Originally posted by brianmcg in our forums - original thread can be found here.

So I decided to go on a little ride on Thanksgiving day before I stuffed myself. Downtown Cleveland is a fun place to ride around and take pictures as it is generally pretty deserted. Enjoy.

HO HO HO. Santa checking out my bike. Wow, those bars look high. I was futzing with my brake lever position and now I got those way too low and the bars are now turned up like a crazy persons. It doesn’t look that bad in person, I promise.

A picture of “The Ol’ Woolen Mill”. This place is huge. They used to make lots of wool clothing here. If only Rivendell had been around to sell some wool t-shirts back in the day they might still be open

Neat little barber shop. I picture Andy, Goober, Floyd and Barney hangning out here playing checkers. This is the O.K Barber Shop. Their nemis is right down the street, The Great Barber Shop.

I don’t think in Mayberry next to Floyd’s Barber shop there was an extreme skate shop named “Asylum”

I took this picture before, but I had different bar tape on.

Cafe Roma. Great little restaurant. Deserted street.

More deserted streets. It reminds me of the opening scene of “Vanilla Sky”.

Neat bell in front of the courthouse.

I had the whole place to myself.

The obligatory shot of the best bike shop in Cleveland.

Ride Report by Argentius - originally posted here

Do you know how many pictures I can get on a pair of AA batteries when it’s 34 degrees out? I found out that it’s about 25. That’s okay, because the distance views I was hoping to get were just mist, anyhow.

But we’ve got a new trail, or, at least, part of one. It’s not officially open yet, but it’ll be the “Milton Interurban Trail.” I posted some pics from the (as yet) still unpaved section farther north back this summer.

You’d never know how close to the freeway this is.

Tacoma’s Stadium District had a few shots, at least. Stadium High got famous in a movie when I was in high school, I guess. It’s a pretty impressive building, especially for a public high school. Word was, it was going to be a fancy hotel in the 19th century, but the original builders ran out of cash and sold it to the city…

If you like cobbles, you’ll like a lot of Old Town Tacoma. They pave over some of these, fix others, and just plain leave some. For a long, long time. Here’s “court C,” just past stadium:

About once a year or so we like to get the car serviced. The dealer is out in Tysons Corner.

Not that all of the area isn’t messed up traffic-wise but Tysons Corner is outstanding. For us though the bike trails aren’t too far away from the dealer (one of the main reasons we chose that dealer).

Drop it off nice and early, a couple nasty miles in ‘burb hell and it is time for the W&OD trail.

Pretty nice riding at sunrise on a nice warm fall morning.

Traffic looked bad on the beltway but I wasn’t on the beltway.

Traffic on the trail picked up as I got closer to town.

The W&OD wasn’t all that crazy for a MUT but when I turned onto the Custis Trail the excitement level seemed to ramp up with every mile.

It sure beats driving.

Most folks turned off at the Key Bridge so the little stretch Mount Vernon Trail I used was quite calm. A short hop across the Potomac on the Roosevelt Bridge and “Hello Work”!

Work wasn’t bad today but there was this car to pick up.

Bike ride!

I had to get across the mall to meet Miss M before crossing the 14th Street Bridge and taking the reverse route from this morning.

The Mount Vernon Trail gets pretty busy on a nice warm afternoon. The Custis Trail is always a fun little climb. After those the W&OD seems almost calm.

Almost.

Still it beats driving.

We have always noticed a big difference between the morning and evening commutes.

Mostly in the morning anyone out just wants to go about their business and stay out of everyone elses way. In the evening OTOH there are always sport folks out looking to race anyone who dares go faster then them.

Miss M won’t put up with that foolishness (let’s face it, we have seen far too many stupid crashes on the MUTs to ever want to play games while riding). No one is allowed to get on our wheel-too bad since I was hoping to get some pix of Miss M blowing through stop signs for Gregory Taylors thread but we were going way too fast at the intersections for me to be comfortable shooting.

Other than that is was a very nice evening to ride and we were treated to a subtle sunset.

Alas, every so often as we were enjoying our ride we would catch a view of traffic-not pretty. Why anyone would ever deal with that on a regular basis is beyond us (and alas we were getting an idea of what we were going to have to deal with driving home).

As for driving; let’s just say that we would rather ride.

Turned out to be about as bad as we expected (took us a nasty hour and a half to get home driving (a lot longer than it took us to get out there on our bikes)) but at least the car is taken care of for another year.

MB1
Ride your bike.

As many of you may know, I live and travel quite a bit throughout Europe … so its high time I give you a user review of some of the many high-tech “free” or “near-free” bicycle rental programs that can be found in many EU cities. This is especially timely given that Paris (my town) has put a highly successful system in place this July.My one-word review: a.w.e.s.o.m.e!

These systems, the way in which they make living here so pleasant, the thinking behind their implementation, the common desire to make these city centres vibrant and eminently livable places are all things that make even thinking about moving back to the States very difficult indeeed!

But on to the subject.

Many of you may have heard of “free” bike programs or “town” bike programs - indeed, some places in the States have experimented with these. Typically these have involved (as in the past in Amsterdam abd Copenhagen) providing cheap, sometimes refurbished, and oftentimes yellow-hued bikes in large quantities for all to take and use as they see fit. The thinking was that once you finished your trip, you left the bike out for the next person to use, and so-on. The reality of these systems is that most bikes ended up a. trashed, b. abandoned or c. in the bottom of the local canal or its last users garage (or all three!). These systems had a very limited success and gave the image of cycling as a somewhat marginal activity that remained the remit of those who make it a point to spend their lives imbued in an alcoholic haze.

The systems I will describe below are to these “yellow-bike” programs what the Airbus 380 is to the Wright brother canvas and piano chord flyer (and by that, I don’t mean hugely complicated and prone to cost over-runs… but I digress)

The principal of these systems is that all bikes are electronically tracked (via GPS or by docking stations) and all bikes are attributed to a registered user with a form of payment on file. The bikes themselves are purposely heavy, simple bikes that are made for robustness, not speed and are thus perfectly suited for city travel in most EU cities. The tariff systems are biased for short-term use (often less than 30 minutes) and the thinking is that these can help city inhabitants avoid using cars for the most frequent and shortewst of their trips. There are two major “families” of these programs - the approach used by J.C. Decaux in (Paris, Lyon, Bruxelles, etc….) and that used by the DBahn (the German Railway Company). I’ll describe the JC Decaux system first.

Vel’lib and other JC Dcaux systems

JC Decaux (http://www.jcdecaux.com/content/jcdecaux_en/accueil/) is a the a major outdoor advertising and urban “furnishings” (read park benches, lamp-posts, bus stops…) supplier that afew years ago had an idea to combine “free bikes” with high tech tracking and billing in order to offer cities with an innovative sustainable transportation package. The deal was that the cities would receive the equipment for free and JC Decaux would run it and in return, the cities would install the systems and provide Decaux with a negotiated amount of billboard advertising space. Thus the cities get a great addition to ytheir transport systems and the company gets access to some prime advertising real-estate throughout the city.

In Paris, the JC Decaux-supplied Vel’lib system in operation since July 15 (other cities have had their systems in place for for several years) has been a huge success. Everywhere you look you see some of the 14000 bicycles (will be 20000 bicycles by the end of the year) tooling around the city streets or at some of the 1000+ (will be 1451 by December) docking stations. The goal is to have a station every 300 metres.

You must be registered with the system to use it (either w/ a day or week pass) and at a minumum must provide a CC# that can accept a payment of 150 euros if the bike is not returned. Registration can be done at any docking station or by mail for a year pass. I have a year pass which for 29 euros gets me a magnetic swipe card that I can use at any docking unit without having to go by the central panel of the docking station. The first half hour is free, the second half hour is 1 euro, the third is 2 eusros and every half-hour afterwards is 4 euros. As you can see, the system is set up to ensure that trips are short and that there is a high turn-over — thus maximising the transportation function of the system. Want to have the bike for longer? Just dock it at any station and re-check it out .. the 30 minute timer gets set back to zero everytime you bring it in! You can check online or via your cell phone to see where the closest station is and how many bikes are currently available.

During both day and night, there are special trucks with trailers that go about redistributing bikes to stations as required (the exact routing of the trucks is determined via the real-time docking info).

Here is the link to the Paris system: http://www.en.velib.paris.fr/comment_ca_marche

DBahn’s Call-a-Bike

The German Railway company operates another type of system in several large Germ,an cities (Berlin, Cologne, Munich, etc.). The bikes are slightly clunkier and have an on-board GPS unit that allows the control centre to track all of the bikes. You register by calling up the center and giving your cell phone # and CC#. Once registered, you can pick up any bike whose light is flashing green. The bikes can be left anywhere but they request that you leave them at intersections to make it easy for others to find them — there are also many marked stations where bikes are lined up. Once you have selected a bike, you call up the centre with your cell and enter the bike number. The computer system gives you your release code which you then type into the LCD touch pad on the back of the bike. You can now move aside the arm of the built-in locking mechanism, the light turns from green to red and the bike is now yours to use. If you want to lock it up for an errand, just re-position the arm and the bike is locked up (the light stays red indicating that the bike is not available for hire). When you are ready to go, just re-enter the release code (which you also get as a SMS text message). When you are ready to return the bike, just leave it at an intersection, call up the system and it gives you the terminating code which, once entered into the keypad, indicates to the system that you no longer have the bike. The light turns from red to green and the bike is available to be hired by someone else. Billing is monthly and the tarif system is more expensive (it does not depend on advertising for its operating revenue) but cannot surpass 15 euros a day. Link here: http://www.callabike-interaktiv.de/k…0146e6…00000

Originally posted on roadbikereviews.com forums @ http://forums.roadbikereview.com/showthread.php?p=1197125