(Photo: Let’s Bike It!)
[This week’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by North St. Bags, celebrating their 5th year of making great bags in Portland.]
Here are the great bike links that caught our eyes this week:
Road space demo: Latvian bike commuters came up with an evocative (though probably wobbly) way to show how much space bikes save on the road.
“The Wash Cyclist”: A Philadelphia startup is preparing a national rollout of a cargo-trike laundry delivery service.
Violent tweet: A UK bike journalist landed in hot water after writing that a newspaper journalist who criticized “cycling vigilantes” should be “taken out and shot.”
Vocal distraction: Voice-activated dashboards and smartphones greatly increase driver distraction, two new studies found.
Denmark pushes on: As bike commuting in Copenhagen keeps rising (from 36% two years ago to 41% at last count) the city is widening bike lanes from three abreast to four abreast, among other changes.
Lane widths: If you could change just one thing about the United States, it should maybe be ending the supposedly safer but actually disastrous 12-foot-wide traffic lane.
Best transit: Here’s one way to rank the country’s top transit systems: by percentage of jobs reachable during the morning peak hours. (The Portland area ranks 11th.)
Hand-me-down bike share: Stymied by Alta Bicycle Share’s continuing lack of new equipment, DC’s thriving Capital Bikeshare is finally expanding by buying 250 used bike share bikes from Canada. Meanwhile, two New Jersey cities that had been planning to join Alta’s empire are switching to dockless systems.
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Chinese bike sharing: China’s bike sharing systems are massive, but the biggest has been a flop and usage rates are low compared to European systems.
We still don’t have bike share: Seattle’s bike share system launches today, a fact that OPB used to rub salt in our lack-of-bike-share wounds.
Portland’s fall: The Bike Snob noticed our post last week about Walktober and fears we’ve “tumbled from grace so spectacularly that they’ve given up on bikes altogether.”
Floating joke: Citylab calls a concept for a floating eight-mile bike path atop the Thames “a whole club sandwich of wrongness, made up of many delectable layers of stupid.”
Blind-spot warnings: Here’s a nifty system that uses sound waves to detect people biking in a truck’s blind spot and flash a warning to both parties.
Missing the market: Too many cities invest in “the 2 percent who already bike, not the 98 percent who don’t,” says Gil Penalosa. (He’s previously called out bike maps and parking as examples of low-priority investments.)
St. Paul investment: Drawing on an idea advanced by Penalosa, St. Paul’s mayor is proposing a $42 million “8-80 vitality fund” to make streets better for young and old to bike on.
NYC casualty: Zelda, a beloved wild turkey who lived in Manhattan’s Battery Park since 2003 and survived Hurricane Sandy, has been killed by a car.
HR idea: Seems like a lot of workplace cultures would benefit from a monthly company bike outing.
NYC biking advocates Steven O’Neill and Doug Gordon bring the bromance in your inspiring video of the week, in which they attempt to count every bike over the Manhattan Bridge during 20 minutes one morning:
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.