I just read interesting article by George Monbiot after being spurred to check out his web site from an article my dad sent me.

The linked piece talks about his perception of the relationship between car-driving and libertarianism in the UK, and some of the inherent contradictions and conflicts that come from them.

While i'm not really a big fan of the speed cameras that Monbiot seems to support, i do recognize them as some kind of counterbalance to some of the uglier forms of road rage and other socially-destructive habits encouraged by the private automobile. My biggest qualms with speed cameras and the like are related to situations where the society has basically forced driving on nearly everyone (e.g. roads and low population density, but no public transport, like many places in the US), and then uses the fact that you are in a private vehicle as a tool for selective (read: discriminatory) law enforcement.

Just in time for Jamie's long-awaited trial, I came across these images of New Yorkers enjoying their bicycles, I mean "parading without a permit", over the years. Of course, the remarkable dearth of automobiles is most enticing! You can see the jpegs in the "comments" section.

I just ran across this interesting experiment demonstrating the ways that public space is broken down by use of different forms of transport. Sadly, the 6-year-old article is still entirely relevant today.

It's interesting to visually see the comparison of space and people used by cars, busses, cycling, and pedestrians. When we're on the street, we tend to identify people with their vehicles, but this visualization makes it much clearer how crazy it is to drive a car.

10-speeds? fixed-gear? internal planetary transmission? there's another option that i'd never heard of or even thought of before:

The Retro-Direct arrangement has effectively 2 different speeds: one for when you are pedalling forwards, and one for when you pedal backwards. the design is over a hundred years old, and, uh, not in widespread production.

Pretty cool, though. This would make an interesting project to build.

Electric bikes are thriving in China. They're also being attacked by industry competitors, including the auto industry and government mass transit officials, who fear erosion of their customer base. Some interesting quotes from the article:

[Consumers prefer electric bicycles over public transit] when it comes to health concerns: the overcrowded transit system is feared for its potential to spread disease. Liu says Crown's sales spiked during the SARS epidemic that emerged in China in the spring of 2003.

Wow. I know few people other than me that would really appreciate this (daniel); a web site deticated entirely to those hidden unix configuration files know as dot files. I'm always having trouble figuring out how to configure my linux programs. I usually end up asking Daniel to show me his dot files (sounds kinky, doesn't it). I'm not sure how useful this resource will be, but who knows.

It's a much much much geekier version of the fixed-gear bike enthusiast's web site, where I submitted a picture of my bike, Big Blue.

The Bicycle Film Festival is showing this Thursday through Sunday at the Anthology Film Archives. It looks like a lot of fun, actually, as part of the city's Bike Month. Most politically interesting, perhaps, is the "bike parade" scheduled at 1pm on Saturday, starting in Madison Square park. We'll see what happens, i suppose.

Not surprisingly, most of the promotional materials about bike month seem to include critical mass on 27 May (the last friday of the month, as usual).

So the NYC Critical mass was extremely weakly covered today by the New York Times. Hopefully there will be a bigger writeup soon, given that the last paragraph of the article states:

Soon after the ride began, a freelance reporter for The New York Times, Colin Moynihan, was standing on a sidewalk at Sixth Street and Avenue A interviewing people when he was briefly detained and handcuffed. He was later released by the police without charges.

i had a run-in with the police myself, which fortunately ended OK for me. The numbers i heard for the arrest were more on the order of 30-40, not the 18 mentioned in the article.