Happy National Bike Week in the United States.
You probably know about and participate in the National Bike Challenge, in which you sign up to challenge yourself and your peers to ride more miles during the months of the challenge (May thru September). The more miles you ride, the more points you can earn for a chance to win prizes. You track your mileage with a bike challenge app. You can also import your rides from popular tracking tools like Strava.
They’re doing something similar in Europe with a European Cycling Challenge, now in its fifth year. Different cities — mostly in Poland, Italy, and the UK — compete to encourage more cycling for more people, and use an app to track the rides. Warsaw, Poland even had a Bike to Work Day today, complete with free breakfasts to those who rode their bikes, to encourage more participation in this #ECC2016. A good time was had by all on what appeared to be a lovely day.
People elsewhere around the world continue to use bikes for transportation, of course.
This boy prepares a popular Indian dish called paratha on a gas stove attached to his older brother’s bicycle at a transport stand in a street of New Delhi on May 19, 2016. Navin sells two Parathas with a chickpea sauce for 20 INR or about 2 US cents. This street corner is used as a micro bus stand that ferries mostly working people from this popular neighborhood to destinations further down a main avenue.
A street vendor sells ‘banh da’ (rice crackers) carried on her bicycle in downtown Hanoi on May 17, 2016.
A young man wearing a chef’s hat and pollution mask cycles through Piazza Venezia on May 13, 2016 in Rome, Italy.
A food vendor rides his bicycle across a flooded road to return back home after a downpour in the eastern Indian city Bhubaneswar, India, and Wednesday, 11 May 2016.
A man in Tokyo rides his Strida folding bike in the crosswalk.
A bicycle rickshaw driver rests in the shade on a hot afternoon in Amritsar on May 19, 2016 as a heat wave continues across north and central India.