes it so easy to bike, I’m not missing a car. The bike paths are plenty, the lanes are wide, and the drivers expect cyclists to be on the road. I’ve seen countless Xtracycles, tandems, recumbents, and other “odd” bikes that would turn heads in any other town. But here in Davis, where on Saturday they set a new bikes-in-a-line record for Guiness’ book, it takes something extraordinary to turn heads. Biking to work, carrying groceries in panniers — these are not extraordinary things. Which I guess is why I didn’t even notice.
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