Places a bike can take you...

Out to Midtown for the grand opening of Saint.  The new small concert venue and bar expansion of Brasserie St. James.  Good eats were had!

So True!

New Virginia Street Bridge....with bike lanes to nowhere?

Well...I've been out of town for a while so I haven't had the privilege of the daily bike commute.  So yesterday was my first chance to ride across the newly opened Virginia Street bridge.  All in all a nice modern structure...that includes bike lanes that extend on to the abutments...and then disappear. 

So while I'm glad they were put in (rather than the previous parking spots), I'm curious about this decision.  Really recently (in Midtown) removing this number of parking spots was a hugely contentious issue and the council chose to keep parking rather than design a true complete street with bike lanes that would have been a continuous interconnected part of the infrastructure.  So why put bike lanes here where parking is even more limited and the bike lanes don't do anything for providing benefits to infrastructure? 

Any which way....it's another few hundred feet of bike lane...so I'll take it.  My only follow up question is how long it will take for someone to ride a bike over those suspension beams!

Too much travel...and cool bicycle infrastructure and art!

Three examples of awesome infrastructure (sharrows, a bike parking corral, and way finding signs), and some cool bike art that doubles as extra space to lock up!  Reno...this is what we want!!!

Google's self driving bike!

Yeah, Yeah....it's an April fools joke.  I've been busy and I just saw it....so it's going to be posted!

Making the Old New Again!

Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures during this little project, but here are the first pass results on a bike I'm building up for the girlfriend.  The base bike is a Marin Muirwood Urban (2010?).  It was in need of some serious TLC, but after a bit of work I think it will be a perfect bike for some intro to bikepacking with the new girl!

From start to finish here were the steps I went through to recondition the little bugger.  Reset the headset bearings, a complete removal and clean up of the bottom bracket and cranks, reran all break and shifting cables and housings.  Added v-brake compatible break levers (it only had interrupter breaks previously), re-wrapped the bars, new tubes (tires are on order), and trued the rims.  All in all it was really only a couple evenings to get it back in shape.

Since its currently paired with 26" rims there is a ton of clearance for fenders and 2 inch plus tires in the near future!  I'm thinking another nice set of wood fenders for it (like you can see on the fargo in the background).

All in all...a fun little project.