{"id":744,"date":"2010-06-28T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-28T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wabikes.org\/2010\/06\/28\/the-ultimate-social-bike-ride\/"},"modified":"2013-01-05T19:45:53","modified_gmt":"2013-01-05T19:45:53","slug":"the-ultimate-social-bike-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wabikes.org\/index.php\/2010\/06\/28\/the-ultimate-social-bike-ride\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ultimate Social Bike Ride"},"content":{"rendered":"

Washington Bikes marched–I mean biked–\u00a0in Sunday’s Pride Parade<\/a> in Seattle and the Dutch Bike Company<\/a> generously lent us the use of their Conference Bike for the event.\u00a0 All we had to do was pick up the bike late Saturday afternoon at their store in Ballard and deliver it to the Bike Alliance office in Pioneer Square, then return it\u00a0before the shop closed on Sunday.<\/p>\n

<\/a>The Conference Bike, with seating for seven,\u00a0is no ordinary bike.\u00a0 At 8′ long and 6′\u00a0wide and weighing in at nearly 500 lbs, you don’t toss this bike in the back of a pickup truck\u00a0or put it on a Metro bus bike rack<\/a>.\u00a0 This bike is also too big for our trails, so we would be navigating this baby on the\u00a0streets of Seattle.\u00a0 This would be a major Share the Road vehicle!<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
I issued a call for assistance among\u00a0our loyal volunteers to ride this bike to our office and, within an hour, I had my Conference Bike team: Bill Bloxom, Steve Keithly, Vicki Moseley, Charlie Tiebout, Marti Verkuilen, Jeremy Vrablik, and me.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/a>Only one person controls the steering and braking for the Conference Bike and Charlie volunteered to be our captain.\u00a0 The rest of us provided the pedal power.\u00a0 We took a lane on Leary Way then\u00a0pedaled\u00a0and chatted our way\u00a0to Fremont, where we paused as the drawbridge closed.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
“What is that thing?” curious onlookers asked.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/a>“It’s a Conference Bike!” we replied.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
“What are you doing?” one guy asked.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
“We’re conferencing!” was our reply.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
We rolled across the Fremont Bridge then turned onto Westlake Avenue.\u00a0 We pedaled to the cheers of encouragement and amusement from pedestrians, passing motorists, and other cyclists!\u00a0 A street vendor pulled out his cell phone to snap our picture.\u00a0 Several\u00a0Ride the Duck<\/a> vehicles passed us by.\u00a0 We rang our bike bells as\u00a0the tourists\u00a0blew their quackers and snapped our photos.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/a>At Bell Street, we turned west and all of us applied our pedal power to get us up the hill.\u00a0 Another\u00a0comment about the Conference Bike:\u00a0 it is a single-speed vehicle and doesn’t travel very fast.\u00a0 We averaged about 6 mph overall and cruised a cool 17 mph through downtown on First Avenue.\u00a0 Thanks to Bill for the stats–he downloaded a speedometer app during our ride.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

A special shout out to Jeremy’s friend Nick who accompanied us on his bike for much of the ride.\u00a0 Nick occasionally reminded motorists to share the road with us by directing the\u00a0traffic around us and guiding us through some tight spots.<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
We followed First Avenue into Pioneer Square, then made our way to the sport stadiums where we pedaled a victory lap before we dropped the Conference Bike off at the Bike Alliance office.\u00a0 Hands down, this was the ultimate social ride on a bike!<\/div>\n
Check out Jeremy’s video<\/a> of our cruise through downtown.\u00a0 Thanks to Steve Keithly for the photos.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington Bikes marched–I mean biked–\u00a0in Sunday’s Pride Parade in Seattle and the Dutch Bike Company […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[32,5,56,11,28,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bike-culture","category-bike-events-wa","category-go-by-bike","category-seattle-king-county-wa","category-share-the-road","category-volunteer"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Ultimate Social Bike Ride - Washington Bikes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/wabikes.org\/index.php\/2010\/06\/28\/the-ultimate-social-bike-ride\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Ultimate Social Bike Ride - 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