Last week while introducing the Hollywood Golden Age on two wheels site Rides a Bike, I intimated that part of the problem with how cycling is sold to the public is lack of sex appeal. It’s really not the bike industry’s fault. It’s a male dominated, techno focused trade that is more impressed with gear to make you fast than looking fast. Having spent a good part of the 90s in the tech industry, the component obsessed, socially awkward guy is a familiar archetype.

Well if the tech industry can have its iPhone to break through the nerdom, so can the bike industry and hopefully appeal to those beyond its inner tribe. I was recently turned on via Copenhagenize to this short film called Bicycle City directed by Martin de Thurah for the EXPO Shanghai 2010 as a prime example of what is possible.

De Thurah has created a piece that takes many of the cues from the auto industry on how to sell your product as sexy: wide open roads, beautiful cinematic scenes, the casual backward glance of a lovely, nubile women. We don’t have association by guilty (the environmentalist’s approach) or by speed (the gearhead approach) or by thriftiness (the governmental approach). It’s time to go back to Advertizing 101 and tap into the psychological wants of all humans. The bicycle can be positioned to fulfull many of those wants if we just try.