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Posts Tagged ‘carrboro’

Helmet laws are not the answer

Icon Written by Morgan Giddings on September 9, 2009 – 9:00 pm

It is campaign season again, and there are a number of candidates running for the Board of Aldermen in our sleepy little town of Carrboro, NC (right next to Chapel Hill, NC).

Just a few days ago, Sierra Club held a candidates forum. One question they asked the candidates was how they might improve safety for cyclists and pedestrians. While we found all of the responses to be lacking (perhaps in part due to the reporting in the newspaper), one particularly stood out. Randee Haven-O’Donnel is claimed to have said we should pass an adult helmet law, mandating that we all wear helmets.
NO WE SHOULD NOT PASS A MANDATORY HELMET LAW! I rarely if ever yell in this blog, but this one warrants a big yell.
Many places have tried mandatory helmet laws, and it has been a miserable failure wherever and whenever tried. Australia is the biggest case in point. Seven years after the mandatory helmet law was passed, the cycling population dropped by 22%. At the same time, the total number of bicycle injuries increased.
Some may be scratching their heads. How could that be? Why didn’t this law instantly make people safer?
Because one-size-fits all laws like this usually have unintended consequences. One consequence is discouraging people from riding at all. And study after study has shown that cyclists have safety in numbers. The numbers go down because of helmet laws, and safety goes down. There may also be a factor of risk compensation – people riding faster and more aggressively when wearing a helmet. But the reasons really do not matter. Because the facts are the facts – and those facts aren’t unique to Australia.
The same experiment was born out in New Zealand, which also passed a mandatory helmet law, and also saw a reduction in cycling by 51%, and saw only a 51% drop in fatal accidents. In other words, less people are biking, and less accidents are occurring, by the same amount. The helmet law is making people no safer, while it is preventing many people from biking.
We’re not anti-helmet, we’re anti-helmet law. In fact, all the owners and employees of Cycle 9 regularly wear their helmets. We help many of our customers get fitted out with a helmet.
But helmet laws just don’t work. And worse, they promote a nanny-state mentality that every risk we might take must be proscribed by legal decree. We believe bikes are about freedom, not laws. Maybe that’s why less people cycle when helmet laws are passed – the association of riding a bike with a sense of freedom becomes diminished.
Biking should be a free activity. An adult should be able to choose how she regards his or her own risks and rewards from either wearing or not wearing a helmet. This would be true even if helmet laws did work. But it is especially true since mandatory helmet laws don’t work.
I hope that Ms Haven-O’Donnel and the other Aldermen/women don’t go down that route. It may benefit certain helmet manufacturers, but it won’t benefit anyone else.
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Cycle 9 wins GO!Triangle commuter award

Icon Written by admin on August 11, 2009 – 7:47 am

In June, Cycle 9, along with the other bike shops in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, won an award for working together to promote bicycle transportation as an alternative to cars. The award reads:

Go Chapel Hill Commute Challenger Award
Chapel Hill & Carrboro Bike Shops
The Town of Chapel Hill recognizes all of the Chapel Hill & Carrboro Bicycle Shops for outstanding participation in Bike to Work Week events. Rarely do competing businesses put aside their own bottom lines for the bigger cause. Yet, all five of the Chapel Hill – Carrboro hotspot bicycle shops joined together to promote cycling in our area. Throughout Bike to Work Week they offered discounts, ran special promotions, offered free inspections and conducted Bike on Bus workshops. Representatives from all five shops are currently working with the Town of Chapel Hill to develop a more intense promotional campaign for the coming year! Hats off to The Clean Machine, Cycle 9, Performance Bike, Back Alley Bikes and the Bicycle Chain for your teamwork for the greater good!
Just goes to show what a great bicycle town we live in! Keep up the good work.
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Solar at Shakori Hills: does it make sense?

Icon Written by Morgan Giddings on April 19, 2009 – 4:20 pm

We had the pleasure of making it out to the Shakori Hill Festival today to let the kids participate in various events such as the Paperhand Puppet Intervention, and to listen to a bit of good music.

The organizers had a booth there, asking for contributions towards a solar electic system that would power the event in the future. The card indicates that 10,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity are used to put on the event. I applaud their goal to get off the grid. But the sea of cars I saw in the parking lot left me wondering: how much energy was used in just getting people to/from the event, in comparison to the 10,000 kWh goal?
Here’s my attempt to figure it out. When we were there on Sunday, there were perhaps 700-900 cars around. We can estimate from that a total of about 5,000 cars were driven to/from the event during the course of the four days (that’s an average of 1,125 cars/day, or 2,250 people per day if it averaged 2 people per car, probably a low estimate). The location is 17 miles from Carrboro, 40 mi from Raleigh, 35 mi from Durham, and 10 mi from Pittsboro. So we’ll average all of those at 25 mi (each way), for an average round trip of 50 miles. The fleet average for the US automobiles as of 2003 was 25 miles per gallon, so on average, 2 gallons of gasoline were burned per car trip to/from the festival. If our estimate of 5,000 car trips is accurate (maybe an underestimate?), that’s 10,000 gallons of gasoline burned up (526 barrels of oil).
Now, hold onto your seats. Each gallon of gasoline contains about 37 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy. So, we have 10,000 * 37 = 370,000 kWh of energy burnt up to get people to/from the festival in their cars/SUV’s/trucks/motor homes.
That is, 37 times more energy were used to transport people to/from Shakori Hills, than would be saved if the festival organizers reach their goal of going all solar.
Here’s another way to look at it. An efficient generator will extract about 7 kWh of energy out of a gallon of gas (no, they are not very efficient, they only recover a small part of the 37 kWh contained in a gallon). So, to generate the 10,000 kWh of energy that the festival needs to run, that is about 1,429 gallons of gas, if they were to use local generators. Compare that 1,429 to our estimate of 10,000 gallons burned up getting people to and from. I.e., even using inefficient gas generators, generating all that power to run the festival would only take 1/7th the power that is consumed to get all those people to/from the event. 1/7th. That is sobering. (and note: even if everyone drove a super efficient hybrid like the Prius out there, and averaged 50mpg, it would still consume more than 3x more energy to transport people there).
And this is why all the peak oil people are so concerned about our future. They realize how much energy we are just burning up driving around in our gasoline burning cars. But most people don’t think about that. Even very “green” people just don’t realize how much energy is contained in each and every gallon of gas put into their cars. And, while I applaud the goal of Biodiesel, I had a look at the Piedmont biofuels website to see how much they produce. They produce “thousands of gallons per day” – so, basically, if every person going to the festival used biodiesel instead of fossil fuel, there would be none left in this area for any other purpose (such as powering tractors that help grow our food).
I don’t want to come off as overly critical of these efforts. Every small bit helps. But if people think these are solutions to fossil fuel dependency, they are clearly not. They are drops-in-the-bucket.
Anyway, I think if the Shakori Hills organizers can get the solar panels, it will save energy and have a positive effect – not only by the direct power saved, but by the example set. At the same time, they could have a vastly greater effect on energy usage for the festival (and also local pollution/noise/danger created by the cars) by implementing a bus system to/from the event. Or getting people to go out there on their electric bikes :)
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New Store open Tuesday, Dec 9

Icon Written by Morgan Giddings on December 6, 2008 – 11:15 am

We’re getting closer on the new retail store, but we’re still finishing some renovations on the building, waiting for the power company to turn the power on, and will be moving in this weekend. So, we anticipate being able to open the doors on Tuesday, December 9. We’ll still be getting organized, but you can see and ride our bikes and check out what we’ve got on special for your holiday shopping. See you then!

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New Retail Store

Icon Written by Morgan Giddings on November 30, 2008 – 3:08 pm

After a long wait, it looks like our new retail store will be open the weekend of Dec 6-7 or at latest early the following week. It will be a bit of a work in progress for the next couple weeks, but we hope to at least have the doors open on the 6th, so come on down and check us out!

We’re located at 601 W. Main Street in Carrboro. For those of you who know Carrboro, this building has been known for a long time as the “Basnight” building, for the hardware store that operated here for > 50 years. We hope that soon it will be known as the “Cycle9″ building. We’ll have a selection of hub motors, cargo bikes, Breezer and Marin bikes, Xtracycle kits and accessories for you to browse and try out. New store hours are as follows:
Monday closed
Tuesday 11-6
Wednesday 11-6
Thursday 11-7
Friday 11-6
Saturday 10-5
Sunday 12-5
Phone number/email will remain the same.
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