BikinginLA

Bike travel site Bikabout offers a bike tourism guide to Santa Monica.

Or maybe not, since most of the site is still appears to be vaporware.

And clicking one beachfront bike path photo just takes you to to the Denver Art Museum.

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How to tell when someone doesn’t ride a bike.

After actress Maura Tierney was hit by a driver while riding her bicycle in Marina del Rey, a blogger wonders how it could have happened since the street has a bike lane.

Maybe someone could explain it to her.

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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes goes on.

Someone sabotaged a Boston-area bike path with razor blades, which slashed a rider’s tire. And could have resulted in serious injuries.

Police in the UK are looking for two men on a motorcycle who tried to push a man off his bicycle.

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Local

Downtown News says the MyFigueroa Complete Streets project is finally ready to roll. Although as Curbed points out, it still has some major bugs to work out.

CiclaValley urges you to turn out for a public workshop for safety improvements on Winnetka Ave, including a proposal to add a mile of bike lanes that offer genuine connectivity for a change.

Good news for mountain bikers, as the Gabriel National Recreation Trail through the Arroyo Seco canyon reopens this weekend, nine years after it was destroyed by the flooding that followed the Station Fire.

 

State

Nice gesture. A cycling club in Coronado bought pizza for the local fire department in appreciation for the care they gave an injured rider.

A San Luis Obispo woman complains that a group of retired NIMBY homeowners were allowed to dominate a recent planning commission meeting, and urges the city to approve the bikeway they came out to oppose.

Lyft is building a geofence around a pair of San Francisco streets to prevent drivers from stopping in the bike lanes to pickup or drop-off passengers.

Vox explains the sudden proliferation of e-scooters across the US — despite their sudden disappearance from the streets of San Francisco — saying there’s a lot of latent demand for a quick and cheap way to get around.

It probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that half of the injuries treated at San Francisco General Hospital result from traffic collisions; bicyclists accounted for 16% of those hospitalization costs, while pedestrians made up 44%.

Bay Area residents are urged to attend a court hearing this Friday to support Rich City Rides founder Najari Smith, who was arrested and jailed for a weekend over what appears to amount to a charge of Biking While Black.

 

National

Volunteers in Austin, Texas are refurbishing hundreds of yellow bikeshare bikes that were donated by Ofo when it pulled out of the city. Although someone might want to explain to Spectrum News that there’s a difference between bikeshare and rideshare.

A Missouri writer points out that bike tourism is a powerful economic driver. Especially when they can keep the people on bikes away from the other kind of drivers.

That didn’t take long. Just two weeks after an Indiana town installed a steel planter-protected cycle track, someone has already vandalized them with spray paint.

Bro country star Luke Bryan is one of us, doing 35 – 40 mile rides with former pro Robbie Ventura and America’s most famous ex-Tour de France winner.

A Pitt University student reminds drivers that bike lanes are for bicyclists, which should be obvious. But obviously isn’t.

A New York driver claims squatter’s rights, claiming he has the right to park in a parking-protected bike lane because he was parking there before the lane was striped.

Unbelievable. A Philadelphia driver won’t be charged with killing an 11-year old bike rider after rolling a stop because he didn’t actually hit the victim, who crashed into the side of the car after he was cut off.

Baltimore conducts a road diet to build a bike lane through a park to connect two hard-to-reach neighborhoods; one bike advocate describes it as taking away a lane of traffic and giving the space back to the neighborhood.

Speaking of Baltimore, the Maryland city may be a trendsetter, shutting down its troubled bikeshare system in favor of dockless bikeshare and scooters. It’s hard to imagine how most bikeshare systems will survive without significant sponsorship revenues when dockless options offer greater convenience at a significantly lower price.

A Mississippi city is about to get the state’s first two-way bike lane, which will pick up where an existing bike path leaves off.

A three-day Mississippi bike tour helps a group of older Florida riders discover that bicycling is the fountain of youth.

Already on trial for intentionally running down and killing a Florida father as he rode on a bike path, the driver repeatedly interrupted the judge to confess to killing another rider in a crash authorities say never happened.

Residents of a Florida town say they’d rather have wider bike lanes than sidewalks along a 50 mph coastal highway. Except state law won’t let them do that.

 

International

Wonder Woman is one of us, too.

A writer for Bicycle Times tells his tale of riding 6,500 miles across South America.

More support for the safety in numbers theory, as a London study concludes roads with the most bike riders are 13% safer.

This is the cost of traffic violence. A wealthy British woman was found dead from a heroin overdose, after she was unable to get over killing a 17-year old bike rider eight years earlier.

A 30-something working mom shares what she learned by biking 500 miles across France.

A bike advocacy group met with civic leaders in Prague for the first time, after the courts threw out a ban on bicycles in the city center.

Life is cheap in Japan, where a distracted driver gets a suspended sentence for killing a 77-year old bike rider, despite having her smartphone in one hand and a drink in the other at the time of the crash.

They get it. A Vietnamese website calls for separate roads for bicyclists and pedestrians to ease traffic in increasingly congested cities.

 

Competitive Cycling

Cycling Weekly offers our first spoiler-free report from the Vuelta, while Vincenzo Nibali says he just hasn’t got it this time after fracturing his back in the Tour de France.

An Indian cyclist describes what he went through to become the first rider from his country to finish the over 5,600 mile Red Bull Trans-Siberian Extreme ultra-stage race.

Another Continental team folds after losing its sponsor.

 

Finally…

It’s hard to be number one when you have to stop for number two. When you want to go vegan on your bike, because you’re so tired of strapping on those leather arm warmers and that bacon bike bell.

And maybe he really is the spawn of hell. At least when it comes to people on bikes.