(Photo via Peter Norton)
Here are the great bike links that caught our eyes this week:
“A hundred years ago it was called Safety First”: Streetsblog’s two–part interview about Vision Zero with traffic historian Peter Norton is a must-read. The campaign for safe streets can learn a lot from the century-old campaign to make them unsafe.
“Customer code of conduct”: A bike shop in southern California is making all customers who wear their team uniform commit to obeying traffic laws.
Onshoring bikes: The Wall Street Journal takes a close look at the new factory in South Carolina that, with wages of $12 an hour, expects to produce $120 Walmart bikes more cheaply than China can by 2017. (Click the first link on the search page.)
Prescience requirement: Washington DC is considering getting rid of its unusual law that shields drivers from liability in situations where a person on a bike failed to anticipate the driver’s illegal actions.
Passing distance research: Painted bike lanes don’t actually have much effect on car-bike passing distance compared to factors like other cars and, maybe, the driver’s attitude.
Misperceiving risk: Seattle’s Sightline Institute made a useful chart of the relative danger of two frightening epidemics:
Sex with cars: “Masturbation is, I guess the word” for what this Tacoma-area man has done with 700 cars since 1965. He identifies as a mechanaphile.
Anti-bike trolls: You probably have to leave BikePortland to play bike news commenter Bingo.
Advertisement
Money walks: It’s hard to see a strong pattern in the places people die while walking, but if you also map injuries an overwhelming trend emerges: places poor people live.
Vive la différence: It’d be nuts for the law to treat bikes and cars identically, an Alexandria Times contributor argues.
Debunking congestion: New website City Observatory has a great takedown of a new report that parrots the “cost of congestion” myth that wider roads would help the economy.
Safety conference: Four years after the “Vision Zero” concept started circulating in the bike world, the country’s brains are gathering in New York City next month for a national symposium on the subject.
Parking shortage: According to the BBC, bike parking space is so scarce in Copenhagen that most people just leave their bikes in huge piles — what are the odds their bike will be the one stolen?
Suburban bike sharing: Capital Bikeshare is expanding rapidly in Arlington, Virginia, though rising ridership hasn’t made it operationally profitable.
Rolling park: A Brussels art collective has created a modular cargo bike that is also a “temporary park,” transforming into a mobile cinema or a waffle cart.
Bike manufacturing: Michigan has quantified its growing bike industry: $668 million a year, with the largest single hub of it in Grand Rapids.
In your video of the week, our friends at The Path Less Pedaled check out one of Oregon’s most unique cycling experiences: rocketing in custom 4-wheelers down an otherwise abandoned rail line in Joseph.
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.
Correction 10/21: An earlier version of this post misstated the site of the rail pedaling service.