Skip to main content

Surfer Friendly Bicycle Signage in Ubatuba

Update: 26 November 2013: New photos of Ubatuba bicycle parking added! Scroll down.


Denir, from the Books & Bicycles blog in Brazil sent us these shots from his holiday to the Brazilian town of Ubatuba. It's a surfing mecca and is even nicknamed 'Capital do Surf' so signage in the town is often surf-related.


Which also applies to the 'ciclofaixa' or bicycle lanes in the incredibly bicycle-friendly city. Painted lanes, sure, by they are nice and wide - see the red/yellow markings at bottom right in the first shot.

Having realised I'd stumbled upon a potential holiday paradise, I did a spot of googling. The name Ubatuba alone just sounds like a surfer paradise and could be worked into 50 different Beach Boy songs.

I found this article, in Portugese, about the city wherein it says that 80% of the students of this school ride bicycles to school each day. Impressive.

And staying at a little pousada like this one is about €70 a night - about the same as a crappy, two-star tourist hotel in Copenhagen. Nice.
Ubatuba, Brazil - Bicycle Paradise
Some recent photos from Zé from Transporte Ativo, the Brazilian mobility NGO, showing bicycle parking in Ubatuba.
Ubatuba, Brazil - Bicycle Paradise

What we need is a list of bicycle-friendly destinations to visit. Ubatuba, Barcelona, Seville, Ferrara, Bordeaux, San Sebastian, various Scandinavian/Dutch/German cities, etc. Preferably places uninfected by the Culture of Fear.

Signage influenced by local branding is great, too. There are often rigid design manuals to be adhered to, which is fair enough, but being able to tweak the rules a bit would offer up some interesting signage. The Dutch, for example, could just hang Gouda cheeses up from signposts with a bicycle pictogram carved through.

It would go well with their tulip island visible from space.

;-)
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

7550 New Bike Parking Spots at Copenhagen Central Station

For all of Copenhagen's badassness as a bicycle city, there remains one thing that the City still completely sucks at. Bicycle parking at train stations. At Copenhagen Central Station there are only about 1000 bike parking spots. Danish State Railways can't even tell us how many spots they have. They're not sure. Even in Basel they have 800+. In Antwerp they have this . Don't even get me started on the Dutch. 12,500 bike parking spots are on the way in some place called Utrecht . Amsterdam has a multi-story bike parking facility, floating bicycle barges round the back and are planning 7000 more spots underwater . Even at the nation's busiest train station, Nørreport, the recent and fancy redesign failed miserably in providing parking that is adequate for the demand . Architects once again failing to respond to actual urban needs. It is time to remedy that. Here is my design for 7550 bike parking spots behind Copenhagen Central Station. Steve C. Montebello i...
Read more

The New Question for 21st Century Cities

It's all so simple if we want it to be. For almost a century we have been asking the same question in our cities. "How many cars can we move down a street?" It's time to change the question. If you ask "How many PEOPLE can we move down a street?", the answer becomes much more modern and visionary. And simple. Oh, and cheaper. Let alone the fact that the model at the top can move 10 times more people down a street than the model at the bottom. When I travel with my Bicycle Urbanism by Design keynote , I often step on the toes of traffic engineers all around the world. Not all of them, however. I am always approached by engineers who are grateful that someone is questioning the unchanged nature of traffic engineering and the unmerited emphasis placed on it. I find it brilliant that individual traffic engineers in six different nations have all said the same thing to me: "We're problem solvers. But we're only ever asked to solve the sam...
Read more

The Race for Lithium for Electric Cars and Bicycles

Uyuni Salt Flats, Bolivia. Photo: Ezequiel Cabrera/Wikipedia The coming boom in batteries to electric cars and Lazy Bikes (electric-assist bicycles) means a boom in batteries with which to run them. A new race for natural resources has begun. Enter Lithium, the world's lightest metal. For 150 years it's been nickel and lead that have been used in batteries but the advent of lithium technology has allowed for a revolution. Longer battery life, lighter batteries in our laptaps and mobile phones and iPods. Lithium weighs 1/20th of what nickel and lead do. Lithium is also used in anti-depressive medicine, ceramics and nuclear power. With all this talk of electric cars and bicycles, the demand for lithium is on the verge of exploding. Lithium is the new oil. Enter Boliva. This developing country sits on at least half of the world's supply of lithium, most of it in underground salt layers beneath the world's largest salt flats in Salar de Uyuni , in south-west Boliva. Betwee...
Read more