(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)
This week’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by Abraham Fixes Bikes who reminds Portland mountain bikers that they’re loved on Williams Ave!
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Idaho stop: A majority of San Francisco’s board of supervisors has endorsed a measure that would de facto make it legal to treat stop signs as yield signs while biking by designating it as the lowest priority for police enforcement. Could this be a model for city-level changes?
Dream Beijing: To prepare for the biggest military parade in its history, China banned half the cars from Beijing’s streets and closed hundreds of factories for two weeks. The result: a stunning azure sky that immediately vanished on the morning after.
Dream Philly: The Pope’s weekend in Philadelphia led to a five-square-mile ban on driving and led to people “rushing into the streets like toddlers too long strapped in their strollers,” The Inquirer’s architecture critic writes.
Seattle levy: While Portland was bending backwards to avoid a public vote on transportation funding, our neighbors to the north rolled the dice and sent the question to voters. With the vote looming, a debate on King 5 this week gives a taste of what that sort of fight looks like.
Subway speed: The structure of London’s Tube system is such that its trains’ optimal speed is actually the speed of a bicycle, researchers calculated.
Volkswagen scandal: The automaker’s huge emissions cheating system was unearthed by four American academics driving up I-5.
Star Trek bridge: KGW has the story of the guy who spent $5,000 on billboards to suggest naming Tilikum Crossing after Jean-Luc Picard instead.
Housing costs: TechCrunch reporter Kim-Mai Cutler’s packed address about the parallels between the roots of San Francisco’s housing crisis and Portland’s current situation is online.
Housing action: A San Francisco renters’ group is pioneering a new strategy to increase housing supply: suing suburbs for blocking density there.
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Transportation innovation: More cities are discovering a fun new way to save on gas while zipping around town: the pimped-out golf cart, of course.
Teaching bikes: High schools around the country are building them into extracurrics and even into curriculums.
School safety: Edinburgh’s latest livable-streets measure is to test a ban on driving near six primary schools at the start and end of each school day.
Bike fee: L.A. Times columnist George Skelton has a plan to fix California’s roads: charge kids and poor people for riding bikes.
Pump track: The new dirt-biking course along the East River in Brooklyn is gorgeous.
Apple car: It’s arriving in 2019, the company says.
Prettier freeways: Minnesota is trying to get people to leave highways by making its exits look less like highway exits.
Congestion culture: If cars are so great, why do so many people who use them get upset by “the thought of spending a few extra minutes in a comfortable climate-controlled vehicle where you control the radio station”? A West Seattle Blog commenter wants to know.
And finally, in your video of the week: You may have already read about the residents of Coronado, Calif., who have successfully stopped their city from painting bike lanes because of the “vertigo” that hashed pavement markings might induce in people driving past them. But did you know you can also see them say such things out loud?
— If you come across a noteworthy story, send it in via email, Tweet @bikeportland, or whatever else and we’ll consider adding it to next Monday’s roundup.