Traffic

Don't we all know deep down that WE are the cause of all traffic in the world?  We should be ashamed!




Really.  We should be ashamed.

more nytimes bike style: portlandia video edition

the ny times is pretty good at delivering news in a timely fashion, but they are not always timely in their cultural trends. if only they had someone on staff who's been riding a bicycle for awhile now who watches style to alert them to this trend of cycle chic. (pssst, they do.)

the mama texican sent me this link of portlandia types talking about their style in "the pearl." and yes, bikes are accessories. of course.



enjoy! and bill cunningham, why wont they listen to you more? heh.

video: bike to work week and oak street improvements

as i wrote on fb yesterday, there are some big changes on three mere blocks of san francisco's 7x7 slice of earth.

so excited to see this green paint going up on one of the more precarious streets to bike on in SF. it is basically a one way highway for cars that bring people from the west side of town to downtown and other actually designated freeways. bikes share three blocks of this stretch of road.

one of our "reporters on the scene" took some video during his commute to work. oak street is getting some improvements. the actual ride is a bit precarious due to the construction. but nothing totally out of the complete ordinary on a workday commute.



have you noticed any bikey improvements going on in anticipation of bike to work day? SF's bike to work day is tomorrow, THURSDAY, may 9. when is yours in your town? SF tends to be earlier than normal. other than that in these parts of the interwebs bike to work day is everyday, of course.

7 angels on a bicycle

last night i went to the east bay, a rare event indeed. why did i do this? to see a woman i've grown up with perform. her name is carrie rodriguez and she is on tour promoting her new album. when we were growing up, she was studying classical violin, and now she plays the fiddle. heh. she's now grown up from that 6 year old girl i first met all those years ago into a talented, and lovely, female americana artist.

she was born into an artistic texas family. her dad is songwriter david rodriguez and her mother is fine artist katy nail. fun chisme fact: mama texican ran into katy nail the other day, and then two weeks later the daughters were reunited.

so i'm glad to see carrie is carrying on her family tradition. and to see she's also representing austin well. we're all so proud to be from austin! it's ingrained in our veins.

anyway, she wrote a song for a friend that she knew since she was 2 years old who lost his life too soon while commuting to work in manhattan. she says she plays the song every day to her dear friend. her friend had bike toured from seattle to austin, backpacked in patagonia, chile, and succumbed to a commute in manhattan at the age of 25.



what a nice way to be remembered and to heal.

i've included a video of lyle lovett covering one of her dad's tunes, just for fun.



have a great weekend everyone, and hug your fellow bicyclist. one day we will not be killed going to work.

Did your bike chose you?

googly eyes for your bike! kinda cute, right :)

 “Life always seems sweetest when we stumble upon a new experience, whether it be a new trial, an open road, rush hour traffic, a freshly tamped set of rollers or in this case a fixer upper project bike.”

via urbanvelo

Rising From Ashes

We always talk/read about the good outcome +the why of how bicycles benefit and make our life better +happier. As I was watching this trailer for an upcoming documentary, this quote came up:

"You cannot be a cyclists without going through an incredible amount of pain..."

That hits the nail right on top for me, and not for physical reasons but a tremendous emotional hurricane of grief, loss and memories that hit me anytime I think or consider being back on the saddle and return to ride a bike on a constant basis.

1+minute of the trailer and it really made quite a lasting impression on me and, hope you like it.
Here is the trailer and I cannot wait to watch it once it's released:
Rising From Ashes from T.C. Johnstone on Vimeo.

xxom

---
via urbanvelo

support a burgeoning local business!

mamak: a common roadside food stall found in Malaysia.

meet ian.

doesn't he look like a great person? that is because he is. in addition to being great fun, he also wants to be is a bike powered business owner. that's right. not only is ian a great person with fantastic positive energy, he wants to change his life by owning and operating mamakSF, a pedal-powered food cart.

Born and raised in Malaysia. Migrated to Southern California as a teen. Now a happy transplant in San Francisco. Growing up in Malaysia and eating at mamak stalls was the highlight of my eating life. Love of food and cycling fuels my desire to feed Malaysian inspired food from my pedal-powered food cart to everyone.

here's a video explaining his idea.



how can you help? ian has a kickstarter campaign to raise funds to help build his pedal powered business. it's great to see a minority business owner get started! ian has done a lot of good things for the biking community here in SF. now it's our turn to contribute to this great cause.

oh, and the toadies are GREAT. and my mouth is watering thinking of the (veggie) rojak! mmmm.

follow ian and mamakSF on the interwebs:
website
twitter
facebook
email him! eat@mamaksf.com

with my own two wheels

let's take a few minutes to leave san francisco, and visit the countries of zambia, ghana, india and guatemala.

this video shows the lives of four people whose lives have been transformed by bicycle in very different ways. a farmer can visit aids patients as a caregiver as far as 10 miles away and make it home in time for dinner. a disabled person is now a bike mechanic at a bike co-op created by boston's bikes not bombs. a ninth grade girl can now go to school and discovers she likes solving math problems. the air quality for one guatamalan farmer led him to founding an organization that helps rural mayans by inventing bicimaquinas, a 100% recycled product. they are half discarded bike, half old (formerly polluting) machines. bicimaquinas are transformed into a new machine that "fills the gap between the artisinal and the industrial."

this is brought to you by hubub films, world bicycle relief and bikes not bombs.

please be sure to take some time out of your day to watch.

h/t to bike hugger.

Inappropriate Wednesday Fun

Don't watch this at work. Unless you work somewhere where this kind of thing is OK. In which case, pump it up!



Those of us in SF will have a little bit of a chuckle over this.

via SFist

the man who lived on his bike

i came across this video in my RSS feed. my favorite is when he's doing the crossword while riding.

the director, Guillaume Blanchet, writes, "I love being on a bike. It helps me feel free. I get it from my dad."

THE MAN WHO LIVED ON HIS BIKE from Guillaume Blanchet on Vimeo.

enjoy!

via laughing squid

la cumbia de la bici

ahhh!! i love me some cumbia y'all! and here's a youtube made by mexican musician david aguilar in May 2010 about la bici!

i LOVE it. <3 also in finding this video, i found more tributes to la bici en espanol, so i'm sure i'll be sharing those with you in the upcoming weeks.

until then happy wednesday y'all. i'm fighting some lame sick thing. you know you are truly not feeling well when you're still not tired of being in bed after 2 days. i'm not even stir crazy. imagine that. weird. i'm sure i'll be back to my 10millionthingstodo-self in a couple of days. :) and that's when i will have to show y'all joanie's holiday lights upgrade!

via here.

Relief Is A Bicycle

Times are hard around the world these days. No one knows where the economy is going and jobs don't fall from the sky like they used to. But let's face it, if you are reading this blog post chances are you do not have to get water from a well you had to dig in the first place. My guess is you were able to go to school without difficulty as are your children. I bet malaria does not plague many people in your community. I could be wrong, but I bet not.

With that in mind I would like you to watch the following video from World Bicycle Relief.



It does not take much to help. It really does not. 15 readers donating $10 each gets one person a bicycle that could bring them, and their families out of a kind of grinding poverty that those of us with reliable internet connections can not imagine.

To further entice you to donate to this cause, I will have some kind of giveaway for those who can prove they have donated. I am not sure what it will be, but it will be bicycle related, probably made by me and sent to you free of charge (other than your generous donation to WBR). I will announce the giveaway by the end of the week, so keep a look out!

Who will be first?

guest contribution: with my own two wheels

this was a post passed on to us over by KT over at velo vogue. thanks KT!!



For many Americans, the bicycle is a choice. For countless others across the globe, it is much more. For Fred, a health worker in Zambia, the bicycle is a means of reaching twice as many patients. For Bharati, a teenager in India, it provides access to education. For Mirriam, a disabled Ghanaian woman, working on bicycles is an escape from the stigma attached to disabled people in her community. For Carlos, a farmer in Guatemala, pedal power is a way to help neighbors reduce their impact on the environment. For Sharkey, a young man in California, the bicycle is an escape from the gangs that consume so many of his peers.

My Own Two Wheels weaves together the experiences of these five individuals into a single story about how the bicycle can change the world - one pedal stroke at a time. Find out when it airs at linktv.org.

ViewChange: With My Own Two Wheels Airdates

(Times in Pacific time zone)
Friday, October 21st
05:00 pm
Tuesday, October 25th
08:00 pm
Thursday, October 27th
02:30 am
Saturday, October 29th
05:30 am

DIRECTV Channel 375 | DISH Network Channel 9410

crossposted over at velo vogue

"don't ride on handlebars...exexexcuse me"

what's the most important rule of all?

oh man, i found this in my RSS reader on friday afternoon. i couldn't help but to share!! heh.



via jezebel

Change Lots Of Lives. Build A Bike!

One of the most interesting things about blogging, to me at least, is getting the chance to see where our readers come from.  I use a stats program that can give me a world map of readership over a specified period of time.  When the world map comes up, there are little dots for where each visitor's general area is.

Today, when I looked there were dots in Finland, New Zealand, Rio de Janeiro, Ghana and Turkey all within the same time period.  What a global spread!!  It got me to wondering what kind of information I could easily find about bicycling in some of these places, starting with Turkey.

There isn't a lot of easily findable material from a first person perspective about bicycling in Turkey.  There are a few stories about people having a bicycle vacation in Turkey, but I didn't find (with a very limited search) anything written by a Turk about riding in Turkey.  I have to admit, I was a little disappointed.  Lucky for me, I wasn't disappointed for long!

In my search I found this story about De Fietsfabriek, The Bicycle Factory, in the Hurriyet Daily News.  It turns out that De Fietsfabriek was started by a Turkish immigrant to the Netherlands, Yalcin Cihangir.

"Cihangir discovered that he liked fixing bicycles and wanted to make his own bikes; after six months, he started his own business in Amsterdam. Teaming up with a local colleague in 2004, he started the Bicycle Factory (www.defietsfabriek.nl)."*

The best part of this story is that Cihangir has his parts manufactured in his small hometown in Turkey.

"Bike parts are produced in Büyükcamili, creating jobs for almost 30 men in a small place in danger of being abandoned. Cihangir opened the factory in his home village in order to give something back. People working at the factory have reasonable working hours and get a decent salary, between 1,300 and 1,700 Turkish Liras. Next to the bicycle factory, an atelier has been created where women make special clothing that is sold in the Netherlands and returns the revenues to Anatolia.

Cihangir is also financing a local agricultural project to grow products in an environmentally friendly way. His final goal is to make his home village an attractive place for young people to stay and make a living."*

Here are some of the people who make his bicycles in Turkey

and here is a wonderful little documentary of the opening of his factory. It is in Dutch and Turkish but you will get a very good idea of how big a deal this factory is and just how much good it is doing.

I have never met Yalcin Cihangir and I probably never will, but I would be very proud to own one of his bicycles.  He proves through his actions that there is so much more to bicycles than any of us think of when we jump on them to go to work or play.  Bicycles can save your home town!  Maybe Flint and Detroit, Michigan should get on the bandwagon, too.  After all, Henry Ford built and sold bicycles before cars and now Michigan is suffering the after effects.  Maybe those same bicycles could help repair some of that damage.  I know I would buy an American made bicycle like we used to be able to.  

I would certainly buy a De Fietsfabriek bicycle.  I may not be from a tiny village in Turkey, but it doesn't mean I can't help one out!

*excerpt from "The Turkish Bicycle Factory" by JOOST LAGENDİJK and linked to above.

Further Adventures Of Declan- Repost

This is from back in 2009. I was asked to name 3 of my favorite posts and this one came to mind first. Declan does not sit on the back of my bicycle anymore, and I have to admit I miss having him back there. We had many wonderful, silly and very bonding conversations with one another while he was back there. It is fantastic to see him riding his own like a pro but I will always think of my Bat as a bicycle built for two.

Today's installment of Declan's life on the back of a bike- harmonica playing! Declan has decided, for now, to be a "Blues Man". Today, I was serenaded whenever I got tired toiling up the hills. Not a bad way to ride along on errand day : ) I will try to be a better camera person, next time!

video: ramona's one minute ride

ms. wheelright, over at velo vogue and at wheelright, managed to be at the right place at the right time today to take some awesome spur of the moment footage of bombing a hill in SF with a bunch of bmx bikers.

this hill is part of my new commute. sometimes times i bomb it, other times it terrifies me, so i have to really congratulate her on the ability to capture this footage! you go grrrl!

video: CYLRAB survived the cutting room floor!

take a look for yourself (UPDATED: to specify "SF CYLRAB...." we love our LA peep!)

Over Achiever

It's Monday. Time to go back to work.



Bet it isn't half as exciting as what this guy did!

Found here. Thanks, Veronika!

The Drivers Aren't Complaining!

The above title is my favorite line from the film.

It is a shame people have to create controversy where there is none. It makes it so much more difficult to get these projects out to the many places who need them. Like, all of San Francisco!!

Do you dream of lanes like these? What are the ones like in your neck of the woods?