I’m so excited to work with The Squeaky Wheel  to launch ‘Westie Women on Wheels‘, a FREE cycling skills program for  women who live or work in Melbourne’s west.

The program is for ‘interested but concerned’ women who have basic bike skills and who would like to gain the knowledge and confidence to ride for transport.

Delivered over 3 sessions, participants will receive bicycle skills training, road rule education and route planning advice. The final session will be a fun social ride, introducing you to the safest and most direct routes for amenities in your local area.

Places are limited to 22 participants and participants are strongly encouraged to attend all three sessions to get the maximum benefit.

The first two sessions will meet at the Footscray Bike Shed, Mills Close, Footscray (next to Building K, Footscray Park Campus of Victoria University). BOOK HERE.

Westie Women on Wheels has been made possible with the support of the Maribyrnong Community Grants program.

We recently moved house and office and along with it all our bicycles – a kids balance bike, single speed, ladies step-through, fold up and cargo bike (if that sounds like a lot we got rid of another three before we moved!). Instead of hauling the lot of them to our local bike shop, and being without our mode of transport for days, we called Good Cycles.

Good Cycles are mobile bike mechanics whose workshop is based out of Docklands. They ride around the CBD and inner city with their 30+ kg Yuba impressively laden with tools, parts and accessories, servicing bikes in people’s offices, universities and at your home.

That means you don’t need to be without your bike on your commute and your errands and don’t have to spend your lunch hour or weekends getting your bike fixed. How often do you put off getting your bike serviced because it’s too much hassle? (Guilty as charged).

Good Cycles rode their cargo bike over to my house and set up in their mobile workshop in my backyard. For almost three hours Mike the mechanic checked, greased, aligned and pumped our bikes, giving them the kind of attention that they hadn’t received in a long time. A standard service costs $77 or you can upgrade to higher levels of service for $120 and $170. Their prices are commensurate with the prices for most local bike shops and they offer discounts for group bookings too.

Not only is getting your bike serviced by Good Cycles more convenient than taking your bike to a bike shop, the business is also a social enterprise. They teach people in need, such as long term unemployed and homeless, to be bike mechanics (an in-demand job). They work with Melbourne City Mission, job agencies, and the Youth Support and Advocacy to recruit trainees into the program then during the 18 month program, participants are employed as trainees, completing on-and-off the job training in Certificate III in Bicycles and teamed with qualified bike mechanics. The traineeship includes accredited training, employment, personal support and assistance with transition into the open labour market with an option to complete an apprenticeship if they opportunity arises.

Good Cycles also run workshops and classes in bike maintenance and help local governments and community organisations deliver bicycle-based programs. All the profits from the business go back to supporting, training and engaging the people they help.

So with Good Cycles you can get your bike serviced, save time and support a good cause. Win-win for everyone!

Bike Buddies is a website which matches aspiring bike riders with experienced riders (‘Angel Buddies’) in Sydney.

The volunteer Angel Buddies meet with aspiring riders and provide the guidance that a new rider needs to feel comfortable and confident. Together, they’ll go on a practice ride and the Angel Buddy will show the buddy the best route and give advice on riding in the city traffic. 

What a great idea – we hope that Bike Buddies will be able to expand nationally one day!

We love the idea of Good Cycles – a Melbourne-based social enterprise/not for profit mobile bike service that fixes your bike while you’re at work, university or even at home.  

Professional mechanics are teamed with trainees and together they take their cargo bikes around Melbourne and fix bikes.  While they provide a service to you, dear bike rider, they also give training and employment to long-term unemployed and disadvantaged folks. It’s a win-win situation!

A standard service (the Good Standard) is $77 while The Good as Gold is a very thorough service for $170. You can also  pick and choose what you’d like fixed which individually costs between $15 and $30. 

Good Cycles have a special introductory offer of $55 for a standard service, just book here. Register online for yourself or gather your friends or colleagues together for a discounted group service.

Currently services occur on Mondays and Tuesdays and they’ll be adding Thursdays as demand increases. 

If you’ve ever felt a little unsafe walking home by yourself late at night, we’ve discovered a great scheme in New York City that could easily be replicated anywhere in the world.

Jay Ruiz and his team of volunteers escorts late-night travellers home from the subway safely with the Brooklyn Bike Patrol. It’s a free borough-wide service with 13 volunteers on call seven days a week – they receive a call, jump on their bikes to meet the caller at a subway station, walk the person safely home and wait for the next call. 

What a heartwarming good news bike story.

It’s pretty chilly today and we have soup on our mind.

SoupCycle is a soup subscription service based in Portland, Oregon. They’re unique because they deliver your hot, steaming soup selection (along with rustic bread or a mixed green salad) via bike. The soups are made from organic, locally sourced ingredients – we particularly like the sound of Barbecue Split Pea and Brazilian Black Bean.

So, who’s going to start SoupCycle Australia and bring us some soup?

Does Fitzroy/Collingwood has the greatest density of bike shops per square kilometre in Melbourne?

Being Fitzroy locals we had thought we were familiar with all the bike shops in the area – but just recently we stumbled across Mottainai Cycles.

Cameron Trethowan has been operating Mottainai Cycles for around 6 months now and he doesn’t even know how many bikes he’s got in stock these days.

On weekdays you enter the garage area via a graffitied laneway off Kerr St, while on Sundays he opens the back of his open-air workshop for the Rose Street Artists Markets (Saturday is his day off). Not only does he sell restored bikes, he sells parts, does repairs and hires out bikes as well.

Bikes range from $350 upwards, with this pastel Pashley beauty catching our eye for $800. We’re not supposed to be buying any more bikes…but…

Mottainai Cycles, 41 Kerr St, Fitzroy +61 448884051

With the weather warming up, every day is just an excuse to drink another smoothie.

Brisbane business The Smoothie Cycle brings a slightly different experience to the smoothie blender – the smoothies are pedal powered! You can opt to pedal your own smoothie or a friendly staff member will burn the calories for you.

The ingredients are 100% certified organic and the smoothies include different combinations of seasonal fruits, nuts, seeds, cacao, cinnamon, cardamon, honey, agave, juice, mesquite, chia seeds, maca, yoghurt and milk.

We spotted them in Brisbane at the Finders Keepers markets and while we couldn’t leave our stall to do our own pedaling we did try one of their classic banana smoothies. Yum!

Image via The Smoothie Cycle

We visit Sydney several times a year and we’ve had great fun discovering the city’s ever-expanding network of cycleways with a rental from Humble Vintage.

Now City of Sydney has a free pocket-sized booklet featuring eight adventures for you and your bike in inner-Sydney.

You can order a hard copy of the booklet by calling 9265 9333 or just download the ride you want.

• The Inner East Circuit | 1.24mb
  Freewheel through the urban culture hub of Sydney’s inner east.
• Bay Run and Hawthorne Canal | 512kb
  A kid friendly loop to get the family pedalling.
• Sydney Foreshore Loop | 2.47mb
  Ride along quiet streets and shared paths with water views.
• Three Creeks Ride | 351kb
  Roll around the back streets and waterways of the inner west.
• Sydney Park Kids Ride | 470kb
  One of the best family ride spots in Sydney.
• The Foodie Ride | 390kb
  A lip-smacking loop around a few of Sydney’s culinary hotspots.
• Inner West Art Ride | 367mb
  Saddle up and soak up some Sydney art.
• Two Ducks Family Ride | 325kb
  An all-ages ride from Sydney Park to Centennial Park.

The video’s a bit grainy but it shows one of the most innovative bike parking structures we’ve ever seen.

Swipe your smart card, put your bike on the hook and it hoists it up the ‘tree’. Retrieve your bike by swiping the same smart card on your return.

It’s the end of the week and the beginning of a 4 day long weekend for us here at CycleStyle thanks to the Melbourne Cup holiday on Tuesday.

We’ll be back dispatching your orders on Wednesday 2 November. In the meantime, G&T anyone?

via Citizen Couture

This week we’re doing a series of post about cycling to work, to help get you in the mood for Ride to Work Day next Wednesday 12 October.

To start us off, check out the video showing how commuters to Kansai station in Japan park their bikes in the morning rush hour with a push of a button.

We’re so jealous! Five seconds to park your bike safely rather than searching for a free lamp-post. Plus we love the stair-side conveyer belt for bikes.

Roll-Up is a new bicycle valet parking service which is launching at State of Design.

Instead of locking your bike up to the nearest lamp post, cyclists can get their bike valet parked for free by the fun-fair themed Roll-Up crew. It’s a great initiative as the provision of safe, secure and convenient bike parking will hopefully encourage people to take active and sustainable transport to festivals and events.

Melbourne is an official bike city, after all :–)

Dutch beer brand Grolsch has partnered with Dutch bicycle designer VANMOOF to produce a unique
commuter bike to help celebrate the arrival of Grolsch Draught in Australia.

The customised 3 gear VANMOOF x Grolsch bicycle comes complete with green mudguards and a specially
designed case that can carry 24 beers. The reinforced tray is also designed to carry the weight of a person (making dinking just that bit easier) and solar panels have been integrated into the frame design to power the lights at night.

Perfect for your Friday after-work drinks delivery…

Brrr cold weather is definitely pie weather, which makes us wish that Bike Basket Pies were able to deliver pies to our door!

Bike Basket Pies is a one-woman pie baking and delivery service based in San Francisco. Natalie Galatzer sources seasonal ingredients locally and organic where possible to make her ever-changing pie menu (tummy rumble for the shaker orange pie) and delivers the cupcake-sized goodies on her bike.

We particularly love her ‘About’ page which asks ‘Why by bike basket?’

Natalie was introduced to big city biking when she moved to San Francisco, and is totally addicted. Plus riding a bike is a low cost (and no pollution!) way to get around town. Way faster than the 12, or the 27, or the 26, or the 14, but maybe not faster than the BART. So she bakes and bikes and is pretty happy. She just wishes the amount of calories she burned while delivering pies was equal or greater than the amount she gains while taste testing pies. (I guess not everything is perfect in this world).

June 2010 marked the beginning of our first winter of CycleStyle. Our favourite posts for that month:

• Use the iPhone App SizeMyBike to find the right bike for you.
• We test-ride the Melbourne Bike Share scheme.
• Guys’ cycle chic fashion by GQ Japan.
• Some lovely colour spotted on Swanston Street.

Magnificent Revolution is a not-for-profit education project based in London.

The organisation has been running since the summer of 2007 when they first built a bicycle powered cinema at the Big Chill Festival. MR uses bicycle power generators as educational tools in schools, colleges and communities to help people understand their energy use, its links with power production and climate change.

One of their projects is Cycle-In Cinema. Magnificent Revolution build bike-powered cinemas, from the full Magnificent Cycle Cinema system which uses up to 8 bicycles / 16 legs to power 600W of audio visual equipment for public film screenings or projections to the Pop-up LED Cinema which just 2 bicycles. In 2011, they want to put together 3 free regular Cycle-In Cinemas all over London. A new 10-bike generator will be built as a resource to be lent out to small organisations, schools and charities.

For more information, click here.

via Cool Hunting

You know that Anarchy in a Jar is not going to be any sort of fuddy-duddy company with a name like that.

Working out of her Brooklyn apartment, Laena McCarthy creates jams that she sells locally to shops and markets, as well as delivering jars by bicycle (named Bluebell) to private homes in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan on weekends.

We like the idea that the person stirring the jam pot is also the person who delivers the product to your doorstep – what an eco-friendly and personable business!

We’re also reliably told that the jam is packed with flavour – almost all the seasonal fruit is sourced locally and the jams all have a particular ‘vintage’ because they’re made from fruit grown in a particular year and under those unique environmental conditions.

We’ve written about bike-related vending machines before – here’s another handy one dispensing Schwalbe inner tubes for those pesky punctures.

via Bike Hugger

B-Line, a company based in Portland, Oregon, demonstrates the kind of loads that is possible to deliver on a bicycle (or in this case, tricycle). Their tricycles are faster, cleaner and cheaper than conventional trucks and the ubiquitous white van and still with over 55 cubic feet and 600-pound capacity.

Here’s a video from Franklin Jones, the founder of B-Line, and includes interviews with B-Line customers who explain why they choose to use bikes for local deliveries. Not to forget that being able to make more deliveries, faster, in groovy trucks which feature advertising, means better profits for B-Line.