Branding Bikes
22 October 2011
According to the Queensland Cycle Strategy 2011-2021, one of the state government’s four priorities regarding cycling is to make Queensland “a place where cycling is widely supported, encouraged and celebrated”.
As part of a revamp in August, Brisbane’s CityCycle scheme launched a marketing campaign called CityCycle Stories, the premise of which being that “[e]veryone has a different CityCycle story to tell”. The campaign presents five such stories, and cyclists are invited to add their own (only via facebook, but that’s another story).
Whatever the actual effect advertising has on community perceptions of cycling, this sounds like a good opportunity for the council to support, encourage and celebrate cycling. In the same way, though, a poor campaign has the power to ridicule, discourage and denigrate cycling. That’s my concern.
For this panel, why is someone cycling? Only because they can’t drive their car. Indeed, the logic of this situation is that only the most ridiculous circumstance could stop someone from driving their car—under normal circumstances there is no excuse (not to drive).
Here the campaign comes closest to endorsing a sensible reason for riding a bike, namely that relative to other forms of transport, it’s less polluting (again, taking driving as normality is problematic, I’m unsure of how the environmental comparison between cycling and public transport works out, walking is the ideal). But even here, the campaign displaces a concern for the environment to someone else (how quirky!). We should ride bikes, not because we give a shit about the environment, but because it gives us a chance to get some jollies out of some other that does.
The rest are similarly dumb, see them here. It’s interesting to compare the tone of the CityCycle campaign with one from the SA Motor Accident Commission that’s been widely condemned for beating up on cycling. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were produced by the same agency.
Of course, council doesn’t have to play by the state’s rules vis-à-vis cycling culture, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. On a purely pragmatic point, promoting a bike hire scheme by making fun of its users is just foolish.
Mt Coot-tha on a CityCycle
26 June 2011
I posted this on my posterous earlier today, because it has some nice media options and I was going to embed video. I didn’t end up doing that, but it’s there anyway. So, the repost.
I thought it would be fun to ride up Mt Coot-tha on a CityCycle bike, so today I finally got around to it. Since the north west hasn’t been connected yet, I started and finished at the Go Betweens Bridge. I had intended to video the thing, but as you can see, the vibrations from mounting my phone on the basket made it pretty hard to watch. I’ve uploaded them in the spirit of a Lucas Arts adventure game cutscene (I’m thinking The Dig) here and here.
The ride took me fifty-seven minutes, end-to-end. Forty-eight of those were spent riding, most of the balance was waiting at the Hale St West construction site and refilling my water bottle at the top. What’s sort of cool is that when a did a similar ride a few months ago, it took me forty-four minutes. That was slightly more circuitous, going around the graveyard but skipping the initial Planetarium climb, but the point remains that despite a CityCycle bike’s weight and positioning, it doesn’t really make that much of a difference. Nevertheless, the uphill segment of my ride did take the record for the slowest front-side Mt Coot-tha ascent.
Just in case they see this, I must say hello to rider in the leopard kit and his friend with some quickstep gear. They beat me to the top, but their pace encouraged me to get all the way up.
Sore Feet
9 May 2011
This past Saturday, I joined a few friends walking from Birkdale to Brisbane. A common response upon hearing this is an incredulous ‘why?’. First and foremost, we walked back to Brisbane because we didn’t want to spend the day in Birkdale. Beyond simply transporting us back to Brisbane, the walk offers much more. Over the thirty kilometre parcours, we witnessed a progression from mixed-use residential-light-agriculture land to increasingly suburban and then urban spaces. It reminded us of the geography of Brisbane and that the inner city is such a small part of the city. The walk holds further meaning for my friend Dan, who grew up around Birkdale and invited the rest of us along.
Since I’m a bike-dork, I was reminded of the Bicycle Empowerment Network which operates in southern Africa. They distribute bikes, train mechanics and in general encourage bicycle use in areas where walking is a dominant mode of transport. As someone who regularly rides reasonable distances on a bicycle (I have a blog about it), it was striking how much effort went into a similarly far walk. It took us most of the day and completely drained us. Now I have a keener sense of the transformative power of a bicycle (and, in the technocratic west, public transport) for mobility on the scale of cities. I’m looking forward to next year’s walk, but I won’t be doing it every week.