Early April in Northern Ontario, Canada and finally a few dry spots to test the MoonCool e-bike. This was my first attempt at putting together and riding an e-bike. First off if I had looked at the video online I would have opened the box in a few seconds. I hadn’t so 1/2 hour later I managed to open it. I needed a stronger arm to unfold the frame.

Everything fits easily according to instruction manual except for the front light wire. I had to redo that part to make it fit (kind of short). I charged the battery in November when it arrived. It snowed the next day do had to wait till now, April to test it. The battery, which I kept in the house over the winter, held its full charge for 4 months.

Today I locked the battery in position with the key. It took  a few readings of the instructions to realize that there is an on/off switch on the battery itself before the power activates the display.

Raven in her forest in the summer

Mind you I am a senior putting all this together and the excitement of finally being able to go for a ride between mud & ice spots might of made me a bit inattentive while reading the instructions.

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I’ve had about 6 bikes stolen over the years in the city,  and then later when my ugly little Ukrainian throwback got stolen, possibly “removed” from my street, it got me thinking about the best strategies for keeping my bike safe and sound.

Writes Rick Polito, author of a bike guide writes: “Nature is a master of disguise. The tiger swallowtail caterpillar starts out as a bird dropping to discourage hungry birds…having an ugly bike doesn’t mean having a junky bike. A bike thief may see the gem under the Krylon, but he also knows he can’t sell it as quickly as the tricked out speedster at the other end of the bike rack.”

When I buy shiny new bikes, I take care of them. I bring them in my house, I buy them a good lock, they feel safe and secure to drive… but after my last new metallic purple street bike got stolen, I imagined it was time to buy the ugliest bike I could get my hands on. Certainly no thief wants an ugly bike. It turns out they do, but it takes longer for the ultimate act to take place.

Some tips to “ugly” your bike:

1. Remove any flashy stickers or brand name labels from your bike.

2. Buy second hand so the bike already looks worn.

3. Repaint it with a cheap matte black or army green spray paint. Don’t be modest with the paint. Over-spraying is a good thing. Not on the gears, chain, or brakes though. 

4. Decorate it with ugly stickers, possibly a car air freshener, or fake animal fur.

5. Attach a milk crate or a rusty rack for carrying stuff.

6. Fake rust your bike with modern spray paint from the hardware store.

7. Tear a hole in your saddle (when it’s raining cover with plastic bag).

8. Add some duct tape to the frame.

9. Consider adding some streamers or spokey dokeys.

10. Visit U-G-L-Y Your Bike, a great how-to guide that offers step-by-step tips to keep your “first class ride” from the hands of thieves.

Tip: buy it ugly new. Here are some fugly e-bikes you might want to try.

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Are you looking for a fun and healthy activity to enjoy with friends or family this fall? Bike riding is in season every season, especially if you visit some of the best trails and paths along the coast. Fall is a perfect time for coastal bike rides because of smaller crowds and excellent weather. Here are some of the best coastal bike trails to check out this autumn when you want a break from your regular routes.

Riding your Bike on or by the Beach

Before you head out, you may want to know a few tricks to make beach riding easier, especially if you are more accustomed to road cycling. Not every bike is ideal for coastal rides; a women’s and men’s comfort bike or hybrid can handle sand well and help you shift from paved paths to off-road conditions. Some people prefer an early start in the day when the winds tend to be calmer; you may want to wear layers if the morning is cooler. Also, sunscreen is a must any time you are outside. Make sure you and your riding companions have plenty of water to avoid dehydration when riding, especially if the temperatures prevent you from working up a sweat.

Best Coastal Bike Trails

Now that you know the basics for a successful ride, where should you go? The US has miles of coastline waiting for you to explore. Some cyclists avoid the Southeast during the fall when hurricane season is in full swing, but the New England coastline is ideal, thanks to the colorful foliage. Check out these two spots for an unforgettable ride:

• Cape Cod Rail Trail – This 25-mile ride gives you both forest and coastal vistas to enjoy. The paved trail goes from South Dennis to Yarmouth, with stops in six Cape Cod towns along the way.
• The Lake Champlain Bikeway – Large lakes may not be your typical autumn coastal ride, but this 1,600-mile system of loops and trails takes you from upstate New York through Vermont and across the border to Quebec with plenty of leaf-peeping and water views.

If you rather stick to the Pacific Coast for a beach ride or a gentle bike trail for kids near me, plan a visit to one of these locations:

• Kitsap Peninsula Trail – You’re in for a treat with an autumn ride through this network of coastal bike paths through Puget Sound. Stick to north-south trails for a more leisurely ride; the east-west routes may be better for advanced cyclists.
• Santa Catalina Island – If you avoid this nearby island during the busy summer, then plan for riding the 40 miles of trails in autumn. See if you need a permit for some routes and take a hard helmet to comply with local regulations.
• Huntington Beach Bike Trail – at 8.5 miles one way, this may not be the most strenuous, but fall is a much more enjoyable time to take your electric bikes to Orange County for a ride without the crowds.

Hopefully, these suggestions can get you excited about biking this fall. No matter what coast you visit, you are sure to enjoy the benefits that a bike ride delivers.

The post Best Coastal Bike Rides for the Fall appeared first on Green Prophet.

I did the best part of my growing up in Toronto, a cold and somewhat bike-crazed city. It’s there where I met a champion bike courier from Berlin and had my first long-distance love affair when he moved back to Germany. Joern, god bless his heart, used to deliver love letters by international courier!

The city of Toronto and its people encouraged me to ride my bike  – in the thick of winter even. I shunned cars and sped by buses like I was on a zip line. Part of my enthusiasm for cycling came from the city’s renegade bike courier culture which fuelled up every morning at a coffee shop called Jet Fuel. Some 15 years later, the bike messenger movement is now moving into Lebanon.

Deghri is a new bike courier service that moves parcels around the city in a green way. Although Tel Aviv tried building its own bike courier culture and failed with Cicleta in 2008, Lebanon’s Beirut is trying to do it now and branding it as the first bike courier business in the Arab world.

It looks like the team is using traditional city bikes, and not those pimped up into an electric ride. They even have bikes with carriers on them to deliver groceries.

Sending a package by bike messenger is both a great way to employ a student or a young city cyclist, and it also helps you deliver the goods in a greenhouse gas reducing manner.

How it works: According to the good folks at Deghri, they deliver everything exclusively by bicycle, allowing them to speed past the traffic jams and get those all-important packages there on time, every time. Their basic delivery takes two hours from the moment you contact them.

“By choosing to send your packages by Deghri, you help to reduce congestion, noise and air pollution in the city. If you are looking to reduce your carbon footprint, we are the delivery service for you,” the group advertises.

The promise: 

• Fast delivery straight from A to B (within max. 2 hours)
• Carry any package up to 10kg that fits in our bags (50 litres)
• Do EVERYTHING by bicycle
• Take stuff anywhere within Greater Beirut. Note that deliveries between different municipalities incur extra charges (see map)

What they won’t deliver:

• We are not a postal service
• We don’t collect mail and distribute later the same day or the next day
• We don’t process official documents
• We don’t wait for more than 10 minutes to pick up a package. Please have it ready to be picked up.
• We don’t carry cash sums over $100. Cheques are no problem.

Their video:

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Consider this: Bicycles are really efficient. Fully 99 percent of the energy a person applies to the pedals is converted to forward motion. If we converted the calories a bicyclist consumes to the energy equivalent in gasoline, we could say that a bicycle gets about 500 miles per gallon.

Consider that a bicyclist can travel 400% of a walking pace while using the same energy as a walker and produces 1/10th the carbon dioxide of our most efficient cars would when driving the same distance and speed.

This is why a human-powered bicycle is considered to be the most efficient transportation technology on the planet. But don’t tell that to someone trying to pedal up a steep hill.

This might  explain why bicycles are popular means of personal transportation in low, flat countries such as Holland, Denmark and why they are crucial for last-mile freight transport in flat places such as Beijing.

This might explain why it’s an uphill battle to get people elsewhere to adopt the most efficient transportation method ever invented.

All of this is about to change: Researchers at MIT developed what they call the Copenhagen Wheel which attaches to any ordinary bicycle as a back wheel. The Copenhagen wheel gathers and stores the energy normally lost when a cyclist is coasting or going downhill.

Then it automatically detects when the cyclist is going uphill and applies a boost via a battery powered electric motor.

It might be just the boost we need to increase the adoption of this efficient technology.

::Copenhagen Wheel website

The post Copenhagen Wheel is like a dynamo rocket booster for bikes! [video] appeared first on Green Prophet.

Bicycle riding, including bike sharing in Tel Aviv and traveling by bike in the Middle East have been popular topics that Green Prophet writers have enjoyed sharing with their readers. Those living in urban areas, where bike riding is a very green way of getting around, stories of young bicycle enthusiasts using an abandoned bus lane in Amman Jordan and  a girl and her green bicycle in Saudi Arabia  indicate that bike riding is becoming increasingly popular in the Middle East.

With this fact in mind, the idea of  using a personal collection to create a bicycle museum is more than just an idea for an Israeli guy named Alon Woolfe. Woolfe regards himself as an avid collector; and turned a converted chicken coop into the country’s first museum of bicycles.

Woolfe began purchasing his collection and storing it in the building with the idea of finding the most “interesting, wacky and unique bicycles” he could find, he tells the local newspaper Haaretz.

His collection includes early models no longer in existence, such as a 100-year-old German model that actually has wheel rims made of wood.

Other interesting specimens include an 1880 “high wheeler” made by the Singer Sewing machine company. It is said to be one of the few surviving types from a 19th Century era when gentlemen and ladies  rode these contraptions around parks on Sunday afternoons.

“Some people are addicted to things like gambling; but I am addicted to collecting things, especially bicycles,”he told the newspaper.

An early 1800’s  Velocipede walking bicycle model Woolfe hopes to find or recreate for the museum. Photo: Wikipedia

Woolfe’s collection now contains around 120 different models. He wants to find one of the original velocipede bicycles from back in 1817.  Velocipedes (which means fast foot) pedal less “walking bikes”  were made out of wood and iron and moved by means of its rider pushing it along with his feet. “My dream is to bring an old walking bike – one of the first bikes manufactured in 1817. It’s really difficult to get your hands on one, so I’m considering making my own based on the original models,” he says.

In addition to models that Woolfe purchased himself, other models have been donated to the museum; including racing bikes and accessories from cyclists who rode them in international competitions, including Olympic road bike competitions.

Former Olympic cyclists Henri Ohayon and Ben David made aliyah from Morocco in the early 19th century. They rode Bertini racing  bicycles and were national champions in the 1950s and 1960s. They were the only Israelis to ride in  Olympic road bike competitions.

Woolfe may also want to add a recently innovated model made largely out of recycled cardboard by another fellow Israeli, Izhar Gafni. Gafni makes these bicycles with cardboard material fortified with various resins at a cost of only $9 to $12  per unit; and which should sell for around $60. Nothing is greener than this.

More on bike riding and models in the Middle East:
‘Wadjda’ – A Saudi Girl and Her Green Bicycle
Tel Aviv Bike Sharing: Green Prophet Hits the Road
Cardboard Bike From Israel Makes Cycling Even Greener
Travel by Bike in the Middle East
Teenagers Use Abandoned Bus Lane for Safe Urban Cycling in Jordan

Bertini Bike Photo: Bertinclassiccycles.com  Velocipede photo: Wikipedia

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This may be thanks to the successful, if not frustrating Tel-O-Fun bike sharing program in Tel Aviv. But I think it’s also due to the rising gas prices, increasing traffic, impossibility of finding a parking space and better awareness to the environment and one’s health. It’s cool to ride bikes along the bike lanes and promenades of Tel Aviv, especially those ones shaded by large trees.

According to the new poll, Haaretz reports:  “Some 23.5 percent of central and southern residents said they ride their bikes habitually to reach all destinations, compared to only five percent in north and east Tel Aviv and Jaffa.

“Nonetheless, private vehicles are still the most popular means of transport among central city residents. In the northern part, two-thirds of the residents use private cars, and in Jaffa half of the population uses buses regularly.”

This is all good news, despite the city-wide bike impounding rampage.

Image of cycling in Tel Aviv from Shutterstock

The post Fourteen Percent of Tel Aviv is Biking to Work or School appeared first on Green Prophet.

From the first time I visited Tel Aviv more than a decade ago, up until today so much has changed in the way the city’s residents accept cycling. Back then if you rode a bike you were either a migrant worker pushing fabric rolls across the city, a vagrant collecting junk and hobbling it to the side of your wheels, or a strange kind of hippy. Fast forward ten years and the middle and upper class of Tel Aviv has embraced bike riding – so much that the city has rolled out a Paris-style Velo bike program called Tel-O-Fun.

Although it has its aggravating moments (as some users complain), it’s a pretty neat way to get around the city while avoiding the stress of thievery. But now, Tel Aviv cyclists have more than vandals to worry about. Media reports say that the City is indiscriminately impounding bikes that aren’t chained to one of the city’s 3000 official bike racks. Like every story there are two sides, but the approach has the city’s bike riders up in ire. 

According to the new rules drafted by the city, bikes parked in non-official racks will be affixed with a 24 hour notice. If the bike is not claimed the city will come to remove it and impound it for a month. If it is not claimed, it will be scrapped. Many residents who have had their bikes impounded this way were not aware that the city had taken their bike, and thought it just had been stolen. The city says that many of the residents bikes are being parked in a dangerous way and that the bikes need to be removed.

I have seen bikes flung off electricity poles dangling onto the streets, and with European-sized sidewalks there is a good argument that many of the city’s bikes are not parked appropriately. There is also a good measure of abandoned bikes left throughout the city, with chains hanging off them. Now that I am a mother with a baby in a stroller it becomes increasingly important to me that the sidewalks are clear when I am walking down the street. In fact one of the biggest pet peeves I have where I live in Jaffa is that a local bike store on Jerusalem Boulevard thinks it owns the sidewalks – using public space as a place to change tires, give tune-ups and unload product.

Biking is good but I don’t advocate this holier-than-though approach that I grew up with in Toronto. There the cyclists are pretty aggressive as to their rights, kicking in the sides of cars that piss them off. I grow to realize that everyone has to give space to all people that share our cities. If you drive a car, don’t drive carelessly, and don’t park on sidewalks. Same is true if you are cycling or riding a moped or motorbike. All people driving something need to respect the flow of traffic, and most important the nearby pedestrians walking on foot.

Image of Tel Aviv bike inspectors via My Tel Aviv

The post Tel Aviv Goes on Bike Impounding Rampage appeared first on Green Prophet.

Engineers told Izhar Gafni that a cardboard bike was impossible. But he went ahead and made one anyway. An ardent cyclist and skilled mechanic, Gafni found a cardboard bicycle taking shape in his mind. American engineers he consulted solemnly nay-sayed, but he couldn’t let go of the idea, he told the Israeli tech blog NewsGeek (in Hebrew).

The burly man’s eyes twinkle under his mop of curly hair as he tells what made him push it forward.

“My wife told me, ‘If you’re not going to try it, you’re going to drive yourself crazy. Then you’re going to drive me crazy, then drive the entire family crazy. So just go ahead and try it!'” Encouraged by domestic support, inspired by origami, and remembering the success of another “impossible” project  – the creation of jumbo jets – Gafni took his skills and built a road-worthy bicycle out of corrugated cardboard sheets.

The first prototypes worked, but “they looked like delivery boxes on wheels,” Gafni says. Investors weren’t interested. Gafni realized that the cardboard bike needed a more attractive design. With that in place, plus applications of materials to make it withstand moisture, it became a bike that anyone would want to hop onto.

How does the cardboard bicycle hold up? Well, it takes up to 140 kg. in weight. It’s waterproof. If you watch the 6-minute video below, you will see Gafni cycling carefree through puddles. The video is in English.

And once the bike hits the market, what will be the price to the consumer? An incredibly cheap $60, and up to $90 with extra attachments like a removable motor. Production costs of only $9-12 make this eco-friendly bike available even to teenagers with babysitting money.

According to The Fiscal Times, it’s a commercially viable product with potential appeal to the hospitality industry.

Gafni created the cardboard bike with the urban cyclist in mind. The Israeli press points out that it’s so cheap that it’s not worth stealing: in towns like Tel Aviv, where people cycle everywhere, bicycle theft is a scourge. To us at Green Prophet, being easy on the wallet is certainly a plus. But the biggest advantage of this cardboard bike is how gentle it is to the planet.

CLICK HERE for more photos of the cardboard bike.

[vimeo 37584656 w=500 h=281]

Izhar cardboard bike project from Giora Kariv on Vimeo.

More cool cardboard design on Green Prophet:

•  Cardboard Interior Design Upgrades Community Lobby
• Sanserif Creatius Brings Recycled Cardboard Furniture to UAE
• Nokka Customized Cardboard Furniture

::Newsgeek

Photo of Izhar Gafni’s cardboard bike via The Fiscal Times.

The post Cardboard Bike from Israel Makes Cycling Even Greener appeared first on Green Prophet.

Jerusalem’s light rail may be a great way to encourage the use of public transportation, but why doesn’t it allow bikes on board?

Four months ago the much anticipated Jerusalem light rail was launched after years of construction.  (The future of the Tel Aviv light rail has yet to be seen.)  The new light rail provides another convenient, comfortable means of public transportation within the city and further eliminates the need for gas-guzzling and carbon emitting personal vehicles.  It is not proving convenient for one environmentally significant group of Jerusalem residents, however: the cyclists.  Despite the fact that the light rail cars have a device specifically for storing bikes, bicycles are forbidden aboard the Jerusalem light rail.

Cycle Jerusalem, a group of local cyclists, is protesting the issue with a Critical Mass today starting at Safra Square.

Critical Mass is a cycling event typically held on the last Friday of each month in over 300 cities around the world, and is often intended as a way for bikes to “take back the streets” from personal vehicles.

Before organizing today’s protest, Cycle Jerusalem approached the Minister of Transportation, the mayor of Jerusalem and the company managing the light rail.  All three parties refused to take responsibility or to provide a reason why bikes could not be allowed on the trains.

It looks like whoever is responsible is missing a golden opportunity to promote sustainable urban transportation within Jerusalem.  There are no bike paths leading to the light rail, no secure bike parking devices at the light rail stations, and no bikes allowed on board.

For more information about today’s Critical Mass and Cycle Jerusalem visit the group’s Facebook page.

Read more about cycling in Jerusalem:
Critical Mass of Cyclists to Test Jerusalem’s Bike Paths
The Cycling Nightlife in Jerusalem
Israel Becomes a Nation of Pedalers (Cycling Freaks)

Image via: Cycle Jerusalem

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