I can’t describe this event any better than the description on the New Amsterdam Bike Slam website:

Four hundred years after Henry Hudson’s arrival in Manhattan, two teams of Dutch and American planners & designers face off in a battle for the future of New York City transportation. Their challenge: find ways to bring NYC cycling up to the level of the Netherlands, the only country with more bikes than people.

Spread over four days, the New Amsterdam Bike Slam is a live design battle, a dance party, a world-class transportation summit, a bridge across the Atlantic, and a path forward.

New Amsterdam Bike Slam is an initiative of Amsterdam Cycling to Sustainability, produced by Vélo Mondial and Transportation Alternatives, with funding from Transumo and the City of Amsterdam.

Party favors provided by New Amsterdam Records.

And some more text blatantly copied from the NABS site:

Inspired by poetry slams, reality television competitions, and celebrity death matches, the New Amsterdam Bike Slam is a unique battle for the future of New York City transportation.

On the evening of Saturday, September 12th, after three days of intense preparation, two teams of accomplished Dutch and American planners & designers will face off in a live competition, part performance art and part debate. Combining insights from marketing, urban planning, and design, each team will present its most creative, compelling vision to increase bicycling in lower Manhattan and the New York Harbor District.

Over three challenging rounds, each team will defend its proposals in front of a panel of expert judges and a live audience. At the end of the evening, the judges will declare a winner, with the most innovative and practical plan for making New York, and New Yorkers, more bicycle-friendly.

The next morning at Battery Park, Mr. Job Cohen, Mayor of Amsterdam – one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world – will convey the prize to the winning team: free Dutch bicycles, courtesy of WORKCYCLES.

I’ll add that, though not noted on the NABS website, those WORKCYCLES bike prizes are being donated in part by Dutch Bike Co, who’ll be opening their Dutch Bike New York City shop in early 2010.

The activities and festivities begin on Friday, 11 September and continue through Sunday 13 september. Check it out at New Amsterdam Bike Slam.

Actress Famke Jansen rides her WorkCycles Omafiets through the streets of New York

Actually it concerns me less that she’s a semi-famous celebrity type (former Bond-girl etc.) than that it’s just a cool photo of a good looking Dutch woman nonchalantly riding her good looking Dutch bike through Manhattan. Yes, the bike is a WorkCycles-Azor Omafiets, purchased from WorkCycles dealer Dutch Bike Seattle.

Whoever the photographer is, he used a seriously high resolution camera. Amongst the photo series are a couple that zoom in on details of Famke I didn’t specifically need to see. Look here if you DO want to see that but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the “adult” content.

Word on the street has it that an anonymous cyclist has put a €50,000 bounty out for anyone who can steal her bike seat and deliver it to his office in a zip lock bag. Famke, keep that bike and saddle well locked!

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.

West 8, a leading urban design & landscape architecture practice in Rotterdam, Netherlands has recently led a winning team in the design competition to transform Governors Island in New York into a major new park. This announcement was made by New York City mayor Bloomberg and New York State governor Spitzer on 19 December 2007.

The plan is to recreate Governors Island into an extraordinary park that embraces what New York Harbor encompasses: ecology, history, culture and beauty. Everybody knows New York City’s Central Park. Now Governors Island will become its “Un-central Park”.

Not only are the park plans lovely, the proposed shared wooden bicycles are too. Much like the white bicycles that are free to use in the beautiful Hoge Veluwe Park in the Netherlands (see below photos of the white bikes and wooden bikes in similar racks) Governors Island will have NO automobiles and feature simple wooden bicycles for visitors to use as needed. Making the bicycles from wood not only makes them charming. It also discourages theft. Stealing the wooden bikes won’t be easy anyway since the island is only accessible by ferry.

Governors Island has had a rich history dating back to the period when New Amsterdam was a Dutch colony, a fact probably not missed by either West 8 or the jury panel. That the Dutch have extensive experience with this type shared bicycle use certainly didn’t harm their proposal.

In case you’re not familiar with Governors Island: It is situated near the mouth of the East River between Manhattan and Queens, and is technically within the borders of Manhattan. Since its essentially in New York Harbor the Statue of Liberty is within view.

Here is more information about Governors Island from:
West 8: A brief history of Governors Island
Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation
Wikipedia: Governors Island

May 9, 2007

By COLIN MOYNIHAN
To look at nearly any bicycle — from graceful racers with inch-thick tires to the clunky, rusted workhorses of food delivery fleets — is to behold a union of form and function that has existed for nearly two centuries. Bicycles, after all, have been transporting people at least since 1817, when Baron Karl von Drais invented a contraption in Germany that operated without pedals and required riders to push against the ground with their feet to propel themselves.

Look closely though, and there are aspects that transcend the utilitarian. People who ride regularly tend toward the philosophical when they describe why. Some view bicycles as political symbols with which to make a statement about carbon emissions from cars. Others are inspired by the mobility that bikes can provide in a crowded urban setting. Then there are those who are invigorated by the physicality of pedaling or simply savor the way the city looks when viewed from atop two wheels.

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