Tag: WorkCycles

Dutch biking is better than all other kinds

Yonah Freemark, famous person behind The Transport Politic and now a semi-famous person at Metropolitan Planning Council (shut down the Illiana, Yonah!), needed a ride from the Damen Blue Line station for a special Vancetour of the Bloomingdale Trail. The Dutch way of biking is extremely social, both because of the way bicycles are built and the way the infrastructure is built. That style is rare in America, and even downright anti-social and hostile in many places. For starters, there’s not enough room to ride side-by-side (in Chicago it’s illegal outside of too-narrow bike lanes).

The WorkCycles Fr8, my main bicycle, is built like a tank. Some may call it the Mercedes G-Class SUV of bicycles. I called it a Cadillac to some guy outside City Hall – referring to how comfortably it rides – and he said “They suck, it’s a Mercedes.” (He was German and I don’t think either of us knew any Dutch car manufacturers.)

Thank you, Ryan Lakes, for the photos.

My experience with Divvy today: smooth and slow

Trading one bike for another.

In short, the functionality was everything I expected it to be.

Read more about the Divvy launch on Streetsblog Chicago here, here, here, and here (all posted today). 

I biked to the station at Damen Ave & Pierce St (Damen Blue Line station), locked my WorkCycles Fr8 to a potential sucker pole (it still had its bolt), grabbed my tote bag from its basket and stuffed that into the oddly shaped carrier on the Divvy bicycle. I inserted my key into the slot and waited for the green light. I only saw yellow. It was either never going to turn green on this bike, or I didn’t wait long enough. I tried the next bike and it unlocked.

To undock, lift the bicycle by its saddle and pull backwards. I adjusted the seat to its maximum. I also adjusted the quick release because someone had loosened it so it wouldn’t tighten the seat post. Off I went, through the congested streets of Wicker Park.

I wanted to hit up every dock on my way to my destination: Eckhart Park. My friend told me this station wasn’t there although the map said a couple of days ago it was there. Divvy’s spokesperson, Elliot Greenberger, told me it was moved from the corner of Chicago Ave & Noble St to inside the park (east of the field house) for traffic safety reasons that he didn’t specify in the quick email. The station was offline.

On the way I stopped at the station outside the Walgreens at Wood St & Milwaukee Ave. I returned my bike and checked it out less than 5 seconds later – this is called docksurfing (thanks Doug). I biked over to the next station on the way to the park: Noble St & Milwaukee Ave.

Rebalancing by removing bikes from this station to take them to another. 

There was a guy here with one of the blue Sprinter vans loading bikes into the van. I asked if he was rebalancing. Yep. I asked how many could fit inside: “22 if I’m lazy, or 24 if I play Tetris right”. He asked me what I was doing and I said I was trying Divvy for the first time. He said “Have a great ride!” Aw, how nice.

I found the station at Eckhart Park just as it started raining. But like most storms this week, it stopped raining after 5-10 minutes. I got nervous because I didn’t know when I checked out this bike and I didn’t want to run over my free 30 minute period. I’ll have to pay better attention next time and perhaps get this kitchen timer on a rope (it has a magnet, too; thanks for the idea, Robert).

I biked the Divvy steed over Noble Street’s potholes, cracks, and bumps, with extreme comfort and agility. My WorkCycles Fr8 isn’t this comfortable (except it better matches my height). The aluminum frame and wide Schwalbe tires wonderfully absorb bumps. I docked the bike, then sat on it and texted a few more people about how cool Divvy is. After a couple minutes, I checked out the same bike and rode it back over to Damen Ave & Pierce St. I traded back to my Fr8 and came home.

The awkward carrier, but it held my tote bag.

Whining about the bike as being heavy is uncalled for: many of the bikes people ride in Chicago are within 25% of the weight of a Divvy (which is around 45 pounds). Think about all those vintage Schwinns people are riding: they weigh the same yet Divvy rolls so much smoother and more comfortably and it won’t flat as often. Then there’re the mountain bikes from department stores like Walmart and Target. Those have no consideration of longevity, efficiency, or “weight savings”: they’re just as heavy and wear out within a year. The Divvy bike, I believe, is the first universally-designed setup I’ve seen. Bicycle shops will be doing themselves a service to stock the closest-feeling bike as some Divvy members are going to migrate to owning their bicycle and will seek the Divvy equivalent.

What I dislike about the Divvy bicycles is its low gearing. My average speed was less than 10 MPH while on my Fr8 it’s just over 12 MPH. Whatever. In most places in Chicago, you shouldn’t be going fast because you won’t be able to spot and anticipate all the drivers who have inattentional blindness and won’t see you before dooring you or swerving into your path.

(Whet thinks he hit 15 MPH, which I told him I doubted, but I would love to have a Divvy race with him!)

I saw one other person riding a Divvy on my short (less than 45 minutes) journey on Divvy in Wicker Park and around Eckhart Park. 

An app that shows real-time availability is available in Cyclefinder, but the Divvy staff didn’t promote this until people inquired on Twitter and Facebook. The app was updated by the Divvy hardware vendor on June 21 to include the Chicago system in the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store, but you had to search for “divvy” to find it and since it wasn’t branded as “Divvy” I bet a lot of people avoided installing it.

You can also buy and download my app, the Chicago Bike Guide, which has Divvy station location integrated (read how). However, I must warn you that it’s already slightly out of date and I’m working on fixing this. I’m also working on real-time availability as I’ve just discovered the API. This is going to take me at least a week.

Don’t forget there’s a hidden bell by your left thumb. 

Tidy bikes on trains: a trip to Den Haag, and Thursday in the Netherlands

Two WorkCycles bikes stand tucked out of anyone’s way in a Nederlands Spoorwegen (NS) train to Zandvoort aan Ze. See all photos from this set, and from Netherlands.

60% of people arrive to train stations on bicycles.
A third of the country commutes by train each weekday.
Passengers, in a departure from American transit policies, must pay a fee to bring a bike aboard trains. (Bikes are not allowed on buses or trams, though.)

In August, my friend Brandon Gobel and I took a trip to Copenhagen for 7 days and Amsterdam for a little less than 3 (when he returned to Chicago I kept going to Munich and Berlin). We arrived in Amsterdam on Wednesday, August 22, by overnight train, walked to the WorkCycles Jordaan shop and picked up our reserved rental bikes. Brandon got an opafiets and I a Fr8 (the same model I bought two days later).

Bicycles are accommodated at every point in a Dutch resident’s journey – and for visitors, too! I don’t know how it would have been possible for us to do so much in the Netherlands without the bicycles.

In Latin: A wise man doesn’t piss against the wind. 

On Thursday we had breakfast at some place with a surly waiter that old pancakes near the Apple Store and this funny slogan written in Latin. We then ambled to Amsterdam Centraal Station to buy tickets for our short train trip to Zandvoort from where we’d then bike to Den Haag (The Hague; I just love pronouncing Den Haag). The station never stops bustling. We walked our bikes to the desk to buy one-way tickets, including all-day bike tickets. I never set a PIN on my credit card so the NS ticket vending machine wouldn’t accept it; I had no idea that you could set a PIN on credit cards, thinking that was something only debit cards had.

The train station at Zandvoort. The train is a DD-AR.

A lot of people were traveling to Zandvoort: it’s a beach resort town less than an hour from Amsterdam and the weather was atypically wonderful, warm and sunny. We rode in the direction of the water until we found the infamous red and white bike wayfinding sign pointing to Den Haag. It hugs the sea for a short distance. Before deviating, though, I wanted to jump into the North Sea.

There are no photos of me swimming in the North Sea, but here’s a photo of my rental bike on the beach. 

We got back on the route to Den Haag. I didn’t bring my GPS logging device so I can’t say for certain where we got off the route, but we kept going south and on the advice I got from a local, “kept the sea to our right”. We eventually drifted inland and started riding through towns and along highways (Americans: in the two-lane, rural sense of the word). There was separated infrastructure for most of the journey. When there wasn’t, the roads and laws were set up to prioritize bicycle traffic.

Welcome to South Holland province. Holland ? Netherlands. Do not call the Netherlands “Holland”. 

At one point in our “off the route” cycling, the off-street path ended. That didn’t seem right. I didn’t notice a sign indicating that we should turn off prior. We backtracked a little an then found a different path (still no directional sign). But we kept moving south. Neither of us had a map, nor data connections on our iPhones. I was confident we wouldn’t need one. I have a pretty good sense of geography, even in a foreign country. This one’s so small and I memorized some of the names on a map before we left.

I will admit that I was getting nervous. I didn’t want to “get lost”, even though I completely disbelieved that “getting lost” in the Netherlands was really possible because of its small size and extremely well-connected towns, trains, and roads.

One of the signs that eventually popped up along the bike path that pointed us towards Den Haag. 

“Huzzah!” A red and white sign saying Den Haag is 17 km thataway! After this sign, every proceeding junction had one pointing to Den Haag. It’s still weird that we got off the route for 30-45 minutes (it seems longer).

The last part of the route before entering Den Haag is along a motorway. This is kind of awkward. Think of biking along any interstate. The only separation between the bike path and the road was a strip of grass and some trees (I didn’t take a picture of it). This is the complete opposite of American motorway design (Americans: motorway is “European” for interstate): here, if there’s no concrete or metal barrier on the outside, then there’s a 50-feet wide cleared right-of-way, often with a ditch.  But we know that while clear areas mean less colliding into stuff, it means faster driving!

Pretty much any city greater than 200,000 people in Europe has trams.

Anyway, back to the bike route. We arrive in Den Haag. We head toward the train station, in the center of town. We’re hungry but there’s nothing around here (which is unexpected, as this is the center of town). But the center of Den Haag is very modern and “business oriented”. Maybe the restaurants are inside the office buildings where the plebeians can’t find them.

Expansive plaza outside the Den Haag train station. View of the opposite direction.

We bike north a little towards what looks like a residential area and find what could be a dive bar. Whatever, as they’ve got cheap beer and food. The menus in Dutch, neither of us read Dutch, and the proprietors don’t speak English, but we recognize the word “hambuger”. That’s what we order. I order mine “deluxe” – I can’t remember how it was described; it came with an egg on top! Hamburgers don’t automatically come with buns, apparently.

We ate weird hamburgers at Café Locus. 

I turn on my iPhone and find that the restaurant has wifi. I’m having a hard time recalling how I asked for the wifi password. A patron (who seems like a regular) knows English and passes this along to the proprietor and tells me the wifi password. After a few attempts it works. I needed it to try and contact someone in Delft whom I wanted to meet but it wasn’t to be. We pay up and depart the restaurant for the Den Haag train station, saying thank you and goodbye to the owner and patrons.

A low volume neighborhood street between Café Locus and the Den Haag train station. 

The bike ticket we bought (€6 each) is good for the day. We return to Amsterdam, tired. It was a smooth, fast train ride  on a VIRM (my favorite).

The return train to Amsterdam (which leaves pretty much every 30 minutes) had seatbelts for bicycles. 

We return to the apartment on Bilderdijkstraat we rented through Airbnb. The lovely bakery across the street, Cake Loves Coffee, is still open so we talk to the owner and sole employee, Nicole. I get a slice of berry sponge mascarpone (photo). We can’t subsist on sweets and fill up on fast food pizza restaurant across the street while we gulp beers sitting outside on the sidewalk in front of the apartment, watching nearly a hundred people bike south after work.

Beers in public. Yes, it’s allowed. Yes, it’s a very civil and normal thing to do. No, it doesn’t lead to the downfall of society. 

View Street View of apartment/bakery neighborhood larger. This image was taken over 3 years ago and the street has been redesigned. Instead of having door zone bike lanes, there’s now a proper cycle track. The bakery wasn’t built yet.

It eventually comes time to head out and visit the Red Light District. What a fun place to visit. If you don’t like seeing real live topless women, or stag parties (Americans: stag is British for bachelor), you should probably avoid it. On our way back to the apartment we stop at a nice bar down the street (between it and Vondelpark). I had noticed it the previous day and finding it reminded me of something peculiar: I never created a turn-by-turn route for any journey we took but I was able to get Brandon and I to any destination in Amsterdam, and “home”, without too many deviations (one of my goals is to never backtrack). I think half the money we spent that wasn’t on trains was spent on booze.

Hash Marijuana and Hemp museum in the Red Light District. 

A group of guys carry the bachelor in the Red Light District. Prostitution is legal in this area of the city. It’s impossible to photograph Amsterdam without a bike in the shot.