Gotta say, pretty surprised such a great pro city-biking commercial could have been made. Beautiful functional city bike, people utilizing their bike for function and cargo, people having FUN on a bike, perfect. Thanks Kaiser for this pro bike spot

I like this commercial so much I’m willing to glance over the sidewalk and wrong way riding

Bikes on California Ave, UC Davis, originally uploaded by amsthirty.

Here’s a USA Today article citing some examples of high schools and universities looking to deter students from bringing cars to campus through various changes and incentive programs. The crown jewel example is Ripon College’s precedent setting program where they’ve agreed to offer incoming freshmen a brand new Trek mountain bike in exchange for not bringing a car to campus; pretty sweet deal if you ask me. What I find interesting about this type of incentive program is that the school may actually save money by giving each student a $300 bike; get everyone to ditch their car and you won’t have to build new parking lots/structures. I know at my local university one single parking space comes at the cost of $11,000…ELEVEN THOUSAND!

Other programs listed to discourage car usage and/or encourage bicycle usage are on campus bicycle shops, loaner bikes (ie bike library), more bike racks on campus, pathways and more.

Check out the full article: Schools move to eject cars from campuses - USA Today

Haha, absolutely brilliant! People like myself often wonder “what can we do to really encourage people to accept bikes into their lives?”. Well here’s a smart ad that hopefully does just that.

Here is the translation:

Lady: Would you like some tea?
Man: Yes, that would be lovely, thanks.
Telltale noises from the other side of the wall.
Lady [muttering under her breath]: You should rather be biking, too, Rezso.

This comes way of one of my favorite blogs, Copenhagenize

The Economist magazine has written a print article taking notice to the rise in bicycling’s popularity as fuel prices have hit their record highs. The article also makes mention of recent altercations; one at Critical Mass in NYC and one in Portland.

“After years of federal and local spending on bike routes and other amenities, most cities are ready to handle more cyclists. But many motorists simply don’t see their two-wheeled brethren or, when they do, find them aggravating. Managing more cyclists is going to take more than new bike paths or fresh stripes on the roads. It looks as though there is a need, on both sides, for a revolution in manners.“

To the point, we may be seeing an increase in the desirabilityof riding a bike for transportation but we still have not overcome the problems of motorist interaction.

Read the article here. The Economist - Bicycles, Bumpy Roads

If you’re been reading my blog lately you’ve seen that I’ve been pretty excited about these high gas prices but I understand not all share my odd enthusiasm. So if perhaps you don’t, I really encourage you to give this list of 10 things you can like about $4 gas a read. All the points are spot on and you really can learn to love our new higher gas prices.

Read the article here

2008 is certainly looking like a promising year for bikes many thanks to $4 gallon gasoline. This whole experience really goes to show that how we operate as a society has been driven by the premise of cheap oil, cheap cheap oil. But once the cheap goes away, so does the use.

Arist: Jim Borgman

Not sure why this wasn’t thought of sooner, its rather simple and already proved useful in other situations. Makes it seemingly very easy for a motorist to spot oncoming bikes in the bike lane possibly preventing right hooks. And its no surprise who the trailblazer city was that first installed these, Amsterdam.

Read more via Bike Portland:

Sweeeet. Leave it to the Japanese to come up with this (of course). Tokyo’s Kasai rail station now has a robotic bike parking system. Japanese culture seems to really embrace the bicycle for transportation and because of it has the dubious problem of bikes littering the streetscape locked to all manner of objects. Being from the US, I’d more than welcome that kind of problem but it seems the problem is so out of hand there, solutions such as this robotic parking garage are necessary. Check out the robot parker in the video below:

Don’t want to hype this too much……but this is possibly the best cycling advocacy advert ever! Again this comes from the UK where they do advocacy adverts the right way

Wouldn’t it be great if your favorite “get there” mapping application, Google Maps of course, had the ability to route you without assuming you were taking a car to get there. How about public tranist, biking and walking?

Just found a site established in the hopes of seeing this happen and I full heartedly give my support

Check them out and sign the petition: http://googlemapsbikethere.org/