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Showing posts from April 13, 2014

Liz Hatch - Come Ride with Me (2009)

HALF THE ROAD - Official Trailer (Long Version)

A Glowing Cycling Jacket Inspired By Tron | FastCompany

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A sleek new cycling jacket was originally inspired by some failed Halloween costumes: Designer  Elton King  watched as his friends tried to dress like characters from Tron by gluing glow sticks on their clothing. “It just looked ridiculous,” King says. “But there wasn’t an affordable version of that suit on the market.” King, who had experience working in the reflective textile industry, realized that cyclists didn’t have an affordable option for reflective clothing either, and decided to step in to fill the gap. “There were no absolutely no choices for reflective garments in my price range that looked nice,” he says. “The options that did look nice ranged anywhere from $320 to $1,800, which is way too expensive for someone like me. I made up my mind that I would do the world a favor, and make the coolest reflective jacket out there, and make it as affordable as possible.” The jacket, which is  currently up on Kickstarter , is designed with basically every feature that cyclists

Texting Driver Who Slammed Cyclist: I, Like, 'Just Don't Care'

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Poor Kimberley Davis. The 21-year-old Australian woman was livid when she slammed into a bicyclist while texting late last year, putting dents in her car. The victim suffered a spinal fracture and would spend the next three months in a hospital, but  Davis wasn't having any of it , The Standard reports. "I just don’t care because I’ve already been through a lot of bullshit and my car is, like, pretty expensive and now I have to fix it," she told a responding officer two days after the Sept. 20 collision. "I’m kind of pissed off that the cyclist has hit the side of my car. I don’t agree that people texting and driving could hit a cyclist. I wasn’t on my phone when I hit the cyclist." Davis, of Port Fairy, pleaded guilty on Monday to dangerous driving and was fined $4,500. Police say she used her phone behind the wheel 44 times before running down the cyclist. She called emergency responders but parked more than 300 feet away from the victim and refused t

GAS TAX: BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE | LAB

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The League was honored to once again host Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) at the 2014 National Bike Summit, where he  spoke  about a very important piece of new legislation under consideration in the House. The League has endorsed that bill,  HR 3636:   Update, Promote, and Develop America's Transportation Essentials Act of 2013, which  increases the  gas tax and indexes it for inflation for the years 2015 through 2024. The bill also expresses the sense of Congress that by 2025, the gas tax should be repealed and replaced with a more sustainable, stable funding source for transportation funding .   We've endorsed Blumenauer's bill because we believe the immediate chronic shortfall in transportation funding is detrimental for two critical reasons.  One, the massive investment we've made over the past 50 years in a national transportation system that is increasingly multi-modal is threatened by the lack of funding to maintain the infrastructur

Portland DRT - Disaster Relief Training

Portland DRT from Russ Roca on Vimeo .

The States And Cities That Are Best For Getting To Work On Two Feet

Are we slowly seeing the death of the car commute? An exhaustive new report commissioned by the CDC looks at the progress the U.S. has made in encouraging walking and cycling. There's been a big shift in how cities and states view cycling and walking. Having barely heard of a protected bike lane a few years ago, many are now putting in friendlier infrastructure and generally making bikers and pedestrians feel more valued. Which city is the furthest ahead? You can get a sense from an exhaustive new report that ranks states and cities, commissioned by the CDC and coordinated by the  Alliance for Biking & Walking , a coalition of advocacy groups. We picked out a few points here. THE STREETS ARE GETTING SAFER It may not always seem that way, but the data says so. Since 1980, the number of pedestrian fatalities has fallen from 3.6 per 100,000 people to 1.4, the report says. The cyclist-death rate has also fallen, from 0.4 per 100,000 people in 1980, to 0.2 in 2011. Having

Citi Bike reveals how New Yorkers ride their bikes | treehugger

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© Charles Sykes, Invision for Citi Where do  Citi Bikers  ride? When do they ride? How far do they go? Which stations are most popular? What days of the week are most rides taken on? These are the questions that we can now answer thanks to New York's bike share's move in the direction of more transparency: They have officially opened their trove of usage data to the public, allowing anyone to create all kinds of visualizations and graphs to better tease out how cyclists in NYC behave, something that could be very useful to determine where to put more stations, build more bike lanes, and improve multi-modal  transit . Above is a visualization of the Citi Bike data for a few days last September. You might not see much activity at the beginning of the video, but it's because it starts in the middle of the night. If you wait - or fast forward - to the next morning, you'll see the map light up as people commute to work. [ Read more on treehugger.com  ]

Woman pleads guilty in bicyclist's death | Columbus Dispatch

An angry Franklin County Common Pleas judge threw a 20-year-old University District woman into jail yesterday after she admitted that she’d smoked marijuana before pleading guilty to the hit-skip death of a Columbus man. Judge Mark A. Serrott said it was “ridiculous” that Jasmine J. Herring, of 361 Clinton St., had been using drugs before coming to court to plead guilty to vehicular manslaughter, leaving the scene of an accident and tampering with evidence in the July 3 death of 21-year-old Elijah Smith. Serrott set a bond hearing for 9 a.m. Thursday to decide whether Herring should remain in jail while she awaits her May 29 sentencing. He said he heard that she had been “out clubbing” and so questioned her about drug use during her plea hearing yesterday. The defense and prosecuting attorneys recommended a sentence of four years and 11 months in prison, with early release possible. Serrott said he didn’t know whether he would accept that recommendation. [Keep reading at Colum

8 Fascinating Facts about Bicycling and Walking in the United States | Alliance for Biking & Walking

Today marks the release of the brand new 2014 Alliance Benchmarking Report, a massive compendium of data and research on walking and bicycling in all 50 states, 52 of the most populous cities, and 17 midsized cities. The Alliance produces the Benchmarking Report every two years in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Healthy Community Design Initiative. Our goal: to comprehensively examine bicycling and walking transportation across the U.S. and how these trends relate to public health, safety, and social and economic well being. Want to check it out for yourself?  Download the report here .  Download the 2014 Report There’s a TON of really fascinating data in this year’s Alliance Benchmarking Report. Here’s our peek at the eight most interesting data points. 1. We're seeing small but steady increases in the number of people biking and walking to work. The average large American city experienced a 5.9% increase in population from 2000 t

360° Video Using 6 GoPro Cameras - Spherical Panorama Timelapse

Jobseekers to get 50 free bikes under £5,000 Sustrans scheme | BBC News

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A trial scheme will see 50 unemployed people receive a free bike, helmet and lights to help them find a job Jobseekers in Derby will be given free bikes refurbished by prisoners in a bid to help them find work. Transport charity Sustrans will buy a bike, helmet and lights for 50 unemployed people in a scheme thought to be the first of its kind in the UK. The £5,000 trial is funded by the city council's  Connected  initiative, aimed at encouraging alternatives to cars. Al Ditheridge, from Sustrans, said he was "hopeful" more money would be granted to extend the scheme. "Where affordability is an issue, bikes are cheap, they are cost-effective," he said. Continue reading the main story "The main person who's going to get a jobseeker a job is the jobseeker. What the bike might help them do is go for training opportunities and go for work opportunities. "Potentially a shift worker can't access a bus as there are no buses at 2am

Dutch Test Glow-In-The-Dark Road Of The Future | NPR

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Glowing Lines are tested earlier this month on a highway near Oss in the Netherlands.  The road markings absorb light during the day and emit the green glow at night. Remko De Waal / EPA/Landov There's a half-kilometer stretch of road in the Netherlands that looks a bit like something out of the movie  Tron , thanks to new luminescent markings that glow green in the dark. The photoluminescent paint, a sort of amped-up version of what is found on many wristwatches, charges up during daylight hours and then emits the green hue at night along the short test patch of N329 highway in Oss, according to Dutch companies  Studio Roosegaarde  and Heijmans, a road construction firm. "It's almost radioactive," says artist Daan Roosegaarde, who envisioned the project as being a sort of "Route 66 of the future,"  according to Wired , which says part of the ultimate vision is for "weather markings — snowdrops, for instance, [to] appear when the temp

COUNTERTOP CONCEPT BIKE: DEZIEN’S BICYCLE THAT POWERS YOUR HOME | Bike Radar

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The appliances sitting atop your kitchen countertop may pull energy from the grid, but the Levitation bicycle built from the same acrylic as that kitchen countertop can put energy back into it. We knew cycling was green, but  DEzien  is taking it to a whole new level. Connect on through to see how the electricity you create on the Levitation can power your home. And e-car. And iPhone and microwave and… [Keep reading at Bike Radar]

4 year old BMX twins

The Indiana University Student Foundation Little 500 is April 25th and 26th, 2014

The Little 500 is the largest collegiate bike race in the United States. Modeled after the Indianapolis 500, riders compete in four-person teams around a quarter-mile cinder track at Bill Armstrong Stadium. The men’s race is 200 laps — 50 miles — and the women’s race is 100. April 25th and 26th, 2014 More than 25,000 fans flock to the campus in Bloomington, Indiana, each April to be a part of IU’s storied tradition. And who can blame them? The excitement, the competition, the pageantry — Little 500 is an experience like no other. The excitement doesn’t begin and end on race day. Check the  IUSF Events Calendar  to gear up for Little 500 throughout the year. THE CAUSE The race began in 1951 as a way to raise scholarship money for students working their way through college. Since that first race, IUSF has given away over $1 million to deserving undergrads. Read more about Little 500's beginnings » [Keep reading at IUSF Student Foundation]

Aftermass: Bicycling in a Post-Critical Mass Portland | Taking the Lane

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Five years and a few weeks ago, some guys came by my office to see if they could interview me for a documentary the next day. I said sure. Then I didn’t show up. Fortunately, they were persistent and came by again the next day, and I sat in front of their camera for an hour and looked into the filmaker’s unbelievably distracting blue eyes and told my story of being involved with the demise of Portland’s Critical Mass. The filmmaker was Joe Biel, who agreed to go on a date with me shortly afterward and has stuck around through thick and thin ever since. And the documentary is called  Aftermass: Bicycling in a Post-Critical Mass Portland  and it’s having  its Portland premier screening  at the bikey Clinton Street Theater on May 23rd from 7 to 10pm. I’ll be there for a Q&A along afterward along with some other folks who were interviewed in or involved in the production of the film. [Keep reading at Taking the Lane]

Rethinking Streets

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For too long we’ve been building streets as though they have one function–to move cars quickly. The reality is that streets can to do more than just move cars. They can move people on foot, on bikes, on transit, without hurting vehicular throughput and safety. They can be more than a way to get somewhere else. Good streets are good places, too – public places where people meet, sit and socialize, conduct business, wander about, play, and more. This new book uses evidence from completed street projects from around the United States in order to help communities imagine alternative futures for their streets. The book does not show hypothetical street re-designs, but actual examples from typical communities to show how they did what they did and see what resulted from the change. For more information, please contact  Marc Schlossberg  at the University of Oregon's  Sustainable Cities Initiative .