(Photo: Geo Orbital)
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
E-bike wheel: The Geo Orbital replaces the front wheel of a conventional bike, is currently Kickstarting for $699 and will retail for $950.
Biker Tazed: A 15-year-old Tacoma girl who was bicycling through a mall parking lot was stopped for “trespassing” by a uniformed off-duty police officer working as a security guard. After she tried to bike away, he threw her to the ground by her hair and then used a Taser on her.
Sidewalk bots: Rolling package-delivery robots may be on the way, but whose pavement will they move on?
NYC bike parking: Driven by a Portland-style city mandate, it’s arriving in new buildings (often paid), and it’s popular.
Crash recovery: The BBC has a narrative about the process of trying (and sometimes failing) to get back on the bike.
SF housing: A San Franciscan manually entered 31 years of apartment listings in the San Francisco Chronicle to create a fantastically accurate model of the three main factors behind housing costs since 1948: population, housing unit count and total wages paid. (If you’re interested, I wrote a thing on Medium about some lessons from this data.)
Basketball biker: Sad Blazers fans can at least respect the fact that Golden State Warriors guard Shaun Livingston bikes to work.
Big-kid bikes: Physiology and engineering students in Boulder are creating a bicycle optimized for people who weigh 300 pounds or more.
Optional viaduct: After predicting that the temporary closure of Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct would increase commute times by 50 percent, traffic analysis firm Inrix now says additional delay on freeways turned out to be five minutes.
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Transportation futurism: Three overlapping technological changes will create shared self-driving solar-powered cars, writes David Roberts, and they’ll transform the U.S. over the next 50 years.
Streetcar tracks: They trouble British people who bike, too.
Bike survey: Six percent of Americans (and nine percent of Americans 18-34) don’t know how to ride a bike. (That compares to 40 percent who don’t have a driver’s license.)
Dangerous Metro: On Tuesday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said he might shut down the Washington Metro due to its fatality rate of 0.48 per 100,000 weekday riders.
Dangerous metropolises: The next day, Foxx realized that the automobile fatality rates of every major metro area in the country are far higher and shut down the nation’s roads, too.
Infrastructure costs: The American Society of Civil Engineers says the country will need to find $1.4 trillion in new taxes over the next 10 years to cover decaying roads and transit.
Bike-path prosperity: A 25-mile path outside Ankeny, Iowa, has become a “bicycle-tourism mecca” and spawned a string of businesses that “pack in thousands of riders on busy summer weekends.”
Mother’s Day: 111 moms celebrated by shutting down 111th Street for 111 seconds.
Road love: It’s the emotion that’s missing from city streets, writes bike commuter Jason Gay, so he’s pledging to unilaterally embrace it.
If you come across a noteworthy story, send it in via email, Tweet @bikeportland, or whatever else and we’ll consider adding it to next Monday’s roundup.
— Michael Andersen, (503) 333-7824 – michael@bikeportland.org
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