Fuck cars. Ride bikes.
Switching from a carcentric to a bike-centric urban infrastructure feels like the single best way to improve the economy, public health, and environmental conciousness imaginable. With a single change you’re:
Promoting an active lifestyle for the population
Creating more foot traffic and bike traffic for small businesses
Moving people from cars to bikes (burning less fuel)
Sowing the seeds for more environmentally-concious thinking in the population
Now, obviously, the go to city people think of regarding bike infrastructure is usually Amsterdam. But how transferable is the Amsterdam “bike design” language to, say, Kyiv? Well, I think the answer is “not that transferable”.
Transferability is the concept of taking something that works in one place and transfering it to another place.
Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not really sure why the rules used in Amsterdam can’t be applied to Kyiv. I mean, it’s all the basic rules of “take space from cars and give it to bikes.”
And the street structure in Kyiv is much closer to how Amsterdam looks than to how Copenhagen works.
So yeah, I’m not quite sure what I’m thinking of here when I’m writing this pae.
My Bike
I currently ride a Fairdale Lookfar with the lilac color scheme from Nora Vasconcellos.
I spent most of 2022 (Feb - July) watching hella videos about bikes, choosing between all the models currently available in Ukraine, doing “deep dives” into components, frame materials, and frame geometries…
And then just bought this bike because I loved the color and I think Nora is a cool skater 😆.
So, if I had to give one tip about choosing a bike it would be:
Buy a bike that looks good to you because if you think it looks good, you’ll be more likely to ride it regularly.
And then I guess tip #2 would be:
Don’t just buy a bike because it’s cheap (unless it’s used and you know what you’re doing), because the “ride quality” between a cheap bike and a mid-range bike is so huge it’s definitely worth to go for mid-range.
At some point the marginal gains of more expensive bikes just isn’t worth it, but if your bike is in the $400+ range, you’ll probably end up being happy riding it for a long time and loving it.
And tip #3:
When in doubt, go for a steel bike.
Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not really sure why the rules used in Amsterdam can’t be applied to Kyiv. I mean, it’s all the basic rules of “take space from cars and give it to bikes.”
And the street structure in Kyiv is much closer to how Amsterdam looks than to how Copenhagen works.
So yeah, I’m not quite sure what I’m thinking of here when I’m writing this pae.