#Cyclist Friendly and Auto-Free: Check out Sunday Streets San Francisco!

Discover auto-free, cyclist-friendly fun at:

http://www.sundaystreetssf.com

How to Choose the Best Bike and Gear for Your Ride!

Biking is a fun way to get outdoors, get some exercise, and get around town, if you do it safely. Part of doing it safely is choosing the right bike for the terrain you'll ride on, making sure you have the right gear for your ride, and learning some of the basic rules and lingo required for a safe ride. This graphic from Greatist will get you up to speed on all of it.

Aside from outlining some good reasons to get out and ride, the graphic does a great job of breaking down the general types and styles of bicycle available and what type of ride they're best suited for. If you're planning on riding on trails and unpaved paths, for example, it's probably not a good idea to grab a fixed gear or a road bike. Even if you are riding on the road all the time, you may consider avoiding drop-bar handlebars on your road bike, especially if you're a beginning rider.

The graphic goes on to outline some of the basic gear you'll need, like a helmet, a good lock, reflectors or lights, and how much you should expect to spend on your ride. There are some basic road safety tips in there too that are important to review (and to review the laws in your state or city), along with a little lingo to learn if you're really planning on getting into biking as a pastime. Scroll down to check out the full graphic, or hit the link below.

Read the Entire Article at Lifehacker

Swedes Develop Invisible Bike Helmet

Leave it to the Women: 2 Swedish Women Develop Invisible Bike Helmet

 

You know what kind of sucks about riding a bike? Other than all that pedaling? Bike helmets. Sure, they keep that overrated "brain" from getting splattered, but they take a lot of the open-air-joy out of things, and they're not comfortable. A pair of Swedish women have developed a remarkable solution: the invisible bike helmet.

Tired of strapping ugly, uncomfortable styrofoam-and-plastic turtle shells to their heads, the pair came up with a pretty revolutionary solution that does manage to give you full head protection without, remarkably, wearing anything on your head.

I'd like to just come out and tell you the secret of how their Hövding helmet works, but this video does such a nice job of building suspense I kind of don't want to ruin it. So I won't post any pictures showing the operation, and don't follow that link to their site if you don't want to spoil a minor surprise.

Once you see how it works it all makes sense, and is a very clever solution that draws from a number of technologies that are well-established and familiar.3

Read the rest at JaloPink.com

Check out the video!

Cool Gear Alert: Zackees Turn-Signal Gloves

Zackees LED turn-signal gloves are a geeky fusion of tech, fashion, and safety.

- Ricardo Bilton

The Zackees turn-signal gloves might be the greatest gift to cyclists since the helmet.
A unique fusion of fashion and tech, the gloves have their own arrow-shaped strings of LEDs, which cyclists can use to signal that they’re turning. They’re the sort of thing that screams “geek,” but if they keep the wearer safe, geekiness might not matter so much.
Zackees pitches the gloves slightly differently: You’ll need them for safety but wear them because they’re fashionable. That “utility + tech + fashion” combination is core to the Zackees, which were developed by a former Google engineer, a fashion designer, and a robotics specialist.

Click here to read the rest at VentureBeat

Happy Holidays! Co-Cycle Vacation, Anyone?

Co-cycle participants, courtesy of Co-cycle

Cooperative Tourism

Take a Co-cycle tour across the US while visiting and learning about cooperative working and living spaces. It's a fun, but rigorous touring schedule that's best for avid cyclists. The deadline to apply is April 8th. Or kick back and relax at Breitenbush, an affordable hot springs resort in Oregon run by a worker cooperative/intentional community that so co-op it hosts the Western Worker Cooperative Conference. While you're there, stop by Portland, Oregon to get a broad taste of sharing culture and visit local worker coops while biking around a model bike friendly town. Take a tour of the San Francisco Bay Area's beautiful coastline, hills and redwoods, and while you're there, see how many worker coops you can hit up using this map. For more participatory fun, stop by any one of the many collective bike kitchens in the Bay, and Noisebridge a famous hackerspace. If Europe is your thing, visit Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, the famous worker cooperative complex in Basque, Spain and learn how to create an autonomous cooperative economic region. See this video about Mondragon - what could be more inspiring!

Read the rest at Shareable.

 

Groningen: The World's Most Bike-friendly City

Groningen: The World's Most Bike-friendly City


Check out this Streetfilms video below to learn about the 10,000 bike parking spaces at the train station, as well as the other elements the city has put into place to create a fast, energy efficient, and low-cost transportation system with bikes at the center. Other cities would do well to learn from Groningen.

Read the rest at Shareable