(Photo © J. Maus/BikePortland)
Good morning readers! Please join us in thanking this week’s sponsor of the Monday Roundup: Pedal PT is southeast Portland’s full-service, bike-friendly physical therapy headquarters. They specialize in bike fit and cycling injury recovery… And their support helps make BikePortland possible.
Now, onto the news…
Poetic justice: “Labour MP who called cyclists ‘law-breakers’ busted for running a red.”
Condoms sponsor bikesharing: “If you climb in the saddle, be ready for the ride,” say the ads for a Boulder, Colo.-based condom maker that are helping pay for the city’s new bikeshare system. With our system probably delayed again due to lack of sponsors. Portland needs all the ideas it can get.
Traffic as a new global pandemic: Fascinating analogy: “Car crashes and motorcycle accidents are symptoms of a disease, and it’s high time we started looking at killer roads as a public health crisis.”
PSU scholar killed: The Egypt-born founder of Portland State University’s well-regarded School of Urban Studies and Planning, Nohad Toulan, died with his wife in an Uruguay car crash this week.
Hit and run enforcement: “Oregon makes it too easy for lily-livered motorists to play the odds of not getting caught,” Oregonian columnist Joe Rose writes, suggesting that the state follow in California’s footsteps by doubling the statute of limitations from three years to six.
Tickets for bike speeders: Seattle police have been handing out speeding tickets to drivers and bicyclists alike.
Three ideologies of transportation: How did you become passionate about bike politics, and why? Richard Masoner of Cyclicious summarizes a chapter from a new book by describing the three sides of “the politics of mobility.”
Bikes and social equity: The new blog Invisible Cyclist includes a great roundup of links to recent thinking about race, class and bikes, many of them written by Portlanders.
Networked bikes: The bikes of the future will talk to each other (and to your phone, of course), tech blog ReadWrite argues using a few examples, though we wish Intel’s Open Bike Initiative were one of them.
Bikeshare maker lawsuit: The operator of Minneapolis’s bikesharing system is threatening to sue Public Bike System Company for breach of contract. PBSC also supplies equipment to Portland-based Alta Bicycle Share; back in January, Alta also filed, then withdrew, a similar suit. By all available accounts, PBSC is in deep financial trouble.
Bike event regulation: Four years after Chicago’s bid to host the Summer Olympics, a rural Wisconsin county that might have held the bike events has become a popular bike tourism destination … and its county government now wants to require organized bike rides to buy event insurance and notify “affected residents” in advance.
Chicago cycle track: After months of resisting installation of protected bike lanes on state-run streets, the Illinois Department of Transportation has changed course and is allowing a pilot project on a street where a local bike advocate was killed by an allegedly drunk driver. The Chicago Reader has a heart-rending profile of that victim, Bobby Cann.
Drunk walking: Here’s a scary thought: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wants you to think that “Walking impaired can be just as dangerous as drunk driving,” according to its official press release.
AAA activism: Automobile lobby organization AAA is opposing a proposal to set a maximum speed limit of 20 mph on neighborhood streets throughout New York City because it says the decision is “best left to traffic engineers.”
The Dutch way of crashing: It’s nuts for American law to presume that people who crash cars into people are innocent unless proven guilty, argues Bob Mionske on Bicycling.com. the Dutch force drivers to prove that they weren’t at fault. “If you say you were driving and didn’t see somebody, it’s almost always because you weren’t paying attention.”
How sprawl killed childhood: Jane Brody says auto-dependent lifestyles have replaced youngsters’ freedom with “play dates, lessons and organized activities to which they must be driven and watched over by adults.”
Bike reformer quits: Gabe Klein, the bureaucrat who made Washington and Chicago two of the country’s most pro-bike cities (and served as a mentor to Portland Bureau of Transportation Director Leah Treat), is leaving his post as Chicago’s transportation director to rejoin the private sector.
Biking and civil rights: “Much of bicycle advocacy in the last forty years has been geared (statistically speaking) to the needs of men,” Elly Blue argues. “I’ll never forget speaking in Atlanta two years ago and asking what the barriers to bicycling were and people brought up a ton — fast, unfriendly roads, smog, distance — but nearly every woman in the room added “and harassment.'”
Colville-Andersen walks: Urban mobility expert and outspoken critic of helmet laws Mikael Colville-Andersen plans to protest Adelaide, Australia’s helmet legislation by refusing to bike when he visits for a bike conference next year.
Even when your job is coaching the second-ranked football team in the country, a bit of physical activity each day will probably make you better at it. Oregon Ducks coach Mark Helfrich and his classily casual riding wear are the unassuming stars of your video of the week:
If you come across a noteworthy bicycle story, send it in via email, Tweet @bikeportland, or whatever else and we’ll consider adding it to next Monday’s roundup.
This month’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by Pedal PT, southeast Portland’s full-service, bike-friendly physical therapy headquarters with a specialty in bike fit and treatment of cycling injuries. Roll into their indoor bike parking at SE 25th and Clinton (and thank them for supporting BikePortland!).