Redesigning America Hottest City Before It Melts
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America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)
Openbike
Most of us enjoyed putting together toys pieces when we were young or joined machine parts when adults. Now, imagine you could make the same with bicycles provided you do not work in a production line. Would not it be marvelous? Well, you can do it thanks to the Openbike project.
Raquel Ares and Iñaki Albistur are the founders of Arquimaña (Basque Country, Spain), an architecture study with digital manufacturing workshop since 2010. The idea under Arquimaña is simple and powerful: To create original bicycles from wood, plastic or aluminum, and by using common tools that you can find in a digital manufacturing workshop such as 3D impression or CNC cutting. Besides, they opt to free design, so whoever wants to contribute is welcomed.
Knowledge is the inner source of the Openbike project. Thus, what you need to do is go to the webpage project, select the REV bike model you want, download information and e-handbooks, and start creating your new bicycle. Arquimaña also encourages to modify the REV models so that more original vehicles are created and share with the Openbike project. Hence, the community increases month after month. If you access the webpage project, you will see all the REV models are built in wood. This way your bike will be more environmentally friendly.
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Women and bikes
Women represents more than half of human population, still their percentage in total bikers is less than half. Why is that?
It is clear that lack of bike infrastructures, mainly bike lines and their width, affects this behavior. Additional improvement on streets are also needed such as better lighting or perhaps excessive speed of actors which share common space. But, among all what makes it difficult for women is society. Yes, society because they suffer machismo, verbal aggression and even sexual harassment. If I ride my bicycle, nobody says me “You go on sidewalk!”, and I feel strong enough to recriminate a male car driver if he makes a dangerous maneuver which endangers my life. Moreover, lack of opportunities to learn how to ride a bike in the past influences it today. Besides, sadly who dedicates more time in tasks such as taking care of people, buying in the supermarket and housework are women which let them less free time for themselves in comparison with men.
As it comes to human behavior, what I see would increase the percentage of women on bikes is women empowering. So women, please, please, please do not mind to idiots, defend your space, ride your bikes in the middle of a car line because bicycles are traffic.
Secure cities and egalitarian societies will boom bike women.
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The bike footprint
Protecting the environment is urgent and challenging for human beings as numerous international administrations have been demonstrating, although there are still some dumb who denied it. Some firms are taken it seriously by doing specific actions, changing processes, looking for green providers, etc., while some others practice the greenwashing in order to try their customers believe they are green. What is important is not words or advertising, what really matters is deeds.
If we take into account the whole lifecycle of a bike, that way of transport contaminates even if we consider a traditional bicycle (ebikes pollute more). Think in the raw materials it needs, the industrial processes, logistics and so on. However, some companies are taking steps to fight against climate change. Trek Bicycle is implementing actions to diminish their footprint. Firstly, they hire a consultant firm to know its carbon footprint at worldwide level: 300,000 tonnes of CO2 yearly. They discovered that pedaling 692 km in bike instead of in car compensates the carbon footprint of that bicycle. Secondly, once knowing these figures they cudgeled their brains and determined the 10 commandment of sustainability:
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Get bigger the use of bicycles
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Increase shared bicycles
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Ban plastic in packaging
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Build and protect new environmentally friendly paths
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Create production factories with zero residues
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Augment the use of alternative, green materials
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Reduce the business trips
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Boom the use of renewable energies
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Group deliveries to stores
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Diminish the use of airplane
From a firm point of view, I would personally add additional points like use green materials like wood, or recycled ones. Finally, public organizations and governments should strain to create and improve bike infrastructures.