AAA now assisting bikers (!?!)
The American Automobile Association—that venerable proponent of auto safety, auto insurance, auto touring maps and roads-roads-roads (sometimes at the expense of walking and biking trails)—is slowly changing. Over the past six years, a number of chapters have expanded their services to include roadside assistance for bikers. It wasn’t that many years ago when AAA...
Why does the South hate cyclists?
Walk Score has published its list of the Most Bikeable Large U.S. cities, based on a methodology that includes infrastructure, hills, connectivity and “mode share”—meaning how many fellow bikers are on the road. No surprises here. You know who wins this: Portland, San Francisco, Denver. But dig a little deeper into the site’s...
London doubles down on biking
Londoners have always had a genius for urban transportation: faced with a massive population and crowded streets, the city built the world’s first subways (inaugurated in 1863). They also improvised double-decker buses—first powered by horse, then by motor—as a way to get twice as many people moving along the same square footage of roadway. ...
Toward a safer bike
The bicyclist with a jacket tied loosely around her waist, a guy with a strap dangling from whatever is clamped into the mousetrap over his back fender. An errant shoe string or flapping pants leg. Suddenly, the fabric swings that extra inch and gets snagged. It’s pulled into the derailleur or wedged between the chain...
In biking as in life, listen to the women
And then give them what they want. That’s one conclusion found in City Cycling (MIT Press 2012), which the Rutgers Focus calls “a guide to the urban cycling renaissance underway in most countries of the western industrialized world.” The book, co-edited by professors John Pucher (from Rutgers ) and Ralph Buehler (Virginia Tech), contains...
Love your car? Get a bike.
If you love your car, you need to ride a bike. I have a slightly complicated rationale for this position, so you to have to pay slightly more attention than usual for a Recreati story. It begins with Superstorm Sandy and our human need to know the cause of horrible things. If we have...
Raleigh is now a Dutch brand
The iconic British bike-maker, Raleigh Cycle has been sold to Dutch rival Accell for $100 million. Founded 125 years ago, Raleigh was once the largest bike manufacturer in the world, employing 8,000 people. Make no mistake, Raleigh is still a going concern. It sold 850,000 bikes last year; its current brands include Avenir and Diamondback....
Nice racks in Amsterdam
Of all the videos you’ve seen of the Netherlands, this one is the least likely to make you dig into your IRA and call KLM. It shows a group of municipal bureaucrats from America touring the Netherlands to learn how that country has promoted bicycling. So, no windmills. Not much focus on the architecture of...
Bicycling Magazine plays us for a fool
We aren’t dumb…but we are susceptible. Which is why we were drawn in by the press release touting Bicycling Magazine’s latest readers’ poll, which leads with the finding that 58 percent of the publication’s female readers would give up sex for a month rather than spend a similar time off...
Rabbit hole for cyclists
The internet is a rabbit hole, which is its blessing and its curse. You stumble across a link, and fall headlong into a world you never knew existed. A new reality opens up; hours disappear. It can begin with a simple Google Alert that points to an article in...
Car-bike battle continues, this time in print ads. Advantage: bikes.
Cars and bikes need to share the road. It’s the law, and it matters for our health and well-being. And we need both. Sorry, until we figure out something better (sun-powered hover-cars!), we need four wheels and a chassis to plow through the drifts on those frigid dark...
There’s an app for this bike…or there’s a bike for this app
Why does an auto-maker like Ford offer an e-bike, even as a concept, when they’re (1) strapped for cash and (2) pre-occupied with bringing new technology into their four-wheeled vehicles. Could be just a PR gambit. Could be someone saw all these technologies on the shelf and thought...
