The Perfect Commute Identified

New York has recently approved a bill to allow bikes to be taken into any building with a freight elevator This seems like a great move to encourage bike use in a city where, like London, many people live in flats and apartments, and where negotiating a bile up and down stairs would put anyone off using it everyday. It doesn’t go as far as forcing employers to allow people to park a bike next to your desk but it certainly encourages people to have a bike and get it out of the flat from time to time. You can find more about the bill here, and, while not entirely perfect yet, it is a start to a properly pro-bike culture.

Americans are doing pretty well at the moment, and at the other end of your commute (as long as it ends in one of the covered cities) you can also be helped out with a Bikestation to store your bike, or rent another one for the rest of your commute. There are ad-hoc systems like this in the UK, including places like Finsbury Park cycle park and more impressively the Mud Dock Bikeshed in Bristol but it’s really something that needs to be done on a bigger and more co-ordinated scale, like the example from over the Atlantic. With legislation to allow bikes to be kept at home and somewhere to keep them when you get to work then cycling your commute seems far more attractive.

At the moment it seems best if your commute happens to be from New York to Santa Barbara, which, I guess might not suit everyone.

In other news it seems influential people must have read this blog and decided my idea about Prius drivers making a noise to warn cyclists that they’re coming was a good one. Or possibly it had nothing to do with that.

Also Bike Radar have come up with 33 reasons to cycle, including softer stools. Now that’s why I do it…

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