Archive for the ‘bike blog posts’ Category

I made a trailer to pull our canoe behind my bike.

Unfortunately, it took longer to put it together than I expected, so we didn’t actually go canoeing.

Here’s how I did it: make your own canoe trailer to pull behind a bike

Here’s a quote from the “suggestions” page I wrote after I was done.

What I learned from this project is that, while you can build just about anything with scrap wood if you can manage to fit it into your project, sometimes it is better to purchase new wood and follow a design for the project you’re doing.

If this hitch breaks, or if I decide to redo it just because, then I’ll definitely do it differently. You can see in the photo in Step 10 that there are several smaller pieces of wood attached to each other. Based on my experience with this so far, a better design would be to use pieces of plywood instead.

From cnn.com:

Car crashes into bike race; one dead

MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) — A car plowed into a weekend bike race along a highway near the U.S.-Mexico border, killing one and injuring 10 others, police said.

A car plows into a crowd of bicyclists participating in a race on a highway near the U.S.-Mexico border.
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The 28-year-old driver was apparently drunk and fell asleep when he crashed into the race, said police investigator Jose Alfredo Rodriguez.

A photograph taken by a city official showed bicyclists and equipment being hurled high into the air by the collision.

Rodriguez said Juan Campos was charged with killing Alejandro Alvarez, 37, of Monterrey.

Authorities said the wreck happened 15 minutes into the 34-kilometer (21 mile) race Sunday along a highway between Playa Bagdad and Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.

Campos said he is an American citizen living in Brownsville. The U.S. Consulate could not immediately confirm that.

“We are looking into the incident in terms of whether American citizens were involved,”

I don’t want to sound morbid or cynical, but I imagine that, eventually, that is how I’ll die. I’m not morbid or cynical, but when you see a picture like this, it reminds you that ANYTHING is possible. Don’t forget, there are more than 45,000 deaths from motor vehicle accidents every year in the USA. That’s about 125 every day.

As I wrote on my bike taxi blog, I took the bike taxi out for Mardi Gras. Lots of fun riding, but only one passenger, so not what we call in the bike taxi business a commercially successful outing.

The past three seasons, I didn’t take the bike taxi out for Buffalo’s Mardi Gras celebrations, but this year the mild weather made it a no-brainer–why not, right?

I caught the parade (maybe next year I’ll create a “float” and sign up to be IN the parade, –only if I can get some bikey friends to ride along with me), so here are some snapshots from where I watched the parade (I missed a few of the floats because oncoming traffic blocked my view).

I didn’t have beads to throw to the people watching the parade, so I gave out my yellow bike taxi pens instead. My joke that they are “Not as much fun, but so much more practical” got a few laughs.

A judge gave a drunk-driving woman 10 1/2 years for killing a bicyclist while she was driving drunk. The judge said that the reason the sentence was so stiff was because of a recorded phone call, in which the woman laughed at a friend’s joke about killing the bicyclists.

Listen to the story here.

Drinking, driving and killing a man. If that weren’t enough, a woman’s callous comments earned her even more time in prison.

The Pima County jail monitors phone calls to and from inmates.

A week after Paul L’Ecuyer died and Melissa Arrington went to jail charged with hitting him, she got a call from a friend.

Judge Michael Cruikshank said that call was a big part of why he gave Arrington ten and a half years, just one year short of the max.

Judge Cruikshank described the call as breathtaking in it’s inhumanity.

Source: kgun9.com

In today’s Buffalo News:

Robbers strike twice on city bike path

The bike path near Grant and Tonawanda streets was the site of a gunpoint robbery of a bicyclist and an attempted robbery of a man walking to the supermarket on Tuesday afternoon, police reported today.

The two incidents happened just minutes apart, at the same location, and police believe they were committed by the same two robbers.

At about 3:15 p.m., a man heading to Tops supermarket was walking on the bike path about a quarter-mile from Grant Street, where he was stopped by two men wearing bandanas.

Police said one of the men displayed a 9mm handgun and demanded money, but the victim told them that he had no money.

Within minutes, the same two robbers confronted a bicyclist who had stopped to help, displayed their handgun, and robbed him of his cell phone, $5 and his iPod with headphones, police reported.

The robbers ran west down the bike path. No arrests have been made.

I’ve been biking more than this blog shows, and I really need to get back to blogging regularly. Stuff like this article in the News can’t be the only story I tell.