The Return of Neighborhood Bicycle Shops: A Sustainable Community Indicator
“The communities that embrace the bicycle and all that goes with it NOW will be the successful communities of the next generation.”
–Alex Obriecht, President Bike Maryland & Race Pace Bicycles
Did you buy that bicycle at the hardware store?
Baltimore Bicycle Works baltimorebicycleworks.com
Credit: David Whitaker
This was quite likely several decades ago. From the 1950’s through the 1970’s, you could often find a bicycle shop combined with a local hardware store in communities throughout the U.S. This was a unique 20th century retail combination that was often located on or near a main street or at a nearby neighborhood commercial center.
Retail operated differently decades ago and both bicycle shops and hardware stores often were located in the neighborhood. Sometimes that first paper-route bike or later the Schwinn Stingray, Varsity or Paramount 10-speed was purchased at one of these long gone local hardware & bicycle shops.
Several years thereafter there was a commercial transition More
I used to write about the Internet and telecommunications for a living, but urban planning frequently seems even tougher to describe. I’m not sure why. I often felt that the tech community never figured out that acronyms were meant to make things easier to remember, not harder. RSS feeds? JPEGs? VOIP? DSL? Really? Planners don’t traffic in such odd terminology, but the field can still seem hard to convey. It’s rooted in data and science and seeks to analyze large-scale cause and effect over a long span. That’s why I was excited when a colleague forwarded me a link to Saga City, a video produced by a Quebec firm called Vivre en Ville. 
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