Heleana Zambonino conducting a basic bicycling skills class at Sunday Streets in Guadalajara, Mexico, Sept. 2009.

In Guadalajara last September I met dozens of cycling activists from around Mexico, and one remarkable woman from Quito, Ecuador, Heleana Zambonino. While riding in a big Critical Mass in Guadalajara, she told me about the cycling scene in Quito, and her organization CiclóPolis. Her story left me inspired and a bit embarrassed. They’ve accomplished a great deal more in a half dozen years in Quito than we have in 20 years in San Francisco!

Art from one of a half dozen thriving bike activist groups in Quito, Ecuador, Andando en Bici Carajo.

Todas en Bici logo.

Heleana Zambonino:

CC: What is the bicycling movement like in Quito, Ecuador right now? What are the regular events? What are the other advocacy organizations besides CiclóPolis, if any? Publications? Radio or TV shows?

HZ: The bikers movement in Quito city grew a lot during the last decade. Nowadays we have several advocacy organizations such as CiclóPolis, Biciacción, Andando en Bici Carajo (ABC), CicloPUCE, Ciclismo Politecnica, Cicletadas el Rey and SENDA among others. It is beautiful to see more urban cyclists on the roads. These organizations offer a wide range of activities. For example, CicloPUCE, which is the cycling club from Universidad Católica, goes on biking tours every weekend. They organize huge bike rides near Quito as well as other beautiful places in Ecuador. They go biking to the beach, on the high mountains and to the forest.

Inside the city there are weekly events such as bike polo offered by Bike Polo EC, Biciacción sponsors “Bicipaseos patrimoniales,” which are rides to the colonial treasures here in Quito (Quito is officially part of the Cultural Heritage of Mankind since 1972). They also lead a ride called “VDP” or Viernes De Pedales (Friday of Pedals) which is a Critical Mass that rides around the city making bikers visible in the face of traffic jams. ABC organizes the alleycat competitions and the “piques,” where the fastest biker wins the competition. They also support the ghost bike campaign to honor bikers killed while riding in the city. SENDA runs workshops to introduce women to mountain biking—they practice in Metropolitano Park which is one of the larger greenbelts we have in the city. At the end of 2009 Radio Pedal was launched, where cyclists have the opportunity to express their opinions, concerns and doubts about the predominant automobile addiction that Quito dwellers suffer from.

Bike culture graffiti in Quito.

The international movement to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 ppm or less was embraced by CiclóPolis too.

CC: What about the CicloVias (dedicated bike paths) in Quito? How were they decided on? Who pushed for them? Can you tell the story about how the first implementation was rejected by the cycling movement and the city had to rebuild new CicloVias? How were the new ones different from the first ones?

HZ: The CicloVias are another major achievement. Since the CicloPaseo started, more and more people decided to start biking through the everyday traffic jams. That became very, very dangerous, but it made more visible the need for a dedicated lane for bikes. This bike lane was born as a “Vida para Quito” project (this is a private governmental corporation that takes care of environmental quality). There were several disagreements while building the lane. The neighbors that love going by car to the corner store opposed it, so part of the bike lane was built on the sidewalk. Unfortunately this layout of the lane didn’t have another solution (Japon St., north of the city). The municipality decided that they would take advantage of the sidewalk to avoid disturbing motorists with bikes alongside. They also built a bike lane on the Amazon Ave. sidewalk, one of the main city arteries. Fortunately, there was so much pressure to make bikers visible, and the municipality did want to contribute to the bike movement, so they realized their mistake. They rebuilt the bike lane on the side of the road with its own traffic signals. This was a big win for us bikers. Then the CicloVias were extended further (both longer and covering more of the city), so we have more bike lanes that connect the north with the south and an east-west lane that connect the two major universities zones. It’s called “La inter U’s”

CC: Do you have Do-It-Yourself bike repair cooperatives or collectives? (In Italy they are called “ciclofficine”) Can you describe the cycling economy in Quito in terms of for-profit businesses, non-profit or anti-profit groups, and advocacy groups? Are there lots of old bikes in the trash, or is everything getting used and re-used?

HZ: Unfortunately here in Ecuador we don’t have any initiative like the ciclofficine or LA Bicycle Kitchen, but we have pretty good bike workshops such as Construbicis, managed by Carlos Tacuri. In this workshop you can recycle your bike. If you ask to do an internship you can help and learn about building bikes from start to finish. The cycling economy regrettably is a bump on the road if you want to bike. There is no non-profit or anti-profit organization that could help people to get a free bike. It is the next step I hope. People trash their bikes only when it is pure scrap. So it is difficult to find parts to recycle bikes. Everything with bikes is used until it really doesn’t work anymore.

CC: How do cyclists get along with pedestrians in Quito?

HZ: It is a pretty good relationship. Pedestrians and cyclists interact the most on Sundays during the CicloPaseo. There is a respectful attitude both ways. During regular days most people walk, bike and share the bus, the 65% that don’t own a private car.

CC: What are road conditions like in Quito? Are there dedicated bike boulevards during normal work days?

HZ: Well, road conditions throughout Ecuador are a shame. Quito is not an exception. Unhappily there are no bike boulevards, just the CicloVias. I wish there were just one.

CC: There is an oil industry in Ecuador. Do they campaign for cars and oil and against bicyclists? Do bicyclists make common cause with the indigenous protesting the exploitation of Amazonian lands for oil exploration? Can you describe any demonstrations like that?

Me wearing the CiclóPolis windbreaker, while Heleana helpfully displays my book, Nowtopia!

HZ: Correa had changed his mind dramatically. As the topic before, I’ll be writing about him… grrrrr….

CC: What’s the best time of year to come for a visit? (Visit SF in May or September-October!)

HZ: Well, Ecuador is a beautiful country. It has everything: rainforest, cloudforest, pristine beaches, mangroves, high mountains, active volcanoes and the uniqueness of the Galapagos Islands. In Quito you can find anything you want about South American art, colonial art, the most beautiful sights and mysterious paths to the pre-Columbian cultures and the magic of the land of the sun. I’m in love with the middle of the earth and its biological, cultural and ethnic diversity. I’m really short in words to describe it! And the best season—well, since we have just 2 seasons, summer and rainy summer… any time of the year is pretty to come.

July 2009, Critical Mass circles Union Square

In the following months, the ride grew steadily, hitting a couple of hundred by February 1993, and still there was no police presence. I think there may have been one motorcycle cop who came upon us during those months and just rode on. In April 1993 it changed though. The ride had grown to several hundred cyclists, and those of us who were publishing the monthly "Critical Mass Missives" and preparing proposed routes with maps, writing flyers, handing out stickers (all under the happy neologism of "Xerocracy") were already worried about the culture of the ride. Too many people were bleating that Orwellian chant "Two Wheels Good, Four Wheels Bad!" and admonishing motorists in an entirely unpleasant self-righteous moralistic tone.

Behaviorally, we already had identified the "Testosterone Brigade" as a problem, young men who seemed to be looking for confrontation, perhaps exercising unresolved anger with their parents by taunting motorists or deliberately riding into oncoming traffic. Another group was dubbed the "snails" because no matter how often we stopped at the front to give everyone a chance to "mass up," a bunch of folks would just dawdle way at the back and never catch up. This led to long stretches of thinly-occupied streets, where just a few cyclists were noodling along. In April 1993 in just this kind of scenario, a motorist tried to cross Market to Guerrero and when cyclists surged in front to block him, he hit one girl. Her bike was totaled, ending up under his car, which careened into a hydrant on the corner while he was trying to escape. The girl was not physically harmed luckily, but her boyfriend, not knowing that she wasn't under the car, reached in and took the keys out of the ignition. The cops came up and arrested the girl and her boyfriend and let the motorist go, treating him as the victim, even though it was widely felt by all present, including bystanders on the street, that he had behaved with homicidal intent.

The 16th birthday ride in Sept. 2008, here on Polk Street.

In June 1997, rumor has it Mayor Willie Brown got stuck in his limo during Critical Mass. He was soon fulminating in the press about how something had to be done! He tried to bring Critical Mass representatives into a meeting (I was invited and refused to go) and managed to get some SF Bike Coalition board members to show up. His pet supervisor at the time was Michael Yaki, and it was Yaki who appeared on the steps of City Hall after the meeting impersonating Neville Chamberlain in 1938 ("peace in our time!"), waving a piece of paper which he claimed was an agreement with Critical Mass (impossible by definition) about how the ride would proceed on the following Friday.

What happened was beautifully documented in Ted White's documentary "We Are Traffic!" which you can see online. The police and Mayor Brown put up a sound system and stage and had the gall to welcome the riders to our own event. They were roundly booed. Brown, realizing that he had not managed to co-opt Critical Mass, decided to unleash the police. They were happy to oblige and a mini-riot took place in mid-Market where several cyclists were arbitrarily pushed to the ground, violently arrested, and their bikes impounded. Critical Mass had split into dozens of groups roaming the city's streets for hours, in what was probably one of the most chaotic evenings in Critical Mass history. The police could not get a handle on things, in spite of their license to repress, and it wasn't until very late that night that they corralled one of the mini-masses still riding, surrounding them in the financial district and arresting them all. The day after the Chronicle's false headline was "250 cyclists arrested!" The actual number was about 112, and most of them had been in the illegal roundup. Howard Besser, one of the arrestees, filed a suit against the police and won, and won a second time when the city appealed, and was awarded about $1,000 in damages. No one was ever convicted of any crimes that occured that night, because there had been no crimes!

The following month, August 1997, after a month of torrid bad press, online flame wars (much like you we still see on the SFGate) denouncing all bicyclists, and a remarkably one-sided representation of what had happened (no mention of Mayor Brown's land-swap shenanigans with the Transbay terminal property that was going on behind the scenes during the same summer), about 5,000 bicyclists showed up in defiant celebration at their own monthly gathering. This time, anticipating a very heavy-handed police presence, the plan was to follow the Good Soldier Schweik approach, that is, ride to rule. Each cyclist would ride as if it were a motor vehicle, obeying all laws, stopping at every light and sign, signaling every turn, etc. That held for the first hour or so, and the traffic downtown was MUCH WORSE than it had ever been before. Thousands of cyclists filling the streets, obeying the traffic laws, turned out to be much more disruptive than following the safe and predictable method of Critical Mass that had evolved over time. 

From that time forward, a kind of truce developed with the police. The ebb and flow of policing over the ensuing years has been unpredictable, going back and forth between angry belligerence and benign tolerance. Sometimes a bunch of bicycling cops joined us, sometimes there were hardly any police at all, and sometimes a whole bunch of motorcycle cops and paddy wagons would come. They've never made any mass arrests, but they do ticket riders on occasion, usually in a somewhat punitive fashion if they see someone they particularly want to inconvenience (it's generally for running red lights, or impeding traffic, or other normal Critical Mass behaviors). When they do, like a few months ago on Broadway coming east out of the tunnel, it led to a half hour traffic jam blocking the streets. Critical Mass riders don't always stop in solidarity with every rider who gets hassled by the cops, but when they do, it raises the costs to the city in terms of traffic blocked and the number of officers who gather to secure the area while a traffic infraction ticket is written.

It is a useful reminder to all that the best approach (usually the one taken by the cops when they're being reasonable) is to facilitate the ride moving continuously through the city until it's finished.

Police repression, when it comes, is part of a larger culture war between those who think the American Way of Life is fundamentally about cars, business, and private property (almost always a strong bias of individual police) and the growing movement to shift into a new way of organizing our lives, based on ecological principles, reduced resource use, and a more convivial, publicly-oriented cityscape. Most of us riding in Critical Mass are not out to break the law or antagonize anyone, but we do feel strongly that we have to demonstrate firmly and directly a different way of life. To those of us committed to a life with a greater sense of conviviality and a commitment to a public sphere, the childish and antagonistic behavior that a few cyclists bring to the ride has been dismaying.

Unfortunately, the old xerocracy mostly died out (with the notable exception of the 10th anniversary ride in 2002--four different beautiful posters were made and put all around town, dozens of stickers and flyers were distributed at the ride, a book was published). Once or twice a year someone shows up with a flyer addressing the culture of the ride, or prepares a suggested route, but in general, cultural production, once so essential to the experience, went into hibernation. After more than a decade the transmission of the culture from oldtimers to newbies has broken down. People riding in Critical Mass these days might have been infants when we started it 18 years ago!

Sadly, some people show up because they believe all the media lies about this big anarchistic confrontational experience, though they are tiny in number. Still, when they behave badly they get an inordinate amount of attention, not just in the media when it deigns to address this ongoing cultural phenomenon, but weirdly, from other cyclists. There's a mentality that has been shaped by our profit-driven media: when it bleeds, it leads. I'm afraid all too many people on all sides of Critical Mass tend to fall into this same mental trap, focusing their attention on the tiny few who behave like jerks, rather than the overwhelming thousands (and not just here, but across the planet in over 300 cities worldwide) who manage things well, extend courtesy and kindness to bystanders, have joyful interchanges with people briefly stuck in buses and cars, and are greeted exuberantly from neighbors in their windows as we roll through central city neighborhoods.

Now the police seem to be threatening Critical Mass again, but to what end?

It's a small thing, lasting 2-3 hours a month, inconveniencing lots of people for a short time, but keeping an important cultural space open. In that space, a different kind of life is in gestation, where new friends and networks continually discover one another, where we experience radical direct democracy, rolling through the streets. And it is available to all comers. Historically it's been self-managed, and recently a new website and discussion list have been started to remedy the fact that the culture hasn't been handed down well between generations of riders.

As for what could work, I'd suggest that Chief Gascon start by removing all motorized vehicles from accompanying the ride, send whatever police he deems necessary on bicycles, and reiterate that Critical Mass is a cultural fact of life in San Francisco. Anything else is likely to make things worse and cost the city a lot more money over the long haul.

Cycling chic in Copenhagen, and this is a cold day in December!

I caught Mikael Colville-Andersen's inspiring talk on urban cycling from the Copenhagen context at San Francisco's SPUR on the last Friday of October. I suggested we could do an interview when I came to Copenhagen in December and he graciously agreed, stepping outside into the drizzling snow at a December 10 awards ceremony he was hosting. (The title of this post is a quote from him when he was on stage at the ceremony, and is a new tag line on his blog too.) They were handing out prizes for the best new designs for the next generation of Copenhagen's bikeshare program. He is well known for his blogging at Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycling Chic. The photos throughout were taken by me in Copenhagen during the last couple of weeks there.

Chris Carlsson: What was your experience in San Francisco? Did you have a good time there?

Mikael Colville-Andersen: I had a brilliant time. I just blogged a film with three of my friends, about Critical Mass.

C: Did you get in to the Halloween Critical Mass?

M: Oh yeah, all the way!

C: I saw you wrote some vaguely critical comments about Critical Mass in general.

M: I have done… it’s just that marketing thing. You’re not selling it if you’re pissing people off. Riding around… I didn’t see any bad behavior. There were so many people at that Critical Mass that it was more tame?

Bike parking takes up incredible amounts of space throughout Copenhagen. This is adjacent to the back of the main train station. Note the two cyclists passing on the separate bikeway. Such sidepaths are ubiquitous in Copenhagen.

This great bike counter is on the Norrebro Bridge, and is the most heavily bicycled street in the world, according to Colville-Andersen. The day before I passed it around 9 pm and there had been 12,126 cyclists that day, and as the bottom number shows, over 2.1 million since June 2009!

On her way in to demonstrate on December 12, this mom and her kids were briefly impeded by the motorcycle cops.

Another busy bicycling intersection, the bridge to Christianshavn. More cycling chic too!

C: In terms of the politics of bicycling, I love your presentation, it’s just great... this notion of subcultures and bicycles: you’re kind of on a rampage about that, it seems, to try to mainstream bicycling. What’s the turning point? Because Copenhagen didn’t have a bike culture all along right? There’s a point where, it happened maybe when you were quite young, suddenly a municipal administration decided to put in the infrastructure?

M: It was there before. You see archive footage, archive photos. We’ve always had masses of people, far more in the 1940s and 50s. And then it started dying off, we started killing it off by expanding roads and taking away separated infrastructure, which we used to have back 100 years ago. So we had to reinvent it. That’s when I was young (I’m 41) in the 1970s with the oil crisis. We had a popular uprising, people in the City Hall square, 20,000 cyclists. These were just regular people on bikes, saying we want better security on the streets, we want separate infrastructure again. And that’s where it all sort of started again. We were killing it off and we  resuscitated it. That’s the angle here.

In the city museum there's a nice small exhibit of cycling past and present, with photo sets like this one, showing 1940s and the present.

A bike bloc organized a DIY shop at the Candy Factory in northern Copenhagen, readying themselves for the big Dec. 16 effort to breach the COP15 perimeter.

The yard at the Candy Factory.

Winter Cycling Chic.

M: You’ll buy it, anyone would buy it. Even if you’ll never look like the most elegant fashionista here in Copenhagen on a bike, it’s still an inspiration. I can just wear my clothes. Open my closet, it’s filled with cycling clothes. It’s definitely happening in North America, in the big cities: New York, Washington, I’ve got loads of photos of regular people. Helmetless as well. The sight of helmetless cyclists is a good sign too no?  Forget about the helmet issue, it’s a sign that you’re doing something right. People are feeling safe, safe enough to make their own decision. You see that and you’re on your way. There’s not that many helmets in San Francisco is there?...

C: No, I’m a big anti-helmet guy in San Francisco. People ride up to me and tell me to get a helmet, or yell out of their car “get a helmet!” This whole mentality is born of this basic idea that you as an individual have to be a good consumer and buy a product to solve the social problem of bad engineering. That’s fucked up! Who thought of that? Because no Americans think critically about the commodification of life. I will never wear a helmet so I can always have this argument.

M: I’m also very stubborn about this.

C: You don’t really need one here. There’s such a lot of courtesy. I haven’t seen any bike-on-bike crashes here. In SF now we have the problem of us long-term wreckless riders whizzing through intersections and having near misses with each other! I’ve had about 5 really close near-misses in the recent past.

M: I’ve been staring at this thing we call bike culture for the past 3 years every single day and I’ve seen 3 or 4 accidents total. There was a bike messenger on the busiest bicycling street in the western world. I didn’t’ see it, I had my back turned. He went over the hood, landed on his shoulder and up again, really aggressive, and the lady was on her way out of the car to check if he was ok, but WHOA she stayed in her car because here he was coming at her with all this aggression and adrenaline. Obviously, he’d just been hit by a car! What happens in the meantime is that 3 or 4 cyclists had rolled up to the stoplight, and one of the girls says to the messenger “you ran the red light!” and another girl said “I saw it too!” and they were defending the motorist. The messenger just shrunk, and the lady was so relieved in the car, and they pulled off and exchanged details. She’s at fault since she’s in a car, but there’s no way you’d have that in your country, where cyclists would be defending the motorist… In three years I saw a few people falling off their bikes on to their bums… you never see bike-to-bike crashes, we don’t go fast enough for that shit.

C: How is it that they sent you as a diplomat? Did you pitch them to hire you?

M: No, they pitched me because of my blogs. Because of the global interest in our bicycle culture, and the City of Copenhagen is a cycling capital. This is all spawned because of my blogs. The whole global fashion bicycle movement is because I took a picture one day and put it on the fucking internet! It’s wild. And Copenhagenize advocacy and a lot of opinions on it and well they came to me.

A Christiania bike crosses in the blue cycling lane.

C: I was so happy when I found your voice of reason here in Denmark. The bike culture here benefits from these things that are reasonable within the context of living in a culture that’s fundamentally Social Democratic. There’s this notion of public goods and public space, and taking care of each other, and kind of being knit together in a slightly tighter way. You’ve seen how we are in the U.S.: We’re completely atomized from each other. Everything is dog-eat-dog, I’m in it for myself, get out of my way, it’s my road, I’m not paying taxes for anything. I think the bike culture has embedded in it the possibility of a more convivial, sharing culture at the heart of it. But you can’t even make that argument overtly in the U.S. without running into weird political problems.

And now, thanks to Elizabeth Press and our sister site Streetfilms.org, a lovely video featuring Mikael Colville-Andersen!

Photo: meligrosa

There are some good explanations of the benefits of bicycles in a city, like "@velobration no parking, no gas, better view of nature, feel great, quads & glutes look awesome, fresh air."

Some others I liked:

• "@dudeonabike: I ride my bike so my kids know that they can too."
• "pdxtyler To get someplace. To feel rain on my face."
• "@Area45 Because this Brooks isn't going to break itself in."

But what if you're faced with a more daunting problem than the morning commute?

"@GraphikDeziner: I ride because a bike is the most reliable means of escape from Zombies."

"It's a place where cyclists of all shapes, sizes and creeds come together to celebrate cycling and the SFBC," said Jodi Madeiros, SFBC Development Director. "The timing couldn't be more perfect with the green pavement, the bike boxes, the separated bike lane on Market Street. We didn't say that 2009 was going to be the year of the bicycle for nothing and now is the time to come celebrate that."

There will be ample beer from New Belgium and an art auction featuring works from David Byrne, Dave Eggers, Guy Overfelt, and other local artists. They will also auction up to 20 bicycles, so it's a great opportunity to get out on a new bike and ride [download auction catalog PDF].

There is a fee to get in, but the proceeds go to benefit the SFBC and help them advocate for better biking in San Francisco. $15+ for current SF Bicycle Coalition Members, $40 for non-members includes one year of Bike Coalition membership. 

The party is at the SOMArts Gallery at 934 Brannan St. (@ 8th St), from 6pm-10:30pm. DJ's Laron & ShOOey will be spinning and as always you can park your bike with free valet bike parking. This is what it looked like last year:

An annual ritual sure to make Rob Anderson's skin crawl. Photo: dustinj

Godspeed and Chrome, a match made in San Francisco. Photo: Seng Chen

Same-day delivery by courier hearkens to the heady days of dot-com hyper-convenience, when messengers were dispatched to deliver everything from DVDs to ice cream and beer. Chrome manufactured the bags for one of those short-lived companies, Kozmo.com. Reedy explained that Chrome had loosely talked with Godspeed and other couriers about bag delivery by messenger since then, but the idea hadn't been implemented. Asked whether the effort was to help Godspeed avoid the plight of downsizing or closure that has hit bicycle couriers across the country, Reedy said his consideration was more about the connection to the messenger community in general.

"Godspeed is doing extremely well, they're fast, dependable, legit. We've organized events and parties with them in the past," said Reedy. When asked how far Godspeed would ride, Reedy said, "Godspeed will pedal everywhere, they're animals. They'll ride over the bridge if needed."  He admitted some longer-distance deliveries might have to be next morning, depending on just how far away and how much business the new promotion engenders.

"The retail store is going to act as the epicenter," said Reedy, who envisioned a swarm of couriers coming in and out on runs. "It's going to add to the mystique of the retail store." The new Chrome store, located on 4th Street and Brannan in SoMa, suffered a break in and theft of goods a couple of months ago, but has been doing well, according to Reedy.

For a small business, working with Chrome can be a significant boost. The kids over at Bicycle Coffee Company, who we profiled in July, recently finished a promotion with Chrome, where each new bag purchase included a half-pound of their coffee.

Mikael Kirkman, who roasts the coffee in his pottery studio in Berkeley, said they had moved 600 pounds through the Chrome deal, an enormous boost to their fledgling company, but one that required near-constant roasting.

For Chrome, the coffee promotion grew out of a connection they had to Matthew McKee, one of Bicycle Coffee Company's co-founders, who had done some artwork for the company's San Francisco store. Reedy was drawn to the path McKee and Kirkman followed to start their company and said Chrome was looking for similar entrepreneurs.

"For us that was just a cool story, period," he said. "Chrome can be tied to bikes, to urban culture, to art. If something feels good and legitimate, that's when we jump on it."

Photo: Gothamist

One white-haired woman in the audience explained that she wanted to like cyclists, but was on a walk recently with her little dog and they almost got "hit six times" by a crazed cyclist, and there was another time when a bike rider swerved in front of her car and how could they be so crazy?  Another man, with a thick salt-and-pepper beard, asked: "How can we get people who ride bikes to stop at red lights and to stop at stop signs?" Teitz, with a droll British cadence responded: "Bicyclist of the Month: somebody who has been noted for stopping at stop signs...the mayor shakes hands, an award is given....."

Still, Byrne and his guest panelists delivered an entertaining ninety minutes for everyone, no matter how familiar they were with urban cycling.  Each speaker explained how they came to ride bicycles and what a world would look like where the bicycle was an equal transportation partner with cars and other modes (short answer: Copenhagen). Byrne explained that he has been riding a bicycle in New York City for more than 30 years and he has taken a bicycle on tour with him nearly everywhere. In his slide show, full of humorous anecdotes about his travels and his bicycle, he ran through a number of photos and images of master-planned cities as they have been imagined by the likes of le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and General Motors, cities built around cars and naked, empty public spaces, cities devoid of neighborhoods, cities "antagonistic to [their] own citizens."

Byrne lauded the bicycle as utilitarian transport that connects him to neighborhoods: "I ride around on a bicycle as a way of getting around--I don't race or do those things.... I find that I see things and I stop for things that I wouldn't normally stop for if I was in a car." He showed a slide of a barbeque joint in Charlottesville, Virginia, with a sign commanding "Get in Here, Eat Barbeque." Byrne: "We did."  Another slide featured houseboat brothels in Utrecht, The Netherlands, beside a street sign depicting mother and child pedestrians. Byrne: "They're charming, they're floating... little floating whore houses. There's a sign that says 'Hold Your Child's Hand.'"

In a short video slide, three young children no older than eight played in a band on a sidewalk for money. Byrne: "This is a band that I saw on the streets of New York--really bad band.... If I wasn't on a bicycle, I wouldn't have stopped to check it out." His final slide was a Frankenstein bicycle made out of the front wheel of a child's scooter, a few pieces of plywood, and no seat. Byrne: "Riding a bike doesn't have to be an expensive thing, you can make them yourself. This one's a little uncomfortable, but it works."

With little fanfare, Byrne wrapped up his presentation and turned the microphone over to Professor Teitz, who explained that growing up in England, bicycles were not considered recreation, but a fundamental transportation mode complimenting transit and walking. "Nobody in their right mind would have considered using them for recreation," he said. "For recreation you walked three miles across country paths and sat in front of pub and then walked back--actually quite nice."

After a brief history of the bicycle in America, where he pointed out the irony that the demand for quality paved roads resulted from the good organizing of the League of American Wheelmen (now LAB), Teitz asked the audience to imagine how San Francisco might have developed if the bicycle were the fundamental mode of transportation, San Francisco without the invention of the automobile. He suggested that the cabal of bicycle transportation planners and engineers might have figured out how to level some of San Francisco's steeper hills, or drilled elevators into them so cyclists could take them up to the highest point of the hill and coast down to their homes or jobs.

Teitz then suggested that the real future of urban transportation ought to be fully multi-modal, with space taken from cars and given back to other modes until they are in a suitable balance. He encouraged thinking beyond mere stripes and lines on the asphalt to innovations like the woonerfs, which compel drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists to pay attention to each other and negotiate space. "The problem of moving away from a single dominant mode is that it can't be done with linear thinking...." As evidence that some of the non-linear, creative thinking might be "finally sinking in," he said he recently found an article on woonerfs in the Interlocking Concrete Pavement Magazine.

SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum related a harrowing tale not too long after she first started riding a bicycle in San Francisco, when a driver, who was upset that she was taking a lane of traffic on Masonic, forced her to the sidewalk, then drove up on the sidewalk after her for nearly a block. Shahum only escaped when she came upon another car parked illegally on the sidewalk. She darted between the parked car and the house adjacent, but the maniac pursuing her couldn't. "I was shaken, I was angry, and I was now an advocate," said Shahum.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu boasted of being the only supervisor who didn't own a car, said he didn't get a driver's license until he was 23 and admitted that he had long been a "bike dork." He was grateful, however, "biking is finally cool," largely because of the work of Byrne, the SFBC, and others who promote bicycle culture. Where friends used to rib him for his post-helmet hairdo, or tell him without a car he couldn't attract members of the opposite sex and "Muni dates were not very cool," now he said he feels part of a bigger and more sustained movement that will make cities more livable. His only request of Byrne was to create a music video with bicycles to compete with the "hip hop guy and the fly girls dancing around the cool car." (Clearly David didn't read this post with the world's greatest bicycle videos!)

More seriously, Chiu said San Francisco has not been cutting edge with bicycle policy, despite the city's reputation for progressive thinking. He said the city needs to do a better job of enforcing traffic laws to make cycling safer, that the city should design curbside bike lanes, improved bicycle parking on streets and in buildings, and that the city should reconsider the hidden subsidies we pay to maintain automobility and automobile infrastructure. 

We have to think about how to properly value the costs of driving versus cycling.... Our city silently subsidizes the costs of upkeeping our roads, upkeeping our parking. As a city, we need to think about what that means.... Change is not easy. For every change that is proposed, there is a naysayer that will tell you the world will come to an end. With your help, with those of you who care about building our community, who care about building our neighborhoods, who care about protecting our environment, we can transform ourselves, not just one day a year, one day a month, but every single day here in San Francisco.

The Bicycle Works grand opening celebration August 9. Flickr photo: cproppe

Less than a month after the grand opening Aug. 9, "Spokey" Godfrey and Jelani Bertoni have more than 70 members and provide classes on basic bike maintenance and repair free to members, and $10 to the public.

They set up in the old Breezer Bikes storefront, nestled on a busy bicycle corridor between Fairfax and San Anselmo. And the non-profit co-op bills itself as "a community hub for culture and technology."

Membership is $100 a year, giving members free use of bike tools daily between 11 a.m. and 7p.m., space to work and free advice from Godfrey and Bertoni. In addition, classes on an array of topics from basic how-to-change-a-flat to more sophisticated efforts are free to members, or $10 for the public.

"We wanted a non-profit workspace that allowed people to come together to work on bikes. A key issue is just giving people a place to have a good time," Godfrey says. "It's amazing to me to see the hunger in people to learn how to do this."

Photo by Tom Murphy.

On Monday afternoon, with some reggae playing in the background, co-op member Andrew Abballo of Fairfax had his mountain bike up on a work stand converting it to a single speed bike. And a woman came in to ask about her son volunteering.

Nearly 15 people showed up for the first class offered on conversion of bikes to accommodate electric-assisted motors.

Godfrey says they have arranged for a Boy Scout troop to come in to earn a bike repair merit badge.

Bertoni got interested in the notion of bicycle co-ops while he was at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he regularly used the bike co-op on campus of The Bike Church, a non-profit community bike shop in downtown Santa Cruz.

"I want to help make it easier for people to get around and to make the world a better place, one bike at a time," Bertoni says.

There are other bicycle co-ops in the Bay Area, including Berkeley's Missing Link and San Francisco's Bike Kitchen.

In the long-term, Godfrey says he and Bertoni hope to include a small café in the space and will retail some bicycles. Any profits from sales will be plowed back into the co-op for the benefit of members.

Photo: Noah Berger for the New York Times

The article in the Times Saturday highlights Grillos' journey as an example of what it calls "accidental entrepreneurs," or entrepreneurs that have turned to their current vocation as a result of losing their jobs or their incomes because of the "Great Recession." Grillos' entrepreneurial spark? Connecting fashion with a simple bicycle amenity, the frame-mounted utility bag.

Frame-mounted bags tend to be black canvas and forgettable, something even bike thieves rarely steal. They are usually utilitarian and simple, an extra pocket to keep bike tools and a spare tube, hardly something to look at once, let alone give a double-take.

Now Grillos is trying to change the profile and at a cost that is approximate to the less-fashionable counterparts.

"I think if anybody told you that parts of bicycling isn't about fashion, they'd be lying," said Grillos. "People love to trick out their bicycles."

Grillos and her brother, Hernan Berangan, who lives in Santa Monica, started Hambone Designs after Hernan proposed the idea. The family had a tradition of crafting and gifting only hand-made presents for the holidays, explained Grillos, so the jump to fabricating bags was not difficult. She had taken a sewing class at the now defunct Stitch Lounge, where she learned her way around a sewing machine.

Asked whether she had ever expected to call herself a "designer," Grillos laughed and exclaimed, "Never!"

While the bags come in a few sizes and colors, the concept is quite simple, with two variations on a theme. The bags snap over the down tube and the top tube of a bicycle, and are easy to remove for carrying around after locking up the bicycle. The Balzac, the women's version of the bag, comes with a small purse strap so that it can be worn as an accessory. The Velopocket doesn't have straps, but Grillos said the down tube loop can easily be snapped onto a belt and makes for a simple hanging pouch, not unlike a fanny pack.

Right now Grillos fabricates the cloth bags in a sewing studio in her home and Barangan makes the leather ones in his. Grillos said the spike in publicity has exhausted their stock and has them considering larger-scale manufacturing. She says they don't want to source to another country and would prefer to stay local to California, if the price point is right. While they currently sell their wares on Etsy.com and at craft fairs, she has spoken with some larger bag makers about subcontracting, but still with no takers. She is also considering approaching local bike shops for distribution.

A long-time member of the SFBC, Grillos intends to donate several bags for the annual Winterfest fundraiser and party. She wasn't certain what the future would hold, but she was confident that the market for her bags was solid and growing.

"I think bicycles are really hot right now," said Grillos. "People are realizing with global warming and the price of gas, bicycles are just cool."

A GPS drawing of a character from the Atari 2600 “Pitfall!” game. Image: NY Times

Once the figure is traced, users upload them to sites like everytrail.com and gpsdrawing.com (check out the Dog Drawings video). Jeremy Wood, an artist from London who maintains gpsdrawing.com, uses his GPS phone to trace his every movement while outside, which he has been doing since 2004:

'People have been doing this for centuries, making big drawings so they could be seen by the gods,' he said, citing the ancient Nasca geoglyphsin Peru as an example.

I suppose any excuse to get people to explore and appreciate their urban environment is a good thing. Have any readers been GPS Drawing themselves or know of people using these apps for interesting art projects, flash mobs, protests, or other reasons?

Photo by Bryan Goebel.

So like Pavlov's dog, I learned how to ride evasively and defensively by being quick and assertive on the streets, and always flowing towards the emptiest places. Forty years later, I have been well-served by this approach, remaining a wreck-less rider all these years, in spite of what some motorists and even some cyclists might consider reckless riding. And no, I don't wear a helmet, and never have. I don't oppose anyone using one if they want to, but I feel perfectly safe riding through the streets, fully responsible for my own safety, and a helmet does not enhance that safety in my experience. (Obviously there is a subset of bike accidents in which one's head hits the ground or a vehicle hard, and a helmet can be very helpful in those cases. But there are many more accidents that mangle other parts of the body, often resulting from bad road design or maintenance, indifferent and hostile motorists, and yes, sometimes, unsafe cycling.)

Photo by Chris Carlsson.

* Drivers must:

- look carefully for bicyclists before opening doors next to moving traffic or before turning right.
- safely merge toward the curb or into the bike lane.
- not overtake a bicyclist just before making a right turn. Merge first, then turn.

There is a list of what bicyclists must do too, including having access to some freeways and being allowed to use left-turn lanes. Unlike the Golden Era of cycling where we could and did go anywhere, in any direction (as plenty of bike messengers and those of us who ride like them still do), the DMV admonishes that bicyclists

- must ride in the same direction as other traffic, not against it.
- must ride in a straight line as near to the right curb or edge of the roadway as practical-not on the sidewalk.
- must ride single file on a busy or narrow street.

None of this particularly corresponds to what is good for cyclists, but does conform to how motorists want cyclists to behave. It underscores how out of kilter the licensing process is with the current reality of cycling and street usage in San Francisco. Now that we're having four blocks of Valencia redesigned, with wider sidewalks to suit more pedestrians, let's hope a more thorough rethinking and redesign of city streets can follow. If we can move towards dedicated street space for bicyclists, like in Copenhagen, Montreal, New York, Berlin and other great cities, maybe we'll be able to claim that mantle too.

Until then, bicyclists, you're on your own! Your safety and survival are your responsibility, not the motorists who can't or won't see you.

The online news outlet Digital City reports that the state of Alabama has banned the sale of Cycles Gladiator wine, produced by California winery Hahn Family Wines because of what it terms an inappropriate label.  Digital City reports:

A poster advertising bicycles dating back to 1895 is causing quiet a stir in Alabama. Hahn Family Wines out of California makes a wine called Cycle Gladiators and they've featured the original ad on the label.

Why all the fuss? The ad in question (pictured above) includes the image of a long-haired woman flying alongside a bicycle -- wearing nothing but a smile ... well, she's not smiling but you get the idea.

The cartoon lady could be considered artistically tasteful but the Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board doesn't think so. The board decided to pull the the wine from liquor store shelves statewide, deeming the label as inappropriate.

Are they trying to make a statement about biking while intoxicated? Is it because the bike has no front brakes? Are they worried people are going to try and make their bikes fly?

Maybe the AABCB rulesmakers should just spend a week up in Black Rock City and learn to love powerful, artfully (un)clad women riding bicycles everywhere. Tut tut.

Born in the streets of Oakland, scraper bikes have become so much more than just a colorful trend of tricked-out bicycles. Scraper bikes have become an Internet phenomenon via YouTube, a practical means of greening urban space, a social movement, and a rallying cry for young people organizing against violence in their community.

Tyrone "Baby Champ" Stevenson, who styles himself the "Scraper Bike King," says the bikes were created by Oakland teens who coveted but could not afford scraper cars, the souped-up sedans painted with bright colors and with rims so large they scrape the undercarriage. Scraper bikes are such a hit that many teens skip the cars and keep pedaling well past the age of 16.

Last weekend, Stevenson organized the second annual "Bike 4 Life" ride to call for an end to violence in Oakland's neighborhoods. "We're trying to bring together a gun truce," he says, "because a lot of people in our community are dying from guns." This Streetfilm features scenes from the ride and more from Stevenson about the movement he helped launch.

Matthew McKee, Mike Kirkman, and Brad Butler of Bicycle Coffee Company. Photo: Michael Rhodes

"We're not really interested in doing things that aren't sustainable in our lives," said Brad Butler of Bicycle Coffee Company, which delivers coffee throughout the city and the East Bay by bicycle. "I think bicycling is the most effective and efficient vehicle and the most earth-healthy vehicle that I know of in the city."

Sustainability starts early in the process for Bicycle Coffee Company, which is based in San Francisco and is mostly comprised of brothers, cousins, and close friends. The entire concept started with a trip to Costa Rica: the plan was to start an eco lodge.

"This was our idea of our next endeavor," said Butler. "To go down there and build a project that would consist of land, we would grow all of our own food, and we'd basically be self-sustainable and invite people down from the States, Europe, basically anybody who'd like to come and live this life, a prehistoric type of life."

But the recession intervened, and the eco lodge plan was postponed.

"We just liked these communities and the farms there, and we all liked coffee, and drink coffee, and liked being in this area," explains Matthew McKee, Butler's cousin. "So we were thinking, well, shoot, what can we do with coffee and with the connections we have in San Francisco, and how can we find a way for us still to all have a business and work together, but go back to San Francisco and take back with us something we've learned in our adventures in Panama."

"We made connections with these farmers, and found out that we could have the coffee shipped to a warehouse in Oakland. We … built a coffee roaster in [family friend Mike Kirkman's] backyard, in Albany … and started roasting coffee and using one of our nightclubs as a café during the daytime to kind of experiment with our roasting coffee and using it as our office to get this other idea, which is delivering bags of beans to offices and to people's homes by bicycle."

Other than the short trip from the Port of Oakland to Kirkman's backyard in Albany, the coffee is never transported by automobile. Everyone in the group rides a bicycle and does deliveries. Hills are not a concern.

"I'll take it tough," said Butler, "and I'll go east, and then I'll come back to 7th and Market or wherever our hub is, I'll load up another 25 pounds and I'll go west."

Though sustainability is a core tenet of the company's philosophy, delivering by bike has had economic benefits as well. "We're also on a tight budget," said McKee. Delivering by bicycle means you don't have to purchase a delivery truck, Butler points out.

For Jason Benford of De La Paz Coffee Company, based in the Mission, sustainability is great, and the price is right, but the real value of delivering by bicycle is the branding.

The De La Paz Coffee Company delivery bike. Photo courtesy of De La Paz Coffee Company.

Like Bicycle Coffee Company, De La Paz delivers throughout the city by bike. They also have customers throughout the Bay Area, and they employ a truck for longer deliveries.

Delivering by bike shows a commitment to the city and its neighborhoods, said Benford. "I think it's just another way of branding your business, and showing that you're kind of focusing on the small community, local aspect of it."

Benford also notes that, for deliveries downtown, the bicycle has a huge advantage, versus "having to go down there" by car, "find a parking spot, pay for parking, and so forth."

Benford said he was already a "bike nerd" when he started the company, which takes its name from his wife's name, Maria de la Paz Garcia Cortes. His background is also in environmental policy, so the sustainability benefits are hardly negligible to him.

For other businesses, ease of delivery is the main reason to deliver by bike. Similar to most Chinese restaurants in Manhattan, Green Garden Restaurant in North Beach makes most of its deliveries by bicycle. An employee said "ease" and "parking" were the primary reasons.

Boccalone, based in the Ferry Building, makes deliveries using this nifty bike. But you'll have to follow them on Twitter to know where and when. Flickr photo: niallkennedy

"Especially given a really short distance, a bike can actually be faster than a car, just given the way that you can kind maneuver around an urban environment, even if you're carrying something pretty heavy," said Logan Harris, who delivers for Pedal Express.

Though bikes have proven potent for short-range delivery, Pedal Express' choice of transportation was ultimately an ethical one. "It was really founded philosophically, it wasn't like, 'oh, we want to start a delivery company, bicycling will be fast,'" said Harris. "It was kind of like, 'bicycling is a really ethically-responsible way of getting around,' and actually a lot of stuff can be carried on bicycle."

In a city where food delivery is oddly scarce, and where most short-run deliveries are made by car, there may be room for a lot more delivery by bicycle. With the Internet and the economic recession slowly eating away at the bicycle courier industry, there is certainly a workforce ready to do the job.

If the recommendations of the city's Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force are taken to heart, bicycle delivery could also soon be a matter of public policy. The report recommends that the city "explore package delivery by bicycle or other alternative vehicles."

The Bicycle Coffee Company's Butler said he's already working on promoting that. "We kind of want to make an impression on persons that you can live your lives without having to use motorized vehicles," he said. Hopefully more restaurants will start getting the message. In the meantime, residents will just have to bike over and pickup food themselves.

With everyone under the sun boasting their carbon reduction initiatives, including laughable entries by oil giants like Chevron and ExxonMobile, it's nice to see an event that walks the walk, or pedals the pedals, as it were.

The Bicycle Music Festival is an all-day musical event tomorrow that runs entirely on human power. The sound system is powered by several people riding bicycles connected to a generator. As long as there are pedalers, there's a party.

Event organizer Paul Freedman, a.k.a Fossil Fool of Rock the Bike, emphasized that the bicycle is really only a tool in project; the primary goal is having fun with one's community.

"It's about the power of music to inspire people to make change. It emphasizes the positive message and not the guilt trip. The main message, though, is to get to know your neighbors. There is a community movement in this country that is bigger than the bicycle movement but includes biking. It's one amazing tool to tap into community, but it's only one tool."

Over the course of the day, Freedman expect upwards of 2000 people to take part, either dancing at the stationary locations in Golden Gate Park in the morning and Dolores Park in the afternoon, or riding along the two one-hour mobile concerts.  For the mobile events, Freedman and Rock the Bike have built a bicycle towed stage.

The morning event starts at at 9:30 am at Marx Meadow in Golden Gate Park near the 25th Avenue and Fulton entrance. The Dolores Park concert kicks off at 2:30 pm, with a roving show in between the two park events. Get more route and band lineup information here.

See more photos and watch a video of last year's event after the jump.

A video of Bicycle Music Festival 2008, produced by the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

All bicycle powered Ginger Ninjas frontman Kipchoge rockin' the tall long-tail bike. Photo alwaysupndown

Photo: ppl.

The new hub attachment translates into less power loss from the bicycle wheel to the generator than the previous power set-up. Courtesy, Bicycle Music Festival.

Matthew Modine doesn't don certain ritual headgear while he rides

Unfortunately Treehugger and Ecorazzi get in on the game, making the argument that only reckless people don't use a helmet while riding a bike, which isn't far from the argument made by motorists that only reckless people ride bikes. Fortunately the cooler head (s?) at Copenhagenize dissects the arguments in the "Get Yer Pitchforks! It's a Bike Helmet Witchhunt!" article and exposes a very interesting angle of helmet-mania: Americans are so helmet-conscious in part because the helmet manufacturers are American, they have lobbyists everywhere, and cycling was pitched in part by these same manufactures as a sport, not a transportation mode. Love the Emerging Bicycle Culture tag too:

The difference between North America and other Emerging Bicycle Cultures is remarkable. I covered the rebirth of the bicycle in Paris last year and I was recently speaking in Riga and Moscow. Helmets don't even feature on the radar. In Spain, France, Italy it's the same.  Even in an established bike culture like Japan in general and Tokyo in particular, there are hardly any helmets among everyday cyclists, as you can see right here.

All the people involved thus far in this discussion are homo sapiens who have developed the ability to judge personal risk for themselves. At that level, we're all equal.

So why is it so different in North America? The question of lack of helmets has little to do with infrastructure. It is a cultural and, most importantly, economic issue. There are 100 million daily cyclists in the EU according to the European Cyclists Federation. Easily half don’t have dedicated infrastructure and yet they don’t wear helmets.

The reason is quite simple. All the main helmet manufacturers are American. When they started suddenly promoting helmets in the late 1980’s, they targeted their local market and aimed helmets at those who cycled there; namely sports enthusiasts and hobby cyclists. The helmet was yet another piece of ‘necessary gear’ to be sold. The manufacturers capitalized on their branding of cycling as a fast-paced, sweaty sport.

As resident San Francisco bare-header Andy Thornley noted (and he made clear this is not the position of his employer, the SFBC, which doesn't have a position), this matter "has the tendency to get distracted into a discussion that has become religious. It's a matter of faith, because there are so many nuances to it. Ultimately there isn't a single clear set of facts that say you should or you shouldn't."

Thornley added that helmets are not tested for many types of impact, but are effective only if you land directly on the top of your head at a particular speed. He added that most helmet arguments make the assumption that you've been hit, when most of one's energy should be spent on preventing instances where the very specific protection they provide is necessary.

"Helmet wearing is about your fourth layer of defense; first, make every practice to not get hit by a car. Riding predictably, riding respectfully, being visible, wearing clothes that are visible. The helmet ends up being effective only if you get hit by a car."

Thornley also gave us this very interesting thought exercise about perceived dangers on a couple pages on a website he maintains precisely for these questions (good resources for studies and links):

Here's a little exercise for pedestrian advocates: Do you think a mandatory helmet law for pedestrians would be a good thing? All the data I've seen for urban trips indicates that a pedestrian is more likely than a bicyclist to incur a traumatic head injury. Even if it would only help in a minor percentage of collisions, why wouldn't you walk around with a helmet strapped to your head, if it could help you in that case?

I'm guessing you wouldn't support this because it would make everyday walking look more dangerous than it actually is, and would codify a concession of massive public policy failure, and generally relocate the responsibility for traffic danger and crash survival on the most vulnerable party. You'd probably also object to such a law because it made one single measure of personal armor the focus of all personal safety practice, and distract from more effective measures such as looking both ways and waiting till the signal light was green before crossing the street.

So full disclosure: I wear a helmet almost every time I ride, though I used to go sans for the first few years I lived in New York City. One day a friend of mine found out I rode without a helmet and guilt-tripped me into wearing one more often. Two weeks later I got hit by a double-lane right hook in the middle of Times Square and flew over the hood of the car, landing on my back and smacking my head on impact. I cringe to think what would have happened if I weren't wearing the helmet.

So I do like Thornley suggested, I ride with a helmet when it makes me feel safe, which is almost every time I get on my bike. Of course, if every day were like Mission Sunday Streets, I would ride now like I (and most everyone) rode then, with the wind gently blowing through my hair.

We’ve been waiting for years now to see some physical changes to accommodate the huge increase in daily bicycling. We did get an odd set of painted bike lanes and green bike route signs, and a significant number of bike racks for parking, before it all came to a halt due to the injunction three years ago. After perusing the much-anticipated Draft Bicycle Plan and its dense bureaucratese, full of overlapping redundant promises, I’m afraid we’ll be waiting a good while longer to see the kinds of changes that we ought to be getting.

It’s really hard to believe that after all this organizing and earnest campaigning we’ll basically end up with a few thousand “sharrows” and another batch of partial, end-in-the-middle-of-nowhere bike lanes, lanes which in any case are horribly inadequate patches on our misallocated and car-centric public streets. How is it that after almost two decades of rapidly expanding bicycling, the city’s transit priorities still treat bicycles as an annoyance that they only grudgingly are willing to accommodate? When will there be a systematic commitment to altering the streets of this city to create dedicated bikeways, separated from cars and pedestrians, comprehensively linked to provide for easy, graceful, convivial bicycling to all parts of the city?

Over at the blog Copenhaganize their basic point is summarized in two short sentences:

Each and every day 500,000 people ride their bicycle to work or school in Copenhagen. This blog highlights who they are, why they do and how it was made possible.

Forty years ago Copenhagen was just as car-clogged as anywhere else but now 36% of the population choose the bicycle. Copehagenizing is possible anywhere.

My mother is from Copenhagen so I’ve visited the Danish city many times. I think it must have influenced my early thinking, because it was back in 1987 when I drew up a little flyer calling for a “City of Panhandles.” San Francisco cyclists all know the Panhandle’s cyclepath as one of the real pleasures around here (granted, it would be better if pedestrians would have their own path to its side!) and the way it links to the Wiggle route between the Mission and the Haight is just icing on the cake. A city with some vision, rather than a plodding traffic planning bureaucracy that is led by a Mayor who is only interested in what is going to facilitate his election to the next office (and always blatantly biased towards car owners and the wealthy), would have already been working on converting key routes across the city to bicycle boulevards… not just car-centric streets with “bike boulevard” signs, but whole thoroughfares that are closed to cars and only open to bicycles and emergency vehicles. Going a couple of steps further, why not open such thoroughfares to horticultural design and public art? Imagine sculpture gardens, curving murals, daylighted creeks, linear food forests, vegetable gardens, benches and fountains… the list goes on. The city would benefit in so many ways through such a comprehensive conversion of space currently sacrificed to the insatiable uses of private automobiles.

It’s self-evident how much better such street spaces would be for neighbors, pedestrians, children, and cyclists. It would open space for a systematic approach to re-localized food security. For those who clamor for “green jobs” (I’m not one of them), such natural ribbons crisscrossing the city would require first a lot of major construction work, and then a great number of gardeners, farmers, bicycle mechanics, bike parking attendants, landscapers, artists, and more. Juxtapose such quality, engaging, meaningful work to the stupid jobs that pass as “important” in the financial district, or the wasted labor producing so many luxury highrises, office buildings and other pointless projects of “economic development”… Let the tourists join us in riding and walking through the garden paths of San Francisco! Let’s think about the work we do and the design of our city as a canvas on which to create something really astonishingly better than what we’re settling for now. The SF Bike Coalition should be a lot more aggressive and push for much more far-reaching and far-sighted transformations than this tepid and uninspiring Bike Plan, in order to live up to its political and social responsibilities!

Leah Shahum addresses hundreds in the crowd at City Hall

San Francisco's annual Bike to Work Day drew a record 200,000 bicyclists this morning, according to early estimates, making it the most successful bike to work day since it began 15 years ago. Crowds of cyclists took advantage of the SFBC Energizer Stations to get food and coffee and make new friends in what has become the most exciting and politically important year for bicycle improvements in the city.

Eight supervisors, including car-free Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, and other dignitaries and agency staff, rode from locations around the city to City Hall, where they held a press conference to call for quick action on the Bicycle Network once the longstanding injunction is lifted. 

"I'm so proud to say our movement both politically and at a grassroots level is stronger and more successful than ever, and I think it's fair to say is one of the strongest advocacy movements in the city today," SFBC  Executive Director Leah Shahum told the crowd, urging city leaders to move forward. "They all know this: we are never satisfied. So what we've accomplished up to today does not compare to what is coming."

Chiu gave props to the Bike Coalition and cyclists in general, saying, "I've only been in office a few months and there are hundreds of interests that troll the halls, but what's different between them and the SF Bicycle Coalition is that you are actually real people. You guys are real San Franciscans.  This is a real movement, this is a revolution.  We are looking forward here at the Board of Supervisors to making sure that every one of these bike lanes gets developed and gets built."

Pointing at the map of the Bicycle Network, he added, "I don't think we should stop at what this map looks like.  We need to keep on going."

City Attorney Dennis Herrera arrives at City Hall.

Bicycling Numbers are Way Up

Bike to Work Day was bolstered by the news that the number of people bicycling the streets of  San Francisco has dramatically increased since 2006, according to the Municipal Transportation Agency's first State of Cycling Report issued today:

The Report documents a 43 percent increase in bicycling citywide in the past two years shows that 128,000 trips daily—or 6 percent—are via bicycle.  The Report provides a baseline analysis of bicycling from information gathered via bicycle counts and surveys conducted during 2006, 2007 and 2008. 

In addition, the agency counted record numbers of bicyclists on Market Street at Van Ness Avenue this morning:

A count taken between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. this morning found that twice as many bicyclists as motorists traveled eastbound on Market Street past Van Ness Avenue.  A total of 776 bicycles were counted, compared to 374 automobiles.  Bicycles made up 66 percent of the total vehicles headed eastbound, while automobiles came in at 31 percent (transit and taxis accounted for the remaining 3 percent of the vehicles).  In 2008 bicycles accounted for 64 percent of the vehicles and automobiles for 32 percent.

Photos from the rides are coming in on our Streetsblog San Francisco Flickr pool, which you can see here.  Send us your photos and we'll post the best ones!

Flickr photo: kate at yr own risk

The SFBC has organized Energizer Stations along some of the busiest bicycle commuter routes and will host several Commuter Convoys with elected officials and agency directors along critical bike routes being considered for improvements, such as Second, Fifth, 17th and Townsend Streets, Kirkham Ave., Alemany Blvd., and dozens of others. These bike tours will converge on the steps of City Hall at 8:30am for a press conference celebrating Bike to Work Day and the upcoming decision on the Bike Plan that will double the miles of bike lanes in San Francisco.

“As part of this year’s Bike to Work Day, we are asking our City leaders to experience the thrills and the challenges of biking in San Francisco on the dozens of streets that are being considered for dramatic improvements next month,” said Leah Shahum, Executive Director of the SFBC.

Around the Bay Area, 450 teams of bicycle commuters have been riding since the beginning of May in the Team Bike Challenge, a month-long competition where teams compete to win a grand prize Peak Racks bike rack that will be placed in a public location of the winning team’s choice. As part of the Team Bike Challenge, established bicycle commuters recruit their colleagues, friends, neighbors and local “bigwigs” to bike for most of their May trips to work, school and other destinations.

“As a participant in past Team Bike Challenges, I have found that using my bike can get me anywhere I need to go quickly, with a lot less stress,” says Santa Clara County Supervisor Ken Yeager, who also serves as a member of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), which funds a major portion of the Bay Area’s Bike to Work Day activities. “It’s also a great way to get your exercise in before the workday.”

Nearly half of the 2,100 miles of continuous and connected bicycling corridors planned for the Bay Area already have been completed, according to MTC’s just-adopted 2009 Regional Bicycle Plan. The $1 billion that MTC has committed to help finance the Regional Bikeway Network will help to complete the on-street portion of these
corridors.

 “MTC is pleased to support Bike to Work Day as part of our overall strategy to improve mobility and the environment in the Bay Area,” said MTC Spokesman Randy Rentschler.

In Downtown San Francisco, the SFBC is offering special all-day bike parking at its Market Street and Battery Street Energizer Station.  SFBC Program Associate Marc Caswell said that while the organization hadn't heard an abundance of complaints from members about being denied access to office buildings with a bicycle, they wanted to test the waters to see if it is a bigger problem than expected.  Streetsblog readers who do have problems with bicycle access to buildings are encouraged to send us an email at tips@sf.streetsblog.org.

For more information on Bay Area Bike to Work Day activities, click here.

San Francisco Commuter Convoy locations are as follows, with push-off from each location at 7:45 am:

• Richmond: Blue Danube, 306 Clement St at 4th Ave (with Supervisor Eric Mar)
• Marina: Peet's, 2156 Chestnut at Steiner St
• Nob Hill: It's a Grind, 1800 Polk St at Washington (with Board President David Chiu, and Chair of the MTA Board of Directors Tom Nolan)
• Sunset: House of Coffee, 1618 Noriega St at 23rd Ave. (with Supervisor Carmen Chu and Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting)
• NOPA: Sacred Grounds, 2095 Hayes St at Clayton (with Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi and DPW Director Ed Reiskin)
• North Potrero: Coffee Bar, 1890 Mariposa at Florida (with Planning Director John Rahaim and City Attorney Dennis Herrera)
• Portola Heights: Creighton's Bakery, 673 Portola Dr at Teresita Blvd
• Castro: Peet's, 2257 Market St at Noe St (with Supervisor Bevan Dufty)
• Outer Mission: Nervous Dog, 3438 Mission St at 30th St (with Supervisor David Campos)
• Bayview: Road House, 5191 3rd St at Thomas St
• Excelsior: Mama Art Cafe, 4754 Mission St at Russia St (with Supervisor John Avalos)
  

It's Bike Month - which means there are scads of neophytes out there nationwide giving cycling a try.  Oh goody! But, oh baddy - it also means more improper locking - and we all know there are predators just licking their chops at the thought of stealing all or part of your bike. So we want to do all we can to preach good locking technique and thwart thieves.

We need a sage in these times to remind us how easy it is to roll your bike.  Once again enter the immortal, Bicycle Habitat mechanic Hal Ruzal to give us the straight dope in what he's calling "your final warning" in this last chapter of our exclusive trilogy.  Let's hope the third time is a charm!

This time around Hal's not only grading bike locking ability of anonymous locker uppers, but he also shows you how he secures his bike so you too can score an "A" (or at least have a decent shot at an A- or B+.)  And if you love the humorous anecdotes and musings here, don't miss our first two chapters:  "Hal Grades Your Bike Locking" and "Hal (and Kerri) Grade Your Bike Locking".