incident involving a skirt.
(Photo © J. Maus)
Here’s the bike news from around the world that caught my eye in the last week:
– What do you do if your city isn’t home to a summer season of grassroots bike fun, like Portland’s Pedalpalooza, Vancouver B.C.’s Velopalooza, and now Calgary’s Cyclepalooza? Start your own, of course. Even if it’s just one ride. Here’s how it’s done.
– A representative of the Dutch bicycle industry in New York for an industry event was allegedly pulled over by a police officer and threatened with a ticket for bicycling in a skirt.* (Some people believe this might have been a guerrilla marketing stunt by Vanmoof. If I’m able to confirm that, I’ll edit this item as necessary. – JM).
– In London, a woman was stopped and warned by a police officer for carrying her two children on her cargo bike, even though that isn’t illegal.
– A survey finds that cycling encouragement and education campaigns in the U.K. have not been effective at getting people on bicycles when streets aren’t actually safe to bike on.
– This season, bicycles are all the rage in marketing chic, expensive fashion, furniture, dishware, and other goods.
– In Brighton, England, the Bike Train is a group commute ride inspired by Critical Mass which also includes convoys to events and is planning to expand to school trips.
– A man in Ada, Kansas can’t walk, but he can ride a bicycle — that’s powered by hand cranks.
– In Philadelphia, a startup bicycle-based laundry service has five employees and 75 clients.
– Cycling is the recreational activity of choice in a county in Taiwan — a survey found that 63% of residents like to ride — so the local government is investing in signing, mapping, and promoting its bike routes.
– In Boulder, Colorado, a new $3.2 million mountain biking skills park has just opened.
– On-street bike parking has come to Spokane, Washington, at the request of the business it’s located in front of.
– For those of you wondering what happened to the Washington, D.C. woman who was purposely hit while riding by a driver who fled after she showed him her police badge, here’s the end of the story.
– Videos of the week: Casey Neistat (you might recall him stealing his own bike, repeatedly, on film a few years back) got a traffic ticket in New York City for riding outside the bike lane. In protest, he made a short movie of himself riding in the bike lane, no matter what else he was sharing it with.
Also from NYC is a fascinating video of a chaotic intersection that shows traffic safety is a “3 way street”:
3-Way Street from ronconcocacola on Vimeo.