Floyd A. O'Reilly Blog: The Monday Roundup: Myopic marketing, wheelchair biking, pedaling protest, and more

Monday, February 5, 2018

The Monday Roundup: Myopic marketing, wheelchair biking, pedaling protest, and more

Welcome to the week. Looks like the rain is gone for a bit and we’ve warmed up a bit. I might even try riding without gloves today. I know, right!

You might notice something new this week: I’ve started giving credit to sources of links we use in the roundup. Giving credit is one of the most important tenets of the web, and it’s always bothered me that I didn’t do this in the past. I also hope you’ll discover new and smart people to follow on Twitter.

Here are the best stories we came across last week…

Unsafe at any level of nudity: A man is suing the City of Portland for $566,000 after he hit a median curb on SE Morrison and suffered injuries on his way home from the World Naked Bike Ride in 2016. (via The Oregonian)

On a related note: Los Angeles paid out $19 million last year to bicycle riders and their families to settle lawsuits related to crashes caused by unsafe road conditions. (via @bikinginorange)

Pedaling for net neutrality: A protestor rode his bike around FCC headquarters — and purposely held up a full lane of road users — to make a point about net neutrality. (via Steve K.)

Bad dockless: When you plop a bunch of shareable bikes into a city that has no supportive bike cutlure or respect for cycling in general, you get a huge mess (and lots of dockless naysayers). (via John L.)

Good dockless: China has had a huge problem with dockless bike messes too, but Streetsblog reports that, “Cycling rates have doubled in Chinese cities since the advent of dockless bike-share system.”

Picking up trash by bike: That feeling when some cool people actually did the thing you’ve been thinking about for many years: a bike tour devoted to picking up trash. Imagine if we got dozens of people together and did this in one quadrant of Portland? (via @BarbChamberlain)

Segments a security risk: How come nobody told soldiers and army staff to turn off Strava when logging bike rides in war zones? (via @BikeRadar)

Biking emerges after the storm: As we’ve seen with many major natural disasters, people re-discover the efficacy of bicycles as a transportation tool. People for Bikes has the latest from Puerto Rico, post Maria.

Industry’s myopic marketing: There’s a lot of talk in the bike industry that road cycling is way down. Maybe that’s because the pain-and-suffering and win-at-all-costs marketing imagery is very unappealing to all but the tiny percentage of hardcore riders already participating in the sport. (via CyclingTips.com)

Cross-border bike share: El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico are about to launch a two-country bike-share system. (via @Pflax1)

Future transport pact: Fresh on heels of Uber’s big integration with Jump (formerly Social Bicycles), 15 bike-share and ride-hailing companies signed a pact promising to do keep the best interests of urban livability at core of their mission.

Quick and cheap sidewalks: We talk a lot about protected bikeways. Have you seen Seattle’s “protected walking lanes”? They make them with just paint and curbs. (via Streetsblog)

Biking for all: A wheelchair biking program has popped up in Sequim, Washington. With the demand for adaptive bikes in Portland, I wonder if someone could make this work here? (via @IansRide2016)

Prioritize walking now: When cities make walking easier and driving less convenient in dense urban areas, fewer people die. This article has shares a provocative insight: U.S. fatality rates have only gone down because we took people off their feet and put them in cars — which ultimately leads to less safe conditions. (via @awalkerinLA)

Video of the week: The definition of entitlement is, “the fact of having a right to something.”

Here’s more of what we saw from #Skycam9 as drivers took to the bike path to avoid a crash SB LSD past 57th. @WGNMorningNews pic.twitter.com/QsSdB6onDj

— Sarah Jindra (@SarahJindra) February 1, 2018