"Islabikes came about after friends and relatives asked their resident cycling expert – Rowntree is a former UK cyclocross champion – for advice on bikes for young children..."
Slowly but surely, more U.S. communities are realizing that the future of mobility is bigger than cars. Biking is seen as an attractive, cost effective, healthy and convenient way to get around. Bike commuting tripled in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington DC, Minneapolis, Portland and Denver from 1990 to 2012, and doubled in many other cities.
Controlled through your smart phone, the Copenhagen Wheel becomes a natural extension of your everyday life. You can use your phone to unlock and lock your bike, change gears and select how much the motor assists you. As you cycle, the wheel’s sensing unit is also capturing your effort level and information about your surroundings, including road conditions, carbon monoxide, NOx, noise, ambient temperature and relative humidity. Access this data through your phone or the web and use it to plan healthier bike routes, to achieve your exercise goals or to meet up with friends on the go. You can also share your data with friends, or with your city – anonymously if you wish – thereby contributing to a fine-grained database of environmental information from which we can all benefit.
The company got about three dozen designs, every thing from a BMX-style bike to a modern take on the old Penny-farthing high-wheel bike from the 19th century. It chose a far more conservative model -- something of a beach cruiser with coaster brakes and hand brakes. The steel bike comes with a basket and bell. And it features fenders to keep spray off cyclists' backs in the rain, and a case covering the chain to protect their clothes from grease.
On the other hand, helmet-lax Dublin — cold, cobbled and hilly — has more than 5,000 daily rides in its young bike-sharing scheme. Mexico City recently repealed a mandatory helmet law to get a bike-sharing scheme off the ground. But here in the United States, the politics are tricky. —New York Times articleIt would seem bike share programs in Montreal, Washingon and Minneapolis show that, while helmet use among people using these programs is lower than cyclists in those cities using their own bikes, the accident rates are also low. A new fact sheet by the European Cyclists' Federation (in PDF) Safety In Numbers claims that higher rates of bicycle use result in lower numbers of casualties. The reason is that cycling is safer for each cyclist when more people do it. So perhaps the trade-off in health benefits from helmet-less riding to in aggregate increases in ridership are worth it?
The District piloted the country’s first bike share in 2008 and then launched Capital Bikeshare--or CaBi--two years ago as the large-scale prototype for systems that later spread to Boston, Miami and a dozen other towns, and that will come next year, finally, to Chicago and New York City. For reasons that Washington officials did not count on at the time, the nation’s capital may well have been the right place to kickstart the program.This is comparable to the one Dublin launched in September 2009, known as Dublinbikes. With an initial 450 bicycles, the plan reached 1 million trips very quickly. The Montgomery County Department of Transportation, Division of Transportation Engineering (DTE) has the responsibility to plan and construct bikeways, as well as provide maintenance for approximately 100 miles of bike facilities -- a network of shared use paths, bike lanes and shared roadways bike routes primarily located within the road rights-of ways. Read more here... And, remember, decades after the first "share the road" signs popped up, Maryland drivers could be fined as much as $500 if they pass within three feet of a bicyclist.
It appears, according to Michael Kimmelman, that New York City is ripe for a revolution: "Decades ago the architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote about how we see cities differently at different speeds… On a bike time bends. Space expands and contracts… it may sound a little crazy to talk about meditating on urban scenery when the issue is crashing into double-parked cars, abruptly opened taxi doors and reckless riders, which is where properly designed and enforced bike lanes come in, or increasingly will, as their network grows." He goes on to write that the ciry has installed 260 miles of bike lanes in the last four years, and is setting up a bike-share system.
In DC, the Capital Bikeshare is expanding. The planned expansion of the Capital Bikeshare program is underway this month with more docking stations being added at the most popular locations where riders pick up and leave bikes in the District. Thirty-six docks, which keep bikes securely locked between uses, were added to four stations Monday. Four other stations were expanded Friday, and a total of 18 stations will have the capacity to handle more of the red bikes when the expansion is complete.
This bodes well for the bicycle as an alternative to bus, train and car (oh, and walking). While the weather may be turning nippy, rest assured you can find me out on the streets and trails…
