Fred's Bike: Bike-Friendly Companies Doing Brisk Business As Bike Culture, Infrastructure Gains Ground

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Bike-Friendly Companies Doing Brisk Business As Bike Culture, Infrastructure Gains Ground

NEW YORK -- When Mary Walsh opened Swamp Rabbit Café and Grocery in 2011, the business had all the markings of a venture destined to fail. Rather than open up in downtown Greenville, S.C., the SUV-friendly town where Walsh and her business partner, Jacqueline Oliver, live, the duo set up shop in an abandoned storefront more easily accessible via bike trail. In a part of the country better known for pulled pork and fried food, Walsh's store offered organic hummus and kombucha.

But two years after launching, Walsh says sales are going briskly, driven by customers who'd rather take their groceries home in a bike basket than a car trunk. A gym, bike shop and "environmental hair and nail salon" have opened next door, turning a site Walsh says used to be a crackhouse into a bike-focused strip mall.
While some may have called Walsh crazy for choosing to open her store along a cycling path, her success is part of a surge in bike-related business opportunities. With the initial economic hit from the Great Recession in the rearview mirror, both new and existing businesses across the country are tapping into changing attitudes about biking as a way to drive up traffic and put their sales into high gear.

Bike-Friendly Companies Doing Brisk Business As Bike Culture, Infrastructure Gains Ground

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Bike Quotes

As I get older the tendency to stick my foot up someone's ass is starting to subside. - Fred on Pump Track Pricks

The 29 inch chingaderra rolls best downhill! ~ Fred

I thought of that while riding my bicycle.

~ Albert Einstein on the Theory of Relativity

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving ~ Albert Einstein

If constellations had been named in the 20th century, I suppose we would see bicycles. ~ Prof. Carl Sagan

It never gets easier, you just go faster. ~ Greg LeMond.

~ Charles M. Schulz

The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind. ~ William Saroyan Nobel prize winner

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle. ~ Ernest Hemingway

Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I have hope for the human race. ~ H.G. Wells

Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia. ~ H.G. Wells

When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking. ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Get a bicycle. You will certainly not regret it, if you live. ~ Mark Twain Taming the Bicycle. 1884

PEDAL. Pray Every Day And Listen. ~ Rev. Johannes Myors, The pedaling preacher

The bicycle is a curious vehicle. Its passenger is its engine. ~John Howard

A bicycle does get you there and more.... And there is always the thin edge of danger to keep you alert and comfortably apprehensive. Dogs become dogs again and snap at your raincoat; potholes become personal. And getting there is all the fun. ~Bill Emerson

Until mountain biking came along, the bike scene was ruled by a small elite cadre of people who seemed allergic to enthusiasm. ~Jacquie Phelan

Bicycling is the nearest approximation I know to the flight of birds. The airplane simply carries a man on its back like an obedient Pegasus; it gives him no wings of his own. ~Louis J. Helle

The secret to mountain biking is pretty simple. The slower you go the more likely it is you'll crash. ~Julie Furtado

If you worried about falling off the bike, you’d never get on. ~ Lance Armstrong

Never use your face as a brake pad. ~ Jake Watson

Refrain from throwing your bicycle in public. It shows poor upbringing. ~ Jacquie Phelan

When I was sick, I didn't want to die.
When I race, I don't want to lose.
Dying and losing, it's the same thing. ~ Lance Armstrong

"It is no longer a beast of steel,
no it is a friend it is a faithful
and powerful ally against one's worst
enemies. It is stronger than anxiety,
stronger than sadness. It has all the
power of hope." ~  Maurice Leblanc