Many of the harmful effects of loneliness are well-known, aside from the fact that being lonely just sucks. Depriving people of social contact is just one of the many ways we can effectively torture people. And we know that poor urban design can increase loneliness.

Being forced to ride single-file, and therefore being disallowed to communicate while we ride, is not torture, but it is a significant deterrent to biking when compared to driving and taking public motorized transit. If we care about putting more people on bikes, we need to advocate for the ability to ride two-abreast. And even if we don’t care about putting more people on bikes, we cyclists still deserve the right to ride two abreast, just like drivers and their passengers.

If I want to hang with a friend — all other things being equal — if I can’t talk to them while we’re moving about, I’m driving. That decision is simple. I want to be able to talk to my friends while we’re riding our bikes around. Cars do not deserve two to three times the asphalt just because they’re wider. If people are really dedicated to getting around by individual private motorized transport, they can go buy a Tango ‘single-file’ car:

'Single-file' cars -- not as space-wasteful

Drivers and their passengers don’t have to deal with this ‘single-file’ nonsense, why should we? And look where this single-file biking was being forced to happen – one side of the street even has two lanes for motor vehicles, so two sets of drivers/passengers can have a decent conversations with each other, while bikers are forced to ‘get in line’.

5 (fat) cars lanes, two (skinny) bike lanes

Shoot — even pedestrians on the sidewalk have to deal with this all the time – except most of the time it’s inanimate objects like traffic lights and parking signs and fire hydrants and trees and an assortment of other obstacles which force walkers to ‘single file it’ on the sidewalk time and again.

Pedestrian slalom course

The new Prospect Park West (PPW) street design in Brooklyn New York City is going to replace some unused, restricted road space — currently in line with a ‘parking row’ — with some pedestrian islands. The key benefit being touted is ‘increased pedestrian safety’. The islands probably will do that, if only slightly. If we were really concerned with pedestrian and biker safety, though, we’d two-way the street, and provide more room for people to bike.

Why would we want to allow cars to travel in the same direction, in separate travel lanes, while allowing bikers only single-file access?

And why would we want to continue to apportion the street 80/20 in favor of cars?

It doesn’t make any sense.

Maybe it’s not politically feasible at the moment to two-way PPW, but the proposal to fix this street fully and correctly should now be on the table, and that includes giving cyclists the ability to ride two-abreast. It goes without saying that walkers should be afforded this same luxury.

Here is the current PPW design:

Cyclists not able to ride two-abreast

Here is the proposed design (not much different):

Nice trees, but bikers still cannot ride two abreast

This is closer to what it should look like — a two-way PPW:

Now bikers can ride two abreast

And if we proceed apace we can imagine a time in the not-too-distant future when cars will no longer be tolerated. If any type of motorized mode of transport can be substantially shown to be in alignment with the goal of a Vision Zero policy, then we can consider allowing them to continue to be used among the population. That could be cars, trucks, trains, buses, NEVs, etc. The burden of proof of safety, of course, remains on those wanting to use these modes of transport.

p.s. In the last post on the need to push for weekday ciclovias, I meant to point out a post by BostonBiker.org that challenged conventional wisdom regarding traffic. The blogger writes: “Below is an argument that some people have used to complain about bicycles, slightly altered to reflect a bikers point of view,” and then provides this rant:

Today when I got on my bike to go to work there were a bunch of inconsiderate jerks clogging up the road in front of me. They were riding two abreast, sometimes three abreast (when there was enough room, the things they were riding were like 5-6 feet wide each!). I don’t know what the occasion is, but every morning around 7 and every evening around 5 they have some sort of massive group ride. It should be illegal for them to all ride at the same time, it fills up the streets making it impossible to go anywhere, don’t these jerks realize that people have things to do?! I am forced to ride around them as they rudely take up the entire lane just for one person. I don’t understand why they don’t just use the highways, I mean the highways are designed just for them. I don’t understand why they are even allowed to ride on the streets, get on the highway where you belong! The worst part is their behavior, if you try to tell them to get out of the way all they do is honk their horn or give you the finger, I mean how rude!

It makes sense. We should challenge every assumption.

pps. — Anyone seen bike directions on the iPhone yet?

San Francisco’s ciclovia event is held on Sundays, and is called Sunday Streets.

We and every city and town should seriously think about how to extend these ciclovias into the weekdays — i.e. hold them during the business week (which in some places might still include Saturdays, etc.).

Do any of these currently exist?

The only cases I can think of are cities that do a pretty good representation for World Carfree Day.

It’s just a one day trial — if we plan it carefully, we can make it work. As we know from real world examples, auto traffic often ‘disappears’ when major roads/bridges/tunnels are shut — temporarily or permanently — we can expect the same effect, and probably to a lesser extent, because the road will only close to car traffic, but open up to all human-powered traffic.

If you think businesses will freak, remember what it was like when we first pitched (weekend) ciclovias — sometimes it was serious ridicule and/or anger.

And now we have a built-in fan base which will include at least some businesses who will actually help us push the idea.

The message is simple — people being allowed to walk and bike and skate to and from their destinations makes our city a better place to live, work, and play. Ciclovias, thus far, have only been about play — we should work to change that.

And the best place to pitch this idea? Your ciclovia.

We pitch it the same way we originally pitched the weekend ciclovia — have an FAQ (like this one) with a bunch of the ‘tough’ questions answered, we get some quotes from some early adopter businesses who have bought into the weekday ciclovia idea, etc. Done. It seems most ciclovias run outside of rush hours already – so no issue there (though, we should work to change that, too).

First city to win a weekday ciclovia wins a gold star from yours truly.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

One of the perks tech companies are using to lure talent is bikes and bike amenities — which inherently includes dignified bike access to where ever employees will be working every day. A quick 3-minute radio segment (the player starts at 19:07 automatically) from the uber-popular radio show Marketplace (wiki) tells us what companies like FourSquare (New York City) and Google (Mountain View) are doing to be bike-friendly:

Companies are in a race to outdo each other on bike friendliness. Google not only gives employees racks and lockers, the company will donate to charity if employees ride to work. Etsy‘s got an in-house bike mechanic. In New York, Foursquare just chose a new location for its headquarters, based on where biking would be easy.

To me, FourSquare’s move is the ultimate in bike-friendliness — we bikers don’t need showers and pumps and cheerleading (though all of that could be nice) — we just need the absolute bare minimum required to allow us to ride our bikes to the office: a safe, convenient, direct, dignified route to the office, and some place to lock our bike so it won’t be stolen — nothing ‘rocket-sciency’ about this formula, and not too much to expect from any and every company, and every city council, in my opinion.

Of course, FourSquare is a much newer company than Google, and has the advantage of being born just three years ago (wiki) — right when bicycling was starting to takeoff again in major, developed countries. And FourSquare has the advantage of being in urban New York City, where a major biking renaissance has been occurring, with cycletracks appearing all over the city. Google is ‘saddled’ with a zillion employees (to FourSquare’s 100) — the realities of the real estate market helped push Google onto the wrong side of Highway 101 in suburban Mountain View, CA.

We wrote just a couple of days ago about how Google needs to help achieve part one of the ‘bare minimum requirements’ that would allow employees to bike to work at Google — on-street cycletracks/bike lanes/etc.

One company not mentioned in the article was Facebook (wiki). Though they probably have a very young staff, generally speaking, they chose to move their corporate headquarters recently out to a place which makes Google’s location look like Times Square in Manhattan. This place is so desolate, so anti-human, so bike-unfriendly, one has to wonder if Facebook management didn’t have it out for cyclists and would-be cyclists. Yes, there is talk about improving bike and walk access to the Mars-like landscape that surrounds and protects the Facebook headquarters from non-motorized humans (look at the entrance — it’s literally a freeway) – you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

Finally, it’s been said that Apple could change the slave-labor conditions of its sweatshops “tomorrow” if Apple told them to do so. Similarly, Google could snap their fingers and have the Mountain View city council study then approve and implement bike infrastructure all throughout the local Googleplex street network — first bike lanes, then buffered bike lanes, then cycletracks — it’s so obvious and easy it’s hardly worth mentioning — only, it still hasn’t been done yet.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

In other news:

• Google’s bike directions now offers a legend to help differentiate between the Level of Service (LOS) of various streets/paths along your bike route: bike-friendly, bike lane, or separate trails/paths.
• RideTheCity.com has launched in LA, and also launched an iPhone app update.
• Big article on Google Transit, with info on real-time (NextBus-like functionality) API/feed format. Includes link to startup transit app-maker company, Embark (not the auto/bus PR firm, EMBARQ).
• An interesting, if flawed, analysis of Google Maps Driving Directions vs. Transit vs. whatever functionality from the founder of the now-defunct WorldChanging.org (wiki).
• Google Street View is moving into Botswana — it’s already got a bunch of cool street view imagery from South Africa, including photos of actual BRT stations.

• SF Bay Area to get bike-sharing.
• The hype on Long Beach is making it seem like the Portland of SoCal.
• Gas prices soaring. In response, I think we bicycle advocates should pound on this refrain: “Let us ride (by building appropriate bike facilities).”
• Even Hitler knows mandatory helmet laws are a bad idea (NSFW)
• Ciclovia’s coming to Dallas. And Long Beach?
• Santana Row is the best urban design I’ve seen anywhere in America
• The true origin of PARK(ing) Day?
• A few months ago there was talk of redefining LOS by defining it for walking and biking, but it seems to have slipped off the radar. It popped up again.
• Paris starting to make sense – allows cyclists to run red lights
• This would be awesome for getting up hills
• The answer to transit-dependence is not more and faster bus service — it’s allowing people to go where they want to go when they want to go under their own power.
• Truth about BRT systems is slowly slipping out into the light of day
• I’ve been less of a fan of StreetFilms since they started pushing BRT so hard, but this film is great
• Brad Pitt rips automobility while talking about baseball (tip)

Photo on right: Joe Linton

That is, if your goal is to get more people on bikes more often for more reasons — daily commuting, errand-running, socializing, etc. — you should spend more of your dollars on on-street infrastructure rather than off-street infrastructure. Several studies, however conflicting, suggest the same – “More specifically, provision of good quality separate cycling facilities alongside heavily travelled roads and linking to everyday facilities that people need to use…”. In other words, cyclists and would-be cyclists are human beings that have places to go and things to do, and they sometimes/often want to be able to do them quickly and conveniently.

If your city has $10M to spend on bike infrastructure (as if), then the breakdown between on-street and off-street facilities should fall towards the on-street side. Whether it’s 51/49, or 99/1, or somewhere in between, is up to you and your city to figure out.

Most times I’ve suggested this online, I was treated as a blaspheme. I knew I had to be correct because how could we suggest that women should be forced to ride a pitch-dark bike path at night when most Americans, men and women, are afraid to walk around even their own neighborhoods at night? [Unless we're just planning to keep women at home?] We know women are more risk-averse than men (thankfully!). Should we just throw women under the bus? [I will not ride a bike path at night, so being afraid of getting jumped or worse is not specific to women.]

This thought crossed my mind recently because Google is expanding their campus again, and there are some bike paths in the area and little to no worthwhile on-street facilities — the question is, which projects should we go after, and with what percentage of our resources?

Right now there is no dignified way for a biker to get from civilization — downtown Mountain View, or really, any place west of Highway 101 — to the Googleplex [the recommended bike route is 3.8 miles whereas a car can get there in about 2.6 miles (non-highway)]. A biker could choose to take some trail that’s often dark and/or flooded out and, by its very nature, lacks social safety (Did he shut down his blog?), etc., but we need to allow normal human beings to hop off a train or bus in downtown Mountain View/wherever, and simply ride to the Googleplex, on their own bike or on the soon-to-be-coming bike-share bikes — without fear of losing life or limb. And it has to be the shortest route possible — shorter than is possible by car. There are actually a couple of beautiful streets near both the start and end of the trip — it’s only about a 2.5 mile walk — we should work to make this direct route walkable first, then bikeable, and if there’s any room left over we can talk about other ways that people might want to get around.

If it was up to me, 99% of our collective resources — monetary, political, etc. — from Google, city council, workers, citizens — would go to on-street facilities. On-street facilities simply have to take precedence, for obvious reasons.

Just an idea I thought of when walking about on Christmas Day. The streets were eerily empty of motorized traffic, and some people were actually walking around, seemingly just for the enjoyment of it — spending some time with family, etc. It was almost like you could see people thinking to themselves in an approving fashion, “Huh. So this is what walking around feels like. Kinda cool.”

And it was so quiet (little to no motor traffic).

The lack motor traffic made me think it might be pretty easy to pull off a Christmas Day Ciclovia. Of course, most businesses/schools/organizations are closed on Christmas Day.

Lots of people get new bikes/skateboards/basketballs/sneakers/etc. on Christmas Day, and during the holidays generally, so they’d like to get outside and try their new gear.

It seems Bogota has a type of holiday night time ciclovia, Ciclovia Nocturna (English) — the bike path is so crowded, it’s more of a walkavia — theirs was held on Wednesday, December 8.

The Bogota office of the Secretary of Culture has more info (English).

If San Jose was bikeable, I’d like to go see a bunch of the cool light displays (more here).

Side commentary:

• Don’t try to bury highways a la Boston/Big Dig (they’re too expensive and just leave in place the cancer pump that is every highway); instead, just tear them down, a la SF/Embarcadero Freeway.
• The road-building lobby gets another $12.5 Million from Caterpillar. The road-building lobby also wants you to think this is a picture of sustainability.
• Our local (San Jose) transit authority has some historic streetcars (like San Francisco’s), and they’re running a holiday route — the program is called The Candyland Express. Public transit should not just be about making poor people suffer — it should be about allowing people to move about freely, conveniently, with dignity intact — and it should strive to be…<gulp>…pleasant. The old streetcars have style, and they have windows all the way around so one can actually see what is going on on the streets as you travel them, and some of the old streetcars are at least partially open-air and have windows that could be opened so you could get some fresh air in case of an on-board stench or if the heat is up too high. We need to try to introduce a little humanity into public transportation — public bike sharing is making that happen at least a little bit — these old streetcars can help, too.
• End of the day, it doesn’t matter whether you prevent people from biking by building LRT or BRT — you’re still preventing biking — especially when you build this motorized infrastructure in the outside travel lanes, where bicycles would typically be.  And when you prevent biking, that is not ‘sustainability’, unless you’re talking about the sustainability of the auto industry.
• Another backwoods town wants to ban walking and biking. It highlights the fact that freedom of movement is a human right — and that this right inherently includes the right to travel under one’s own power (by walk, bike, etc.). International human rights conventions already, in theory at least, protect us from unjustified violence and threats of violence, etc. I’m looking at you, outlaw drivers.
• Most US transit agencies can’t keep their inside escalators working. Will Colombia be able to keep its outside escalators working? They’ll start by operating only 3 hours a day.

Why is it important to tour your new potential neighborhood by bike?

Q. Why is the Pedal to Properties option better than the standard way of viewing homes?
A. As a home buyer, you want to know that the neighborhood you may potentially live in is safe, practical for your needs, and fits your lifestyle. Touring neighborhoods on bicycles gives you an up-close and personal look at each street you travel. You will truly experience a neighborhood by riding up and down its streets, rather than zooming by in a car, giving you a feel for what it might be like if you lived there someday.

Bike-based realtors have been around for years now — it’s nice to see they’re taking advantage of the good work Google has done to integrate biking directions into Google Maps.

No.

Multimodalism (the ability to make a trip using more than one mode of transport — e.g. walking and biking, biking and driving, etc.) is overrated. Multimodalism has certain advantages over unimodalism just as it has certain disadvantages. A community or society may decide that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, or vice-versa, but our goal should not be ‘multimodalism’ – it should be ‘an awesome transportation system’.

‘Multimodalism’ in much of the blogosphere today means that a particular town allows people to get around by bike, at least a little bit. Sometimes it means that a town has a streetcar system, so at least 1% of the population can get around without a car. Fine. It’s not the end of the world. Popular use of various transportation terms is not something to get hung up about, but I think it’s important to stay clear about what our goals are, because language affects how we think about the problems we’re facing. The implication of too many posts I read is, “Hey — we’re multimodal, therefore we’re awesome, and our job is done.” I say, ‘Not quite.’

If a town has a mode split of 99% driving and 1% walk/bike/skate/train/etc., then that town is, by definition, multimodal. Mission accomplished? Of course, not.

A city that is proclaimed as ‘really multimodal,’ like New York City, might boast of a non-driving mode share of about 71%. A town that is just multimodal, like the San Jose, might boast of a non-driving mode share around 12%. Are these cities similar in any way? They’re both multimodal, but is that meaningful at all? Hardly. And they both still have disastrous transportation systems. If the majority of your population cannot get around safely, comfortably, and conveniently, with dignity intact, under their own power, then your transportation system fails, period.

The ability to get around under one’s own power is a human right — it has to be guaranteed in order to restore people’s dignity, and of course, to help head off further climate disaster.

If a town allows most of its citizens to get around under their own power — by walk, bike, skate, whatever — then that town potentially has an awesome transportation system.

Every few weeks a cycling ‘advocate’ will tear into people for daring to ride their bikes on the sidewalk — usually after someone riding a bike on the sidewalk was killed. We get some of the same from many cycling ‘advocates’ when cyclists riding in the road are killed, but the pomposity really flows when the killed cyclist was cycling on the sidewalk. This ‘criticizing the dead’ behavior is boorish, but it doesn’t seem to stop people. C’est la vie.

The concern these ‘sidewalk cycling bloggers’ are trolling is one of ‘safety’ — in theory, presumably they care, or claim to care, about the safety of the person doing the sidewalk cycling — not the drivers and walkers.

These bloggers point to various dubious studies by vehicular cycling advocates, and they fail to provide context for the studies. For instance, I could probably find data that shows walking on one-way streets is much safer than walking on two-way streets. But what use is the study if we don’t talk about the fact that people don’t walk on one-way streets because they’re so anti-human? Not much.

Ditto with these ‘sidewalks are dangerous’ studies — they simply don’t hold water if we claim to care about implementing policies which allow people to ride their bikes. We need studies that look at the totality of safety effects of riding on sidewalks vs. riding on the street — to the extent that such studies can even be statistically significant.

For instance, this safety page (which is, overall, very good — even if it’s old school, and has some nonsense in there about headphones and other alleged dangers) says don’t ride on the sidewalk, except in certain cases where it is OK to ride on the sidewalk – so, which one is it? Always, never, or sometimes? And who gets to decide the criteria?

This video makes a strong case for sidewalk cycling (the narrator clowns League cyclists while he’s at it — funny):

Someone at Treehugger called ‘bs’ on the anti-biking brigade a couple of years ago:

As a new or continuing city cyclist, you are bound to hear the admonishment: “Don’t ride on the sidewalk. It’s dangerous.” I swallowed that Kool-Aid for quite a while. After all, I want cycling to be a respected part of the transport infrastructure, I want cyclists to be generally law abiding and not continually agitate either pedestrians or car drivers (or each other!). But that word “dangerous,” bandied about as it is so frequently in cycling, should serve as the first clue that the warning to not sidewalk ride is a complicated, multi-faceted subject.

One oft-cited study seems to make some sense — it says, at a minimum, the haters need to stop hating:

Whatever the reasons, sidewalk cyclists should not simply be taught that sidewalk cycling is dangerous and should, therefore, be discontinued. Attempts to teach cyclists effective cycling skills should be considered.

This study from Toronto says sidewalk collisions are lower than riding in the street:

The rate of collision on off-road paths and sidewalks was lower than for roads.

And, if riding on sidewalks and sidepaths is so dangerous, why are they primary features of the roadway infrastructure of The Netherlands, the safest place on earth to ride a bike?

Because sidewalk and sidepath cycling is safe.

If you were ever told otherwise, you were fed a line — by the same people who probably admonished you to wear a helmet.

And when measured in the most critical terms — your ability to bike another day — you are almost certainly safer on the sidewalk than in the road — because most collisions occur in the road — i.e. doorings, hit from behind, etc.

So when certain ‘advocates’ tell cyclists not to ride on the sidewalk — they are effectively telling these cyclists to stop riding — which makes riding overall that much more dangerous for everyone else — because of the safety in numbers effect, in reverse.

So, if you are confused as to what you should tell a new sidewalk rider who has been accosted by the anti-cycling zealots, go with this:

Dude(tte) — I am so happy to hear you’re riding your bike — that’s so cool. Keep it up. Don’t let the haters get you down — haters gonna hate. Just keep doing what you’re doing, and if you feel more comfortable on the sidewalk, then you keep riding on the sidewalk. It’s probably safer there anyways.

I would advise that you not injure, maim, or kill any pedestrians — that just goes without saying — the same argument for cars — they shouldn’t injure, maim, or kill any cyclists or pedestrians — so watch out for pedestrians, and just generally be considerate of them, especially if they’re old — flying by a walker on the sidewalk can make them jump (make the jump/twitch! move here), and that’s kinda scary and just not cool. But other than that, have at it.

You’ll learn that the slower you ride on the sidewalk, the generally-more comfortable ride you’ll have, just because you can relax more, not worry about hitting walkers so much, etc. Try to watch out for blind entrances/exits from shops/apartments — if you start taking the same route every day you’ll learn which doors are busy. It might be technically illegal to ride your bike on some sidewalks, so some cops might harass you if you’re blazing down the sidewalk and menacing people, but if you’re kinda chillin and just moseying then they probably won’t bug you.

All the same rules apply as if you were riding in the road — so read this page if you haven’t yet — watch out for the right hook, definitely watch out for the left hook, watch out for all the cars that are going to blow through every Stop sign on every street along your route — you know, all the usual stuff.

Ride on!

Oh, don’t forget to top up your tires once a week (get a good pump — it’s worth it) — you won’t notice the difference until you top up and then you’ll be like, “Dang! I wish I topped up earlier!” And, it’ll help keep you from getting pinch flats, which are super-common for noob riders like you.

A couple of other points — telling people to ride in the street is akin to telling them to subject themselves to harassment, random violence and threats of violence (i.e. terrorism) — from outlaw drivers — I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to do.

Also, telling cyclists to do anything other than not kill pedestrians absolves drivers of…injuring, maiming, and killing people. Just because it is legal to kill bikers and walkers doesn’t mean that it should be legal. The laws should be changed, and we should push for them to be changed. We should pass a radical new law that says ‘Nobody is allowed to kill walkers and bikers.’ — something like that.

Happy sidewalk cycling!

Update: I didn’t point out some more of the obvious, but if cycling on the sidewalk is more dangerous than cycling in the road, why in the world would the federal government recommend that young children ride on the sidewalk?

Update: Want to continue to excuse the deadly, outlaw behavior of motorists? Easy — just keep telling people to stop riding on the sidewalks — implying that it is their fault that they just got run over. They were riding on the sidewalk — they had it coming — zing! The were riding in the road — they had it coming — zing! They were riding anywhere at all doing everything or nothing at all — they had it coming — zing! This blame the victim stuff is fun — it’s easy too — the victims are not around to defend themselves.

Update: Thought I’d take a snapshot of some outlaw driver behavior over the last few days, as it shows up in my feed reader and in Google News, and see if we could divine a pattern of injury and death rained down upon cyclists — and, by extension, determine whether riding on the sidewalk is more dangerous than riding in the road. Some/most of the events are more recent — some older. Of course, generally speaking, deaths are going to be reported more often than ‘just’ injuries, so I would expect the results to scew ‘in favor’ of ‘road’ injuries/deaths (as opposed to ‘sidewalk and sidewalk-enabled’ injuries/death), and that does appear to be the case. This is just anecdote, of course, but it’s all real — hundreds/thousands of lives destroyed and severely/adversely affected by outlaw drivers, propped up by an insufficient and corrupt legal system, unsafe infrastructure, and a certain group of cycling ‘advocates’:

12 yo struck/killed (road):
http://bikinginla.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/12-year-old-victorville-cyclist-killed-near-hesperia/

6 yo struck/killed in road/alley (road):
http://www.suntimes.com/news/7037043-417/6-year-old-on-bike-struck-and-killed-by-pickup-truck-backing-up.html

hit-run/injury and hit-run/kill (road):
http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/article-77-14504-hit-runs-on-rise.html

hit-run/kill (road):
http://www.wreg.com/news/wreg-biker-killed-in-hit-and-run-20110814,0,4154107.story

hit/kill (road):
http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2011/082011/08122011/645159

hit-run/one killed, one injured (road):
http://southeastportland.katu.com/news/crime/442369-hit-and-run-kills-one-cyclist-police-arrest-suspected-driver

hit/injury (sidewalk):
http://pointpleasant.patch.com/articles/bicyclist-struck-by-car-and-injured-on-bridge-avenue

hit-run injury (road):
http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/3-Injured-in-Wild-Kensington-Car-Chase–127666298.html

hit/injury (road and sidewalk?):
http://www.arlnow.com/2011/08/11/cyclist-recounts-accident-at-lynn-street-and-lee-hwy/

hit/kill – 2 instances (road):
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Deaths+refocus+attention+road+safety/5248268/story.html

hit/kill (road) and hit/injury (unclear) [this one is incredible/insane]:
http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-teen-bicyclist-hit-run-arrest,0,6005640.story

hit-run/kill (unclear):
http://mynorthwest.com/?nid=11&sid=522720

hit/injury (unclear):
http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/cityregion/article/1431333

hit/kill (sidewalk):
http://www.thespec.com/news/crime/article/569166–six-year-old-cyclist-fatally-injured-in-crash

hit/injury (sidewalk):
http://www.fdlreporter.com/article/20110811/FON0101/108110376/Fond-du-Lac-area-news-briefs

hit/kill (road):
http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/cityregion/article/1427273

hit/kill (sidewalk):
http://www.tbrnews.com/articles/2011/08/11/redondo_beach_news/news12.txt

hit/kill (sidewalk):
http://www.bendbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110727/NEWS0107/307279999/1002/NEWS01&nav_category=NEWS01

hit/injury (unclear):
http://www.redbankgreen.com/2011/07/teen-bicyclist-hit-by-car-in-little-silver.html

hit/injury (sidewalk):
http://articles.aberdeennews.com/2011-07-22/news/29805823_1_sixth-avenue-southeast-hit-and-run-accident-truck

hti/kill (road):
http://www.streetsblog.org/2011/08/02/trucker-kills-cyclist-daily-news-are-bikes-more-dangerous-than-cars/comment-page-1/

hit/injury (sidewalk):
http://www.wjbdradio.com/index.php?f=news_single&id=28288

hit/injury (sidewalk):
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/52354794-78/officer-ogden-investigation-police.html.csp

hit/kill (road):
http://www.masoncountydailynews.com/news/news-page/11940-regional-news-8511

hit-run/kill (road):
http://www.ktvu.com/news/28756202/detail.html

Update: If you hate folks riding on the sidewalk, then spend your time advocating for real bicycle infrastructure — namely, cycletracks – sidewalks for cyclists.

Update: Pedestrians being forced to share the sidewalk with cyclists is like cyclists being forced to share the roads with cars/trucks/buses — only, 10,000 times safer.

Update: One anecdotal piece of evidence to support my contention that allowing folks to ride in the street allows them to get off the sidewalks:

And what’s good for bikes is often times good for pedestrians.  [Long Beach Mobility Coordinator, Charlie] Gandy struck up a conversation with a mother and father pushing a stroller while I took pictures of the separated bike paths on 3rd Street.  Even though they haven’t ridden a bike in years, they loved the lane.  Why?  Because it got all the bikes off the sidewalk.  ”I used to see bikes on the sidewalk everyday on 3rd.  I haven’t seen one in months,” the father smiled while pushing the stroller.

This stuff is not rocket science.

We can all be like those lowly crooks down in Austell, Georgia, and go after the victims — in that case, pedestrians — in our case, cyclists — or we can try to be decent human beings and go after outlaw drivers, and other crooks who continue to get off scot-free — the designers and engineers behind these malignant road designs — city and state DOT engineers and officials — they belong in jail more than anyone else when these situations arise — because of the wickedness they’ve designed into our road system — dangerous by design, indeed.

Yes! Another major-ish US city, another bike-sharing program. Boston’s Hubway bike-sharing program starts up tomorrow.

Boston is slightly bigger than Washington, DC, which is currently home to the signature bike-sharing program in the US.

Like DC, Boston has tons of students who will be eager early adopters of the bike-sharing program. Boston’s bike infrastructure lags that of DC, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out.

A Boston-area article gives some early good hope  — having seen the success of bike-sharing in DC (and Montreal and Toronto), the car folks will not be able to act all hysterical — they’d be laughed off the page:

Now that the Hubway bike-sharing program is here, some Bostonians seem to believe an alien is landing, and that utter chaos — or at least massive inconvenience and injury — will ensue when kiosks open Tuesday.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

And, as we noted/hoped, many cities may start to feel a twinge of ‘lameness’ for not getting into the bike-sharing game sooner:

As it is in many other ways, Boston is late to the game in bike-sharing.

And, finally — what a pleasant way to think about the ‘unloosing’ of a fleet of bikes over the city (and at the same time, an almost-admonition directed at drivers instead of cyclists and pedestrians):

So let the pedestrian cross in the unsignaled crosswalk, look in your rear view mirror before you open the car door, and go ahead and let yourself celebrate all those slightly clunk-looking silver and black bikes that will soon be unloosed on the metropolis, like a flock of doves.

He put the camera in my face — like, 12 inches away, it seemed — and said something about ‘gas prices’ and ‘The Grand Canyon’ and then he started pointing at the gas prices sign — which looked a bit like the picture shown.

My first thought, and what I actually said to him, was, “We need to make this street bikeable — we need to make it safe and comfortable for people to bike on — we need to allow people to bike on this street.” (It’s an awesome street — or, has the potential to be.)

Reporter-guy-with-camera was amused, gave a smirky-smile and guffaw, and then presumably mumbled the same leading question he did before — this time gesturing more wildly towards the gas prices sign — and again, I had no idea what he said. I turned around to get a good look at the sign, and most prices seemed to be right around the $4/gallon mark, so of course my first thought was, “Wow — one gallon of gas could buy me a Pliny the Elder at Wine Affairs.” In other words, I was not thinking, “Wow — gas is cheap now.” I was thinking, “Why would you spend your $4 on a gallon of gas instead of a pint of really good beer??”

So I said, “Well I’m more of a train guy so I don’t tend to do a lot of driving — the train is awesome.”

Now he was really getting frustrated. At this point I started to figure out what he was getting at — I think he was suggesting that gas prices were down and so therefore wouldn’t that make me more likely to drive to The Grand Canyon this 4th of July holiday weekend?

After he mumbled his leading question one more time, I said, “Yes, more likely.” And then I smiled and split, and he was happy to be rid of me, I’m sure.

I was amused by the whole thing. Imagine you’re a local video reporter and you’re sent out to get some footage for a 4th of July-type driving and gas prices story and you just happen to try to interview someone who thinks that cars are humanity’s best example of pure-evil-on-earth. It’s tough being a local news reporter!