Back in April, I mentioned the competition to design the new bike racks for New York City, then promptly forgot to keep an eye on it. The finalists were announced in July and it took an entry at treehugger and a reminder from tom before I bothered to mention it again today. I even saw this entry in the New York Times blogs and it didn’t register. But I got there in the end.

They all look both beautiful and practical, although I do wonder about the more curvy ones (especially that orange spirally one)—if people have trouble locking up to straight bars, how much more trouble will they have with something like that? A bike rack shouldn’t be a puzzle, although perversely the absent-minded may be forced to lock more carefully to an odd-shaped rack.

And given what’s happened lately, I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable locking up to David Byrne’s dollar sign rack!

There are so many ways that this thing could go wrong, but I’m sure that the Japanese inventors have it all worked out. And with secure storage for 9400 bikes and a retrieval time of 23 seconds, you can’t really knock it. [Thanks Tom, and via spacing.ca and TreeHugger]

Melbourne-style

As the state of my health demands that I temporarily return to the loving embrace of the Dementors Connex, I am also temporarily exposed to the journalistic joys of the MX “newspaper”.

But for once I saw something of interest (to me, at least):

World-first bike park-and-shower pods will be in Bourke St within months, with Flinders St station to follow…The council-funded pods provide a shower and change room in buildings where there are no facilities for cyclists.

It looks like they have a bit of a scoop here—can’t find it on any online news source, and although Bicycle Victoria mentioned it a year ago, they didn’t name specific locations, tipped by MX to include the NAB building, Fed Square, City Square, and Docklands Stadium.

New York-style

A competition has been opened to design the new bike racks for New York City, intended to

develop functional, well-designed sidewalk racks and to generate new concepts for bicycle parking inside commercial and residential buildings.

‘Twill be interesting to see what comes of that.

Dundee (2006)

It’s a beautiful day as davidmam takes to the cobbled backstreets of Dundee…

New York City (2006)

jermsy carves out some tight lane-splitting on a fixie ride through NYC:

Duluth (2006)

Is that Lake Superior I spy on BrianBarber‘s (almost) daily commute?

Oh yeah, and plenty of help from the police.

It looks a lot like the Bystander Effect in action.

[via cycling shots]

Back on 1 July, The Economist proclaimed the imminent demise of the bike courier:

Look around: bike messengers, the freewheeling mavericks whose tattooed calves and daredevil stunts once defined urban cool, are slowly vanishing from America’s streets. In New York, the hub of the messenger world, the number has skidded from 2,500 during the dotcom frenzy in the 1990s to an estimated 1,100 today, according to Joel Metz, who runs www.messengers.org, the website of the International Federation of Bike Messenger Associations.

The reason is straightforward. High-speed internet, PDF files, digital photography and digital audio have been eroding bike-messenger revenues by between 5-10% a year since 2000, or so reckons Lorenz Gotte, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Zurich (and a former bike messenger himself). The revenue slump has sent wages tumbling. In 2000, messengers in San Francisco could make $20 an hour. Now the average is closer to $11.

Professor of Economics Greg Mankiw sees this as a “striking example” of how “recent increases in income inequality are largely attributable to technological changes that have reduced the demand for less-skilled workers”. Many respondents on his blog beg to differ, and maybe technological advance isn’t the primary cause of income inequality but my guess is that it’s a significant contributing factor.

That said, The Economist seems to sense that proclaiming the death of bike couriers might be akin to the exaggerations about the death of Mark Twain:

Bike messengers have survived dire prophecies before. In the 1980s, doomsayers had predicted that the fax machine would push the profession into oblivion. Faxes did indeed carve a big chunk out of the business, but messengers hung on, thanks both to the poor quality of faxes and to new technology, such as pagers, which allowed prompter dispatch.

But the whole digital thing is quite a different proposition — we’re no longer talking about rough copies of the original — a copy of a digital file is effectively identical to the original. The future for couriers seems to be focussing on stuff that can’t be emailed, for example:

The legal system still relies on original documents, so some messengers cater to lawyers by offering benefits such as serving subpoenas and filing papers in court. “They are almost paralegals on bikes,” says Mr Gotte.

I’ve got to say that the image of a bike-mounted paralegal is almost oxymoronic when set next to that earlier description about freewheeling mavericks with tattooed calves.

The rewards may be down, but the culture is as strong as ever:

Paradoxically, although their long-term prospects look wobbly, the messenger subculture has never been stronger. Their grimy allure is celebrated in books, films, festivals, and even trading cards. Last year’s Cycle Messenger World Championship, held in New York, drew 700 competitors from 30 countries. Perhaps this signals a resurgence. More probably, it reflects the urge to honour a tradition that is beginning to slip away.

Is the future really so dire for bike couriers? Well, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of them but it does look like an increasingly tough way to make a living.

And a final thought from a commenter on Mankiw’s blog: “but on the other hand pedicabs are now seen in our major cities” – there’s the ultimate cargo that can’t be sent digitally: people.