The Monday Roundup

[Publisher’s note: Please welcome back contributor Elly Blue from her Bikestravaganza Tour. This is her first Monday Roundup for the past month or so.]

Here’s the news that caught my eye this week:

– Remember the three-year injunction on any bike projects in San Francisco? Now that it’s lifted the City attorney is going after the man who started it all in order to recoup their $51,959 in court costs.

– Bike sharing comes to Des Moines, Iowa, with a pilot program consisting of a whopping 18 bicycles at four kiosks, with more planned in the next year.

– And in other midwestern news, a new “bike center” with parking and showers is planned in downtown St Louis, Missouri.

– In a year of budget cuts, Omaha, Nebraska has created a position for a bicycle and pedestrian coordinator.

– Crunching the numbers on Seattle road funding demonstrates that everyone pays, and non-drivers may even over-pay for the roads.

– In Minneapolis, 72% of bike commuters are thought to be men, but there’s a strong feminist movement growing in the bike scene, much of it centered around WTF (Women-Trans-Femme) repair nights at local bike projects.

– In Seattle, as transportation bicycling grows in popularity, so does the demand for homes in bike-friendly neighborhoods and bike parking spots in condos and apartment buildings.

– Could light rail be coming to Detroit? Yes, and maybe streetcars as well. It’s all being decided now.

– A researcher in Vancouver, BC shares a variety of fascinating insights from his team’s work studying bicycling safety and adds to the chorus of voices saying that bike safety is improved most when the number of people riding increases.

– Demolition has finally begun on Baltimore’s infamous Highway to Nowhere. At least some local residents, however, are skeptical that the parking lots planned to replace it will contribute significantly to the recovery of their neighborhood from its partial demolition when the freeway was built in the 1970s.

– In tiny Bantam, Connecticut an off-duty police officer was apparently taking all possible safety precautions when struck and killed by a drunk man and the case is being prosecuted thoroughly.

– Meanwhile, in Wisconsin Dells, a small town with no public transit, a young woman from Russia, one of many foreign students working at a local resort for the summer, was killed in a right hook crash with a truck as she rode down the sidewalk of a road so busy that an exception to the town’s ban on sidewalk riding is made for it. Local officials’ reaction? Give more traffic tickets to foreign bike riders.

– Taiwanese police apprehended a bike thief, but upon learning of his poverty and that the bicycle was for his daughter to ride to work, they helped him buy a bicycle rather than prosecuting him.

– Could cities in the so-called developed world have something to learn about urban planning from some of the world’s slums? Prince Charles and a pair of U.S. architects think we do.

– In Helsinki, a group of artists creates a bike lane of sorts where there is none.