Category: Musings

7 MIND BLOWING BIKE PREDICTIONS FOR 2014 THAT WILL ROCK YOUR WORLD

Richard MasonerJanuary 3, 20145 Comments on 7 MIND BLOWING BIKE PREDICTIONS FOR 2014 THAT WILL ROCK YOUR WORLD

Made you look! That headline is partly a joke, partly an experiment, and partly a commentary on this trend of stupidly hyperbolic click bait.

It started with a joke and experiment by Calgary Herald reporter and bike blogger Tom Babin, who tweeted two different headlines for the same story on winter cycling in Calgary. The below tweets are reverse chronology, i.e. read from bottom to top:

Tom Babin hype experiment

Then, Bike Hugger’s D.L. Byron snarked on the overuse of hype for “viral” marketing.

Hype by D.L. Byron / Bike Hugger

But now, on to the predictions. Bike writer Elly Blue posts her predictions to her “Everyday Rider” at Bicycling Magazine. She believes “the Velo Revolution is happening, and it’s a going to be a real game changer in the US over the next 12 months.”

I’m particularly interested in her fourth prediction because of a major election coming up this year for California’s third largest city: “Bike advocates will be elected.” San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed terms out this year, and six people have filed to run in this June’s election. Two candidates — Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese and San Jose Council Member Sam Liccardo — are aggressively courting the bike vote with plenty of glad-handing at diverse bike events.

Pierluigi Oliverio and Rose Herrera have also made appearances at several bike events and voted in favor of bike projects over the past three years. Retired police officer Pete Constant, the only GOP candidate, rides a bike, but he’s historically been critical of bicycle and pedestrian safety improvements for San Jose and has repeatedly nixed traffic calming projects in the district he represents. Madison Nguyen is an unknown to me when it comes to cycling. Former council member Forrest Williams, who also says he plans to run, has been supportive of downtown San Jose bike projects.

Measure B — the pension reform measure backed by the current mayor and council and passed by city voters in 2012 — is a bugbear for those on the current council running for mayor. The police union in particular denounced Oliviero, Liccardo, Herrera and Constant for their support for pension reform. The police union even forced Constant to resign from the union.

Oliviero, Cortese and Liccardo would do the most for cycling in San Jose. With San Jose’s city manager form of government, power belongs to whoever in city government can take it. Cortese and Oliviero are both perhaps a little too nice and easy-going to get their way. Liccardo is friendly and good at consensus building, but he’s also the type of guy who focuses on a task and works to achieve it. I also suspect Liccardo has his eyes on higher office in the near future.

Other 2014 elections

Governor Jerry Brown is eligible to run for his fourth term as California governor. If he runs, Brown right now is expected to easily retake the office, though anything can happen between now and November.

The real action takes place in the legislature. We’ll have elections in all 80 state assembly districts and half of our state senate districts. We’ll also have elections for our 53 U.S. House of Representative seats. I’m sure Dave Snyder and his team at the California Bicycle Coalition are working up voter guides for these elections. Candidates for all of these elections will be selected on June 3, so go register to vote already!

What elections are happening in your part of the world? Are any viable candidates known for their bike advocacy?

Posted In Musings | politics

Social media and bike trail conditions?

Richard MasonerJanuary 3, 20145 Comments on Social media and bike trail conditions?

Yesterday, I linked to Elisa Poteat’s request for bike path traffic reports.

I call upon all traffic reporters in major cities in the U.S. and U.K. to make a New Year’s resolution to report conditions for cyclists. We know that that we need to increase the number of bike commuters and diversify the crowd that is already commuting. You need a younger audience if you want to survive. So it is in our mutual interest to have bike condition reports.

Her context is the winter storm slamming the U.S. East Coast right now, but a local cyclist reminded me that these condition reports can be helpful for Silicon Valley as well. Eric W wrote:

I do think some kind of condition announcements would be good for cyclists. The underpass for 101 on the Guadalupe Trail for one. It’s not legal for me to pick up my bike and go over the roadway… Major washouts if any on trails would be good to announce.


Drenched

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Posted In Musings

New Year Strava Art from Santa Cruz California

Richard MasonerDecember 31, 20131 Comment on New Year Strava Art from Santa Cruz California

For the new year I tried my hand at creating some Strava art. Strava art or GPS drawing uses a city as a gigantic Etch-A-Sketch, with a GPS device that tracks your movements as the stylus.

For my first attempt, I rode my bike between Mission Street and Escalona Drive in Santa Cruz to spell out 2014. You can find the Strava track here. Some people thought the elevation profile was interesting.


Strava Art: Happy New Year 2014

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Posted In Musings

What does “Critical Mass” mean to you?

Richard MasonerDecember 18, 20131 Comment on What does “Critical Mass” mean to you?

If you played word association with Joe and Jane Random, how would they respond to Critical Mass?

In 1934, Hungarian phycisist Leó Szilárd filed his patent for a neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction and introduced the concept of “critical mass.” The critical mass is the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction.

Nearly 60 years later, bike designer George Bliss remarked in a documentary that bicycles would queue up at intersections in large Chinese cities until they built up to a “critical mass,” when they would proceed safely across en masse. San Francisco cyclists soon applied that name for their monthly “Commute Clog” ride.

More recently, other large spontaneous group rides began to appear. “Bike Party” is among the more popular of these offshoots from Critical Mass. How do the two compare in Google Trends over the past nine years?


Google Trends: Critical Mass, etc

The problem with my quick comparison: We really don’t know the context when people search for “Critical Mass.” Do they want an online guide to building weapons of mass destruction? Do they mean “critical mass” in terms of a tipping point? Or do they look for information on the monthly bike rides? All I know is that incognito search on Google results mostly in bike ride results.

You’ll see I’ve compared against “Bike Party” and “Martyn Ashton.” To me, Bike Party is the monthly celebration of cycling that now occurs in several cities around the world. Martyn Ashton’s “Road Bike Party” trials riding video skewed the search results late in 2012. We can see significantly more interest in his sequel video, represented by the yellow line going sharply up at the right side of the above graph.

Something else interesting: We have searches for “critical mass” (in English) in Leó Szilárd’s home country of Hungary at 10 times the levels we see in America. Furthermore, we see this interest peaks suddenly and dramatically every April and September.

Google Trends: Critical Mass, etc

What is going on? Do Hungarian children learn about their countryman’s role in developing nuclear physics? Do they test on the topic every Spring and Autumn?

I dug around and learned Hungary claims the world’s largest Critical Mass ride with tens of thousands of riders. Interest and participation is very high.

Digging more, this Hungarian Critical Mass is an organized biannual ride with official road closures. It seems akin to something like Chicago’s Bike the Drive, the Five Boro Tour in New York City, or even a bike-centric Ciclovia type of event.

What does Critical Mass mean to you?

Americans variously see Critical Mass as a spontaneous celebration of bikes, a protest against automotive culture, or a group of scofflaws on bikes causing trouble and giving cyclists a bad name. In Hungary — the country of the nuclear physicist who invented the term — Critical Mass is an organized celebration of bikes on roads officially closed from traffic.

Posted In Musings | seo | Uncategorized

Crisis management and the power of a headline

Richard MasonerDecember 12, 20131 Comment on Crisis management and the power of a headline

For years, Specialized Bicycles has sent cease and desist letters to any and all in the bicycle business using names that Specialized’s legal research team feels can dilute their brands. In 2006, Mountains Cycles of Portland, OR locked horns with Specialized over Mountain Cycles’ use of “Stumptown” for their cyclocross bike. Although Stumptown is a traditional nickname for the city of Portland, Specialized complained it was confusingly similar to Specialized’s own Stumpjumper brand of mountain bikes. That disagreement more or less resolved itself when Mountain Cycles ceased operations in Portland later that year.

In 2009, Epic Designs in Alaska changed their name to Revelate Designs after they received a cease and desist from Specialized. Two years later Epic Wheel Works in Portland, OR changed their name to Sugar Wheel Works after Specialized made it clear that they would “allow the use of “Epic” on bicycle wheels, bicycle components or other bicycle-related products.”

In each of those cases, social media responded with protests and threatened boycotts, but that response was unheeded by Specialized.

Why did Specialized perform an about face in this week’s Cafe Roubaix saga? Was it really the power of social media, as so many observers claim?

Social media is part of it, but it’s not the complete story. Good writing and a great headline by Calgary Herald feature editor Tom Babin made the difference.

Although Cafe Roubaix owner Dan Richter says he received the cease & desist months ago, the story finally broke with publication in the online edition of a mainstream media publication. It was “war vet” that caught my attention on this one, and I imagine that’s what grabbed the attention of the thousands who were outraged with a “goliath” (a $500M dollar company ranked third behind Trek and Giant in the USA market) picking on a war hero just trying to make a living on the Alberta prairie.

Calgary Herald Headline

Specialized at first appeared to hunker down in the face of heavy criticism. After a couple of days of silence, it becomes obvious that Specialized Bicycles contacted a crisis management expert after they released a short statement to media on Tuesday. That’s also about when Sinyard must have started his eight hour trip to Calgary from San Jose, CA. On Wednesday, Specialized manages to neutralize the bad press with a personal visit by Specialized CEO Mike Sinyard to Cafe Roubaix, where we can see him in this video looking very uncomfortable as he eats crow.

Post by Café Roubaix Bicycle Studio.

This is crisis management on the cheap. Tylenol destroyed $100M worth of capsules after the cyanide scare of 1982. Odwalla spent $6.5 million to recall thousands of bottles of their beverage within 48 hours after an E. coli outbreak. Kryptonite’s lock exchange program to address their infamous “Bic pen flaw” cost the small company tens of millions of dollars.

Specialized managed this crisis for the cost of round trip travel to Calgary, a car rental, hotel room and meals, and Richter has reinforced Canada’s famous “nice guy” image with his gracious attitude and willingness to compromise through this whole thing.

Epilogue: Every good movie villain resurrects for a sequel or reboot, and the same is sometimes true in real life. Epix Gear, a tiny, five year old outfit in North Carolina which sells apparel for triathletes, says on their Facebook page that they’ve now received a cease and desist from Specialized on their use of a name that sounds too much like “Epic.” Epix Gear posts to Facebook:

Sadly, Specialized is doing the same to Epix now. I received a letter today from their lawyers- Our logo is in their eyes too similar to their “Epic” MTB frames logo. The text is DIFFERENT. The logo stylization is DIFFERENT. We are not competing for the same clients (apparel vs frames). They are over-reaching, as they did with the Roubaix bike shop. They withdrew that case thanks to social media pressure, and we would be very grateful if everyone could support us in our efforts to fight this!

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