Bicycle and weather conditions

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Among the different actors in the pavement, bikers are the most foresighted. Due to the fact of the extreme exposition of an usual bicycle to the environment, the impacts of raining, snowing and winding should be anticipated.

There are places like the Northern European and other countries in which riders are so used to somehow bad weather conditions that they ride without apparently any inconvenient. Interestingly enough, some bikers in sunnier countries wonder how they can do it. The answer is simple: they prepare themselves. If weather forecast predicts rain, they ride with a raincoat (or even an umbrella). Coat, globes and wool hat constitute the basic equipment in winter. It does not even bother themselves when snowing and here it is better to use drought wheels. Its amazing!

A different section is required for wind. Although there is a specific garment to deal with this element know as windbreak jacket, the impact on the biker can be both beneficial or harmful just depending on the wind direction. In the first case, wind blows to your back and hence it helps you riding. On the other hand, if it hits squarely your face, you must make extra effort to move from point A to point B. Under special circumstances like in a hurricane should you not ride your bicycle for safety reasons.

Some more bike safety tips

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The other day someone at my work had a small incident and we all began sharing safety tips when biking. Here are mine:

  • First of all, your security is the most important thing.
  • I use physically separated bikeways whenever possible.
  • Totally ignore sharrows that invite you to bike in areas where you can easily be doored.
  • When I bike on the road I always bike in the middle of the lane to force drivers who want to overtake to do it following the law and giving proper clearance.
  • I wear visible helmet, shirts, jackets, gloves, etc, and 2 front and 2 rear lights at night.
    Glasses help avoiding eye-insect collisions.
  • Totally disregard the 1% of drivers who honk the horn at you and appreciate the 99% who actually follow the law and behave in a humane way.
  • Don’t wear any headphones ever, do stop at red lights, make sure to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, and specially whenever you’re riding on the sidewalk. Basically, behave like a bicycle when you’re on a bikeway, like a car when you’re on the road, and like a pedestrian when you’re on the sidewalk.
  • Despite everything above, about once a year or two I have a close call with someone changing lanes while checking their phone or something similar, so I record my rides with a gopro pointing forward and another pointing backwards just in case I ever need them, plus people behave nicer when they realize they are being recorded.
  • Bonus point I got from my coworkers: if you usually bike on the road don’t use a bell and use a loud horn instead.

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Two people on a bike?

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The bike movement is unstoppable and several factors promote it. We have the concern about the environment, the health promotion, the personal economy, the interest in living better and longer, the need to learn new issues regarding bikes, the attitude to develop relationships or the desire to make a better world. The positive impacts of riding a bike are impressive, although some people oppose them. Special attention is put on the car industry which has been making everything to stop bikes, from aggressive advertisements in order to discredit these vehicles to brainwashing other people and showing cars like a status symbol. Nothing further from the truth. Negative impacts of cars overwhelm positive ones.

Moreover, some politicians bent on putting a spoke in bike’s wheel since they dictate laws in some cases against logic. Take for example the Spanish law. At the time I am writing this post, one can read some points in it which would have been alright in the past century. One of them is the prohibition of carrying more than two people on a bike given that the second person uses a seat. Spain can look a lot of examples of countries which permit riding bicycles with more than two people on them. If only politicians treasure how cyclists go in central and north Europe. This way they would realize the present law is cochista and more suitable of the past century. But let’s think about the benefits of implementing such a law. Nowadays, some Spanish parents drive their children by car until school to distances up to 3 km generating traffic problems like double parking and increasing pollution in the nearness of education centers. Allowing riding bikes by more than two people would make more parents use it and the reduction of the car use.

Gamification

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Gamification is the use of elements related to games into non-game contexts. It means making people feeling the positive impacts of playing games from video games to board games. A lot of companies have used this technique to attract the attention to the products and services they sell in the last years. They have looked for improving user engagement, increase organizational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing, employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use, usefulness of systems, physical exercise, traffic violations, voter apathy and more. Yet the world of bikes has been used it to improve its use through marketing strategies.

The public bicycle system Bicing from Barcelona, implemented it through an app to accumulate points by riding bikes, achieving challenges or checking the stations anchors. Riders won awards thanks to these points. The Move Us project was launched by the public bus company in Madrid and works similarly as Bicing except from the fact that it focuses not only on bikers, but also on people in general.

Strava Metro uses gamification to help bikers to establish a track when they need to, plan bike lines and analyze the city traffic.

Bike and genre

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Bicycles can be enjoyed by both, women and men. Nevertheless, the way both genres behave when riding use to be different. Studies say women tend to ride at lower speed without competing between them (at least at no professional level) and appreciate much more landscapes in routes, whereas men tend to be more competitive with more testosterone, ride at higher speed and do not put so much attention to sceneries.

At psychological level, women do not usually speak openly to men regarding common problems they face when biking. On the contrary, they feel more confident to talk about their issues to other women. Moreover, car drivers act differently in arguments with a bike ridden by a woman or a man. If a woman is biking and a dispute with a male car drive takes place, the car driver acts as a beast feeling he has the right to yield or insult the woman even if he is wrong and malicious in his reasoning (supposing he has one since sometimes he has nothing to clutch at straws). In contrast, if a man rides the bike, the male car driver does not show himself so aggressively as he innerly know he could loss in a fight. This animal behavior is another example of the patriarchal society we suffer.

Here I have exposed some reasons because women need women-gender spaces to share ideas and empower themselves. Feminism is a global movement which looks for women to have the same rights as men. Biking is just another field in which come out. As a result of it, changes have been producing. For example, the Iberian Congress was initially opened to both genres, but in the Zaragoza edition they decided to give a space only to women with the creation of the Cyclist Women Meeting. This meeting was repeated in the Valencia edition and it was agreed to differentiate it with an appropriate event by women to women. The Iberian Congress is not expected to count with the Cyclist Women Meeting anymore, which will be an independent event held in a different place and date.