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POTUS needs a safety lesson

Apparently Obama was riding along a Martha’s Vineyard trail with no helmet, and the bare-headed ride was caught by a photographer. Not a very good example to set…

No-helmet Obama

Let’s hope no one hits a pothole.

While Sasha Obama (yellow shirt) and another girl have enough sense to wear helmets, it appears President Barack Obama (second from left), his secret service agent and Dr. Eric Whitaker (far right)need a few bike safety lessons while on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.

Whitaker, we should point out, is technically wearing a helmet, but they don’t work very well when they’re not fastened. (See the photo below).

“What kind of fool doesn’t wear a helmet while biking?” wondered Tribune photo editor Maggie Walker, who was so aghast after spotting the images that she emailed the White House. She’s waiting to hear back. (AP photos by Alex Brandon)

Via the Chicago Tribune.

los padres on bikes

I got a call last week from my mom who wanted advice about bikes. Be still my beating heart! My folks, riding bikes!

Over the weekend, I received this cell phone pic… a new Trek Pure (lime green) for my mom and Trek Navigator for my dad. They’ve already ridden around the neighborhood several times and to a café for breakfast over the weekend.

Google (trail) Maps

Now that Google’s done mapping and photographing all the important streets in the world, they’re turning their attention to the auto-free zones.

Now Google Maps is expanding to biking and hiking trails. A Google employee on a tricycle rides around to snap the same wide-area views.

“Much of the world is inaccessible to the car,” says Daniel Ratner, a Google senior engineer who designed the trike. “We want to get access to places people find important.” — USA Today

View Larger Map

Google Maps Bike Paths and Hiking Trails, coming soon to a place off the beaten path near you. How long before the Google Tricycle rides the ATT I wonder…

Bicycle movie night, Durham

In preparation for the 2009 Bull Moon Ride, Durham Habitat for Humanity is hosting a potluck dinner and a chance to view a classic cycling film. Roxanne Hall and Peter Anlyan send out this note to the Durham cycling community…

Breaking Away (IMDB page at link)

Oscar winner for Best writing, Best actress and Best director
See this link for Breaking  Away
Presented by Durham Habitat

Wednesday: June 17th 2009
Gathering & Pot Luck: 6:00 pm
Movie: 7:30 pm
Rigsbee Hall
208 Rigsbee Ave. Durham NC 27701

Please spread the word

Habitat Bull Moon Ride
Sat., July 18, 2009
8:31 p.m.
To register and for additional information visit www.durhamhabitat.org.

Read more about the Bull Moon Ride.

penal Tour de France takes off this year

No, not the penile Tour de France, the penal Tour de France. Nearly 200 inmates in French prisons will participate this year in the inaugural bicycle tour of the French countryside, designed and run only for prison inmates.

The 194 inmates, escorted by 124 prison guards and sports instructors, will set off from Lille and cycle about 2,400km (1,500 miles), ending up in Paris. They will have to cycle in a pack, will not be ranked and, for obvious reasons, breakaway sprints will not be allowed. — BBC

Why ride? The hope is that inmates will learn such values as teamwork, self-esteem, and dedication.

A May article in Reuters ran under the title “What could possibly go wrong?“

Ride for Clive, Saturday, June 6th

The uncomfortable truth about the everyday meeting place for automobiles and bicycles is that we both share the same width of road, despite a significant discrepancy in power, weight, and protection from the environment. The very same feat of civil engineering that makes road biking so pleasant (smooth pavement) facilitates distracted drivers continuing the culturally acceptable bad habit of driving too fast.

If bike meets car, the bike usually loses.

The Annual Ride of Silence is a memorial event encouraging “cyclists of all abilities and levels of experience” to honor and remember cyclists who have been injured or killed on public roads. In recent years, phenomena called Ghost Bikes have appeared at the site of deadly bike/auto accidents.  “Small and somber memorials for bicyclists who are killed or hit on the street,” Ghost Bikes are like striped bike lanes in that, by serving as a visual reminder of the responsibility to share the road, they create the expectation that bicyclists will be on the road, even if they are not there right now.

This Saturday (June 6th, 2009) in Durham is a free, all-abilities cycling event to promote bicycle safety and remember someone who was the victim of our cultural unwillingness to slow down. The 12-mile Ride for Clive is at once a memorial ride for Clive Sweeney and a celebration of Clive’s life and love of cycling. Whether you knew Clive or not, all are welcome.

Sweeney was killed in an unfortunate meeting of car and bicycle, of inattentive driver and dedicated cyclist. To say he was killed by  “wreckless driving,” as WRAL writes,  is insensitive.  To call it a bike accident is to miss the point. His “bike didn’t kill him,” said one commenter on the durhambikeandped listserv, “Clive was killed by a reckless person driving a weapon.”

The route for Saturday’s Ride for Clive follows the American Tobacco Trail, the focus of the ride is safety, and the spirit is sure to be positive.

• 8AM registration
• 8:30AM safety tips
• 9AM ride

Before his untimely death, McKinney (advertising firm in Durham) interviewed Clive talking about himself and his passions in life. If you would like to know more, you can watch the video here.

Read more about both the ride and about Clive Sweeney at http://rideforclive.com/

UPDATE: Forgot to mention that the good folks at Bull City Cycling are behind this, organizing and planning the ride.

Durham bike patrol officer trained as a bike mechanic

Who knows, “protect and serve” might mean changing your tire the next time you flat.

h/t to Dale McKeel who pointed this out on the durhambikeandped listserv.

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.

stolen goods and the power of the internet

Like the good folks over at the Independent, I too have recently been reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, a collection of arguments and vignettes on the power of the Internet. The salient point that the Indy picked up on is how, by abolishing the high costs of printing, publishing, and distributing information, the Internet is forcing The Newspaper to reassess its traditional role as the weekly standard for a community.

A few weeks ago, I ran into Lenore Ramm of Eclectic Glob of Tangential Verbosity at the DPAC Blogger Bash. She told me of a friend who’s bike had been stolen and how, in an effort to retrieve the bike, the friend created a website. While stories of using blogs and monitoring eBay and Craigslist to recover stolen goods have become almost commonplace, take a second to think about what this means for just how pervasive the Internet has become to our conception of community.

Just two examples to focus my point:

• Neighborhood listservs are now among the most reliable sources of hyperlocal news. Warnings about loose dogs on the streets, plants to give away, yard sales announced, café music benefit show funds raised, even homes sold — no topic is off-topic as long as it happens in the neighborhood. When friends ask about finding housing in my neighborhood, I refer them to the listserv and encourage them to join.
• There are also a growing number of cities with local blogs that cover on-the-ground civic reporting with as much reliability and insight as the municipal papers. Bull City Rising and Church Hill People’s News (Richmond, VA) come to mind.

And while there have always been start-up attempts at taking a cut from the local publishing market, Shirky’s point is that never has it been so easy to obtain the means of publication. Until the advent of the Internet, publishing an independent organ for the sole purpose of recovering a $700 bicycle just would not have been possible.

So, on March 21st, a bike was stolen in Old West Durham, and now the whole world can know about it. Any computer attached to the Internet can browse to http://findmybicycle.blogspot.com/, learn how to spot the features that make the victim’s bike unique, and get in touch with the owner. “I’m hoping that we demonstrate the power of social media!,” says the website’s creator.

So world, although it may add some perverse pleasure to your life to know that bike thieves spend eternity in a special circle of hell for their miscreant deeds, the owner of a silver Trek 7500 FX will find more pleasure if she gets her bike back. Even more still if a community helps her find it.

Trips for Kids benefit art show, Cinco de Mayo

The cycling community has a reputation for creativity — the annual Bike Art exhibits (I, II, III, IV), the Bicycle Film Festival, and the alt-bike phenomenon each attest to the restlessness that two-wheeled travelers often feel. By restlessness I mean an inability to accept the world as ordinary. Perhaps nowhere is that restlessness evident than in North Carolina, where a bicycle mechanic on the Outer Banks once said to his brother, “what else can we make with these tools?”

Danielle Riley, a Durham school teacher and editor, is sharing her art with the cycling community for the month of May. Andrea Hundredmark, Durham Public Schools teacher and Director of the Triangle chapter of Trips For Kids, says…

Danielle Riley is showing her photography for the first time EVER at The Broad Street Cafe.  Her work will be up for the month of May.  The kickoff for the show is Tuesday, May 5th at 7 pm.  There will be a wine tasting as well.

Please check out the link [sic] to learn a little about Broad Street Café, their menu and Danielle.  There is a short artist bio and some samples of some her photos on the site.

20%  of any proceeds from the sale of her work will be donated to Triangle Trips for Kids – a non-profit organization that takes children living in at-risk situations on bike rides, teaches them about cycling and how to build bikes.

To learn more about Trips for Kids, check out their website or this article written for the Herald Sun last year. The Broad St Café is located here.

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