Happy Monday, folks.
– First off, some exciting meta-news: our own BikePortland.org has been accepted by Google as a legitimate news source. Now, when you search news.google.com, our stories may come up, depending on your search terms. If you search for “bicycle portland,” a lot of our stories come up. We’ll have a big party to celebrate when I get back to town in a week and a half!
– Snow can’t stop the hardy cyclists of Montreal.
– This Norwegian TV commercial is the first for a group called Miljøagentene (Eco Agents). It features a very young eco-agent fighting the battle against SUVs on a family level.
– In bike economy news, LA bike advocacy group CICLE and the uber bike friendly New Belgium Brewery of Colorado have teamed up to start the new Social Bike Business program in Los Angeles. The business is intended to provide jobs building affordable bikes to sell in the community, and also includes a program to provide assistance to distressed bike shops.
– Tom Vanderbilt, in his blog How We Drive, writes up a research paper discovering that more traffic tickets (even the kind issued primarily to out of town drivers) translate directly to not only more revenue, but fewer crashes.
– The radio in Baltimore has been nonstop on the topic all the bridges into Washington, DC being closed for the inauguration. Intrepid local blogger Washcycle has discovered that they’ll still be open to bicycle and walk across. DC may be largely carfree for the big day. Even so, I’m not sticking around for the circus.
– James L. Jones, retired Marines general and Obama’s appointed National Security Advisor, commutes by bike.