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Bicycle recyclers empower riders
Matthew Shaer, Christian Science Monitor
Programs in New York and elsewhere train young mechanics and provide ‘beater’ bikes.
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A year ago, Natalie Feliciano couldn’t tell the difference between a derailleur and a bottom bracket. A bike was a thing, made up of other shiny things, all of which churned together in some strange, magical concert. Sometimes she’d walk the streets of her East Village neighborhood and see rusty frames jammed into trash cans. “I’d think, you know, what a waste,” she grimaces. “All that garbage for someone else to clean up. But I never knew how much went into a bike.”

These days, her outlook is considerably more refined. On a warm fall afternoon here, standing in the cluttered back room of Recycle-a-Bicycle’s Manhattan store, Ms. Feliciano absentmindedly runs a greasy chain through her fingers and holds forth expertly on all things two-wheeled. She talks about the sudden passion in New York for fixed-gear bikes – once popular only among reckless, bombastic couriers – and her own stable of rides, which includes a bicycle she repaired on her own time. “I like knowing I can help my friends with their bikes. I like to know that I can be there,” she says. “And I like knowing how they work. How everything fits together.”

The nuts-and-bolts approach is something Recycle-a-Bicycle has always done particularly well. The organization was founded in 1999 with a straightforward mandate: Repair abused, remaindered, broken, or worn bikes and funnel them back to consumers.
(8 October 2008)

Bailout gives tax break to bicycle commuters
Rachel Gordon, San Francisco Chronicle
he $700 billion bailout bill intended to stop the tailspin of the nation's financial sector did something else: It includes federal tax benefits for people who commute by bike.

Starting in January, workers who use two-wheelers as their primary transportation mode to get to and from work will be eligible for a $20-a-month, tax-free reimbursement from their employers for bicycle-related expenses. In return, employers will be able to deduct the expense from their federal taxes.

... Bike advocates have been trying for seven years to get such a provision passed in Washington, but came up short until Congress rushed through the Wall Street bailout package last week and lawmakers squeezed in pet projects. The bicycle benefit was championed by members of the Oregon delegation.

Backers estimate that the federal tax rolls may lose out on about $1 million a year due to the new employer write-off, according to the advocacy group League of American Bicyclists.

Willy Dommen, 49, regularly rides his bike from his San Anselmo home to his job as a management technology consultant in San Francisco's Financial District. He said the $20-a-month perk for cyclists won't amount to much in term of covering actual expenses. But, he said, it will help raise awareness of bicycling, "and that recognition is great."
(8 October 2008)
HTML at the original does not display correctly on my browser (Firefox), although the article is still readable. -BA

How Powerful Is Your Workout?
Linda Baker, New York Times
THE four stationary bikes look almost like any others, except that they are fitted with an arm crank and are hooked up to a generator. As riders pedal and turn the lever, the movement creates a current that flows to a battery pack. They generate an average of 200 watts, enough to run the stereo, a 37-inch L.C.D. television and a laptop for for as long as the bikes are being pedaled at this new gym in Portland, Ore.

Adam Boesel, a personal trainer, wants his clients to burn calories, not fossil fuels. Last month he opened the Green Microgym, one of a new breed of fitness clubs that seek to harness the power of human exercise as a source of electricity.

... Of course, riding a real bike rather than driving a car saves much more energy than riding a stationary bike attached to a generator, said Clark Williams-Derry, research director for the Sightline Institute, an environmental research center in Seattle. Nonetheless, Mr. Williams-Derry said, the human power initiatives “show the kind of ingenuity that we’re capable of, and a comprehensive, smart climate policy would unleash lots of similar efforts.”
(24 September 2008)

Scooter-ful?
Alan Durning, Sightline
Buy one, Daddy!” That’s what my daughter Kathryn said after her recent ride behind Daily Score reader Jay Morrison on his all-electric scooter. Jay’s Vectrix captured her fifteen-year-old heart. Just seeing it roll up in front of the house sent her scurrying to her closet for her most Italian-looking scarf, which then fluttered in the breeze as she toured the neighborhood. She rhapsodized about being picked up from soccer practice in such style. (Apparently, being picked up on my tandem is déclassé.)

Car-less I remain, but as my kids’ peak soccer season (and peak Zip-car bills) overtake me, I’ve been thinking about motor scooters. Apparently, I’m not alone: motor scooters are selling like never before in the Northwest. In fact, last year and this year to date, two-wheeler sales (including both scooters and motorcycles) are outpacing sales of passenger cars even in auto-friendly Boise and surrounding Ada County, Idaho.

For short, in-city trips that don’t require traveling at high speeds—like, say, delivering someone to soccer practice four miles from home over city streets, a motor scooter seems like a useful addition to my quiver of personal urban transportation options: foot, bicycle, public transit, taxi, and Zipcar.

... Gasoline-powered motor scooters are old and familiar technology. They carry tens of millions of people in China and India, as they did in southern Europe in the post-war years. In developing countries, motor scooters cost as little as $300 apiece, which helps explain why an estimated one-third of the world’s motorized vehicles are two-wheelers.

Here in Cascadia, of course, motor scooters and motorcycles make up less 4 percent of motor vehicles (and a smaller share of miles driven). Still, their numbers appear to be rising quickly, as this figure shows. As a share of all vehicles, they are heading back into the range of their peak popularity—the 1970s.
(8 October 2008)