(Photo: PlanPhilly)
This week’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by North St Bags, celebrating their fifth anniversary of making great panniers and backpacks right here in Portland.
Here are the great bike links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Beautiful parking: When businesses pay for their own bike corrals, they tend to look really nice.
Car-free mechanic: Tom Magliozzi, the late “Car Talk” host, didn’t own a car and said he preferred bikes and public transit.
Deliberate speed: Maybe the fact that the U.S. is failing to reduce traffic fatalities as fast as other rich countries has something to do with our 20th century engineering practice of systematically designing roads to be driven at faster-than-legal speeds.
Courier renaissance: Wait, weren’t bike couriers supposed to go extinct? Nope. They’ve just switched from legal documents to sandwiches and coffee.
NYC, slower: “This is not about being a tough New Yorker,” CityLab’s Sarah Goodyear writes about the media’s weirdly nostalgic reactions to the city’s new 25 mph speed limit. “No one is tough enough to withstand being hit by a car going 35 miles an hour that jumps the curb.” This coverage is probably my favorite:
The Post unironically says speed limit is "killing" drivers next to story about child killed by speeding driver. pic.twitter.com/Vo1XVsTYCI
— Chris O'Leary (@ohhleary) November 8, 2014
Anti-theft funding: San Francisco’s much-discussed police campaign against bike theft grew out of a $75,000 decision from City Hall.
Bike-friendly trucks: Boston is following London in requiring truck-side guards to be attached to large city-contracted vehicles.
Carless driver: “I’m a cyclist,” says industrial designer Jenny Arden, part of the small team behind Google’s driverless car technology. “I don’t like cars.”
Zombie freeway: The Columbia River Crossing consensus is gone, but the Washington Department of Transportation still has the exact same project on their list of plans.
A post-car Europe: EU car sales are down 25 percent and not expected to rebound as more families prioritize different purchases — even though car purchase costs keep falling relative to wages.
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Texting and driving: The problem isn’t that people don’t know it’s unsafe, the problem is that they do it anyway.
Sidewalk expansion: For one busy weekend this fall, Georgetown turned 47 street parking spaces into wider sidewalks. Guess what? People parked in nearby garages instead.
Sidewalk riding ban: A woman badly injured in a bike crash while walking on a Sacramento sidewalk is calling for a ban on all sidewalk biking.
Advocacy lawsuit: Willamette Week’s history issue tells the story of how the Bicycle Transportation Alliance won bike lanes through the Rose Quarter by suing the city in defiance of then-Transportation Commissioner Earl Blumenauer.
Drunk-driving ad: Nice one, Fiat:
Anti drink driving poster by Fiat in Brazil. The caption reads "Now you see it. Now you don't." pic.twitter.com/oP9EAhQI26
— Brilliant Ads (@Brilliant_Ads) November 2, 2014
“Transit last” loses: San Francisco’s Proposition L, which would have ended the city’s “transit first” policy to prioritize driving and cheap on-street parking, went down in flames.
Pothole narratives: A Mumbai entrepreneur is tapping public frustration with potholes by photographing action figures playing in them.
Stylebook update: The Minneapolis Star Tribune is considering amending its official rules about describing traffic crashes to avoid the word “accident,” which presumes that no one chose to drive unsafely.
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.