Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Bikes

May is National Bike Month!

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I’m taking a blogging vacation and a mini digital detox this week to hang out with family visiting from out of town. But in honor of National Bike Month, I’ll be celebrating bikes all week by rerunning some of my previous posts about bicycles and car-free living. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll see you next week!

Credit: Tammy Strobel

Bicycle Love (originally published May 5, 2009)

May is National Bike Month! Oh bikes, how I love thee. Let me count the reasons…..

10.  Bikes are quiet.

You’ll never get woken up at midnight, because your teenage neighbor’s revving his bike engine. And imagine if they replaced that freeway next to your house with a seven-lane bike path.

9.  You can cart groceries home on a bike.

Baskets are classy. Panniers are sophisticated. Cargo bikes are cool. And you can make your own hauling machine with a simple grocery cart.

8.  Bikes run on renewable resources – food, water, and human calories.

With the obesity rate hovering around 35%, quite a few of us have some calories to spare.

7.  Cycling tones your muscles, heart, and lungs.

The American Heart Association says all healthy adults ages 18 to 65 should get at least 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise five days a week. With a bike, you can probably get that on your commute to work.

6.  Bikes enable you to smile and wave at your neighbors.

Social isolation is growing in the U.S. Let’s get out of our cars and take a spin around our neighborhoods.

5.  Bikes are thrifty.

Check out Bike at Work’s calculator to see how much cash you can save by dumping your car.

4.  Bikes emit zero pollution.

Automobiles belch out 333 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, not to mention nitrogen oxide, sulpher oxide, toluene, benzene, formaldehyde, and more. All bikes emit is a little human sweat.

3.  Once you’ve learned how to ride a bike, you never forget.

What can I say … it’s like riding a bike.

2. Bikes are economical.

What’s the world’s most efficient mode of transportation? You guessed it – the bike. For energy burned per miles travelled, cycling is three to five times more efficient than walking. And it trounces running, driving a moped, taking a train, car-pooling, horseback riding, and swimming. (Sadly the least efficient mode of transport seems to be America’s favorite – driving a car with no passengers.)

And finally, the ultimate reason I love the bicycle…..

1. Bikes took down the bustle and the corset.

That’s right, ladies. The bicycle craze in the 1890s changed womens’ fashion forever. Women abandoned their confining corsets and adopted what was known as common-sense dressing.

In 1896, Susan B. Anthony said, “I think [the bicycle] has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

bicycling not buttons

Let’s celebrate our two-wheeled friends all month by taking them everywhere. Note that Bike-to-Work Week is May 17-21, and Bike–to-Work Day is Friday, May 21. Employers can find out how to participate here.

What are your top reasons for loving bikes?


Adults on Bikes

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Shareable.net published my article about three different bike cooperatives today. It starts:

Over a hundred years ago, H.G. Wells famously quipped, “When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.”

When Wells wrote his novel Cycles of Change in 1896, the world was in the throes of a bicycling craze. James Kemp Starley’s 1885 invention of the modern bicycle enabled the working classes to travel quickly and cheaply for the first time. Women who had been constricted in corsets, hoops, and petticoats were donning bloomers and discovering a newfound freedom of movement.

Today in the United States it can be harder to muster Wells’ optimism about the bicycle. Only one percent of urban trips in this country are made by bike, and only 0.55 percent of people commute to work on a bicycle.

And although Susan B. Anthony once credited the bicycle with doing “more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,” today the vast majority of American cyclists are white males. According to research by John Pucher, American men make three times more trips by bicycle than women. Plus, a 2008 NSGA Sports Performance Study found that while African Americans and Hispanics make up 12 and 15 percent of the U.S. population respectively, each group represents only about six percent of bicyclists.

Obviously there are some huge barriers to bicycling in the United States, especially for women and minorities.

Nevertheless I discovered ample reason for optimism about the future of American bicycling. In cities across the country, people are coming together to form bicycle cooperatives with the mission to make buying, building, and repairing bikes an affordable, accessible, and shareable experience. And many of them are reaching out to women and minorities.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Plan a Bicycle Trip

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Google Maps added a “bicycle” option! Now they’ll help you find the best route by car, public transit, on foot, or by bicycle. The bike function is still being tested, and Google is asking for users’ feedback to guarantee their routes are actually bicycle-safe.

I just tested it by asking for a map of the best bicycle route from my house to my friend’s house across town. I wouldn’t say it chose the absolute best route, as it sent me up a busy street when I know of a couple of safer, more enjoyable routes. But it was a much better route for biking than the way they recommend for cars. So it’s definitely an improvement.

Check it out!

And speaking of bikes, I can’t tell you how happy it makes me that my son is crazy about them. He runs and find his bike first thing in the morning, and he squeals “Vroom vroom” every time someone rides past on a bike. He’s also a big fan of wearing his helmet and riding in his bike trailer.

In this nice, peaceful stretch of time before he starts making everything into guns, I must also say, it’s thrilling to see how much he loves reading books, or “nanomes” as he calls them, and smelling flowers, or “floofs”.

And yes, he’s also big on making up his own words.