(Photo: Ryoichi Tanaka)
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
No-fault injuries: A bill in Hawaii’s legislature would prohibit personal injury protection payments to anyone who hit by a car while bicycling.
Mandatory high-viz: Following Wyoming’s tracks, South Dakota is considering a law to make it a misdemeanor to bike on any public roadway without wearing “fluorescent or reflective garments.”
Mandatory helmets: A bill in California would require all adults to wear helmets while biking.
Maintenance crisis: The U.S. infrastructure crisis is actually a maintenance crisis, with pavement and rail lines needing maintenance far more than roads need expansion. But filling potholes doesn’t seem to get voters excited.
Federal gap: Republicans and Democrats agree that they need transportation money, but there are two problems: conservatives don’t want a penny for walking, biking or transit; and few are willing to talk about how to fund it.
London’s follow-up: Fresh off his green light to build a $240 million downtown protected bike lane network, London’s mayor wants to build a $30 billion underground ring road.
All-ages bikeways: A British web survey found that 33 percent of adults think it’s appropriate to ride with an eight-year-old in a painted bike lane, while 80 percent approve of doing so in a curb-separated bike lane.
Texas milestone: The latest city to get a downtown protected bike lane: Houston.
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Parking removal: Seattle’s push for better bike and bus lanes is crossing a long-avoided line: it’s removing curbside parking spaces. Leaders are framing it as part of the city “growing up.”
Seattle safety: Seattle has launched a Vision Zero plan, with a hard target of 2030 for eliminating traffic deaths.
Proportional funding: San Luis Obispo, Calif., just set a 20 percent bike mode share goal … and more importantly, allocated a matching share of its general fund transportation spending for bike infrastructure.
Standardizing buffers: In a major shift of direction, the Florida Department of Transportation has endorsed 10-foot-wide lanes on urban arterials and made 2 to 3-foot hatched buffers standard for all urban bike lanes.
Livability PAC: Some Dallas residents have launched a political action committee to destroy a freeway.
Job locations: Office tenants say they prefer mixed-use environments to single-use office parks, 83 percent to 17 percent.
Young-adult suburbs: Increasingly priced out of the cities their older siblings helped popularize, millennials are moving to suburbs in large numbers, and the ones with walkable, bikeable grids may have a leg up.
Urban disease: Stephen Corwin writes that driving is like smoking — fun in the beginning, eventually routine — but Los Angeles isn’t just addicted: it has cancer.
Efficiency in action: Here’s a pretty good illustration:
Simple urban math. Congestion-busting, Copenhagen style. pic.twitter.com/y3mJrm5nJl
— M. Colville-Andersen (@copenhagenize) February 9, 2015
Exporting Sadik-Khan: Bloomberg Philanthropies has chosen 10 cities in the developing world to get help enacting NYC-style makeovers.
And in your video of the week (via Streetsblog USA), the Russian “Stop a Douchebag movement” is a group of men who force people to stop driving on the sidewalk and sometimes get loaded guns pointed at them for it:
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 2/17: A previous version of this post misstated the type of payments that the Hawaii bill would ban. It would ban personal injury protection payments that are assigned regardless of fault or liability.