Last week, Beth Israel CIO and prolific blogger John Halamka, wrote about his monthlong experience biking to work and from meeting to meeting.
It prompted me (and many other readers, I’m sure) to think about trying it myself — after all, the economics are obvious, and the health benefits are a bonus you can’t deny. He wrote, “The bottomline – using a bike to commute in Boston saves me 30 minutes per day, saves gas, saves parking, and burns calories. If the rain stops, the pedestrians get off the phone, and the potholes are filled, life will be grand. The experiment has been a success and I will continue to bike to all my meetings in Boston, April to November, weather permitting.”
It also reminded me of the many entrepreneurs and inventors who ride their bike to work, particularly clean tech entrepreneur and bicycle innovator David Wilson, who was 80 years old when we profiled him last year and who was riding the recumbent bicycle he designed to work in Woburn.
And then, of course, there are the bicycle innovations that keep cropping up around here. Just last week, Managing Editor Jim Connolly included Global Cycle Solutions in a wrapup of emerging technologies. Global Cycle Solutions is building bicycle-powered peripherals such as a corn sheller, a grain grinder and a cell phone charger for use in developing nations. The company says its mission is “to leverage a worldwide market of over 1 billion bicycles as a driver of innovation and affordable energy. We hope to enable micro-entrepreneurs to bring the service of pedal-powered devices to their communities to meet an extensive range of needs from agricultural food processing to home appliances to battery charging.”
And who can forget BikeNow, which proposes a fleet of rental bikes in Boston? Bikenow is an automated bicycle-share program for the Boston area, which it positions as a Zipcar Inc.-style service for bikes.
Virtual biking also popped up earlier this week, as some local firms help Pan Mass Challenge raise funds using virtual bikers. The web-based fundraising application built by two Massachusetts companies is using a virtual-goods model to expand the Pan Mass Challenge’s fundraising horizons. The application, called PaceLine, lets donors create online avatars that join a rider’s fundraising campaign on a tandem bicycle with an infinite number of seats. Each donor can then start his or her own PaceLine page, inviting friends to add to their contribution. The avatars display each donor’s reason for giving using a pop-up text field and icons.
I’m sure there are other stories out there we haven’t hit upon. Do you take your bike to work every day in some unique way? Know of someone who does? Or is there some cycling innovation we haven’t covered? Let us know by commenting below.
-Doug Banks, Editor
Posted by dbanks
Tags: bicycles, commuting, invention, technology
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I live in the North End, work with Boston start-ups and have been biking to the office and around town for over 7 years. In the last few years my biking has evolved as my life has evolved. Now I have a child-seat on the back and first make a stop at daughters pre-school in the West End before heading over to my office at WorkBar, a community shared office space right by south station. By car, foot or public transit daily routine is over an hour; by bike it is under a half hour.
I was at TEDxBoston last week and the most interesting talk (more than mine!) was by Ryan Chin of the MIT Media Lab titled “Smart Cities: Sustainable Urban Mobility-on-Demand” where electric bikes, scooters, and cars are getting integrated into a next-gen personal urban transit system. Very cool stuff.
Often bike to work, Back Bay Bay Colony, Waltham. It’s about 15 miles each way. Favorite routes are along the Charles River and sometimes the longer ways through Lincoln, Bedford, Lexington, Arlington, and Cambridge along the Minuteman.
Life is good!
Actually, biking is a way of enlivening my impending obituary. I don’t want to die ignominiously in a nursing home or running toward a departure gate. Biking is now the most likely way I’ll die. Experience indicates I’ll be taken out in a bike lane by some woman in a minivan drinking a latte while on her cellphone with her kids screaming in the back seats. That, or a pick-up truck’s rear-view mirror on the back of my head. Not as good as a flaming wreck at Le Mans, but better than cancer.
Bike!
/Bob Metcalfe