My Bike Blog

Archive for March, 2010

This is cool, isn’t it?

Transportation Secretary Announces “Sea-Change” for American Transport: Bikes!

“People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.”

Buffalo has these bicycle parking spots too, but ours are way cooler than NYC’s.

Click here for the whole article.

NYC Repurposing Old Parking Meters Into Bike Racks

Urban cyclists, rejoice: New York City is transforming 225 parking meters into bike racks. Every third or fourth parking meter on select streets in the Upper East and West sides, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens will have its “head” chopped off and recycled for scrap metal. The remaining poles will be transformed into bike racks.

For the past year, I didn’t live far enough from work to bother bicycling (I was walking to work), but I recently started a new job, so yesterday was my first bicycle ride to work and back. It felt great! It was also nice that the snow had melted so that there was room for me on the side of the road.

But on my way home, an ignorant motorist shouted out the window to me. “Get off the ____ road, you _____!”  You may fill in the blanks with “paved” and “bicyclist” if you wish, but that would not really convey the spirit of what the boy said. Well, he looked like a boy, to me.

I saw their car pull into a coffee shop at the next light, so I coasted into the lot, waited for him and the girl who was driving to get out of the car, and (once I saw he wasn’t bigger than me, heh heh) said “Nice mouth you have there!” Yeah, that was the sum total of my amazing wit.

You’d think that, after cyclo-commuting all these years, my brain would have a larger set of responses for dealing with these people. But no, that’s all I could muster. When he countered “Get on the sidewalk, stay out of the road,” I could barely reply that sidewalks are for walking.

Maybe I need to take longer rides, because I was out of breath from catching up to him at the red light.

After I pedaled away, I thought of some really pithy comebacks. Great timing. I could have said “When you go for your driver’s license test, maybe you’ll learn that cars and bikes share the road.” I KNOW, isn’t that CUTTING?!? I’m so witty.

I think what I should do instead of breathlessly stuttering at offensive motorists (and their passengers) is carry with me a bunch of little cards that give <a href=”http://www.nydmv.state.ny.us/DMVfaqs.htm#bikes”>the NYS DMV web address for the page</a> that talks about how cars and bicycles have to share the road, with a brief statement about safety on the other side of the card. A little less “crazy old guy on a Schwinn” and a little more “if it’s on the web, it must be true” instead.

What do you think?

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. At one point, I started working on a program that would use Google’s map tools to create bicycle routes, but the programming was a little over my head.

<blockquote><a href=”http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/03/google-maps-for-bikes?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29″>Google Maps Finally Adds Bike Routes<br> (click here for complete article on Wired.com)</a>

At long last, Google Maps has routes specifically for bikes.

With the click of a mouse, the new feature allows you to plot the best (and flattest!) ride from Point A to Point B. Several cities, including New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, have bike-specific mapping sites. But Google is rolling it out in 150 cities nationwide and announcing it Wednesday at the 10th Annual Bike Summit in Washington, D.C.

“This has been a top-requested feature from Google Maps users for the last couple years,” says Shannon Guymon, product manager for Google Maps. “There are over 50,000 signatures on a petition.”</blockquote>