I’m just going to stop while I’m ahead.

Here are a few more shots (obviously taken before yesterday’s snowstorm). Want more info on the event?

Michael, Tanya and Mark White were jazzed to participate in the event.

Connie Mansour of Boulder Tamales served up warm food on a chilly morning.

Ed Dowski sipped chai tea at the Dushanbe Tea House station.

Graduate students Sarah Bounty, Sara Beck and Traci Brooks smiled at the CU station with their professor, Karl Linden.

Get yourself in the habit and you’ll be all keyed up for next year’s Winter Bike to Work Day.

Finally, here’s a great and detailed video with tips on how to dress for winter biking — a major deterrent for some of us! Gotta strike the balance between arriving drenched in sweat and falling over dead on the ride, frozen solid into a bikecicle.

I found the video on the Meetup page for the Boulder & Denver Commuter Cyclists, who have an event next Monday.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The service cuts include reducing the frequency of some light-rail routes after 9 p.m. on weeknights, and increasing the interval between 16th Street Mall shuttle-bus trips from 6:15 to 8:20 a.m. on weekdays to every 150 seconds from 75 seconds — the current interval.

The mall shuttle handles about 47,000 passenger boardings daily.

RTD staff had proposed that directors eliminate route 63X bus service linking the Littleton Mineral light-rail station with Lockheed Martin’s Waterton complex because of low ridership, but directors chose to retain the route.

Local buses will cost $2.25 and express buses will cost $4.

Um, also, there’s a whole story on the RTD website about a couple who met on the 10 bus and now they have a cake shaped like a bus together or something. I might be missing some details.

The other number that sticks out on this data from the 2009 U.S. Census American Community Survey is our work-from-home number — but we already knew that.

Here’s some of the relevant data:

In Amsterdam, they take more trips by bike than by car. Consider that!

In Portland, bike traffic constitutes 20 percent of the traffic on some roads, leading to bikejams.

Until we’re having bikejams — or until I have to stand up for part of my bus commute — it seems like there’s still a lot of education to be done. (But please don’t cut bus service to artificially make this happen. Here’s a great post from our neighbors to the south on that line of thinking.)

Note: When I lived on the Skip line, I did have to stand up — often.

Business consultant and real estate investor Eric Lipsey supports his daughter Ajna, 10 months, while sitting at his work computer at their Broomfield home in August. | Photo: David Jennings, Broomfield Enterprise

Hey, some of us can get pretty satisfied with our short, carbon-light commutes. At the moment I’ve got a slightly-broken bike and a slightly-mysterious foot injury, so I’m off of two thin wheels and onto four big, fat RTD wheels in the mornings (and, by the way, I’m starting to miss the sun!).

But that’s nothing compared to the people whose commute is… nothing!

Boulder County leads the state in telecommuting, and the percentage of workers here doing their jobs from home doubled over the last decade, according to an analysis of data from the American Community Survey.

Those working from home — or “working from anywhere,” as one business owner put it — say technological changes have made it easier to take a pass on commuting, while worsening traffic has made it more appealing.

The large number of small businesses and high-tech start-ups in Boulder also contributes to more people working at home.

The American Community Survey, an ongoing study of economic and social conditions conducted by the Census Bureau, found that in 2009, the year for which survey data was recently released, slightly more than 12 percent of Boulder County workers worked from home.

Twelve percent! Holy mackerel!

That frog was right — it’s not easy bein’ green. Boulder knows it and, apparently, so does the BBC, which did a story on Boulder’s efforts to reduce its pollution and poor energy habits — and while it’s very short, it’s not very flattering.

But for all the solar panels arrayed on the roof of the municipal building on the corner of Broadway and Canyon, the roar of traffic tells a different story.

The people of Boulder are just as wedded to their cars as they are anywhere else in America.

Read the rest at the BBC’s site.

Bikes on a Boulder bike rack| flickr user niehoff

It’s not too late to get into Boulder Walk and Bike to work Month: Bike to Work Day is June 23.

For those who have already pulled their bikes out of winter storage, or never put them away (or maybe you’re even a practitioner of Winter Bike to Work Day), June 23 is just another Wednesday. For everyone else it marks the day the excuses run out. Leave the car in the garage, pump up your tires and get out onto the many bike paths Boulder has to offer.

Bike to Work Day veterans, remember how great last year was?

Just past 6 a.m. on Wednesday, more than 40 Boulder businesses broke out bagels, fruit, organic breakfast bars and hot meals to serve the thousands of people who were participating in this year’s Bike to Work Day.

The annual event was expected to draw more than 35,000 across the state, with more than 6,300 registered to participate in Boulder.

Not a Bike to Work Day veteran? No worries. Whether or not you’re an experienced cyclist on Boulder’s bike paths and main roads, here’s everything needed to help make Boulder’s 34th annual Bike to Work Day the biggest one yet–and how to get as many perks as possible for your hard-earned sweat.

Get started

If you’ve never biked to work mapping the best route can seem a daunting task. Even for experienced riders there is always a need to find the best way to get where you are going. To help with the task GO Boulder has a MapQuest-style Boulder bike route mapping website specifically designed to get you where you need to go, by bike — and Google Maps now has bike path information and streetview for some bike paths in Boulder.

With your route in hand, hit Boulder’s Bike to Work Day 2010 registration.

Why bother registering for Bike to Work Day? Well, GO Boulder is counting on you. Last year 7,132 people registered for Bike to Work Day, according to the Go Boulder Boulder Bike to Work Day 2009 Wrap Up. If you are not registered, you are not being counted–although you are still reducing the number of cars on the road.

No excuses

The bad weather seems to have finally passed–hopefully there won’t be any June snowstorms. A more likely weather deterrent in June is 90 degree heat. Allay your qualms about arriving with a smell by checking out Jenn Fields’ tips on how to bike to work and not stink, including:

Don’t just keep deodorant in your desk drawer — add a washcloth for warmer rides that require the bathroom-sink mini sponge bath. Also, witch hazel sprizted on the washcloth is a helpful de-funkifier. Ladies, do your make up once you get to work. This could apply to men, too. We don’t judge.

To help you make sure your bike is in working order there will be bike repair stations set up around Boulder. A few are listed below.

Boulder Cycle Sport, 4580 Broadway

Great Harvest Bread Company, 2525 Arapahoe, service provided by Performance Bikes

Whole Foods Market, 2905 Pearl, service provided by Bicycle Village

Don’t forget breakfast

June 23 many restaurants and businesses will be offering breakfast stations for participants. Whichever area of town you are coming from, or headed toward, there is an official breakfast station near you. Below are a few places around town that will be participating. For a complete list of participating businesses check the Community Cycles Website.

Half Fast Subs, 1215 13th Street

Moe’s Bagel on Arapahoe, 3075 Arapahoe

Moe’s Broadway Bagel, 2650 Broadway

Ozo Coffee, 5340 Arapahoe

Celestial Seasonings, 4600 Sleepytime Drive

Boulder Chamber of Commerce, 2440 Pearl

Get involved

Events on Bike to Work Day don’t end when you arrive at work. The CU Environmental Center, along with Community Cycles, is hosting the 4th annual Bike Shorts Film Festival at Old Main on CU’s Boulder campus.

Community Cycles and GO Boulder work year round to help more people find ways to make bicycling more convenient and possible for more people in Boulder and Colorado. To help keep Boulder moving check out volunteer opportunities and how to donate an old bike.

Show your Bike to Work Day pride with the official Walk and Bike to Work Month T-shirt.

Now that you’re in the know, see you on the streets!

-Mikaila Altenbern

FLEX bus map from RTD

We do like to be useful around here, so we’re glad to see that someone linked to us in trying to solve some commute worries. The case in question involved a Boulder-to-Loveland trip and, as of today, that trip became a one-transfer trip (or maybe two if you’re starting from somewhere difficult in Boulder).

The RTD FLEX bus starts service today. Here’s the FLEX bus schedule (PDF).

A quick picture from the Loveland Reporter-Herald of what a FLEX bus schedule might look like for a commuter (shift the hours back a touch for a “normal” commute):

[Mass-transit advocate Gary] Thomas will depart from the transit center at The Square retail center in Fort Collins at 5 a.m. Monday and arrive at Longmont’s south transit center at Coffman and Eighth streets just after 6 a.m.

There, riders have the option of boarding RTD express buses for Denver or Boulder.

Day festivals in Fort Collins just got a bit closer. And folks who commute along this path are happier now, too, according to a Times-Call story about FLEX bus riders.

“It’s about time,” [Longmont resident Connie] Poole said of the new bus route.

She said she’d been frustrated in the past with the lack of a bus route connecting Longmont to Larimer County.

A crowded bike rack | flickr user phlyingpenguin

Recently, my complex doubled the amount of bike parking available on my side of the building. That parking immediately filled up with bikes. My guess is that if they knocked out another car parking spot, yet another 12-24 bikes would materialize and be parked there — bikes that people are currently storing on their balconies or in their kitchens or wherever else. 

Think about that as a business. If your business is located somewhere with very limited parking — let’s say, downtown Boulder — would you rather have one car parked outside or 12 bikes? The safe bet is that 12 customers are better than however many fit in that hypothetical car. (Needless to say, you’re making the automobile parking situation just a touch worse by making the switch.)

Maybe that’s why San Francisco is moving ahead with on-street bike parking, according to the Bay Citizen:

They’re called bike corrals – racks bolted into the street, using a spot that typically would go to a vehicle. This month a handful of corrals popped up in the city, like the one on Valencia at 22nd Street outside insanely popular Boogaloos restaurant.

A bike corral in Portland, Ore. | flickr user BikePortland.org

Bike corrals are already used in Portland, Ore. There, they’ve got blue bike corrals, uniformly painted, Ryan Van Duzer says writing for elephant, so they settle into citizens’ minds as municipal structures. Business owners can petition the city and ask for a bicycle corral near their business.

Seattle has them, too.

Locally, The Cup has been advocating for these. Kind of a lot. They’re talking about bike corrals on Twitter (check that link for a pic of a bike corral in Durango) and they’ve got a bike corral primer [PDF] on their site, which says:

Bike corrals give bikes a designated place, acknowledge their importance (which cyclists appreciate) and clear the sidewalk. Shop owners like the extra traffic, and have been known to pay for their installation.

What are they?

Basically elongated bike racks, corrals can be installed in a parking space, where they allow 12 to 14 vehicles to park instead of one. The fixed element is often a staggered series of upside down U-shapes (or “staples”) or a metal spiral, though there’s no reason they couldn’t be more imaginative. The City of Portland paints the fixtures all blue, making them recognizable to users as city structures. Corrals themselves cost around $1,000. Labor and additions for stability and safety may bring the total to $3,000 to $4,000.

Here’s a photo of a temporary and very unofficial bike corral in Los Angeles, where an official bike corral program was just approved in April:

"There was no special occasion for the installation of LA's first parking corral - only the brutal necessity of a bike repair collective and the need to keep the sidewalk relatively clear during operating hours. This corral appears temporarily in half a car parking space in front of the Bike Oven most evenings these days. Ramon Martinez deserves the credit for this excellent idea." | photo and caption: flickr user ubrayj02

Where would you put ‘em?

[The Bay Citizen via Urban Velo]

Unicycle! | Low-quality photo from Dave's phone

Parked at the Boulder Public Library today and chained to a bike rack: one unicycle. I know we’ve got a few unicyclers in Boulder — and mountain unicyclers, too — but it’s still fun to just see one parked.

I’ve thought about trying to unicycle — as has a friend, perhaps a bit more seriously — but I’m pretty sure I’ll stick to the bike for trips to the library.

Library unicyclist, whoever you are, I salute you.