Jaunted

Biking / Bike Travel / Cycling / Holiday Travel / New York City / Design Travel / Shopping Travel / → All Tags

Buy This: Sturdy Bikes with Good Design at Adeline Adeline NYC

A bike from Scottish brand Paper Bicycles

It's crunch time for holiday presents. This close to the weekend, you're either shelling out for 2-day/overnight shipping or just heading into a store to pick up gifts in person. Still stuck for ideas? Just think about what you wanted as a kid, but updated. Luckily our answer to that is "a bike a bike!" and buying bicycles for your friends or family is luckily something easily done last-minute.

As huge proponents of both bike sharing and cycling wherever possible, we admit that our biggest, big-ticket gift suggestion this year (for anyone, really) is a proper sturdy bike with some style. Fortunately one New York City store specializes in such two-wheelers: Adeline Adeline.

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London Travel / Bike Travel / Tours / Biking / Cheap London / Active Travel / → All Tags

Avoid Standing Next to Sweaty Strangers on the Tube with a London Bike Tour

A cyclist heading up Regent's Canal on a sunny day in London

Underground, bus, and ridiculously pricey black cabs are the three most common modes of transport for visitors to London, but they're certainly not always the most pleasant. If you've ever stood cheek-to-cheek next to a sweaty stranger on the tube, taken a night bus full of drunken teens back to your hotel, or shelled out upward of £30.00 for a taxi ride across town, surely you understand.

But, what you'll also notice on London's streets are a bevy of cyclists, mainly locals, taking advantage of the city's many bike-friendly pathways and routes. Tourists hoping to do the same can rent a Boris bike and make their way around Hyde Park or Regent's Canal, feeling the burn in the process.

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Bicycling / Biking / Hertz / Bike Sharing / Green Travel / Spain Travel / → All Tags

Spain Gets All the Cool Stuff, Like Hertz's Rental Electric Bicycles

This seems crazy, but leave it to Hertz to figure out more ways to rent things that move to travelers when they just don't need cars. We're talking about electric bicycles, which have now entered Hertz's rental fleets in London and—the newest—all over Spain, including Granada, Almería, Alicante, Valencia, Pontevedra, Álava and Barcelona. Even the islands of Mallorca and Formentera haven't been left out; Hertz has brought their nine different types of Swiss Flyer electric bikes off the mainland.

We'd probably most likely use these on an island; it's already on our to-do list now for Palma.

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Bicycling / Biking / London Travel / Active Travel / Green Travel / Hertz / → All Tags

No Sweat in the City If You Rent an Electric Bike from Hertz London

We know that there's plenty of spots to score a rental bike, rental car, or electric rental car, but there really haven't been too many options when it comes to finding and borrowing an electric rental bike. Hertz is about to change that, as they're moving from providing four-wheeled transportation options to two-wheeled as well.

In response to London's mission to turn the city into one of the leading electric vehicle destinations in the world, Hertz has begun to offer up some electric bikes for one and all from their Marble Arch branch in the city. Just £20 will get you access to a bike for the whole day, and not having to pedal your way around the city will probably be quite handy during the warm summer months.

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Bike Sharing / Bicycling / Biking / Active Travel / Toronto Travel / Bike Travel / → All Tags

Bixi Bike Share Arrives in Toronto Just in Time for Summer

We can’t get enough of different cities and their bike sharing programs. London and Boston are just two of the latest towns to get their two-wheeled act together in the last couple of years, and earlier this month Toronto joined the pedal powered party.

Canada’s largest city added around 1,000 bikes thanks to a little bit of assistance from around 80 different stations in and about the downtown area. The Public Bike System Company is behind the city’s new shipment of velocipedes, but for those looking to simply score a cheap ride it’s better known as Bixi. This is the same kind of system that’s already in use in spots like Montreal and Washington, DC, so it might look kind of similar—and that’s a good thing.

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Bike Sharing / Bicycling / Biking / Active Travel / Boston Travel / → All Tags

Boston Breaks Out Bike Sharing This Summer with 'Hubway'

No need to hit up Paris or London this summer to ride around in pay-per-ride bicycles, as another city here at home is getting ready for a two-wheel test. Boston is just about ready to unleash its public bike sharing system on the masses, so get ready for a wicked fun time.

Things are moving full speed ahead, and if all goes as planned, the new system—it's called Hubway—could begin as early as July. They’ll start with just 600 or so bikes at around 60 stations around the city, but they’re already thinking about explaining. Eventually the plan is to have like 5,000 bikes all over the greater metropolitan area including spots like Brookline and Cambridge.

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Bike Rentals / Bike Sharing / Bicycling / Biking / Paris Travel / Velib Bikes / → All Tags

Paris' Vélib Bike Sharing Celebrates Four Years, Raises Prices

If you’ve been to Paris in the last few years, you’ve probably seen all those Vélib bicycles ready for tourists and locals alike to take them for a spin. We’ve even had the pleasure of pedaling one with a baguette in our basket, so it’s with great pleasure that we wish them well on their fourth anniversary this summer.

However, it’s pricey to keep all those seats nice and cushy, and it looks like the bike sharing program is going to cost everyone a few more euros and cents. Starting at the beginning of May—that’s like this week—prices will rise by around 70 cents. Now one-day tickets will set you back €1.70, where things were previously just €1—that’s roughly $2.50 for those of us that have credit cards based in the nifty fifty.

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Bike Sharing / Bicycling / Biking / London Travel / Active Travel / Cheap London / → All Tags

Cheap Bike Sharing Hits London, Thanks to Barclays

We’ve been following public bike sharing around the globe for quite some time, and we even got to test out the famous Vélib bikes in Paris not too long ago. The latest city to join the craze is London, and we’re sure that the Barclays Cycle Hire will only get bigger and better with the royal wedding just a few months away, not to mention the Olympics in 2012.

Things kicked off last summer, but the real fun began last month when things were opened up to the general public with fewer restrictions and no specific membership requirements. London’s bike rental program works pretty similar to others, so all you need to do is find a bike rack, throw down a few bucks—Pounds Sterling in this case—and then start pedaling.

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Bike Rentals / Bike Sharing / Bicycling / Biking / Paris Travel / Velib Bikes / → All Tags

How to Survive a Metro Strike in Paris: Vélib Bike Rentals

Last week on our trip to Paris, we had a great Tuesday all planned out--grab a croissant and a cappucino and head out to Versailles. Unfortunately, we were thwarted by a 36-hour Metro strike, an annoying but common occurrence in Paris.

So we had to rejigger our itinerary a bit to do some sightseeing instead. But how we were going to get around? We were staying at the schmancy Le Meurice on Rue de Rivoli, which is very central (and near the Louvre) but we were not keen to spend the entire day walking around the city. Nor were we going to pony up for the hotel's chauffeur services or go crazy trying to hail a cab.

Then we spotted Vélib, the city's bike rental system.

For one euro day, you can rent a bike and ride around the city like a real Parisian. The bikes even come with a basket for you to store your baguettes, fresh flowers and a bottle of red wine. Yet, there is a dark side to Vélib. Let us tell you now:

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Google Maps / Google / Colorado / Colorado Travel / Bicycling / Active Travel / Green Travel / Biking / → All Tags

Google Maps Expands Street View To Boulder's 360 Miles of Bike Routes

The Google GPS trike!

In January we told you about how Google used their new specially designed GPS trike to go where no Google Maps had gone before, mapping the inside of the San Diego Zoo. Now the search giant is taking their toy off-road, promising to add Boulder, Colorado's 360 miles of bike routes to Street View. The city officially won a contest after 1 in 5 residents voted online, asking to be the test site for a new kind of Google Maps biking feature.

Google Maps can already create point-to-point driving routes, bus routes, and walking routes for many major cities. This new project seems geared toward giving a fourth kind of route option, one that would take commuters and travelers along biking trails. If bikes are going to become a stable mode of transportation—and they already are in some American cities, to say nothing about certain European capitals—then this just makes good sense.

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Cycling / Florida Travel / Biking / Bike Tours / Key West / Active Travel / → All Tags

Bike Down US Highway 1 From Key Largo To Key West During BubbaFest

November is a tricky travel month, because the onslaught of cooler weather usually puts quite the damper on any outdoor endeavors. That’s why we say to follow millions of others and head down to Florida. We’re not going to play bridge all afternoon and then head out for the early bird special; we’re going to ride our bicycles. Thanks to retired police sergeant Bubba Barron, we have the BubbaFest Bike Tour. It’s a 200-mile cycling event from Key Largo To Key West, and you don’t have to be Lance Armstrong to do it.

Bikers are encouraged to go at their own pace and make frequent pit stops to swim, snorkel, and snooze away part of the day. The whole course over US Highway 1 is pretty flat, so if you can ride a bike and have some patience, you should have no problem pedaling the approximate 45 miles per day. If you do get a little tired, or just lazy, support vehicles follow the whole time and can give you a free ride. Things kick off on November 7 and wrap up on November 13, with a few layover days to soak in the sun.

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Cold War Travel / Iron Curtain Trail / Biking / Jogging / → All Tags

Hike And Bike Your Way Along The Cold War's Most Dangerous Fault Line

On one hand, the Cold War was kind of depressing. Cf. the Lewis Black clip below, which includes the phrase "nuclear fuck holocaust." On the other hand, there was something charmingly absurd about the whole thing. We knew who the enemy was, we knew what a war would look like, and we knew we would all die. Kids today don't appreciate how refreshing it is to know who you're supposed to hate.

If you fall on the nostalgia side of Cold War reminiscence, the EU has been developing a series of jogging trails and biking paths that might be up your alley. The final route of the whole project just got published in the form of a brochure. The Iron Curtain Trail now stretches from Finland, down through central Germany, along the outer border of the former Czechoslovakia, and between Hungary and Austria. The trail stretches 4,225 miles, winding its way along the old Warsaw Pact-NATO border.

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