Going a step further

 

Urban biking intends to make a better world for everybody. It promotes a way of living differently from the one in Western countries in the XX century: More bikes means less polluting vehicles on streets, less noise, better human physical health, better human psychological health, better environment, more surface for people, you name it.

Social movements like feminism and LGTBI+ share an equal ultimate point: Make a better world for everybody. Thus, it is not rare to cooperate between movements with similar, universal targets. If as Susan B. Anthony said (“I think [bicycling] has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world”), and there are of course LGTBI+ bikers, we as urban cyclists should support and even encourage them. Summing up allies to growth is key to advance.

Danish pavilion (Shanghai)

Though more than a decade has passed since the Shanghai World Expo, it is worthwhile remembering the Danish pavilion in relation to biking. The concept of hedonist sustainability was applied in this singular project to reach the conjunction of social, economic and environmental concepts.

The Danish pavilion consisted in a double ellipses in 3,000 squared meters. The inner one was dedicated to pedestrians and connected to many rooms in which exhibitions and conferences were done. The outer ellipsis was ridden by thousands because Bjarke Ingels, its designer, imagined that bikers must get the top of the pavilion, stop their bikes and walk through the inner ellipsis to access the activities within the building. And it worked.

Tour de Pharmacy

Tour de Pharmacy is a made-of-television mockumentary (a fake documentary) sports film directed by Jake Szymanski and written by Murray Miller. Additional characters are Nathan Fielder, Dolph Lungdren, Joe Buck, Julia Ormond, Maya Rudolph, Jeff Goldblum and Kevin Bacon. This 2017 film has a lot of humor and is starring Andy Samberg, Orlando Bloom, Freddie Highmore, Daveed Digs and John Cena. It makes a critic about doping in cyclist in just 38 minutes and it is hard not to laugh when watching it. This film shows a made-up Tour de France back in 1982 in which only five bikers participate due to the fact that all the other competitors have been disqualified as a result of doping. Lance Armstrong and Marco Pantani are represented in Tour de Pharmacy.

Seriously, this mockumentary was born as a way to denounce doping in a sport which had created more headlines by it rather than the pedaling itself. Doping cases in the Tour started in 1924 when Henri and Francis Pelissier admitted the use of cocaine, chloroform and many more illegal substances to face physical efforts better. However, doping in the Tour de France has continued in cases such as Bjarne Riis, Jan Ulrich, Alberto Contador (who lost one tour) or Floyd Landis (who also lost one tour).

A good bicycle parking

A good bicycle parking is one of the most important infrastructures to improve bike use. It is so upset looking for your bicycle and realizing that somebody has stolen it that bikers tend not to let it sleep on the street without proper padlocks. An improvement to traditional bicycle parking is a closed one as you can see in the picture bellow. In this case bikes are protected from thefts thanks to the strong, transparent, plastic cover which is accessed through a proper digit code on a console. This gadget is feed with the electricity that the solar panel provides. Other models allow users to access their bicycles by using a card with a chip. The fact of the plastic cover being transparent makes bike owners to check their bicycles without opening the bicycle parking, while bike thefts regret the existence of this infrastructure.