Category: Biking Elsewhere

Dan and Sadie McCrady (the latter a remarkable yellow Labrador) cycled the East Coast Greenway from Annapolis, MD to Portland, MD. See their daily blog/story and pictures at https://traildog-sadie.blogspot.com/
Continue reading “Maryland-to-Maine: Cute Dog/OK Man Complete East Coast Greenway Adventure”

Leaders of South Williamsburg’s Hasidic community said yesterday that bike lanes that bring scantily clad cyclists – especially sexy women – peddling through their neighborhood are definitely not kosher.
Continue reading “And you thought you heard all the reasons why there should be no bike lanes”

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In China, electric bicycles are leaving cars in the dust. Last year, Chinese bought 21 million e-bikes, compared with 9.4 million autos. While China now has about 25 million cars on the road, it has four times as many e-bikes. Thanks to government encouragement and a population well versed in riding two wheels to work, the country has become the world’s leading market for the cheap, green vehicles, helping to offset some of the harmful effects of the country’s automobile boom. Indeed, as engineers around the world scramble to create eco-friendly, plug-in electric cars, China is already ahead of the game. Says Frank Jamerson, a former GM engineer turned electric-vehicle analyst: "What’s happening in China is sort of a clue to what the future will be."
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Continue reading “Electric bicycles are leaving cars in the dust”

Matthew Modine founder of the advocacy group "Bicycle for a Day" held a fundraising party for this project last night at Solar One, the City’s first solar-powered “Green Energy, Arts, and Education Center.” Modine plan’s to recycle New York City’s junk bikes and distribute them around the world so more people will be able to participate in "Bicycle for a Day." This project will debut in Iraq and Afghanistan. Modine was also joined by a whole host of cycling enthusiasts and promoters from the Consulate General of the Netherlands to Grammy Award winning beatbox artist Rahzel.
Continue reading “Street Films: Bicycle For A Day”

Younger drivers (18-21 years) are over-involved in crashes. Research suggests that one of the reasons for this over-involvement is their failure to scan areas of the roadway for information about potential risks in situations that are hazardous, but not obviously so. The primary objective of the present study is to develop and evaluate a training program that addresses this failure. It was hypothesised that PC-based hazard anticipation training would increase the likelihood that younger drivers would scan for potential hazards on the open road. In order to test this hypothesis, 12 trained and 12 untrained drivers’ eye movements were measured as they drove a vehicle on local residential, feeder and arterial roads. Overall, the trained drivers were significantly more likely to gaze at areas of the roadway that contained information relevant to the reduction of risks (64.4%) than were the untrained drivers (37.4%). Significant training effects were observed even in situations on the road that were quite different from those shown in training. These findings have clear implications for the type of training of teen drivers that is necessary in order to increase their anticipation of hazards.
Continue reading “Can younger drivers be trained to identify hazards/risks in roadway traffic scenarios?”

-> "Every additional 30 minutes spent in a car each day translates into a 3 percent greater chance of being obese. People who live in neighborhoods with a mix of shops and businesses within easy walking distance are 7 percent less likely to be obese."
— Lawrence Frank, University of British Columbia
Continue reading “Quantity time in car = quantity of you”

[Having just done a bike trip around the car centric university in Towson I thought this might be of interest to show the potential of bicycling.]
-> According to the June issue of ITS-Davis e-news, "The results of the third campus travel assessment are almost complete, and they show that a greater percentage of people biked and fewer drove alone to campus in 2008 than in 2007. While the changes were small — 3% increase in biking and 5% decrease in driving alone — they trend in the direction campus transportation planners would like to see…"
According to the accompanying graphic, in 2008 40.2% biked to campus, 24.3% drove alone, 19.9% took the bus, 7.5% carpooled, 5.6% walked, 1.4% telecommuted, 0.8% took the train, and 0.3% skated.
Continue reading “UNIV. OF CALIF. DAVIS SURVEY: 40% BICYCLE TO CAMPUS”

By Jon Schmitz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Motorists are being urged to become bicyclists, transit riders or pedestrians for at least one day a week, starting Friday.
From 8 to 10 a.m., the Car-Free Friday project, an initiative of Bike Pittsburgh, will kick off with an event at Schenley Plaza in Oakland, featuring free breakfast. Also that morning, Downtown bicycle riders who show their helmets can partake of a free light breakfast at Fifth Avenue Place.
Those who attend either event will receive coupons for discounts at more than two dozen local businesses.
"Breaking away from the one-person one-car mode is in everybody’s interest. We urge people not only to participate on [Friday], but to be car-free every Friday, and more often if possible," said Lynn Manion, executive director of the Airport Corridor Transportation Association, one of three transportation management associations supporting the event.
Port Authority, which is co-sponsoring the event with Whole Foods Market and the Mullen advertising agency, said nearly two-thirds of its buses now have bicycle racks.
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Continue reading “Pittsburgh’s Car-Free Friday kicks off with breakfast events”

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DAVID WILSON, the cycle club’s president, said there was clearly a safety issue that needed to be addressed by putting up signs, enforcing speed limits, widening part of the road, or even installing a few hundred feet of rumble strips to slow cars trying to get around vehicles making a left.
But he said that had the accidents not been at a Department of Transportation center, there would have been no chance of four miles of ridged curtain. The road’s accident rate was lower than the state average, Mr. Wilson added, there were virtually no reports of drivers falling asleep, and the strips seemed to violate the department’s regulations.
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“What was a reasonably safe thoroughfare for bicyclists was essentially destroyed by the addition of the rumble strips,” went one of the dozens of complaints sent to the department. The writer said that a road where she had taught her son to ride a bike “now represents a significant danger to bicyclists and motorists.”
After the department issued a report supporting the project, the cycle club filed suit June 1 asking a state court to force it to pave over the strips.
Continue reading “Bike Club sues State over rumble strips”

More Americans rode bicycles for recreation and transportation in 2008 than in any year since the turn of this century, according to the National Sporting Goods Association and the Outdoor Foundation. According to the NSGA, 44.7 million people age 7 and older rode a bike more than 6 times last year, up from 40.1 million in 2007 and 35.6 million in 2006. The 11% increase is attributed to factors such as record high gas prices last summer, a growing green movement and increased funding for bicycle infrastructure. Overall, bike riding placed 6th in the NSGA’s participation list, behind exercise walking, swimming, exercising with equipment, bowling and camping, in that order.
Continue reading “More Americans rode bicycles for recreation and transportation in 2008”