last week.
(Photo © J. Maus)
Here’s the news that caught our eye this week:
– A reporter had low expectations for his assignment to visit Los Angeles on a budget that did not allow him to rent a car–and had a blast, enjoying the city far more by bicycle and bus than he ever had from behind the wheel.
– Two friends have recently made a religious pilgrimage to Mecca from their home in South Africa by bicycle (with an unplanned leg by airplane after they were denied entry into Ethiopia).
– Why, asks Streetsblog, do cities continue to make it standard practice to build bike lanes directly in the door zone of parked cars, and when is this going to stop?
– In Tucson, concern is emerging over how the city’s planned street car line will affect bicycling, including a bike lane that may trap riders between the door zone on one side and new streetcar tracks on the other.
– A study commissioned by the city of Ashland, Oregon compared the location of non car-owning households with existing transportation facilities and found some of them lacking; the city will use the data in updating its new transportation plan.
– The completely touching story of how a woman in southern California helped her mom ride her bike to work for the first time.
– The practice of moving house by bicycle continues to spread as people, like this family in Davis, realize that it’s not a gimmick but an efficient way to do the job.
– A new report shows that the Nice Ride bike sharing program in Minneapolis has had a successful first season, with limited vandalism and a fifth of users reporting that they used the bikes to replace car trips.
– This video report takes a look at the state of the bike scene in New Orleans, from enforcement to bike parking to the plans for more infrastructure.
– As air travel security procedures have become more stringent, the airport has become an unlikely venue for civil disobedience.
– Germany’s famous beer bikes, pedaled by groups of drunken friends as they sit around a mobile bar, may be banned from one city, which considers them a “traffic nuisance.”
– We do not advise making and using this DIY bike pump that is designed to steal air from car tires to inflate the ones on your bicycle.
– An artist takes us on a tour of his collection of candid moments captured by the Google Street View cars as they navigate the country’s roads and public spaces.