Yes, even the baby grand! Well maybe not, but the Gentle Giant Moving Company in Boston wants to move the contents of your abode via bicycle, not truck. The company says they avoid the cost of permits and the hassles of parking — and that a lot of their customers are cyclists who like the idea of a zero-carbon move. The company uses trailers and extra-low-gear bikes. But they didn’t invent the notion: The idea started when a local rider moved friends’ stuff by bike for extra cash, then brought the idea to a Gentle Giant, which loved it. Now they work together.

That’s according to Australian pro cyclist Chloe Hosking, who isn’t apologizing for the thoughts that led to the outburst. Cycling Australia admonished Hosking and in response she’s said she will send McQuaid a formal apology for her choice of words — but the Commonwealth Games bronze medalist maintains that the world cycling governing body, the UCI, is sexist, that the pay is inequitable, and that the leadership is flawed. While Cycling Australia’s retort was that Hosking was being disrespectful, the views expressed are hardly out of line with what’s often been said behind closed doors about McQuaid and the UCI by both male and female racers and especially team managers who find the body dictatorial and inanely organized compared to most professional sporting bodies.

With bicycle vending machines becoming more common, maybe it was only a matter of time until someone developed a helmet vending machine. This one comes from the brainiacs at MIT, and it’s designed to sell or rent bike lids at extremely low cost to users of Boston’s Hubway, a wildly successful bike-sharing system that saw 140,000 rides in just four months. Research showed that just 30 percent of Hubway riders wore helmets, compared to 72 of peeps on their own rigs. The MIT prototype machine would offer head protection for as little as $8 — and those are Giro, not WalMart, helmets.

A guy who can enter any kind of winter bike race and win it is a hero to many, we’re sure, but it’s his blogging and musing and videography of his adventures that makes him compellingly normal to us. Because his soul-searching isn’t any different than any other nature lover’s. Here’s a fittingly quick and quiet example he posted on a snow bike ride during the Winter Solstice that he took with his dog Fang (yes, he has a dog named “Fang,” too). Take a moment for the read and let it inspire some winter play of your own.

The claim: Helmets don’t increase safety, only improving infrastructure and driver/cyclist education does that. Further, the petition by several cycling groups suggests that helmet laws only put off would-be cyclists because it tells society that cycling is something to fear, and is dangerous. While the petition says that helmet laws in Australia have directly contributed to the rise in obesity, and the Netherlands, which has no helmet law, has a much lower rate of obesity and much higher rates of cycling, the logic here seems pretty specious. There’s no national helmet law in the U.S., either, and yet we have very few cyclists and massive obesity problems.

College campuses are smaller and more self-contained than cities, but are only now figuring out bike sharing, AFTER cities have implemented programs. Bike theft and lack of decent bicycle storage have often been cited as reasons many students forgo owning their own bikes and commuting to or across campus, and scheduling constraints can also play a role, but universities as varied as Cornell in Ithaca, New York, to Washington State in Spokane and Stanford in Palo Alto are now putting more work into share programs, where students pay a small fee and can ride to various lock stations, many of them within the community, not just on campus.

In The Netherlands 30% of people commute daily on a bicycle. Compare that to .7% in New York. With so many people wheeling around on bikes in that country, by comparison it makes Portland/Minneapolis look like a monster-truck-friendly town. Of all the fantastic things I’ve seen come out of The Netherlands, this trash can for bikers has to be my favorite. Sure, some city worker probably has to walk behind it to collect all the empty beer bottles tossed by imbibers with bad aim who are enjoying a sip on the ride home, but you take the good with the bad.

via Brain Pickings

With trail access a never-ending battle in Norcal, mountain bikers have been trying to influence the local chapter of the Sierra Club. And this small skirmish shows a deeper rift between the interests of mountain bikers and other environmental advocates. At issue is whether several mountain bikers who are running for seats on the chapter should even be considered — there’s some debate about whether they care about larger environmental issues, or just access to trails. A fair question, and not one specific to Santa Cruz. But as groups like Sierra and others have long had feuds with mountain bikers it’s worth considering the far larger picture: the next environmentalists are far more likely to mountain bike than to hike. They’re going to continue to push for change. Advocacy for the environment, yes, but a voice, too.

Yes, they’ve heard that turns a lot of people off, wondering why it isn’t made in England, where the high-end cycling brand is based, and they go right at that question in this blog post about why that’s untenable, and why what you might end up with would be far inferior to what you get from China. They drill down on labor quality and labor quality of life as well, and explain that KTC, their Chinese manufacturing partner, was founded by a pair of Austrians in the 1970s, and that since, KTC has worked for brands as mass as Adidas and as elite as Bogner. It’s an interesting read for anyone who wonders why things are no longer made in the West.