Recently, a post on the West Seattle Blog described how a cyclist encountered a truck coming towards him in his lane with no intention of stopping, and he was forced to toss his bike and himself over a jersey barrier to avoid being hit. There was some skepticism in the comments, but I knew the exact spot – it’s on my bike commute.

At that particular stretch of road, trucks turning into the port are just a few hundred yards from their destination, when sometimes they get caught in a line of train-stopped traffic that is trying to turn the other way. And they are often overcome by the temptation to cut out of the line, into the oncoming traffic lane, to get to the port entrance, instead of waiting for the train to pass and traffic to move. The problem is, aside from that being illegal, it’s also VERY dangerous – that oncoming traffic lane is hemmed in by Jersey barriers and is the main bike thoroughfare from downtown to West Seattle.

This WILL result in a bad accident if it doesn’t change. So I made a short video that explains the situation visually.

Continuing on the theme of traffic dangers… as you may know, Seattle cyclist Mike Wang was killed this summer while riding in a bike lane on Seattle’s busiest bike commute route on Dexter.  Mike was riding his bike home to his family and was struck by a driver who was turning left onto Thomas, and who fled the scene.  The search is still on for the driver of the vehicle.

On Tuesday, October 18th at the Palace Ballroom, friends, coworkers, community members, and fellow cyclists will come together to remember Mike Wang and the photographic and artistic legacy that he leaves behind.  The evening will feature delicious food from Tom Douglas Restaurants, beverages from local wineries and breweries, and a silent auction of pieces from Mike’s exceptional work as a photographer. Guest speakers include WA State Representative Eric Pettigrew and PATH Vice President, Jackie Sherris.  Radio’s Cathy Sorbo will emcee the evening.  The event will serve as a place to remember, donate, and keep important conversations going by celebrating the work and life of a truly gifted artist.

More information can be found here:  http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/204102

I plan to attend and I hope to see you there.

Today is Seattle’s bike to work day, and it’s a gorgeous sunny Friday. Seemed like the perfect day to try weaving my tallbike through downtown traffic and up the hills of my 9 mile commute!

A yarn bombed parking meter in Vancouver, from yarnbombing.com.

Cross posted at The Tangled Nest too…

What is it about yarn bombing that’s so compelling? “Knit graffiti” — it brings a smile to my face just to think about it! Guerrilla crafters wrapping yarn creation around objects in the streetscape under the cover of darkness, adding a touch of whimsy and warmth to the built environment we all share.

Part of what I love is the the way, when describing this art form, you can’t avoid juxtaposing words with a Monty Pythonesque absurdity – guerrilla crafting, yarn bombing, knit graffiti, textile street art, yarn core.

Do these purling pirates cover their faces with black hand-knit bandanas as they skulk through the streets in the moonlight? Do they hatch their dastardly plots over Earl Grey tea drunk straight with no chaser? Is there a yarn core bar where embroiderers are tossed into the alley on their ear, and brawls erupt over the relative merits of alpaca and sheep wool? (I certainly hope so!)

Don't mess with yarn core.

Anyhow… when I read that a yarn bombing project had knit round a bike rack at the other end of our own West Seattle neighborhood, I dragged us of all up there to take a look. (Then Lyanda and I got to have a little debate about whether this would make a better Bikejuju or Tangled Nest blog post – the answer is both!).

West Seattle knitter Jaesee wrapped this bike rack as her first yarn bombing project, and started an appropriately tough-sounding blog to document it and tantalize us with the promise of more of these dangerous urban guerrilla yarn actions to come.

It’s a wonderful little burst of color and flowers in our gray Seattle spring, and as we walked over through the drizzle to look at it, another fellow was also circling the bike rack and touching it. Yarn bombing is definitely a tactile art form; we also could not resist touching this installation, feeling its texture and figuring out how it had been made and attached.

Lyanda, Claire and I have all been pondering guerrilla art projects this spring, and we’re even more inspired now. Our projects probably won’t be knit graffiti, but I, for one, definitely aspire to find an art form with an equally hardcore-yet-whimsical name. Suggestions welcome.

PS: Higher-resolutions versions of these photos available for free use on Flickr.

This is a truly horrific story from Brazil, made all the more terrible by the fact that is is so well documented and you can watch it unfold close-up, and by the fact that I have not been able to find any English-language coverage of it at all. Given the footage below, which shows a close-up of the accident attempted murder as it occurs, it is extremely fortunate that no cyclists or bystanders were killed.

The video below is very very hard to watch- it shows a peaceful, pleasant-looking dusk ride, with a hundred or more cyclists of all kinds (fewer than half of whom are wearing helmets) riding through a medium sized street in Porto Alegre. Young and old riding together on a warm evening: a friendly looking woman on a trike with her dog on the back, a guy in Red Bull kit, people on cruisers, some hipsters. It looks like a really fun, friendly evening ride.

And then, at 1:00 into the video, a black car literally mows through the cyclists from behind, carrying several cyclists on the hood and windshield, and the rest of the video is of shocked cyclists, twisted bikes, the injured being comforted on the pavement, and finally ambulances, and twisted bikes being carried away. Click below to play the video.

Added: Here is a better video that edits together footage from multiple cameras to provide a more complete narrative, with English subtitles, including witness testimony and outrage at the end.

The Porto Alegre Critical Mass blog has links to more videos and reflections on the incident.

The local news site Zero Hour says police have identified the driver and are waiting for him to turn himself in voluntarily (apparently as of yesterday he is not at his home address). It also have video of the accident from a different perspective, shot from high above out an apartment window. The same video appears in this TV news report.

In the words of our friend Cabelo, who alerted me to this story, “Much light and energy to all who lived through this horrible experience.”

Ok, it’s a relatively simple idea but I fell for it. I have to admit that I think this is pretty cool. “Precious” is a Specialized bike that has been outfitted with sensors that feed to a live web interface. The website shows the grade the bike is climbing or descending, the cardinal direction the bike is heading, and more. (Check the site during the day; during the night the bike, and the sensors, are still.)

In addition, in a tally reminiscent of scientist Michael Fay’s Megtransect expedition across the Congo basin, the website is tallying roadkills, honking cars, flat tires, and other vital cycling statistics in real time. And building on the temperature, humidity, grade, and map data, Precious has also been programmed to tweet various witty and relevant remarks as @yesiamprecious. (The bike currently has twice as many Twitter followers as its rider – that’s gotta smart!). I thought immediately of HAL, Wired drew a parallel to Knight Rider. You get the idea.

No Direction Home

The bike is being ridden by a woman named Janeen McCrae or “the noodleator” as a fundraiser for the Livestrong foundation, and she is also tweeting/blogging the trip at a website called No Direction Known. She had a rough day today, climbing hills in Kentucky, and I have mad respect for her, cycling solo across the country for a good cause. Her blog entries are honest, funny, and well written (though I do wish her RSS feed contained photos).

The sensor-laden bike aspect of this project is somewhat reminiscent of the Yahoo Purple Pedals bikes, which were loaded with GPS and Flickr-connected cameras, and lent to various riders as a Yahoo promotion. (Tech details on the Yahoo bikes) While those bikes had many interesting adventures, the one I remember best is the creative rider who took his, in the pre-election period, on a very carefully planned ride around Manhattan, so that the “dot every sixty seconds” automatic Yahoo map application would spell out “Obama.”

Precious was built by the interactive firm BreakfastNY, and thinking of the Yahoo project begs the question why Precious does not integrate any kind of camera. I guess some task has to be left to the rider in addition to sweating up the hills in the heat.  In any case, the country she is currently rolling through is beautiful and challenging, and her efforts deserve our support. She’s only trying to raise one dollar per mile, or $4262, which to be honest seems like a pretty low goal for a solo cross country ride, and it must be feeling especially low as those miles drag on during this section of the ride, climbing hills in the Kentucky heat. So I pitched in for a couple dozen miles tomorrow, and you should to.

Ride strong, Janeen! Say hello when you reach Seattle!

I’ve been feeling like I should post some kind of comment on the giant underwater BP oil-zit that our crazy auto-centric culture has recently popped, to the tune of 47 million gallons of crude and counting.

But really, what else is there to say? Then I found this (via Ecovelo):

Our blog-friend Cabelo, whose amazing art Bikejuju has featured before, undertook a very creative street improvement project with his friends over the last few days.

Using old X-rays they cut stencils reading “Share The Road” in Portuguese (they are in São Paulo, Brazil). Then they stenciled onto old records, making very real-looking street signs in red and white.

“The idea is to encourage sharing between bicycles and motor vehicles,” Cabelo wrote to me, and to “introduce bicycles into the imagination of the city.” They hung the signs high on lampposts around the city, just like official signs.

Cabelo has written before about his frustration with the traffic, the cars, and the pace of change in São Paulo. I love the enthusiasm, positivity, and creativity of this project.

And for all you Seattlites bemoaning the spring rains, Cabelo has a limited edition print of one of my favorite of his illustrations for sale on his blog. Enjoy.

This blog often has a global focus, but all cycling is local. Today is Bike to Work Day. I’m riding to work this morning, doing my best to avoid the danger spots covered in a front page article on the Seattle Times today, and thinking a lot about the commuter from my neighborhood who went under a car during yesterday’s commute. The Bike Fairy has her work cut out for her!

Meanwhile, a circle of Seattle bike bloggers has been getting together for monthly beers this spring and forming an informal little network, and many of them have great posts up today:

• Car Free Days posts about the Bike Fairy and biking to school.
• Totcycle is running a Kidical Mass (“fun, safe, and courteous”) kids/family ride from Ballard today (Friday) at 5:45. meet at the Bell.
• Seattle Likes Bikes has a wrap up of the unfortunately poorly attended Ride of Silence. Cascade Bicycle Club doesn’t consider this event part of Bike Month, but it should.
• Paul at Bike Intelligencer takes a look at the cyclists at F5 Networks, the main corporate sponsor of Bike to Work Day.
• Kent “Mountain Turtle” Peterson has an FAQ on his car-free life.
• Byron and the Bike Hugger crew are in Portland AND Seattle (leave it to them to raise the ante!).
• Biking Bis checked in at the Bellevue Commuter Station.

Ride safe, ride strong, and may the wind be at your back!

(Bikejuju’s main Bike to Work week post is here).

This Mothers Day weekend, a salute to the mothers who tote their kids around town in and on various kinds of mutant, youngster-friendly cycles. And a special tip of the hat to those of you who blog about it, inspiring others through your words, images, example.

Anne from Car Free Days.

The boys from the Hands Full blog.

Jasper in his Most Civilized Conveyance.

There are lots of wonderful blogs being kept by cycling families – I’ll start with this fine list from Julian’s blog TotCycle, which is a great resource. Give these blogs a click, and feel free to post any I missed in the comments.

• A Most Civilized Conveyance
• Bakfiets.co.uk
• CafeMama
• Car Free Days
• Car Free with Kids
• Carfree Families Column
• Full Hands
• Four on a Quarter
• Humans 4,Cars 0
• JP Bike Research
• Roanoke Carfree With Kids
• Kids. Bikes. Dads.
• Tacoma Bike Ranch
• The Bakfiets Cargobike
• The Wheel American Family
• Totally Smitten Mama
• The Family Adventure Project
• Towsey French

But mostly, Mothers Day gives me an excuse to feature this excellent video recently posted by Seattle bike-blogging compatriots Car Free Days and borrowed shamelessly for your viewing pleasure. They write:

Now that our kids are getting older, they don’t always ride on the back of the Xtracycles. They are both confident road riders and are quite capable of riding their own bikes. But, sometimes they take a ride on the Snapdeck. Usually because it’s night or we’re traveling farther than they think they can ride or our destination requires pedaling on busy roads or they just feel like chilling on the back of the bike with a book.

When they choose to be a Snapdeck passenger, I usually tell them to wear running shoes. Cause even the most seasoned Snapdeck rider needs to get off, stretch his/her legs and take a little run from time to time:

Happy Mothers Day!

There are many great organizations that take discarded bicycles in good shape, and ship them to Africa. In poor communities, a bicycle can literally have a transformative impact on someone’s life – shortening the many miles walked to school, or work, or to a clinic for regular appointment, helping transport goods to market, or becoming an essential tool for a rural health care worker visiting patients.

Recently in Mozambique I came across a sight that shouted “bikes made a lot of lives easier today.” At a rural Catholic hospital, the waiting area was literally over-run with parked bicycles. I counted more than 100.

In fact, the bikes carried little tags on the handlebars just like you would get for your SUV in the hospital parking lot in America. Except there was no car parking lot at this hospital – none of the patients, and only a handful of the clinicians, can afford a car.

So this weekend, we were happy to be able to help the Village Bicycle Project load their 100th container of bicycles, bound from Seattle for Africa. VBP has been shipping bikes for more than 10 years, and has shipped over 45,000 bicycles. And they have a good system on the ground in Ghana and other (primarily West African) countries to ensure that these bicycles have real impact. They run classes, train mechanics, and emphasize getting girls on bicycles.

The bicycles are staged outside the container and then loaded by size like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

After 100 containers, experienced VBP volunteers have it down to a science how to pack the maximum number of bicycles into a container.

Village Bicycle Project is one of the many organizations on the list of international bike nonprofits I am developing. I still welcome your contributions to that list – I have gotten a lot of email about it, and will post an update soon. But meanwhile, check out VBP’s new website, and join me in congratulating VBP on reaching the 100 container milestone. That’s a lot of bikes!

PS: My wife Lyanda also posted her perspective on this on her blog The Tangled Nest. It’s a family blogging affair!