Bike Battles

Author: James Longhurst
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805994
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
Americans have been riding bikes for more than a century now. So why are most American cities still so ill-prepared to handle cyclists? James Longhurst, a historian and avid cyclist, tackles that question by tracing the contentious debates between American bike riders, motorists, and pedestrians over the shared road. Bike Battles explores the different ways that Americans have thought about the bicycle through popular songs, merit badge pamphlets, advertising, films, newspapers and sitcoms. Those associations shaped the actions of government and the courts when they intervened in bike policy through lawsuits, traffic control, road building, taxation, rationing, import tariffs, safety education and bike lanes from the 1870s to the 1970s. Today, cycling in American urban centers remains a challenge as city planners, political pundits, and residents continue to argue over bike lanes, bike-share programs, law enforcement, sustainability, and public safety. Combining fascinating new research from a wide range of sources with a true passion for the topic, Longhurst shows us that these battles are nothing new; in fact they’re simply a continuation of the original battle over who is - and isn’t - welcome on our roads. Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNleJ0tDvqg

Uphill Battle

Author: Owen Mulholland
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781931382120
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This book, rich in anecdote and history, explores in words and pictures the world of uphill cycling. Recreational cyclists can ride the same roads, compare their own efforts with those of masters like Coppi and Merckx and Armstrong, and come away with an understanding of the heroic feats that made these greats so great. Dozens of photographs add to an engaging look at this amazing sport.

Get Up and Ride

Author: Jim Shea
Publisher: Jim Shea
ISBN: 173626060X
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
In the summer of 2010, brothers-in-law Marty and Jim embark on a cycling trip along the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal, a 335-mile trek from their home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Jim's boyhood home in Washington, DC. Chance encounters with colorful local characters and other surprising escapades during five days on the trail make for nonstop laughs. As they travel through forests and along winding rivers, they experience the breathtaking scenery of western Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia, exploring early American history while learning more about each other as well as themselves. This true story is for adventurers and cyclists as well as couch potatoes looking for a lighthearted take on friendship and some hilarious fun.

Bicycling Magazine's Complete Book of Road Cycling Skills

Author: Ed Pavelka
Publisher: Rodale
ISBN: 9780875964867
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Provides advice on equipment and skills, including tips on how to prevent injury and convert a mountain bike into a road bike

Bike Boom

Author: Carlton Reid
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610918169
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
Bicycling advocates envision a future in which bikes are a widespread daily form of transportation, but this reality is still far away. Will we ever witness a true "bike boom" in cities? What can we learn from past successes and failures to make cycling safer, easier, and more accessible? In Bike Boom, journalist Carlton Reid uses history to shine a spotlight on the present and demonstrates how bicycling has the potential to grow even further, if the right measures are put in place by the politicians and planners of today and tomorrow. He explores the benefits and challenges of cycling, the roles of infrastructure and advocacy, and what we can learn from cities that have successfully supported and encouraged bike booms. In this entertaining and thought-provoking book, Reid sets out to discover what we can learn from the history of bike "booms."

Old Wheelways

Author: Robert L. McCullough
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262029464
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
How American bicyclists shaped the landscape and left traces of their journeys for us in writing, illustrations, and photographs. In the later part of the nineteenth century, American bicyclists were explorers, cycling through both charted and uncharted territory. These wheelmen and wheelwomen became keen observers of suburban and rural landscapes, and left copious records of their journeys—in travel narratives, journalism, maps, photographs, illustrations. They were also instrumental in the construction of roads and paths (“wheelways”)—building them, funding them, and lobbying legislators for them. Their explorations shaped the landscape and the way we look at it, yet with few exceptions their writings have been largely overlooked by landscape scholars, and many of the paths cyclists cleared have disappeared. In Old Wheelways, Robert McCullough restores the pioneering cyclists of the nineteenth century to the history of American landscapes. McCullough recounts marathon cycling trips around the Northeast undertaken by hardy cyclists, who then describe their journeys in such magazines as The Wheelman Illustrated and Bicycling World; the work of illustrators (including Childe Hassam, before his fame as a painter); efforts by cyclists to build better rural roads and bicycle paths; and conflicts with park planners, including the famous Olmsted Firm, who often opposed separate paths for bicycles. Today's ubiquitous bicycle lanes owe their origins to nineteenth century versions, including New York City's “asphalt ribbons.” Long before there were “rails to trails,” there was a movement to adapt existing passageways—including aqueduct corridors, trolley rights-of-way, and canal towpaths—for bicycling. The campaigns for wheelways, McCullough points out, offer a prologue to nearly every obstacle faced by those advocating bicycle paths and lanes today. McCullough's text is enriched by more than one hundred historic images of cyclists (often attired in skirts and bonnets, suits and ties), country lanes, and city streets.

The Magic Bicycle

Author: John Bibee
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 9780877843481
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
The Spirit Flyer, a rusty old bicycle found in the city dump, surprises its new owner, John Kramar, when it magically lives up to its name, introducing John to an unknown world and changing his life for good.

On Bicycles

Author: Evan Friss
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
Subways and yellow taxis may be the icons of New York transportation, but it is the bicycle that has the longest claim to New York’s streets: two hundred years and counting. Never has it taken to the streets without controversy: 1819 was the year of the city’s first bicycle and also its first bicycle ban. Debates around the bicycle’s place in city life have been so persistent not just because of its many uses—recreation, sport, transportation, business—but because of changing conceptions of who cyclists are. In On Bicycles, Evan Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of cycling in New York City. He uncovers the bicycle’s place in the city over time, showing how it has served as a mirror of the city’s changing social, economic, infrastructural, and cultural politics since it first appeared. It has been central, as when horse-drawn carriages shared the road with bicycle lanes in the 1890s; peripheral, when Robert Moses’s car-centric vision made room for bicycles only as recreation; and aggressively marginalized, when Ed Koch’s battle against bike messengers culminated in the short-lived 1987 Midtown Bike Ban. On Bicycles illuminates how the city as we know it today—veined with over a thousand miles of bicycle lanes—reflects a fitful journey powered, and opposed, by New York City’s people and its politics.

It's Not About the Bike

Author: Lance Armstrong
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780425179611
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
The champion cyclist recounts his diagnosis with cancer, the grueling treatments during which he was given a less than twenty percent chance for survival, his surprising victory in the 1999 Tour de France, and the birth of his son.

Lost Battles

Author: Philip Sabin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0826422004
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 527

Book Description
From the author's introduction: Ancient battles seize the modern imagination. Far from being forgotten, they have become a significant aspect of popular culture, prompting a continuing stream of books, feature films, television programs and board and computer games... there is a certain escapist satisfaction in looking back to an era when conflicts between entire states turned on clear-cut pitched battles between formed armies, lasting just a few hours and spanning just a few miles of ground. These battles were still unspeakably traumatic and grisly affairs for those involved - at Cannae, Hannibal's men butchered around two and a half times as many Romans (out of a much smaller overall population) as there were British soldiers killed on the notorious first day of the Somme. However, as with the great clashes of the Napoleonic era, time has dulled our preoccupation with such awful human consequences, and we tend to focus instead on the inspired generalship of commanders like Alexander and Caesar and on the intriguing tactical interactions of units such as massed pikemen and war elephants within the very different military context of pre-gunpowder warfare. Lost Battles takes a new and innovative approach to the battles of antiquity. Using his experience with conflict simulation, Philip Sabin draws together ancient evidence and modern scholarship to construct a generic, grand tactical model of the battles as a whole. This model unites a mathematical framework, to capture the movement and combat of the opposing armies, with human decisions to shape the tactics of the antagonists. Sabin then develops detailed scenarios for 36 individual battles such as Marathon and Cannae, and uses the comparative structure offered by the generic model to help cast light on which particular interpretations of the ancient sources on issues such as army size fit in best with the general patterns observed elsewhere. Readers can use the model to experiment for themselves by re-fighting engagements of their choice, tweaking the scenarios to accord with their own judgment of the evidence, trying out different tactics from those used historically, and seeing how the battle then plays out. Lost Battles thus offers a unique dynamic insight into ancient warfare, combining academic rigor with the interest and accessibility of simulation gaming. This book includes access to a downloadable computer simulation where the reader can view the author's simulations as well create their own.