Why does Alfonso Dominguez, owner of Oakland's Tamarindo, La Calle, and partial owner of Era Art Bar and Lounge, spend his free time hawking tacos from a bike? An avid cyclist and owner of six different bikes himself, we got the idea talking to him last week that Dominguez built El Taco Bike to prove it was possible in the first place.

We're in full support. Too few snack foods come off the back of bicycles these days. Read more »

Rapha Cycle Club is altering my mental image of what a biker bar is. For one thing, the walls are all really white. For others, I can shop, I can order a cup of Four Barrel and a Telltale Preserve croissant, I can watch the Tour de France – but I can't have a beer. 

That's because it's a clothing shop, mainly. But as manager Emily Haddad (who Rapha imported to SF from her gig at an Austin bike shop specifically to work at the new space) tells me, it's so much more. 

“It's a bar, but one where everyone's drinking coffee.” Read more »

Our bike spotted this super clean tag in the Lower Haight the other day. It was drawn to the piece not just for its subject matter (you know how bikes tend to stick with their own kind), but also because of the composition. Check those lines! Dynamic! Hot. It was in love.  Read more »

Chilling in the middle of Saturday evening traffic in the Stanyan-Kezar intersection doesn't seem like a situation engineered to produce warm fuzzy feelings. But the aggressive honk cloud of surely confused, possibly perturbed automobiles behind me mattered little – I was digging too much on the tandems, trailers, and trees rolling past me on two (and three, holler back trikes!) wheels. 

In a way, that was all part one of the Bicycle Music Festival organizers, Paul “Fossil Fool” Freedman's plan. Freedman (who we profiled in our recent Bike To Work issue), co-founder Gabe Dominguez, the Rock the Bike crew, and a superhuman pack of volunteers, staged the fifth year of their outdoor festival on June 18. Once again, it was completely pedal-powered, from the stage to the smoothies. Read more »

We're in a moment of bike love. Bikes are hot: in SF the weather's hot, the Bicycle Music Festival's coming up, an extended network of bike paths is on their way – and around the world, there's a lot of energy surrounding the rise of two-wheeled transport. It's an important time for bicycles, so let look at how it's being documented. 

One way: Matthew Finkle and Brittain Sullivan are the authors of a book called – yes – I Love My Bike (Chronicle Books, $16.95, 160 pages) that recently landed in our Guardian mailbox. Finkle and Sullivan, the book's intro tells me, met on a bike ride on a summer night in Boston and subsquently pedaled across the country with each other, snapping flicks of their bikey buddies along the way. Read more »