Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Rain gear: Your bike definitely needs handlebar sleeves and a built-in umbrella.
Car-lite downtown: Madrid is completely banning cars from its 1.36-square-mile downtown (about the size of Portland’s) unless they have a reserved space in one of 13 official parking lots.
After theft: “To the prepared thief, every bike rack is a buffet,” writes Seattle Met in a great look at what happens to your bike after it’s stolen.
Race sabotaged: Dozens of participants in a bike race in Wales suffered punctures at 50 mph due to alleged sabotage by thumbtacks.
2030 scenarios: These four scenarios for near-future transportation systems in the age of autonomous vehicles are fun, far-fetched and plausible all at once.
Liberating parents: Part of the reason bike infrastructure boosts female biking so much isn’t that just women use it themselves — it’s that letting kids to get around on their own gives moms more time. (Having dads schlep kids more probably wouldn’t hurt, either.)
Virtual racing: A $10-a-month service will turn your stationary training bike into a massively multiplayer bike-racing video game.
Ticketable Subarus: One in three people who uses insurance.com to cover their the Subaru WRX reports having a traffic citation in the last 18 months, making it the most-ticketed car in America.
Commute shifts: Brookings has a map of which U.S. metro areas have been getting the most new bikers, walkers and telecommuters on the way to work since the recession began.
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One crime? No problem: In New York, you won’t be charged with criminal negligence for killing somebody with your car unless you also commit two separate misdemeanors while doing so.
Zeroing out deaths: “If Los Angeles can get to Vision Zero by 2025, we should be able to get it done in Portland by, like, next Thursday,” wrote Oregon Walks president Aaron Brown about this news.
Replace bike with car: Here’s a good one:
How would car drivers feel
if they got treated like cyclists on bike lanes?
via @BrentToderian
by: @StevePAdams pic.twitter.com/Pd2pDa82Lq
— Taras Grescoe (@grescoe) October 3, 2014
Bike-thru windows: Salt Lake City has officially legalized biking through fast-food pick-up windows.
Portland’s missing tool: “It’s too simplistic to write off Portland — its bike innovations are myriad and significant,” writes Tom Babin of Calgary, which this spring approved a grid of protected lanes through its downtown. “But the city’s relative lack of simple protected bike lanes is getting impossible to ignore.”
And finally: a Londoner has used quite a lot of equipment to build the world’s loudest bike horn. The voiceover won’t be much use unless you speak Urdu (I think), but it might be worth activating audio anyway for your video of the week.
Dunya news-The world's loudest bicycle horn by dunyanews
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.