Designer Bike Share Grocery Totes and Quaxing in the City

The urban dilemma of how to carry it all on your bike rears its head this time of year.  In the holiday season some of us cook for friends and family in a constant, rolling effort.  How can you carry groceries and gifts on a bike share bike?  You can buy a new designer tote for the front holder of bike shares rides.  These totes a cool and expensive - gratuitously so.  Or, you can use a large backpack and stuff it full of non smash-able groceries. That means that you cannot stuff the bananas at the bottom of your bag, or push the lettuce down and sit on it, like you are packing a truck for months long trip aboard a steamer.  Solutions require some planning, but it is not like planning to cross the Sierras in a covered wagon with your kin.
https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/bike-share-carrying-space-new-tote-design

Youtube has several videos to help you see exactly what the right quax kit would look like for your needs.  (In case you find yourself too busy to conjure your otherwise great imagination.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA-5xkBsfIA

bikearlington.org

Small, medium and large loads require different equipment and planning.  These two posts from Bike Arlington and Bike East Bay describe what you should consider if you are carrying a single baguette or a couple of banquet tables.
http://www.bikearlington.com/pages/news-events/blog/bike-errand-challenge-how-to-carry-anything-you-want-via-bike/
https://bikeeastbay.org/Carrying

The last and most obvious solution:
Buy less (the thought seems un-American) and shop more often.  Simplicity can be glorious.
https://momentummag.com/bike-curious-how-to-shop-by-bike/

If you decide to bring your Christmas Tree home on a bicycle, post it!

So, if I see you in the bike lane hauling a refrigerator or a deck of cards, let's be smug.
Elisa P.

Ride With DC Police Through the Nation's Capital or Suffer the Bloat - Your Choice

At Thanksgiving, Americans love to eat too much food.  Afterwards we need to exercise - a lot.  The Sunday after Thanksgiving, if you are not sitting in some terrible airport, staring at the Sbarro and Starbucks, and still recovering from the tryptophan hangover you got from eating too much bearded poultry, you could be riding your bicycle across Washington with DC Police.  MPD are hosting a cycling event.  Wow.  Good cops.  No donuts.  Be there.  The ride starts at Headquarters.  Do not be deterred by the Arno Breker-inspired exterior of the building.  It looked pretty haute in about 1948.  You may find yourself humming the Flight of the Valkyries, but make no mistake, MPD is a diverse and serious force.  Mostly anyway.  They have many bicycle officers, about 75 of whom just got rockin' new bikes.  And a hundred years ago, DC police had officers on bicycles.  Fixies, as it turns out.  And they wore silly hats, if you care to know.  Photos below.  See you on the 29th.
http://dcist.com/2015/11/mpd_to_ride_traverse_the_streets_al.php

By the way, if you have had your bicycle stolen in DC, use this link to try to identify it from a photo of MPD's recovered stolen and abandoned bikes. They post fairly regularly, so you may eventually see that awful Huffy you consider a loss.
http://mpdc.dc.gov/service/view-photos-recovered-property

Are cyclists and cycling advocates grandiose?  Momentum Magazine has a piece this month that posits that cycling can save the world.  So can nuclear fusion, effective drought farming, and an abandonment of extreme ideology and ethnic hatred.  But those things will take time.  So in the meantime, as you place your canned food in the charity boxes at Piggly Wiggly and Whole Foods, think about how cycling can play an important role in cutting transportation emissions in half by 2050, as Climate Central opines not unreasonably.  In addition to that tin can of no-salt white beans you accidentally purchased last year and are now inflicting on the needy, think about how to help the world's most desperate by driving far less and riding your bike far more.  Grandiose?  Not in the least bit.
https://momentummag.com/can-cycling-save-the-world/

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/transportation-emissions-could-be-halved-by-2050-19721

So, if I see you in the bike lane, dressed as pilgrim, or wearing a police uniform, and you are on a bike you lawfully own, let's be smug.

Elisa P.

Will Bike Lanes Destroy Church Communities? Seriously?

Millennials in Boston care a lot about public transit and bike share.  This is to the exclusion of cars.  They are riding the crest of a wave of common sense.  Their views are having an impact on city planning and residential development.  They are the future.  They are the young, often white residents who took to the streets in support of the idea that Black Lives Matter.  But are they tone-deaf to how those outside of their particular culture see bike lanes and cycling generally?  Could that have a bad impact of the expansion of cycling infrastructure? The extending of canoe share to existing bike share members would seem to be focused on people whose parents taught them how to canoe because they knew how to canoe themselves.  This too looks like a smart, forward leaning partnership.  But into every future, there arrives a past.  Sometimes it's a past that no longer serves a purpose.
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2015/11/09/boston-millennials-care-about-public-transit
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/11/bike-share-meet-canoe-share/415260/

No place is the focus on the past more acute than in Washington, DC right now, where bike lanes have become synonymous with white gentrification, as mostly older African American residents want to prevent the placement of bike lanes in front of a church they use perhaps twice a week, and to which they mostly drive from the suburbs.  This was not the first such meeting.  The conversation has become a stream of subtext and nonsense, where older folks balk at the suggestion they ride public transit in lieu of parking and driving.  In the minds of these older Washingtonians, mass transit is for those who have not achieved a place in society where they can afford to drive.  And this crowd was not the most able-bodied to be fair.  Perhaps in about 1975 the idea that Metro was somehow a lesser transit mode would've been true.  To take a Metro bus then meant you could not get there in your own car.  The bus system was the transit medium of kitchen staff, not educated city government workers.  So somehow, through a process of illogic, bike lanes are opposed under the erroneous belief that they will cause church goers to have to park further from church or relegate worshippers to mass transit.  This opposition sadly comes from a community that is disproportionately impacted by Type 2 diabetes and other diseases related to poor diet and sedentary lifestyle.  The community leaders who could help to educate those opposing bike lanes have instead largely tried to pander to this opposition.  The terrible and longterm result may be no or fewer bike lanes in neighborhoods that need them.  Once again, whole swathes of this city will be left behind on important transportation progress, just as they were when the Metrorail system was built.  Kaboom, flash.  We are back 30 years ago or more, having conversations about things that will hurt the next generation.  Where is a hero when you need one?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/11/12/why-are-bike-lanes-such-heated-symbols-of-gentrification/

In rooting around for a hero, someone who could come in and change the tone of the conversation about cycling, I happened to find one in the person of #LisaNutter, graduate of the Wharton School, cycling advocate, African American woman, and wife of Philadelphia's mayor.  She is a competitive cyclist who has tried to bring safe cycling to all neighborhoods.  Her particular platform involves - pause - expanding bike lanes, including into underserved neighborhoods.  She has not ever talked of how these lanes would hurt African American neighborhoods as far as I know.  Quite the opposite.  I cannot imagine exactly how she would have handled the meeting with the hostile, fearful church group, but I bet she would have been a powerful influence in favor of bike lanes.   Read this short but sweet piece on Lisa Nutter in Bicycling Magazine this week.
http://www.bicycling.com/culture/people/philadelphia-first-lady-lisa-nutter-gets-ht-done-cyclists?

Failing to build sustainable cycling infrastructure will not address our continued national obesity.  Most of those opposing the bike lanes were women.  And obesity is still terribly high in the United States.  Would it surprise you to learn that women are the most obese?

http://wtop.com/health/2015/11/obesity-still-rising-among-us-adults-women-overtake-men/

http://fortune.com/2015/11/12/american-obesity-increasing

So, if you see you in the bike lane, and you are African American, Armenian American, or Asian American, or not, and you know that your presence is not taking anything from anyone at all, let's be smug,
Elisa P.

UK Writer Tells Cyclists to Get Off Road and Go To Gym and Chicago Becomes a Car Free Possibility

Yvette Castor

Yvette Castor, a writer in the UK, has offered the opinion, in writing, that cyclists should get off the road and go to the gym instead.  Brilliant.  Reasoning with people like this could draw you into their insanity.  She is clearly provocative in a time when any writer has to attract attention to survive.  But I would venture a suggestion that Yvette try a little exercise herself.  Perhaps on a bike. She would probably find herself less appalling. And dinging the way cyclists look will not deter them.  The idea that all cyclists look absurd as she suggests is simply ludicrous.  Her photo is shown above.  Choose your own caption.  A mere day or so after Yvette's blather, the same UK paper published another editorial about how cyclists were making traffic lighter, and all persons, driving, cycling or walking, should treat each other with respect.  This time the author was Luke McLaughlin featured below.  So I took a look at the related stories links to see how the cycling debate is playing out in the UK and whether it looks like the debate in the US.  The same paper published the bit about mandating licenses for cycling and the bit about how cycling could save your life and make you healthier.  The answer seems to be a split in logic and lifestyle.   If you prefer the comforts of your car, or you have no choice due to where you live, cycling may seem like a menace.  So I pause for one quick anecdote.  While riding my bike in Washington, DC, I noticed a wheelchair-bound man at 12th and G Streets who thanked me for allowing him to clear the intersection after the light had turned in my favor, something he said other cyclists had not done the day before.  As I rode on in the lanes in front of Veterans' Affairs building, an elderly woman who had placed her toe in the crosswalk thanked me for stopping as several other cyclists rode around me almost hitting her and ignoring her rights in that crosswalk.  I am not a menace.  I will try to never be a menace.  And I will be healthier than people who lose an hour a day of exercise to sit idle in the comforts of their cars as the planet warms.

http://metro.co.uk/2015/11/05/cyclists-are-a-menace-and-should-be-banned-from-the-roads-5482050/
http://metro.co.uk/2015/11/06/rather-than-complaining-about-cyclists-motorists-should-be-campaigning-for-more-bikes-on-the-roads-5484438/

"Do you really need cycling clothes?" asks the London Cyclist.  If you are not cycling far, what is the point?  Unless you are one of those folks who dresses in a matchy-matchy track suit to walk the dog imaging that is "exercise," in which case, maybe you do need special clothes.  If your commute is terribly short, not only are cycling clothes unnecessary, but they could tip you over into silly.  I ride home some nights along with a kitchen helper from a nearby Pret.  He goes all the way to Maryland from Washington, DC wearing black jeans, a black shirt and jacket, and a baseball cap.  I have never seen him get his pants caught in the chain.  I have never seen him threaten to kill a cab driver who cut him off.  And, I have never seen him fall behind anyone wearing a perfect spandex get-up.  His zen comes from the inside, not from his clothes.
http://www.londoncyclist.co.uk/do-you-need-cycling-clothes/

Ah, the helmet debate.  It will not go away.  Like chewing coconut, it lingers.  Another study . . . another study . . . published in Road CC finds no link between mandating helmets and prevention of injuries.   I suppose if you found yourself nearly under the tire of a car that was about to snap your head into pieces like, well, a coconut, a helmet might help you.  But my guess is that no helmet could withstand a three ton car.  Which begs the question of why so many people think a helmet law will prevent head injuries from cycling.  Last we visited this issue, data showed that helmets would be more likely to prevent head injuries to drivers in cars.  If we enact a helmet law, I think it should apply across the board to drivers of any moving vehicle.  That bill would die in committee after spontaneous gaiety of the sort not seen in 50 years.
http://road.cc/content/news/170525-study-finds-no-link-between-cycling-helmet-laws-and-head-injury-rates

abc7chicago.com

Chicago is becoming a place where you can live car free.  Perhaps recognizing that cycling may present a challenge in winter there, Divvy bikes has teamed up with Zipcar to offer discounts to members.  There is no shame in taking the train or a Zipcar on those days when you do not want to arrive at a stoplight, let alone the office, with a snot-cicle that will be only thing people ever say about you afterwards.  ("Who is Fred? . . . Oh, the guy that had that awful snot-cicle last year in the elevator.  Right."  Never:"Fred is a great lawyer who wrote that steller brief in the Kolinsky case last year.")
Go Chicago!
Debbie-Downer edit:  The ex-COO of Divvy is accused of breaching the terms of employment with Divvy by seeking employment with Divvy's parent company's rival.  Bike share.  It's a cold calculating business, dog-eat-dog.  Nah.  Not really.
http://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/zipcar-chicago-partners-with-divvy-bike-share-to-further-enable-residents-to-live-carfree-in-the-20151105-01283
http://cookcountyrecord.com/stories/510646648-divvy-corporate-parent-says-former-coo-lied-stole-company-data-when-he-left-to-launch-competitor

So if I see you in the bike lane, and you are dressed like yourself, or have chosen a matching spandex get-up that looks as uncomfortable as support pantyhose on a big girl, let's be smug.
Elisa P.