Bunchland

Yahoo!‘s Purple Pedals Project is an effort to get people to share their adventures via a fleet of photo-snapping purple bicycles given out to different people in different cities around the world. This summer, Yahoo! gave Bunch a Purple Pedals bike to ride around our hometown of Toronto. So what kinds of images did Bunch’s bike, Purple Shutter, capture? When you click through the Flickr photo stream, you get a neat mix of action shots (a bike’s-eye-view of a busy street), artistic blurs (Is that a bike rack or a backhoe?), and wonderfully candid photos of the people and places a family encounters on an urban outing. Ultimately, the types of photos are as different as the families who took Purple Shutter for a ride. We asked these  families to write about their Purple Shutter adventures and pick their favourite photo highlights:

Bloor West Cookie Quest
Join Parent Central editor Brandie Weikle and her son Cameron as they ride through their Bloor West neighbourhood in search of the ultimate cookie.

Ramping up for Extreme fun
Ride along with me (Rebecca), my husband, Marc, our son Sam (5) and our pals as we visit the wild ramps at the Wallace Emerson BMX Bike Park.

Making a Splash in Parkdale
The Meyer Odell family are crafty urban entrepreneurs with a fun blog to boot. Take a look at a mom-and-son ramble around Parkdale with Gretel and 7-year-old Tristan: splashing through giant puddles, gawking at gleaming fire trucks, and a much needed cheeseburger run.

Barenaked Bicycling
Ouch. Not really. But Barenaked Ladies band member Jim Creeggan did hit the road with his wife Anna, their kids Finn & Chloe, and of course, Purple Shutter.

Chilling at Cherry Beach
Richard Lee and Nina Aquino maybe be best known for co-creating the indie theatre company Fu-Gen Theatre, but the creation closest to their hearts is their daughter Eponine. Join Richard and Eponine as they battle busy roads and stinky garbage in a bid to make it to the beach.

Coming Soon:

Luminato’s Robert VanderBerg and his crew hit Ashbridge’s Bay Park and the Gerrard India Bazaar.

The Hosios family takes shutter to Mt. Pleasant Cemetery to reflect on life and death.

The Winking Circle’s Will Zenga and his bunch take Shutter to the Island, then Benny Zenga makes Shutter his date for the Bicycle Film Festival.

Plus: Purple Shutter bloopers and outtakes.

Want to see more?
There are 20 YBikes around the world. Since the photos are geo-tagged, you can check in on all of them with the Mapplication, a mapping service that shows you where all the Purple Pedal Project’s YBikes are and what they’re up to.