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Unfolding commuter convenience
Sherri Buri McDonaldm The Register-Guard
During a recent visit to Eugene, Bobbi Kamil, of California’s Monterey Bay area, attracted a small audience at the Starbucks near the University of Oregon campus.
The 64-year-old retired educator wheeled up to the coffee house on her bike, and – in about 15 seconds – folded it into a compact, 25-pound package that could be stowed easily beside one of the tables.
She’s a proud and happy owner of a “tikit,” the latest creation of Bike Friday, a manufacturer in west Eugene that says it has designed the fastest-folding bike in the world. The company says it can be folded in five seconds.
…sensing that the broader market is finally ready to accept fold-up bicycles as one antidote to global warming and rising obesity rates, Bike Friday hopes that its tikit, which retails for $1,195 – compared with an average cost of about $400 for folding bikes – will turn more people into bike commuters.
(1 November 2007)
Vicious Cycle
Portland is not so bike-friendly-But it could be. Here’s how.
Corey Pein, Willamette Week
Repeat something often enough and people will assume it’s true.
Portland is bike-friendly.
Portland is bike-friendly.
Portland is bike-friendly.
Year after year, Bicycling Magazine ranks Portland the best cycling city in the country. The League of American Bicyclists gives us a gold rating, and we may soon become the first big city to join Davis, Calif., in the coveted platinum category.
… Portland could actually become a cyclists’ utopia. And it should be if, after we’re done mourning the deaths of Jarolimek and Sparling, people get serious about making Portland a world-class bike city.
Former city bike planner Mia Birk likens bike programs to affirmative action. The cars already get the best of everything, sort of like rich white guys. Bike programs would be minorities in her analogy, getting increased and overdue access to common resources.
“You have to step back and say, this isn’t just about bicyclists,” she says. “It’s great that it benefits bicyclists, but it really improves safety for all of us.”
Here are 14 ways that Portland could really live the dream of bike equality
1. SEPARATED BIKE LANES
2. SLOW DOWN …
3. BIKE BOULEVARDS …
4. BETTER SIGNALS …
(31 October 2007)
Recycling with ‘Bill the Bike Man’
Kathleen O’Connell, The Age
A Melbourne man is using the humble push bike to create a greener, fairer world. reports.
BILL BRETHERTON is living the maxim. No matter how many times you fall off, you have to get back on the bike. Even after four months of your life have disappeared.
Not that the 27-year-old remembers much of how his world came crashing down in the middle of 2000 after he landed on his head while mountain biking on Mount Buller. What he does remember is that it prompted a radical meaning-of-life analysis that has seen this big-thinking Brunswick man start a bicycle recycling business to fund his charity work.
…This mental journey he pedalled during rehabilitation has seen him arrive, seven years later, at Human Powered Cycles, a volunteer driven co-operative that pushes pedal power as the solution for a more sustainable world.
Each weekend countless people visit the workshop at the bottom of his garden, wheeling in their injured bikes. “Bill the Bike Man’s” reputation is far reaching.
(31 October 2007)
