This week’s Monday Roundup is brought to you by the Ride the Heart of the Valley Bike Ride. Set for April 18th, this ride is a benefit for the Oregon State University College of Veterinary Medicine and the Boys and Girls Club of Corvallis.
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Hamburg post-auto: Germany’s second-largest city is planning to ban motor vehicles from “significant swathes of the city by 2034” in favor of a “Green Network” of biking, walking and public transit.
Beach biking: Fat-tire biking on Oregon’s beaches could be enough to end your love of long walks.
Sidewalk biking: A British cop warned a four year-old girl using training wheels that if she didn’t stop biking on the sidewalk on the way to school, he would take away her bike.
Minneapolis bike share: The Nice Ride system, now up to 1,700 bikes and anticipating another 18 percent ridership growth in 2015, is expecting to open early due to Minnesota’s mild spring.
Iditarod by bike: A 36-year-old on a fat bike rode Alaska’s 350-mile Iditarod route last week in 1 day 18 hours — 10 hours shorter than the previous record and eight hours shorter than the all-time dogsled record. He credited the lack of snow.
Biking vs. parking: Eric Jaffe of Citylab gathers 12 different studies from around the world comparing the impacts of biking and car access to retailers.
Vibration warning: Too-close cars are literally a pain in the butt (or the wrists, depending on their location) if you’re riding this new Dutch bike.
Amtrak bikes: A new Amtrak bill passed by the House of Representatives would improve boarding for people with wheelchairs and bikes.
Advertisement
Counterrevolutionary action: Facing both political and scientific pressure to add new protected bike lane designs to official U.S. manuals, the conservative committee of engineers who control American road signs, signals and markings seems to be arming for a fight.
Anti-infrastructure advocate: In the comments beneath the previous post, biking advocate John Forester says Amsterdam-style separated bikeways “work only because their whole society is different from American society.”
Would-be riders: National advocacy group PeopleForBikes has completed the first-ever national survey of “interested but concerned” bike users. Infrastructure is a big barrier but it’s one of many.
E-bike pricing: What does it take to get a new e-bike to market in the Anglosphere? Doubling the price and marketing it to yacht owners, apparently.
No bikes welcome: Sausalito, Calif., now gets hundreds of bike tourists each day of summer, and it’s considering a cap on the number of bikes entering its borders. “It’s just unsustainable to have those numbers exponentially increase every year,” one city council member says.
Finally, Streetfilms’ latest comes from a series of conversations at last week’s National Bike Summit about the many things bikes enhance. It’s your video of the week:
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.