Bicycle Safety Tips from King Dorko

I was discussing helmets with someone the other day - their general dorkiness and unfortunate essentialness - and recalled this excellent list of safety tips courtesy of The Onion (And by "courtesy of" I mean "completely unauthorized use of").

Once again The Onion provides a real public service:

Bicycle-Safety Tips

March 28, 2001

Warm weather is just around the corner, and soon it will be time to dust off those bicycles. Here are some tips for safe riding:

• Always use hand signals when turning at intersections. There's nothing motorists pay more attention to than hand signals from bicyclists.
• Leaving your bike out in the ice and cold all winter may cause serious damage. But it makes a nice subject for the cover illustration of a short-fiction quarterly.
• Always wear a helmet. If this makes you uncomfortable, think of the helmet as a crown and yourself as King Dorko.
• Placing your feet firmly on the pedals of the bike will help reduce the "Wheee" sound emitted from your mouth while going downhill.
• Insist on a bicycle made of solid matter. Liquid and vapor bikes are a passing fancy; argon frames are particularly shoddy.
• Taking your bike in for a professional tune-up is a great way to waste $25.
• Be sure to wear your seatbelt, even if just biking down to the corner store.
• Fat-bottomed girls may be riding today, so look out for those beauties, oh, yeah.
• Visibility is crucial when biking. Ride with a lit highway flare in each hand.
• Every three to four weeks, lightly oil the chain. Then dip it in flour and fry it for a real taste treat.
• As soon as you buy a bike, talk to your friends about how great Shimano crank sets and STX hubs are.
• Does your city have adequate bike paths? If not, consider bitching about it to your local government for the next 40 years.
• If rich, spoiled Francis Buxton steals your bike, go on a hilarious and heartwarming journey through the American Southwest to get it back.
• Bike safety can never be stressed enough. If you doubt this, try stressing it as much as you possibly can. It won't be enough–guaranteed.

There. Don't you feel safer already?

It's not just for kids

I love how utilitarian the bicycle is. A simple design that has remained fundamentally unchanged for over a hundred years (though the fact one iteration was called "The Boneshaker" implies we've made some improvements...). Most technology from that period has disappeared completely or is unrecognizable (though apparently toilet paper was invented around the same time, so there's that).

But the bike forges on. Adding the trailer takes that a step further, from just alternative transportation to a real tool for real world tasks. We take a lot of our inspiration from those familes I saw in Amsterdam when I was there 25 years ago, where riding a bike doesn't define your social class - it's a tool that just makes sense.


But now that we've made this jump to finding more opportunities to leave the car at home, we'd like to do it with a bit more style. To avoid the bicycling image of a sweaty mish-mash of function over form. We want to be emissaries (in our small way) of cycling as an important social, political and ecological change; to show others in our community that riding a bike isn't just a way to get to the next hacky-sack festival (not that there's anything wrong with that!) since you can't afford a car. We want to show you can ride up to restaurant and step off the bike in style. It's a necessary evolution, an acceptance of the fact that the way we transport people and goods in America is unsustainable and it's killing us.


But that change doesn't need to be some dour return to the dark ages as the foot-draggers suggest. In this case it can be inspiring. It can be fun. It can make us healthier and more connected as a community. It can be elegant. All it takes is confronting the small discomforts of change, and through creativity and experimentation finding ways we can adjust our habits. For our family, it has been a small revelation. We are happier.

Now we just need to replace that sad old bike trailer that looks like we stole it from some poor soul here in the Home of the Homeless...