Heels on Wheels 2

Ms. Dailey identifies four chief types of “ladies burning rubber out there”: the Fashion Victim, whose outfits harmonize with her trendy neo-vintage wheels; the Speed Demon with extraterrestrial helmet and sleek, Matrixy gear (like Gwyneth Paltrow); the Earth Mother, who careers toward farmers’ markets with her baby bobbing precariously in the front basket; and the Retro Rider in Steampunk get-up, whose vehicle “weighs more than a cement-mixer.” Beyoncé Knowles is a devoted urban biker who relishes the anonymity a bike gives her when she’s in public. “By the time they realize it’s me, I’m already gone,” she says. The suffragist Susan B. Anthony declared that bicycling “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,” and the novelist Iris Murdoch called the bicycle “the most civilized conveyance known to man.” Albert Einstein, though not a woman, gets a pat on the head because he came up with his theory of relativity while riding his bicycle at night. Comment by velo Mondial: He must have had great cycle infrastructure guding him, as his mind clearly was not on the road. Read on in The New York Times.