Happy new year! It’s now been over two years that we’ve brought you a weekly bicycle news roundup—only missing two weeks, ever. If you value this feature, please consider dropping a few dollars in the BikePortland tip jar to help keep it going for another year. Thank you all for coming back week after week to read and discuss the news.
And now, here’s the news that caught our eye this week:
– There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about Peak Oil. But have we reached Peak Driving, with a demand for cars and road miles reaching saturation point? The numbers suggest this moment may have already come and gone.
– The great New York blizzard was big news last week and transportation was the real story. Cars, trains, and planes were not the best way to get around. While streets remained blocked for hours by the cars, tow trucks, and emergency vehicles that became stuck in the snow, often in chain reactions, snowplows were able to access bike lanes early on, resulting in grumbling ranging from the livid to the hilarious.
– In Uganda, a political candidate is campaigning by bicycle, saying “I want to feel the potholes in areas I will represent in Parliament once elected.”
– Now here’s an interesting concept — make people who cause car crashes pay for the response from police and fire crews themselves. This story in the LA Times says 50 cities have already adopted “crash taxes.”
– The president of the Philippines plans to take up bicycling in the New Year as part of a resolution to get more exercise. His former sport of choice is shooting.
– A story provides only a few tantalizing details about a village in India where bicycle riding has been banned since the 1970s.
– A new hybrid bicycle and coffee shop in Lexington, Massachusetts is building community and motivating people to ride through the snowy New England winter.
– An in-depth article about bicycle fatalities in Spokane in 2010 focuses heavily on what people riding bikes can do to stay safe, even though four out of five of the victims weren’t deemed to be remotely at fault.
– An irreverent parsing of the variety of roadway classifications in the UK, and what their historical and current incarnations mean for a variety of users, from bikes to geese.
Feel free to email potential news items to elly at bikeportland dot org, or to tag them in del.icio.us as “mondayroundup.” On Mondays you can usually catch a few news items that didn’t make the cut by checking Elly’s twitter.