Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Big Wig, Bradley Wiggins, Dave Brailsford, Froome, TDF, Team Sky, Tour de France, wiggin'
Big disappointment, a major high drama showdown between Big Wig and Froome was brewing.
“With illness, injury and treatment Brad has gone past the point where he can be ready for the Tour,” Sky boss Dave Brailsford said in a team statement. “It’s a big loss but, given these circumstances, we won’t consider him for selection.”
[…]
Wiggins said it was a “huge disappointment not to make the Tour.”
“I desperately wanted be there, for the team and for all the fans along the way — but it’s not going to happen,” Wiggins said. “I can’t train the way I need to train and I’m not going to be ready. Once you accept that, it’s almost a relief not having to worry about the injury and the race against time.
via Bradley Wiggins ruled out of the Tour de France.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicycling, bicycling advocacy, Cyclist's Manifesto, EVs, evworld, history of bicycling, Prius, urban cycling, urban mobility, Viet Cong, women's liberation
I appreciate the shout out from evworld.com, but fear what might happen when they reach the Prius chapter.
Writing about the “simple fun” of riding a bicycle in “The Cyclist’s Manifesto,” Robert Hurst put the technology in historical perspective, stating:
“Fun is apolitical. Fun has no agenda, other than to make you smile. And yet even the person who climbs onto a bike for the simple purpose of having fun or getting a whiff of fresh air will be saddled with the baggage of history, accompanied by a cloud of suspicion hanging around a machine that has at various times been intimately associated with women’s liberation, white power, political sneakiness, Asian communism, sabotage and spying and other rebel mischief, the Viet Cong, European socialism, illegal immigration, serial drunk drivers, anarchy, privilege, anti-car fanaticism, and multiple manifestations of youthful antiestablishment activities. This mishmash of historical symbolism is now woven into the collective subconscious of the nation. The bicycle is loaded.”
Until reading “Manifesto,” I had no idea that such an elegant and efficient machine carried so much historical baggage from across such a wide political and philosophical spectrum, from revolutionary communism to the epitome of capitalism, Henry Ford, himself, whose first ‘automobile’, the Quadracycle,’ was built largely from repurposed bicycle parts.
via Seven Solid Reasons Conservatives Should Love Bicycles : URBAN MOBILITY ON EVWORLD.COM.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicycle, bicycling, bike rental, bike share, Citi, Citi Bike, Citibank, Citibike, end of the world, helmet, helmets, New York, New Yorker Magazine, NYC, slow rollout, stationary bicycle, transportation, urban cycling
Painfully slow rollout of NYC’s Citibike rental scheme is here, maybe. Lock up your daughters!
Interesting the artist put a helmet on the outside rider. Wonder if he/she was told to do that.
via http://publicbikeshare.com/2013/05/28/public-bike-share-a-picture-says-1000-words/
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: auto bailout, auto subsidies, bailouts, battery, Better Place, electric hansom cabs, electric vehicles, EV, Evan Thornley, Fiat, hansom cabs, Maxim, NYC, Obama, phev, Pope, Pope Manufacturing Company, Shai Agassi
I wrote a little about this company’s scheme for swappable batteries and recharging stations in The Cyclist’s Manifesto, the book I wanted to call 1000 M.P.G. Noted the similarity of their scheme to what was working in NYC in the 1890s with Pope’s electric hansom cabs.
Better Place was situating itself to capitalize on the eventual demise of gas guzzling auto companies. But when certain key gas guzzling car companies tried to go paws-up, Dr. Obama and Co. stepped in and — Clear! — hit ’em with the paddles. Priorities.
FORTUNE — Electric car company Better Place is planning to file for bankruptcy within the next several days, Fortune has learned.
The move will come seven months after the ouster of charismatic founder Shai Agassi, and five months after his successor — Evan Thornley, CEO of Better Place Australia — also departed.
via Exclusive: Better Place to file for bankruptcy – The Term Sheet: Fortune's deals blogTerm Sheet.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: deepwater drilling, EIA, fracking, IEA, liquid fuel production, oil price, oil price predictions, oil production, Peak Demand, peak oil, refinery gain, shale oil, tight gas, tight oil
Via Kurt Cobb in the CS Monitor:
Back in the year 2000, the IEA divined that by 2010, liquid fuel production worldwide would reach 95.8 million barrels per day (mbpd). The actual 2010 number was 87.1 mbpd. The agency further forecast an average daily oil price of $28.25 per barrel (adjusted for inflation). The actual average daily price of oil traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange in 2010 was $79.61
[…]
So, what made the IEA so sanguine about oil supply growth in the year 2000? It cited the revolution taking place in deepwater drilling technology which was expected to allow the extraction of oil supplies ample for the world’s needs for decades to come. But, deepwater drilling has turned out to be more challenging than anticipated and has not produced the bounty the IEA imagined it would. …
via When oil forecasts get it wrong – CSMonitor.com.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: air cargo, air traffic, air travel, aviation, economic activity, economics, energy, jet fuel, peak oil, recession, transportation
Trending down.
Via Macronomics:
Macronomics: Air Traffic is pointing to additional economic activity weakness.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Art of Mountain Biking, babyhead, berm, cross country, enduro, Hurst, mountain bike, mountain biking, MTB, Robert Hurst, rock garden, singletrack, Specialized, XC
BUY IT NOW: AMAZON
Via Velonews: Armstrong, Vaughters talking about moving cycling forward.
uh huh
Moving cycling forward? Or, with their mutual everybody-quit-doping-in-2006 tall tale, consigning a new generation of young riders to the hell of having to take all the latest products and lie about it?
liked both of these guys a lot more when they were pedaling more and talking less.
Filed under: Bike of the Day | Tags: apehangers, bicycle, cruiser bike, cycling, Schwinn, urban cycling
Cruiser style frame, apehanger bars and 10 speeds.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicycling safety, Boulder, cycling accidents, Lyons, Patrick Ward, Van Duym, vehicular homicide
Turns out the drunk who ran over and killed Michel Van Duym had a real psychological problem with cyclists. Looks real bad.
LYONS – The driver facing charges in a crash over the weekend that killed a bicyclist in Lyons spoke out against cyclists at a series of public meetings in 2010.Catherine Olguin with the Boulder County District Attorneys Office says Patrick Ward is due in court Thursday at 2 p.m.Deputies arrested Ward Saturday afternoon in Lyons on eight charges, including vehicular homicide, for the death of a Boulder bicyclist.Ward lives in Lyons and has gone on the record in that town out at least six times to express his displeasure with the cyclists who share the road.Lyons resident Colleen Dickes understands the tension between people in cars, and people on bikes.”Theres a lot of cyclists,” Dickes said. “People are always trying to avoid them. I think there is always going to be a friction.”Patrick Ward knew that friction well.Lyons Town Administrator Victoria Simonsen confirmed to 9NEWS that Ward, 69, spoke at public meetings in March, April, May, June, and July of 2010 when the town was considering a 10-year plan that included promoting cycling in Lyons.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bakken, crude oil, energy, IEA, IEA forecast, OECD, oil price predictions, oil supply, OPEC, peak oil, refining capacity, shale oil, tight oil
IEA… Not a good track record with the predictions. Doesn’t stop ’em from throwing out new crazy numbers every year.
While geopolitical risks abound, market fundamentals suggest a more comfortable global oil supply/demand balance over the next five years. The MTOMR forecasts North American supply to grow by 3.9 million barrels per day (mb/d) from 2012 to 2018, or nearly two-thirds of total forecast non-OPEC supply growth of 6 mb/d. World liquid production capacity is expected to grow by 8.4 mb/d – significantly faster than demand – which is projected to expand by 6.9 mb/d. Global refining capacity will post even steeper growth, surging by 9.5 mb/d, led by China and the Middle East.
via IEA – May:- Supply shock from North American oil rippling through global markets.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bakken, enegy, frack, fracking, IEA, oil journalism, oil production, oil shale, oil supply, Peak Demand, peak oil, shale oil, tight oil, Tom Gjelten
As NPR’s Tom Gjelten reports:
“Petroleum engineers have always known about the untapped underground oil in the United States, but it was unreachable, trapped in tight shale rock. Then the engineers figured out how to crack the rock. Hydraulic fracturing — fracking — got that ‘tight oil’ finally flowing in places like North Dakota.”
via Huge Boost In U.S. Oil Output Set To Transform Global Market : The Two-Way : NPR.
Wrong, Tom. The tight oil has been ‘reachable’ for several decades, it was just such an expensive process that it made no sense to do it when oil was cheap — a money-losing proposition. Now, all the cheap oil is gone, and out comes the ‘unconventional’ oil.
Gjelten also said that the decline in oil consumption in the US was due to efficiency (check the VMT chart Tom). There was no mention of depletion of existing fields, or the striking decline rate of fracked shale wells. And he reported that cheaper oil is just over the horizon.
Would it hurt Mr. Gjelten to do just a tiny bit of research on the topic of his reports so he doesn’t sound like a complete idiot?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: carbon, carbon credits, Chris Martenson, CO2, coal, energy, LNG, natural gas exports, Obama, peak oil
Chris Martenson, smart about energy, busts the O administration for its disingenuous claims about lowering carbon emissions with natural gas:
To claim credit for lowered carbon emissions due to natural gas and then also support the idea of exporting LNG (where fully 25% of the base energy is combusted in order to simply liquefy the product) is hypocritical. These are two ideas that work against each other. Either you use natural gas wisely and efficiently as you move away from coal resources and claim a carbon credit for these actions, or you support throwing 25% of natural gas’ energy right into the atmosphere just to cool it for transport.
So it’s a fallacy to imply that exporting natural gas will help lower carbon emissions. In all honesty, total emissions will most likely be higher than otherwise – because let’s be realistic; the most likely path is for humanity to burn up all the natural gas and then burn up the coal next.
Further, where the U.S. carbon emissions have gone down due to less coal being burned, that happy circumstance resulted in Europe doing exactly the opposite:
[…]
Does natural gas help to lower carbon emissions? No, it merely pushes the carbon emissions elsewhere while the U.S. feasts on relatively cheap natural gas domestically. The only thing that lowers carbon emissions is NOT burning coal, natural gas, or petroleum – collectively.
via The Obama Administration's Policy on LNG Makes No Energy Sense | Peak Prosperity.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Battaglin, bicycle racing, blood doping, CERA, Di Luca, doping, EPO, Garmin, Giro d'Italia, Neal Rogers, Vaughters, VDV, Velonews, weasel power
This strikes me as hypocritical and simple-minded stuff from Neal Rogers, cheering Di Luca’s getting caught by young unknown riders who have yet to be caught in any doping dragnets.
Garmin is packed full of “riders with controversial pasts.” Let’s see if he has the same venom for them as they defend their Giro title.
While his move was bold, that Di Luca was unable to hold his attack on Tuesday is encouraging.
The day when the pro peloton is clear of suspicion will likely never materialize. However, the day when the peloton is clear of riders with controversial pasts may be only a few years away.
via Commentary: Why Battaglin’s Giro stage win matters.
Translation: Di Luca’s defeat helps us pretend that they’re not all still doping.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicycle helmets, bicycling, Costco Connection, cycling, FalconGuides, helmets, Hurst, Karen Bannan, Robert Hurst, The Bicycle Commuter's Handbook, urban cycling, USCPSC
Big Time Stuff, y’all.
Costco Connection – May 2013 – Page 48-49.
…Some helmets offer more protection, with harder shells and fewer ventilation holes, but will not be as comfortable for long rides, says Robert Hurst, the author of several bicycle-related books, including The Bicycle Commuter’s Handbook (FalconGuides, 2013). “You don’t need to spend a ton of cash to get a decent helmet, but steer clear of bargain-bin knock-offs that haven’t been certified by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission,” he says.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicycles, concept bike, levitation bike, Special Area, transportation
This fellow took not thinking much about how and why bicycles work to a new level before he drew up this “concept bike.”
Just looking at the “custom saddle” makes my Special Area hurt.
click to enlarge
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicycle crashes, bicycle safety, Boston, Cambridge, car-bike collisions, car-bike crashes, enforcement, Harvard, Jack Danilecki, traffic accidents
Capt. Jack Danilecki of the Boston police, former commander of the tactical bicycle unit, said that five cyclists were killed in Boston last year. Police are taking an initial step to address the problem by issuing reminders — in the form of $20 tickets — to cyclists who run red lights and stop signs that they are legally bound to obey the rules of the road.
via How to protect cyclists | Harvard Gazette.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: clean, everybody went totally clean in '06, Giro d'Italia, Ischia, Italy, new era, Ryder
Stage two looks pretty cool. Short. Little island.
via http://www.cyclingnews.com/giro-ditalia/stage-2
Industrialized Cyclist Notepad 