Melbourne Vernacular

The Melbourne Vernacular as sold on Ebay:

Google Maps offers intelligent bike pats to USA

Hopefully they offer it here too soon:

Google Maps Now Includes Intelligent Bike Routes



Bikers rejoice, Google has just added intelligent biking directions for more than 12,000 U.S. bike trails as a new option inside Google Maps.

The company writes that the new biking features will “include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes.”

The new option now sits next to the current Google Maps standbys — car, public transit and walking — for online routing options, so users can select the new option from the dropdown menu to uncover a Google-recommended bike routes (likely sans big hills!).

You can also turn on a “Bicycling” layer via the “More” tab when zoomed into a particular city in Google Maps. The trails’ green hues should indicate terrain and road type. Dark green equates to bike-only, light green means there’s a bike lane, and dashed green means it’s a decent biking path but one without a bike lane.

Before you get too excited, we should note that as of right now biking is not an option in mobile apps, so make sure to plan ahead before you hit the pavement.

http://mashable.com/2010/03/10/google-maps-biking/

60 Minutes - Cycling

60 Minutes take on commuter cycling/cycling on busy roads.  take from it what you will

http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=1026252

The Bicycle Custom Culture

bikerodnkustom.homestead.com has been at the forefront of custom chopper and dragster bicycle information for near a decade.  Here's a few interesting bikes shown on their site.

no comment on their weight, but they're made from Spruce and they are ridden

CRUD (Chopper Riding Urbad Dwellers) have been around a similar amount of time and are an interesting look into the lo-tech custom bike culture.  A few of their bikes are below:

http://www.crud.org/

Kustom Kuhl is a linited run bike manufacturer from Melbourne.  The companies creater is well known in the Aircooled Volkswagen scene for his other business' extremely high quality restorations and customisations.  These skills have been transferred into the creation of some very unique bikes: http://www.gkustomkuhl.com/deuce.htm

Other Alternative Bike Culture Links:
http://www.carsrcoffins.com/welcome.php
http://www.cyclecide.com/
http://www.scul.org
http://chunk666lab.blogspot.com/
http://critical-mass.info/

Most of these organisations have been doing there thing for 10 years or more.  I wonder how far cycling's acceptance has advanced in that time.