Thanks to Brandon Gobel for tipping us to this commercial about Chicagoan Christina Peck prepping for the Cycle Messenger World Championships which will go down at Soldier Field on August 4-5, 2012.
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A scene from the race in Tokyo, Japan, in 2009. Photo by pistbiker.
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Meet Maggie Martinez. She was the final commenter at last night’s final public meeting for the development of the Bloomingdale Trail framework plan*. And what a final comment she made. If I had known it was going to be a rousing call to action for supporting youth in arts and cycling, and the benefits of the project for the Humboldt Park and nearby communities, I would have filmed it. Instead you get this (pretty good) photo, the audio of her speech, and a transcript.
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I put the audio of Maggie speaking to a basic slideshow of photos from the meeting. Watch it on Vimeo. Continue reading Rallying the community around the Bloomingdale Trail, a project for open space, art, and active transportation
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Randy Neufeld, Even Jennings, and Mike Amsden. Photo by Eric Rogers.
Thank you to the tens of people who visited the Grid Chicago table at the Chicago Bike Swap in the Pulaski Park Fieldhouse on Saturday. We thoroughly enjoyed talking to current and (hopefully) new readers of our blog. We handed out pins, business cards, and demonstrated the site. Since there was no wifi or electricity available, we improvised: we showed off the website with an iPad and a mobile hotspot. MobileCitizen generously lent us the mobile hotspot for the day. I was also able to talk to people about the Get Lit campaign.
In addition to the myriad organizations signing up interested guests, and shops selling bike parts, handlebar smartphone holders, and cycling caps, there were many great presentations. I filmed two: a Q&A on bicycling with kids with three Logan Square parents called “Kids in the Saddle: Raising the Next Generation of Cyclists”; and “Decade of Revolution: the Rise of Bicycle Transportation in Chicago”. The videos will be up later this week – each are longer than 30 minutes and will take some time to edit for publishing. Continue reading The Bike Swap on Saturday was an informative event
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A depiction of what wouldn’t have happened. Photo by flickrknufflo.
Share the road? What a terrible idea.
The Netherlands is the safest place to travel, on any mode, because they’ve a road design philosophy called “sustainable safety”. One of the principles is to homogenize modes by mass, speed, and direction:
Large differences in speed and mass of different road users in the same space must be eliminated as much as possible. Where speed differences cannot be eliminated types of traffic must be separated. [Read about the four other principles.]
In Chicago and most places in the United States, the philosophy is “share the road” and “good luck”. Continue reading Does Chicago want to be a bike friendly city or what? (video)
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Utrecht is a nice city to visit. I recommend it.
Mark Wagenbuur, a Dutch blogger from ‘s-Hertogenbosch, starts the story like this:
One of my videos went viral…again…and while that is in itself rather pointless, it does make clear that a lot of people in the world are completely in the dark when it comes to every day cycling [in the Netherlands]. I published the video over a year ago. It shows a cycle path in Utrecht near the central railway station where all the main cycle routes of Utrecht come together.
Mark then reviews for readers some of the comments people left about the video (which has over 1 million views), on the YouTube page, and on the various sites that embedded it; they’re rife with insults, questions about why overweight people cannot be seen, and other expressions of bewilderment and ignorance. His original video is below. Continue reading Dutch man posts video showing normal cycling and world goes crazy over it
Updated: Eben Weiss will be on a bike ride from TATI Cycles in Hyde Park to Cellar and 57th Street Books in Lakeview on March 29, 2012. Details are here.
Lots of books have commercials, but they’re often for books by Stephen King, Sue Grafton, or some other soon-to-be national best seller. This is the first commercial I’ve seen for a book about cycling. Thanks to BikePortland for the tip.
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The book is The Enlightened Cyclist, by BikeSnobNYC, or Eben Weiss, the most sharp-tongued (and spot-on) bike blogger in America. The book will be released in March, but you can pre-order it on Amazon.
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Eben Weiss singing books in Seattle by Gene Bisbee.
See earlier: A Chicago bike shop posts a commercial for its fix a flat on the fly service.