Airbags on Cars?! What Will They Think of Next

Fast Company shows an airbag designed for cars that protects cyclists and pedestrians. Morgan Clendaniel describes it:

The exterior airbags cover the lower portion of the windshield, creating a softer landing for a human skull flying through the air at 25 miles per hour than, say, a pane of glass. A camera positioned beneath the rear-view mirror can determine if the car is approaching any pedestrians or cyclists, and if sensors in the car’s bumper detect contact--here comes the airbag.

Then it's the War on the Car in comments, with drivers saying "So.....car drivers should carry even more weight, cost and responsibility for the actions of irresponsible cyclists." and "Cyclists need to take the risk that roads were built for cars, and cars belong there.... not cyclists."

In fact, drivers should be applauding these; studies have shown that drivers with antilock brakes follow more closely, and that people in seat belts often drive faster. It's called Risk Compensation, defined in Wikipedia as "whereby people tend to adjust their behavior in response to perceived level of risk, behaving less cautiously where they feel more protected and more cautiously where they feel a higher level of risk." With an airbag on the front, drivers can just go faster and mow down more cyclists with impunity.

Over at the Urban Country, James Schwartz has a better idea to increase safety:

The best way to increase safety for pedestrians and bicyclists is to remove seatbelts from cars and put metal spikes on the steering wheel facing the driver. This will guarantee that drivers will be more cautious while driving.

How about we just slow down.

Japanese Bike Parking Technology

This is some of the coolest and unique technology to park bikes safely from theft and bad weather...

NYC Bike Advocacy Getting Stronger

Local Spokes is a New York City-based coalition of nine different local organizations that does bike advocacy in the Lower East Side and Chinatown (you can see a list of the nine at the bottom of this page). They do a great job, working particularly hard to reach low income people, immigrants, young people, etc. Elizabeth Press has a great video providing an overview of the work they do:

To understand the transportation needs of the neighborhoods, Local Spokes conducted an extensive survey in 2010 and 2011 and held a series of workshops in Chinese, English, and Spanish.

Last summer Local Spokes synthesized everything the coalition had gathered from this process into a neighborhood action plan for bicycling [PDF]. The goal of the action plan is to ensure that residents of the Lower East Side and Chinatown will have a role guiding decisions about bike-related policies and initiatives for their streets, and to create a model for community-based bike plans in other neighborhoods. (source)

The action plan has been published here (pdf).
Via Streetfilms

Austin's Separated Bike Lanes Are on the Right Track

Searching the web today for work comps and I ran across some of the new stuff happening in Austin. Austin implemented a new two-way, buffered bikeway on Bluebonnet Lane and Melridge Place, which runs about seven-tenths of a mile from near Rabb Road (up the hill from Zilker Park) to near South Lamar Boulevard. The track, installed by the city of Austin a couple of months ago, is a harbinger of what is likely to be many such segregated bike lanes around the city. Right now, Austin has three of them — Bluebonnet, Rio Grande Street for five blocks near the University of Texas and the off-street portions of the Lance Armstrong Bikeway.

But another is under construction on Barton Springs Road, the Rio Grande track will be extended another four blocks, and more are planned over the next year or so for Rainey Street, South Congress Avenue south of Live Oak Street and Berkman Drive in Mueller. The city is working on an overall network of “low stress” bicycle tracks. The thinking is that many more people would use a bike for basic transportation — including getting to and from work — if the element of fear could be removed from cycling. Cycle tracks, which separate the bike lanes from car lanes with a series of plastic pylons rather than merely a 4-inch strip of white paint, are seen as a way to provide that comfort.
Based on a U.S. census figures, about 1.9 percent of Austinites used a bike regularly to commute in 2011. That number might seem small, but it is about twice what census numbers have generally shown for Austin and three times the national average. It puts Austin in 11th place among U.S. cities.
The city’s goal is to have cyclists make up 5 percent of commuters by 2020. Thus the cycle tracks.


The four types of cyclists: less than 1 percent fall into that “strong and fearless” cohort, 7 percent are “enthused and confident,” 60 percent are “interested but concerned” and 33 percent say “no way no how.” It stands to reason that making biking safer would increase the commute percentage. Portland, which has installed an array of bike facilities over the past generation, saw the portion of commuting cyclists go from 1.2 percent in 1990 to a best-in-the-country 6.3 percent in 2011. But to get this perceived and actual bicycle safety, and the resulting increased use, motorists will have to sacrifice.

Rio Grande between Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and West 24th Street used to be a two-lane street, with parallel parking on both sides. Now, with the cycle track, it has either two lanes and no parking or, for several blocks, one lane and parking on just one side of the road. On Bluebonnet and Melridge, parking has been lost on the west side of the street where the track runs. But there was no loss of driving lanes, and lightly traveled streets like these are probably well-suited for giving cyclists an alternative to a harrowing trip on South Lamar. The trade-off could be worth it. And not just to the enthused and confident.

Liquid Is the AirBNB of Bike Share

Want to rent a glow-in-the-dark fixie? Just $15 a day in Portland.
I've loved every chance I've gotten to ride a bike in a foreign city - though it isn't always easy. In Amsterdam, where bikes abound, there is a bike sharing program, as there is in Barcelona, Stockholm, Paris, and Berlin - more than 100 European cities. These bike sharing services are geared more toward city residents than tourists, and they can be easy to sign up for, moderately difficult, or downright impossible. Bike sharing is superior to regular bike rental for a couple of reasons - usually the first half-hour of the service is free (once you've purchased some type of nominal membership), and there are more locations for dropping off the bike and then, later on, picking up another one.
Bike sharing has definitely arrived on US shores - Denver has a great service, Washington DC's bike share has become extremely popular, and new programs are planned for cities across the nation, from New York to Portland and points in between.
If for any reason you are away from your hometown, however, and want to find a bike wherever you find yourself, there's a new service that's trying to be the AirBNB of the biking world. First formed in 2011 as Spinlister, the San Francisco-based bike "sharing" service now called Liquid aims to make renting out your bike as easy as renting out your extra room.
As Liquid puts it:

Bike owners still can earn incremental income while meeting people who share an interest (and often a passion) for bikes. Renters still get to rent a great bike at a reasonable price from a friendly local. We’re deeply committed to making this interaction as safe, easy, and downright fun as possible.

Of course, Liquid can't provide the multiple locations that a bike share can, nor does this service offer free short trips. In fact, the prices that people charge for lending you their precious bicycles vary pretty wildly, and aren't significantly cheaper than renting a bike from a storefront bike store.
On the other hand, let's say you are a small family and find yourself at the mercy of distant relatives in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro, and then find yourself further stranded without a car. If you know about Liquid, you can rent a beautiful bakfiets (one child an easy haul) for just 10 bucks a day, or a Surly longtail bike (two kids or a kid and a light adult, no problem) for $20 dollars a day, and easily, two-wheeled freedom is yours.

Aside from providing a great service, Liquid can be a good way to meet people in an unfamiliar city, or, even experience a number of different biking styles in your own backyard. Professional road bikes to fixies to folders are available at Liquid, and the service exists in many, though not all, major U.S. cities. In some places, you can even rent a unicycle.

Bikescore Now Available From Walkscore

There are many great organization working on promoting alternatives to car-centric transportation in the U.S., and Walkscore is one of them. If knowledge is power, that's exactly what they provide: Knowledge about how walkable and bikeable various cities and neighborhoods are, empowering people make informed choices about where they want to live and, hopefully, helping policymakers improve infrastructure.

The great thing is, they keep improving their service! Last Spring they started ranking cities by how bike-friendly they are, and now they've already made that data more granular. You can now see bikeability info on an address-by-address basis for 25 cities in the U.S. and 11 in Canada.

So you can now type an address and get the bike score for that particular location, but you can also look at those cities' maps (full list here) and see overlaid 'heat maps' that show which areas are better than others, either for overall bike score or for things like bike lanes or topography. It's very cool!
They've also incorporated bike-sharing data:

Bonus: Walk Score Now Has Bike Shares
We have also mapped nearly 1,600 locations of bike shares across North America. Search for any address in these cities and find bike share locations listed as one of the main categories: Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York, Houston, Washington, D.C., Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Broward, Charlotte, Des Moines, Kailua, Kansas City, Madison, Nashville, Omaha, San Antonio and Spartanburg.

Keep up the good work, Walkscore!

Via Walkscore

Open Streets Continue to Grow and be Successful!

H.G. Wells was quoted as saying that the sight of an adult on a bicycle gave him hope for the future of the human race. I feel the same about ciclovías, those wonderful big-city events in which streets usually packed with cars get cordoned off for all types of wheeling and walking citizens. Cyclovías originated in Bogotá, Columbia 35 years ago, part of an effort to make that city friendlier for pedestrians and cyclists and reduce the dominance of automobiles.

Bogotá’s sustainably-minded former mayor Enrique Peñalosa made ciclovías popular starting in the 1990s, and helped to stimulate the spread of ciclovías worldwide (though they are sometimes named something different, such as Portland's Sunday Parkways or LA's CicLAvia. One of the beautiful thing about the ciclovías in Bogotá and Lima, for example, is that they happen each week, and draw thousands upon thousands. In the U.S. the events are usually just a couple of times, during the summer.

In the video, the streets of Guadalajara, which has 64 kilometers of closed streets each Sunday, are featured. Filmed by Sheila of Sheila and Kai, a couple biking the world to live their dream, this nearly five minute video is a sweet treat because of the way Sheila captures the streets with people on bikes, skates, skateboards and on foot, occupying them. They form a contrast to the noisy, chaotic, and stress-filled streets that are generally filled with cars day and night in most big cities.
Luckily, the ciclovía movement is still expanding. Take a look at all the cities (and this list is by no means definitive).


2 cycle 2gether Around the World :: Guadalajara Via RecreActiva from 2cycle 2gether on Vimeo.