Bike lanes and bike riders may be controversial, but bikes as an image are marketing gold right now. Want to sell it? Put a bike on it! Transportation Nation found bikes for sale or used as display elements at Kate Spade, CB2, Club Monaco, Anthropologie, the Gap, Urban Outfitters, and Brooklyn Industries.
Sure, those bikes are being used to move whatever consumerist crap people are hawking. But on the flip side, the consumerist crap is also kind of selling the bike. If bikes are promoted as the image of coolness all over your favorite trendy store, you might just start thinking that riding a bike is kind of cool.
On the other hand, it's not like people rushed out to buy birds. And if bikes say "modern" and "hip," why is there so much anti-bike pushback? Probably because the people in charge of things like enforcing biking rules or authorizing new lanes are neither hip nor modern.
