Shoot The Bike: Taipei Bicycle Film Festival Seeking Submissions

The Bicycle Film Festival in Taipei is looking for cyclists and filmmakers to submit their works for this year's festival for Bike To Work Day through the month of October.

The film festival is to help promote bicycle commuting in the hopes of encouraging 20,000 cyclists to bike to work instead of driving or riding a scooter.

The organizers encourage riders to use the Riverside Bike Lane, where they will provide feed stations along the way supplying bananas and water to desperate riders.

Organizers are also requesting submissions of photos and movie files revolving around the themes Bicycle.Memory/Bicycle.Traveling/Bicycle.Life. to present images that best portray cycling in the city and they are offering a NT$60,000 grand prize and several smaller prizes.

Photo:

Gold medal*1 : NTD 60,000, a certificate of merit

Silver medal*1 : NTD 30,000, a certificate of merit

Bronze medal*1 : NTD 10,000, a certificate of merit

Excellent award *60 : each gets a voucher of NTD 2000 , a certificate of merit

Movie:

10 winners: each gets NTD 5000, a certificate of merit

• Bicycle.Memory hopes to find images or video depicting Taipei's old bicycle culture to create links to the past.

• Bicycle.Travel is seeking submissions to depict traveling around Taipei by bicycle.

• Bicycle Life is for submissions that show Taipei's modern bicycle culture.

• Photo submissions may be in either color or black and white and be in 6 million pixels at either 2000-3000 dpi JPEG or TIFF formats. The submission should be the original image without a frame.Video files should be in submitted on disk with mpeg or AVI files no more that 15 minutes in length. Each submission should contain a brief description under 100 words.

All submissions should be sent to:

105臺北市內湖區港墘路117號【BFF自行車電影節 徵件】

BFF Bicycle Film Festival

No. 117 Gang-chien Rd. Neihu Dist. Taipei City, 105

You can download an application HERE: 活動詳細辦法與報名表下載

Be sure to follow the link at the top to see some of the great trailers for some of the movies that will be screened at this year's festival.

Government Sights Trained on Bicycle Transport

According to a report in the United Daily News, Taiwan's government is finally ready to address the urgent need for trains with bicycle carrying capabilities. The need for bike trains has become increasingly important as Taiwan's government has made cycling tourism one of the six pillars of its tourism plan.

The article reports that the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) is poised to procure new train cars for its local commuter trains, enabling each train to hold up to eight bicycles.

The first train cars are scheduled to arrive in September 2012, followed by a second batch of train cars by 2015. The plan expects to put 296 new bicycle equipped train cars into service around Taiwan and increase ridership for both bikes and trains.

Anything would be an improvement at this point. Under the current system you must apply to bring a bike on board and then you just rest it against the wall with everyone else. At your stop you practically have to beat the rest of the passengers over the head with your bicycle to exit.

Unfortunately, the new trains won't go into effect soon enough.