(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)
Here are the great bike links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Cheap gas coming: The price of oil plummeted to its lowest non-recession level since 2007 on Thursday and Friday. It’s being described as the result of a major price war launched by OPEC in hopes of ending North America’s oil boom.
Vision zero bikes: Sydney is considering banning bikes from its “shared cycle way” network because someone walking might get hurt and sue.
Car-free Sundays: After London’s mayor saw them at work in Jakarta, he’s asking his transport agency to consider them, too.
Dynamic routing: Have Dutch bike signals finally gone too far? The latest tells you the fastest of two possible ways to bike around a big intersection.
Phoenix bike share: The new hybrid dock/dockless system in Phoenix has launched with just 100 bikes. You’ll be able to pay $2 per ride to park away from one of 27 stations.
Gold-plated garages: Congress apparently provides an illegally large subsidy for its own auto parking.
Streetcar sunset: Portland’s United Streetcar has produced 18 streetcars for three cities and entered “hibernation” as European companies beat it out for new orders, reports the Washington Post.
Locomotive money: Amtrak tipped within 8 percentage points of an operating profit last year, its best result in 40 years.
Hit-and-run casulaties: As biking has risen in Los Angeles, so has the number and the share of hit-and-runs that injure people riding. Four in 10 victims are minors; eight in ten of hit and runs go unsolved.
Happiness machine: Time on a bike is a treatment for the depression of Paul Watson of Brooklyn, who got support this year from the New York Times’ annual charity drive and aims to one day own a bike shop.
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Measuring bike sharing: Don’t miss the smart comments on this post about which bike share systems are performing best.
Helmet cams: The untold costs.
RT @wheeliefast: Funny pic.twitter.com/yqNfp0n8Ud
— Carlton Reid (@carltonreid) November 29, 2014
Bus lane lawsuit: A few Clark County residents are trying to force a public vote on whether to upgrade the county’s busiest bus line to bus rapid transit.
Parking surplus: We’re looking forward to the results of this photo contest of half-empty Black Friday parking lots.
Uber informative: With a little regulation, ridesharing companies could open up transformative levels of transportation planning data.
Healthy transport: Here’s a useful list of ideas from Ohio for integrating public health and transportation policy.
Assigning blame: A new San Diego study has found that police coded people on bikes as being “most at fault” in 56 to 60 percent of crashes that injured or killed a bike user. (Local advocate Sam Ollinger is quoted acknowledging that some people are breaking the law, but suggests building a better system instead of just assigning blame.)
Food-drive ride: Matt Lauer, Al Roker and the rest of the Today Show gang joined the Cranksgiving rides in New York, DC and Miami.
Highway protests: From Tahrir Square to Oakland, civil demonstrators are moved to seize highways. Why?
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.