Now, usually I don’t do this.

But I’m about to ask you to make a contribution. No, the money’s not for me. It’s for research to find a cure for multiple sclerosis and to support programs for people who live with MS.

If you’ve read any of my posts this week about biking, you already know I’m going to be riding 100 miles in the New York Bike MS ride on October 4. This event is a major fund-raiser for the National MS Society. I’m riding in honor of my stepmom, who lives with MS. My goal is to raise at least $1000. I’m so grateful to my friends and family who have already given. As of this morning, we’ve raised $680! That’s excellent, but we’re not there yet.

If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you enjoy this blog. This blog costs me money and I don’t earn a dime from it. I’ve never asked for any donations to keep it running. I have no product to sell. There’s no advertising here. So today I ask you to donate a few bucks to the MS ride in the amount you think this blog is worth to you. If you’ve ever read something here that made you think, please give. If you’ve ever grinned while reading one of my posts, please give. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Hey, I already know about this thing because I saw it first on Daryl’s blog,” please give. If this blog has ever turned you on to a good film, or good band, or a good book, please give.

Try giving $10. Lunch money.

Like most people, I’ve given to friends’ fund-raising rides, walks and runs. But I’ve never participated in one before. Why am I doing this now? It’s because of a feeling I got. You’ve probably experienced it at some point, too. It’s the feeling that the world has been cruelly unfair to people who simply don’t deserve it. And you want to do something to correct this injustice. Sometimes that’s impossible. But channeling energy into raising money to help… Well, it might not solve the problem immediately, but it’s positive action. It’s a little way to push back on the unfairness of the world.

Follow this link to give online using a credit card. It’s easy, secure and simple. Thank you.

Note: I’m riding in the Bike MS ride on October 4 (info) and so every post this week is about biking!

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I had to break the law to get these pictures. I’ll explain in a moment…

Meadowlands Xanadu, East Rutherford

I’ve written before about Meadowlands Xanadu, the ginormous mall under construction in New Jersey. I’m fascinated by this brash, misbegotten project. It’s shockingly ugly, it has absolutely no interaction with the space surrounding it, and it has an indoor ski slope.

On Labor Day, I decided to see if it was possible to ride my bike from Brooklyn to Xanadu. According to Google Maps, it was 27 miles each way via the back roads. Totally doable. Off I went.

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Note: I’m riding in the Bike MS ride on October 4 (info) and so every post this week is about biking!

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I was originally going to call this post “The top 5 bike movies of all time,” but who would I be kidding? There is only one that matters: “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.”

“I wouldn’t sell my bike for all the money in the world!,” Pee-Wee declares. “Not for a hundred billion million trillion dollars!”

Right on! Fact: This movie launched director Tim Burton’s career. Fact: This movie spawned the sugary 1980s Saturday morning classic Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, beloved by millions of children. Fact: Every time you hear the song “Tequila” by The Champs, you picture Pee-Wee dancing on the bar.

This movie also has the best bicycle chase scene ever committed to film. Beyond dispute.

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Note: I’m riding in the Bike MS ride on October 4 (info) and so every post this week is about biking!

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Here are a few of my personal rules for cycling in the city:

Keep your bike in good repair. A well-maintained bike is a silent bike. Every sound indicates some loss of efficiency.

Similarly, a cyclist should be quiet. You should glide through the streets unnoticed, slipping between pedestrians and cars with the stealth of a night bird.

Have a bell. Pretend it isn’t there. Install it a few inches away from your thumb so you aren’t tempted to use it.

Ride happy and calm. Never try to teach anyone a lesson while you are on a bike; it will not work. Oblivious people do not deserve to be scolded, yelled at or given the finger. You are moving so quickly that their ignorance is a blip on your timeline.

Safety is your job. Watch out for yourself and for others who share the road. Expect no one to watch out for you.

Understand your bike. Know exactly where it can fit and how it can maneuver. Ride like a fighter pilot: fast and precise, always in absolute control.

Ride often. Ride in heat and rain, wind and darkness. Ride on and on. You are a bat. You are a laser-guided missile. You are a comic book hero. With great power comes great responsibility.

Note: I’m riding in the Bike MS ride on October 4. (Info.) Since I’ve got cycling on the brain, I’m declaring it Bike Week on the blog! Every day at 9 a.m., Monday through Friday, I’ll have a new post about biking.

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I recently read the 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. It was a fascinating read, and kind of a head trip. Amid some heavy philosophy and reflections on family and mental illness, Pirsig offers some sound advice about taking care of a motorcycle. He argues that it’s better to know your machine and work on it yourself than take it to a mechanic.

When it comes to bicycles, I generally agree. I always try to do as much bike maintenance as I can by myself. It saves money, it’s more convenient, and it’s personally satisfying. My bike is also simple and solidly built, so it usually only requires minor adjustments.

This past weekend, in preparation for my big ride next month, I decided to upgrade a few components on my bike. I installed new brake pads and adjusted the brakes. I mended a rip in the seat covering. I oiled the chain and wiped some of that sooty New York City street grime off the frame. And I decided to replace my cheap plastic pedals with lightweight metal ones with toe clips. A helpful guy at the friendly neighborhood bike shop, Brooklyn Bicycles, sold me a good, inexpensive set of metal pedals and clips. I decided to install them myself. Easy, right?

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Last month I wrote about the New York City bike rack design competition. After seeing all the experimental bike racks installed in the Astor Place traffic island near my office, my favorite was the circular rack seen here…

Recently they announced the winning design, and guess what won? Right! From the design competition blog:

“Ian Mahaffy and Maarten De Greeve’s design reflects a modern simplicity that will greatly enhance the City’s streetscape. The rack is round with a horizontal crossbar, evoking an abstracted bicycle tire. Constructed of cast-metal, the design is elegant yet sturdy enough to withstand the harshest street environments.”

Here’s hoping the city installs these racks in pairs, both for convenience and aesthetics.

(From The Times, spotted first at Cityspecific.)

Seen in the picture above is the standard New York City bike rack. It’s simple, ugly, indestructible, and barely functional. NYCDOT thinks we can do better, so they’re having a contest to redesign the bike rack. Prototypes of all the finalists have been installed around The Cube in the traffic island at Astor Place.

None of the prototypes proposes an elegant solution to the biggest problems facing the current racks: They can only host two or three bikes at a time, and bikes can fall over and bang up against each other. The present racks are sometimes hijacked by fools who hitch both tires of their bike parallel to the rack, rather than perpendicular to it.

Only one proposed rack looks like a fool-proof way to host four bikes, and it is also the biggest and ugliest.

The rest of the bike racks seem resigned to only accommodate two bikes, but if installed in pairs this could work. Something about the circular racks is appealing. They evoke bicycle wheels, they offer hitching space at a variety of heights to accommodate different-size bikes and chains, and they seem like they’d be durable. I think there is a quiet genius to this design:

Interestingly, one of the judges for the bike rack contest is David Byrne. He even proposed a few bike rack designs of his own just for fun, seen here.

The winner will be announced October 24.

Last year when I went to Paris, the city had just installed the Velib bicycle sharing program. I was so amazed by this idea I couldn’t stop telling people about it. When I visited France last week, it was clear the system is still humming along, but some cracks in the infrastructure have started to appear. More about that in a minute. First, here’s the rundown on how it works.

In short: You walk up to a kiosk, tap a few buttons, and the computer unlocks a bike from an electronic rack. You can ride the bike as much as you want and return it to any one of hundreds of other racks just like it scattered around the city. The computer charges you a Euro or two (or nothing) depending on how long you use the bike, and charges you 150 Euro if you fail to return the bike at all. (The bikes are heavy, fat-tire cruisers with ugly fenders. You can buy a better bike for 150 Euro.)

Who pays for this? No, not taxes. Somebody had a great idea when the contract to manage Paris’s outdoor advertising came up for bid. To win this lucrative contract, companies were required to submit a proposal to create and operate a public bicycle program. Done!

In Paris I had a great time riding around on the Velib bikes. I also saw similar systems in action in Lyon (their Velo’v system was the model for the one in Paris) and Perpignan. These local bike-share programs have been so successful that they are rapidly spreading across Europe. Some U.S. cities have expressed interest. But before we deploy the bikes here, we need to avoid the pitfalls starting to crop up in Paris.

• First, the system needs way more racks that bikes. Why? Because people tend to ride in the same direction at the same time of day. When I was zipping around Paris last Monday, I found that all of the bike stations near the center of the city were full. I spent about half an hour looking for a station that had an open hitch. The kiosks can display a map showing you where the nearest open bike rack is, but it’s confusing. This problem really gums up the works.
• Second, the payment system in Paris and Lyon seems needlessly complicated. Most riders buy a special card online, which is mailed to them. Visitors can buy a temporary card right at the kiosk using a credit card. (But only the European kind with a built-in chip. Curiously, the only card in my wallet that worked was my American Express card, and it only worked in Paris.) Perpignan has a much more elegant system. You go online and use your credit card to register for an ID number, which you punch into the kiosk to unlock a bike. (Mine was a four-digit number less than 2,000.) Use it once or use it forever; there’s no card to carry. So simple. I also found the BIP bikes in Perpignan to be better to ride – smaller and lighter, but still sturdy.
• Third, the system should let the users choose the bikes they want. That was my one gripe with the Perpignan bikes. Sometimes people return damaged bikes to the racks, or bikes with flat tires. The Paris and Lyon systems let you choose the best bike yourself, but the Perpignan system assigns a bike to you.
• And finally, these bike systems just wouldn’t work in some American cities. Snow and ice – and road salt – would destroy these bikes. That rules out most of the East Coast and Midwest. It has to be a compact city, so forget places like Los Angeles and Miami. What’s left? I’m thinking Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and mid-size southern cities like Austin and Savannah. Let’s make it happen!

(Photo shows a guy waiting for a space to open up at a Velib rack outside the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris.)

Welcome to part II of my occasional series, “Weird stuff the Vanderbilts built.” (Previously: Atlantic Avenue Tunnel.)

Today I rode my bike to the abandoned Long Island Motor Parkway. It was built by William Vanderbilt II to connect Queens to Long Island; the first segment opened in 1908. (Hey, that was 100 years ago!) The Motor Parkway operated as a toll road until 1938, when it was unable to compete with the free parkway that Robert Moses built. As soon as it closed, Moses turned it into a bike path. And so it remains today, an overgrown strip of blacktop two lanes wide. It looks like any rails-to-trails bike path, though the hills leading up to the overpasses are steeper than a typical railroad grade. I was surprised by how narrow it is; the parkway was only two lanes wide.

The Parkway was one of the first roads to use elevated bridges (grade separation) to create an express highway. Some refer to it as the country’s “first superhighway,” but the Pennsylvania Turnpike, as a divided highway, has a stronger claim that title.

It never fails to amaze me how much abandoned infrastructure there is in Brooklyn and Queens. As I was riding today, I crossed at least three disused railroad rights-of-way. One is the impressive tunnel and open-cut track that runs beneath the elevated L train south of Broadway Junction. The next was the overgrown right-of-way that runs through Forest Park (identifiably by the abandoned utility poles that run beside where the track was). And finally there was the Central Railroad of Long Island Creedmore Branch, which ran through what is now Kissena Park. It operated from 1872 to 1879 – barely six years!

More info:
NYC Parks Vanderbilt Motor Parkway sign.
NYCroads.com Long Island Motor Parkway page.
Forgotten New York Kissena Park page.

The last Friday of every month in major cities, a pack of cyclists takes over the streets with the Critical Mass demonstration bike rides. By terrible luck, I got caught in San Francisco’s Critical Mass in my rental car last week.

I support Critical Mass; I participated in it once in New York. But it’s not really my thing, since it reminds me too much of 1990s-style anti-globalization protest politics. I’ve said before that the best way to get people riding bikes is to make cycling so mainstream that practically everybody finds it normal and appealing. And as more people ride bikes, the streets will change to accommodate them, and things will get better for all cyclists. That was the initial idea behind Critical Mass, as I understand it.

But one police officer patrolling the Critical Mass ride in New York last Friday had other ideas, as seen in this YouTube video…

The stupid actions of one violent cop put several cyclists at risk of injury, and will doubtlessly fan a lot of negative feelings in the bike community. Not cool. (The 22-year-old rookie officer, meanwhile, has been stripped of his badge and gun, per the Post.)