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Yahoo’s Purple Pedals

Start Wearing Purple, Yahoo!

Yahoo has a new ad campaign called “Start Wearing Purple“; the main theme song is Start Wearing Purple by the band Gogol Bordello. Great song.

Part of the new ad campaign is a set of custom-made bicycles, colored purple (Yahoo’s primary color), that automatically takes pictures and uploads them to Flickr (a photo-sharing website that Yahoo bought) with a mounted digital camera. The pitch: “Bikes + Flickr + GPS + Purple + holy moly”. The bikey contraptions will capture “the life of a bike” in various towns across America (San Francisco, New York, San Diego, Jersey City, and Bethel, Vermont) and a few spots around the world (Copenhagen, the UK, Sydney, and Singapore). ...

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Get out of my bike lane

Pedaling to work is such a joyful thing -- if only all those recent new cyclists (with an aversion to high gas prices) would go back to their cars.
By Del Dickson, Special to The Times

Southern California should be a bicycling paradise. The weather is perfect, the roads wide and the terrain favorable. Given our natural advantages, we should have named one of our cities after the Madonna del Ghisallo, the patron saint of cyclists.

So why don't we have better cycling infrastructure? Holland and other progressive countries have beautiful networks of bicycle-only highways that take you anywhere you want to go.

Why don't we? Blame the bicyclist's natural predator: the automobile. Cars suck up public money and real estate as greedily as they consume fossil fuel, and drivers see bicycles as unwelcome competition.

As far as I can tell, most drivers are not actively trying to kill bicyclists. They just don't care whether we live or die. If a driver wants to turn right 6 inches in front of me without signaling, that is, apparently, my problem.

A few drivers go out of their way to be polite, waving cyclists through busy intersections or giving us a few inches of extra room as they pass. These people make it a joy to ride, and I just wish there were more of them.

Sadly, there are a lot of hostile drivers out there. It is difficult to get a driver's license if you are an illegal immigrant, but it is easy to get one if you are sociopath. Hostiles not only believe that cyclists don't belong on the road, they also want to hurt us. They honk, yell, throw things, buzz us and occasionally run us over. They are a minority, but even one can wreck your day.

What is most disturbing is that drivers seem to have a license to kill when it comes to cyclists.

When a driver hits a cyclist, he or she will invariably say, "I never saw her." And they almost always get away with it. It is rare that a driver is ticketed, let alone charged with a more serious crime, when a cyclist is injured or dies at the hands of a motorist. Cyclists are, to drivers and to the law, invisible.

Despite the perils, I love to cycle. I commute from National City to the University of San Diego two or three days a week and ride 400 to 500 miles each month.

Why do I ride? I could claim to be an environmentalist, but I am as indifferent toward the Earth as anyone. Last year, I put enough AA batteries into the landfill to make Iron Eyes Cody cry for a week.

I do have one environmentalist fantasy. I want to ride up to a Prius at a stoplight and berate the driver for destroying the Earth just as surely as if he drove a Hummer, only a bit more slowly. They have it coming.

I do not ride for economic reasons. I rode almost as much when gas was 50 cents a gallon.

Like most cyclists, I ride for selfish, intangible reasons. I love the long stretches of quiet when I can reflect and be alone with my thoughts, punctuated by moments of terror when I am helpfully reminded of the fragility of mortal life.

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The Moment We’ve All Been Waiting For

... I want all of our elected officials to know we’re serious about achieving our objectives. I want them constantly bombarded with our messages, from all angles. I want to make it socially and politically unacceptable for them to take any action which provides anything less than the the best facilities for bicycles and pedestrians. I want to be able to ride to work in safety. I want my kids to be able to play in the neighborhood streets in safety. I don’t want my kids to be showing signs of heart disease when they’re five years old, or needing a liver transplant by the time they’re fifteen, all because they had no safe place to play or ride a bike. I want livable streets, and I want them now. It’s largely up to us; if we educate people and pressure our politicians, we’ll get our livable streets.

I’m sure of it.

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For safety, just add bikes

There's a new prescription for communities that want to make their streets safer for bike riders: just add more bikes. A team of international researchers looked at cities from Australia to Denmark to California, and found that more riders meant fewer run-ins with cars. The researchers presented their findings to a cycling safety seminar on September 5 in Sydney, Australia.

What's surprising, the researchers say, is that biker safety doesn't seem to correspond to a city's efforts to cut down on accidents. Run-ins between bikes and cars had little to do with miles of bike lanes or lower speed limits. But if the number of bike riders in a city doubled, the rate of bike-car accidents dropped by a third.

Apparently, motorists learn to share the road better when they have to deal with more bikes on their daily commute. Also, more cyclists means more drivers who also bike, which makes them better aware of fellow bikers. The researchers call it a virtuous cycle—run-ins with cars drop with more bikes on the road. And safer cycling means more people strap on a helmet and join the revolution.

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Dumbest Product of the Week

I just had to comment on this $250 carbon fiber seat post rack that holds up to 11lbs. I like fast bikes and I like utility accessories but I really have to question why someone would think this is a great idea.

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Bait Bike serving as theft deterrent

by John Lucas

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department (UWPD) has a new, high-tech answer to the decades-old problem of campus bicycle thefts.

In May 2008, the department began placing bikes equipped with GPS units in places around campus where other thefts have been reported.

When a GPS-equipped bike is taken from its location, police are notified that the bike is moving. An officer then logs on to a computer showing a map of the area and dispatches other officers to the bike's location.

"We're hopeful that this piece of technology can help us deter thieves," says Sgt. Jason Whitney of UWPD. "Madison is one of the best biking cities in the world. We want students to have peace of mind knowing that if they bring a bike here, they will leave with it at the end of the school year."

The program, created by Police Officer John Deering, is showing positive early results. From January 2007 to May 2008, the UW-Madison police took reports of a total of 100 reported bike thefts. During the 2007-2008 academic year, only one person was arrested for a bike theft.

With the GPS program in place, 16 arrests had been made between May and August 1.

UWPD has purchased more GPS units so multiple areas around campus can be covered at the same time. Roger Charly and his company, Budget Bicycles, are donating bicycles for the project.

As an added deterrent, UWPD is creating stickers reading, "This could be a Bait Bike." The police will be handing out the stickers to students to have them placed on bikes all around campus.

Stickers are available at UWPD and Budget Bicycles.

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What’s Wrong with Bike-Sharing?

A lot, says Greg Beato, of Reason Online. The Reason Foundation is a libertarian think tank/publisher. I think Beato misses the point, saying this in his concluding paragraph:

But if a bike-sharing program’s utility mostly lies in how much secure parking it offers—and it does—why bother with the bikes? And the sharing? Let users be responsible for obtaining their own bikes—that’s the simple part of the solution.

Secure bike parking is just one of the many utilities of a bike-sharing program. And really, “secure bike parking” is encompassed by the one overall functional utility of a bike-sharing program—to make bicycling extremely convenient. Many folks have bicycles “in their basements or in their apartment balconies,” as the Washington D.C. bicycle coordinator said. Even those necessary maintenance tasks—digging out the old bike, dusting it off, making sure it has air in the tires, making sure everything is working—prevent people from biking. Bike-sharing programs address that head-on.

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