Here’s the bike news from around the world that caught our eye last week:
– Utah is one step closer to becoming the second state in the nation, after Idaho, to allow people on bicycles to treat stop signs as yield signs.
– In Porto Alegre, Brazil on Friday night, someone accelerated a car through the length of a 130 person Critical Mass ride. Full coverage and videos of this horrible incident can be found on The Urban Country. As many as fifty people were injured, two seriously. The car was found abandoned and a suspect has come forward.
– If you chose to watch that last video, we recommend you immediately follow up by watching this one, a musical ode by Kenyan teenagers about how much they love bicycling. If you need more, move on to this one, demonstrating a bicycle-mounted robot that creates public art.
– San Diego is contemplating spending $2.8 billion for active transportation infrastructure in the next 40 years.
– From the world of bike sharing: A profile of an entrepreneurial college student in Mumbai, India who has started a system for his city. A look back at the history of the long-ago campus “yellow bikes” program at Bowdoin College in Maine. Lyon, France, the home of contemporary bike sharing, wants to become even more bicycle friendly with a 90 million Euro investment over a six year period.
– Memphis, Tennessee faces a decision: Will they add bike lanes to a major commercial strip when it’s repaved, or will they opt for another turn lane?
– One British newspaper claims that bicycling in traffic causes heart attacks; another debunks.
– An 18 year old from central California aims to become the youngest person and first African-American woman to bicycle around the world.
– A Norfolk, Virginia woman compares bicycle safety discourse with the politics of domestic violence, writing about how she used to assume people who were hit by cars while bicycling were somehow at fault, until she started putting in more miles on her bike without the safety in numbers of a group.
– The NYPD has determined that two of its officers were justified in beating a Bronx teenager who they had stopped for riding his bike on the sidewalk (the incident was caught on video).
– A Portland newspaper features the story of Major Taylor, one of the United States’ earliest superstar bicycle racers, and an overview of other prominent bicycle racers of African descent.
– A homemade alarm system helped a Pennsylvania homeowner prevent his bicycle from being stolen.
– The City of Los Angeles is considering a bill that would allow people riding bikes to “bring civil suit against drivers who assault them, harass them, threaten them, or intentionally distract them.”
– “Maybe it’s time we really did wage a war on cars,” ponders David Suzuki. Meanwhile, the editors of an Oregon newspaper appear ready to wage war on people trying to cross the city’s five-lane Main Street.
– There’ve been a lot of videos in the news this week. Here’s a final one worth sharing: Streetfilms’ latest episode in their Moving Beyond the Automobile series puts the spotlight on bicycling…
