History of Cycling on eBay: Moser’s Bike

1984 Francesco MOSER (Italy) “TT 51.151 HOUR RECORD ROAD” professional time trial bike. On sale / Auction HERE

 

SOLD for $3850 / £2440Medium/large sized with center-bb-to-top-of-saddle about 74cm.

Campagnolo Super Record, Ambrosio 700/650 disc, 3ttt, Regina, Vetta, etc.

Presented like handed over in good condition.

*************************************************************************************

Shipping ECONOMY (10-30+ days, full insured)*: USA US$ 116.00 – Japan US$ 138.00 – Europe US$ 89.00
Ship PRIORITY (5-15 days, insured)*: USA US$ 143 – Japan US$ 199 – Europe US$ 108 – Australia US$ 513

*************************************************************************************

Vintage time trial bike from Francesco Moser (Italy), type “TT 51.151 hour record road”.

Probably made in 1984.

Special aero designed Columbus framework.

Shiny paintwork in light blue/medium blue.

Equipped with 1984 Campagnolo Super Record,
3ttt bar/stem, Ambrosio disc wheels, Regina Freewheel/chain, etc.

Many pantographed parts.

Good to very good condition (presented like handed over).

Very good technic.

—

 

Medium/large sized with actual about 74cm from center bb to top of saddle.

(A special bent seat post for some extra height can be added if wished).

Seat tube (c-c) about 56cm (c-t 66cm), top tube about (c-c) 52cm, weight like presented 9.8kg, handlebar (c-c) 40cm, stem (c-c) 110mm.

Chris Chance on Cycle EXIF

WHAT A BEAUTY

Chris Chance is a bastion of the American old guard of custom frame building. He started building road frames in 1977, and his mountain bike frame, The Fat Chance, in 1982. Pre-MTB road frames are highly desirable to collectors of American rolling steel, and Mac Spikes is one such enthusiast. So far his collection consists of a 1987 Fat Chance Tandem, a 1985 Fat Chance kicker MTB, a rare pista frame and several Chris Chance road bikes, including this one, a custom frame from 1997.

With a paint job colorful enough to rival Italian steeds of the era, it’s a singular example of Chris Chance’s enigmatic work. Mac has built it up with a Campagnolo Athena gruppo, and while the limited edition ‘Contador’ LOOK Keo pedals aren’t period correct, the yellow is a perfect match. Sometimes that’s just as important. Check out Mac’s collection on his flickr.

 

Read more: http://www.cycleexif.com/chris-chance-cycles#ixzz1Yn6ZeOsr

Klunkers – the birth of the mtb

I love the bit in here where a young Gary Fisher (who works in a bike shop) speaks about klunking …. ‘it’s come a long way in 5 years and it’s going to go a long way ….’

This segment, Klunking, is from the late 1970s, hosted by Steve Fox, and comes from the Paul Colardo (an Evening Magazine crew member) collection. This is one of the first segments that Paul produced.

Steve Kotton was the cameraman on this shoot and remember having to climb up the steep hillside. There was also a lawsuit against KPIX brought by one of the riders. He claimed that the camera crew were in the middle of the road and he crashed. He lost the lawsuit because the video clearly showed the side of the track location of the crew.

It is believed this piece was edited by Jim Farney.

Segments from the original Evening Magazine are brought to you courtesy the School of Multimedia Communications archive at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and Jan Yanehiro.

The butte 100 – mtb race

From cycling news

The Butte 100 mountain bike race began with about 40 local racers headed out for little more than a day in the saddle. But even that number is debatable between those in Triple Ring Productions (TRP), the organizing body of the Butte 100 endurance mountain bike race. Back then, record keeping ranked just below figuring out who’s buying the post-race beer. Fast forward five short years and the race has evolved from its Montana-esque, grassroots approach into one of the nation’s newest elite endurance mountain bike races.

This past July, a record 228 racers came from 14 states and Canada to test their endurance at the fifth annual event. The routes, a 50- and 100-mile figure eight course, rambled over frontage roads, technical pitches, sandy doubletracks, and endless miles of smooth Continental Divide Trail singletrack. The draw is seeing over 16,000 feet of climbing recorded on the racer’s GPS; 9,000 feet for the 50-milers. The Butte 100 is one of the most difficult races in the US. At least that’s what mountain biking legend Tinker Juarez says.

In July, Juarez was back for a second year of competing in his favorite race and posted a course record (nine hours and 36 minutes) on his way to winning the 100-mile open class. He was made aware of the race in 2009 through a friend, while racing in Costa Rica. He did some research, called then race director Bob Waggoner, and committed. Juarez saw an opportunity – an opportunity for a race, a town, and a gauge of his own conditioning in the critical weeks leading up to Leadville.

Word of Juarez’s 2010 registration in this little, down-home race somewhere on Montana’s Continental Divide swept through the bike community. Overnight, the 2010 Butte 100 had literally tripled in size.

2010 was a pivotal year for the four who make up TRP: Gina Evans, Guy Vesco, Bob and Gwen Waggoner. It put the race on the map and realized a long-held vision of bringing endurance mountain bike racing to Montana.

The newfound popularity of the event exposed some weaknesses for those who were used to putting on a race for a handful of locals: a poorly marked turn sent racers off course; a late afternoon squall ripped canopies and poles into one congealed mess; handwritten results melted under the rain; and the post-race food were sorely underestimated. Weeks after the event, results were finally posted – skewed at best. The opportunity to showcase itself to the mountain biking world was a failure and the Butte 100’s future was uncertain.

Not long after the race, an employee at The Outdoorsman bike shop was visiting with two of the organizers about the race. A guidebook author and graduate student at Montana Tech saw an opportunity to apply his technical communication thesis to the race and offered his time. The crew agreed to bring him onboard. It turned out to be just what they were looking for. The addition of Jon Wick and his race bible thesis injected life into the veins of the depleted TRP.

In a time of introspection, the TRP members took a long look at what needed to be done to improve the race. A unanimous consensus was reached: if the Butte 100 was going to attract world-class athletes, it needed to be a world-class race. Period. The group recommitted themselves to the vision.

Others such as Ryan Munsen and Phil Dean came onboard to help with volunteer coordination and re-doing the website. A timing company was brought for near instantaneous results.

One short year after the wheels fell off, the 2011 Butte 100 closed registration with 228 racers and over 60 volunteers – both were race records.

That confidence spilled over to race day. The riders hammered under a typical summertime bluebird day. The elite racers relentlessly pressed Juarez throughout the day. Reports surfaced that John Curry surpassed Juarez for nearly 11 miles until cramping ensued. On the notorious climb out of the Basin Creek aid station, Juarez regained the lead and danced along the CDT never looking back. He crossed the finish line 12 minutes ahead of Curry and almost an hour before the next chaser, Bill Martin. An epic race, on all fronts, was happening that day.

Trail scouting is already underway for possible improvements for the next edition on August 4, 2012.

Growing pains are a necessary evil for every race, but the flawless 2011 race proved the Butte 100 has moved beyond infancy and is ready to line up next to the other established 100-milers.

A move back to cycling (and other alternatives) in cities

A great article on te rise of green in europe – a slant from the New York Times but interesting reading.

ZURICH — While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.

Christoph Bangert for The New York Times

Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded bypopular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of“environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter.

Likeminded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict the allowable number of parking spaces. On-street parking is vanishing. In recent years, even former car capitals like Munich have evolved into “walkers’ paradises,” said Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University who specializes in sustainable transportation.

“In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.”

To that end, the municipal Traffic Planning Department here in Zurich has been working overtime in recent years to torment drivers. Closely spaced red lights have been added on roads into town, causing delays and angst for commuters. Pedestrian underpasses that once allowed traffic to flow freely across major intersections have been removed. Operators in the city’s ever expanding tram system can turn traffic lights in their favor as they approach, forcing cars to halt.

Around Löwenplatz, one of Zurich’s busiest squares, cars are now banned on many blocks. Where permitted, their speed is limited to a snail’s pace so that crosswalks and crossing signs can be removed entirely, giving people on foot the right to cross anywhere they like at any time.

As he stood watching a few cars inch through a mass of bicycles and pedestrians, the city’s chief traffic planner, Andy Fellmann, smiled. “Driving is a stop-and-go experience,” he said. “That’s what we like! Our goal is to reconquer public space for pedestrians, not to make it easy for drivers.”

While some American cities — notably San Francisco, which has “pedestrianized” parts of Market Street — have made similar efforts, they are still the exception in the United States, where it has been difficult to get people to imagine a life where cars are not entrenched, Dr. Schipper said.

Europe’s cities generally have stronger incentives to act. Built for the most part before the advent of cars, their narrow roads are poor at handling heavy traffic. Public transportation is generally better in Europe than in the United States, and gas often costs over $8 a gallon, contributing to driving costs that are two to three times greater per mile than in the United States, Dr. Schipper said.

What is more, European Union countries probably cannot meet a commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions unless they curb driving. The United States never ratified that pact.

Globally, emissions from transportation continue a relentless rise, with half of them coming from personal cars. Yet an important impulse behind Europe’s traffic reforms will be familiar to mayors in Los Angeles and Vienna alike: to make cities more inviting, with cleaner air and less traffic.

Michael Kodransky, global research manager at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York, which works with cities to reduce transport emissions, said that Europe was previously “on the same trajectory as the United States, with more people wanting to own more cars.” But in the past decade, there had been “a conscious shift in thinking, and firm policy,” he said. And it is having an effect.

After two decades of car ownership, Hans Von Matt, 52, who works in the insurance industry, sold his vehicle and now gets around Zurich by tram or bicycle, using a car-sharing service for trips out of the city. Carless households have increased from 40 to 45 percent in the last decade, and car owners use their vehicles less, city statistics show.

“There were big fights over whether to close this road or not — but now it is closed, and people got used to it,” he said, alighting from his bicycle on Limmatquai, a riverside pedestrian zone lined with cafes that used to be two lanes of gridlock. Each major road closing has to be approved in a referendum.

Today 91 percent of the delegates to the Swiss Parliament take the tram to work.

Still, there is grumbling. “There are all these zones where you can only drive 20 or 30 kilometers per hour [about 12 to 18 miles an hour], which is rather stressful,” Thomas Rickli, a consultant, said as he parked his Jaguar in a lot at the edge of town. “It’s useless.”

Urban planners generally agree that a rise in car commuting is not desirable for cities anywhere.

Mr. Fellmann calculated that a person using a car took up 115 cubic meters (roughly 4,000 cubic feet) of urban space in Zurich while a pedestrian took three. “So it’s not really fair to everyone else if you take the car,” he said.

European cities also realized they could not meetincreasingly strict World Health Organization guidelinesfor fine-particulate air pollution if cars continued to reign. Many American cities are likewise in “nonattainment” of their Clean Air Act requirements, but that fact “is just accepted here,” said Mr. Kodransky of the New York-based transportation institute.

It often takes extreme measures to get people out of their cars, and providing good public transportation is a crucial first step. One novel strategy in Europe is intentionally making it harder and more costly to park. “Parking is everywhere in the United States, but it’s disappearing from the urban space in Europe,” said Mr. Kodransky, whose recent report“Europe’s Parking U-Turn” surveys the shift.

Sihl City, a new Zurich mall, is three times the size of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Mall but has only half the number of parking spaces, and as a result, 70 percent of visitors get there by public transport, Mr. Kodransky said.

In Copenhagen, Mr. Jensen, at the European Environment Agency, said that his office building had more than 150 spaces for bicycles and only one for a car, to accommodate a disabled person.

While many building codes in Europe cap the number of parking spaces in new buildings to discourage car ownership, American codes conversely tend to stipulate a minimum number. New apartment complexes built along the light rail line in Denver devote their bottom eight floors to parking, making it “too easy” to get in the car rather than take advantage of rail transit, Mr. Kodransky said.

While Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has generated controversy in New York by “pedestrianizing” a few areas like Times Square, many European cities have already closed vast areas to car traffic. Store owners in Zurich had worried that the closings would mean a drop in business, but that fear has proved unfounded, Mr. Fellmann said, because pedestrian traffic increased 30 to 40 percent where cars were banned.

With politicians and most citizens still largely behind them, Zurich’s planners continue their traffic-taming quest, shortening the green-light periods and lengthening the red with the goal that pedestrians wait no more than 20 seconds to cross.

“We would never synchronize green lights for cars with our philosophy,” said Pio Marzolini, a city official. “When I’m in other cities, I feel like I’m always waiting to cross a street. I can’t get used to the idea that I am worth less than a car.”

X-Dance Kitesurfing Short Film (5 Min)

Nice little film – well shot although narrative a touch twee (sorry guys I do like it though)

Los Angeles Afternoon, nominated for best Short Film at 2007 X-Dance Film Festival. Kitesurfing Film shot in Los Angeles on HD. Los Angeles Afternoon – Kite Surf
Directed by Mark Hannah – Produced by Mark Hannah, David Auerbach, Mathias Klozenbuecher

The Bicycle City and not Copenhagen

What happens to an impoverished developing nation town when you flood it with 20,000 bicycles? You lift three times that number of people out of poverty. Pedals for Progress and founder David Schweidenback have been shipping used American bicycles to Rivas, Nicaragua for the last two decades and the transformation has been incredible.

Help Fund Our Film:
indiegogo.com/​The-Bicycle-City-Film

thebicyclecityfilm.com/​

What happens when a poor town in an impoverished nation is saturated with tens of thousands of bicycles? The Bicycle City is the story of the struggle, determination, idealism, and hope that has brought about the transformation of an entire society.

Crippled by decades of military dictatorship, civil war, and environmental catastrophe, Nicaragua is the second poorest country in Latin America, having one of the region’s lowest GDPs and the second highest Human Poverty Index, behind only Haiti. Economic opportunities are few and those born into the lower classes tend to remain in poverty for life.

Over the past 20 years, more than 20,000 bicycles have been brought into Rivas, a city on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast, by the non-profit Pedals for Progress, which collects donated bicycles in the United States and distributes them in impoverished communities worldwide. Since the first was unloaded in Rivas in 1991, the bicycle has become an integral part of daily life.

Told from the vantage points of Julia, the street vendor; Xiomara, the young mother; Joaquin, the entrepreneur; and David, the unlikely philanthropist, The Bicycle City is the story of how an idealistic experiment has helped the war-ravaged city of Rivas find its own path to recovery and normalcy through the introduction of cheap, reliable transportation in the form of the bicycle.

The Bicycle City is a feature length documentary film currently in post-production.

Dear Urban Cyclists: Go Play in Traffic – by PJ O’ROURKE

place tongue in cheek now

By P.J. O’ROURKE

‘Although the technology necessary to build a bicycle has been around since ancient Egypt, bikes didn’t appear until the 19th century. The reason it took mankind 5,000 years to get the idea for the bicycle is that it was a bad idea.’

 

A fibrosis of bicycle lanes is spreading through the cities of the world. The well-being of innocent motorists is threatened as traffic passageways are choked by the spread of dull whirs, sharp whistles and sanctimonious pedal-pushing. Bike lanes have appeared in all the predictable places—Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berkeley and Palo Alto. But the incidence of bike lanes is also on the rise in unlikely locales such as slush-covered Boston, rain-drenched Vancouver, frozen Montreal and Bogotá, Colombia (where, perhaps, bicycles have been given the traffic lanes previously reserved for drug mules). Even Dublin, Ireland, has had portions of its streets set aside for bicycles only—surely unnecessary in a country where everyone’s car has been repossessed. Then there is the notorious case of New York City. Not long ago the only people who braved New York on bicycles were maniacal bike messengers and children heeding an abusive parent’s command to “go play in traffic.” Now New York has 670 miles of bike lanes—rather more than it has miles of decently paved streets. The proliferation of New York’s bike lanes is the work of the city’s indomitable transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-(Genghis)-Khan. Her department has a horde of 4,500 employees and a budget nearing a billion dollars. The transportation commissioner’s job is—judging by rush-hour cab and subway rides and last December’s blizzard—to prevent the transportation of anybody or anything to anywhere in New York. Bicycles are the perfect way to go nowhere while carrying nothing. The bicycle is a parody of a wheeled vehicle—a donkey cart without the cart, where you do the work of the donkey. Although the technology necessary to build a bicycle has been around since ancient Egypt, bikes didn’t appear until the 19th century. The reason it took mankind 5,000 years to get the idea for the bicycle is that it was a bad idea. The bicycle is the only method of conveyance worse than feet. You can walk up three flights of stairs carrying one end of a sofa. Try that on a bicycle. Almost everything that travels on a city street, including some of the larger people in the crosswalks, can crush a bicycle. Everything that protrudes from or into a city street—pot holes, pavement cracks, manhole covers—can send a bicycle flying into the air.

When the president of the United States goes somewhere in Washington, does he ride an armored bicycle? Given that riding a bike in a city is insane and that very few cities need more insane people on their streets, why the profusion of urban bike lanes? One excuse for bike lanes is that an increase in bicycle riding means a decrease in traffic congestion. A visit to New York—or Bogotá—gives the lie to this notion. You can’t decrease traffic congestion by putting things in the way of traffic. Also, only a few bicycles are needed to take up as much space as my Chevrolet Suburban—just one if its rider is wobbling all over the place while trying to Tweet. And my Suburban seats eight. The answer to traffic congestion is lower taxes so that legions of baby boomers my age can afford to retire and stay home.

Bike lane advocates also claim that bicycles are environmentally friendly, producing less pollution and fewer carbon emissions than automobiles. But bicycle riders do a lot of huffing and puffing, exhaling large amounts of CO2. And whether a bicycle rider, after a long bicycle ride, is cleaner than the exhaust of a modern automobile is open to question. If drops in pollution and traffic congestion are wanted and if discomfort and inconvenience are the trade-offs, we should be packed into tiny circus clown cars. These fit neatly into bike lanes and provide more amusement to bystanders than bicycle wrecks. In fact, bike lanes don’t necessarily lessen car travel. A study by the U.K. Department for Transport found that the installation of “cycle facilities” in eight towns and cities resulted in no change in the number of people driving cars. Bike lanes don’t even necessarily increase bike riding. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the Dutch government spent $945 million on bicycle routes without any discernible effect on how many Dutch rode bicycles. “The bicycle is a parody of a wheeled vehicle—a donkey cart without the cart, where you do the work of the donkey.” But maybe there’s a darker side to bike-lane advocacy. Political activists of a certain ideological stripe want citizens to have a child-like dependence on government. And it’s impossible to feel like a grown-up when you’re on a bicycle if you aren’t in the Tour de France. All but the most athletic among us get on and off a bicycle the way a toddler goes up and down stairs. Wearing bicycle shorts in public is more embarrassing than wearing Depends. Exchanging briefcases for backpacks takes us from the boardroom to the schoolyard. And it’s hard to keep a straight face when talking to anyone in a Skittles-colored, Wiffle ball-slotted bike helmet that makes you look like Woody Woodpecker. Bike lanes must be intended to foster immaturity or New York would have chosen instead to create 670 miles of bridle paths. Being on horseback has adult gravitas. Search plazas, parks and city squares the world over and you won’t fine a single statue of a national hero riding a bike. This promotion of childishness in the electorate means that bike lanes are just the beginning. Soon we’ll be making room on our city streets for scooter and skateboard lanes, Soapbox Derby lanes, pogo-stick lanes, lanes for Radio Flyer wagons (actually more practical than bicycles since you can carry a case of beer—if we’re still allowed to drink beer), stilt lanes, three-legged-race lanes, lanes for skipping while playing the comb and wax paper, hopscotch lanes and Mother-May-I lanes with Mayor Bloomberg at the top of Lenox Hill shouting to the people on Park Avenue, “Take three baby steps!” A good, hard-played game of Mother-May-I will make us all more physically fit. Fitness being another reason given for cluttering our cities with bike lanes. But why is it so important that the public be fit? Fit for what? Are they planning to draft us into forced labor battalions? Bike lanes violate a fundamental principle of democracy. We, the majority who do not ride bicycles, are being forced to sacrifice our left turns, parking places and chances to squeeze by delivery trucks so that an affluent elite can feel good about itself for getting wet, cold, tired and run-over. Our tax dollars are being used to subsidize our annoyance. Bicycle riders must be made to bear the burden of this special-interest boondoggle. Bicycle registration fees should be raised until they produce enough revenue to build and maintain new expressways so that drivers can avoid city streets clogged by bike lanes. Special rubber fittings should be made available so that bicycle riders can wear E-ZPass transponders on their noses. And riders’ license qualifications should be rigorous, requiring not only written exams and road tests but also bathroom scales. No one is to be allowed on a bicycle if the view he or she presents from behind causes the kind of hysterical laughter that stops traffic. Bike lanes can become an acceptable part of the urban landscape, if bicycle riders are willing to pay their way. And if they pay enough, maybe we’ll even give them a lift during the next snow storm.

A way to a better future in cities – Bikes

In the second chapter of Streetfilms’ Moving Beyond the Automobile series, we’re taking a look at bicycling.

The benefits of cycling are simple: It helps reduce congestion, meet sustainability goals, and improve public health. With Portland leading the way, many American cities have seen the share of people biking to work rise substantially in recent years [PDF]. For this video we spent some time with leading thinkers in New York, San Francisco and Portland to discuss how safer cycling infrastructure is helping more people make the choice to bike.

This series is made possible by funding from The Oram Foundation’s Fund for The Environment & Urban Life.

Casio (square) digital atomic wave watches

green atomic

I love the square watches that G-shock make particularly the GWm5600BC – but they do others which are equally fantastic …

 

The green GWM5610 – get it here

Atomic Multi-band self-adjusting

Receives time calibration signals and corrects the time automatically. Casio watches with Wave Ceptor technology receive radio waves carrying American Standard Time data transmitted from Fort Collins, Colorado. It then corrects the time automatically for one of four U.S. cities you pre-select depending on your time zone and displays the time.

• Correct time reception, self adjusting.
• Self-adjusts to time zone differences, wherever you go from coast to coast! * after home time is set

Compatibility with all six transmission stations worldwide:
Multi Band 6 is the worlds first radio-controlled system built to receive time calibration signals from six transmission stations: two in Japan and one each in North America, the United Kingdom and Germany, plus the new station in China.

• Miniaturized, shock-resistant, high-sensitivity amorphous antenna.
• Large-capacity, power-saving LSI controlling 6-station radio wave reception.

atomic surf

Get the GWX5600 here

New York, NY, August 2, 2010 — Casio America, Inc. proudly debuts the G-Shock GWX5600B-7, a perfect pairing of the surf-friendly G-LIDE style with advanced timepiece technology. Beach fresh in a shiny black and white colorway, the new GWX5600B-7 features Self-Charging, Tough Solar Power and Self-Adjusting Multi-Band 6 Atomic Timekeeping for superior accuracy and performance.

Self-Adjusting, Multi-Band 6 Atomic Timekeeping – Compatible with all six transmission stations worldwide, Multi-Band 6 is the world’s first radio-control system built to receive time calibration signals from up to six transmission stations: two in Japan and one each in North America, the United Kingdom and Germany, plus the new station in China. Through a miniaturized, shock-resistant, highly sensitive amorphous antenna and large-capacity, power-saving LSI, stable operation of watch functions including 6-station radio wave reception are achieved. With Casio’s Atomic Timekeeping Technology, you will always have ultimate precision.Self-Charging, Tough Solar Power – A tiny, solar panel combined with a large-capacity rechargeable battery enables a variety of energy-hungry functions to operate smoothly. The result is an impressive solar timepiece that assures reliable timekeeping and greatly reduces the need for battery change.

Designed with the surf lifestyle in mind, the new G-LIDE timepiece features a Tide Graph function with 100 pre-set site locations as well as a Moon Age & Phase Data indicator for the ultimate in tide tracking. Performance driven, the GWX5600B-7 additional features include Shock Resistance, 200M Water Resistance, Full Auto EL Backlight, Flash Alert, World Time (31TZ/48 City + UTC), 4 Multi-function Alarms and 1 Snooze Alarm, Hourly Time Signal, 1/100th Sec. Stopwatch, Dual Countdown Timers, 12/24 Hr. Formats, Mute Function and Mineral Glass for unmatched functionality.

“Casio G-Shock is proud to expand our G-LIDE product line for our water sports enthusiasts,” said Shigenori Itoh, Vice President of Casio’s Timepiece Division. “Fusing the high performance G-LIDE with advanced Tough Solar Power and Multi Band 6 Atomic Timekeeping create a truly surfer-focused chronograph.”

nice watches – both atomic (radio sync) and solar powered. Not sure the black face would be very readable.

American Couple Documenting Young People’s Lives Around The World – BikeRadar

American Couple Documenting Young People’s Lives Around The World – BikeRadar.

An American couple are preparing for a 30,000 mile cycle journey to document the lives of 20-somethings in more than 50 different countries across the world.

Photographers Alan Winslow, 26, and Morrigan McCarthy, 27, will leave Fairbanks, Alaska in July this year and expect to spend as much as three-and-a-half years on the road. The two, who live in Maine and work together under the title of The Restless Collective, have dubbed their new project Geography of Youth and will share images and stories with followers via digital postcards, posted on the project’s website,www.geographyofyouth.org.

“The bike is a great icebreaker,” Winslow told BikeRadar. “In the past when we travelled around America for work in planes and cars to do a story we’d have to park and find our [own] way around. But for some reason when we rolled into towns on our bikes people would just open their doors and chat with us.”

The scope of the Geography of Youth project will be significantly larger than a previous journey, around the United States, in 2008. Titled Project Tandem, it saw them ride 11,000 miles around the US to document the views of everyday Americans on environmental issues. The two have subsequently continued to tour their home country, sharing what they learned through a lecture series and photographic exhibition.

Both Project Tandem and the Geography of Youth share common genesis in the duo’s desire to discover whether the reported opinion around major issues by mass media matched people’s actual experience.

“We were reading a lot of newspaper articles about environmental issues here in the States and we were reading a lot of polls about what Americans thought about the environment, global warming and pollution. But we didn’t think there was enough information or direct quotes from people around the States,” said Winslow of the motivation for their original trip.

“It’s sort of the same thing with our new project,” added McCarthy. “We started reading a bunch of stuff in the newspapers about twenty-somethings and frankly, when we were on our last trip we ran into a lot of twenty-somethings. It struck us in the past couple of years that people in their twenties can lead such disparate lives. Some have children, houses and have settled down, while others are dedicated to their careers, or doing their own thing, or still living with their parents.

“The question we’re asking is why are we so spread out across all these walks of life and we also realised that we are so connected through things like the internet. We want to explore that and find out what life is really like for people all over the world in this age range.”

The two will ride directly south from Alaska along the east coast of Canada, through Central America and across the South American continent. From there they will travel to South Africa, their starting point for a south-to-north traverse of Africa. They will then fly from Egypt to New Zealand. A subsequent leg along the east coast of Australia will be followed by journey through South-East Asia. They will cross the bulk of the Asian landmass by train before looping around Europe. They expect to conclude the trip in Turkey sometime in late 2014.

The sheer magnitude of the trip has made plotting a precise route difficult, with political and environmental factors expected to alter their final path. “If all goes according to plan, which it most certainly won’t, we expect it to take three-and-a-half years,” said McCarthy.

The admitted that they had ridden little before their 2008 trip, essentially using the first three weeks of that journey to build fitness for the months that followed. However, the two have since become dedicated cyclists. Their preferred mode of transport has also made finding subjects for their work as photographers easier – something that is almost certain to continue on their journey around the world.

“There’s something so gentle about a bicycle. It’s not a terribly intimidating mode of transportation and you’re obviously pretty vulnerable,” said McCarthy. “People want to talk to you and ask you questions. They want to chat to you and find out what you’re doing and why you’re on touring bikes. That they allows you to ask them questions, find out about them, and that interaction is invaluable to us.”

Video: The Geography of Youth

With their departure still five months away, the two are working 12 hours a day in an effort to secure sponsors and financial backing for the project. British saddle company Brooks and pannier manufacturer Ortlieb have already agreed to provide material support for the pair. They have also set-up a Kickstarter account, which they hope will provide funding for the North and South American legs of the trip.

McCarthy and Winslow are also working hard to reply to a spate of emails of support that have flooded in since they launched the project last month.

“People have just been writing to us saying, ‘this is great, I thought of doing something like this but I never did, so congratulations and good luck.’ We’re trying to write all these people back because it seems to have touched some sort of nerve, which is great and more than we could have hoped for. So we’re trying to give back a little something to anybody who has reached out to say hey to us.”

People will be able to follow the pair’s progress via the project website and Facebook.

Given the relatively specific focus of their project, Winslow and McCarthy agree that the lines between art, anthropology and journalism are blurred. But vagaries of definition aside, their goal is simple: share what they learn.

“We are speaking to some well known professors – sociologists and anthropologists in the university system here who do research twenty-somethings, so we’re trying to bring an academic side to it as well,” said McCarthy.

“We’ve been asked to define the trip a lot lately. I think we’re really more exploring. We’re trying to gather information out in the world and share it with anybody who will listen. We’ll be using writing, photos and maybe some video to send back, through the internet, all these things that we’re seeing.”

 

From America Bikes – Bikes and cycling vs cars and Congestion

American focussed but probably the same in the UK

 

From America Bikes:

1. Bicycling and walking make up 10% of all trips made in the U.S., but receive less than 2% of federal transportation funding.
2. Bicyclists and pedestrians account for 13% of traffic fatalities, but receive less than 1% of federal safety funding.
3. 40% of all trips in America are two miles or less, 74% of which are traveled by car.
4. Americans spend, on average, 18% of their annual income for transportation. The average annual operating cost of a bicycle is 3.75% ($308) of an average car ($8,220).
5. A small reduction in driving causes a large drop in traffic. In 2008, the number of vehicle miles traveled dropped 3%, translating to a nearly 30% reduction in peak hour congestion.
6. Transportation sources account for 70% of our nation’s oil consumption and for 30% of total U.S. GHC emissions.
7. Simply increasing bicycling and walking from 10% of trips to 13% could lead to fuel savings of around 3.8 billion gallons a year. This is equivalent to having 19 million more hybrid cars on the road.
8. 89% of Americans believe that transportation investments should support the goals of reducing energy use.
9. 71% of Americans report that they would like to bicycle more. 53% favor increasing federal spending on bicycle lanes and paths.
10. For the price of one mile of four-lane urban highway, around $50 million, hundreds of miles of bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure can be built, an investment that could complete an entire network of active transportation facilities for a mid-sized city.