Have you decorated your bike tree and cookies yet? Sung your bike carols? Anxiously waited for the Bike Month peloton to land on your rooftop? I hope so.

With gas prices climbing and environmental concerns increasing, this is a particularly good year to celebrate National Bicycle Month. Started in 1956, National Bike Month is still going strong and growing.

To celebrate, take a minute (well, two) to watch this great little video about one man’s bike commute.

Mat’s Commute from Mat Barlow on Vimeo.

NEW NATIONAL LEGISLATION
Complete Streets Bill Now in House and Senate
(05.05.08) Representative Doris Matsui (D-CA) took an important step on Thursday, May 1 for safer, better designed streets yesterday by introducing the Safe and Complete Streets Act of 2008 (HR 5951) into the U.S. House. Click here to read more.

UPCOMING EVENTS
May 16: Bike to Work Day
Not a centralized national event, so you might want to Google “Bike To Work Day 2008″ for more events in your area.

May 21: Ride of Silence
Ride of Silence will begin in North America and roll across the globe. Cyclists will take to the roads in a silent procession to honor cyclists who have been killed or injured while cycling on public roadways. Although cyclists have a legal right to share the road with motorists, the motoring public often isn’t aware of these rights, and sometimes not aware of the cyclists themselves.

FOR MORE BICYCLE AND CYCLING ADVOCACY INFO
Bikes Belong Coalition
(very nice design, excellent up-to-date content)

League of American Bicyclists
(great advocacy info and contact forms to talk to politicians about cycling rights/issues)

Bicycling Magazine’s This Just In blog

Please feel free to share links and resources that you find helpful. Happy National Bike Month!

Earlier today, Hanson Dodge Creative launched the first iPhone-optimized site that we’ve created for one of our clients, Trek Bicycles. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, I invite you to pop over to the site and take a ride. We’re really excited about the new site and are fortunate to work with forward-looking clients who engage us on projects like this. These are the types of projects that make being a designer or developer worth it.

Yesterday, the New York Times published an interesting article that spoke about a spike in Google’s traffic on Christmas, ostensibly from users who had just received iPhones for the holidays. The traffic from iPhone users eclipsed that of established, entrenched mobile OS providers. Here’s the really interesting part of the article:

“The data is striking because the iPhone, an Apple product, accounts for just 2 percent of smartphones worldwide, according to IDC, a market research firm. Phones powered by Symbian make up 63 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, while those powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile have 11 percent and those running the BlackBerry system have 10 percent.”

So, with just 2 percent of the market, the iPhone already registered higher web traffic volumes than platforms that when combined, hold 84 percent of the current market. From my design-centric point of view, I can only deduce that people with existing smart phones do not use the web functionality of their phones and that the interface design of the iPhone makes mobile web browsing a viable, if not liberating option.

We’ve seen the same trend. In fact, it’s even more pronounced than Google’s numbers. In our own traffic logs, and in some of our clients’, we’ve noticed a meteoric rise in of the number of iPhone and iPod touch users. Overall, we’ve seen iPhone and iPod touch users, with .2 percent of traffic, register an order of magnitude higher than the next closest OS - Symbian, coming in at .02 percent. This is an unscientific look at the numbers, but it does seem to indicate that the iPhone is in a league of its own when it comes to mobile browsing.

For those of you who love lists, here’s how we see the OS traffic levels shaking out currently. Again, the jump to the iPhone and iPod touch was an order of magnitude from the closest competitor, Symbian. Any platforms not listed were below .01 percent of traffic.

1. Windows
2. Macintosh
3. Linux
4. iPhone/iPod
5. SymbianOS
6. Danger Hiptop
7. Playstation 3
8. Palm OS
9. Nintendo Wii
10. Sun OS
11. Playstation Portable

For me, this project was the first one that really made me believe in the future of the mobile web. I’ve been designing for the web for a decade now, and although I’ve done my fair share of mobile projects, none of them ever felt like a viable substitution for a full browser-based experience. The iPhone is changing this, and will hopefully pressure other mobile platforms to improve the browsing experience for its users.