Free coffee for bike commuters

Attention San Jose bike people: I put $40 in the pot just for you at Bel Bacio Il Migliore Caffè in Little Italy, and there’s still at least $30 available for you to spend. Please spend it today. Show up with a bike, ask for a “sospeso for bike train” and get a free coffee on Yours Truly. One drink per person, please, and please tip your barista. You can access Bel Bacio directly off of the Guadalupe River Trail between West Julian and West St John Streets just west of downtown San Jose.

Bike news below the photo of commuters waiting to board as Caltrain 329 pulls into Diridon Station in San Jose, California. 4000 people board Caltrain each weekday morning in San Jose, with about 400 of them rolling their bikes on board for their northbound commute to jobs elsewhere in Silicon Valley, on the Peninsula, and in San Francisco.


Caltrain 329 San Jose Diridon Station

Do you remember Dan Koeppel’s excellent “Invisible Cyclist” story in Bicycling Magazine eight years ago? The lesson: recent immigrants who ride bikes to their day labor jobs aspire to car ownership. Duh, right? City Lab asks the same question of low-income Americans, with unsurprising results.

WaPo covers the 2014 Brompton Bicycle U.S. Championship Race with a video and fun series of photos. [ paywall ]

Denver Post Editorial: Dogs treated better than cyclists in Ft Collins Hit and Run case in which Theresa Marie O’Connor is sentenced to a year in the county lockup (with work release privileges) after she left Dr. Ernesto Wiedenbrug to die on the side of the road last January.

USA Cycling coach James Herrera explains how to become a better climber. Hint: It involves work. You need to overload (i.e. push harder than you’re accustomed to), recover, and repeat.

This is not Alberto Contador’s broken bicycle.

“Please allow me to get something off my chest,” writes Chris Bruntlett of Vancouver, BC. “I despise it when someone refers to me as a ‘cyclist’. The phrase ‘avid cyclist’ is even worse. I am no more an avid cyclist than I am an avid walker or avid eater. I am someone who often uses a bicycle, simply because it is the most civilized, efficient, enjoyable, and economical way to get around my city.”

Discussion about the recent news that male cyclists have a higher incidence of prostate cancer than the general population of men, which I guess is something like a variation of the 21st Century version of the “bicycle face” scare of 1890.

Lady Fleur tests out the new bike repair station at the Mountain View, CA library.

How to make biking mainstream in a car-centric city.

Urban Velo looks a little deeper at London’s TFL Share the Road video. “It’s a little pie-in-the-sky thinking, but a suitable reminder regardless.”

LTE: Patrick Dickson takes the city of Burbank to task for putting the burden of traffic safety on the victim.

Net Zero Growth proposal for Palo Alto means net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions, net-zero vehicle miles traveled or net-zero use of potable water. It’ll never happen, and state law isn’t to blame. For whatever reason Tanya Snyder believes California’s CEQA laws keep higher density development from happening in Palo Alto; everybody local to the Bay Area knows it’s Palo Alto NIMBYism pure and simple.

The Onion reports on yesterday’s rest day in the Tour de France.

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