Floyd A. O'Reilly Blog: The Monday Roundup: Tokenism in advocacy, murals in Montreal, handcycling in London and more

Monday, May 2, 2016

The Monday Roundup: Tokenism in advocacy, murals in Montreal, handcycling in London and more

This week’s Monday Roundup is brought to you by Hassalo on Eighth, Portland’s newest bike-friendly community.

Here are the bike links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:

Bike-path murals: Montréal may allow them.

Bikes and disability: In London, about 15 percent of people with disabilities bike for transportation compared to 18 percent of people without disabilities, observes wheelchair handcyclist Isabelle Clement.

New York City’s Pulaski Bridge between Queens and Brooklyn has a “magnificent” new protected bike lane.

Tokenism in advocacy: “Sometimes we have to tokenize ourselves for the sake of pushing the movement forward,” said Los Angeles Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Tamika Butler. It’s the prompt for an uncomfortable, interesting piece about race in the biking movement.

“Interesting outriggers”: Seattle is voting on a ballot measure that would preserve or rebuild its allegedly architecturally significant Harbor Viaduct for elevated park space.

Drinking while driving: It’s still legal in Mississippi.

Road rules: After an advocacy campaign, Idaho’s driving test now asks about people biking and walking.

Bike-share equity: “Most bike-share systems are too small to provide useful transportation options,” writes NACTO’s bike-share expert.

Manufactured consent: CNN viewers see five times as much advertising by the oil industry as they do reporting on climate change.

Freeway bottleneck: Texas has cut congestion on State Route 161 by turning the shoulder of a two-lane bottleneck between two three-way stretches into a traffic lane, but some predict gains will be temporary as traffic expands to fill the demand.

Auto lobby: Google, Ford, Uber, Lyft and Volvo have teamed up to create the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, the first lobby group for self-driving cars.

Roof racks: Aerodynamic drag from roof racks might be responsible for 1 percent of all national fuel consumption by cars and SUVs. (The other 99 percent: yep, it’s the cars and SUVs.)

Frankentrike: It’s electric-assisted, hauls 500 pounds of cargo, gets 900 miles to the gallon-equivalent and is currently fundraising on Indiegogo.

Vision Zero: The growing movement to aim for zero traffic deaths draws coverage in Fortune magazine.

Measuring urbanism: Portland-based City Observatory has created a “Storefront Index” that measures the vibrancy of an area by number and concentration of commercial shops. (Portland’s downtown ranks 10th nationally in a virtual tie with Seattle.)

Measuring walking: Walk Score measures walkability of a location by the variety of destination types within walking distance. Portland’s rose in 2016, but not as fast as others like St. Louis or Los Angeles, which now top us; we’re 16th.

Mountain biking: After three years’ advocacy, a new 4.5-mile trail is the start of a planned system at Silver Falls State Park near Salem.

Parking: With many competing needs on major streets, “San Francisco Needs to Get Out of the Car Storage Business,” writes Streetsblog SF.

Study tour: Mayor Charlie Hales was in Copenhagen last week, riding bikes with U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and the Danish Cycling Embassy.

Root causes: The problem with texting while driving isn’t actually the texting, notes FastCoExist. It’s the driving.

Montana crowdfunding: Missoula’s nonprofit bike shop is looking to buy the land it operates on.

Car-free Champs-Élysées: Starting on Sunday, the most famous street in the world will be pedestrian-only one day a month.

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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