Bike lines between city and village

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As it comes to urban cycling, we think about it in terms of moving within the same city most of the time. In addition, we use bikes to visit our beloved park, forest or beach by pedaling few kilometers outside the place we live in. However, cycling is also a good idea in order to transport yourself to a close city or village in which you work, study or go shopping. By the way, remember using panniers if you guess you can carry weight in your trip.

It is believed that such closed cities means one big city attracts people from commuter towns due to the fact of job opportunities, amusement, culture, hospitals, does it ring a bell? And yes, this is true in a lot of cases, but not in every one. A biker can move in opposite direction from city A to village B just because she wants to visit her relatives, enjoy excellent cuisine or discover a bike route that a friend of hers told her yesterday. Thus, the flow of cyclist goes in both ways. Such a reason explains why having and maintaining bike lines which connect two cities, two villages and one city with one village is so important.

To my mind, the aforementioned bike lines should fulfill some points:

  • They should have a physical separation between them and the other lines, even between them and pedestrian lines

  • They should run parallel to the car lines when possible since these were built in order to optimize move time

  • If the previous point can not be meet, bike lines should run through natural, maybe previously abandoned lines with a second life

  • They should avoid unnecessary curves and elevation changes

  • They should be marked with signals and banners so that nobody gets lost

Koffeecleta

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Bicycles can be used in a myriad of ways often as a surprising idea. One of them is what the Koffeecleta represents: a new local business. The entrepreneur Yoli Díaz made it up when pedaling on her loved Female Dragon bike through South Asia (Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam). Traveling to exotic places makes it easy to see the world through different eyes, not to mention that Yoli is an extrovert, imaginative and passionate woman. She lives in Aínsa, Aragon, the Spanish Pyrenees.

On the way back, she contacted a friend in order to develop the idea of a food truck. However, something did not fit in with. Finally, her friend abandoned the concept and Yoli came across what she was looking for: a bicycle. Thus, she created the Koffeecleta by combining both concepts: bicycle plus selling food (coffee in this case). Before deciding the final model, she studied hard several options like the Foodicleta, on which she would sell octopus balls, or the Conocleta, to sell ice creams.

The Koffeecleta not only offers coffee, but also handmade chocolates and, in Summer, flavored water. As it comes to its characteristics, the Koffeecleta attracts people attention thanks to its shape and colors. A highlighted front wooden crate, the canopy stands out by its design and colors combination, the rear trunk and so on make the Koffeecleta special. It weights 170 kg net load and counts on a small fridge, a kitchen, a power strip and a battery, all the accessories to prepare good coffee.

An important issue is that she changes the route on a day-to-day basis. This way monotony is avoided, although she has made regular customers. Moreover, she escapes sameness while chatting with customers in the seven minutes it takes to prepare the coffee. And no matter if it is raining, snowing or a windy day, she starts the route with a big smile on her face.

From coast to coast

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The dream of crossing the USA in bicycle from coast to coast is being built at the time I write this post. Just imagine a bike-friendly, secure, seamless path that connects the Indian and the Atlantic oceans. This is going to be possible soon thanks to The Great American Rail-Trail. This project aims for developing what was once a myriad of railroads which were abandoned long time ago. As I talked about  green paths, such infrastructures can be taken advantage of in order to give them a second life, and when it occurs with a clear intention of improving human lives it becomes even better off.

The Great American Rail-Trail plans traversing 12 states: Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland, plus the district of Columbia. Its vision continues with allowing bikers and pedestrians going down for more than 3,700 miles. Moreover, imagine the economic opportunities and benefits for the local communities along the route between Washington and Washington. More than 145 existing trails hosting route and more than 90 trail gaps are being reviving, the numbers make you dizzy. The Great American Rail-Trail can constitute a landmark in the cycle tourism  and bike development in the USA.

Who is behind The Great American Rail-Trail project? The NGO Rail-to-Trail Conservancy (RTC) started it back in 1986. It has set itself the task of developing a large net of paths along the country. The RTC has gathered public and private financial donations to carry it forward and giving the opportunity to 50 million people every year to enjoy their bicycles and forests, mountains, vast plains or local communities. Plain and gentle slope combine in the impressive paths so that whoever biker can pedal on them.

Paradoxically, the pandemic has made people use more and more bicycles and in turn The Great American Rail-Trail project has been increasingly supported since people is manifestly in promoting bike use.

Stolen childhood

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The New York photographer Lewis Hine took photos from child messengers at the beginning of the XX century. He showed how widespread child labor was at that time as well as some other habits like child smoking that we consider disturbing today. These children were used as couriers to deliver goods from newspapers to medicines from small and big businesses. They worked as small ants coming and going which preoccupied the most progressive sectors in the American society.

In 1908 the National Committee for Child Labor hired the photographer and sociologist Lewis Hine in order to document the labor conditions of such small people. He traveled the USA for nine years with a humble equip consisting in a 13 x 8 cm camera, an unstable tripod and a magnesium flash. Such effort was the start of considering Hine a pioneer of social photography.

What Hine found was worse than he had imagined. Children suffered from leonine working conditions, starting working at the age of nine, they often pedaled until dawn and slept under a bridge. The luckiest ones combine school with long hours of pedaling. Some times they entered the worse neighborhoods in which arms dealers, drug addicts and pimps operated. Some others worked for unscrupulously bosses. Hine wrote a sentence in their photos which summarized what was behind every picture. This fact allowed people understanding the real feeling they passed on them.

The situations that Lewis Hine shot were extensible to both large cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Houston or New York to small localities, and no matter how big a firm was i.e. giants like Western Union as well as small courier business were involved.

After taking the photos, Hine presented them to the Committee which used them as arguments in order to reach the dreaming Keatings-Owen Law in 1916. This established restrictions as it comes to legal working age and work shifts. However the Supreme Court repealed it, the spirit of the original Law influenced the New Deal which did not allow for child labor in the 1930’s.

The history of Hine continued by being part of the Red Cross in the First World War which allowed him traveling in Europe and taking lots of photos. Nevertheless, he ended his days in the same poverty that had been denounced in his pictures. He left 5,000 photos which were donated to the Photo League by his son. The Photo League was dismantled in 1951 and the Museum of Modern Art of New York considered them as irrelevant and refused them even though the enormous social value they had. So discouraging. Finally, they were donated to the International Museum of Photography George Eastman House in Rochester where you can see some of them.