(Photo © J. Maus/BikePortland)
Your summer of bike fun is far from done, but most of it from now on will involve more fabric. In the meantime, here’s some of the bike news that caught our eyes this week:
— Last month we assessed an interesting takedown of separated bikeways by Bicycle Quarterly’s Jan Heine, and last week we highlighted some infographics that recommend when to use different types of bike infrastructure. As several readers noted, Heine recently shared his own data-driven post on the subject of using different bikeways in different contexts.
— In the Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay has some implicit advice for his now-notorious colleague Dorothy Rabinowitz: “Just get on a bike. Then it all makes sense. It really does.”
— And if you can’t get enough of the WSJ’s bike-hating Rabinowitz, she returned to video on Friday to “respond” to “the Bike Lobby.”
— Why is your bike bell way over there? Sugru has a guide on how to attach it to your brake lever instead.
— In an editorial about the Bicycle Transportation Alliance‘s new Blueprint for World-Class Bicycling, the Oregonian’s editorial board calls neighborhood greenways “smart, simple and proven” but pooh-poohs “turning the Tualatin-Valley Highway and Southeast Foster Road into fabulous, welcoming bike routes.” Dedicated bikeways are “intriguing and plausible” but “hard to carry off,” they say.
— Classic case of good news/bad news: Oregon is one of just 12 states with more deaths from guns than cars.
— In Chicago, the rate by which people on bikes stop for red lights “has improved by 161 percent since cyclist-specific traffic signals, which glow with the image of a bike on the lens, were installed on Dearborn in December.” The compliance rate, in other words, is up from 31 percent to 81 percent.
If you come across an important or fun bike story, send it in or Tweet @BikePortland and we’ll consider featuring it here next Monday.