(Image: Portlandness: a Cultural Atlas of Portland)
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
“Stop” signs: A new book of creative Portland maps includes a comprehensive directory of everything Southeast Portland’s traffic-sign graffiti artists don’t want you to do.
City liable: A California city will pay $5.8 million because a judge said “narrow bike lanes and lack of streetlights” contributed to an alleged drunk driver’s fatal rear-ending of a man on a bike.
Short commutes: Why did rich people return to central cities? A new paper theorizes that the rapid decline of rich people’s leisure time has reduced their tolerance for long commutes.
Collective freight: Gothenberg, Sweden, has created a service that pools freight deliveries to small city-center businesses with shared delivery vehicles, making its downtown safer, quieter and cleaner.
Speed cameras: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has sold them as ways to enforce school zones, but that’s undermined the city’s ability to use them elsewhere.
Walking currency: People can “mine” a new Bitcoin-style digital currency not through computer processing cycles but through steps logged on a smartphone app.
Athlete mechanics: The San Francisco 49ers teamed up with a pro cycling team to personally build 50 bikes for middle schoolers.
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Death and life: For the record, you are almost certainly going to die when your circulatory or resperatory systems fail, not when terrorists attack you.
Street empathy: The hardest thing to do while getting around the city by bike, car or foot might be to see things from another modal point of view.
Solar bike path: One year after opening, the much-shared Dutch concept has generated a “0.0057 percent return on investment.”
Nepal race: Yak Attack, the highest bike race on Earth, finished its first run since the country’s massive earthquake last spring.
Paid commute: The Italian city of Massarosa is the latest to see what happens when the government offers to pay you to bike to work.
More cars: A new report estimates that without decongestion pricing, self-driving cars will increase U.S. vehicle miles traveled by 30 percent, in part because they’ll automobilize children and seniors who currently don’t drive.
Cheap gas: The last year’s rising driving rates and street fatalities have proved what the previous decade did: people respond to prices.
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.
— Michael Andersen, (503) 333-7824 – michael@bikeportland.org