(Image: City of Niagara Falls)
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Highway removal: New York State will remove Robert Moses Parkway from the waterfront that overlooks Niagara Falls to create a park and walking trails.
11-year-old activist for safe streets: Los Angeles resident Matlock Grossman has wisdom beyond his years. He sees the benefits of bicycling on his rides to orchestra practice.
Victim blamed: The NYC police department says a 61-year-old Spanish teacher is to blame for his own death because he walked into a crosswalk right before an on-duty police officer who was reportedly on her cell phone turned her police van into him.
Street transformation manual: Could there be any more momentum for quick-build street projects like the ones we’ve seen locally on SW 3rd Avenue and Naito recently? National nonprofit People For Bikes just published a guide to help make more of these “fast, flexible changes” happen.
Misused cash: Fremont, Calif., used a Safe Routes to School grant to remove a bike lane and widen an intersection in front of a high school.
Uber subsidy: The Florida city subsidizing 20 percent of Uber fares just might become a model for public transit in low-density areas.
Killing stoplights: An MIT effort to milk more automotive capacity out of intersections by replacing red lights with modulated vehicle speed makes perfect sense as long as everyone is in a motor vehicle.
Bike share parking wars: Jersey City and Hoboken are sparring over where bike share bikes can park, with fines and threats of a lawsuit. Keep in mind Hudson Bike Share uses a “smart bike” system similar to Portland’s.
Vision Zero: The push to cut traffic deaths is not working so far in San Francisco, and some are blaming the city’s unwillingness to remove street parking spaces for better crosswalks or transit stops.
Fatality penalties: Despite the boom in urban biking, people regularly get off with fines in the low thousands after killing people with their cars, reports the Associated Press.
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Excess parking: It may have hit a new high with a building in southern England that is topped by a parking lot that can’t be reached by car. (The project is apparently speculative.)
Trader Joe’s: Thanks in part to comparatively tiny parking lots, their stores have twice the revenue per square foot as Whole Foods.
Seattle housing: The Oregonian has taken its turn considering whether Seattle’s attempted grand bargain on housing could work in Portland.
Industry sexism: U.S. bike maker Specialized apologized and said “we do not support the objectification of women in any way” after its marketers hired women to pose in Playboy Bunny costumes next to a Playboy-branded Specialized bike.
Rob Ford: Toronto’s crack-smoking, bike-lane-hating mayor, who died last Tuesday at 46, was actually like a lot of Canadians, the BBC wrote in a rememberance.
Biking “destroying London”: As Portlander Carl Larson points out, this piece from the Independent is “the rare anti-bike AND anti-car editorial.”
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.
— Michael Andersen, (503) 333-7824 – michael@bikeportland.org
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