Denver B Cycles and Carbon Drive

Speaking of Earth Day, Denver launched the first large scale bike-share program with 400 red Trek B-cycles.http://denver.bcycle.com/  These share stations are located throughout the city center.  Just swipe your cash card and you can rent the bike for different time periods or get a membership.  There was a share station just outside the Gates building in LoDo where I work and I thought it was very cool that the station was sponsored by our Carbon Drive Group that developed the newest technology belt drive systems for bicycles.  Check out the Carbon Drive Blog.http://blog.carbondrivesystems.com/ 

Can't wait to give one of these bikes a try.

Earth Day 2010

So today was Earth Day. I could not help but think back to the early 1970’s when all this was brand new.

My brother and I were going to school up in the Adirondacks. We and our friends all wanted to get into the environmental sciences and that meant Forestry. We really did not give much though to careers. We wanted to help; we wanted to make a real difference. We were also very interested in being out in the environment experiencing new things and trying not to get ourselves killed in the process, like rock climbing, and I guess what could be called extreme winter camping today. Just doing crazy stuff outdoors. We read the Whole Earth Catalog and came up with various back to the land schemes. We talked about Bucky Fuller’s ideas and read the work of Gary Snyder because he once was a forest fire lookout on the West Coast. We did science in the field, we made maps, we even learned to log with horses. To finish College in Resource Management we moved on to Idaho to get our degrees and to work for the Forest Service. That was our deal. We worked in the woods, we weren't just visitors, and we had a vested interest in making the forest sustainable. The now mainstream phrase Green Movement came later from European political activism. We take much of the Environment Movement now for granted. Bucky said it took about 40 to 50 years for an idea to really catch on so I guess we are right on schedule. It’s all good. Things are getting better but there is a lot more stuff that needs to be done. Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

Bike Thoughts

The weather is starting to get really great out here in Colorado and as the temperatures gets warmer the bikes start to come out in droves. This past weekend in Boulder tons of folks were out and about on bicycles. The majority of them appeared to be out on fitness rides or group rides. The next group were families out for a tour with the kids. It would really be interesting to find out how many of the real hard core riders carried their activity over to the work week and commuted to work on bike either all the way or a mixed ride with their bike and public transportation and what this means in real eco-savings.

STING-RAY

Saw this great looking Schwinn Sting-Ray just off the 16'th Street Mall in Denver the other day. It was in great shape, even had the slick on the back. I never had one of these as a kid, I was into my 3 speed "English Racer" but I thought these were very cool and they really introduced a whole new world of biking. All of a sudden everyone seemed to be customizing their bikes with vulture bars and banana seats. There was tons going on chopping the front forks of bikes. Lots of street creativity.

Donating a Bike

Stopped by Community Cycles today in Boulder to drop off an old bike I had. Amazing place. Lots of activity going on. Bikes all over the place in different stages of clean up, repair, rebuilding. Very friendly people. As soon as I arrived a young woman introduced herself, thanked me for the donation, filled out my tax-deductable form and showed me where to take the bike. After that I just wandered around checking the place out. Volunteers cleaning the shop up, parts being sorted, people getting instructions on how to work on their bikes. They even have an Earn-A-Bike program where you donate your time and after 15 hours you can pick out a bike and fix it up for yourself. Just great bike stuff, right to ride advocacy, communtiy bike programs where they hold Rolling Bike Clinics to fix broken bikes in low income neighborhoods. Lots of real world bike experience here. Very cool. Glad I found it.