(Image: AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety)
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 that caught our eyes this week:
Distracted driving: A AAA study put video cameras into teen drivers’ cars to study the moments just before 1,700 collisions. More than half of drivers were distracted just before moderate and severe crashes, but only 12 percent by telephones.
Reflective spraypaint: With bike safety in mind, Volvo has created a spray-on substance that is “completely invisible until it’s hit by the glare of a car’s headlights.”
Parking revolutionary: Donald Shoup, the UCLA professor who sounded the national alarm about the cost of free parking, will hold his retirement party on top of a parking structure.
Hit-and-run consequences: In the six years since a Vancouver 18-year-old became the first Washingtonian imprisoned for vehicular homicide, a 2009 hit-and-run case caused by his texting behind the wheel, his life has descended into a string of apparently nonviolent criminal charges.
Fashion felonies: “Now people need special costumes to ride bicycles. I mean, a helmet, what, are you an astronaut??” That’s inimitable fashion maven Fran Lebowitz, who also claims that her glasses cost as much as a car.
Gee thanks Google: Its driverless cars will have external airbags.
Scofflaw reasons: The top three reasons people break laws while biking, a recent study found, were “poor infrastructure design,” “the speed of motorised traffic” and “the behaviour of other road users.”
Bike licensing: Chicago Magazine rounds up the many examples of it not working, but adds that a bike-related tax could help fund the two things that actually improve biking safety and behavior: bike infrastructure and bike education.
Equity tips: To start thinking about the causes of disparities, try to “ask ‘why?’ approximately five times.” And four other suggestions for improving racial equity in the biking movement.
Black in Portland: Bikes are clearly used as a symbol of change in a powerful video interviewing several people about what the generation-long displacement of black Portlanders from inner North and Northeast has felt like.
Near misses: A British website is the latest to compile and analyze narrowly avoided bike collisions.
Paris pollution: Paris is rationing car use and making bike-sharing and other public transit free in a fight against some of the world’s dirtiest air.
Advertisement
Bike agenda: Hillsboro’s city council has put better biking and walking infrastructure on its list of 11 priorities for the year.
Car-free commerce: As Stockholm closes some major commercial streets to cars, a consultancy group scoured the numbers and concluded that “car accessibility did not have a significant effect on apartment prices or office rents.”
Seattle woonerf: Property values are up along Bell Street Park, Seattle’s attempt at shared street space. CityLab looks at it and five other woonerfs worldwide.
Auto-only funding: Two months after someone asked them to, Five Republican congressmen have introduced the so-called DRIVE Act, which would end federal gas tax spending on “bike paths, sidewalks, mass transit, and other local projects.”
Protected lane: After years of debate, Boston will add curb-protected bike lanes, including protected intersections, to a 2/3-mile stretch of Commonwealth Avenue. Some call it an “outrage”; others disagree.
And in your video of the week, a mixed-bag milestone: Sunday Parkways (not to mention a tallbike, a recumbent, a longtail and a pennyfarthing) made it to The Simpsons.
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.