Keeping It Wheel

  This video of Danny MacAskill in Edinburgh, Scotland is like nothing I’ve ever seen. He takes freestyle biking to another level, trees, fences, railings, stairs, it’s insane. Definitely worth a watch.  

I was curious what the City of Oakland is doing to create more bike paths and found this information on the City of Oakland Public Works Agency Web site. They have a bunch of information about signs, trails and paths. They say that from 1999 to 2007 they installed more than 87 miles of bike lanes and in December 2007 approved the “Oakland Bicycle Master Plan” that will build 131 miles more. I also found their definitions of bike lanes,…

Yes, the elusive wheelie (is that the right word to describe wheelies? Probably not, but just go with me). A while back, a friend sent me a YouTube link to a video of a group of guys riding bikes with quick release front wheels — they’d get pedaling to top speed then do a wheelie letting the front wheel roll to the side.  They’d continue riding on what seemed like these makeshift unicycles for blocks until their speed petered out…

In honor of Manifesto Bicycles celebrating it’s official one-year birthday today, I’m posting these outtake photos from the article I wrote last month. Happy anniversary!

I was recently riding down Powell Street towards Emeryville and noticed a ghost bike on the corner of Vallejo Street. This is one of the first ghost bikes I’ve seen in Oakland. I did some research and found out it was for Matthew Sperry, a musician who was killed by a distracted driver while riding his bicycle to work on June 5, 2003. When Matthew was killed there was a public outpouring of grief. There were protests, memorial concerts and…

My friend Chris McNally is an illustrator who lives in San Francisco and loves riding, racing, fixing and collecting bikes. (It’s almost bordering on obsession.) Lately, he has been making these screen prints of vintage bicycles and bicycle parts. They are big, around 15″ x 20″, and really beautiful. You can check out more prints on his website and even buy them at Bicycle Odyssey in Sausalito. These are a few of my favorites:

Recently, I stopped by the Edible Schoolyard, a garden and kitchen classroom at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. Here, students learn how to garden and find out about where we get our daily food. As part of this project, they’ve built a wheat-grinder out of an exercise bicycle. Kids can get on and ride while grinding the wheat for their homemade pizza crust at the same time. Here are some photos I took:

As a follow-up on my “missing pieces” post with photos of bikes with stolen parts, I’m dedicating this post to poorly locked bikes. I can’t believe how many bikes I’ve seen that aren’t locked up well. The biggest offenders are people who lock just the wheel. The Missing Link Bicycle Co-op reports on their website (with clever statistics) that, “Unfortunately, the Bay Area is among the worst areas worldwide for bike theft — over 4 billion bikes are stolen every…