(Photo: Road Less Traveled)
This week’s news roundup is sponsored by Western Bikeworks, who reminds you to join them for their shop ride this on Sunday (8/10) followed by a Team in Training BBQ fundraiser that afternoon.
Here are the great bike links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
The “rail rider”: This looks like a fun way to get around rural Oregon.
Wireless e-bikes: These concept bikes imagine a future “where inductive bicycle lanes could be used to wirelessly charge electric bikes and other devices on the go.”
The bike collapse: What killed the 1890s bike boom? A fascinating new essay argues that poor people started biking, which made it uncool.
How to teach: Elly Blue’s account (with tips) of how to teach someone to ride a bike is heartwarming.
Domestic bike-making: Betting that labor costs in China will keep rising, Walmart is subsidizing a new bike factory in South Carolina. Workers make 500,000 bikes a year and up to $12 an hour.
Licensing rights: Oregon Safe Roads is a new campaign to let Oregon residents without green cards become licensed drivers, “reducing the number of uninsured and untested drivers on the road.”
Car freedom therapy: A therapy created to treat addiction is being used to reduce car reliance.”
Bikesnob strikes: He writes of Oregon Manifest‘s design contest: “Just when you think nobody can improve the bicycle, someone proves you right.”
Road-rage mayor? A Missouri man claims that a suburban St. Louis mayor drove into his bike on purpose. (The mayor tells things differently.)
Speed conflict: A 55-year-old Florida Critical Mass ride leader was dragged off his bicycle after he complained to a police sergeant that the 3 mph pace she’d ordered was too slow.
Brazil’s bikes: Critical Mass is wrapped up in the recent bike boom of Porto Alegre, Brazil.
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Protection trend: Cincinnati got its first protected bike lanes this week.
Legalizing protection: After years of pretending they don’t exist, California’s legislature might finally decide to declare that protected bike lanes are a thing.
Streetcar sketpicism If “mixed-traffic streetcars don’t particularly offer useful transit, nor are they necessarily the only/best/cheapest placemaking tool, then I have to wonder if 30 years from now we’ll look back on them as yet another expensive urban renewal fad,” writes one fan of faster-moving mass transit.
More streetcar skepticism: Vox’s Matt Yglesias opens a full broadside against streetcars. “Securing funding for a boondoggle often seems more politically realistic than the harder problem of tackling the entrenched interests of (heavily subsidized) frequent car drivers,” he writes.
Theory of change: “Much like feminism, bike advocacy can be looked at in waves,” says the League of American Bicyclists’ new Women Bike Manager, Liz Jones, about the debt transportation advocates owe to athlete-driven advocacy.
Sidewalk police: Gothamist’s quick take on police officers who bike on sidewalks is good for a smile.
Normalizing violence: NPR’s ombudsman says this spot shouldn’t have presented as reasonable a woman’s confession that she deliberately tries to frighten bikers by driving next to them.
20 is plenty: London’s banking district got a new municipal speed limit last month. Officials say it’ll cut fatalities 7 percent and add 25 seconds to the average 1.6-mile car trip.
Selling bike share: The latest report, last Tuesday, puts REQX Ventures in “advanced negotiations” to buy a majority stake in Alta Bicycle Share.
Bike share and helmet laws: Seattle Bike Blog looks at the grim particulars of running a bike share system in a city where bike helmets are mandatory even for adults. (Alta’s Seattle system will launch next month.)
The latest Streetfilm, your video of the week: takes a short look at Buenos Aires, second city of South America and the site of rapid transportation change in the last few years:
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.