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The Monday Roundup: NYC’s special sauce, right-hook research, a moral dilemma, and more



Welcome to Monday!

Hope you had a chance to pedal through the nice cool weekend. Who got caught out on a ride without a jacket?

This week’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by Efficient Velo Tools: From inflators and wheel-building tools, to the EZ-Lift Repair Stand, Portland’s Efficient Velo Tools offers tools for the pro and home mechanic! Learn more about their great products here.

And with that, here are the most noteworthy stories we came across in the past seven days…

How NYC does it: From road redesigns that put bikers and walkers first, to tough speed enforcement laws, New York City’s progress toward Vision Zero is getting much-deserved attention.

Plan for racial equity: One of America’s leading active transportation planning firms, Alta Design, has published a plea for more people in their industry to address how their work impacts people of color.

Push for automobile green light: In London there are traffic signals that default green to walkers and force auto users to trigger a change.

Bright side of ridesharing: While rideshare vehicles like Uber and Lyft clog our roads and raise VMT overall, they are also credited with reducing drunk driving.

Rideshare regs: NYC is about to lower-the-boom on Uber and Lyft by capping the amount of cars and requiring licenses and minimum wage pay for drivers.

Right-hook research: A PSU researcher is among the authors in this new study about right hooks that found the worst-case scenario is when the auto user is focused on cars around them and the bicycle rider approaches from behind.

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More on bad drivers: Research from University of Toronto found that a majority of auto users don’t scan for bicycle users or walkers before turning right.

Biking while black: The leader of a bike advocacy group in Oakland was stopped during a group ride because police felt his music was too loud. The man, who is black, ended up in jail.

Cars are the problem: A shopping district in an Los Angeles neighborhood wants to improve its retailing vibe and encourage more shopping and hanging out. Their solution? Get rid of the cars.

From parking to housing: An architect writing for Fast Company has great ideas on how cities can build parking garages that are future-proof and can be easily adapted into useful things like housing.

It’s the street design, stupid: If we really cared about safety we’d put a higher priority on street designs that slow people down, than hoping and praying that high-tech robo-cars will be the solution.

Report = deport: Interesting debate on Streetsblog Chicago after a woman on a bike was injured by a careless road user, yet decided to not report the incident because the driver was using an expired green card and she didn’t want to subject her to immigration authorities.

Serious activism: In Bangladesh a reckless bus operator hit a group students on the side of the road and the incident sparked a “revolution” with people taking to the streets to demand safety.

The curious case of “Mr. X”: This is the absolutely bonkers tale of journalists trying to track down the author of an anti-cycling Facebook campaign that gathered major steam. Goes to show you should always view FB content from unverified sources with extreme skepticism.

— Jonathan Maus: (503) 706-8804, @jonathan_maus on Twitter and jonathan@bikeportland.org

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