Author: Tom Babin Page 1 of 16
Tom is an award-winning author and journalist who has written about cycling for years. He is the author of Frostbike: The Joy, Pain and Numbness of Winter Cycling, a bestselling exploration of getting around on two wheels throughout the year. He has delivered speeches about cycling around the world, and is often in the media addressing issues related to cycling. For several years, he wrote the Pedal blog for the Calgary Herald. He lives in Calgary.
There’s a route in my city that I’ve hated for years. It’s bad to drive on. It’s bad to ride a bike on. It’s bad to walk on. But I never could really put my finger on why it was so loathsome until I read the new @Strong Towns book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town by Chuck Marohn. Now I know why: This route is a stroad. So I decided to go a bicycle adventure all along the worst stroad in my city to really get to the heart of its awfulness.
A few weeks ago, I made a video about mistakes that newbie winter cyclists make. But the things we can do individually is only part of the equation. Of even more importance to winter cycling is the things our cities can do to make winter cycling work. Unfortunately, cities don’t always get it right. So after exploring winter cycling for years, here are some of the mistakes that I’ve seen cities make.
Riding a bike through winter can be a challenge, but there’s no need to miss out on the pleasures and benefits of riding in winter. So, after doing it badly for years, I’ve compiled a list of mistakes that I (and some other people) have made over the years with the hopes of helping you avoid these rookie missteps.
A viewer emailed recently with a question I had long pondered but never actioned: Is listening to music on a bike a good thing? If so, how? I have never worn headphones while riding, always assuming that it was terribly unsafe to plug your ears while riding city streets, so I had no answer. So in this video, I set out to answer the question.
If your city is like mine, there have been many initiatives over the years to improve its bike-friendliness, from painted bike lanes to pathways to separated bike lanes. But if you’re city is really like mine then many of those routes remain islands unto themselves, disconnected from each other and untethered to a more comprehensive plan intended to help cyclists really get around the city. So after exploring these disconnections, I have a theory that there are four different types of disconnections that can be easily fixed to make our cities more bike-friendly.
There are, generally, two types of bike lights. In North America, where most bikes are built for speed rather than practicality, lights are often an aftermarket product, powered by rechargeable batteries and affixed to handlebars and seatposts. But there is another way, common elsewhere, to stay lit up while riding by integrating lights that are powered by the rider’s pedal strokes through a dynamo. Which type is best? In this video, I set out to answer that question.
To support this channel, please subscribe, share this video and check out the links below.
• Buy my book Frostbike: The Joy, Pain and Numbness of Winter Cycling: https://amzn.to/3lxJiHT
• Here’s the winter bike I’m riding these days: https://bit.ly/2PhqUqF
• Epidemic Sound for music. It’s great for my YouTube needs: https://bit.ly/3v2Bl05
#cycling #bikecommuting #bikes
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/tombabin
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tombabin/
If, like me, you live in a city that is not very bike-friendly, bicycle commuting can sometimes be intimidating. But bike commuting is an amazing way to improve your life, so I thought I’d share a few tips I picked up over the years the hard way. Hopefully, this video will help you avoid some of the mistakes that I made.
To support this channel, please subscribe, share this video and check out the links below.
• Buy my book Frostbike: The Joy, Pain and Numbness of Winter Cycling: https://amzn.to/3lxJiHT
• Here’s the winter bike I’m riding these days: https://bit.ly/2PhqUqF
• Love these pants for cycling without looking like a cyclist: https://bit.ly/3eH1Io5
• Epidemic Sound for music. It’s great for my YouTube needs: https://bit.ly/3v2Bl05 #cycling #bikecommuting #bikes Follow me! Blog: http://shifter.info Twitter: https://twitter.com/tombabin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tombabin/
The most common question I receive on this channel, by far, is some version of this: “Yo, what’s that bike you’re riding?”
I’ve done videos on my winter bikes, but I’ve never dedicated a video to my beloved summer bike, for a simple reason: There’s not much to talk about. It’s an old, plain, simple machine. But it’s also the bike I love more than any other. So, on the verge of the bike’s first tune-up in a decade (bad bike owner, bad!), I decided to finally give up some details on this bike, and, in the process, explore a little more deeply why I love this bike and, more broadly, why humans seem to make such strong emotional attachments to bicycles.
Thanks to Karly Coleman for sharing her research into the human-bicycle emotional connection. Follow her at https://twitter.com/szaracat and read her complete study here: https://era.library.ualberta.ca/items/384f7788-e638-4a01-adf9-2cbe8e7b7e80
To support this channel, please subscribe, share this video and check out the links below.
• Buy my book Frostbike: The Joy, Pain and Numbness of Winter Cycling: https://amzn.to/3lxJiHT
• Here’s the winter bike I’m riding these days: https://bit.ly/2PhqUqF
• Epidemic Sound for music. It’s great for my YouTube needs: https://bit.ly/3v2Bl05 #cycling #bikecommuting #bikes
Follow me! Blog: http://shifter.info Twitter: https://twitter.com/tombabin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tombabin/
There’s an old argument that suggests bike lanes are bad for local businesses because only a car makes it convenient enough for people to make multiple stops at local businesses to spend their hard-earned money. So today I decided to put that dubious theory to the test. Here’s the scenario: I choose a route about six kilometers long, with three stops along the way. I run it on a bike. Then I run it in a car. I time both journeys with a stopwatch. Which urban vehicle to you think will be faster and more efficient?