baltimorespokes

No city in Maryland made it 🙁
Continue reading “Top 101 cities with the most people taking a bicycle to work”

There was a news article about Huffy pedals falling off so I went to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission site to find the details and I got 42 hits of various Huffy products falling apart. If you have a Huffy bike it may be worth your trouble of looking through the CPSC site.
Continue reading “Huffy Recall Notices”

[A letter to the editor Washington Post]
Per a request from a gentleman who drove quite close to me — and vocally protested my right to share the road — while I was riding my bike south on 17th Street NW around N Street in the District one morning last week, I did look into the law. According to the D.C. Department of Transportation’s guide "Common Enforcement Errors Involving Bicyclists," which is available on the agency’s Web site:
"A bicyclist does not have to ride to the far right if the lane is narrow or if he/she is trying to avoid car doors, pavement hazards, or similar hazardous conditions. A narrow lane is defined as one [that is] 11 feet or less. Most lanes in the District are 11 feet or less."
At the time, I was passing a truck parked in the right lane and another bicyclist. Further, the law "requires an overtaking vehicle to pass to the left at a safe distance." This clearly was not the case during this incident.
Finally, according to the Washington Area Bicyclist Association Web site, "Full lane use [is] allowed when traveling at the normal speed of traffic," as I was.
I am embarrassed that I replied to this gentleman’s anger with equal anger. For that I apologize.
Continue reading “Where Bicyclists Can Ride”

by Harry Jaffe, The Examiner
WASHINGTON (Map, News) – Paris has a few things we Washingtonians might envy. The Eiffel Tower, the Left Bank, fine cuisine at every corner – and those thin, stylish, bored Parisians who smoke Gauloises and sip Bordeaux at cafes all day and night.
On a more bourgeois note, I have been in awe of the French capital city’s that allows Parisians or visitors to swipe a card, grab a bike, and ride around town to the Louvre.
Envy no more. Washington, D.C., is about to become the first major U.S. city to embark on "Velib" bike rental system, an automated bicycle rental system, much like the Zipcar program for cars.
"We hope to have it fully up and running by spring," says Jim Sebastian, who manages the District’s bike and pedestrian programs. D.C. will start with 100 bikes in four kiosks; Paris has 15,000 bikes. "We hope to expand to the Paris level."
Continue reading “Parisian cool comes to D.C. on two wheels”

The series of TV ads shows women shaking their little finger – a gesture used to symbolise a small penis – as speeding male motorists race past.

The $A1.9m (
Continue reading “TV anti-speeding ad hits below the belt”

After clocks are turned back this weekend, pedestrians walking during the evening rush hour are nearly three times more likely to be struck and killed by cars than before the time change, two scientists calculate. Ending daylight saving time translates into about 37 more U.S. pedestrian deaths around 6 p.m. in November compared to October, the researchers report.
Their study of risk to pedestrians is preliminary but confirms previous findings of higher deaths after clocks are set back in fall.
It’s not the darkness itself, but the adjustment to earlier nighttime that’s the killer, said professors Paul Fischbeck and David Gerard, both of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
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Continue reading “Study ties time shift, pedestrian deaths”