Category: Bicycle Advocacy

If a far-reaching plan to enhance bicycling can be enacted anywhere, it's in Portland.

Although members of the City Council delayed the vote on the Portland Bicycle Plan for a week back on Feb. 4, they unanimously approved it on Thursday.

According to BikePortland.org, Mayor Sam Adams will return next week with a proposal to inject $20 million into the bike plan to get some improvements on the ground right away.

The entire 20-year plan would cost an estimated $600 million to create 700 miles of bikeways and make other improvements to encourage commuters to choose bicycles instead of their cars.

See developing details at “Bike plan passes with unanimous support: — BikePortland.org. …

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Bicycle advocates in state legislatures are once again promoting bills that require motorists to give bicyclists 3 feet of clearance when passing.

Currently, 14 states require a 3-foot gap for bicycle riders. They are Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin. 

This year, lawmakers in Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, South Dakota and Virginia are considering 3-foot laws. At least two other states, Iowa an Washington, have 3-foot passing laws in committee from last year.

Here are some details about the laws so you can follow along at home ….

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More than 2,000 south Florida cyclists gathered in Key Biscayne on Sunday morning for a memorial ride to honor hit-and-run victim Christophe LeCanne.

It was an amazing outpouring of support to demonstrate to elected officials and the motoring public that bike riders are tired of second-class citizenship on the road.

LeCanne, 44, was struck by an allegedly  drunken motorist as he rode his bike in the bicycle lane on the Rickenbacher Causeway a week ago Sunday.

He lay bleeding to death in the road for over 15 minutes because the closest fire-rescue station was closed due to a reduction in hours …..

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If bicycling were the only factor, what would be the 10 best cities in the world in which to live?

The website AskMen.com set out to name the Top 10 Bicycle-Friendly Cities in its quest for naming the Top 10 in dozens of categories — prescription drugs, to motorbikes, to hottest women.

The list has undergone some modifications since I first stumbled across it in 2007. Amsterdam is still No. 1, but Portland, Oregon, fell from No. 2 to No. 6.

The website doesn't explain this sudden loss of prestige for Portland, but I doubt if it has anything to do with the 5% to 6% decrease in bike traffic in the past year, as revealed in a recent study by the city.

BikePortland saysthat the city attributed that first bike traffic decrease since 1995 to the poor economy (car traffic was down, too) and to people returning to cars as the price of gasoline dropped a bit.

Here's the Top 10, as reported by AskMen:

1. Amsterdam, The Netherlands — Cars are almost secondary ..

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Prompted by the deaths of three bicyclists on city streets last year, Boise, Idaho, is the latest locale to require motorists to give bicyclists a 3 feet of space when passing.

Usually this is a statewide law. Although the Idaho state legislature hasn't approved such a law, it is the only state that allows bicyclists to make the “Idaho stop” — treating stop signs as yield signs and stop lights as stop signs. 

Currently 14 states require that motorists give bicycle riders the 3-foot margin of safety.

The Boise City Council took the action this week based on the recommendations in a final report by the Cycling Safety Task Force …

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While last week's 5-year sentence of a Los Angeles doctor for a road rage attack that injured two cyclists got big headlines, rage on the road involving bicyclists isn't uncommon.

Sometimes bicycle riders are the target, sometimes they're the aggressors, and sometimes they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. It makes me wonder if there's a way to avoid road rage.

In Naperville, Illinois, a 67-year-old woman is charged with four felony counts of aggravated battery. Last July, witnesses told police she rammed a 17-year-old bicyclist on a BMX bike from behind ….

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A Los Angeles judge sentenced an emergency room doctor to 5 years in prison on Friday for assaulting a group of cyclists with his car on a winding road near his home in 2008.

It's good to see justice handed down in this case against Christopher Thompson, 60. The incident caught the attention of bicycle riders worldwide; more than 270 e-mailed or wrote the Los Angeles court in support of a stiff sentence.

In November, a jury convicted Thompson of mayhem, assault with a deadly weapon, battery with serious injury and reckless driving causing injury.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Superior Court Judge Scott T. Millington said he did not take the correspondence from bicyclists into account in making his sentence. The Times said the judge:

“…called the case a “wake-up call” to motorists and cyclists and urged local government to provide riders with more bike lanes. He said he believed that Thompson had shown a lack of remorse ….

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Meridian Bridge

It's good to have a friend in the federal government who sounds like he's looking out for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Granted, most federal transportation projects are road-building exercises that support our car culture. But DOT Secretary Ray LaHood appears to understand that bicycles are one of the solutions to the traffic congestion that's stifling our cities.

It's a refreshing change from his predecessor, Bush-appointee Mary Peters, who complained in 2007 that spending on bike paths and trails was taking away money from upgrading the nation's transportation infrastructure.

I just saw recently where LaHood came to the defense of bike paths that a couple of Republican senators attacked last month because they got funding in the economic stimulus package ….

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Jan. 9 update: Cyclists overrun anti-bicycling hate page

Jan. 8 update: Facebook page launched to counteract hate page (see below)

As a former newspaperman I take dim view of censorship, but this Facebook page has no redeeming value and espouses violence against bike riders.

This Australia-based Facebook page — “There's a perfectly good path right next to the road you stupid cyclist” — is a platform for rants and threats against people riding bicycles.

It may have started innocently enough by someone who had to slow down one day to share a narrow stretch of road with a bicyclist, but it has devolved into hate-mongering and harassment of cyclists fulfilling their rights to the road.

The statements do more damage than reflect poorly on the authors. They turn cyclists into objects who may be considered rightful targets by some drunken, drug-addled driver whose grip on sanity is looser than his grasp on the steering wheel ……

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