Columbus Rides Bikes!

Why Need a Bicycle Brake Light? According to statistics, majority of bike-related accidents happened by being hit !!  There are over 20 million bicycles sold in the U.S. each year nowadays, and there are thousands of injuries and deaths out of accidents each year too.  Here you can find important statistics . Unlike most European countries, most roads in the States don't have bike lanes, which forces bike-riders to ride closely with cars, trucks or motorcycles, and thus exposes themselves to great dangers......Also when riding in a group, bike-riders tell us that accidents happen because the guy in front slows down or stops and the one behind doesn't notice in time. Even 0.01% risk should be avoided, and our brake lights are here to help reduce the accident probability. Don't let any "tiny" risk become a "big" devil standing in your life !! Can a mere flashing light protect you enough????    Flashing lights only work at nighttime, so apparently, i...

After a long ride there's nothing quite like a refreshing bottle of water. But getting to that point where you're tired and dehydrated sometimes takes some extra motivation. Like your favorite music, which Scosche makes easier to access on a bike with its new boomBOTTLE weatherproof speaker. Clad in a shock proof exterior that should easily survive even bumpy trail rides, the omnidirectional boomBOTTLE uses a pair of 40 millimeter drivers and a passive subwoofer to make it easy to hear your music even over the sound of your bike rattling about. [Keep reading at Gizmodo]

Have you ever been riding down a wet, leaf covered road, approach a corner and think “Ooh, I better be easy on this corner, it’s slippery.” You gently apply the rear brake and before you can think “I’m falling”, your backside is being grated like swiss cheese on the asphalt at 20 mph? In today’s modern litigious society, nothing is our fault anymore. We have to blame something or someone. So who’s to blame for you running out of talent on that slippery corner? How about that archaic caliper braking system on your bike? All your friends are enamored with your new carbon fiber wheelset that you just dumped more coin on than your used Toyota Corolla. They look mighty fine, but hey, unless you want to try and pull a Fred Flintstone heel braking technique with your crotch on the top tube, don’t dare ride them in the rain. Oh, and if you damage the braking track on those spendy carbon hoops, you might as well make some stylish earrings out of them, because that’s about all they’ll be g...

Optrix XD mount for iPhone with TGR from Optrix on Vimeo .

The Wabash Avenue bike lanes, now classified as “buffer-protected.” Photo by John Lankford. 2012 was a banner year for bike lanes in Chicago. According to the Active Transportation Alliance’s  Bikeways Tracker , by the end of the year the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) had completed or was in the process of building a total of 12.5 miles of protected bike lanes and 14.5 miles of buffered bike lanes. When Rahm Emanuel took office in last year our city had no protected or buffered bike lanes, but nineteen months later we’re now the national leader in providing enhanced on-street bikeways. That’s a huge achievement. One issue that has come up is CDOT’s recent adoption of the terms “barrier-protected” and “buffer-protected” lanes to refer to what the department formerly called “protected” and “buffered” lanes. This change in terminology also seems to indicate a shift in goals. Emanuel’s  Chicago 2011 Transition Report , released in May of that year, announce...

Make no mistake, San Francisco loves bicycles. There's been a 71 percent increase in cycling (yes, 71 percent!) in the last five years in this city. Add in the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's "Connecting the City"  project, which will provide miles of new bike lanes in the near future, a five-fold increase in bike rentals, and  a long-awaited bike-sharing program  launching this summer and you’ve got a city made for cycling, except for one thing  … This: One of many daunting hills in San Francisco (this one on Dolores Street). (Photo by Allison Arieff) Most people cite safety concerns—and rightfully so—as the number one impediment to them getting on a bike. But in San Francisco, there’s another major obstacle standing in the way: With few exceptions, there are hardly any ways through our fair city that don’t involve considerable inclines (and the quads to tackle them). [Keep reading at The Atlantic]

Peddlin' Pierogies Thomas Guentner, 33, of the South Side Slopes and Jeff Newman, 29, of Braddock Hills with their pierogi delivery cart. By Dan Gigler / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Mention the simple pierogi -- an iconic food in these parts -- and one might conjure images of babushka'd babkas cooking the Eastern European peasant dish in the basements of onion-domed Orthodox churches, where recipes are passed between generations. Typically, it would not put one in mind of a pair of tattooed, 30-ish, ultra-progressive guys, rolling dumplings made from organic dough, cage-free eggs and local produce in the kitchen of a smoky dive bar, serving patrons who are bobbing their heads to the metal and punk bands that play the joint. Oh, and the guys occasionally sell their pierogies via bicycle, too. Read more:  http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/life/food/dumpling-duo-peddlin-pierogies-669792/#ixzz2Ha3bek5A

The InterLock™ hides inside of your bike frame through the seat post. It's universal and can be installed on virtually any bike. [Kickstarter]

Rubber tread rolling on ice and snow often slips. But bikers who brave the cold months have an option with studs. Many bike brands offer tires with metal or carbide studs implanted in the rubber. The tiny points grip the ground, including ice patches or snow on a road. Xerxes tire from 45Nrth For almost a decade, I’ve commuted on a bike 12 months of the year. Along with extra-warm mittens, studs have been an important part of the cold-weather equation. This year, my tires are faster and more toothy than ever before. A new brand,  45Nrth  is a niche seller of cycling products made for winter. The company’s  Xerxes tires  have a fast-rolling rubber tread flanked with 140 aluminum-carbide studs. That’s enough grip to handle starts, stops, and speedy cornering when the asphalt turns white. Studs are made for days like these Like any studded tire, the Xerxes are not a panacea for winter riding — you can slip and skid. But the studs engage when ...

[Rebecca J Kaye - Weekly Workings]

The concept e-bike, called the NCycle, has everything a cyclist could dream about: a holographic display, an innovative locking system, even a hidden pocket for your stuff. Many electric bicycle designs are clunky; they look like bloated regular bikes with motors. There are exceptions to that rule, like the arched  PiCycle . And now we have the NCycle , a skinny concept foldable electric bike that comes with a handlebar locking system--no outside lock necessary. Designers Skyrill and Marin Myftiu  explain : Doing away with cables, most of the system consists of the handle bar itself. With dual handles for multiple positions and comfort, the handle bar is appropriately loop-shaped to fit most of the poles and steel bars in the city. Closing the loop when locked is again a hardened steel tube sliding from one of the handles, which makes the locking [mechanism] virtually impossible to break or cut with any kind of man-powered pliers, in the end, making it almost ...

We test bike gear year-round at  Outside , from our desert  test trip  in January and endurance races like the  Arizona Trail Race ,  Breck Epic , and Triple Bypass, to daily road and trail rides here in Santa Fe (including snow biking just this week). In the process, we beat the bejeezus out of lots of gear, and while much of it these days is very good, there are often a handful of items that we come back to again and again. With our 2013 test trip to Tucson coming up next week, we decided this was the perfect moment to highlight the top pieces of bike gear that impressed us most in 2012. 01.  CRANK BROTHERS KRONOLOG This dropper post impressed us more than any other piece of gear this year. Crank Brothers replaced the hydraulic internals of the uneven Joplin with an all-mechanical design that has stood up to nine months of hard wear. We prefer the Kronolog’s infinite height adjustment to other brands' two- or three- stage configurations, as well as...

A May bikepacking trip from Peter Nylund on Vimeo . A two-night bikepacking trip in the beginning of May. More about it here: http://www.yetirides.com/2011/05/yet-another-bikepacking-outing.html Filmed with Canon EOS 60D and the 15-85/3.5-5.6 lens. Edited with Windows Live Movie Maker.

Bicycles are seen in a rack at a bike sharing station in Washington, DC. Photograph by KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images If you had been handed, a decade ago, a map of the U.S. and asked to predict where the novel idea of bike sharing—then limited to a few small-scale projects in a handful of European cities, might first find its firmest footing, you probably would have laid your money on a progressive hub like Portland or Seattle or the regional poles of walkable urbanism, New York or San Francisco—all of which were scoring higher, those days, in surveys like Bicycling  magazine’s list of most bikeable cities. But today, the nation’s largest, most successful bike-share program—in terms of size, ridership, and financial viability—is in Washington, D.C. How did D.C. accomplish this unlikely task? The program was essentially born late one night, two decades ago, in a library.   Paul DeMaio, an urban planning student at the University of Virginia, was doing...

The 30th annual Dirty Dozen was held on Saturday, November 24th. I woke up to an inch of fresh, new snow on my back porch, and when some of my staff people started telling me about all the bad traffic accidents they had seen on their drive to my house, I was seriously thinking about postponing or even canceling the DD for the first time ever. To avoid crashing on snow-covered, icy roads on my ride over to the start (Bud Harris Cycling Track), I waited as late as possible to leave my Squirrel Hill home. My 21 year old Nephew Steven Perezluha & I left on slushy and wet roads around 9 am. We were amazed to see the entire parking lot filled with eager cyclists ready to tackle Pittsburgh's steepest and toughest hills despite such lousy weather.  Luckily by the time we left just after 10 am, the roads were only wet and stayed this way for the first half of the ride, although some icy spots were reported on some hills. Under cloudy skies, a stiff wind blew snow showers most of the d...