Sunday, April 24, 2016

30% Of Car Trips In Los Angeles Are For Less Than Three Miles, and Alibaba CEO Bans Employees From Living More than 15 Minutes From Work - Cycling Rising


#PCworld calls the #Zeitgeist electric bike one that was made for storm troopers.  It is a lighter-weight e-bike than most, and boasts a traveling distance of 100 miles between charges.  And I guess if you put on your Lucas glasses you could say it looks like it is designed for an evil fighting force from the Imperial Army.  I think of it as a sleek bike, a sort of Jil Sander-come-Narciso Rodriquez type of bike.  It wouldn't work for the person who likes paisley and plaid, but for the person who loves a simple black cashmere sweater and a pair of Chuck Taylors, it looks great.  Has anyone tried it yet to report in?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3058237/hardware/this-electric-bike-is-made-for-imperial-stormtroopers.html



Momentum Mag has some ideas for the person looking to start a bike to work program.  My personal belief is that, if you ride a bike to work, you look reasonably good doing it, you drop a few casual lines here and there about how great you feel when you ride, others will follow.  That said, if you can also rustle up a shower and Friday morning coffee club for cyclists, you have a movement, maybe even a revolution.

BTW, if you are a city rider and you have not subscribed to #Momentummag, please explain why not!  This is a great little publication and it needs the support of this community, at least the non-spandex, maybe-a-little-fred-but-more-high-heels-than-fred members.
https://momentummag.com/start-bike-work-program/



Did you know that 30% of car trips in Los Angeles are less then three miles long?  It's like latter day Rome, isn't it?  The gorging, the waste, the lack of foresight.

If ever a city was crying out for greater cycling infrastructure, the City of Angels is it.  Safety has been cited my many Angelinos as a reason why they tend to stick to four wheels and fossil fuels.  I know that some may see LA as a place where priorities are, well, askew.  This sort of madness does not improve that image.  The ride from Santa Monica to Downtown is about 10 miles.  The drive along the freeway and surface streets can take an eternity.  Then, later, you will need to work out.  Blink, honk, your day is over, and the air is just a little bit yellower.  What will the historians and anthropologists of the future say about our culture?  That were nuts to act this way and should have tried harder to make cycling more appealing.
http://orange20bikes.com/index.php/1386-the-strange-case-of-the-missing-mixing-zones.html



I cannot stop smiling when I think of this Swedish pod bike/car.  Will someone please sponsor this man on Indiegogo so he can move past his little prototype to real manufacturing?   #podride
http://www.topspeed.com/cars/car-news/say-hello-to-the-podride-a-swedish-all-weather-electric-bike-car-ar173045.html



Looking for a tracker for your bicycle?  Kind of like that Tile thing you put on your keys the exact moment when you stopped misplacing them?  Well, here it is.  Not sure how it will be missed by seasoned thieves, but assume most people who choose to work as bike thieves are not the sharpest tacks in the box.  I'd buy it.  Would you?  If might be worth it to recover your bike.


The CEO of Alibaba recently banned his employees from living more than 15 minutes from the office because they lost too much time commuting.  Wow.  In Washington, DC, many people sit in traffic for an hour or an hour and half.  What is left after that?

What if US CEOs did the same thing?  The truth is that they probably already do this through online applications that run algorithms designed to detect and eliminate from the stack occupants of the x-urbs who will be late when the I-95 backs up or the MARC train has a rail problem.

I got some insight into this recently when a small business owner told me that she was going through a stack of resumes and eliminating people who lived in remote suburbs because: "They will hate their commute, and their attitude at work will be bad and tired."  This raises important questions about what the American Dream will look like in the future.  Is a lawn important?  If so, can you really afford a lawn?  Or is living smaller, more sustainably the answer to health, success and employment? It all means that, in time, more people will cycle, and smaller spaces, closer in will increasingly be the norm.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/04/22/this-ceo-banned-his-first-employees-from-living-more-than-15-minutes-from-work/

So, if I see you in the bike lane, and you are atop a #Zeitgeist, and you recognize that we cannot afford to have cycling characterized as merely the symbol of the zeitgeist, let's be smug.
Elisa P.

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