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.
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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:
