If you love summer farmers' markets, but hate cars, then keep reading.

Perhaps you're summer plan is to stock your pantry with a Portlandia amount of pickles from every farmers' market in town. But you're not planning to cart your cache home by car, which means you're going to need some bike-friendly ways to pedal your produce home.

Here's a few:

Bags From Freight, Zugster, Rickshaw Bagworks, and more...
If you don't need to haul a bushel of corn, you can probably make due with a sturdy bag. The Bay Area is home to some of the finest bagmakers in the world, and while you might end up with a sweaty back, a backpack or a messenger pack is probably the least intrusive and least expensive way to increase your carrying capacity. A large bag from Freight, Zugster, Rickshaw, Mission Workshop, Chrome, or anywhere else, will probably fit more carrots than you can possibly carry.

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There's public nudity and then there's public nudity for a good cause. Over the weekend, cyclists and nudists came together to participate in the annual World Naked Bike Ride, which is a chance to protest against fossil fuel dependence, and actually get people to turn their heads.

It's hard to miss this flock of bare-skinned bikers as they traverse the streets of San Francisco, but if you didn't make outside your house on Saturday, here's what you missed:

Joseph Geha

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The Bike Share Stations are Coming

So bike sharing is coming to the Bay Area, albeit in a modest way. If you don't hate cyclists like the Wall Street Journal, then you're probably glad that San Francisco is catching up to other world-class cities like Paris, New York, and Chattanooga, when it comes to this easy transportation option. If you're happy to see a bike share program come to San Francisco there's at least one reason that you should be frustrated by it as well: it's just not big enough.

You Can Share, Right?

Bike sharing has been a major success in cities around the world. Paris is one famous example, and U.S. cities like Washington D.C., New York, Portland, even Madison, WI, have gotten bike share programs. Small European cities have shot up the bike-friendly rankings with widespread deployment of bike sharing stations. If you haven't ever ventured to use one of these bike sharing things here's how it works: you put your credit card in the machine, you take a bike, and you return the bike to any station you want. Simple, right?

Fees are usually paid in daily, multi-day, or yearly passes, and of course, if you don't bring the bike back, you'll just get charged for it. Usually there are penalties for checking out a bike longer than 30 minutes -- bike sharing is contingent upon bikes being used on short trips and not sitting in someone's office or garage. To account for uneven bike flow the bike sharing program usually includes trucks or vans to balance out the system by moving bikes around.

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Since caffeine is pretty much the only doping still allowed by the Union Cycliste Internationale, I decided I'd go ahead and put together this quick guide to some of the best coffee spots to stop during, before, and after a ride.

This list is less based on science and more on my passion for my coffee and bikes. However, there were two prerequisites for making the list: Good visibility so you keep an eye on your steed, or indoor bike parking, since no roadie would carry a lock in their kit. Oh, and the coffee had to be damn good.

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Medical authorities have say it was 21-year-old Dylan Mitchell who was killed yesterday morning as he was cycling through the city's Mission District.

According to police, Mitchell, a Clayton resident, was riding eastbound on 16th Street toward Van Ness when a Recology garbage truck, driving parallel to Mitchell, took a right turn onto Van Ness, hitting the victim.

Mitchell was not wearing a helmet at the time of the accident.

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Following a series of successful pilot days in March, where no one was impaled by a bike on a train, the BART board last night voted to go ahead and let bikes on board during peak commute hours for another five months.

This was not what cyclists were hoping for, nor was it the recommendation from a study which suggested the no-bikes-on-BART rule could be dropped permanently. However, the board decided, not unanimously, to go forward with the trial period, calling from bike blackouts, where cyclists are their bikes are welcome aboard during commute hours. The new trial period will start July 31 and run until December 1. Ultimately, the Board, despite the urging of hundreds of emails and a bevy of advocates (and a couple naysayers) decided that BART and its commuters needed a little more time to get used to cyclists carting their bikes on trains at all times.

Short of completing the new Bay Bridge, this is about the best thing that could happen to cyclists who commute across the bay. Cyclists who attended and spoke at the meeting, which ran until nearly 10 p.m., lamented that it was hard to ride BART, and that lifting the ban on bikes -- permanently -- would obviously improve life.

And of course, riders used this meeting as a chance to blast other passengers who annoy them -- the ones with doublewide strollers, couches (?), bags of cans, etc.

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Update 12:06 p.m.:Sam Singer, spokesman for Recology, issued the following statement after one of the company's garbage trucks killed a cyclist:

"SFPD responded and took control of the accident scene. They are conducting a thorough investigation and interviewing witnesses. Recology staff responded immediately and we are cooperating fully with police investigators.Our sincere thoughts and prayers go out to family members of the cyclist who died in this morning's accident."

A witness told reporters that the truck hit the male cyclist as the driver was turning onto Van Ness. The driver continued, dragging the cyclist for a short distance until witnesses alerted him.

Original Story 7:39 a.m.: An unidentified cyclist was killed early this morning when he/she collided with a garbage truck in the city's Mission District.

Police, who are still at the scene, didn't have too many details now, but said the incident happened at about 6:45 a.m. at the intersection of 16th street and Van Ness.

The cyclist died at the scene, said Officer Gordon Shyy.

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You see the problem?

If soon you find it a tad easier to find a place to park your bike around Yerba Buena, then you have the clever and artsy students of San Francisco to thank.

A team from San Francisco's Academy of Art University was selected from more than 35 international entries as the winner of a student competition to design a portable bicycle corral for the City's Yerba Buena neighborhood, according to the Yerba Buena Community Benefit District. The portable bicycle corral will "meet the growing demand for bike parking at cultural and special events in Yerba Buena, and encourage even more people to use sustainable alternatives of transportation."

So here are the details of the winning design titled "Pedalution:"

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Any cyclist who knows bikes and knows Craigslist has come across -- way too often -- those sketchy shops shilling in the "by owner" section and the obviously stolen bike ads. Then there's the clueless goofballs. Craigslist is that one Bay Area location that's intimidating, stupid, and hilarious all simultaneously.

I've spent countless hours scouring Craigslist, and especially the bike ads. I've bought, sold, flipped, and have come to appreciate the best worst ads. You'd think people would learn that to sell something on Craigslist, they would have to convince buyers that they actually have a product worth purchasing, and of course, they're not a murder. It's astonishing how many Craigslist sellers have not quite mastered the art of cajoling customers.

So I decided this week, to cull my favorites perfect stupid Craigslist bike ads. Enjoy:

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If you typically bike to work, then Bike to Work Day is probably when you avoid your usual cycle-friendly commuting route because it is now clogged with clumsy inexperienced cyclists.

Or, you're one of those clumsy inexperienced cyclists who has just mustered up the courage to drag that neglected bicycle from the garage or relieve it of its coat hanger duties long enough to wobble to one of the Bike to Work free breakfast events.

While Bike to Work Day certainly promotes a good, clean, healthy, alternative to cars, does it do much beyond piss-off existing cyclists and take a few cars off the road one day a year?

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