A Template for Tennessee

A survey in Washington, D.C. is asking their Federal employees to gauge their employers to see just how health-conscious and bike-friendly they are. I'm assuming they are planning on facilitating some great new incentives to excite their employees to get on commuting by bicycle! The survey includes questions like shower availabilty to what the streets look like on their routes.

Check out the full survey here.

Bicycle Film Festival at the Brooks Museum of Art!!!

I received an email this morning from Fix's mom informing me that the Brooks Museum of Art has posted the BFF dates and summary of the events on their website!

Here's the link-check it out and buy your tickets early!


http://www.brooksmuseum.com/events

CSX Rail Line Official Vote

From an email from Bob Schreiber:

The County Commission will formally vote to approve the purchase of the unused western portion of the CSX Line from Poplar/Walnut Grove to Farm Road at Shelby Park on Monday, Mar 30. The meeting will be in the County Administration Building Auditorium, 160 N. Main, beginning at 1:00
This is an historic first. If you can possibly make it, we would very much appreciate your coming to this meeting, to show the members of the County Commission just how much we would like this to happen. With your help, we would like to fill the auditorium ! Please come, and bring a guest.. and also, pass this on.
Thanks,
Bob Schreiber

The Embacher Collection

Seen at Tracko and elsewhere the Embacher Collection showcases some of the very finest and very unique bicycles ever made. However lacking the site may be in BMX (suddenly I was overwhelmed by memories of my mom taking me to a police auction and allowing me to bid on a bicycle. She told me I had a $25 limit so I started bidding on some bike that I vaguely remember being white but who really knows. The bidding went above my bank so like a good son I stopped bidding. After it sold she told me that it was okay to go a little higher. So I took my new freedom to the next bike I saw and actually won it for a mere $5. Only later would I find out that it had no brakes and was in dire need of a new rear wheel but all my joyous eyes saw was "awesome." It was a dark grey Schwinn Predator and after some time in the shop and several car washes later, I was the fastest kid in the cove. Thanks, mom. I love you.) I found that the bikes I was most enjoying are the steel racing bicycles and the city and touring oriented bicycles.





This is somehow not surprising to me as I've found that I more and more like riding my geared bike and hauling my trailer over riding my fixed gear, not to mention that I still haven't decided what to do with the GT GTB frame.

But this realization brings up a salient point: I started this blog to represent the fixed gear scene in Memphis and named it with the double entendre in mind. But if you review the posting that we've done you'll see that it's more about actually making Memphis more bicycle friendly. This is due in large part to the company I keep. Memphis (nor I) wouldn't be anywhere without the efforts of Anthony Siracusa. At times it seems like this man is single-handedly responsible for putting bicycles on the Memphis agenda and we all owe him a sincere debt of gratitude. If every cyclist in Memphis had a 100th of his devotion we'd be beyond Denver and lots of Left Coast cities in bicycling infrastructure. We wish him well as he travels the globe.

As people influence me, I influence others. Even if it was just putting my mom on a bike that she loved I like to think that I was partially responsible for her commuting to work. And my girlfriend Emily wouldn't even think about bicycles and cyclists on the road had it not been for me; now she's a contributor giving us her female (and wholly unique elsewise) perspective on fixing Memphis. Don't think I'm leaving out Josh Gorman who's guidance has helped bring you every alleycat or Kermit "Captain Planet" who showed almost every shop how to recycle tubes or the countless others who in their way try to fix Memphis.

So you can go drool over amazing bikes on the internet or if you're hardcore, put on your rain pants and go to work. Just remember that people are looking at you and thinking that you're doing something really good for everyone. You'll see this yourself as our community grows (which it is continuously) and we all fix Memphis.

Finally....Spain Pictures (Cort's boring title)

A lot of you guys know that Cort and I went to Spain last week. After we woke up from our "bench bed" in the Madrid airport we started taking some pictures.
Here are some of the bicycles that we saw when we walked to the market or the grocery or to H&M (3 times).
We stayed with our good friend Jenna and her boyfriend Brandon in their beachfront apartment that they rent while Jenna teaches English to gradeschoolers at a nearby school. All along the beach there is a small two lane street for motorized traffic. A pedestrian-only sidewalk runs parallel the entire length of the street with a bicycle-only path directly next to it. It was amazing. The cars actually slammed to a stop if pedestrians were crossing the crosswalks, which were located at every single block and intersection.
We took a train to Granada for Cort's birthday and had rabbit (still on the bone) and tried to befriend some very disinterested Arizonians.
But all in all we mostly laid on the beach in our dugout to block the intense wind. Cort tanned, I burned. It turned to tan though.
You can check out more pictures on my Flickr which will be updated with more pics slowly.

Bicycle-Sharing Program to Be First of Kind in U.S.

Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Bikes waiting for pickup at a self-service docking station in Paris, where the Vélib sharing program began last summer

By BERNIE BECKER

Published: April 27, 2008

WASHINGTON — Starting next month, people here will be able to rent a bicycle day and night with the swipe of a membership card.

A new public-private venture called SmartBike DC will make 120 bicycles available at 10 spots in central locations in the city. The automated program, which district officials say is the first of its kind in the nation, will operate in a similar fashion to car-sharing programs like Zipcar.

The district has teamed up with an advertiser, Clear Channel Outdoor, to put the bikes on the streets.

“There’s a lot of stress on our transit systems currently,” said Jim Sebastian, who manages bicycle and pedestrian programs for Washington’s Transportation Department. Offering another option, Mr. Sebastian said, “will help us reduce congestion and pollution,” as well as parking problems.

In the deal, Clear Channel will have exclusive advertising rights in the city’s bus shelters. The company has reached a similar deal with San Francisco. Chicago and Portland, Ore., are also considering proposals from advertisers.

For a $40 annual membership fee, SmartBike users can check out three-speed bicycles for three hours at a time. The program will not provide helmets but does encourage their use.

Similar programs have proved successful in Europe. The Vélib program in Paris and Bicing in Barcelona, Spain, both started around a year ago and already offer thousands of bicycles.

Mr. Sebastian, who started trying to bring bike-sharing to Washington even before its success in Paris and Barcelona, said he believed that the program could grow within a year and hoped that it would eventually offer 1,000 bicycles.

While automated bike-sharing programs are new to the United States, the idea of bike-sharing is hardly novel. Milan, Amsterdam and Portland have all had lower-tech free bike-sharing programs in the past, with Amsterdam’s dating to the 1960s.

But “studies showed that many bikes would get stolen in a day, or within a few weeks,” said Paul DeMaio, a Washington-area bike-sharing consultant. “In Amsterdam, they would often find them in the canals.”

Improved technology allows programs to better protect bicycles. In Washington, SmartBike subscribers who keep bicycles longer than the three-hour maximum will receive demerits and could eventually lose renting privileges. Bicycles gone for more than 48 hours will be deemed lost, with the last user charged a $200 replacement fee.

That technology comes with a price, which is one reason cities and advertisers started joining forces to offer bike-sharing. The European programs would cost cities about $4,500 per bike if sponsors did not step in, Mr. DeMaio said.

Cities realize “they literally have to spend no money on designing, marketing or maintaining” a bike-sharing program, said Martina Schmidt of Clear Channel Outdoor. Washington will keep the revenue generated by the program.

Bike-sharing has become a “public service subsidized by advertising,” said Bernard Parisot, the president and co-chief executive officer of JCDecaux North America, an outdoor advertiser that made a proposal to bring bike-sharing to Chicago.

But, Mr. Parisot added, if users had to pay all of the costs for bike-sharing, “they would probably just take a cab.”

The low cost could be one of the program’s major selling points.

At George Washington University in Foggy Bottom, one of the program’s 10 locations, students were unsure how often they would use SmartBike, but said its price made it worth a try.

“I’d probably use it more in the summer than winter,” said Dewey Archer, a senior. “But for $40? That’s cheaper than gas.”