(Image: YerkaProject.com)
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Unstealable bike? The Yerka doesn’t have a built-in lock; it is the lock.
Bone music: A British design student literally wants to turn your butt into a speaker system while you’re riding your bike. (Scroll down to “On your bike.”)
Carhead, explained: Angeleno Stephen Corwin’s struggled to understand his family’s reactions to his car-free lifestyle until he realized they didn’t think of it as a “life choice” but as “a stunt.” “To them, I was like David Blaine, performing a weird test of endurance. I was holding my breath in a car-free world, hoping to impress everyone around me before I could bear it no longer.”
Singletrack to school: The town council of Eagle, Colorado, is allowing parents to construct a “flow to school” mountain bike path alongside the existing sidewalks.
Advocacy recipe: The best bike advocacy is 75 percent engineering and 25 percent education/encouragement. That’s one of 14 tips from veteran advocate Randy Neufeld.
Negative space: We should definitely build our cities like this:
Brilliant visual illustration of how much #publicspace we have given to #cars pic.twitter.com/jAYWBuO4hn
— Complete Mobility (@DewanMKarim) November 14, 2014
License plate alternative: This is a hoax, right? Right?
Flawed riposte: Wired does a good job debunking common anti-bike cliches but itself falls into one of the worst … in the closing words of its headline.
Bike jobs: Europe’s cycling industry (including production, tourism, retail, infrastructure and services) now employs more people than mining.
Cellphone ban: As New York City considers a ban on phone use while biking, Brooklyn Spoke calls it a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
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Uber vs. its workers: Uber “employment” isn’t very voluntary when the company can unilaterally cut fares and wages on drivers who may have bought cars so they could start driving Uber.
Squid lock: Here’s an interesting bike lock concept:
Starry path: The glowing Dutch bike path technology that we’ve been tracking on the Monday Roundup for a year is on the ground, and the first use is a tribute to Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
Rocket bike: What do you get when you strap a silver-activated hydrogen peroxide canister to your bike? From zero to 207 mph in 4.8 seconds, for one.
Lycra helps: But how much? Switching from baggy to stretchy shorts might save you 70 seconds over 12.4 miles of mountain biking.
And your video of the week, a nicely shot and edited 10-minute profile of a 50-year-old Brooklyn pizza guy, has a twist near the end.
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.