Guess what I got in the mail? A new sticker for my bicycle helmet. The one that says ONE LESS CAR in big letters.

I have had the same helmet for 15 years, mostly because I really liked the sticker on it that I picked up in Vancouver. It’s from an organization called BEST, and the message is exactly how I feel about my bike – my bike is the reason I don’t have or need a car. And I’d like people to consider bikes a real alternative to cars, whether in their private life or in city planning.

Anyway, it was really hard to part with that sticker, so on a whim I sent an email to BEST, asking if they remembered the stickers and maybe, just maybe still had one. I didn’t think there’s be any chance at all. Most advertising campaigns like this last for a summer, and after 10 years, there’s no chance of still finding any scrap of them. Imagine my surprise when I got a reply the next day saying that not only did they still use the stickers, but they’d send me one to Norway!

It’s such a small thing, but it made me crazily happy. I’ve got to get a picture of it (update later).

I decided that it was time for a new bike helmet today. I bought the old one when I was 19 years old, in a delayed response to a bike accident that killed one of my teenage heroes. Head injury. At that time, helmets were an unusual sight on bicyclists, and it seems something drastic had to happen to convince people like me that they were a good idea.

I have a little game I play to pass the time while I cycle to work every day – I count the number of people that don’t wear helmets. My coworkers think I might be a little autistic because I keep statistics. At the moment, about 2 in 3 cyclists I meet between 8 and 10 in the morning wear a helmet, which I think is a pretty good number. But if I take the same tour in the middle of the day, hardly anyone wears one. My guess is that people I meet in the morning are more like me – they are serious about replacing the car with a bike, and are more conscious about traffic because they ride during rush hours. During the day, the casual bikers are on the road, and a lot of women and old people. Among the people that don’t wear helmets, women and old people are by far the biggest group. I have no concrete numbers for this, and think that I should incorporate that into my statistics.

NRK Faktor had a show some days ago about the danger of bicycling in Norway. In a country where only 4% of the traffic is by bike (as opposed to 12% in Sweden, or 28% in Holland), cyclists are simply not noticed. Accidents are common – Oslo legevakten (emergency room) treats 7 cyclists every day – and wearing a helmet should be common sense.

What I don’t understand: Parents riding the bike with their kids, making the kids wear helmets but refusing to wear one themselves. Why is this such a common sight?

Guess who got his bike back. Yup, that’s me! And guess how much help I got from the police? Zero, Zilch, nada. They said “Oslo police will not help you with this matter. You have to help yourself”. Which is what I did (see the picture below).

My bike was stolen 2 weeks ago. I was told this happens a lot, and since I’ve lost 5 bikes in my life to thieves, and never got any of them back, I was finally fed up and didn’t make a report to the police this time. My experience with the government in norway hasn’t been good. Forms to fill out that I need a translator for, broken english, the whole shebang. I mean, they are still not sure that I paid my taxes, despite 5 letters, numerous phone calls, and two tax declarations filled out.

So it was to my utmost surprise that I found my bike parked outside Cinemateket yesterday. Chained to another bike. I called the police, and they sent someone to look at it (about half an hour later), which made me miss Shaolin Soccer. The squad car arrived and asked me if I was sure it was my bike. Yes, I said. It has numerous odd damages, and you can still see the place where I had one of the Funcom Visitor stickers stuck to it for a year. Did I know the frame number? No. I hadn’t checked during the time I was waiting, either – I mean, what was the point? Did I still have the bill? No, I had moved last summer and thrown away a lot of stuff. So how can I prove it’s my bike? My friends could testify that. No, that’s not enough, they said.

They took my address and födselsnummer, and then found that there is a video camera looking right at where my bike was parked. So we could have had a look at the tape and seen who parked it. But the people at cinemateket didn’t have the key around, and couldn’t let us into the room with the tape. The police officers told me to wait for someone to come out the cinema, stop them when they wanted to take the bike and call the police again. I did. Nobody came. I waited through the next movie, and until Cinemateket closed. Still, nobody came. I called the police again. They said they couldn’t help me still. I would have to leave the bike where it was.

At this point, I was almost in tears. Here was my bike, I could put my hands on it, and I couldn’t take it away. I had called the police for help, and gotten no help at all. Everyone was nice, polite, and no help, saying the rules didn’t allow them to do this. I pleaded. I said, why would I call them if I wanted to steal the bike? And at any rate, they had my address. Even if I was lying, they could come and get me. It wasn’t even a very expensive bike (2500 NOK). No they said, can’t break the lock for you. Just stay around and wait, if you’re lucky, someone will come.

I may be a foreigner in Oslo, but I’ve learned that this part of town is not one to stay around all night waiting for a thief to turn up, and then ask him to please not go away with my bike, because I was going to call the police. So I said to the police I was going to lock up the bike and come back tomorrow. And call them again. The policewoman on the phone said I shouldn’t lock the bike. I said it can’t be illegal to lock your own bike now, can it? She advised strongly against it, and I decided that at this point, I was really not going to bother about what the police said or did. And if my bike is still there tomorrow (I can at least hope), I’ll call them again. But first, I’ll tell the press.