(Photo: Jaime Pérez)
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Bike migration: Refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are arriving in Storskog, Norway, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle, by biking across the border from Russia.
Ghost bikes: Grist traces the history of the memorial tradition to St. Louis.
Bridge history: “I know every crack, every bump, every little ridge on her,” says a Hawthorne Bridge commuter who took up biking as part of her fight to escape anorexia and built deep personal connections to the span. “I just wish the sidewalks were wider.”
Engineer excuses: “Recovering engineer” Charles Marohn has a list of five ways traffic engineers deflect criticism.
Street philosophy: There are basically two ways to think about streets, engineer Simon Valee writes: the engineering approach and the economic approach.
Bridge tolls: The chair of NYC’s transportation committee has endorsed the Move New York plan to toll bridges for subway funding.
#CrashNotAccident campaign: “‘Accident’ is not neutral,” writes Hsi-Pei Liso, whose three-year-old daughter was killed by a person who failed to check the crosswalk before a left turn. “It implies a lack of guilt. Yet reporters often use the word in news stories before crash investigations are complete.”
Chief Bicycle Officer: Atlanta has hired one: Becky Katz.
Self-owning cars: Shared autonomous vehicles could theoretically be set up as tiny rolling corporations that gradually pay off “birth loans” to the factories that build them.
Manufacturer risk: Volvo has joined Mercedes and Google in accepting full liability for collisions from its driverless cars.
Lowrider bikes: L.A. activist General Dogon uses his artsy freak bikes to organize Skid Row residents for protests.
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Cars and community: “With Seattle’s small Black community now so dispersed, ‘automobility’ is essentially a requirement,” writes Seattle Bus Chick Carla Saulter in a short piece on how cars sometimes strengthen community even as they perpetuate the problems they solve.
50-lane jam: Wider highways would definitely relieve congestion. Right?
Pavement cost: “Stormwater runoff from urban roadways is so toxic to coho salmon that it can kill adult fish in as little as 2½ hours.”
Weed for streets: Unconventional Vancouver city council candidate Justin Forsman says he can preserve the city’s crumbling streets with $800,000 in annual marijuana taxes.
Density myth: There’s no such thing as a city that has run out of room, writes Emily Badger. Especially in the States.
Housing and inequality: New homes in Portland are aiming above the middle class because the middle-class population is barely growing, a state economist says.
London beats Amsterdam: The British capital bikes more than any other city … as long as your only data set is people who use Strava.
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.
Correction 2:20 pm: An earlier version of this post inaccurately described Charles Marohn’s professional history.