Dr. Jeremy Groves

Each year, the British Medical Journal publishes a 2-week Christmas Edition over the holidays:

The articles accepted for publication in the special holiday issue are typically tongue-in-cheek, and it’s been described as their “left brain issue”. Here are a few articles from past years:

• Rugby (the religion of Wales) and its influence on the Catholic church: should Pope Benedict XVI be worried?
• Frankincense: systematic review
• Billy Bunter and the obesogenic environment
• Coca-Cola douches and contraception
• Head and neck injury risks in heavy metal: head bangers stuck between rock and a hard bass
• Not becoming a communist doctor
• Back to the future: emergency departments and ancient Greek warfare
• Bumf: increasing exponentially
• The cult of the conference bag
• How to safeguard your ring in theatre
• Texting shows recovery after faint

With the above in mind, I was excited to see Dr. Jeremy Groves’ “study” on lightweight bicycles and their affect on commute times in this year’s edition. To approach his paper with the proper levity, consider this comment from the introduction: “I toyed with the idea of blinding it but, in the interest of self preservation and other road users, decided against it.”

Here’s the abstract:

This entertaining paper was clearly all for fun, though there’s certainly much more than a modicum of truth in the conclusion.

Read the full study at the BMJ →

Showing up is at least half the battle

Over the past year, a number of budding bike bloggers contacted me looking for advice on how to grow their sites and build an audience. Each time I said essentially the same thing, and each time I was left feeling they didn’t like the answer much. To use a favorite analogy, growing a blog is like filling a swimming pool with a teaspoon. You start with one teaspoon; 768 teaspoons later you have one gallon; repeat 15,000 times and you have one average-sized swimming pool full of water (and hopefully, a handful of readers). It’s a slow process that takes dedication and perseverance. In my case, I published my first blog post on March 25th, 2005. It was a tentative start, but I fairly quickly reached the point of posting at least once a day, and I’ve rarely missed a day since. Eventually, if you’re lucky, that sort of stubborn indefatigability starts reaping a few rewards. I’m sure there are bloggers more talented than I who have progressed much faster, but for me, it’s clearly been a story of the tortoise rather than the hare.

I think advocating for bicycles is not unlike blogging. It’s easy to expect too much, too soon, with the danger being discouragement resulting from the interminably slow pace of progress, discouragement that may very well lead to abandoning the cause altogether. As transportational bicyclists and advocates (every transpo bike rider on the road is an advocate for bicycling), the most important thing you and I can do is just keep at it. If we all stick with it and keep riding and advocating everyday, I firmly believe we’ll make the progress we’re hoping for over the long haul. Then, one day, if luck is on our side, we’ll look up and notice that the swimming pool is brimming over the top.

I’ve been enjoying the photographs over at Ocean Air Cycles, a new blog out of Ventura, CA.

Ocean Air Cycles →

Wheels4Life →

I’ve been hoarding, scraping, and begging for cable end caps for 35 years, so you wouldn’t believe the joy I experienced today when a bottle of 500 arrived from Harris Cyclery. I was so excited I shook the bottle like a maraca and did a dance around the bike room. Don’t ask me why I waited so long to order up a bunch. Now I’m set for life — what a relief.

My family thinks I’m nuts, but sometimes it’s the “little” things that make us happy… ;-)

IKEA had a good year, so to say thanks, they gave all 12,400 of their employees in the U.S. a bicycle. From the press release:

This is a cool program, and I hate to rain on the parade, but being a company committed to “great design and quality”, you’d think IKEA could have done a little better on the bike choice. Oh well…

It seems intuitively obvious that the presence of bicycling facilities in the form of signed bicycle routes, bike lanes, and off-street bike paths encourages bike commuting. The idea is widely promoted, and it appears to be effective in certain cities. It’s always been puzzling to me though, that I live in an area with excellent facilities, yet they’re woefully underused. The old adage,”if you build it, they will come”, doesn’t always seem to hold true, at least not here in the suburbs of Northern California.

To dig into this a little deeper, I pulled some data from the Alliance for Biking and Walking’s Biking and Walking in the United States 2010 Benchmarking Report and put it into a graphic. I lined up the top 30 major cities based upon “bicycle mode share among commuters” in one column, and the top 30 major cities based upon “miles of bicycle facilities per square mile” in another column. I then drew lines between the columns, matching up the cities. Cities that placed higher in the “commuters” column than they placed in the “facilities” column got a green line, while those that placed lower in the “commuters” column than they placed in the “facilities” column got a red line.

I can’t say I see a pattern here, and I didn’t come up with the definitive takeaway that I was hoping for, but I think it’s an interesting infographic nonetheless. Obviously, there are many factors other than just the amount of facilities per square mile that contribute to a higher bicycle mode share, some of which may include local bike culture, the proximity of housing to workplaces, the quality and continuity of existing facilities, weather patterns, and so on.

View the Graphic [PDF] →
Biking and Walking in the United States 2010 Benchmarking Report →