Macy’s: Leave the Car at Home

By Brad Aaron
Apr 23, 2008

J. Crew and W Hotels aren’t the only companies to promote cycling as of late. As part of its "Earth Week" campaign, Macy’s is running the above ad in local papers. Reads the copy:

Leave the car at home. Ride a bike or walk to work if you can. Discover your own route. Now that’s thinking on your feet.

Maybe it’s just us, but this seems half a step above greenwashing. With endorsements from household brands, be they in the form of corporations or celebrities, is cycling edging toward taking its place among light bulb changing and tree planting as a staple of mainstream environmentalism?

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The Long and Triumphant History of Women in Cycling

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 27, 2011

The scene was America in the midst of a cycling craze. Cycling conventions were affecting the way people dressed and spoke. Enthusiasts were banding together to lobby for better road conditions. Sound familiar? It was against this background in late 1800s and the early 1900s that the Women’s Suffrage Movement took hold. The two phenomena […]

Mercedes Exploits the Daredevil Cyclist Stereotype

By Sarah Goodyear | Mar 11, 2010

You might have seen it making the rounds over the last couple of days — the new Mercedes ad in which a bike messenger challenges a driver in one of the company’s luxury vehicles to a race from Harlem to the Fulton Ferry landing in Brooklyn. There are many irritating things about the ad, including […]

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The Dutch Have a Strong Car Culture — and Stronger Bike Infrastructure

By Brad Aaron | Aug 4, 2015

We wrote a couple of months back about how Amsterdam prioritized people over cars only after ceding city streets to motor vehicles. Today, David Hembrow at A View From the Cycle Path has more on that subject. As in the U.S. and other European countries, people race cars in The Netherlands. “Dutch people like cars […]

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Cycling Booms in London, and the City’s Not Looking Back

By Angie Schmitt | May 2, 2016

Boris Johnson says that one of his goals as mayor of London was to make cycling “more popular and more normal.” As Johnson’s eight-year tenure winds down, it looks like the progress he made in his second term has accomplished that mission. If current trends continue, bike commuters will outnumber car commuters in central London by 2018, according to a […]

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The Gaman Spirit: Why Cycling Works in Tokyo

By Clarence Eckerson Jr. | Mar 1, 2016

In Tokyo, bicycling accounts for 14 percent of all trips. Yet Tokyo does not have the cycling infrastructure of Amsterdam or even Hamburg. As much as wider bike lanes would help, Tokyo residents will bike regardless. If there’s no bike lane, they’ll just hop on the sidewalk or wherever they feel safe. Joe Baur produced […]

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What’s the Best Way to Make Biking Mainstream in a Car-Centric City?

By Angie Schmitt | Jul 16, 2014

How can you turn a car-dependent city into a place where most people feel safe cycling for transportation? Researchers in Auckland, New Zealand, created a predictive model to assess how different policies affect cycling rates over several years. In a paper published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives [PDF], they concluded that a combination of protected […]