Day 22 of LA’s Vision Zero failure to end traffic deaths by 2025.
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It’s another light bike news day, so let’s jump right in.
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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.
A Next City op-ed says Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s campaign to rip out Toronto’s bike lanes has nothing to do with traffic, and is all about the battle between “Old Toronto” and the city’s auto-centric suburbs. Or maybe just an egocentric, bike-hating politician.
Once again, bicyclists have been the victims of anti-bike attack, as a Wellington, New Zealand man was lucky to escape with just a flat tire after someone tossed tacks onto a number of bikeways around the city; as a recent chemo patient, he had to rely on the kindness of strangers to change his tube. Several other people took to social media to report similar attacks, which have been going on since last month.
But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.
It turns out the French ebike rider we mentioned yesterday who pled guilty to causing the death of a 51-year old man riding a regular bicycle in Yorkshire, England was actually riding an electric motorcycle, which explains the confusion over the charges. Which is why we need to find another term to distinguish between ped-assist ebikes, and electric mo-peds and motorcycles.
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Local
Long Beach will host a public meeting February 13th to discuss the Orange Avenue Backbone Bikeway along the city’s deadliest corridor for pedestrians, and part of Long Beach’s Elevate ‘28 five-year infrastructure plan.
State
New Streetsblog California editor Damien Newton introduces himself, and says his approach to the site will be a little more “bloggy.” While former editor Melanie Curry will be missed, the site couldn’t be in better hands than Damien, who brought Streetsblog to California in the first place as the founder of Streetsblog Los Angeles.
Goleta is conducting an E-Bike Safety Awareness Week this week, which seems to consist mainly of watching an ebike safety video and the CHP’s online ebike safety and training program.
Berkeley is asking for feedback on the city’s 2017 bike plan, as they prepare to update it later this year; the city has identified ten key projects for the new plan. Although the real question is how much of the old plan was actually built, to give some idea of how seriously to take the new one.
San Francisco introduced a new bike plan calling for improvements to 385 routes or street segments. Unlike Los Angeles, they actually dust theirs off from time to time. Never mind that LA’s bike plan hasn’t been updated since 2010, unless you count councilmembers removing key streets from the plan before it was subsumed into the new mobility plan in 2016.
National
People For Bikes says the new AASHTO and NACTO — aka American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and National Association of City Transportation Officials — bikeway guides offer valuable resources for communities to build great places to ride.
An Oregon legislator says “oopsie” about his new bill that would ban throttle-controlled Class 3 ebikes from sidewalks bike lanes, clarifying that it was probably a “misnomer” on his part, since Class 3 ebikes are ped-asssist, rather than throttle-controlled, and that the law was actually targeted towards small electric motorcycles and mopeds.
Two-way, curb-protected bike lanes have now made their way south to Tampa, Florida, in the heart of the country’s deadliest state for people on bicycles. .
International
Momentum ranks the best international bicycle festivals worth traveling for; #1 on the list is Monterey’s Sea Otter Classic. Although what’s missing is any mention of LA’s CicLAvia, though they do include the original in Bogotá.
An Irish minister cancelled plans for a major cut to the Value Added Tax for bicycles over fears that retailers might pocket the savings instead of passing them on to bike buyers. In the simplest terms, VAT is like a sales tax that is built into the retail price, rather than adding it on afterwards; the advantage is that the price you see is the price you pay.
A Dutch university researcher is hitting the road on an ebike equipped with an array of LIDAR sensors to map and identify everything on the road, in an effort to develop an AI system to help drivers avoid people on bicycles.
Competitive Cycling
Velo remembers pioneering American cyclist Doug Shapiro, a two-time Olympian, 1984 Coors Classic champ, and just the third Yank to ride in the Tour de France.
Finally…
Your next e-mountain bike could be a Porsche. It’s not a high bike theft zone, it’s a Bicycle Redistribution Point.
And that feeling when a reviewer calls a futuristic hubless ebike a death trap and the worst bicycle in the world.
But other than that, he liked it, right?
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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.
Oh, and fuck Putin.
