It’s time for the weekly Bike News Roundup! I’m in St. Louis for the holidays, but I’ll still be posting over the break. But be sure to send me tips, since I will not be as vigilant as I usually am. Either leave them in the comments below or email [email protected].
First up, here’s what a $450,000 downtown two-way cycle track looks like:
Take a ride down the new Dearborn Street cycle track from Steven Vance on Vimeo.
Pacific Northwest News:
- 6 pedestrians hit in Metro Vancouver crashes | CTV British Columbia News – In just a few hours one night
- Seattle police: 2 off-duty officers arrested after DUI collision | Seattle Times – A chance to show how serious the city/county is about DUI.
- Drunken DEA agent not charged in Kitsap County | Seattle Times – What shouldn’t happen in the above case.
- Just Read It: The 18th Amendment – Seattle Transit Blog – “Highway purposes” is clearly defined as including city streets. Let’s change the way the state uses gas taxes.
- Announcing BizCycle’s first certified business: Washington Bike Law « Cascade Bike Blog – 100 percent of Seattle Bike Blog employees bike, walk and telecommute. But SBB gives terrible commute benefits, and the showers are not always clean…
- Shareable: Young Reno Activists Demand Bikeable Streets – And Get Them
- Disaster! Bicycling through the apocalypse by Elly Blue — Kickstarter – Funded! You have until Friday to preorder a copy. Plus, five more people need to pledge $25 each in order to make Elly deliver all the Portland copies by bike. And for $200, Elly will deliver an in-person singing telegram to a Portland resident of your choosing. Elly really knows how to use Kickstarter.
- Kate Martin Is Running for Mayor | Slog – Central to her campaign: Sidewalks in north and south Seattle.
- McGinn’s 2009 backers not so united as re-election race nears | The Seattle Times – We’ll have more on the burgeoning mayoral race soon. Stay tuned!
- BikePortland.org » More from the bikes/disaster front – Speaking of bikes and disaster…
- Broadway streetcar+bikeway extension: How far north, first, improvement district levy, later | CHS Capitol Hill Seattle
- Transit’s Long Road to Olympia – Seattle Transit Blog
- Ride recap: Critical Lass and Friends Ride to Candy Cane Lane « Seattle Critical Lass
Halftime Show! We usually have a second video here, but today, I just want you to contemplate this image posted by Brooklyn Spoke. In LEGO space terms, the dots are space where you can build and be creative. Look at how a road diet creates six extra rows of usable dots. The same happens in Seattle (well, not dots, but you know what I mean):
OK, fine, you can have a video, too! Have you seen this crazy landslide derailment video from Everett?
National & Global News:
- North West Evening Mail | Barrow bike thieves exploit smartphone app Strava to locate targets
- LeBron James Bikes Home From Games: ‘I Got Lights On My Bike’ – If he wants to, LeBron could turn the nation’s image of cycling on its head.
- Author Jeff Speck on Walkability and the One Mistake That Can Wreck a City | Streetsblog Capitol Hill
- BBC News – Electric cars ‘pose environmental threat’ – If you are still holding out hope that electric cars will somehow save the world, please read this.
- Yikes:
- Bike Safe Boston – A bike with reflective paint? This could be big.
- The cycle path to happiness – The Independent – Bicycling can battle depression, says clinical study.
- How Britian Is Helping Its Citizens Buy Bikes – The Atlantic Cities – Maybe the US could do this for American-made bikes as a public health/stimulus plan.
- Traffic Jams, Solved – The Atlantic Cities – Congestion charging works. It’s very unpopular at first, but people love it once it is in place.
- Chicago likes bikes — and it’s about to prove it in a big way | Grist
- Drivers’ moral progress, and why they hate cyclists | Andrew Brown | guardian.co.uk – An interesting musing on the psychology behind why people driving get mad at people on bikes (in short: people on bikes are cheating!)
- A Sober, Data-Based Approach to Bicycle Advocacy – The Atlantic Cities
Comments
9 responses to “Bike News Roundup: What a $450,000 cycle track looks like”
Dearborn Street. Nice. Coincidentally, we have one in Seattle that I ride when commuting back from Bellevue to Seattle. Idea spot to have one of these :-)
Wow. I love the left turn signal for cars. *That* is how you do left-side bicycle infrastructure.
Next steps, Chicago – build more of those things, and retime those lights so that cyclists aren’t hitting reds every block. :)
I created the video of Dearborn Street. I was riding very slowly and paying no attention to the lights. I’ve only ridden it once. I predict that after riding it a few times, any person on a bike will be able to “count the lights” and adjust their speed as necessary to hit only green lights. Except at Harrison Street. That red light is forever.
Ref: car on bike/ped bridge…Driver did the same thing just over a year ago on the lower West Seattle Spokane St. bridge. Drove up the bike/ped path (a car can fit on it) heading eastbound and stopped about 1/4 of the way over. Always wished I had a camera for that image.
Just a couple weeks ago there was a car on the BGT near Gas Works. The driver was having a hell of a time getting out of there… she was lost, trying to find a place on Fairview Ave, and while I tried to help, I totally blanked on where Fairview Ave was.
The electric car article shows that something I’ve always said about hybrids is true about electric cars as well: that at best they’re only a marginal environmental improvement over gas-powered vehicles. Even given fairly green mixes of electricity sources, electric cars are less than a 30% improvement over internal-combustion vehicles.
Building a walkable, bikeable city with effective transit has a much bigger upside. A potential for a much bigger than 30% reduction in VMT and car ownership. And cheaper, too!
I really like the way they integrated the lighting system. I could totally see this on 2nd Ave. Sometimes people are flat out parked in the bike lane. This would prevent parking and people make left turns into a bicyclist.
How much slower is the cycle track than riding in the general purpose lanes? Though I suppose since the cycle track went in the general purpose lanes are now car only lanes. It seems you had to stop at every single intersection while the cars going in the same direction had a green light.
While heading South on the Interurban trail at 145th, I saw 4 cars use the cycle track as a right turn lane. When it was time for me to cross, there was a car in the cycle track trying to turn right that reversed up it when they saw me coming. I think most drivers just don’t know what it is.