Love+Sprockets | NYC Cycling Info

Helmets don't have to be boring. Nutcase makes multi-purpose helmets for Biking, Skateboarding, Inline Skating and Snowboarding. They look like they'd be great for winter mostly.

Bike Pal is like a bulletin board for finding a bike riding partner. Post your name and email address and others can connect with you. Would be even better if they hid your email address or used Hivelogic's email enkoder.

Reward good taste: print out “your bike is hot” cards and stick one in the next hot bicycle you roll by. Leave a note; be anonymous; make your own card. It doesn’t matter. You know what matters: hot bicycle proliferation.

Sky News reports that Dominic Hargreaves's bike, The Contortionist, which folds into the circufmference of its wheels and can be rolled away folded, has been shortlisted for this year's James Dyson Award for innovation. If he wins, the inventor would be awarded £10,000. Hargreaves has been in contact with various manufacturers and hopes to get the bike into production soon.

Pretty slick urban commuter bike concept from Teague, found on Core77.

Pulse, Teague's new concept for an urban bike, addresses all the necessities of a standard bike commute. Taking cues from both fixed gears and cafe-racers, Its features include electric turn signals controlled from the handlebars and a luminescent frame that lights up when you need it. We especially love the specialized caged bike pedals--they're counterweighted to always sit "the right way round," allowing the rider to benefit from their three-fold increase in efficiency without suffering from having to clip into upside down pedals at every stoplight.

Springwise reports on a new urban bike sharing service coming to Montreal from Bixi, which is scheduled to launch in April, 2009 with 3,000 bikes in 300 locations across the city.

Bixi follows the standard bike sharing principles: users take a bike from a stand, ride it to where they want to go, and drop it at another stand when they're done. To make the concept even more attractive to users, bikes will be equipped with RFID tags so that users can track availability online; real-time information is beamed to the web from the system's solar-powered bike stands.

Users will pay a membership fee of CDN 78 for one year, CDN 24 for one month or CDN 5 for one day. The first half hour of every trip is free, rising to CDN 12 per hour for extended periods of use. The aim is to encourage short trips, and fees compare favorably with the price of a monthly bus pass (CDN 66.25).

This is a design concept for a product that projects a bike lane around your bike for night time cycling. More on this concept:

"A close brush with a distracted driver is enough to intimidate the most avid bikers from riding at night. The problem isn’t just about visibility, as safety lights are effective at capturing the attention of a driver. However, these lights are typically constrained to the bike frame, which highlights only a fraction of the bike’s envelope. Bike lanes have proven to be an effective method of protecting cyclists on congested roads. One key is that the lane establishes a well defined boundary beyond the envelope of the bicycle, providing a greater margin of safety between the car and the cyclist. Yet, only a small fraction of streets have dedicated bike lanes, and with an installation cost of $5,000 to $50,000 per mile, we shouldn’t expect to find them everywhere anytime soon. Instead of adapting cycling to established bike lanes, the bike lane should adapt to the cyclists. This is the idea behind the LightLane. Our system projects a crisply defined virtual bike lane onto pavement, using a laser, providing the driver with a familiar boundary to avoid. With a wider margin of safety, bikers will regain their confidence to ride at night, making the bike a more viable commuting alternative."

Found via Dustbowl.

brightbike is a project to produce a DIY reflector kit that covers your bike in retro reflective vinyl, a material produced by 3M that looks clear in daylight, but white when headlights reflect light off of it. See the video above for a demonstration.

An automated parking service in Tokyo takes commuters bikes and slides them into a robot-controlled underground parking area. Apparently 90% of commuters take mass transit in Tokyo and 30% of those people use bikes to get them part of the way to their destination. New York City needs to find a way to give people incentives to get more cars off the road. Ideas like this would make it much easier for commuters to park their bikes away safely.

The winner of the CityRacks competition for outdoor and indoor categories have been announced.

The design of Ian Mahaffy and Maarten De Greeve (Bettlelab), based in Copenhagen, Denmark, was selected as the first-place winner in the outdoor competition that attracted over 200 entrants from around the world. Their design was one of ten prototypes installed and tested at Astor Place since September 30. DOT intends to use Mahaffy and De Greeve’s design as the new standard bicycle rack installed on New York City’s sidewalks. The jury also recognized second-place winner Andrew Lang and Harry Dobbs of London and third-place winner Ignacio Ciocchini of New York. Mahaffy and De Greeve will receive a $10,000 prize courtesy of Transportation Alternatives, Dobbs and Lang a $3,000 prize and Ciocchini a $2,000 prize.