A Parking Spot Isn't As Valuable As What Lorca Wants Instead

From Parking Day 2014, in front of Lorca in Stamford, Connecticut

You might remember a couple of years ago Emily and Meg asked me if I wanted to do Parking Day - which I had never heard of at the time. My role was mainly quartermaster as I provided most of the furniture that we used to make a fun living room in front of Lorca, my spirit animal in coffee shop form. 

I'm hoping not all of my Stamford readers have abandoned this blog even though I moved from Connecticut to California a year ago and haven't had the pleasure of Lorca since a visit in December (also, in spite of finding some good coffee shops here in San Jose, I haven't found a Lorca substitute yet).

If you are a Stamford reader or visit Lorca often, please sign their petition to change one of the parking spaces they have in front of their building into a seasonal parklet. 

This is the parking space in front of Lorca. Shouldn't something more befitting to the image of the finest coffee shop in all the land go there instead? 

I hope the powers that are in Stamford listen to Leyla, the business owner of Lorca. She has given life to the business with every breath and made Stamford feel like the city a lot of people wanted it to be. 

And between figuring out the right bean-to-water ratio and developing recipes for some of the most fantastic cookies in the Western World, she has decided that, as a small business owner, that a rectangle of asphalt meant to hold an unoccupied motor vehicle is not as valuable as a small outdoor space where friends can meet and be outside. 

So if you have been to Stamford, you've been to Lorca, so please sign Lorca's petition and make it easier for businesses to decide how to deal with the legacy of increasingly unnecessary on-street parking. Thanks for reading, thanks for riding, and hope to visit Stamford soon. 

What Does Your Child See? First Thoughts on a Box Bike

Note: Good Karma Bikes has now moved to its new location at 460 Lincoln Avenue. The retail space reopens today at 2:00pm and they are once again accepting bicycle donations, so if you have a gently used bike (that isn’t from Walmart, Target or some other big box store) please donate - and like Good Karma Bikes on Facebook. 

I was fortunate to meet a fellow named Alex at the recent Cargo Bike Festival in San Jose. I also met his organization, Box Bike Collective, and his signature product that he welds himself right here in California.

I’m also fortunate that I have a chance to review this handmade cargo bike in great detail: It is about eight feet long and, unlike anything I’ve ever pedaled in my life, has the cargo box in in the front. 

These bikes are not uncommon in Europe but aren’t seen too frequently in the U.S. That’s unfortunate because, right out of the gate, this is what it means to not only #choosethebike but choosing not to own a second car - or even a first car. I know I’m not alone in feeling like California (and most of the U.S. for that matter) deliberately arranges itself so that every adult must have their own car.  But most trips are less than two miles from the home and if you can carry a lot of things with a bike (I do have a long and happy history with saluting the cargo bike) it’s all the more reason to use one.

Now the Box Bike has a child’s seat that allows two kids to sit side by side. I’ve seen people - including, of course, Emily Finch - do this. Having a child or even two isn’t necessarily a one-way ticket to Minivan-ville if you opt for a Box Bike. 

And as I began riding this bike (and, yes, getting used to the linkage steering) I began to ask how do we want to show our children the world? 

If a child is sitting in a Box Bike, this is what they see:

If a child is sitting in a child’s seat in a SUV, this is what they see:

And that view is rather generous when you consider the growing number of kids who are using their parent’s old iPads in the car with the vacant, 1,000 millimeter stare that is too common with today’s youth. In Box Bike, they actually see something other than a tiny screen or the back of a car seat. 

I also got to thinking that if enough people move their children around with bikes then, in the future, the kids will be less likely to see smog in the air and asthma inhalers in their hands. 

So that’s just something to think about as I put this bike through more paces, which I am doing all week. For more information about Box Bike Collective, visit their website, and remember: Good Karma Bikes is reopening today and is again accepting donations. Today, remember to #choosethebike....and, while we're at it, choose to avoid stupid red cup controversies by going to a local coffee shop - like Lorca in Stamford or Moonbeans in San Jose - instead of a national chain. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding. 

Follow me on Twitter: @michaelknorris 

Why You Should Take Part in Park(ing) Day

Photo taken September 3, 2014 - on the way back from my first Parking Day planning meeting

A year ago I was living in Stamford, Connecticut instead of San Jose, California. This meant I had a working knowledge of the cycling quirks in the state I lived in, a memory of what rain looked like, and the ability to carry groceries with complimentary, store-issued bags. 

My Stamford friend and fellow bike activist Emily emailed me and asked if I wanted to take part in Parking Day - an event I had never heard of before that originated in San Francisco in 2005 and takes place on the third Friday of September. I’ve always maintained that if you want a better environment for cyclists and walkers in Stamford (or, for that matter, the state of Connecticut) that you do whatever Emily tells you to do, so I agreed to help.

I met with Emily and Meg (one of the founders of Bike Stamford) at Lorca to discuss what we wanted to do. Thankfully, they gave a rundown of Parking Day that can easily be found on the ParkingDay.org web site: The short version is: you feed a parking meter, but instead of putting a car there, you put a small public space. It can be a living room, a dining area, a mini-golf course - anything you can imagine. This is a fun way to get people to wonder how to best use public space. After all, when you think about it, cars take up a lot of public space.

The name of the new public space is called a ‘parklet.’ This is not a common word. I know this because spell check changed it to ‘parcel’ the first few times I typed it. 

Even still, you’ve probably seen some parklets in your life. The more permanent ones can be pretty elaborate. Here’s one I found when went biking in Germany last year:

In Redwood City, California, I found this near an outstanding Mexican restaurant. The meters are still there. 

But back to the not-yet-built parklet in Stamford: since the jobs of working with the city and promoting the event were taken by people more talented than myself, I volunteered to provide most of the furniture for the parklet. We barely had two weeks to prepare. The big criteria is that we needed to use items that could be put in place quickly and taken away as soon as the meter ran out.  

I used a small vinyl couch from my home office that had big casters on it (it also could fit in the back of my Honda Element) the DIYBIKING.COM signature coffee table, the coat rack I had also welded, a couple of folding chairs and two $20 rugs from Home Depot. Incidentally: two 5 x 8 rugs, when taped together, are about the same footprint as a parked Toyota Corolla.

While mapping this all out in my basement, I realized just how much space a car takes up (a feeling I’d get nearly a year later when I had the not-for-me experience of being in the same room with my car). 

Days before Parking Day, I planned out how we would take the two parking spaces in front of Lorca at the predetermined time.

When it came time to move in, we were annoyed to see an ugly Ford van in the second space hadn’t moved even though its meter had run out. But we pressed forward anyway: I fed our meter and we set up the furniture on the one parking spot.

We worked quickly to put things in place at our parklet - which bore a slight resemblance to my man cave/basement living room. I even brought along my old chess set, and in no time at all we were sitting in our parklet playing a game.

However, a few minutes later…

One of Stamford’s finest stopped to ask what we were doing, and we assured him we had cleared it with the proper people first. Besides: I had added reflective stickers to the back of the sofa to provide more safety after sunset.

After the friendly officer left, more people began stopping by and asking what we were doing. Some brought snacks and a vase of flowers somehow materialized on the coffee table. Emily also provided a board so anyone could stop in and provide their visions for public space (you may have seen Lindsay Perry’s photo of this in the Stamford Advocate with Elizabeth Kim's story). 

Others showed up. I got to meet a nice woman over a chess game that we didn't finish (we finally did days before I moved to California). My wife came over after she got done with work and made a watercolor sketch of the parklet. I even jaywalked through the gridlocked Bedford Street carrying a plate Lorca cookies offering them to motorists. A guy even stopped by on foot playing a guitar.

And then I sat on the vinyl couch with my Lorca cookies, watching friends play board games and talking - laughing, really - with one another.  A few feet away on Bedford Street, cars continued to trundle by. Some of the drivers were staring. Most were smiling. And that ugly Ford van never moved. 

Within a few minutes of the meter running out we packed up. I managed to load the carpet, my coffee table, folding chairs and coat rack onto the vinyl couch and roll the whole lot behind Lorca to stuff them into the back of my legally parked Honda Element. When I returned on foot, I was greeted with a familiar sight.

The car had pulled into the space within thirty seconds of us leaving it - the occupants apparently had no idea how significant the space had been (or wondered who all of these people were who were staring at them when they pulled in). Afterwards, a group of old and new friends went out to dinner at Cask Republic. 

Your own experience with Parking Day may vary but I highly recommend that you get involved with Parking Day and/or make one yourself. As I proved, you don’t need the best or most stylish furnishings to make a Parking Day impression - just a small number of people willing to have fun convincing others that space devoted to an unoccupied motor vehicle may be put to better use. Stamford's Parking Day 2015 will be bigger and better this time around and if you live in the Bay Area: I may have a brown sofa with reflective stickers on it you can borrow.  Thanks for reading and thanks for riding. 

Follow me on Twitter @michaelknorris

Nine Mornings to California: Morning 3

Morning 3: (Monday, May 4) Bolingbrook, IL

With an incredible amount of distance to drive to get to Omaha, Nebraska, I didn’t ride that morning in Bolingbrook, Illinois. From what I saw - at least from the hotel - the town had been assembled from a DIY Corporate Park & Instant Outdoor Mall kit anyway, so it didn't have a lot of appeal for a bike ride.

Instead, after several hours of driving through field-and-windmill country, we stopped for lunch and I rode along the The Riverfront Trail in Davenport, Iowa. My wife sketched it while my mountain bike tires hummed over the pavement.

It’s a pleasant, family-friendly path that runs along the Mississippi River and I stopped briefly to watch a freight train rumble into Illinois.

Riding in the afternoon instead of the morning came to haunt me later, and it became a valuable road trip lesson: it almost always feels better to ride in the morning. Pedaling under the sun in the middle of the day made me tired - especially since there was so much more of Iowa that we needed to drive across before nightfall.  

I got antsy and irritable. My mood wasn’t helped when I ate my last alfajore cookie from Lorca. Remember that moment in 127 Hours when the guy who had his arm pinned under a boulder in a canyon drank the very last of his water? It didn’t feel at all like that. But it was still pretty demoralizing nonetheless. 

We made it to Omaha, Nebraska after a long day of driving. I glanced at the bike in the rearview mirror as I parked and silently promised to ride early the next morning.

Click here for Morning 4.

Nine Mornings to California: Morning 1

Whenever possible, I #choosethebike when getting around. But since my wife and I couldn’t use bicycles to travel from Stamford, Connecticut to Redwood City, California in ten days, we took our Honda Element. I brought a bike, she brought a sketchbook. Here’s what we did: for context, this adventure began two days after I gave away the Bikeducken and one day after we sold our Stamford house. After I started the engine in Connecticut for the last time, I stuck a Yoda action figure on the dashboard for morale.  

Morning 1: (Saturday, May 2) Cherry Hill, New Jersey 

Getting here was the shortest leg of the trip but the most emotional. We had just said goodbye to my parents, signed the closing documents related to the home we had lived in for almost ten years, and headed off to my wife’s parent’s house in New Jersey to spend the night. Spending the night in New Jersey means biking off for coffee in the morning.

From the point of view of a cyclist, Cherry Hill is a collection of busy roads crisscrossing a grid of strip malls. I can assume the town is very old and was built before left turn technology was available. I refer of course to the ‘all turns’ lane that forces drivers who want to turn left to loop right. Like most other ideas connected to improving The Flow, it may have seemed like a good one until cars outgrew the place. The design is just plain hostile, or at best unwelcoming, if you’re a cyclist.

I had set a promise to myself to ride a minimum of five miles a day every day I was driving. I brought only one of my bikes - the mountain bike I had built myself - and had to remove it from the interior Honda Element bike rack I made and attach the seat and front wheel each time I wanted to take a ride (the car was crammed full with stuff we didn't want the movers to put in storage).

With the seat set high (no off roading to be done in Cherry Hill) and the sun just coming up, I set off in search of an independent coffee shop. And Cherry Hill delivered in the only way Cherry Hill can. 

This abandoned shell was found between Dunkin’ Donuts two and three (and it was at the third one - not four miles from where I started - I gave up on looking and settled for What A Marketing Person Says America Runs On. It made me miss Lorca and realize that the more car centric a city, the less friendly it is to independent businesses. At least I had a chance to stretch my legs. I returned to the house and put the bike away, where we visited with her parents a few more hours before setting off to Cleveland - a city I am always excited to bike in and is really the anti-Cherry Hill in terms of design.

The drive from Cherry Hill to that was endlessly long but worth it.  Upon arrival my wife and I ate an excellent dinner at Bar Cento (she sketched it) and then we walked to W. 25th Street to the new Mitchell’s Ice Cream. I reasoned I could work off the treat the next morning - and since I knew it would be my last time biking in Cleveland for a while I wanted to make the ride on Morning 2 count. 

Click here for Morning 2

The Last Days of Bikeducken (And, by Association, Living in Connecticut)

    First photo of 2015: Sunrise on West Beach in Stamford, January 1, 2015

When you collect - well, not really collect but accumulate - bicycles, you don’t really do so thinking you’re going to have to eventually move them. Suddenly presented with that reality in late 2014 when my wife and I realized we were, indeed, moving from Connecticut to California, I began to look at my collection through an anxious lens.

Over a period of nearly five months I sold, scrapped or gave away bikes, parts and other things I didn’t think I’d need in California. It took a long time mostly because I was busy doing freelance work, fixing up the house and getting it ready for a sale, and flying back and forth to California trying to bond with the place (riding through the area, especially in the Willow Glen ride planned by the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition, has helped).

Over time I gathered what I thought I absolutely needed and put myself in a mental place to give up the rest. Bike related stuff that never would have deemed non-essential under any other circumstances went to either the Trafigura Work & Learn Center in Stamford or the BikePort Co-op in Bridgeport. Since we had to make the amount of stuff we needed placed in storage fall under a certain threshold (and fairly certain whatever residence we’d end up with in Silicon Valley would be smaller than what we had in Stamford anyhow) I made other, previously unthinkable choices.

Like throwing away the Bikeducken.

The Bikeducken. It began as one discarded Diamondback and ended up as the DiamondSchwinn because I wanted to see if I could cut a bike in half and weld it back together. Later, when I finally found a children’s BMX bike that had a five-speed cassette in the back I created the two-part DIYBIKING.COM Salutes the Cargo Bike feature. By the time I was done eight bikes - all throwaways - had been used to make it. I had to splice two chains of different makes together to make it work - and when pedaling I’d hear the clattering of the chain passing through the derailleur change pitch. 

The bike was used to carry an entire 4 x 8 sheet of plywood six miles from Rings End Hardware in Darien to build the one sheet workbench.

It carried anything I wanted it to, and in the last days of living in Stamford it was essential for bringing stuff to Goodwill - including a trail-a-bike. 

While closing in on Christmas 2014 I made a run to the Domus Work & Learn Business Center that topped all others before it. If Hollywood wanted to do a reboot of The Grapes of Wrath with bikes this has that covered. 

The Bikeducken was even featured on a web site called Hackaday.com this past September. I wondered why anyone would write anything about it, but I took their publicity. I also got a lot of amusement by reading the comments section of the story: one commenter even said: “that’s not welding; more like trying to glue it with spatters of metal” which didn’t make me upset because it was not only an accurate description of the amateur welding technique I had at the time, but it was funny.

As useful and unique as the bike was, I didn’t think it had any value to anyone other than me. Save for the kickstand, bell and derailleur cable the bike was built from what people in Connecticut threw away. With few exceptions, they loaded a slightly-distressed bike into their car, drove it to the Katrina Mygatt Recycling center on Magee Avenue, and dropped it into or around the Metal Only bin without giving it another thought. 

I decided the Bikeducken should return to the scrapheap from whence it came. Even though I thought it might help with closing my relationship with Connecticut I wasn’t going to feel sentimental about it. I decided I’d buy or build another cargo bike when I got settled in California and that was that. 

I removed the rear deck to make it easier to carry up and down the basement stairs (During half of March and the start of April I had to remove all personal belongings every time a realtor came calling) and the countdown to its last ride began. 

As coldhearted as this all sounds, I saw a practical reason for this as well: All but one of my remaining bikes - The City Bike, the Recumbent, The Dahon Matrix, The Mystery of South Norwalk - were being packed up in a moving truck. In fact: I watched it happen.

The mountain bike I built (in fact, the project that led to this site in the first place) won the coveted spot of being the bike that was to come with us for the cross-country drive to California, and it needed to be packed up and ready to travel too. Having a throwaway bike on hand would actually be useful since it could be used right up until the very end. However, as a promise I made to my cycling brothers and sisters in The Constitution State, I reattached a sign (with an updated date) to the frame. 

When I wasn’t biking around Stamford I was biking around Silicon Valley on my Bike Friday, which had been in California since February. As Bike to Work Day closed in on the West Coast, I attached signs I had procured from the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition.

As stressed out as I was with everything going on, I could at least sleep at night (no matter which time zone that would be in) knowing I was doing what I could to get the word out on Bike to Work Day. 

In addition to promoting Bike to Work Day 2015, the Bikeducken did some irrefutably useful things, such as taking my cable boxes and to the UPS store on High Ridge so I could mail them back to the most incompetent cable company that ever walked the earth. 

It was the last frontier for those cable boxes, I gotta say. 

When my last week in Stamford arrived, I welcomed four guys into my house. I only knew them by their first names and watched them carry everything I owned out of my house and place into a truck  - at one point while the song ‘Love Train’ was playing on an iPod. 

Try to get that image out of your head.

In between their visits, I went to my last yoga class at Exhale - which was even nicer because talented Stamford artist Holly Danger was among my classmates - and sipped my last hot cappuccino at Lorca. 

I also bought some of my favorite cookies - alfajores - for the cross country drive (and enjoyed them all the way through Iowa). The morning I was at Lorca, I treated the Bikeducken to a good parking spot and was reminded of how much cheaper it is to build a place to park many bicycles instead of a place to park one car (the following week, Stamford Mayor David Martin announced a new bike parking pilot program featuring bike hitches welded by a Stamford city worker I never had a chance to meet and thank).

And somewhere in the middle of all this, Jon from Rippowam Labs (where I taught the class on how to fix up your bike for spring), who had heard I was throwing away the Bikeducken, asked if he could have it. I was baffled at why he wanted it but decided not to argue. The night before I left Stamford he stopped in to pick it up. 

Jump ahead a couple weeks: I’m looking at the great Bike to Work Week features written by Elizabeth Kim at the Stamford Advocate and I see Jon holding a familiar-looking bike. 

In Stamford, Two Bike Commuters Launch a Ride-Share Website

It gave me a real smile, and it made me thankful I had put enough value on that strange, wonderful cargo bike to not throw it in the trash. It could go there another day, but maybe, just maybe, that picture in the Stamford Advocate inspired one other person to think one or more of the following:

Maybe I should give away that old bike to Domus or BikePort Co-op instead of throwing it in the trash. 

I have a bike and I can ride it safely. I’ll ride it. 

Rippowam Labs sounds really cool. I should check out their class schedule.

I should bike to Lorca, eat some cookies, and take a class at Exhale Stamford to cancel those cookies out - or at least make me think I did. 

I should bike more and drive less. 

Whether or not any Stamford motorists thought those things or not by seeing the Bikeducken or reading this site, they are going to be thinking those things anyway. After all, there are a lot more cyclists on the roads and a lot more coming. Hope they keep an eye out for them and notice how much faster they’re moving and how much more fun they’re having than they are. 

So farewell, Bikeducken and farewell New England. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding. 

    Last photo I took in Stamford before moving: May 1, 2015

Bikes on Trains, Trains on Bikes - and Christmas

It is Christmas Eve, so that means I am going to be setting up a decades-old (still has the 'Made in West Germany label on the bottom of the locomotive) LGB train at my parent’s house. Trains going around Christmas trees are a big thing in my family. In fact, there’s no tree that can’t be improved by a train. 

You’ve probably seen this train at the Rowayton Arts Center’s Holiday Gift Show - and if you haven’t: they are open today from 10:00am to 2:00pm so I recommend you go there and pick up a last-minute Christmas gift for the cyclist in your life. Like, say…I don’t know….a nice framed photograph from a local artist. 

One of my photographs sold at the show (hence the empty spot on the wall) so I replaced it with another…and you’ll have to see which one it is when you go there.

But you’ll also see the LGB train going around the tree and probably ask yourself: “Well, how did it get there?”

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. 

This is a Landrider that was waiting for the ‘metal only’ bin behind a bike shop before I picked it up. This bike is known for two things: the informercials that seemed to market cycling toward the Metamucil generation…and for its complex automatic transmission. 

The way it worked was as such: the wheel would turn and make a special mechanism on the derailleur spin, and the centrifugal force would pull the derailleur away from the bike and make it shift. 

Not easy to photograph when in motion.

When I picked up the bike the rubber band that made the thing on the derailleur spin was missing (probably part of why the bike was being given away) so I replaced it with a large rubber O-ring from the hardware store for $4.49.

The reason the Landrider got all mixed up in the train set I loaned to the Rowayton Arts Center for Christmas is because (long story) I had to borrow that particular train back for a day in early December. But I didn’t want the show to be without the train for too long, so the very next morning I decided to ride the six miles to RAC with the train, so I packed it carefully in a city box pannier I never use and put it in a basket on a bike I’ve never ridden. 

I discovered something on this ride: the world is not ready for an automatic transmission. At least not this one. Sure, when you’re accelerating the bike shifts up but when at speed it would often shift up or down without warning, causing a distraction or my feet to slip off the pedals. Also my thumbs were constantly pushing for shifters that weren’t there. I had experienced a similar phenomenon when I went from my Jeep Wrangler (1995 - 2006), which had a manual transmission, to my Honda Element, which doesn’t. 

Part of the reason bikes are great is that they do what your body tells them to do. On the Landrider, the natural order of things is reversed.

Unseemly. 

The other thing I discovered on this ride is that if you come across one of those Ridiculous Car Antlers that has fallen off some Suburban, you can attach it to your bike and create your own Instant 3 Foot Law Reminder. 

The Landrider and I continued on. As my legs burned I wondered how much of my energy was being wasted in the centrifugal clutch. I was tempted to abandon the antler to cut down on wind resistance, but before I could do such a thing I arrived at the Rowayton Arts Center.

I returned the train (it was undamaged!) and rode back to Stamford. Because I realized how few Sundays were left in the year where I’d be able to ride about, I took side trips to Lorca and Pacific Swim Bike Run so I could write my #GiftsForCyclists series - thus leaving this dreadful bike (which will probably not be in my possession very soon) in the foreground of the shots I took. 

When I finally got home I discovered the antler bounced off somewhere on my journey - thus returning to the streets from whence it came (unbelievably, while out a couple of days later on my city bike, I found another antler in the road. Mind your tacky car decorations, citizens).

I can honestly say I will never ride this Landrider again.  But still, I got to ride a bike - and I got to bring a train on a bike instead of the other way around. Since today is the last day of the Rowayton Arts Center Holiday Gift Show, I hope all last minute Christmas shoppers enjoy it even more now that they know the origin story.  

And don’t forget: you can still buy raffle tickets for the BikePort Co-Op’s BPT-ONE if you can’t make it to Rowayton and are still short some stocking stuffers. I’m Mike from DIYBIKING.COM wishing you all a Merry Christmas. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.