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Outside Magazine has an article on commuting by bike in the US - Rage Against Your Machine.

THE U.S. CENSUS BUREAU DEFINES AN "EXTREME COMMUTER" AS SOMEONE WHO SPENDS MORE THAN THREE HOURS GETTING TO AND FROM WORK.

This is usually understood to be by car. Its not clear, then, how the Census would categorize Joe Simonetti, a 57-year-old psychotherapist who lives with his wife in Pound Ridge, New York. His commute takes him from the northern reaches of exurban Westchester County to his office just south of Central Park.

Its about three and a half hours each way.

By bike.

When I heard about Simonettis commute—some 50-odd road miles as Google Maps flies—I was vaguely stupefied. It may or may not be the longest bike commute in America, but its certainly the most improbable. In my minds eye, there was the dense clamor of New York City, then a netherland of train yards and traffic-clogged overpasses, then an outer belt of big-box retail, and then you were suddenly in the land of golf courses and five-acre zoning—where middle managers crowd the bar car on Metro-North and hedge-fund analysts cruise in 7 Series BMWs down I-95.

The idea that this landscape could be traversed on a bike struck me as fantastic. This is America, where 65 percent of trips under one mile are made by car. But at 7 A.M. on a mid-November Thursday—among the last of the year on which Simonetti was going to ride—I packed my bike into the back of a hired minivan and headed for Pound Ridge, noting with subtle alarm the ticking off of miles as we pushed north.

Simonetti obviously isnt the typical bike commuter. For one thing, he does it only twice a week, weather permitting. For another, he doesnt ride home the same day; he has a crash pad in the city where he can shower and sleep. But in following this supercommuter, I wanted to open a window into what it means to be a cyclist in a country where the bicycle struggles for the barest acceptance as a means of transportation.

Over the years and the miles, Simonetti has experienced just about everything a cyclist can on the roads today: honked horns, cramped bike lanes, close calls with cars, and even a few crashes—the last one landing him in the hospital. I was curious to ride with him for the sheer novelty of it, and also to get a handle on what seemed to be an increasingly prevalent culture war between cyclists and drivers, one that was claiming actual lives. At least for one beautiful morning, I wanted to move beyond the alarming headlines and toxic chat rooms and into the real world, to get a sense of how, why—and if—things had gotten so bad.

My interest isnt because Im a cyclist, though I am, in the loose recreational sense. Rather, the issue was forced upon me by the publication of my 2008 book Traffic, which looked at the oft-peculiar psychology of drivers. Cyclists were among the books most devoted readers, although Im still not sure if its because they found my dissection of drivers foibles educational or cathartic. After all, the little things that drivers think are excusable—forgetting a turn signal, weaving a bit as they fumble for their Big Gulps—can range from frustrating to life-threatening for a cyclist.

Simonettis house, a cozy ranch that he jokes is the smallest in Pound Ridge, sits on a twisting country lane. The walkability-measuring Web site Walkscore.org gives his address a rating of zero, meaning, basically, that you cant get around without a car. Tall and trim, with a professorial salt-and-pepper beard, Simonetti is waiting with his LeMond Buenos Aires, a 50th-birthday gift that, he jokes, makes him look "like a real cyclist." Clad in a helmet, gloves, and a blue cycling jacket, he fills our bikes bottles with a mixture of juice and water, checks that his back pouch has spare tubes (Ive forgotten mine), and clicks his shoes into his pedals.

The Economist has a post on an innovative form of recycling cardboard - Re-cycling.

THE first bicycles were made of wood. Cycle manufacturers then switched to steel tubes. These days, for high-end bikes where weight is at a premium, they use aluminium alloys or even carbon fibre. But Izhar Gafni, an amateur cyclist who owns a number of such fancy bikes, wonders whether the original inventors had a point. He proposes to go back to using wood—or, rather, a derivative of wood, namely cardboard.

Mr Gafni, who is based in Ahituv, Israel, spent years trying to work out how to make a cardboard bicycle able to support the weight of a human being. The trick is twofold. First, he folds the cardboard—commercial-grade material, made from recycled paper—to increase its strength. (He worked out the exact pattern of folding for each of the machine’s components using the principles of origami.) Then, once it is folded, he treats the result with a proprietary resin that holds it in shape and stiffens it, before cutting it into the form of the component required. A second application of resin renders the component waterproof, and a lick of lacquer makes it look good. The result, Mr Gafni claims, is stronger than carbon fibre.

The bike’s frame, wheels, handlebars and saddle are all made of cardboard in this way, and then fitted together. The tyres—again harking back to the early days of cycling—are composed of solid rubber, which is recycled from old car tyres. That makes the ride a little harder than if the tyres were pneumatic, but means they cannot be punctured.

The chain, based on the timing belt of a car, is also made from car-tyre rubber. The pedals are plastic recycled from bottles and the brakes are recycled too, though Mr Gafni is not yet ready to disclose the details. The finished product weighs 9kg, a bit less than an ordinary bike, and can carry a rider weighing 220kg.

Mr Gafni’s target market is the poorer countries of the world. Because manufacturing the cardboard bike will, he reckons, cost $9-12 a unit, his design is far more affordable than a steel-framed bike.