Urban Biker

flyer.jpg, originally uploaded by Green Biker.

The Dude Abides: a Big Lebowski-inspired Alley Cat flyer from Boston.

Swobo, the San Francisco bike clothing company, has rolled out three city bikes — a coaster, a fixie and a 3-speed — the first bikes the company has made.
Designed by former Bianchi product manager Sky Yaeger, the bikes are neither mountain bikes nor road bikes. they’re city bikes. For example, each has a bottle opener under the saddle. Says Yaeger:

I used the coaster brake so you can ride with one hand on the bar and still brake. Say you’re coming home from the bar with a 12-pack… you can carry it and still slam on the brakes.

More details and lots of pictures after the jump.
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NAHBS: Cyclists at the show, originally uploaded by richardmasoner.

Richard Masoner again:

“Jeff, Ode, and Monsieur took the train down from San Francisco to visit the 2007 North American Handmade Bicycle Show in San Jose this weekend. They were among several dozen cyclists from the City sporting their messenger style and fixed gear bikes as they slummed in the ‘burbs.”

“This bike is is (one of) Craig Calfee’s personal ride and is built up of individual strands of carbon fiber. I’m told he keeps having to add more strands because it’s not quite stiff enough.”

So writes Richard Masoner, who was at the 2007 North American Handmade Bicycle Show in San Jose Calif this week.

More detailed pic after the jump.

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Picture: Serotta’s carbon fiber MeiVici
The cost of high-end bike materials like carbon fiber and titanium are on the rise, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. But it’s not a problem for a fast growing segment of the bike community — those with wads of cash.

Cycling enthusiasts can expect to see prices head uphill for bikes made of in-demand specialty materials such as titanium and carbon fiber.

Driving the increase is a sharp rise in orders for airplanes made of the same materials, meaning that bike makers — along with makers of sailboats, lacrosse sticks, tennis rackets, jewelry and bone screws — are paying 25% more for raw materials and passing along some of the costs to consumers.

Prices for high-end bikes from makers such as Trek Bicycle Corp., Cannondale Bicycle Corp., and Serotta Competition Bicycles, some of which already cost more than $10,000, could rise 5% to 25%. A custom-made La Corsa titanium frame from Serotta, for instance, would sell for up to $7,000 with top components by the end of this year, up from $6,000 in January.

The higher prices are due to extra demand form airplane makers like Boeing and Airbus Co. and defense companies like Lockheed Martin. But this won’t trouble the upper end of the bike market: individuals who are quite happy to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a new bike every year.

The tight supplies of titanium and carbon fiber, a strong lightweight synthetic material, come as the bike industry keeps expanding. About 19.8 million bicycles were sold last year in North America, up 8.2% from 2004, according to the National Bicycle Dealers Association. Sales of bikes and bike-related parts topped $6 billion last year, up from $5.7 billion in 2004. Some bike makers estimate that 30,000 cyclists each year spend $3,000 or more on a new bike, a $90 million market.

But the growth also reflects the ever-escalating upgrades in bike models. Bike makers now use laser measurements, computer simulations, test-ride videos and drawings of a rider’s body dimensions to create a more perfect ride. The desired growth in sales, coupled with tightening demand for raw materials, puts the bike industry in a bind.

A new wave of affluent cyclists is increasingly willing to pay higher prices for bikes that weigh less and are made of high-tech materials. But bike makers believe high prices eventually will hurt sales for middle-class buyers and could cause a return to other, cheaper materials such as lightweight steel. Cheaper bikes at retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are typically made of steel.

Mercedes-Benz has released three top-dollar bicycles — a pair of city bikes and a road bike.

Merc’s road Racing bike is Campy equipped and has a carbon-fiber frame. It starts at $5,200.

The “Fitness” and “Trekking” are aluminum city bikes, starting at $1,300 and$1,700 respectively. Both have disk brakes, front shocks, Shimano Alivio drive trains and built-in lights and racks.

The difference is mainly the headlight. The Fitness bike has an LED light, while the Trekking bike has an auto on, dynamo-powered halogen headlight –t he dynamo is built into the hub.

Designed by ADP Engineering, which sells ‘Rotwild’ bikes in Germany, the Mercedes bikes are double the price of similar bikes. They’ll ship in May.

More photos after the jump. Here’s the press release.

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Picture by Zeelix Posts are not secure places to leave your bike. My friend’s bike was stolen. Cheeky buggers dismantled the posts and lifted the bike up and over.

Reporter Justin Jouvenal goes in search of his stolen bike, which leads him to an “urban underworld of open-air chop shops, steal-to-order thieves, and brazen fencing networks, where San Francisco’s most pervasive crime is ignored by the authorities.”

When Veysey told me about bicycle chop shops, I pictured something from a ’70s cop movie — a warehouse in an industrial district populated with burly men wielding blowtorches. But the trail led me somewhere else entirely: Golden Gate Park.

…

The camp looked like a sidewalk after an eviction. Books and papers vomited from the mouth of a tent. Rain-soaked junk littered the camp, including a golf bag filled with oars, an algebra textbook, a telescope, and a portable toilet. A hypodermic needle stuck in a stump like a dart and a gaudy brass chandelier swung from a branch. Amid the clutter was one constant: bicycles and their parts.

A half dozen bikes leaned against bushes in various states of repair. There were piles of tires and gears scattered around. The noise of the crew had awoken the residents of the camp. A man and two women sprung up and immediately tried to grab things as the crew stuffed the contents of the camp into trash bags. They grew more and more agitated as two dozen bags were filled.

New to me, but probably no one else on the planet, is Veloroutes, a great mashup of Google Maps that lets you draw your route over the top of a map and it calculates the distance, elevation and estimated time.

The site allows users to create, share and find cycle routes, and works with kml data from Google Maps gpx from GPS units. There’s also live webcams and weather for certain cities.

Via Commute By Bike

“Everybody’s in a rush and no one cares. It’s like every man for himself. It’s like a war zone,” says one commentator in this great little film about biking in New York. The film is a call for separate bike lanes in the city, preferably ones with physical barriers to protect bikers from traffic.

From the StreetsBlog.

Base jumper Stefan Oberlander is the first person to land a bas jump on a mountain bike. Stefan says:

“Keeping the bike and landing on it changes everything. If you keep it, you enter a totally different level of commitment as you must attach the bike to you; with all the possibilities for entanglements of your gear and only 1 parachute quite a step.

So far, everybody who has tried Base-jumping on a bike dropped it due to the complexity and the dangers involved in keeping the bike during freefall, deployment and landing.”