Here’s the news that caught our eyes this past week…
– Portland didn’t make it to the top of The Fixie Index but we did come in at the top of The Guardian‘s five best places to live in the world. One reason for the high ranking is that Portland is “the most bike- and foot-friendly city in the country,” according to the British newspaper.
– South Carolina’s Department of Transportation might ban bicycles on the James Island Connector after a person on a bicycle was struck and killed by the operator of an AT&T service van. The road in question is one of limited number of routes to access the city of Charleston, SC.
– The Swedish towns of Malmö and Lund will soon be connected by a “bicycle superhighway”. The four-lane, bicycle-only road will stretch for 20 miles and is being constructed at a total cost of $7.1 million USD.
– A family feud has erupted after after Dr. David Hon, creator of Dahon bicycles, alleged Dahon patents were used by rival bike manufacturer Tern, a company part-owned by Dr. Hon’s wife and son.
– UC Santa Barbara is home to four new bicycle repair stations and two more are scheduled to be installed soon. The repair stands, similar to ones installed at TriMet’s Bike & Rides, were installed by the school’s housing department and student association after they heard about the popularity of similar programs at other schools.
– One woman in Chicago is going to be installing and maintaining beehives around the city via bicycle. Her plan is modeled after the work of a beekeeper she met in Eugene, Oregon.
– Remember last week when we told you about Gene Hackman riding a bike and getting hit by someone driving a car? It turns out he wasn’t wearing helmet but he did survive the collision. Did not wearing a helmet save his life? The answer is very likely “no”, but Lovely Bicycle explores why it’s difficult to prove that bike helmets save lives, especially when a crash involves a motor vehicle.
– Sanibel Island, located off the southwest coast of Florida, will soon be home to a Welcome Center for people on bikes. The facility was planned by Sanibel Bicycle Club member Tom Sharbaugh and is being built completely with private funds.
– When someone driving a motor vehicle injures or kills someone on a bike sometimes their excuse is that they “didn’t see” the person on the bike. An article in Bicycling magazine dives into why that argument doesn’t add up and exposes one big hole in many North American legal systems.
– After following the tenets of vehicular cycling for nearly two decades, one man shares what he enjoyed about the approach to riding as well as his disappointment that the skill is still necessary on some roads.
– Car-centric advertising isn’t unique to the United States. Copenhagenize shares a series of disturbing ads depicting speeding, driverless cars running over Danish celebrities. The advertisements are part of the “Take a Chance” campaign which is partially funded by an insurance company and comes soon after a 10-year old girl was killed by a person driving a car in Copenhagen.
– Bike mechanics are predominantly men but a shop in Chicago is giving women a place to “wield a wrench in a non-patriarchal environment.”
– We finally have snow on the mountains here in the northwest but some ski resorts around Lake Tahoe are still dry. Far from suffering, resorts and shops in the area have plenty of customers renting mountain bikes.
– This complicated concept for a combination bicycle and tripod looks interesting but is probably more complicated and less useful than mounting a camera to your existing bike.
– If music is your creative outlet then you might want to take a look at the Axrak guitar rack, designed to make it easier to bring your six string on a bike ride.
– And finally, a video from Bikes Belong and their People for Bikes campaign that covers pretty much “shit cyclists say” (or “Shit white male cyclists say” according to one of our Twitter followers)…
Did you find something interesting that should be in next week’s Monday Roundup? Drop us a line.
I think you mean ‘tenets’ not tenants.
Unfortunately he didn’t debunk anything or even sketch the tenets.
The embedded piece http://cycle-space.com/?p=6203
was a little bit more informative.
thanks 9watts. fixed that. — JM
Also – probably a feud rather than a “fued”.
Thanks. I’ve got that fixed too.
i don’t think the embedded piece does much, either. what does this guy say he is now doing differently, that is, non-vehicularly, than what he used to do? is he hugging the curb? is he weaving in and out between parked cars? is he allowing motorists to squeeze past in narrow spaces? i don’t get it.
Shit cyclists say = the LOLs, and so true.
Snot rocket in the cafe was the highlight of the video for me.
+1! My first thought was “Inside??!?” Aside from farmer spitting, I think the only white male cyclist things I’ve said from the video were “can I borrow an allen key” and “God, this headwind sucks”.
The section of diet talk was pretty familiar though. -sigh-
Wow, that S Carolina case is disturbing. The driver of a van that drifted into the bike lane and killed an anesthesiologist was fined $113. The driver was totally at fault. There was plenty of room on the bridge for both cars and bikes, yet the answer to the problem, instead of banning “inattentive drivers” which is what they say caused the accident, its to ban the victim.
I’d love to see more of those Bicycle Repair Stations. There are 3 in Beaverton and Gresham. I’d suggest putting one at the 99th St Transit Center for starters, 2nd choice would be the Transit Center between the Rose Garden/ East Bank Esplanade.
OHSU installed two of them, one on the hill on at the base of the tram. They’re pretty nice, though the tire levers are kind of hard to use.
Bicycling article is great. Concise point, “I didn’t see the cyclist” isn’t a defense, its an admission of guilt. Its the drivers responsibility to see who is on the road.
there is a women and trans night at bikefarm, right here in portland
http://bikefarm.org/2012/01/17/women-trans-nights/
I got really lucky with my judge after I got hit by a car last summer. The driver was found at fault. She said she didn’t see me. The judge said, “Why didn’t you see her? I know that intersection. There’s no view obstruction. She didn’t drop out of the sky and land right in front of you. You say you didn’t see her. That tells me you weren’t looking.” He also didn’t accept her lawyer’s argument that I was at fault because I wasn’t in a bike path – because the bike path doesn’t go to where I was going. He said, “Why would she ride on a road that doesn’t go where she needs to go?”