Grease Rag Ride & Wrench

Grease Rag is this Thursday, May 17th!
(This event takes place the 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month)

Wrench with us at Sunrise Cyclery (901 W. Lake St. at Bryant Ave.) 7-9PM.

GROUP RIDE!  It's spring, and Kat is excited to lead this season's group rides from 6-7, starting at Midtown Freewheel on the Greenway.

Grease Rag NE will be June 7.

Grease Rag wants you to know...

GreaseRag.org launched on May 1st.  Check us out!

New flyer design!

Bike Walk Week June 2-10

Lady Biker Party 5/20- Network with other rad bike women

Weather and Trail Condition resources

5/19-20 Bike Camping trip!

STICKERS are here and at Sunrise for a suggested donation of $1!  Get 'em while they're hot.

Very pleased to announce that we have NEW fliers!  Grease Rag friend Nickey Robare designed some fliers for us, what do you think?

The fliers can be downloaded and printed from our Flickr group.  Print one out and leave it on your fridge, hand it to a friend, stick it on a bike!

Check out Nickey's tumblr at nickeyrobo.com, and Fuck Yeah Girls on Bikes.

Big thanks to Cycle Twin Cities blog for the heads up about the new MORC Weather Blog!  I really like the video they posted (check out the CTC link) where Kristin Clark introduces herself.

MORC has launched a great new addition to their website earlier this month which will come in very handy to cyclists, the MORC Weather Blog.   The blog is written by mountain biker, meteorologist Kristin Clark who can be seen on WeatherNationTV , a 24/7 national weather channel based in Minneapolis which launched recently.

Subscribe to the MORC Weather Blog and follow all of their trail conditions updates on Twitter at @trailconditions to stay informed and avoid getting rained out or finding out the trail is closed when you get there.  You can also follow Kristin on Twitter at @KclarkWNTV.  Keep up the great work Kristin.

You can also read and post about trail conditions on MORC’s Trail Conditions Forum.

I am sharing some favorite weather sources that are not cycling-specific, and some Minnesota weather history below the break.

I would like to ask all students, of all ages, to bike to school on May 9 for the first National Bike to School Day.

The list of reasons why you should bike (anywhere, but especially) to school range from health, to independence, to safety, to way-finding.  An article I read recently summed up the topic of my senior thesis: Children develop spatial relationships and geographic way-finding by walking increasing distances from their "home base," establishing landmarks and directional cues as they go.  Apparently they are unable to do this as well when they are driven everywhere.

I spoke with Appleyard about his findings, and he highlighted a paradox of the modern car-dependent community. The United States has made gains in traffic safety over the last generation, but we have done so in part by removing pedestrians from the streetscape. He cites a poll that shows 71 percent of parents surveyed had walked or biked to school when they were kids, but only 18 percent of their children do so.

“We’ve seen a dramatic decrease in fatalities,” Appleyard says. “But we’ve also seen abandonment of the streets. Parents see too much traffic. What is the rational thing for a parent to do? Your choice is to drive them. It’s a multiplier effect – parents are driving because there’s more traffic, and then there’s more traffic.”

Children who had a “windshield perspective” from being driven everywhere weren’t able to accurately draw how the streets in their community connected, whereas children who walked or biked to get around produced detailed and highly accurate maps of their neighborhood street network.

Grease Rag NE is Today, Tuesday, May 8th!

(Grease Rag NE is the second Tuesday of every month.)

Join us at 7pm at Recovery Bikes (2555 Central Ave NE)! From 7pm – 8pm we’ll be teaching a short tutorial on adjusting headsets. So bring in your bike and learn how to get that wiggle waggle out of the headset! From 8pm – 9pm we’ll have open shop to work on anything you’d like. Do you have any projects you want to work on?