Billyburg was getting a little tired of NY, as the fall and winter settles in, so we decided to send him on a little trip to Beirut. I recently met, Dave, a smart and savvy entrepreneur/biker in NY who agreed to be Billyburg’s chaperon for the next couple of months. I asked him for his thoughts of the bike, the project and the cities he has rode in. Below is his response. Here are the photos.

Dave says:
I rode the Yahoo! bike around New York City for a few days before packing it into a big box and bringing it with me to Beirut, Lebanon, where I’ve been living for the past few years.  Same bike, same rider, two very different cities, two very different experiences riding the bike around town.

My relationship with biking goes back much farther than the Purple Pedals Project.  My brother and sister were both top-ranked collegiate cyclists (with UC Santa Barbara and Cal Poly SLO, two great teams).  My sister was a key planner behind setting up the bike routes in Berkeley, and my brother is still an active cyclist and triathlete in NYC.

I only briefly flirted with biking as a competitive sport, but have long been a biker for practical transportation purposes.  Biking was my main means of transportation while in college in Berkeley, and for getting around town while I was living in Damascus, Syria (I lived there for nine months while working on a project for the UN-FAO).  (Biking is even less common in Damascus than in Beirut.)

In NYC, biking is a big part of the culture, with everyone from students to lawyers, people in shorts to people in suits, riding around town.  People ride for leisure, for exercise, and for transportation.

In Beirut, biking isn’t very common. For a variety of social and practical reasons, biking for transportation purposes is limited to a few college students, poor people, and some foreigners.  There has been a slight increase in bikers in the past half-year, probably related to the hike in gas prices and increasing traffic problems in Beirut (I love zipping past people stuck in their cars in a bad traffic jam), and it’s more common to see people riding bikes for fun on the weekends.

Still, regardless of the bike you are riding, you stand out and attract eyeballs.  Even more so if you are riding a big purple bike with white tires, a camera mounted on the front, and solar panels off the back.  Some people ask questions, are curious about the solar panels and ask how fast my electric bike can go (before I explain to them that battery doesn’t power the bike, but rather the hacked camera/phone on the front), give me thumbs up, etc.  Pretty cool.

At the same time, some people have asked questions or expressed concerns about security issues. Beirut is a tense city, with a constant security presence by the Lebanese Army or police, private security guards, etc.  So far I’ve only been blocked from riding the bike into the center of downtown and one of the main convention centers in Beirut.  Both don’t allow bikes at all for security reasons (the center of downtown is open only to foot traffic, but the convention center allows cars, buses, trucks, motorcycles, and scooters, just not bikes!), and both asked a lot of questions about me and the bike, and made me park the bike off to the side away from anything important.  A few areas in town are “no-photo zones”, and the army people never like getting their picture taken.

There is excitement, though, and a lot of people have expressed interest in riding the bike, taking it on special trips, doing some sort of art or performance piece with (and for) the bike, et cetera.  I look forward to seeing what people come up with over the coming few months.  We are going to do some fun stuff with the bike related to Global Entrepreneurship Week (November 17-23) in Lebanon, and then open it up beyond that for people to borrow, to send on bike trips around Lebanon, etc.  If anybody has cool ideas of things we could do with it, please drop me a line!  My email is innovate (at) therootspace (dot) org.

One of my primary goals with RootSpace is to promote/foster in Lebanon some of the innovative thinking and creative entrepreneurship that make Silicon Valley so special, and to build connections between people, companies, projects, and organizations working in Lebanon and abroad.  This bike project with Yahoo is a great example of this.  I think the creative use of technology is fantastic, and is a fun example of innovative design and thinking.  The bike uses a standard Nokia N95 cell phone, a few small solar panels, and a small battery pack.  It is all fairly simple and available technology, but they came up with a great new project from that.  The whole bike system, powered by both human energy and solar energy, is totally self-contained and never needs to be connected to anything (power, internet, etc).

The latest trips I’ve taken with the bike include riding from my home to work… only about a ten-minute ride, but one that goes through the new downtown (Solidere area), and across the infamous Green Line that divided Beirut into two cities during the long civil war (1975-1990).  Construction (and reconstruction) is still taking place all over the city, and there are plenty of reminders of the various conflcts that have hit the country over the years and decades.  I also took the bike with me to a recent performance of my capoeira group on the long sea-side promenade called the Corniche, where we were performing as part of the Beirut Street Festival.  Many more fun trips ahead!

Cheers!

David Munir Nabti

More on Dave: David Munir Nabti is a Lebanese-American, born and raised mostly in the Bay Area,  California (between Palo Alto and Berkeley, two great biking towns in a very bike-friendly region).  He moved out to Lebanon about four years ago.  It wasn’t just one thing that sparked the move, but he wanted, as he says, “to put my time and brainz and experience into a place with greater need and less opportunity than I saw in the Bay Area.”  He first worked as a freelance journalist in Lebanon, and then with a project of the UN-FAO in Damascus.  He moved back to Beirut in the summer of 2006 to see what he could do to help when Israel battered Lebanon in its conflict with Hizballah.  After working on a master’s degree at the American University of Beirut (political economy and Middle East studies) he launched RootSpace, a non-profit organization in Lebanon, almost a year ago.