Floyd A. O'Reilly Blog: The Monday Roundup: LA’s future lane capacity, America’s worst bus stop and more

Monday, September 25, 2017

The Monday Roundup: LA’s future lane capacity, America’s worst bus stop and more

The wide protected bike lanes are in green.
(Image: Perkins+Will, Nelson\Nygaard)

This week’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by Urban Tribe, the affordable family cargo bike.

Here are the bike-related links that caught our eyes this week:

Lane allocation: Check out the lane capacity charts on Lyft’s vision of LA’s future streets.

Against stoplights: Amsterdam flipped off the traffic signals at a busy multimodal intersection and saw startlingly good results. “People pay more attention,” said one man.

Private bike share: The 4,000 private shared bikes in Seattle have been “far more successful in two months than Pronto ever was in its two years.”

Rose Quarter freeway: CityLab’s headline calls our local expansion battle “the freeway fight of the century” and Mayor Ted Wheeler’s argument for it “rather disingenuous.”

Worst bus stop: Streetsblog’s annual honors went to Seattle this year.

Bike share theft: Baltimore’s year-old system has been temporarily shut down because so many bikes were lost or damaged.

Around the world: Mark Beaumont of Scotland pedaled from Paris to Paris in 78 days, shattering the previous 123-day record.

Illegal pedals: An obscure and widely ignored Kansas law effectively bans clip pedals.

Race realism: The former Reddit discussion board about racism being good was taken over by a group of people discussing bike races.

Re-legalizing walking: California’s legislature has voted to end a ban on entering crosswalks while “don’t walk” is flashing.

Walking Portland: In Curbed, Lents-based writer Britany Robinson has a very nice meditation on walking and Portland laced into a 20-mile walk from her home to downtown.

North Portland Greenway: Development fees have provided the local funding for a bike-walk bridge across North Columbia Boulevard, a key link in the future NP Greenway trail.

Tesla subsidy: Citing labor issues, California Democrats want to restrict Teslas’ eligibility for a $2,500 rebate per electric car that has cost the state $82.5 million over seven years.

Engineering, schemengineering: Transportation secretary Elaine Chao apparently believes that Americans are far more evil than Europeans, given her claim last week that “human behavior is the primary cause of all highway fatalities.”

101 tips: Curbed has a massive list of ideas for improving transportation in your city — some personal, some collective.

East Portland advocate: Professional east Portland advocate Lore Wintergreen has a new compatriot on the East Portland Action Plan: Cameron Whitten, a prominent local activist who happens to get around largely by bike.

“All Lives Splatter”: That was the headline on the image of an SUV hitting stick figures shared by a South Dakota state legislator and (accidentally) by a Washington state county sheriff’s department. “Nobody cares about your protest. Keep your ass out of the road.”

“Whose street? Our street!” That was the chant reported to have come from some St. Louis police officers in riot gear as they forcefully shut down a demonstration about excessive violence by police.

Plunger-protected bike lane: Rochester, N.Y. is the latest city to see a guerrilla demonstration.

Atlanta BRT: Politicians in the fast-growing region have fallen for bus lanes.

Finally, a video of the week: The same day a group of Portlanders announced that they were planning a human-protected bike lane on Naito Parkway this week, residents of Lyon, France were enjoying one of their own: