This week’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by Hassalo on Eighth, now leasing in the Lloyd District.
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Adhesive cars: Google has patented a “sticky layer” to hold people on the hood of self-driving cars after a collision.
Car ethics: Should a robot car choose to kill its driver or a child in front of it? There’s a more fundamental ethical question, says N+1. “Why was the car going so damn fast in the first place?”
Vancouver BC bike sharing: It’s finally launching June 30.
“Crash” vs “accident”: The NYT science section covers the language debate.
Train-track priority: Amtrak usually gets it, due to an ambiguous federal mandate, but the freight train industry wants it back.
Barcelona superblocks: The Spanish city is considering restricting through motor traffic to one street every three blocks, creating “superblocks” that you can bike or walk through but not drive through.
Uber apartments: A huge new real estate development in San Francisco is finding it cheaper to pay residents a $100 transportation stipend, plus capping their Uber Pool fees to the nearest transit station, rather than construct more parking.
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Transit parking: Greater Los Angeles is debating whether its new rail line should have ringed its stations with free park-and-rides.
Self-driving trucks: A startup founded by former Google, Apple and Tesla workers is betting that retrofitted freight rigs will go autonomous first.
Self-driving cars: Autonomous cars will increase driving, a new report predicts, because “the biggest cost of car travel is drivers’ time.”
Cycling city: The Dutch Cyclists’ Union has named Nijmegen its cycling city of 2016.
Future city: The United States can’t afford to become anything but Boulder, Colorado, argues a Guardian columnist.
Austin target: Texas’s capital is aiming for less than half its trips to happen in cars by 2040.
Why bike: Streetfilms asked some New Yorkers. “It is safer, it is healthy, and MTA is falling apart.”
Decongesting NYC: A decongestion charge on Manhattan traffic would raise $1.35 billion a year to upgrade the city’s packed subways, said the NYT in a glowing editorial about the MoveNY proposal.
Gridlock Sam: The former NYC transportation commissioner (who helped coin the word) has led creation of MoveNY and gets a nice profile in NextCity.
Sadiq Khan: London’s new mayor made a campaign promise to double the cycling budget to $237 million a year.
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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