(Image: YerkaProject.com)
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Unstealable bike? The Yerka doesn’t have a built-in lock; it is the lock.
Bone music: A British design student literally wants to turn your butt into a speaker system while you’re riding your bike. (Scroll down to “On your bike.”)
Carhead, explained: Angeleno Stephen Corwin’s struggled to understand his family’s reactions to his car-free lifestyle until he realized they didn’t think of it as a “life choice” but as “a stunt.” “To them, I was like David Blaine, performing a weird test of endurance. I was holding my breath in a car-free world, hoping to impress everyone around me before I could bear it no longer.”
Singletrack to school: The town council of Eagle, Colorado, is allowing parents to construct a “flow to school” mountain bike path alongside the existing sidewalks.
Advocacy recipe: The best bike advocacy is 75 percent engineering and 25 percent education/encouragement. That’s one of 14 tips from veteran advocate Randy Neufeld.
Negative space: We should definitely build our cities like this:
Brilliant visual illustration of how much #publicspace we have given to #cars pic.twitter.com/jAYWBuO4hn
— Complete Mobility (@DewanMKarim) November 14, 2014
License plate alternative: This is a hoax, right? Right?
Flawed riposte: Wired does a good job debunking common anti-bike cliches but itself falls into one of the worst … in the closing words of its headline.
Bike jobs: Europe’s cycling industry (including production, tourism, retail, infrastructure and services) now employs more people than mining.
Cellphone ban: As New York City considers a ban on phone use while biking, Brooklyn Spoke calls it a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
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Uber vs. its workers: Uber “employment” isn’t very voluntary when the company can unilaterally cut fares and wages on drivers who may have bought cars so they could start driving Uber.
Squid lock: Here’s an interesting bike lock concept:
Starry path: The glowing Dutch bike path technology that we’ve been tracking on the Monday Roundup for a year is on the ground, and the first use is a tribute to Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
Rocket bike: What do you get when you strap a silver-activated hydrogen peroxide canister to your bike? From zero to 207 mph in 4.8 seconds, for one.
Lycra helps: But how much? Switching from baggy to stretchy shorts might save you 70 seconds over 12.4 miles of mountain biking.
And your video of the week, a nicely shot and edited 10-minute profile of a 50-year-old Brooklyn pizza guy, has a twist near the end.
If you come across a noteworthy bicycle story, send it in via email, Tweet @bikeportland, or whatever else and we’ll consider adding it to next Monday’s roundup.
I normally think that projects that try to reinvent the (bicycle) wheel, so to speak, are silly; but I actually kind of like the idea behind the bike with the frame as the lock.
Somebody tell these yerka guys that plugging a bike as ‘unstealable’ and then locking it to a small tree isn’t the way to go 😀
There used to be some of those single track routes along the springwater near oaks park. Kids had build small jumps and seemed to enjoy riding it on their bmx bikes. Luckily Portland Parks saved the kids from wasting their time exercising outside and banned bikes from those short trail sections. Hopefully all the kids have learned to stay inside and play computer games instead of going outside.
Ahem…. there is a world of difference in riding a paved multi-use path and sitting inside playing video games. False equivalency.
There are trails that used to be open to cyclists along Oaks Bottom, as well as in between the Springwater and the river. It’s funny to me because the Springwater is packed with walkers and I never see people on the trails as I bike there. I guess no use is better than the absolute annihilation bikes would do to that fragile ecosystem.
I’m stoked to see the people of Golden using the low hanging fruit and getting kids outside riding bikes. It’s the first step to becoming lifelong cyclists in many forms.
The same thing can be said for Marshall park in SW. I used to cut through Marshall park to have a few minutes of car free riding but now there are the ubiquitous NO BIKES signs up. I would estimate that I would see a pedestrian on the trails in Marshall less than half the time I rode through.
And Mt. Tabor, as well. Though, no one pays any mind to those closures.
I’m curious about what the failure modes will be for this locking technique.
The video is worth a watch. At first I though the car-jack-prying-apart-u-lock trick would work but the video makes it look like there would be no easy pry points.
Furthermore, any damage to the locking elements is damage to the frame itself making the theft pointless in that there is nothing to sell but bent scrap metal.
But labeling anything “un-breakable”, “un-stealable” or “un-hackable” is simply an invitation to those of us that grew up idolizing Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.
[insert toothy malevolent grin here]
If the seatpost is like any other, I’m guessing a hacksaw would make pretty short work of it. With a little nip at the end, and you’d only lose is the locking functionality.
That’s just a guess without seeing it in detail. Call it what you will, but cynics rarely get it wrong in this field.
I’ve been enamored with a variation of the exploding dye packet used on expensive easy to pilfer goods: UV fluorescent dye with micro tag confetti/glitter.
But instead of putting these in a inert carrier fluid I’d use simulated skunk spray or capsaicin…. or maybe both if I’m feeling particularly vindictive that day.
Pepper spray is probably overkill though; people will empathetically help others in pain. Skunk reek is the sort of thing where people will refuse to help and if you know that this the smell of an anti-theft device triggered people ate going to be even less likely to help you.
Not a surprise that this particular bike helmet with license plate idea, comes from Australia. Like something opponents to helmet use would conceive of, design and present. The thing looks big, awkward and not very good looking. Better styling could vastly improve the appeal of a helmet designed well to display a license plate.
If the plate side of the helmet lights up, very bright, for visibility, that might be beneficial. The designer has thoughts of incorporating bluetooth into the helmet’s functionality. That’s forward thinking.
I agree that it looks like something helmet opponents might come up with. But, I’m also of the opinion that licensing and registration for cyclists is something favored, in the majority, by opponents of cycling.
“…But, I’m also of the opinion that licensing and registration for cyclists is something favored, in the majority, by opponents of cycling.” oliver
oliver…as your opinion, that’s fine. While licenses being required of people that ride, seems to be a rare thing, ideas about it get tossed around a lot. The reasoning some people have for supporting ideas to have people riding get a license to do so, I think goes far beyond and deeper than simply seeking to get people to stop riding.
In many traffic situations, riding a bike is serious business with serious potential for injury and harm by way of collisions, and not just with motor vehicles. The story from NSW very briefly touches on this and some other reasons for licensing.
All that aside, more people working on helmet designs having hi-tech capability, good functionality and good styling, could lead to some really great innovation.
What I hate most about this helmet is that the design could drastically increase the risk of rotational injuries.
I already wear a round helmet for this very reason.
The sidewalk singletracks idea is what I think of every time I ride the Columbia Slough Trail and Springwater. The anti-mountain-bike crowd would have you believe that riding a bike on a dirt trail is an environmental abomination, but that riding a bike on a paved trail is great for the environment. Is more pavement really the answer?
I want to see a Yreka bike/lock in use a regular speed with no edits outside a New Seasons. I not sure it would look so slick under those conditions.
Nice video, thanks for that!
Interesting that shortly after the 6:00 mark he “Yope! Yope!” yells at a pedestrian that had the solid green as he barrels through the red. Bad form, dude.
Yerka bike is an interesting idea. If the seatpost is aluminum and of a standard diameter, it should be easy to cut, making the bike easier to steal than a conventional bike locked with a cable. Then stick on a new seatpost and away you ride. If the seatpost is thick walled steel, it would be harder to cut but heavy. If the seatpost is a proprietary, non-standard diameter or shape, then it would be harder to replace. Also, there should be markings on the seatpost so that the rider can easily set the correct saddle height, since he’ll be doing so on every ride.
Aside from Pitlocks, what would keep the wheels safe in that system?
The bike might not be stealable, but the wheels sure are.
Saddle too.
A frame without wheels is not a bike. 😉
It probably explains the badly adjusted seat of the woman riding it in the video. There are certainly more components of a bike to be stolen than the frame too, as my last brooks saddle would attest. It’s a nice concept, but I don’t really see this catching on.
Wait, European bike industry bigger than European MINING?! Next pillar to fall beneath bicycling’s unstoppable roll: CANDLESTICKMAKERS! In Luxembourg, anyway.
I’d suggest that everybody here would give the bike-helmet-as-registration-idea the big FU (ForgetU) if it was implemented.
The first point of Stephen Corwin’s article reminds me of the ol’: “You’re going to walk there? Okay, but how are you going to GET THERE?!”
>>License plate alternative
ventilation seems a bit lacking ?
RE: Lycra vs. Baggy.
First of all . . . DUUHH.
Secondly, thank you Specialized for giving the dumbest XC racers a newfound edge. It’s not like this was a secret. Form fitting clothing is more efficient at any speed and until now XC riders with rocks in their heads had no clue whatsoever.
I’m not sure mountain biking needed to get it’s dumbest riders closer to the front.
Next up: Air Pressure! Studies show that tires roll faster when they have some!