unsolicited sticker found on doede's bakfiets

Our website dude Doede van der Linden sent me this pic today. Somebody stuck this sticker on his Bakfiets Cargobike today.

“Rot op met deze &*%$#@! fiets” roughly translates to “Fuck off with this fucking bike” .

In other words somebody is displeased with Doede’s choice of bicycle. Below, the same in better detail.

The sticker in all it's glory

Here we can read the smaller text below.

Dit is een asociale fiets hij is echt te groot en waarschijnlijk kan ook jij er niet normaal mee fietsen

And in English: “This is an antisocial bike it is really too big and you probably also can’t cycle normally”

Now let’s consider this more carefully.

Now if anything is antisocial it’s telling people, unsolicited, by sticking things on their bikes, that they have too many kids, that they ride a bike that’s “too big”, and that they probably can’t ride a bike normally. So fuck off, you righteous asshole! Put stickers on your own bike and don’t tell people how they should live. Be happy that Doede rides a bakfiets (no wider than the handlebars of a normal bike in case it matters) instead of driving a Cadillac Escalade. And be happy that you live in Amsterdam, cycling capital of the world.

Just browsing through the old photos here, and I came across some nice oldies: January 2004, WorkCycles‘ first shop in the Veemarkt in Amsterdam under construction. We’d cleaned it up from it’s former (extremely dirty) life as a truck garage and installed the platform that’s still in place.

The large beams were purchased new but the rest of the wood was second hand. I bought an entire truckload of used “betonplex” which is an extremely tough and water resistant coated plywood. It’s a very expensive material and I scored it cheaply but… it was covered in concrete molding residue and had thousands of (bend and broken) screws to be removed. It took a friend and I a couple weeks to clean these boards but to this day almost all of the flooring and shelving in the shop is from this purchase.

A few bikes are visible: Gustav Transport trike on the right and on the left a handful of Monarks including a Long John. Except for those big beams, the Gustav transported practically everything needed to build this shop. Sometimes it was loaded with 250+ kg of materials. That bike remained in rental service until 2008 when Melissa Halley purchased it. I’ll tell that story in a following post.

June 2004, WorkCycles Veemarkt shop is open for business. It wasn’t busy yet and here artist friends Sietske Tjallingii and Eric Staller are using it as HQ for a film shoot nearby. I was happy to participate, especially considering the attractive women involved. Kyoko and I didn’t meet until a couple years later.

June 2004, Gustav Transport cargo trike in service as a rolling film platform… for the Conference Bike. That’s me pedaling. They filmed this movie about the CoBi.

Above a couple more recent pics of the WorkCycles Veemarkt shop from Marc of Amsterdamize fame.

On Wednesday, May 13th (2009), hoist that bike onto the roof of your car and drive it to work! Celebrate the joys of bike-driving with your fellow road warriors! Put some miles on that under-used eco-transport! Plus, raise awareness about the hazard that affects bike-lovers everywhere. Low clearance garages.

All WorkCycles bikes are built to order for their new owners, but we generally keep them quite understated. After all they’re workhorses. Sometimes, though, we just enjoy making something more special. This bike was an experiment in combining the beautiful, curved tube Oma frame with the lighter parts of the Secret Service… and perhaps we then got a little overzealous. The result is still an omafiets but definitely not the one your grandmother rode. Nonetheless it remains a tough, utilitarian bike with full LED/dynamo lighting, fenders, front carrier, chaincase etc.

We were a little sad to see her go but she’s clearly going to a good home; a lovely, sporty woman in Amsterdam who rides 1 1/2 hours per day. Her husband also rides one of our bikes.

In case you’re wondering what one of these babies will set you back, it was €1200 as you see it. Really, that’s a bargain for so much hand-made love you can enjoy every day for decades.

cargobike panda henry pascal 1, originally uploaded by henry in a’dam.

Pascal, Papa practicing plural panda portraiture.

On our way to see friends for dinner at super yummy New King in the Zeedijik. Sun was directly into the camera, making things tricky. We’ll have to try again later.

A while back I wrote this post about Bicycle rain protection, showing a new bicycle rain canopy from France. While perhaps effective it just seems a tad bit overkill, not to mention nerdy as hell. I mean, how often do you actually ride in the rain? Here in Holland there’s an expression “Je bent niet van suiker.”, roughly translating to “Quit yer whining and just ride yer bike”. Here we see that the Dutch indeed don’t make much fuss about some water drops falling on your head. See: Dutch ride in rain. Germans are sugar.

Dutch Bike with Rain Visor, originally uploaded by Dapper Lad Cycles.

Nonetheless some people are clearly charmed by the above contraption and have even mounted it on our bicycles, knowing full well that it might incite my critical wrath. My evaluation?… “Dorktastique”

Amazingly Veltop has not been alone in pursuing this avenue. Last weekend I visited the Spezi Rad Messe (means “dorks and their insane bike inventions” in German) and happened across these people reinventing the wheel:

In the case of this gentleman’s creation not only does the canopy fold up, but also the bicycle. It remains unclear why one would fold a 40kg electric bicycle, though. Certainly not to fit it into a car, given the text “one fewer unnecessarily large automobile” printed at the bottom of the canopy. Perhaps not, but one more unnecessarily large rain canopy

This trike is also headed down the same slippery path, with a similar looking rain shield offered as an option on his “Das “Notebook” unter den Dreirädern” (means “I have much more spare time than sense”)

But wait. That’s not all. This creative soul thought to add it to their single passenger recumbent rickshaw. Single passenger recumbent rickshaw? Why not just take them on the rear carrier of a regular bike? Hello? Must you people always think of the most complex possible solution to a simple problem?

By the way, the scooter world has been plagued by these things as well:

Silicon Valley compact car, originally uploaded by henry in a’dam.

I was in Palo Alto, California last week, or technically Menlo Park when I took this photo. There they have some of the smaller parking spaces designated “COMPACT”, I assume meaning “this space is reserved for smaller cars”.

Apparently opinions vary about what constitutes a compact car. Incidentally this wasn’t the only offender, just the most egregious one at that moment directly in front of me.

Houston Freeways

Here in the Netherlands we’re proud of the extensive and beautifully executed public transport system and bicycling infrastructure. Elsewhere they’re proud of other achievements. Houston, Texas, for example, seems to be proud of its freeway system… proud enough at least for Erik Slotboom (with a Dutch name, btw) to have written and published “Houston Freeways, A Historical and Visual Journey”, according to its website “the most comprehensive book ever written about a regional freeway system.”

Are you a freeway fan too? You can download the book free at this site.

Thanks to Steve Pinkus, emerging livable streets planning guru for the tip.

Though I don’t really enjoy traveling by plane, Kyoko and I always note how wonderful it is to return to Schiphol Airport, far and away the best airport we know. It’s attractive, well marked and human in scale. There’s interesting art, pleasant lounges and acceptable restaurants. There are seemingly never lines or confusion and our luggage is usually on the baggage claim conveyor within moments of arriving. A few meters walk and a spacious elevator downstairs and we’re on a train to Amsterdam Central where another few meters walk brings us to tram 13 which stops in front of our house: 30 minutes from terminal to home in the city center. Thanks Amsterdam. You rock.

We test the public transport systems everywhere we go, sometimes to save money and sometimes out of morbid curiosity. Getting from the airport in Washington DC to Manhattan would fall into the morbid category. What could have been a few hour drive turned into an expensive all day adventure of ad-hoc shuttle buses, waiting for hours in train stations, broken down trains and struggling to drag luggage though New York’s horribly outdated and inaccessible subway system.

During this trip we sampled San Francisco and New York (JFK) again, this time with 8 month old Pascal in his carriage. With Sky Trains finally linking both airports to metros and trains things have improved considerably. But then again improvement is always easy when beginning with nothing. Just a fistful of comments:

New York
The fit, unencumbered and intrepid urban warrior can pretty quickly get around most of New York City in this extensive but hopelessly inhumane system. The shameful condition of the stations and non-Manhattan trains I can accept but the inaccessibility of it all is a bad joke. Try getting around the boroughs as a visitor, with a baby and/or luggage and you’ll understand what I mean: terrible and often misleading signage, large elevation differences and generally no working elevator or even escalator, very narrow turnstiles and not always an attendant to open the gates…

New York: charge lots of money for parking and on all of the bridges and shove that money right into building cycling infrastructure, traffic calming and massively overhauling the subways. As a result fewer people will drive reducing the costs of road maintenance, and subway ridership will increase massively increasing revenues.

San Francisco
The shiny new Air Train here connects directly to BART which goes right to the city. So far we’re in Euro performance territory here. But then it somehow just ends… before we’ve even really gotten into the city. That great BART metro runs along the southern edge of the city and then from there it’s just a ragtag collection of buses and Munis to serve the city. We actually walked up the hill to our hotel in Nob Hill along the bus line on late weekday afternoon. After 30 minutes pushing a baby carriage, towing a suitcase and wearing backpacks we arrived at the hotel… not a single bus had passed us, nor did one go by while we checked in.

SF: You’ve a lovely city but it’s terrible to get around. Charge lots of money for parking, institute some form of congesting pricing and put tolls on the bridges. Use the money to build a public transport system that actually goes through the city. Much of SF is lightly trafficked and/or too hilly for practical cycling so building cycling infrastructure should be relatively easy and cheap.

See? Everybody can be an urban planner as long as they needn’t show any results.

Perhaps only in Amsterdam: A jazz band that plays while riding in a bakfiets.

And I just noticed that the video was made in the Palmgracht, right around the corner from WorkCycles Lijnbaansgracht shop.