A new study found that in the U.S. men make three times as many trips by bike as women. In urban settings the number gets even more disparate with women only making about 20% of total bike trips in cities. This is great news if you’re a single girl and into skinny guys with no social skills–all you need is a bike and you’ll meet tons of that type.

A couple lucky fixie riders got to roll through a massive hydroelectric reservoir before it was filled with water. Imagine the biggest swimming pool in the world. Eat your heart out skaters. The large-scale images are unreal.

You tried convincing your friends to paint bike lanes down frat row but they wouldn’t go for it. The Light Lane might not be as fun as stolen construction vests, Stop signs and buckets of paint for guerilla bike lanes, but it’s a whole lot less illegal. The Light Lane would attach to your seatpost and project a fake bike lane around your bike. If nothing else at least drivers will respect your Ground FX. Light Lane has a prototype running and a video of it on their site.

Ol’ Tom Edison was onto something when he picked up an early camera to shoot video of a fixie rider. They must not have been able to move the camera too much during filming back in 1901. That tweed look is really coming back, too.

via HTATBL

I recently re-built up my first road bike from five years ago with the intention of selling it to a friend who needed a bike. I bought the bike used, hadn’t ridden it for four years, it hadn’t even had wheels on for three. My friend is fairly new to cycling and just needed a basic ride to get her from the Seward neighborhood to the U of M campus for classes. I kept the build as frugal as possible knowing that she didn’t want, or need, to invest much in a campus cruiser. I was able to dig through my parts bin here at home to find about half the parts needed to get the bike rolling again. A set of the cheapest wheels in the shop topped my shopping list, total cost about $125. After two partial afternoons piecing the new-old bike together, I was ready to test the resurrected ride. 

Just for comparison here, my personal project so far this year has been building up a mountain bike for myself. Being a single twenty-something dude with a job at a bike shop and disposable income on the side, I spared no expense and got some of the nicest parts I could dream up. Despite all the money invested in that bike, when I took the $125 cruiser down the block for the first time, I couldn’t help the huge grin that spread across my face. When I pedaled it went forward, when I hit the brakes it slowed and stopped. I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised it worked, but I was a little surprised it felt as smooth and comfortable as it did. That ride around the block reminded me of the simpler days; when I was happy just to be rolling along getting around the city under my own power. From that first ride, I was almost loathe to sell the bike but told myself we didn’t have room for the extra bike, half the reason I built it up in the first place was to clear some space in my already crowded living room/bike shop. So when the bike ended up being too big for my friend (she could barely get a leg over much less get a foot down without tipping) I wasn’t all that disappointed. I figured I could always sell it on craigslist, if nothing else.

The bike never did make it to craigslist, though. I kept it around and it found a niche in my stable of bikes. It’s not as fast as my fixie, but I don’t always feel like sprinting. I can wear regular shoes to the bar now and I don’t have to worry if some drunk is peeing on my fancy mountain bike. When friends come to town, now I have a loaner bike that’s easy for anyone to ride. Maybe most important of all, though, is the feeling I get every time I hop on. Despite being the cheapest and oldest bike in my house, I still have a great time riding it. Sometimes I feel I get caught up in the hype riding my other bikes, thinking I have to ride hard and fast all the time. That’s simply not true. It makes me wonder if some people are turned off of cycling thinking they have to invest a ton of money or effort to get anything out of it. The more people riding bikes, no matter the style, the better I say. Even if you aren’t ditching your car for a bike, everyone who is getting out there and riding makes the city that much more bike friendly. So run what ya brung and get out there and ride!

I’ve never worried about putting my life in someone’s hands when I climb into the car with them. It seems like a pretty safe venture. If I ever was so desperate for a ride that I had to get on one of these clown bikes, my safety in another rider’s hands would be my first thought. As much as I love the zero-carbon footprint from the ride, there’s no way I could subject myself to the embarrassment of being hauled around on a trike by some idiot other than myself. This pedicab driver ran head-on into a car cab heading to Brooklyn from Manhattan during the morning rush, and the rider and passenger went to the hospital. This situation is kind of like when you injure yourself during a kickball game and tell everyone at work it was a baseball injury. In this case, you’d have to tell people you were hit by car while riding your bike, and leave out the part about sitting in the backseat.

Swobo is settling in for some guerilla warfare with bottled water. All of their new water bottles come with the address for Nestle Waters printed on the side so that when it’s time to retire the crusty, moldy bottle, you can add the postage and send it to the people helping to fill the oceans with plastic. The program’s meant to raise the discourse on bottled water and how it’s killing the world. Of course, you could just buy a bottle of water from us and we’ll write the Nestle addy on the side in Sharpie if you want. That way you get to save the world, buy local, and harass corpo water land.

This can only be good news. The about-to-be-appointed Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is a cyclist. Hopefully one of the victim-blaming crashes where a biker gets crushed by a car and then given a ticket for not having a front light will get to the high court. Then she could decree a Rule by Bicycle law where you’d get free drinks at coffee shops and bars as long as you biked there.

“She’s a very human person,” Schumer told reporters after their meeting. They talked New York, he said. “She’s a bicycle rider, I’m a bicycle rider. We talked a little bit about our favorite routes.”

It’s also nice that she’s human and not a robot. Thanks, Chuck Schumer.

Five years ago I walked into a bike shop in Minneapolis…My interest in bikes had increased dramatically from the time I moved into the city and realized cars just made me salty. Five years ago I almost didn’t get into cycling for one very specific reason, bike snobbery. Bike snobbery is the most debilitating illness affecting bike shop employees today. There is nothing worse for someone new to bikes than a bike shop employee that treats them as if they don’t matter because they aren’t riding the trendiest or hippest bicycle. Everyone starts somewhere and nobody starts out knowing everything, so it’s natural that you make a few mistakes on your first bike or two. Unfortunately for me, the shop I visited had no time for anyone that wasn’t part of the cycling scene for the last ten years or some other nonsense. As I left, my only impression of serious bikers was that they were rude, arrogant and altogether not interested in me riding a bike… They couldn’t have cared less. I just about gave up the whole idea of being a cyclist until I found a shop that did things right. They weren’t pushy like a commissioned shop but they didn’t act as if I didn’t belong on a bike. The difference was almost palpable as I realized that these people were here to help me get rolling regardless of my new cyclist ignorance. Finding a shop genuinely interested in me riding changed my whole perspective and took my desire to ride to a whole new level. At a certain point I worked my way into being a bike mechanic as a living and I’ve found myself falling prey to the snobbery sickness many times. Each time I realize that I’ve given someone a look, or possibly a tone, that told them I didn’t care about their full suspension Huffy’s brake problems, I find myself thinking about how close I came to missing out on something that I can’t imagine living without. Each time I think about how much my attention and help could make the difference between someone who rides every day and someone who hangs their bike up in the garage and drives away. My goal as a full time bike shop employee is simply this…Get people on bikes they love…If you don’t like the bike you ride you won’t ride it. Almost as important…if the guys who fix your bike are dicks…You won’t want to get your bike fixed…and won’t ride. Riding a bike makes me happier than anything else I’ve ever found…to take that away from somebody simply by not caring…unacceptable.

Quinn

A new initiative will make it easier to plan your ride from Bar Harbour, Maine to Seattle. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials are accepting applications[pdf] to designate bike lanes as part of a new nation-wide Bicycle Route System. Ideally the Feds will help fund upkeep on these trails that become part of the nationwide map. For now you can only submit bike lanes and trails that link two states or the U.S. to Canada or Mexico.