Floyd A. O'Reilly Blog: The Monday Roundup: Seattle’s secret, Sicily’s stereo cycles, sad satire, and more

Monday, November 20, 2017

The Monday Roundup: Seattle’s secret, Sicily’s stereo cycles, sad satire, and more

Welcome to the week! These are the best stories we came across in the past seven days…

Sponsored by Go To Ortho, a walk-in immediate injury care clinic that treats urgent injuries like breaks, sprains, fractures, dislocations and wounds.

Sad-tire: This Onion article is hits close to home when it quotes a make-believe NHTSA official as saying, “If every cyclist purchased and operated a car like you’re supposed to as an adult, bike fatalities would drop an estimated 40 percent within six months alone.”

Stereo-cycles: Teens in Palermo Sicily are into a hot new trend: Putting as many speakers as possible onto their bicycles.

Seattle’s secret sauce: Turns out the 1991, statewide “Commute Trip Reduction” law is one of the keys to Seattle’s success in reducing drive-alone trips.

L.A.’s bike bunker: While inspecting a homeless camp in Los Angeles, authorities uncovered a tunnel with 1,000 bikes, many of them suspected to be stolen.

Meanwhile, in Oregon: Two auto industry groups are lobbying the Oregon Supreme Court to kill the new 0.5% sales tax on new car purchases that the legislature passed to help pay for transportation investments.

Must-read transit journalism: The NY Times went deep to uncover the causes of NYC’s subway system failure.

Bikenomics strikes again: As Portland gets ready to start the SE Foster road diet project, Bike Biz UK has the story of a business owner who vehemently opposed a street project that removed auto parking — only to embrace the project after it was done.

When driving cars is outlawed: This story on Autoblog envisions a day soon where human-driven cars won’t be allowed on public roads so driving enthusiasts will take to the hills (and the tracks).

TriMet autopsy: Analysis from TransitCenter shows how housing price increases figure into the TriMet bus ridership decline. Lower-income people who are typically heavier transit users, now live further out, in places with less transit service, and vice versa.

Race and renderings: A Streetsblog LA writer is miffed at renderings for a new project in a black community that shows only white people as its future denizens.

Getting tough on Uber: Is Portland City Council about to stand up to Uber? Possibly even kick them out of town?

Traffic deaths continue to rise: The 2016 fatal crash data is complete and it shows that the threat posed by vehicular travel in America is growing faster than our efforts to mitigate it.

E-MTBs coming to a trail near you: The International Mountain Bicycling Association now officially supports the use of Class 1 (pedal-assisted) e-bikes on dirt trails.

Bike share race: WaPo hosted a race of all six (yes six!) of D.C.’s current crop of bike share bikes.

Dockless disappearance: Industry watchers are buzzing about the abrupt death of Bluegogo, a China-based dockless bike share company. Is it an outlier or an omen?

Speed kills: Yet DOTs continue to raise speed limits. In Ohio crashes increased 24 percent in stretches of rural road where speed limits were increased to 70 mph.

MVdP = GOAT: A long and very pleasant read about cycling (mostly cyclocross) phenom Mathieu Van der Poel, whom CyclingTips calls “the most talented bike racer on the planet.”

Twitter thread of the week:

I am becoming convinced that autonomous vehicles are designed to solve the problem of "I live in a wealthy suburb but have a horrible car commute and don't want to drive anymore but also hate trains and buses."

— (((Matthew Lewis))) (@mateosfo) November 18, 2017