BikePortland will be reporting this week on news from both coasts — Jonathan from the National Bike Summit in D.C. and Michael on the news in Portland — but our post schedule may not keep to the normal business hours as usual. This week’s collection of the bike links from around the world that caught our eyes is a good one:
(Photo: Copenhagenize Design Co.)
Cargo bike parking: “Our idea was to design an elegant, functional parking solution for cargo bikes.”
King James rides with the people: If you’re an NBA fan, you probably wish you were at Miami Critical Mass on Friday.
Vision -1: News item: “Pregnant Lady Gives Birth on 68th Street Crosswalk.” “Jesus,” a local parody account tweeted. “This Vision Zero thing is getting out of control.”
Washington biking: Rails to Trails Conservancy’s website has ranked the top 10 trails in Washington state. Most are in the Seattle area, but a few are further afield.
Guerilla activism: Are we living in a budding golden age of street-safety civil disobedience? My favorite of the many anecdotes in this Outside Magazine piece involves people in hazmat suits riding bikes and blaring “The Safety Dance.”
Seattle advocacy: Seattle’s Cascade Bicycle Club has signed up 10,000 members since September, when its new executive Elizabeth Kiker began a near-total staff turnover that took the nation’s largest local bike advocacy group “down a more inclusive path, with less emphasis on lobbying and a more welcoming tone.”
Bizarre email: The club quickly decided to apologize last week after it sent its 16,000 members maybe the weirdest mass nonprofit email I’ve ever read.
Bike share lawsuit: A 73-year-old Connecticut man who claims he can no longer taste and smell after a Citi Bike crash is the first personal injury test case for the bike-share program.
Wrong way? An English man looking for a faster ride home from work consulted his GPS, which suggested that he take the freeway. Police found him riding the shoulder there and fined him $83.
Helmet law follies: Which is more irresponsible: to support biking without helmets or to support biking with helmets?
Developing-world advocacy: As we head into Bike Summit coverage, Portlander Elly Blue’s take on a very different bike conference in Brazil makes a fascinating counterpoint.
Blame the system: Building big wide arterial roads through New York City is “like removing all the guardrails at the top of the Empire State Building and expecting people to use common sense not to fall off,” writes an editor at Fortune magazine.
Swedish safety: Sweden has cut its auto-related casualty rate by 90 percent since 1970. The Economist asks how and decides it’s a combination of stiffer enforcement and roads designed to encourage slower, more predictable traffic.
Familiar story: In Washington D.C., travel after last month’s snowstorm “returned to normal for drivers, Metro riders and other transit users, but the daily commute was still a treacherous trek for many cyclists” due to unswept, uplowed paths and lanes.
Bike share hibernates: Citi Bike “has endured a brutal first winter, and it shows,” with heavy snow delaying maintenance and cutting heavily into ridership (though never eliminating it).
Employee wellness: “If people don’t care about their health, why should companies be paying for it?” asks the president of Trek, who says increasing workers’ health is a business imperative that requires “brutal honesty” with employees who aren’t treating their bodies well.
Parking’s hidden costs: “We pay for parking as residents when we get free parking with our housing. We pay for it as taxpayers. Increasingly, I think we’re paying for it in terms of the environmental harm that it causes.” That’s parking professor Donald Shoup talking to the Freakonomics podcast last year.
Do bikes need RFID-activated motion sensing alarms? Watch your video of the week and think about it.
If you come across a noteworthy bicycle story, send it in via email, Tweet @bikeportland, or whatever else and we’ll consider adding it to next Monday’s roundup.
Your “Helmet law follies” link doesn’t appear to be working…
Gosh, that means no “helmet vs. no helmet flamewar”. So disappointed.
your “Helmet law follie” link doesn’t work…
http://www.theguardian.com/science/occams-corner/2014/feb/25/ban-cycling-cycle-helmets-irresponsible-risk-compensation
thanks. We fixed it.
I don’t understand a) what advantage that cargo bike parking system offers over a staple, and b) what would keep you from flipping the bike on its side and pulling it through the rack, especially after removing the seatpost? So much bike parking “innovation” seems more aesthetic than practical.
I noticed that too. If you zoom in on the 4th picture you can see that the pole has 2 holes that the user can loop through a locking chain.
Conversely, if you want to lock 2 wheeled cargo bikes the posts could be moved closer together… at installation.
had similar thoughts. read the copenhagenize article where he answers some of those questions.
Staples are one solution to the problem. They’d be widely spaced and segregated in a less-convenient area, to deter non-cargo users.
This one is more elegant, though. It’s also got Mikael Ignore-All-Hype-Clouds-Except-Mine-Colville-Andersen’s all-powerful Copenhagenize branding. You could rack a standard bike to it, but like all good bike solutions, they’ve solved that problem with paint!
You’d understand if you were more sophisticated.
They certainly led with their bias didn’t they?
Article about the Cascade Bicycle Club this link leads to: http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2022966347_cascadebikeclubxml.html
Good article, suggests that the CBC is trying to bring a wider range of people to riding:
“…the club has added more rides for seniors, kids and the so-called “willing but wary” riders.
Before, “everything was middle-aged men in Lycra going up and down hills really fast,” …”
Sounds also, as though from some time ago, the club has worked to tone down its advocacy rhetoric, after the club’s former advocacy director let fly with a big one:
“…former advocacy director David Hiller made headlines when he said drivers who accidentally kill cyclists should be hung by their toenails “until the buzzards come and peck their eyes out.” …”
The Guardian’s helmet commentary is a sensible take on helmets that reflect many of my own long-held views (after a small handful of spills with and without).
That doesn’t stop me from wearing one for about 99% of my miles.
The meta-analysing consensus is that helmets are good for individual cyclists if they choose to wear one, and bad for cycling as a group when cyclists are forced to wear them. IOW cyclists that choose to wear helmets are less likely to have head injury than cyclists that don’t choose to but when everyone is forced to wear a helmet there is no corresponding reduction in head injuries because some who would have ridden without a helmet choose not to ride, reducing the number of head injuries by a lower proportion than they reduce the number of cyclists, because most cyclists don’t get head injuries by a wide number.
There is no proof that helmets work…period. Likewise there is no proof that they don’t. Though what little evidence that does exists does seem to imply that they are somewhat effective in low speed falls (note I didn’t say collisions).
Though if you were to actually read the disclaimers of the helmet manufacturers, you’d notice that they don’t really have much faith in their product either. And sorry folks but most of you don’t even wear them right anyway…so what’s the point.
Though it is proven that those things that increase the safety of bicycle riders are even more bicycle riders.
Too many people -even within the bike circles, condemn riding a bike as a dangerous activity. Which simply isn’t true. And our insistence that we wear helmets and other such safety gear only perpetuates the myth. As long we cyclists continue to recommend helmets and the likes, riding a bike will always be seen as dangerous to those that don’t ride. And it’s people that don’t ride that we need to ride to actually make riding a bike safer.
Of course you’ll never hear otherwise from mainstream media. Automobiles are their biggest source of income. It’s to their benefit to keep riding a bike labeled as dangerous. Because most their money is made from selling ads to automotive manufacturers, dealers, automobile service businesses. (You don’t have to believe me. get a news paper and cut out all the auto ads and auto related ads. Or count the ads on TV for cars and car services while watching your favorite show).
Of course you won’t even get a good answer from the bike industry either. Since they make a ton of money by selling you said helmet and other such “safety” nonsense. And in fact, the mark up for the shops is often better on the accessories than it is on the bikes themselves.
I don’t wear a helmet and won’t. I don’t mock those that decide too. Hey it’s your business. But personally, if you want something that looks like a Dutch city in terms of ridership, then you need to make it happen….not wait for it.
“…Too many people -even within the bike circles, condemn riding a bike as a dangerous activity. …” gutterbunny
Riding amongst motor vehicles is a large part of what makes biking potentially dangerous. Road use knowledge and safety equipment can help counter the danger of biking in traffic.
If you don’t want to use a bike helmet to help protect your head, or for whatever reason, don’t use one. No biggy. Other people make choices for their own reasons, different from those you make for yourself.