This week’s Monday Roundup is brought to you by our friends at Bicycle Fitting Services, who reminds you that it’s the perfect time of year to dial-in your fit for maximum power and comfort.
Here are the best stories we came across last week:
Bike valet at the train station: Great news from Amtrak: You can now simply check your bicycle as luggage on the Coast Starlight route which goes from L.A. to Seattle.
Utrecht makes it look easy: This transformation of a street in the Dutch city of Utrecht shows the pinnacle of people-centered design. And yes, it unabashedly comes at the expense of space for driving.
An opportunity for cargo bikes?: Good news: University of Washington now has a corporate-funded Urban Freight Lab to figure out more efficient urban, last-mile deliveries. Bad news: The word “bike” doesn’t appear in the article and “drones” and “autonomous vehicles” does.
Perspective on “inner cities”: After an awkward moment in the second presidential debate, The Black Urbanist Kristin Jeffers lays out some important perspective about who lives where (and why).
Best traffic cone evah: The City of Bozeman is sick and tired of people speeding through a certain intersection so they got creative and installed a six-foot high traffic cone. It’s working.
Build where collisions happen: Strong Towns makes the case for using collision maps to inform where to build bikeways. We do this to some extent already, but the collision dataset is woefully incomplete.
Holy mobility: On Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv people know intuitively that driving just isn’t the right thing to do. So they all ride bikes instead and the city becomes a “playground.”
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Race promotion needs help: We’ve been intrigued by local signs that it’s getting hard for race promoters to make a living. Turns out it’s also a national problem.
Research on collisions: “Male cyclists, with all else being equal, were less likely than female cyclists to be involved in conflicts and dangerous conflicts at the studied intersections.”
Road safety in Canada: A spike in traffic deaths and injuries to bikers and walker isn’t just an American thing. CBC News in Canada cites an urban planner who says their 2016 stats so far show the rate of people driving into other, more vulnerable roadway users has reached “public health epidemic” levels.
Walk and you will die: A business group in downtown Pittsburgh has found a way to kill their business: They’ve paid to have someone in a grim reaper costume walk around and “educate pedestrians” about safety.
Messenger ride-along: It’s always fun to learn the inner-workings of a bike delivery professional.
Epic bike share defense: NYC Council Member Brad Lander absolutely crushed this written response to people who don’t want Citibike bike share stations in Park Slope.
Too wide to ride: This is a scary trend in trail management: Forest Service in Colorado drastically widened former singletrack in the name of “safety for all users.” Barf.
Robin Williams’ legacy: We knew Robin Williams loved bikes, but we had no idea he had such a remarkable collection. And now it’s being auctioned off.
Thank you Denver: This article reads like it came right out of my own dreams. Instead of investing in old technology of parking garages, the City of Denver is making sure any new ones can be easily retrofitted for other uses once private cars become passé.
Read a bike-related story worth sharing? Drop us a line and we’ll consider it for next week’s roundup.
— Jonathan Maus, (503) 706-8804 – jonathan@bikeportland.org
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