Columbus Rides Bikes!

“Inspired to Ride ,” a stunning documentary about the inaugural TransAm Bike Race held in 2014 on the TransAmerica Trail, will screen at the Drexel Theatre in Columbus on Tuesday, February 2 at 7:30 p.m. The event is sponsored by Yay Bikes! “Inspired to Ride” is the followup film from the creators of the wildly popular and award-winning film “Ride the Divide,” as well as their second film, “Reveal the Path.” On June 7, 2014, forty-five cyclists from around the world set out on the inaugural TransAm Bike Race, a 4,233-mile cross-country, self-supported race from Astoria, OR, to Yorktown, VA. The route roughly follows the TransAmerica Trail as created by the Adventure Cycling Association, traversing through ten states in a transcontinental adventure of epic proportions. “Inspired to Ride” follows closely the journey of a handful of these cyclists as they prepare, compete and experience what riding 300 miles a day feels like with only a few hours of sleep each ni...

ENLARGE Fewer people are applying for a driver’s license, according to a new study released this week. Above, a 2011 queue for a motor vehicle licenses outside a DMV office in Los Angeles.   PHOTO:  ASSOCIATED PRESS A study published this week by the University of Michigan reports a sharp decline over the past two decades among people under 25 years of age getting their driver’s licenses.  The drop signals high-schoolers and college-age Americans are less interested in driving than previous generations. And the change is spreading to their parents and grandparents, moves that have auto makers scrambling to ramp up investments in alternative mobility services such car-hailing services. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the proportion of Americans under 70 years of age holding a driver’s license has declined even as annual U.S. light-vehicle sales have slowly climbed back to levels seen early last decade, University of Michigan researchers Michael Sivak...

Sharrows: clip art-style bicycles with arrows painted onto the roads to indicate where bicyclists should ride on a street that remains, ultimately, dedicated to automobile traffic. Sharrows are what cities install when they want to appear as though they care about bicycling, but can’t or don’t want to muster the political will to actually change anything significant in its favor. It has long been assumed by bike advocates and everyday riders that sharrows do very little, if anything, to increase road safety for people on bikes. As it turns out, those assumptions were correct. [Keep reading at Momentum Mag]

You might think you know what determines whether people will walk or bike around a neighborhood. Does it have  complete streets  with sidewalks and bike lanes? Does it have safe speed limits for cars and  traffic-calming features  like median islands? Is it well-lit at night and safe from crime? And, in the metric that  Walk Score  made famous, are there businesses and transit stops near people’s homes? But  a recent study  finds that what we traditionally consider the essential components of walkable urbanism are not necessarily the most important factors to everyone. The paper’s authors, Cynthia Chen and Xi Zhu, a professor of civil engineering and a former graduate student, respectively, at the University of Washington, surveyed residents with both high and low incomes in neighborhoods around Lake Washington in Seattle. For lower-income people, Zhu and Chen found the neighborhood qualities that were associated with more walking were ones...

Chicken Bone Bucksaw from Salsa Cycles on Vimeo .

"I FELT THE BREATH OF THE ARCTIC INTIMATELY BECAUSE OF THE PROXIMITY BIKE RIDING PUT ME TO BEARS ALONG THE KENNICOTT ROAD." Photograph By Carl Battreall BY THE TIME  I think to eat the PB&J sandwiches stuffed in my sports bra, the windchill has turned them into rocks. At this point, I am pushing my bike across an ice-locked lake. Sporadic markers that read "Iditasport" tell me I'm on the trail, yet I can barely make them out because my eyelashes keep sticking together. A vision flashes in my mind, of a woman I'd heard about whose eyeballs had frozen during a race in Alaska. They'd apparently swelled to the size of prunes, causing her temporary blindness. Because her race had been 350 miles while mine is just 100 kilometers, I feel like a baby even thinking things could get that dire. Then again, I've already  broken a chain , lost my way, and run out of water. My fingers are waxy, even in puffy handlebar mitts; my toes wooden in their in...

A typical Dutch commute. Photo by FietsBeraard. When many people think of urban cycling, they think of the Netherlands. Bikes are so popular in the European country that “bike culture” has almost become synonymous with Amsterdam. But according to  a report  by the Dutch  SWOV Institute for Road Safety , everyday cycling has amassed such a crowd of regular participants that the bike lanes are getting, well, crowded. While the sprawling, connected networks of bike lanes in the Netherlands are the envy of urban cyclists from other parts of the globe, they remain insufficient to accommodate the growing numbers of people using them every day. At rush hour, the lanes are overcrowded and crashes are becoming more frequent. According to the report, some of these collisions are the result of poor decision-making and riding habits among riders. The SWOV set up cameras at four major bike lane intersections in the Hague, and the footage revealed...

A bike lane, where — if you’re lucky — a car won’t try to hit you. Probably. (Matt McClain for The Washington Post) About 100 years ago, the auto industry pulled off a neat trick: It stole the public roadways from us. See, in the early days of the motor vehicle, there used to be this quaint idea that the person operating the giant machine should look out for other people. Then came mass production and the Model T. Suddenly there were automobiles all over the place, and by the end of the 1920s, cars (or, more accurately, their drivers) had killed  more than 200,000 people . We clung to our humanity, though. Cities called for stricter traffic laws and better enforcement. The auto industry responded by mounting a propaganda war masked as a safety campaign. One of their most successful salvos was inventing the concept of the “jaywalker,” which effectively robbed us of our right of way. (You can read more about all this  here .) [Keep reading at Washington Post]

Hope Pro 4: Adam Brayton RAW from hopetech on Vimeo .

A Wild and Scenic river, lush cranberry bogs, towering basalt sea stacks and vast ocean views await riders on the Wild Rivers Coast Scenic Bikeway. The 61-mile ride is anchored in the quaint fishing hamlet of Port Orford, the oldest town on the Oregon coast. Here you can count on a great cup of coffee, and you’ll find quiet, locally owned hotels and eclectic art galleries.   http://rideoregonride.com/road-routes/wild-rivers-coast-scenic-bikeway/