1304 Bikes

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Our urgent needs right now are for adult road bikes, bike locks, and bike lights.
Here's what's up,
  • donate items to ACRe yard sale—friday night or sat am
    yard sale runs sat 7am - noon
  • anniversary bash continues after that with games, cookout, bike ride, and scavenger hunt
work on sunday as usual

Two bike related announcements follow:

1)

"Blue Urban Bike" (BUB) Program Launches with Festival

CHAPEL HILL August 19, 2006 The long-awaited bicycle loan collaborative for the area, the "Blue Bike Program," will start rolling at the Blue Bike Festival to be held at Weaver Street Realty and WCOM community radio across from Weaver Street Market in Carrboro on Sunday, August 27th from 8:30am-3:00pm. This event is a combination membership drive, fundraiser, and bike collection and painting day for the bikes that will be used in the program.

With the intention to raise community awareness of this new program, three area organizations are uniting to host the festival. Students United for Responsible Global Environment (SURGE), The ReCYCLEry, and The Legacy Center strongly encourage area residents to stop by to sign up for the program, donate new or used bikes, and learn about other ways to get involved in this unique effort. Local merchants will also have an opportunity to simultaneously serve the community and boost business traffic by volunteering to act as "hubs" for the program.

The Blue Bike Program has been likened to a library system for community transportation. Members can pick up or drop off blue bikes by presenting their membership card at a hub, and use the bikes for up to 24 hours for local travel. SURGE, the key sponsor of the program, plans to establish hubs in Carrboro, Chapel Hill, and the UNC campus. Alison Carpenter, Field Coordinator for SURGE notes, "This novel approach to getting around town is a powerful and positive combination of cleaner air, reduced traffic, new life for used bikes, and true sense of community."

About the sponsoring organizations

The Legacy Center is a coaching company offering a full curriculum of adult educational workshops and leadership programs that enable people to have extraordinary lives. For more information, go to www.TheLegacyCenter.com or call 919-678-6000.

SURGE, Students United for a Responsible Global Environment, is a nonviolent network led by students, but not limited to students, dedicated to achieving social, economic, political, and environmental justice through collective education and action. For more information, go to www.surgenetwork.org or call (919)960-6886.

Located in Carrboro, NC, the ReCYCLEry is a direct-service not-for-profit organization whose mission is to encourage the use of the bicycle as a mode of transportation and recreation. For more information, call (919) 932-1335 or email bike@recyclery.info.

2)

Triangle Pedicabs?

We really ought to make sure a pedicab business gets started downtown, if & when the regional-rail ever gets built. Could it be run as some kind of collective--i.e. non-profit that buys, stores, maintains and leases the pedicabs to drivers? The drivers would put down a deposit, take the pedicab out for a day, then return the cab and collect their deposit less the rental fee, keeping whatever fares and tips they collected.

The New York Times

August 20, 2006
Bedford-Stuyvesant

Wheels, Safety and Bulging Calves

By ALEX MINDLIN

In a shingled gazebo on a sun-drenched lawn in Bedford-Stuyvesant, six young people with oversized leg muscles chatted over mimosas and coffee. Their conversation touched on the finer points of driving a pedicab — a bike linked to a passenger cart.

Allen Weber, a blond, dreadlocked pedicabber, recounted a sighting of "the Sock Guy," a foot fetishist who approaches young male pedicabbers and buys their socks for $100.

"I'm probably too old for him," said Chris West, who is 31. "He likes young, buff, clean-cut guys."

Others talked about the latest models of pedicab. "Some people are buying these creepy-looking baroque things from India with all these twisted pipes," said Erin McAdams, 28, a former video store clerk who was wearing cat's-eye glasses and who has a tattoo of a light bulb on her forearm.

"What about those covered ones that look like bugs?" asked Joan Baker, a former pedicabber who is a building superintendent. "I bet they make a lot of money when it's raining."

If that sort of conversation is normal anywhere in New York, it is in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is home to a large number of the city's roughly 400 drivers of cycle rickshaws. About 20 pedicabbers live in the neighborhood, several of them in two buildings in a small, ramshackle complex on Atlantic Avenue near Nostrand Avenue that surrounds the gazebo and is known as the Compound. Many more pedicabbers have passed through or slept on couches. Three dozen pedicabbers attend monthly parties in a nearby apartment, and a rig or two has even parked in the neighborhood overnight.

These days, the conversation among pedicabbers can get unusually intense, because the City Council is considering two bills that would regulate the industry, requiring pedicabbers to take a safety course, carry insurance, limit the number of their passengers, stay away from bridges, tunnels and parks, and post their rates. Pedicabbers generally charge $1 per block of travel, with a minimum of $20 a ride. A hearing on the bills, the third so far, will be held in the fall.

For the most part, those who live in this Bedford-Stuyvesant enclave belong to pedicabbing's old guard. That is a relative term in an industry that has existed in the city only since 1995, when an entrepreneur named George Bliss started a pedicab company in Manhattan.

Longtime pedicabbers worry that new rules could strangle their nascent industry. "There's concern," Ms. McAdams said, "that they're going to mire it in so much bureaucracy, it won't be reasonable to do it."

The pedicabbers moved from the gazebo indoors to her loftlike apartment, which is decorated with cast-iron machine parts and delicate graffiti. Sitting down to French toast, they began discussing their legs.

"They're huge," Ms. McAdams said. "It's horrible, because knee-high boots don't fit."
ALEX MINDLIN

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