Bike Hugger 

It was just a matter of time before the longtail concept showed up in the custom bike market. This Blacksheep cargo bike is on exhibit this weekend at the North American Hand Built Bicycle Show in Indianapolis Indiana.

Uploaded by pedals | more from the Dapper Lad Cycles Photostream.

Nearing a week after launching Hugga 2.0, we’ve worked out most of the bugs and issues.

Yesterday we got the Huggacasts back working, 404s resolved, and will keep making the site even huggier.

Readers are reporting some issues when logging in to comment and creating accounts. We’re checking those and note that there are like 17 ways to get into the site. If one doesn’t work, we’ve got another and Typepad authentication seems the most reliable. If you’re having issues, please contact us.

There are some transitory issues and periodic strangeness you may have seen. We don’t know either, that’s just how it goes on the Interwebs.

I’ll talk more about Hugga 2.0 during the Try Making Yourself More Interesting panel at SXSW and our Mobile Social.

Props

The site launched with the work and help of

• Jay Allen – Application Architect, user interface, development
• Scott Benish – Design, problem solving
• Six Apart – Movable Type partner
• Our bloggers – Andrew, Mark, David (new), Galen, Frank, Kellie

Thank you readers for your comments and for reading our blog.

The convo at Hugga HQ went like this:

I think our readers will want to really express that they too are a Bike Hugger with ‘lots of hugga’ style.

No. They’ll want it more subtle.

Fine. One logo then, sheesh.

The brand new bamboo will debut at SXSW this year. This is a sample, but I’m going to wear it around the house. The actual shirts have just one logo and we’ve got womens too.

Uploaded by Hugger Industries | more from the Bike Hugger Photostream.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is sponsoring a design-a-rack contest, following the New York’s CityRacks competition last year. We’ve blogged about designer racks before and often wonder why they’re either after thoughts attached to a building, brutalist, or nonfunctioning.

A fav is this bike bench

also see David Byrne’s art racks

and secure bike racks built for cities with thieves. There’s one with a pump in it as well.

Readers,

What good racks have you seen or what would you design?

Hat tip to reader jacobawhite and Wired.

A Northwest cycling tradition marked the beginning of the season on Sunday, as more than 3,500 people rode around Bainbridge Island for the 2009 installment of Chilly Hilly.

Though I wasn’t out getting wet with all the other hard-core folk out there, I was happy (and warm) keeping up via Cascade’s twitter feed and following the many photos.

And so we officially kick off this year’s line-up of Cascade’s events. Clip in, folks.

Few cities consider themselves as progressive as San Francisco, so it’s only slightly surprising to find out that officials there are considering limiting the use of “private cars” on Market Street in order to increase the flow of busses, pedestrians and cyclists.

While I don’t live in San Fran, I spend more time there than any other big city, and I’ve done more riding there than any other metropolis, and I can scarcely count the number of times I’ve been almost struck and killed by vehicles on Market. I’m a pretty savvy urban cyclist but I go out of my way to avoid that thoroughfare while in the area.

Even suggesting that Market Street be made off-limits to cars is a massive move, it’s akin to the idea of converting part of Manhattan’s Broadway into a pedestrian mall and it’s not likely to happen quickly. Still, the city is looking at plans to take the busiest two-mile stretch of roadway (from Van Ness to the Embarcadero) into a car-free zone.

Tilly Chang, deputy director of planning for the S.F. County Transportation Authority says of the project “having been a great street, Market Street has the scale, the social and historical significance, the architectural profile and the infrastructure, and hence the potential, to be great once again.” Run-on sentences aside, that’s a sweeping statement about a street that goes from posh shopping to porn-theater in under two blocks but it indicates San Francisco’s desire to reclaim the streets from cars, and with that action reclaim the grandeur of the heart of the city.

For the next few months Ms. Chang’s authority will look at problems that the restrictions would cause on nearby streets, (personally I think it would cause calamity for tons of motorists, which is exactly what author Tom Vanderbilt says is needed to move people to mass transit in his book Traffic, so I’m all for it.

While the plan, first suggested by mayor Willie Brown, died in its original incarnation, this time it seems to have (ahem) legs and might actually move forward as the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom says he’d approve the changes if studies show that they wouldn’t hurt businesses in the area. (You don’t want to hurt the business at Market Street Cinemas after all.)

Here at Bike Hugger, we’re constantly riding and blogging about Barney and Bettie the Bike Hugger Big Dummy’s. If you’ve been on the fence about getting your own Dummy, this might be your opportunity. From now through Friday at midnight Xtracycle is collecting entries for the grand finale of their Month of Love promotion. One lucky winner will have the opportunity to purchase a Big Dummy Frame and Xtracycle will have it powder coated in any color you can dream up! Check it out after the jump.

Uploaded by Dapper Lad Cycles | more from the Dapper Lad Cycles Photostream.

While at Frostbike, I got to see the production version of Knog’s glueless tire patch kit, called Porn Patches, that I saw at Interbike last September. I can’t enough of these things.

I’ve got this thing against inappropriate use of the letter z. Like when people use it at the end of a word instead of an s, in an effort to communicate coolness and plurality simultaneously. I also hate it when a “z” is meant to confer high tech. Like when people spell the word laser with a z, because the word laser is an acronym. And it doesn’t mean:

Light Amplified by Ztimulated Emissions of Radiation

But in the case of Lazer helmets, based in Belgium, I’ll have to overlook this transgression. Because I found their helmets to be unexpectedly rich in technical features, key among them is what Lazer calls “Rollsys”.

Wired picks up our post on the Air-Bongo Water Bike and adds their own Freak Bike finds, including the Treadmill Bike. Our all-time favs are the Turkey Bike Rotisserie and Bucking 4 Glory shown here with the optional camera rigging.