Things seem to be better for Bike Commuters

This morning, Jeff brought this to my attention.

The summary is:

The power that be has decided to tackle the great bugaboo in NYC cycling accessibility, which is secure parking for your ride.

I really do think that the more secure parking areas there are, the more bike commuters there will be. It's a simple correlation. I bet there are more people riding bikes in NYC parks for fun on a summers day than there are commuters on any day of the week. Take all their bikes and you'd have a beautiful sight like the one above, taken in Japan.

Of course, in Japan bicycles and parked bicycles are so ubiquitous that they're running out of parking spaces and have to come up with novel parking garages like this one:





I wasn't sure there would be enough parking for all the joyriders turned crusty commuters.

With that question in mind, I decided to examine the issue mathematically. Taking the great 2768591 square foot icon of New York, the Empire State Building, and dividing it by the requisite 7500 square feet of space per bike rack means that the Empire State Building would have to open 369 bike parking spaces on 34th street and 5th. Which would be wonderful, because my optometrist is around there.

The only fear I have is that we'd be concentrating our bikes in a sheltered space allowing bike thieves all the time in the world to steal my possessions. Maybe - hopefully - they'll require a security guard.

Now, the story was originally broken by the Post as is mentioned in the NY1 video. For the sake of journalistic integrity, I checked out the article and was shocked, SHOCKED, to discover the following comment from a fellow reader:

Metamorph wrote:
4 more years of this whiny lunatic? Real estate values are crashing, and this gasbag wants to impose ridiculous requirements like this on builders? Bloomberg is an out of touch busybody with an overbearing sense of "nobles oblige."

Well, I agree! It's about time that Bloomberg, ultra wealthy noble that he is, ought to oblige us with a place to park our no-cost transportation. 'Nobles Oblige' indeed, ya douchebag.

Well, regardless of the parking situation, I'll keep riding - until I can have this guy's commute.

Much love, and promising more posts, more frequently now that I'm unemployed.

-Harry

If the first rule of successful blogging is to write regularly then we suck big time.

But we DO NOT actually suck. No siree! Like some big old sperm whale, life sprang out of the cold blue waters and plum swallowed us up. Really!

To wit: I got married, bought a house, made a lot of waffles, launched a couple of web sites, pondered untold imponderables and did my meager best to help a few friends through some troubled times.

Lame excuses perhaps, but they sure did take up a lot of freakin time.

Fortunately, we still managed to ride our bikes...A LOT!

In fact, I even rode my bike to my wedding. And I rode it FROM the wedding, just-married decorations and all.


Please please please come on back soon. We are raring to post all sorts of awesome about the suddenly trendy sport that is biking about New York City. REALLY!

Another prescriptive rant, bitches!

Today is the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq.

I know that cyclists can be seen as self righteous about our riding. After all – and give yourselves a pat on the back here, we’re on the right team, eschewing the oil that drives this nation’s wars and all that. But the reality is that we still live within a culture that uses oil. We define ourselves in opposition but we are inextricably part of it as we define ourselves, by accident of birth. It’s the same shame that a Brandeis liberal feels about not being Black.

I say – screw it. Let’s just be nice. If all we did was say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ as we passed a pedestrian, maybe that pedestrian would decide that you don’t have to be a stark, raving mad nut to ride a bike. They’d realize that regular, decent and, yes, nice people ride their bikes to get to work because it’s fun. And as regular, decent and nice people ride their bikes to their regular, decent and nice jobs, we’d realize that, in fact, by riding our bikes, we’ve caused a revolution.

Now for that bong hit I was holding off on till I reached the end of this little hippy bullshit.

Also, if you belong to the NYPL or QPL, they are offering free downloadable movies. In the case of the unfortunantly named NYPL.org, they have streaming movies! I don't know about Brooklyn. Bg ups to the library. I'm off to enjoy 'Sherlock Holmes abd the Secret Weapon' Oh yeah, they also have an awesome image database of the best pictures ever.

Love,
Harry