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... with a little help from our Friday friends NEW YORK CITY-- by Lynette Chiang, Bike Friday Customer Evangelist This story reproduced from the Bike Friday blog The BMW Building: a naked Brompton gets the nod ... will a fully clothed tikit also? About this experiment See all the videos at once Photo Gallery OFFICE BUILDINGS Below is a list of buildings with an insider who has offered to let me put the tikit to the test, and if we proceed, the results. Missing information means the appointment is yet to be confirmed. Please email lynettec@bikefriday.com to supply more information or help with the test by offering your building. See the blue box on page 1 for the test procedure. UPTOWN SUCCESS! BMW Building, 555 W57th @ 11 Ave, NY | View clip Date of trial: Wed Dec 5, 2007, 5pm Insider: DH, Bike Friday Club of NY member, owns 2 folding bikes and a recumbent Type of building: Secure office building Known policy/insider statement: "Th...

Reproduced from the Bike Friday blog ' Patience' , one of two lions guarding the the Beaux-arts building of the NY Public Library, says it's only a matter of time before folders may cross its threshold ... The Green Building logo proudly etched on the doors of 7 World Trade Center where, despite assurances, my unfolded bicycle was roundly rejected - remember, if the bike folds, fold it, if it doesn't - get one that does.  "The tikit experiment is terrific. What a fantastic baseline to judge accessibility by. I've never heard of anyone doing a survey like this - people have counted bike racks but not access to safe storage. A bit of Michael Moore to rally round. It gives me encouragement to try the same thing in Ithaca - where enlightened talk is cheap." - Andrejs O, BF Club of Ithaca . "I just watched the office building clips. I think taken as a whole they give a nice sense that the only "issues" with riding a bike to work are mo...

Now this is one bummer about being single - you need a permanent partner to invest in one of these! Riding the DoubleDay tandem recumbent with (happily married) Jeff Gilbert on the 5BBC Chocolate Ride in NY. See Bike Friday in NY07 for the full monty. I'm devouring a fascinating book called Singled Out - How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After by Bella DePaulo. What keeps me reading is not only an eye-opening list of discriminatory perks you get from being married in the USA (if you die, your social security benefits pass to your spouse, if you're single it goes to the state; if your spouse dies, you get a small stipend for funeral expenses, if single, your body was presumeably discovered in your lonely walk-up bedsit being nibbled by the cat and so on) but the wittiness infused throughout. It's mischievously pointed, dedicated to the cause, yet not at all defensive. When people feel strongly about something it takes a bit ...

The view over the Hudson from the 26th floor of a Trump tower, where I'm not presently staying. Here's another ... SO HERE I am in NYC, holed up for a few fleeting days in a most privileged fashion: I have the complete run of a 489 sq. foot studio apartment in gayboy central Chelsea, courtesy of my NY host, a walking Wikipedia of the built environment, who I shall codename David, to protect the real David .... To my right is a book shelf groaning with every tree ever pulped in the name of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, among other stylemasters of shelter. To my left is wall of superbly framed portraits of these men who've elevated the 3x2 to to the sublime, which quietly state 'you are in the temple of an architectural nut - and those cushions don't go with those pants.' To my rear is a kitchen, which has never seen so much as a cup of Top Ramen in a rested state. When I casually mentioned I was going to cook a meal, my host looked up from his Isamu N...

Pictured: Ann Kobsa preparing to 'plant' some seeds on my sliver of Hawaii (which I merely borrowed from mother earth for a fee of $20K) using the Fukuoka method of natural farming - basically tossing it to the winds ... read more It's been hot as Hawaii in high summer here in NYC. Yesterday I partook of a 60 mile round trip bike rider to Garden City led by 5bbc member and NY history wiki-on-wheels Danny Liebermann. Many of us were wiped out by the time we'd done 45 miles of basically flat urban riding. There we were, slumped against the walls of an 'Amish (hardly) Market', sipping fancy cold drinks and talking of taking the subway back. Of course, any bike rider will tell you that extended flat bike rides are in may ways more fatiguing than hilly ones - it's one long steady grind, rather than some butt-relieveing downhills. My last post, an extended tirade about global warming (ah, thank god for blogging, better than paying a $120 an hour therapis...

I would have included an original shot of a polar bear or endangered tree frog, but I decided to save the fossil fuel. This old shot is from the seat of my bicycle . +++ Last Monday night I made a pilgrimage back to the NY Explorer's Club , the 103 year-old "international multidisciplinary professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research and the ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore." It's not a place to see lightweight travelogues (like biking across Italy , Peru or Cuba ) unless you're making a scholarly, scientific contribution, or you've an angle the club deems worthy of sharing. Of course, if you're a Sir Edmund or Buzz Aldrin in your chosen field, you'll be eagerly summoned to the lectern in the club's riotously gothic, time-capsule of an edifice, addressing an appreciative audience of both real and armchair explorers – perhaps even honorary chair Sir Edmund himself. And what more real and worthy a to...

Accidental Advertising: This arty shot, resulting from almost dropping my camera as I chased down a customer on her bike, resulted in a very nice little plug for clothing manufacturer Peal Izumi. I've just spent a week riding my bike 80-100 miles a day with 2000 customers and other folks on Cycle Oregon . I was looking forward to impressively blogging from the saddle, except my supposed all-singing-all-dancing iPhone turned out to be a bit of club-footed wallflower, as I ranted on Fastcompany.com . So I'm glad to have my clunky, predicatable but lightening fast old Blackberry back. it does what I want and fast. A friend is reading Terry Pratchett. I'd never heard of this English author at all, but he's prolific, having written a ton of books. The friend keeps sharing snippets aloud. Last one offered: if you steal a sock from a vampire, it will throw him off completely, because vampires are such neat freaks. Now just pause for a moment and savor the absurdity: a vampire ...