Author Archives: jm

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)

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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

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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

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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.

Bicycles and movies

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Movies are one form of culture which can show bicycles under a story. Similarly as I wrote about songs and bikes here, here you have a list about movies and such inspirational vehicles:

6 day bike rider (1934, comedy)
Bicycle thieves (1948, drama)
Cinq tulipe rouges (Five red tulips, 1949, murder mystery)
Skid kids (1953, drama)
Onna keirin-o (1956)
For a yellow jersey (1965, short)
A Sunday in hell (1977, documentary)
Breaking away (1979, comedy-drama)
BMX bandits (1983, adventure)
American flyers (1985, drama)
Rad (1986)
Quicksilver (1986)
The cyclist (1987, drama)
Jo jeeta wohi sikandar (1992. drama)
Il grande Fausto (1995)
El amateur (1999)
Road to Paris (1991, documentary)
Cyclomania (2001)
Le Vélo de Gishlain Lambert (2001, comedy)
Nasu: Summer in Andalusia (2003, anime)
Triplets of Beleville (2003, animated)
Cycling chronicles: Landscape the boy saw (2004)
Hell on wheels (2005, documentary)
Overcoming (2005, documentary)
The flying scotsman (2006, drama)
Island Etude (2006, drama)
Klunkerz: A film about mountain bikes (2006)
Clorophilla (2006)
The cycling genius is coming (2008)
Bicycle dreams (2009, documentary)
The birth of big air (2010, documentary)
Ride the divide (2010, documentary)
The last kilometer (2012, documentary)
Premium rush (2012, action film)
Pantani: The accidental death of a cyclist (2013, documentary)
The Armstrong lie (2013, documentary)
La grande boucle (2013, comedy)
Bicycle (2014, documentary)
Slaying the badger (2014, documentary)
Yowamushi Pedal Re:RIDE (2014, animated)
To the fore (2015, drama)
Yowamushi Pedal Re:ROAD (2015, animated)
Yowamushi Pedal Re: The movie (2015, animated)
The program (2015, drama)
Le ride (2016, documentary)
Blood road (2017, documentary)
Tour de pharmacy (2017, comedy)
The climb (2019, comedy)
LANCE (2020, documentary)
Tour de France: Unchained (2022, documentary)

Spezi

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Bicycles for up to six people, machines for persons with special needs, tricycles, quadricycle, all kind of bike inventions and more… You can find these in your imagination and enjoy them in the Spezi (Internationale Spezialradmesse, in Germany) for a weekend in which you can see and try all of them. Thousand of people and one hundred or more firms show the bicycles diversity.

This event possesses a legendary reputation thanks to its avant-garde. Indeed, some solutions presented as a niche a decade ago have reached to the society nowadays. For instance, special bikes had an enthusiastic base and today more a more people see their potential in the daily life. Spezi goes a further step and gets off the beaten track, commercial, to jut out in curiosities and the dominating headlines.

Moreover, there are concerts, performances on unicycles and an area to camp and a closed zone to sleep if you prefer.

Cargo bikes history

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Cargo bikes are a type of bicycles with special frame, larger than a normal bike, to carry persons, pets and objects. We see them more this year than the previous one. They are folk from year to year. What is its history?

They appeared before the actual bicycles in England back in 1877. It was when James Stanley conceived a tricycle with a platform in order to transport people and goods. The very one of the cargo bike was a machine less attractive with an iron frame, without gears and a small surface to carry loads. However, the improvement in wheels, the larger platform and improvement techniques and even technologies have made them to be more suitable to farmers, craftspeople, postpeople, and riders among others. Improvement continued and cargo bikes were looked from mundane machines to the present beautiful, good-looking ones.

Sara Dykman

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Every year, the Monarch Butterfly, Danaus Plexippus, goes from the USA to Mexico in a massive migration of about 5,000 kilometers. Millions of this butterfly start it with the unique help of their instinct. Sara Dykman accompanied them by pedaling for nine months in which she learned a lot about this insect and came across interesting people. As a result, she wrote the book Bicycling with Butterflies which is plenty of data and rigor as well as humor and lyricism.

In reality, the Monarch Butterfly spends Winter in the Oyamel forests in Michoacan, Mexico and flies to the USA and Canada. When the cold of Autumn arrives, they go back to Mexico. Four generations are needed to complete the migration and lay their eggs on the milkweed plant. Thus, the butterflies which return to Mexico are the great-granddaughter of the ones which initiated the migration.

Sara studied the specie and discovered that this butterfly travels about one hundred kilometers a day. This figure is the preferred one to ride in a day for Sara. She learned a lot about people and butterflies since she claims that we are connected to nature and the force of unity: A butterfly weights 0.5 grams, but if millions perch on a branch, they can break it.

Ruyi bridge

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If you were born in Western countries, you probably identify it as a massive treble clef, whereas if you are a Chinese, you will see it a special, well-known sign immediately. As time goes by, bridges designs have evolved into a more eye-attracting ones. If these bridges are bike and pedestrian friendly, they are better. This is the case of the Ruyi bridge.

This steel and reinforced concrete bridge is located in Chengdu, China, and was approved back in 2016 as a part of the High Technology Zone Principal Landscape Improvement project. It connects two concurred neighbors: Tianfu and the Dayuan Central Park. Their designers inspired in the panpipes, a traditional Chinese music instrument. It is 331 meters long and between 2.36 and 9.23 meters wide. It counts with two spiral staircase for pedestrians and two two ramps allow bikers to access it.

Bicycles and songs

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Bicycles are much more than mere machines. People have developed culture around them and this time I show some of the songs dedicated or related to them: