The Public Bike System Company, PBSC, the company behind Bixi, has signed two new contracts – one with Minneapolis to supply 1000 Bixi bikes, and another with Melbourne for 610 Bixis.

Bixis are the self help rental bikes which are such a success, both in their hometown, Montreal, and now, it seems, elsewhere.

Indeed, TIME named the bike one of the world’s ten best inventions for 2008, and that was before the Bixi took Montreal by storm last northern summer.

Above, you see some happy Montreal riders, city councillors, I suspect, and below, in yellow green, is the Minneapolis Bixi, coming soon.

That Australia would get a bike share scheme in Melbourne, and that the bike would be the sit -up Bixis, has been known for some time.

But from Montreal and it’s Mayor Gerald Tremblay, come some interesting facts.

The 610 bikes on Melbourne streets will be dispensed from 52 stations which will offer 1000 docking bays, almost twice as many bays as bikes. I guess these extra bays are for expansion, and also to make it easier to find a slot to leave the Bixi when you are done with it.

According to the Montreal Mayor, the bikes are to be on Melb. streets by May this year. Yet a news release by Bicycle Victoria on Jan 13th 2010, put the release date as the middle of next year, 2011.

That’s Mystery number one.

What does seem sure is that the Bixi is becoming the bike of choice for these bike share schemes, and a fantastic earner one imagines for Quebec.

These guys from Rio Tinto/Alcan sure look happy now that they’ve sold 6000 Bixis to London, 2000 to Boston, and now have these Minneapolis and Melbourne sales in hand. Bixi is on a two wheel roll!

It’s sad, if we had developed a utility bike culture in Australia, maybe this success might have come to us, innovative as we are.

But we’ve had no eyes for bikes as transport for many years now. Australia has been obsessed with the racing side of cycling, with bikes as ultra light sports machines, everything the Bixi is not, as you see here.

The Bixi designers traveled the world, and in 18 months built from scratch a fourth generation system, robust and flexible.

Hitherto the Velibs of Paris, some 25,000 of them have held the spotlight, bikes which I still find more elegant than the Bixi.

But whereas the Velibs have been vandalized in huge numbers, the Bixis have not. Is this because the Bixis are stronger, more robust?

Like the Velibs, the Bixi is the classic sit-up bike with basket, enclosed chain, 7 enclosed gears. They sit you so high that you see better and can be seen better.

Bixis create a different dialogue with other traffic. They don’t evoke the road rage, now so commonly vented on the sports cyclist here.
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An inbuilt GPS system allows Bixi Central to track each bike and even lock the brakes if the renter is not returning it at the end of the paid for period. Whether this is true or not is uncertain, something Bixi may not want to advertise.

Canada’s CBC News quoted a student who worked on the bikes, as saying the bikes had GPS chips.

The dispensing stations are also very sophisticated in that they can be quickly set up anywhere with no need for excavations or cabling required for the Velibs. They are solar powered and all data transmission to PBSC is wireless.

Bixis are extremely user friendly. You either take out an annual membership for $78 and use a key to unlock a bike in which case the bike is free for you all day, or you rent it via a credit card which, with a swipe, unlocks the bike to you.

In this case, the first half hour is free and a modest charge builds incrementally after that, up to $5 of the day.

My understanding is that most of the million rentals Bixi did last summer season in Montreal (they took them off the streets during the winter ) were free rides, folks doing half hour dashes around the city.

When PBSC initially rolled out 3000 bikes, the thinking was that mainly tourists would use them, but so popular were they with the locals, that they soon added another 2000 bikes as the season progressed.

Locals took them at their name. Bixi is an abbreviation of bike-Taxi, and so Montrealers used them as personal taxis. What Montreal taxi drivers thought of this, I don’t know.

The Second mystery is really more of a question. Can these Bixis work in Melbourne where the situation will be utterly different?

In Melbourne, some way has to be found to dispense not just a bike, but the compulsory helmet as well .

As an expert explains in my film; Bike Share and helmets don’t Mix? no one has succeeded, as yet, in setting up bike share where there is compulsory helmets.

This is because there is no known way to dispense a sterilized and inspected helmet along with each bike, unless done by hand.

But having staff defeats the ease and economy of the Bixi system, and is way outside the what must be a fragile business model.

The Bike Victoria news release speaks of; innovative folding helmets and vending machines.

As I found out with my film, searching for solution, they are not thinking to recycle helmets as helmets. Helmets might be be broken down and made anew, but not passed from rider to rider.

This leads me to ask;
1. How may riders will be ready to buy a helmet, esp. for a short ride, if they are $15 , as was suggested to me as the target price

2. How accessible will the on-sale helmets be? Will there be a dispensing machine at each docking station, or will, as was also suggested to me, they’ll be sold through 7/11s and McDonalds?

3. If so, how far will one have to push the bike to get a helmet, and what does that do to the free half hour ride one wanted?

4. What will you do with the helmet when done? Is the rider, (bike riders tend to be Green,) going to like the idea of the energy needed to handle and re make the helmets ?

5. How will visitors from countries which do allow choice on helmets, the majority, going to react?

Nothing is forcing them to rent a bike. This helmet business, which may well seem silly to them, and could easily be the deciding factor against using a bike.

This will be especially true if visitors feel that our helmet laws, out of step with the rest of the world, are not cycle friendly, which, sad to say, is true since they lower cycle numbers.

Then, there is the question of the number of bikes on the streets. It may be that the 600 planned for Melbourne are a pilot project. But you can’t run a pilot project without a plane which flies.

Unless there are enough bikes for the scheme to work in a near optimum way, the scheme can’t prove itself.

One can imagine 600 bikes meeting tourist needs, folks with no urgent agendas to follow . Here’s my friend, James, who writes that great blog The Urban Country being a tourist on a Montreal Bixi last summer.

But the local user has different needs. Following the Taxi analogy, these users need bikes fast and reliably, to get to a meeting or a maybe lecture at Uni.

The Bixis have to be available in such numbers that one can find one almost all the time. In Montreal, the stations are almost always in line of sight.

Secondly, the renter needs to be able to get rid of the bike equally fast when he/she gets to his appointment or to class.

Imagine in Melbourne with only 50 docking stations, the dramas which might arise.

You’ve nabbed a bike for what you planned as a half hour ride to an urgent appointment, and now you cant get rid of it. There’s no docking station where you need to leave it, or they are all full.

What do you do? The bike have no independent lock. So, either you carry your own lock, locking it to some post till after class, later paying the extra rental, or you carry the bike into your meeting and also pay later.

That only has to happen once for you revert to more reliable transport like your own bike, taxi, or public transport.

The helmet, that’s another problem. If you do find Bixis readily available and convenient, then you might carry a helmet with you.

But if there are any doubts, you wont, and to experiment with the system, you are going to have to buy a helmet and lug it around afterwards

Just as nature abhors the vacuum, nature also abhors unnecessary complications, which is why I can’t see this scheme working with the hassle of the helmet.

Vancouver was supposed to have bike share in time for the Winter Olympics. No bike share has appeared and the word is that helmets, they also make them compulsory, were the problem.

Tel Aviv is ready to bite the Bullet, I’m told. They brought in compulsory helmets quite recently but now, with 1500 bikes ready for the streets, and no helmet solution, the Israelis are thinking of rescinding their new law.

Moreover, as more and more cities prove that you can run bike share schemes without a nasty increase in head injuries, our insistence that we are somehow dumber, our heads more fragile than anyone else, is going to seem more and more silly.

I’ve suggested a workable compromise to what promises to tie bike share in knots.

Namely that all sit-up bike riders be allowed to exercise choice as to wear helmets or not. the choice which they have almost everywhere else, one might add.

This frees schemes like Bixi, which are all sit-up, to take hold to expand and thrive, and at the same time it favors the sort of bike most likely to grow utility cycling in this country, the stately Sit-up

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The sit-up is a very different bike . Look at this Peugeot beauty. We see bikes everyday but few with the elegance, the grace, of this bike .

Is it not obvious that such bikes could be in another category as they arrange their riders in postures never seen on Australian bikes?
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Are you desperate to see a helmet on this rider? I think not.

Do not our streets deserve to be so adorned? and for the pedestrian, what would the impact be to meet such bicycle beauty at the traffic lights?

“I’d like to be doing that!” many would think, is my guess.

Surely this bike and rider from Copenhagen Cycle chic riding a Velorbis, I suspect, that’s a famous Danish Sit-up Bike, is more inviting to the non rider than our women cyclists below.

These riders, pushing hard in their lycra, are no doubt fit and happy, but speak from a world apart.

They don’t help us get the average young woman out of her Getz and onto a bike for those many short trips she makes

And the Hon. Tony Abbott, he sets a good example, but does not attract the non rider. Wouldn’t you agree Mr Abbott?

A helmet exemption for sit up riders could have far ranging effects, all good, I suggest. At the moment we have in Australia what amounts to a mono cycle culture. .

We are apparently third in the world in sports cycling, the mono culture, but in utility cycling, the orphan culture, we are near last.

Here’s the cover of Australian Cyclist, the dominant image the dominant message.

Our tiny utility bike world needs to be nurtured, as my suggestion would do, given special treatment to help it grow by favoring the Sit -Up

In this article in the Melb. Age Dr.Garry Glazebrook is reported as suggesting that those who ride on green-ways be exempted from helmet use.

But such bike paths are rare. Moreover, what do you do when you come to the end of a green-way and have to join the normal road system, pull out the helmet you’re thus forced to lug around? It would be a strange, on and off situation, I fear

With these suggestions to enhance utility cycling, the good thing is that it does not have to be; an either or when it comes to sit up and road bikes

As Dr. Ian Charlton explains in the second half of his video, he loves his racing bike for weekend rides, but come Monday morning, he’s doing his doctors rounds on a sit up.

Related to that, such a helmet compromise could seed the emergence of a powerful new lobby, pushing for bike-ways like the super path in Brisbane.

These have separated paths been proven time and again to be the best way to make people, feel safe on bikes. With Sit -ups, helmet free, a new lobby group can form, to push for such paths more urgently.

Bicycle Victoria and Bicycle NSW have been a doing a heroic job in promoting cycle paths of various sorts, but they need help from a new public on bikes, such as favoring sit-ups could bring

I suspect that we lag with bike-ways because the sports cyclists, the dominant breed, don’t particularly want or need separate paths, clogged as are, with slower riders.

They are happy riding the roads, as they do now, going as always for their PB’s, their personal bests.

But the sit-up rider dreams of little else than a sweet separation from heavy traffic

With new sit-up lobbyists at work, our Governments will no longer be able to shove the responsibility for safety onto the heads of the riders, as they’ve done till now.

True cycle safety is under the wheels not on the head.

The  scheme in Minneapolis and St Paul, the twin cities, is set up by a non profit organization with the great name of Nice Ride Minnesota and is the first large public bike scheme in the US.>

The driving force is Bill Dossett, Executive director of Nice Ride Minnesota.

We wish them luck as we do Melbourne too of course

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Thanks so much to that great blog Auckland Cycle Chic for bringing it to my rapt attention.

Thanks too, to TED talks, for recruiting this man to their forum and posting the video

What is James Howard Kunstler on about? Does he speak about bikes? see for yourself.

If you insist on some biographical info before being willing to click the arrow, try this.

“James Howard Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere, “Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work……….” (One adds, Australians and NewZealanders as well.)

Now for the Quirky! How about Bike lots in tubes?

Yes, the Japanese are quietly sinking tubes into their cityscapes which automatically store and retrieve hundreds of bikes.

I say, quietly, because the pile driving involved is cleverly shhhhed, apparently

Please note in passing, the type of bike being stored.

One might wonder whether, with a 17 second retrieval time , this sort of parking would work well when hundreds of cyclists all want to store or get back their bikes at the same time.

Now for the super quirky. A hill lift for cyclists. You’ll have to look closely to see how it works

Don’t forget to watch Jackie Fristacky’s film, Councillor on a Bike, right below. Also, check out Sydney Cyclist Forum for lots of interesting discussion threads. (link on side)

Indeed , I now have another council film in mind, thanks to the Forum . Keep you posted.

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Dear, Wade, I found an interesting little essay (see below) on a US blog called; Utility cycling.

Its called; Thoughts on Re-Imaging the bicycle.

It raises some of the questions I’ve been asking myself and you, and so I’m including it in this letter to you.

Before that, a note to the reader as to why I write to Wade Wallace .

What’s especially significant about Wade’s blog is that he has broken through to the Mainstream press.

His blog is now carried by our major newspaper chain, the Fairfax papers. Thus Cycling tips becomes the blog face of cycling to a much larger public.

A visit to Cycling tips will show its dominated by the sports aspect of cycling. Lycra is everywhere.

I wrote to Wade saying that his masthead also promises that he’s interested in bikes as transport, and that’s not the Lycra look.

Was he prepared to do stories of the sort that would appeal to those of us who just want a use a bike to get around, and in our regular clothes?

We’re not riding fast bikes, most of us. Just practical bikes, some of them sit-ups like they use all over Europe

Wade wrote back very candidly, and has given me permission to quote him.

Dear Mike, Thanks for taking the time to explain all this to me. I understand where you’re coming from and can appreciate your passion.

Wade.

We’ve exchanged a few more letters since. I understand his caution but what this means that one sort of bike culture, the sport and racing culture, is getting all the attention.

As long as this is true, I suspect we’ll never use bikes for transport to anything like the degree they do in Europe.

This means we”ll keep missing out on all the advantages they bring, unclogged cities, lower emissions, and better health for the average Australian.

I’m sure you know that we are now the most obese nation on earth. Did you also know we spend 58 billion a year, much of it public money, dealing with the consequences?

It’s very serious, Wade, this situation we are in, and the future we face as a consequence.

The humble bike can be part of the solution, and that has to be a fair topic on blogs representing cycling like yours.

Yours is the only one going into the MSM , isn’t it? .

Your readers are having a great time racing around in Lycra, and no one would deny them that. They are not obese. They are not a drain on the health budget, and they are having a great time.

But they shouldn’t be the only game, or even the main game, in town. Riders here should encouraged to look like these riders in Amsterdam as well.

It’s not just me, Melanie Meyers in the US, writing in the blog, Utility cycling, is saying similar things> Here’s Melanie.

Thoughts on Re-Imaging the Bicycle
Posted on 02. Nov, 2009 by Melanie Meyers

I have just been catching up on many of the posts recently about Mikael Colville-Andersen’s lecture tour through the United States.

The biggest issue that I see here is the bicycle itself. The bicycle is multi-functional and multi-faceted. This is good and bad. According to Colville-Andersen, for many cyclists in Copenhagen, the bicycle is like a vacuum cleaner.

It’s a tool, and not too many people get very excited about their vacuums. For others, the bicycle is a piece of sporting equipment, for yet others it is a symbol of resistance and counter-culture.

As always, I welcome your thoughts. By Melanie Meyers originally in Community building

Do visit the original post to see the interesting comments it provoked

I left my own comment. I suggested that re branding the utility bike can be done by upping the status of the Sit-up bike.

These stately machines, preferred all over Europe for just getting around, are not only safer and more comfortable, but they fly the flag we need.

The say; “This sort of cycling is different. This is for you, the no racer.”

I also pointed out that the most likely way for the stately bike, now seen as being very slow and low status, to gain respect, is the coming of Bike Share.

The Velibs in Paris, the Bixis in Montreal and soon, London.

These bikes are invariably sit-up, and as riders and, as non riders get used to them, they will change the image of the sit up bike.

David Hembrow explains their appeal

and Dr. Ian Charlton, who rides both sit-up bikes and racing bikes, suggest they compliment each other

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This is the story of the day I spent following ( on a bike) a very inspiring politician around the streets of Yarra city, which is part of Melbourne.

Jackie has been part of a push which has seen Yarra city climb to the highest rate of bike commuting of anywhere in Australia.

Jackie Fristacky’s story might look like just another movie on YouTube. But actually it’s a very special tool for change, at least potentially.

What you can do, if you like it, is to find out who is sympathetic to bikes as transport on your own local council, and then send that person this video.

If you get a response, follow it up. See if they’d like to be in contact with Jackie Fristacky and Yarra council to find out more.

We can grow bike use together in ways like this. It’s fun.

Just like it’s fun riding a bike as transport, so much fun it should be illegal.

These are not my councillors, not yours either, but they do look receptive, don’t they?

You might be surprised to find your timing is spot on when it comes to your council and bikes. The world is changing and the only way to know, is to pay a visit.

So, here’s the secret weapon, the Fristacky file.

Let me know how you go with Jackie’s story.

People might want to know more as to why Yarra city council is doing so well. Jackie Fristacky has sent myself and David Hembrow, some more detail.

She says; There are a range of reasons why Yarra has a high cycling mode share.

Cr Jackie M Fristacky
Councillor for Nicholls Ward, City of Yarra
jackie.fristacky@yarracity.vic.gov.au
Phone: 0412 597 794

And here’s a companion story, another busy professional who, not only uses a bike on the job but, like Jackie, has interesting ideas about how bikes can make our lives better.

This is Ian Charlton, The Doctor on a Bike. Seeing patients, Ian prefers to prescribe a bike than a pill.

Indeed, Ian believes that if we were to increase our exercise through cycling and walking, we could get off those lifestyle pills so many us now take.

He’s got me off. A year ago I was taking six pills. Now, I take one.

P.S The three men in suits are actually Montreal council people riding the new Bixi bikes around that city. Montreal is a case of city council making a huge difference in the cycling culture of a city.

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I’ve had this little film The Waltz of the Bikes in mind ever since I looked through the one tape that Violeta sent me of a sunny day’s shooting on the streets of Amsterdam.

I’d asked her to just watch bikes, the variety of riders, the flow and curve of them. But nothing prepared me for the ballet she sent me on the tiny tape.

I knew that these were the perfect images to prompt you to see yourself on such bikes, but how to do them justice?

Since then, about two months ago, I’ve been nibbling at the footage, using a few shots here and there, mustering my courage to do justice to the whole feast. The best use so far was probably in;Talking to David Hembrow

Usually, I rely on a strong story telling voice to pull you into my short offerings, but this time I knew it had to be music, and music which would make the pictures dance.

Then, The Blue Danube came to me, and I began playing the images in my head to the music but cutting nothing, fearing it would not work as my imagining said it must.

Also, I was fearing it would not build, but just be more of the same, round and round like a wheel.

Then finally, yesterday, wedged between Xmas and new year, the sky pouring unseasonable rain on us, I began The Waltz of the Bikes. Cutting, showing it to Katya and cutting some more.

Try this Vimeo version first. The YouTube upload (below) is stopping as starting.

The Waltz of the Bikes from mike rubbo on Vimeo.

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Violeta Brana-Lafourcade has not seen her material so shaped as yet, she is off with her family on a boat, but I am happy. Indeed, I look at the waltz again and again.

It has always fascinated me how disparate shots can hint at stories in the lives of people I’ll never meet, who may never know they were filmed.

The women chatting, two pairs, two conversations, glimpsed and gone.

The two guys with guitars, one like a gun turret on a pocket battleship, the other, an unwieldy parcel.

The couple dinking, he riding and she on the back in her turquoise skirt.

But then she parks the bike, clearly hers. The shot continues beyond what you see, as they unlock a shop, maybe it was theirs.

There’s the mum who gives into buying an ice-cream for her blonded pillion rider, her son for sure.

Long legs texting who?.

The men in power clothes, one cresting, and the tiny white dog who zips past, used to riding in the basket.

The grumpy look of the pink shirted man is good too, for surely all is not fine just because the sun is shining in the city of canals.

Towards the end had to come the father and his moppet. She’s in her baby shades, waiting as he secures the cargo bike, the family SUV.

Behind, if you look closely, two men eye a poster of another man, a naked torso.

The last flurry of the music, ( two minutes of the waltz are cut out under the jingle of a bell) just had to go with the flurry of the hurrying woman’s summer dress.

Then the way for the power glide of a rather imposing personage in white, down the long leafy canal.

If any of these riders see this, thank you, and if you contact me, there’s DVD for you.

Meanwhile, the message for Australia is this; let’s at least admit to ourselves that this is how riding in a city, even our city, could be.

It could leisurely too, the Dutch are no less happy no less prosperous for taking their travel slowly.

And it could be, without the danger gear that more and more we wear, the helmets and the day-glo vests, confessing we are in hostile territory. Why should it be here and not there?

If we slowed our traffic, if we impressed on motorists that if they hit something smaller than themselves, they are to blame (that’s the Dutch rule) and if we ride regally like this, seeing and been seen, then this waltz could be us as well.

But then, we’d have to celebrate that we do want this and not always and only the cultish adversarial side of cycling, as is now the case, the glorying in the fight.

(“Share the road, Damn you!” reads a T shirt in Canada infected with the same virus)

(sharethedamnroad.com)

Racing, speed, the high performance bikes which cost a fortune, the Tour De Francing, all of that is fun, challenging and noble in it’s own way.

But it’s no longer the whole story. Ad it should not take all the oxygen to leave this other possibility, this simpler more join-able biking stifled, breathless, marginal.

When, Australian Cyclist recently wrote about Copenhagen as Pedal Paradise, which is very true, they primarily interviewed Mikael Colville-Andersen

He’s the writer of the famous blogs, Copenhagenize.com and Copenhagen cycle chic.

(Ezra Shaw)

You’ve perhaps met Mikael here, for Violeta filmed him too, (The Guy from Cycle Chic and; Talking to Mikael).

Robin Barton of Australian Cyclist was right to pick Mikael to talk to, but it was not so fine to reduce his famous photos of beauty on the bike to almost thumbnails.

All the beauty of the those famous photos in Copenhangen Cycle chic was lost, and moreover, you’d have to look very closely to see no one was wearing helmets.

(Australian Cyclist, Jan. Feb. 2010)

Now these are the sort of photos for which Copenhagen Cycle Chic is famous. (see more in;The Guy from cycle chic)

May we not see them?

There is something going on here, something a bit awkward.

How about we get over our helmet modesty, as if to show rider fully un-helmeted was to show them nude.

I have been reading Australian Cyclist for only a year but I have yet to see a photo of a gloriously un-helmed rider. Might it might put ideas in our heads? Is that the worry?

It’s always pics like this. Now I’m sure these ladies love their lids, but how about not shying away from the rest of the world?

(Australian cyclist)

Whilst helmets might have seemed like a good idea here at the time, virtually no one has followed our lead overseas, in making them compulsory for adults, and and some of those places which have, are now in second thoughts.. (See Israel below ) for adults,

People like Milkael have very strong opinions as to how counter productive helmets are.

It is not right to make him the core of an article in Australian Cyclist and avoid his views , passing over the dramatic lack of helmets there with this offhand remark: “with cyclists feeling so safe on the streets, so safe in fact that most don’t wear helmets…”

The truth to report to that is that Mikael is very disappointed and frustrated that official bodies in Denmark have been using a fear campaign to provoke helmet use in a country where before there was none, and that that fear campaign is working somewhat, to the detriment of cycling. So he feels.

(German helmet promotion)

For as is proven again and again, when you push fear to sell helmets, you do sell helmets, but you also convince many people to stop riding.

As Mikael ends the second video he did for me, (Talking to Mikael) he said;

It’s no coincidence that since Australian put it’s helmet laws into effect ….

…they have actually become the world’s fattest country, a higher percentage of obese people than even America has.

So, you can either promote helmets and kill off cycling, or promote cycling and reap the health benefits, and extend the lives of your citizens. You have the choice but you can’t do both. “

Dr. Ian Charlton said the same thing in…. Doctor on a bike

The Australian Cyclist can disagree with that polarity, but it should report what the man, the most respected blogger on cycling in the world, believes.

As for Israel. They brought in compulsory helmets for adult cyclists just a a year ago.

Now, they are having second thoughts. Why?

(photo borrowed from Copenhangenize.com)

It’s nothing to do with the fact that helmets actually offer very little protection, and in some circumstances, are actually dangerous in that they can result in brain damage through twisting shock.

No, it’s for other unexpected, reasons which might just provoke a rethink here as well.

The big news, the sensation in urban biking is how bike share schemes like the Velibs in Paris and the Bixis in Montreal are sweeping the world.

Cities, their citizens, and their visitors, love the the easy access bikes scattered all over the city, bikes which you don’t have to own or store, but just use and leave.

(My friend, James Schwartz on a Bixi)

The success of Bike Share is massive , despite vandalism….

….as it benefits each host city in terms of less traffic , less greenhouse gasses and the upward tourist dollar. becomes more and more irresistable.

But Tel Aviv quickly realized that that the 2000 bikes slated for that city, can’t be deployed because of their new helmet law.

They’d made themselves a catch 22, since there is no way to dispense a tested, sanitized helmet on the street, along with the bike.

Here is what Mikael has just reported on his blog, Copenhagenize.com, reporting Israeli sources.

The bill, sponsored by MK Sheli Yehimovich (Labor) repeals part of the Helmet Law which was passed last year.

Moreover, the law is unenforceable and the police have said they do not plan to even attempt to enforce it,” she added.

Mikael ends. “The bill hasn’t passed just yet. There are three votes in the Knesset to come. Nevertheless there are signs that rationality is returning to our species.”

Over to us in Australia. We are aware of the problem as; Bike Share and helmets dont mix? discovered.

But what will we do to enable the Waltz of the Bixis?

By the way did Waltz, leave unanswered questions in your mind? Well maybe Michael Bauch can answer them for you.

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There are some great bike blogs in this world, and it’s on these blogs that the best information is being exchanged, good stuff about how to grow urban cycling in our needy times.

Needy from a public health point of view, (we are a very fat nation, Australia) and needy from a climate change point of view. We are a spendthrift nation, too.

Our carbon footprint, each of us, is over 20 tons. We go everywhere in our cars, even the shortest trip has us reaching for the keys.

I say that our cars are not a life style choice as we suppose, but a lifesteal choice. Each unnecessary trip in a car steals an exercise opportunity

Many blogs contribute to this semi underground debate on urban biking Two have come to fascinate me.

Those of Mikael Colville-Andersen in Copenhagen, (copenhagninze.com) and that of David Hembrow in Holland. (A view from the cycle path)

David is actually a Brit. who moved to the Netherlands with his family for the better bike infrastructure, which he now enjoys and makes wicker bike baskets too.

If David has a fault, it’s his constant posting of the Dutch as such paragons of bike lane building, etc. It makes you just feel like giving up in a country like Australia.

I’ve told David this, but he can’t stop. How could you in a country with 29,000 kms. of cycle paths? It’s sickening.

Anyway, my wish is to interview all the great bike bloggers of the world. With no grants, that’s a probably an impossible dream.

In the meantime, I’ve been using a young videographer, Violeta Brana-Lafourcade, who’s super economical, to go places for me, and to film interviews, which she’s done with flair.

Two with Mikael have already been posted. The Guy from Cycle Chic and; Talking to Mikael.

Now, here’s what Violeta sent me on David Hembrow. I hope you like; Talking to David Henbrow. Do leave a comment. It’s mainly about Sit-up bikes which I see as the key to change here.

Thousand will say the type of bike does not matter much, but are they right? Here’s David.

After, making this film, I sent to it David Hembrow with a question which I would have liked Violeta to ask him if I’d thought of it before her visit.

David, Do you think that the sit-up bike sets up a different
“conversation” with other road users as compared with the bent over position favored here?

I think the sit-up is friendlier, that one can make eye contact more easily, and that it’s more apt to be friendly.

That is why I’m pushing hard for people here to think about this posture as not only as safer and more comfortable, but as sending a different message, creating a different climate on the roads. What do think?

David has just replied.

Mike, I think the sit up position is a little more friendly, but it’s only a
part of the difference between cycling in the Netherlands vs. elsewhere.

David.

> mike

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This is our second interview with Mikael Colville-Andersen.

I asked my friend, Violeta Brana Lafourcade, a videographer, to go to Copenhagen to see if she could get an interview with the famous Danish blogger. See his blog

Here’s Violeta

Photo by Julio Martínez Aniceto

Interestingly, Mikael got chided for his stylish glasses in the previous movie Violeta and I posted of him. The Guy from Cycle Chic.

This is the  first film with Mikael. The second, Talking with Mikael,  is below

Violeta seems to like equally fashionable specs. But she was only glimpsed in our first movie, no charming glasses visible, and so copped no heat.

I think they both look great, personally.

I was excoriated too in that review. My narration style was described as coming from to a sort of “leering guy”

You’ll note, there’s no narration in this movie. Just a co incidence, I assure you!

Mikael says things here which can be useful to those of us fighting battles for better urban cycling in far worse conditions than Copenhagen.

He offers telling arguments to use on politicians, and pays compliments to the humour with which the Dutch promote their superb cycling culture.

You’ll see a thanks to David Hembrow, whose blog, View from the Cycle path, is a wealth of information about what makes Dutch bike culture so effective and safe, Infrastructure, says David..

Here’s David on a bike path near Assen where he lives.This pic best sells the joys of sit-up cycling, the theme of this blog.

Mikael ends the film clip on a theme with which David would completely agree, the foolishness of heavy helmet promotion.

Helmet laws tend to allow disinterested Governments to stay away from where the real cycle safety is (abeit expensively) and that’s under the wheels, not on the head.

The sooner we can get our elected officials over their helmetoid fixatis, the better.

In Holland , there’s not a helmet in sight on anyone, even on kids, and yet the cycle injury rate is the lowest in the world.

Denmark by contrast, is creeping into helmet land, something Mikael feels is a mistake

Picking up on what Mikael says, We should offer a deal to our Australian politicians , a deal and a challenge.

You build the bike ways, preferably separated, and we’ll make sure they are ridden to achieve the savings Mikael identifies.

Moreover, we’ll reduce the 58 billion you’ll spend on obesity each year.

Lastly, the fiasco at Copenahagen shows that climate change can’t be achieved top down.

As James Schwartz aptly put it on his blog, Urban Country in a Canadian image, you have the captain of the hockey team making decisions, calling plays, but it’s the guys on the ice who make the game.

We are the guys on the ice. Climate change happens or doesn’t happen because of us.

There is no better way to engage a population in the drama, the crisis of climate change , than to start with their transport habits.

As we all know from our personal lives, so much transport is pure restlessness, that endless searching, foraging, which characterizes us humans.

Place the bike front and center, with pleasant paths to ride on, and it will be astonishing how that restlessness gets soaked up in moving around in the most pleasant and healthy way.

Once, in days past people strolled the boulevards to see and be seen, to take the air, to exercise, rain or shine. (painting by Gustave Caillebotte)

Then, came the car. For a while it was open and people still waved, had the wind in their faces, were part of the scene.

But cars became faster and more enclosed, the emphasis shifted to the machine and not the people.

Waving and greeting, the admiring pause, the word or two, all were gone.

Bring back the bike not just for utility, but as the vehicle of the promenade, and so much will be better. You’ll see!

……………………………..

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You seemed to like Doctor on a Bike, and so when I saw Councillor Jackie Fristacky in action at a Bike Futures Conference recently, I thought, there’s a lady worth a movie.

She rides a bike of course, her main way of getting around the City of Yarra where she used to be mayor, and is now councillor.

Here, I’m trying to keep up with her as she dashes cross -country to a meeting. I’m shooting, hand held, from my own bike whose front tyre is about to go flat.

Her’s is a municipality which has the highest bike usage by people going to work of any place in Australia, a pretty amazing 9%

This success in getting people to ride bikes as transport is not all due to Jackie of course, but she has been a driving force.

I hope you’ll find the way she’s promoting urban cycling, is, well, inspirational. I did.

And she’s doing so in a nation which is a tough nut to crack when it comes to getting people out of their cars and onto two wheels,

This trip to Melbourne had it’s awful moments. Much as I love taking this Countrylink train which ambles across the land at a lovely leisurely speed, I hate having to take my bike apart to get it on board with me, and this I had to do on the way back to Sydney, always have to do, in fact.

Yes, in what must be just about world’s worst practice, they make you disassemble your bike and box it. Here’s a trembling pic of my bike in pieces, trembling with fury, that is.

Every time I do it, there’s something wrong with the bike afterwards

I hope to have Jackie’s film cut this week.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you of my stop over in Kiama on the way home, where I attended a seminar put in by weight loss Guru, Jon Gabriel. You’ve probably seen the before…

and after pics.

I was not initially there for the message, but rather to see how Jon worked the crowd, thinking I could learn something useful for promoting cycling.

But I was impressed enough by the message and the faith of his audience in his methods, he was very gentle with a lot of very fat people, that I stayed to believe somewhat, and, as well, to came away with something to apply to my bike story.

Basically, Jon argues that we gain weight because our bodies are protecting us from famines we’ve constantly experienced as a species way back in our pre history.

This famine threat is even now remembered and acted upon by our animal brains whether appropriate or not.

Diets thus can never work because they merely convince that animal brain that a new famine has indeed arrived, and everything must be done, not only to keep the weight, but to add to it.

Your only hope is to get a message through to this Nervous Nellie animal brain of yours , that, Hey, it’s OK, brain! There’s no famine. Loosen and lighten up too!.

How do you communicate with this primitive part of yourself? By firmly visualizing how you want the animal brain to see you, and then let it then act accordingly to make that image come true.

Exercise, he stressed, is of course good, but atypically, he recommends having short sharp bursts of extreme effort, sprinkled into your routine.

Why? Because this replicates flight from predators, he argues, telling the animal brain that it’s time to flee, that it’s good to be able to run fast, ride fast, etc.

Flee or be eaten, animal brain!

So now, I’ll plan my leisurely bike rides interspersed with sprints, just like Jon himself as he recounted when he out-rode a dog, intent on tearing out his heel tendon.

He spoke further of visualization techniques. For that audience of course, it was in terms of seeing themselves as their once slender selves.

But I suddenly thought that maybe I could use that same idea to promote urban cycling.

Few Australians mentally picture themselves hopping on a bike to go to the shops.

Like a pop up ad on your computer screen, when you think shopping, a car image pops up, does it not? This car image blocks all other visualizations.

How to replace that pop-up car image with a bike? Firstly, a useful mantra. You car is not a lifestyle choice, but a lifesteal choice.

This is because every time you use that car when a bike would do, you steal an exercise opportunity from yourself.

You also put yourself on the path to those six pills a day in later years. (See the movie on this blog; Doctor on a bike)

The flipside manta is; A bike is a two wheeled gym

You can build your bike visualization using images from photographers who prove how beautiful and flattering cycling can be.

This is key since looking good is a core need for all of us. Photographers like Mikael Colville-Andersen and lars T. Danielsen give us a useful gift.

So, maybe we can get you to visualize yourself on one of those Danish bikes you see here. Try it!

Mikael Colville-Andersen has many more photos like this on his famous blog, Copenhagen Cycle Chic.

You are looking superb, as if the bike was just invented to show off a svelte human form like yours to the greatest advantage.

Visualize yourself as were your great grandmothers and grandfathers

Practice bike visualization. If you are not svelte yet, then you maybe prompted, in wanting to cycle, to make your own arrangements.

I’m not making a plug for the Gabriel method, by the way, and haven’t asked permission to use these photos of him.

Kiama , by the way, south of Sydney is a superb small town. Set on a beautiful bay and craggy coast, it has had the sense to keep some of it’s older stately buildings like the post office.

and this row of cottages.

On Manning street, I found a sculpture which strangely thrilled me. As I approached the curve of metal, (they call it the wave) I saw it was covered with etched writing, readable at some angles.

It turned out to be a tribute to a man called Joseph Weston (?), a town father, and journalist in the 19th century.

From what I could read, the text being a tribute by a friend of the period, Watson had been a very fine man, devoted to public service for his adopted town of Kiama. (He’d come from England on a sailing ship)

It made me think, this sculpture in it’s simplicity and beauty, of how important it is to celebrate people of modest honesty, unlike the crooks who so often slither into power these days and on whom so much ink is spilled.

The artist , I remember the name, Vivienne Lowe, so impressed I was

By the way, I must thank James Schwartz for all the help he’s given me, unstintingly, to change this blog over from one that no one could find to what it now is, delightfully findable.

James blogs from Toronto under the name, Urban Country, I have a link on the side.

I happened to use a photo sourced from Google photos of James on a Bike-Share bike, in Montreal, I think. James got in touch and since then, we’ve shared ideas and he’s helped me a lot. Here’s the photo I used by chance.

James has just told me that he was in Montreal with just the clothes of his back, pretty much. He’d canoed there from Toronto, which has to be around 600 kms. Phew!

http://www.theurbancountry.com/2009/07/toronto-to-montreal-kayak-adventure.html

Soon, he’ll go to Montreal again to get an assessment of how well the Bixi Bike share scheme did during it first summer.

And, oh yes, this parrot lives in Kiama. He’s not aware, it seems, that he’d look much better on a bike.

Your thoughts are much appreciated. Comments are easy to leave and can be incognito of course. Mike Rubbo

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Mikael is a film maker by background whose life, chance has turned in a different direction.

The uploading of a photo of his several years ago onto Flicker, a mysterious snap of a long skirted biker in high heels (she was waiting for the lights to change) catapulted him into a a new life.

The wild response prompted the creation of the blog, Copenhagen Cycle Chic, dedicated to the discovery that not only are bikes beautiful, but they present those who ride them as very beautiful as well.

Whilst the word, Chic, suggests fashion, even the fashion industry, catwalks, etc. Mikael’s observed cycle world is peopled by riders who wear their own clothes, who are not posing, who are unselfconscious in their gliding beauty.

There is no promotion of special cycling clothes here, indeed his cycle chic is all about avoiding the the usual uniforms of cycling, the tight lycra, the space age helmets.

It’s all, by contrast, about just getting on a bike, any old bike, and just riding it because that’s the the most sensible way to get from A to B. The attractiveness is the byproduct.

As my blog name suggests, I put special emphasis on the type of bike one rides, the sit-up bike and the posture it produces.

It’s no accident that almost every photo on Cycle chic has its rider proudly and serenely upright as if to say, I’m at the peak of this way of being, and I’ve nothing to do with cyclists hunched over their machines for speed.

Cycling is a broad church, everyone keeps reminding me. True enough, but here in Australia, the congregation has warped itself a certain way, and I find nothing wrong with suggesting some balance.

It so happens that this coincides with the bursting on the scene of a video from Britain which explores beauty on bikes. It’s release is imminent

We have only seen the trailer of Beauty and the Bike, as yet but everyone is rightly tantalized. Here it is.

I plan to explore this same theme here; why are young women not riding bikes?

On a smaller scale, but following the same idea, I hope to recruit a group of young women, probably around 15-16, who’ve never been interested in using bikes for transport, and find out why.

Then, having nailed down the reasons for their disinterest, we’ll get them on some stately sit-up bikes, dressed as they want to be seen, and we’ll have them riding around, savoring this new experience, and seeing if their attitudes change.

We will have a problem, Jill Charlton and I, which the British film makers did not have.

There, the girls could legally ride without helmets. Since helmets, we predict will turn out to be part of the problem, my daughter recently got on a bike after many years when I stopped the helmet nagging…..

….we’ll have to find a way to have our girls ride hair free as well.

Anticipating that problem, we’ll find an off road location which looks like normal streets, but to which the helmet law does not apply, probably the grounds of a University. There, we’ll do our test rides.

Anyone who’d like to help with this project, please contact this blog.

And if you think we’re thus promoting dangerous behavior, consider that the safest cycling takes place in those countries with the least helmet use, a paradox which it takes some time to delve, but which deserves debate it has yet to get.

See another film on this blog; Doctor on a Bike

See also the films on the charming Sue Abbott, who has chosen to confront the law.

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