(Photo by Leo Hidalgo.)
Here’s the bike news from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Economic engines: Andalucia, Spain, is making a major play to boost its economy with bike tourism with a plan to build 3,200 miles of bike paths by 2020.
Auto futurism: At the Detroit Auto Show this month, Ford Motor Company’s CEO said that adding more cars in big cities is “not going to work” and suggested his company is looking into new products related to public transit and/or car sharing.
Bike curiosity: What’s the most exciting research subject in American transportation right now? Bicycles. These two writers counted.
Women biking: Did you know that women make up 55 percent of Generation X bicycling consumers? I didn’t.
Driver training: The teen driver’s ed program in Chattanooga, Tenn., now includes a walk across downtown, a bike ride and a bus trip.
Cute cars: Elly Blue’s column about her obsession with the car icons on her new favorite handbag is weird and maybe brilliant.
Red light runners: A huge traffic-light study from New Zealand finds that almost all bikers who run lights in that country do so in order to get a head start on dangerous traffic; only a tiny minority fail to stop altogether.
Reckless driving: “Reckless driving, circa 2014, is what drunk driving was prior to 1980,” a medical professor argues: “poorly defined in the law, sometimes poorly investigated by police and almost never results in a criminal charge.”
License requirements: A law tightening ID requirements for drivers’ license applications has done basically nothing to change the number of uninsured drivers.
Amsterdamize yourself: Momentum has an interesting guide to riding a bike in a city where it’s almost as common as walking.
Biking to transit: The popularity of bike-plus-transit trips is forcing transit planners to rewrite their models for how many riders a new line will attract.
Vegas messengers: Armed with smartphones, bike couriers are looking to expand their business in Las Vegas. (Their most common cargo: food.)
Mapping poison: The Danes are so good at tracking air pollution that they can calculate the toxin levels at any given street address.
Covering crashes: In Columbia Journalism Review, Tom Vanderbilt asks how local reporting of traffic collisions could get better.
Mandatory flashiness: A UK politician who supports mandatory high-viz vests and registration numbers for bikers doesn’t look like she’s enjoying her own bike very much.
Bad traffic projections: This amazing chart illustrating the ridiculousness of federal highway planning has been making the rounds for a while. Don’t miss it.
Good gentrification? A provocative series of studies suggest that as neighborhoods get richer, longtime low-income residents actually move out of them less frequently, and their credit scores go up — even if they’re renters.
Less youth driving: National Geographic summarizes the four leading theories about the sharp youth driving decline; all four are is almost certainly at work.
Train adventure: A biking tourist from Iowa was nervous when he brought his fully bagged folding bike on Amtrak, but it worked out just fine.
Car racers for road safety: From Louis Chevrolet to Jimmie Johnson, “there’s long and almost symbiotic relationship between cycling and race car driving.” That’s one reason a bunch of auto racers are taking time to promote safe driving around bikes.
Vision Zero: “One minute they are walking to work, or home, or to the grocery store; the next moment, they are in the hospital, and their life has changed irrevocably,” writes ER doctor Kaushal Shah, calling the elimination of traffic fatalities a “moral necessity” in the New York Daily News.
Dumb law: Oops! A Class 6 felony in Virginia intended to fight masked crime also forbids wearing them in cold weather. The state’s bike advocates are trying to change that.
Bike share bankruptcy: If you want to understand the basics of why Alta Bicycle Share’s main supplier entered bankruptcy protection last week and what it means for bikeshare, there’s no better way than to spend these four minutes with NPR, interviewing the leading reporter on the subject.
Finally, your video of the week was inspired by this amazing police memo titled “safety tips for pedestrian”:
Pedestrian Safety Tips from Anna Zivarts on Vimeo.
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.