This week’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by Laughing Planet, where you can now get food delivered by bike in downtown Portland.
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Better lock? The Litelok markets itself on its 2.2-pound weight, but the bigger feature might actually be flexibility. Here’s the $120 product’s promising Kickstarter.
Car-free retail: A narrow cobblestone street in Rome closed to cars and opened to walking during a construction project, but may never go back, because retail sales jumped 30 percent.
Sticks and carrots: Paying employees to bike to work won’t change any habits if you’re simultaneously paying them to drive by offering free parking.
Designing for revenue? Build your city with lots of 25-foot-wide streets.
Quick commutes: Portland’s are faster, on average, than most large cities’.
Protected lanes: Minneapolis will spend $790,000 to build 5.6 miles of protected bike lanes around its central city this year. The projects will likely use plastic flexposts, a low-cost separation method that’s become popular around the country but never yet been used in Portland.
Must-click headlines: Washington, like Oregon, has a bill in its legislature that would allow people on bikes to proceed carefully through stoplights whose sensors are failing to detect them. But for some odd reason, even news articles that clearly explain this concept at the start of the story fail to capture it in the headline.
Vision Zero: “It’s time to slow down to the speed of life,” writes Seattle Transportation Director Scott Kubly in a Seattle Times op-ed explaining his city’s new policy.
Theft investigation: A Twitter tip to @SeattlePD led the city’s Major Crimes Taskforce to investigate a man selling high-end bikes at deep discounts. That led to a sting, an arrest and 27 recovered bikes.
Cyclists Party: That’s the official affiliation of one Australian publisher turned politician.
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Schwarzenegger detained: The former California governor was pulled over in Melbourne for a traffic violation: riding a bike share bike without a helmet.
Expired concept: A bike frame made to resemble a naked woman is just an “idea that was avant-garde (and kind of shitty) more than fifty years ago,” writes Camille Perreault.
Free kids: Here’s a German dad’s perspective on American parenting and the “narrowing of the child’s world.”
Share the cage: Cartoonist Bikeyface imagines zoos designed by anti-infrastructure biking advocates. “Can someone please get the zebra a reflective vest and a copy of my book?”
Incitement outrage: A California meat purveyor who wrote on his blog that people who bike in traffic lanes are “fair game” seems surprised at the online whirlwind he reaped.
Helmet mandate: In California, a proposed mandatory helmet law makes as much sense as one that would “require pedestrians to wear body armor,” the Los Angeles Times editorializes.
Foxx’s fears: To write this news item about the U.S. transportation secretary, the staff of The Onion seems to have started with the photo and worked backwards.
Downtown jobs: Portland economist Joe Cortright talks to Streetsblog’s podcast about the shift of jobs to urban cores.
And finally, your video of the week is a pretty good 90-second summary of a modern bicycling advocacy agenda:
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.