There’s an undeniable chill in the air in the Midwest, and it’s not just the air– in totally bike-unrelated news, the earthquake in Haiti continues to ramp up as the biggest crisis in, well, a very long time. If you’re interested in helping out, or want to get reliable information, we recommend reading up on Partners in Health, who’ve been doing reliable aid work in Haiti for years, and who continue to work in the capital through this disaster.
That’s part one of today’s post. We’d also like to ask you to check out something else– a lot less harrowing, but pretty relevant itself. Women and biking are two things that sometimes seem not to go together. The cycling community, particularly the competitive one, is a bit notorious for being run by men. In honor of the New Year, a blogger at BikePortland.org offered a remarkably lucid analysis of life as a woman in a city of bikes. If this is an issue that’s ever even begun to cross your mind, check this out.
And on a final note, we’re still here. Expect organizing efforts to ramp up and volunteer structure to be remodeled in by mid-February. We appreciate all your support, stay safe, and keep riding!
It’s been a while, but those 4000 More stickers are still shining bright on Oberlin bicycles (even through the snow), and 4kM volunteers are still here trying to decide what to do next!
The past few months have been tricky ones for 4000 More, but we’re eager to get things going in full swing come February. In light of our renewed efforts, we’d like to announce a job opening!
Job Announcement: 4000 More Bikes in Oberlin Co-Organizer
4000 More is seeking a part time community organizer to work in tandem with our current lead organizer. In close cooperation with existing volunteers, the co-organizer will manage the daily operation of 4000 More, planning and offering logistical and organizational support at registration events, community meetings, workshops, classes, and public presentations. Additionally responsible for interfacing between 4000 More, the Oberlin city government, and the Oberlin College administration, the organizer will advocate for a bike-and-walk friendly community at all times, and will be eager to ride their bike as many days and places as possible! Necessary qualifications include excellent writing skills, good public speaking abilities, and general political tact. Community organizing experience is not required, but the desire to learn most certainly is.
This position is 10 hours a week at $7.30 an hour. Unfortunately, due to the origins of our funding at this date, this paid position is open only to Oberlin College students. If you’d like to organize on part-time basis and are a non-student, please feel free to get in touch anyways– if the fit is right, we’ll see what we can work out.
To apply, please submit a cover letter and resume to 4000moreoberlin@gmail.com. Resumes will be accepted on a rolling basis, but we hope to have the position filled by February 10th, 2010. Women and people of color are encouraged to apply!
Thanks so much, everyone! Please spread this announcement as widely as possible– this is a really exciting opportunity for 4000 More and for whoever is chosen for the job.
If the snow’s too deep to ride, we suggest you either grab a pair of these, or get cozy with a good book next to the heat vent! Happy holidays!
Despite an extended interlude (sorry guys!) 4000 More is still here and going strong. Now, more than ever, we need your help! Keep talking to your friends, and keep riding your bikes. We’ve still got a few more weeks of lovely autumn weather; let’s make the most of them.
Representatives from 4000 More will be participating in this weekend’s Powershift Ohio conference, here in our very own town of Oberlin! It’s not too late to register– only $20, and you can sign up online. We’ll be speaking on a panel about bikes on Saturday afternoon, and offering a workshop on the ins and outs of community organizing that same morning. Come say hi!
Have a safe weekend, and keep riding…
Omigosh, you guys! We’ve got out next registration events planned!
Option A: Come to Wilder Bowl today between 4 and 6pm. No special treats, except for our smiling faces and the general merriment that TGIF involves.
Option B: Come to Tappan Square on Oberlin Community Day, October 3rd, from 1pm to whenever. We’ll have mechanics available to help you fix your flat tires (for free!), if you’ve got some, and we might possibly have delicious food to give away.
We’ll look forward to seeing you soon! If you want to volunteer at an event (it’s really easy, and it’d be a huge help) email 4000moreoberlin@gmail.com. Meanwhile, keep riding!
It was hard. That much is totally certain. More than a hundred people, all wearing white t-shirts and carrying flowers, biking in silence over the bridge, cars waiting next to us at stoplights and strangers filming the caravan with cell phones as they blew past. The police escort was a huge help, but as much as anything I was struck by how unbelievably dangerous the ride that Sylvia made to work every day actually was– high speed car traffic, practically un-navigable intersections, and poor road quality. It speaks to Sylvia’s commitment to life free of dependency on cars, and, quite frankly, her bravery in enduring a few miles of road that are about as unfriendly for cyclists as any could be. The words shared by her friends and her co-workers from Hard Hatted Women were compelling and sincere, and although it was pretty tearful at times, I think it was an admirable celebration of a life that ended way too soon.
The ride was sobering and it was heartbreaking, but we all left feeling galvanized about ways to make our rides safer, and to make our bike communities stronger. I’ve talked to several Oberlin folks who are now wearing their helmets around town, even though they used to think it was unnecessary. Sylvia’s tragic death should be a reminder to all of us of how delicate our stay here can be, and of how important it is to make changes now, not tomorrow. The right time to organize is now, the right time to stand up for what we believe in is now– and as much as anything, the right time to acknowledge our friends and appreciate our communities is now. It was an honor to be present at the ride on Tuesday, and an honor to be surrounded by so many wonderful people. To all of Sylvia’s friends– you’re in our thoughts. You are doing incredible work in the face of something almost too tragic to comprehend. -Dory Trimble
Click after the break for more photos from the ride. Feel free to distribute and reproduce them at will! read more…
what to expect tomorrow: sylvia bingham memorial ride in the morning, brainstorming meeting at night
Thanks to everyone in Oberlin who’s made the effort to make it to the ride tomorrow morning– especially with such an early wakeup call, it’s both impressive and heartening that so many of you feel the Sylvia Bingham memorial ride is important. One more time: we’ll be meeting at the intersection of Fairfield and West 11th in Tremont at 7:30am, and from there the ride will follow the route that Sylvia took to work at Hard Hatted Women, and then continuing into Ohio City. Helmets are required (as they always should be), and everyone’s been requested to wear white. We’ll also have a police escort. Please remember that although this ride is very early in the morning (and obviously a very solemn affair) the folks who organized it are also planning a later event with a more activist bent. Meanwhile, here’s some apt commentary from Marianne Eppig over at Renovating the Rustbelt:
I hope that city officials will pay more attention to Cleveland’s biking community in the future. Our city and its suburbs need more bike lanes… If we truly want to have a Green City on a Blue Lake, then we need to respect other modes of transportation besides cars and buses. I don’t want to see other people who are assets to our city killed for this reason. This was avoidable and we can do something about it.
With this in mind– don’t forget to come out to the 4000 More Brainstorming and General Interest Meeting Tuesday night at 7:00pm. We’ll be meeting in the Community Room at the Oberlin Public Library, and the event can’t be a success without your enthusiasm and ideas! With yet another bike/auto accident so near at hand, it’s a more important time than ever to organize for safer streets and stronger community. So tell all your friends and be sure to stop by, even if it’s just for a few minutes– we’d love to see you (and hear what you have to say) for as long or as little as you can stick around.
Keep riding, stay safe, and we’ll see you tomorrow!
The Sylvia Bingham memorial ride will be taking place this Tuesday, September 22nd, at 8:00am (that’s the same day as the general interest meeting, just 12 hours earlier). Here are the details:
Meet at Sylvia’s Tremont home at the intersection of Fairfield and West 11th at 7:30 AM. The ride will begin at 8:00 on Tuesday, September 22nd–on the 1 week anniversary of Sylvia’s accident. We will have a limited number of white “I RIDE FOR SYLVIA” T-shirts available for a goodwill donation. Please wear white shirts. Helmets are required, and loaners will be available at the site if you don’t have your own.
This is an incredibly important event for all of the greater Cleveland cycling community, and we hope you can make it out. 4000 More will be helping organize carpools (with bike racks, of course) to head out from Oberlin in time for the ride– if you have a car and want to help get people out, or you don’t but you want to be there, PLEASE email 4000moreoberlin@gmail.com and we will help you get transportation.
Check out the I Ride For blog for more information.
Many of you have likely already heard about this, especially if you follow 4kM on Twitter– last week, while biking to work, 22 year old Sylvia Bingham was hit and killed by a truck. Sylvia had just moved to Cleveland to work with local nonprofit Hard Hatted Women, and had recently moved in with two ‘09 Oberlin graduates. The truck driver who hit her did not stop, and as of Tuesday no charges have been filed.
According to one of her professors at Yale, Sylvia was a “fearless intellectual, a skilled field worker, and a committed activist.” She could have been any of us– a friend, a daughter, a classmate, a peer. Sylvia’s father, Stephen Bingham, gives us another perspective. “I hope people put the accent on safety,” he said. “It’s very dangerous out there for people on bicycles and people need to be careful. I don’t know if she was wearing a bicycle helmet, but the doctor said it would not have made a difference anyway.” It’s sobering. Quite frankly, it gives me the chills. But Stephen Bingham’s point should be well taken– when you hop on your bike to run to the store or go to work, you put your trust in the cars you share the road with. The relationship between cyclists and drivers is a precarious one, and accidents do occur. But it’s our duty, whether we’re on our bikes or in our cars, to respect each other and treat our fellow travelers exactly how we’d like to be treated ourselves.
What Sylvia’s death should not be is a reason to get off your bikes. There’s a memorial ride being planned in downtown Cleveland for sometime early this week, and 4000 More wants to encourage everyone from the Oberlin bike community to attend the ride– in solidarity with cyclists everywhere, out of respect for the organizing the Cleveland bike community is doing, and most of all, in memory of Sylvia.
For additional coverage of this story, you can read articles at cleveland.com, New Haven Safe Streets Coalition, or Yale Daily News.
Go ride, and be careful.
So a time and date have been set– Tuesday, September 22nd at 7pm, in the Community Room at the Oberlin Public Library. It’ll be a General Interest/Brainstorming get-together, and even if you haven’t signed up yet, you’re more than welcome to come check things out and get involved! It’ll be a short meeting, since we’ve gotta be out of there by the time OPL closes at 8:15, so we want to keep things pretty efficient. With that in mind, feel free to email ideas, issues, or agenda items to 4000moreoberlin@gmail.com, and we can be sure to address them before the time is up.
The primary goal for this meeting is to get some working groups in place– there are a lot of different projects that the 4kM team has been talking about, but they can only get set in motion with the help of your time and energy! We like to think of 4000 More as a forum, a hub where people thinking about different transportation and sustainability issues can get together and figure out how to make things right. A few of the ideas for projects we’ve been working with are: bike safety programs and helmet giveaways in the schools, cyclists education about the rules of the road and bike lanes, group rides, mechanics workshops on Tappan Square, free flat-fixing stations around town & campus, facilitating more covered bike parking… the list goes on and on. If you have an idea that you don’t see here, we absolutely want to see that, too!
Once the meeting is over, we’ll set aside a few minutes to register those of you who came to the meeting but haven’t had a chance to sign the pledge yet.
So put it on your calendars, and start thinking about how you want to get involved!
First of all– a huge thank-you to everyone who showed up and helped out at our kickoff on Friday. We couldn’t have done it without you!
With the help of several super-dedicated volunteers (thanks, guys!) we registered 122 cyclists– every one got a sticker for their bike and a membership card with the pledge, their name, and their cyclist number, which we hope will be valid for discounts at downtown businesses sometime very soon! Stay tuned to the website and your email account for updates on that one. We also gave away a bunch of awesome 4000 More t-shirts (funded by a donation from the college Office of Environmental Sustainability), made some excellent new friends, and (hopefully) got some new people excited about 4kM. It was a beautiful day and we had great turnout, so thumbs up all around! Also– if you have any photos from the event, please send them to 4000moreoberlin@gmail.com. Let’s get some archives rolling!
Now it’s time for the next step. Very soon, date and location TBA we’ll be having a General Interest/Brainstorming Meeting for everyone who’s registered and everyone who feels excited about helping out. We think of 4000 More as a forum for bike-related events and activism– if you want to see more covered bike racks downtown, if you want to help organize bike safety programs in the elementary schools, if you want to staff future 4000 More registration events, or if you want to spend an hour or two making plans with other excited and interesting people, please come out! This meeting is not limited to registered cyclists; instead, it’s a forum for anyone who wants to get involved with 4000 More as a participant and volunteer. If you’ve got an idea, we want to hear it. We’ll post a more detailed meeting agenda early next week.
So again, thanks to everyone who made it out on Friday. Stay in touch, keep riding those bikes, and we’ll see you soon!
