Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
What wide streets are for: Strong Towns finally answers the question.
Trek recall: A problem involving front disc brakes affects 1 million bikes in the U.S. and Canada made between 2000 and 2015.
Tampa profiling: The Florida city’s mayor has asked the federal government to review his police department’s policy of trying to fight crime by targeting thousands of black residents for minor bike-related infractions.
Hit and run: A Washougal woman who struck and injured a 5-year-old boy on a Big Wheel with her pickup truck tried to hide by crawling into a hole and burying herself with dirt.
Breath analysis: In a study that echoes Portland research, a New York City professor is exploring how much pollution people breathe in while biking.
Higher fines for the rich: If you get caught speeding in Finland, authorities base your fine on your income level.
L.A. bike fun: Los Angeles bike activist Don Ward recalls how his city’s Midnight Ridazz events got too popular, then kaleidoscoped into hundreds of urban rides per year.
Mountain biking: “Portland’s least privileged families lack many things, but one thing that tens of thousands of them have, particularly the children, is some kind of fat tire mountain bike,” write three biking leaders in an Oregonian op-ed calling for mountain biking trails that don’t require cars to reach.
Philly bike share: It launched this week with 600 bikes, the first contract for a bike sharing startup founded by Alta Bicycle Share’s early management team.
Reframing safety: In Philadelphia, Uber distributed a bunch of free bike helmets. Hmm.
Advertisement
Speed limits: Washington Gov. Jay Inslee used his first veto of the year to block the state’s top speed limit from rising from 70 mph to 75 mph.
Bike-theft disembowelment: A man who tore open another man’s intestines with a knife during a bike theft received 17 years in prison.
Successful advocacy: Thousands of Scotlanders joined the fourth annual “Pedal on Parliament,” in which they ask for 10 percent of the country’s transport budget to go toward biking and walking, among other measures. Every major political party seems to have sent a delegate to address them — including the transport minister, who promised to further increase bike-walk spending next year.
Apple Watch: Bicycling magazine reviews it from a biker’s perspective. “Hey Siri, how long before the sun sets?”
Chicago woonerf: The city is working on its first fully shared street.
The car ages: “Most city planners now see the era of the car’s urban supremacy as a brief, misguided phase in city culture,” writes the NYT Magazine in a feature about the rights and wrongs of walking in New York.
Cargo bikes: They’re “cropping up not just in the expected West Coast enclaves like Seattle, Portland and the Bay Area, but in cities like New Haven, Tucson and Dallas.”
3-D printed road bike: It’s arrived.
“Cognitive distraction”: Science shows that the problem is talking while driving, not holding an object in your hand while driving.
Protected bike lanes: Minneapolis is circulating a draft plan to build 30 miles of them by 2020, largely by upgrading existing bike lanes.
And in your video of the week, a visitor to the Netherlands argues that Portland-style growth boundaries were a big part of building bikeable cities there:
Can’t see the Trek recall being limited to Trek, since most skewers are bulk parts from other manufacturers. Wondering when the other manufacturers will join??
There’s a simple fix requiring NO replacement of parts if you’re the owner of an affected bike and worried–take the skewers out of the hub and reinstall with the levers on the right hand (derailleur) side of the bike.
Skewer lever removed from spinning disc rotor.
That’s actually what Shimano says in their installation instructions.
Hard top believe this is the basis for a recall; guess there’s no simple fix for stupidity. Someday there might be a thru-axle standard for road bikes, or something like that…
Not sure a skewer coming loose says you are stupid, but it sure shows you should regularly inspect your bike before you ride.
They’re not using them as cam levers. They’re leaving them in the open position and then spinning them until tight. It’s improper wheel installation from the get-go.
ABC Quick Check… 🙂
Perhaps Trek is using a product “recalls” as a way to drive trips into their brick and mortar stores? Hmmm.
Yes, that skewer is a generic, perfectly functional steel item and is sold by numerous vendors. It’s not a part exclusive to Trek.
The problem is actually Lawyer Lips holding wheels with loose QRs in the fork instead of allowing them to fall out like they are supposed to. If I forget to put the lugnuts on my car and the wheel falls off then I’m an idiot, but do the same thing on a bike and it is the manufacturer’s fault?
Love it! I subscribe to Darwinism too… 🙂
AND, I file off lawyer tabs.
New York Times Magazine:
“In pursuing Vision Zero, New York is embracing a relatively new approach to cities, one with a focus on walkers over drivers.”
A while back we were having some conversations about Vision Zero, and there was some uncertainty about this very point. Glad to see it cleared up.
NYC is also attacking the problem from multiple points, from road design and police to professional driver licensing, and health. NYC will be much more successful taking the holistic approach than PDX will with the road design and legal approach.
I think someone has their terminology wrong. The article calls it a “woonerf” but the description sounds like “shared space”. They’re two different things.
The only real difference, and it is real, is the vehicle speed. Woonerfs operate under 10 mph while shared space is closer to 15 mph.
Reference to the guest opinion piece in the Oregonian yesterday, written by several people as an appeal to Mayor Hales to help in acquiring opportunities for mountain biking within Portland city limits, has yet to be made at bikeportland.
I happened to read the piece Saturday afternoon in the advance edition of the Sunday papers. Possibly, it will help bring this subject to the attention of a greater number of Portland residents than past efforts have.
I think I know the one you mean, wsbob. Just added it – thanks.
The Minneapolis protected bike lanes are going to be great. They will connect the Grand Rounds and the Midtown Greenway. Downtown Minneapolis isn’t bad to bike around, though I wouldn’t call it great. Protected bike lanes would really make Minneapolis top tier.
Here is the full bike lane map with new protected lanes, Ground Rounds, Midtown Greenway and non-protected bike lanes.
http://goo.gl/aBXRFp
Your short-link has been disabled. Can you post a direct one?
Sorry, Google Shortener didn’t like that link apparently.
Rocket science: http://windluvr.com/photos/main.php?cmd=imageview&var1=cycling%2FDEvoluzione%2FMasi3.jpg
In reply to http://bikeportland.org/2015/04/27/monday-roundup-wide-street-safety-treks-huge-recall-140894#comment-6359359. Can we have Disqus please?
No, thanks. I’ve signed up via disqus and still with several sites I’ve posted on my comments never seem to appear.
I’ll second the no-disqus-please. I just walk (erm, click) away whenever I see it because it never seems to work, and signing up for yet another account, so a company I have no relationship with can harvest my data, is about the last thing I want to do. (There are a number of technical concerns, too, but those arguments hardly matter in the face of “it doesn’t work.”)
OK, can we at least have comment editing and reply functionality that works?
I like Disqus because I’ve had no problems with it (yet) and it gives me a unique, authenticated identity without having to sign up for Facebook (or communicate my full name, which I prefer not to do for professional reasons). Here on BP, without a gravatar, anyone can ‘pretend’ to be anyone else… 😉
Sorry about the misplaced reply. This is definitely happening more since we made some changes last year and we’re not sure why. But we’re certainly aware of the issue and it’s totally valid to call attention to it. (No plans to move to Disqus for multiple reasons; we’d rather make our system work.)
Re; Tampa Bay Times story linked in today’s roundup. I’m encouraged by what’s reported in that story. At the least, it appears that Tampa’s mayor and police chief have responded by directing their attention to inescapable questions raised by some very ominous information the TBT has brought forth in their reporting.
Again, with this most recent story, the Tampa Bay Times has provided some good information, got some good comments from city leadership and community members. All of them seem committed to working to avoiding unfair pressure applied to certain segments of the city’s residents, which in this case, seem primarily to have been black people.
This isn’t an issue of a quick release that is being used properly coming loose and causing an accident. This is an issue of someone who doesn’t know how to use a quick release not properly tightening and closing the quick release handle before riding off.
Marsha Yumi Perry buries herself to hide? Too bad it wasn’t 6′ down
I think way too many drivers fundamentally misunderstand speed limit signs. They see a number and interpret it as a minimum speed, when in fact it’s supposed to be the MAXIMUM. Set a limit of 75 and people will drive 80+. Seen it almost daily in Texas and Oklahoma. Talk about making driving more stressful…
It doesn’t help that in most satates the design speed for a road is between 5mph to 10mph HIGHER then what the posted speed is.
Maybe true once upon a time, but not anymore given common sprawl into rural areas. Are these roads adequately paved & maintained for 75mph? Just barely where I drive.
The roads you speak of are the most dangerous to drive on. Just compare the fatality rates per mile for people in Wyoming and Washington DC.
Some of the roads around me have full separation between directions, freeway-width lanes, barriers to the side of traffic, limited access (i.e. all the things one would expect of an interstate)… and a speed limit of 30mph or 35.
Then some other streets I have to drive have speed limits that are nominally 25mph, but then put “speed bumps” (in the middle of the street… there’s a technical name for them that escapes me) that cannot be safely driven over at any speed over 10mph, and that’s in a high-clearance vehicle.
Speed limits (and stop signs, but that’s another discussion) don’t seem to have any rational connection to the street design itself. I suspect the process is more political than anything else.
The research on distracted driving was in before we ever passed cell-phone-while-driving laws. And the research said hands-free devices are exactly the same in terms of increased accident-rate as holding the phone. In other words, the law didn’t (and still doesn’t) make sense in terms of safety. A law that did make safety sense (no distractions when driving at all: no GPS entry, no infotainment manipulation, no talking to a person not present, no two-way radio, …) would be so unpopular that it’d never survive. There’s even a positive correlation between listening to commercial radio and accident rate if you wanted to be really stringent about it.
All that said, every day I still see drivers talking while holding their phone and texting on their phone while driving. I know OSP did a special enforcement to try to increase public awareness. Lack of awareness or perhaps just lack of caring is, however, still widespread.
The research also says we all think we’re better at distracted driving than we really are. I don’t think the problem is really going to go away until everyone is using public transit or we can happily be distracted in our autonomous cars.
(I’m sure someone is going to ask for sources. I’m sorry, but I don’t have them at hand anymore and I’m too lazy to go research and find them again.)
the MOST memorable bike video that I’ve ever seen. Thanx Canada.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur…&v=_wtqnbObhbA