BikinginLA

As if Biking While Black wasn’t bad enough, you can add buying a bike while Black.

Pennsylvania police were caught on video tasing and hogtying a Black man who was buying a bike for his son at Walmart.

The store manager accused him of riding recklessly through the aisle and disturbing other shoppers, while some witnesses said he was just test riding the bike and telling people to have a nice day.

https://twitter.com/labousaab44/status/1285372331502772226?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1285372331502772226%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fbikinginla.com%2Fwp-admin%2Fpost.php%3Fpost%3D42378action%3Dedit

Police threw the book at him, filing charges of aggravated and simple assault, disarming a law enforcement officer, resisting arrest, defiant trespass and disorderly conduct.

So instead of a bicycle for his birthday, his son will get to see his father behind bars.

And remarkably, it only took a single day for the DA to absolve the officers of any wrongdoing.

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LADOT appears to be waking from their coronavirus slumber.

In addition to new bike lanes in DTLA, they released videos explaining two upcoming projects, including this one in the North San Fernando Valley.

Let’s hope this is just the start of long-delayed action to make the streets safer for people on two wheels.

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CiclaValley takes you gravel riding up Mt. Lowe above Altadena.

One of a kind ride doing gravel on a 19th century railway in the mountains above Los Angeles. Nothing beats Mt Lowe.@bikinginla @TheRadavist @gravelstoke https://t.co/w9OqdL2L6I via @YouTube

— Zachary Rynew (@Ciclavalley) July 21, 2020

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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.

A driver in Australia’s Queensland state is accused of intentionally crashing into five cars and three bike riders in eight separate incidents over a single three hour period; fortunately, no one was killed.

But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.

Police are looking for a bike-riding man who may have sexually assaulted two women on a Temecula bike path.

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Local

Metro Bike wants to know what you think about LA’s bikeshare system, with a chance to win a $200 gift card.

Los Angeles Magazine readers voted Helen’s Cycle’s the city’s best bike shop, although the magazine only seems to know about two of the LA area chain’s locations.

 

State

No bias here. Tomorrow Riverside police are planning yet another of the frequent safety operations targeting violations by bike riders and drivers that put bicyclists at risk. Yet My News LA, which usually does better, suggests the operation is targeting unsafe bicycling. As usual, ride to the letter of the law until you cross the city limit line so you’re not the one who gets ticketed.

The CHP blamed a bike rider for a Fresno collision, saying he shouldn’t have been riding  on the limited access highway.

A local news site has more on the death of 23-year old fixie rider Andrew Sanders, who died on Sunday following a crash with a skateboarder during last week’s Hill Bomb on San Francisco’s Dolores Street.

 

National

Google Maps is promising to up their bike game.

The newest version of the Lumos smart bike helmet set a Kickstarter record by raising nearly $3 million.

Seattle bike riders formed a line to protect marchers demanding racial, climate, economic, worker and social justice.

Denver bike shop owners say don’t count on getting a mountain bike until next year.

He gets it. An op-ed from a Colorado environmental design professor says this is the time to reinvent our roadways and how we use them while the coronavirus pandemic results in fewer cars on the streets.

There’s a special place in hell for whoever stole a three-wheeled adaptive bike from a nonverbal autistic man in an Iowa town.

A Chicago Streetsblog editor teamed with a local weekly to publish an illustrated low-stress bicycle map of the city showing the most comfortable riding routes.

Good question. A Chicago public radio station wants to know what happened to 76 bicycles police seized from people at a recent protest.

A Champaign IL bike rider was pushed off his bike, punched in the mouth and robbed of his money by a knife-wielding man.

An Illinois hit-and-run driver turned himself in after smashing into a bike rider because he felt bad about what he’d done. Every hit-and-run driver should feel the same way. And do the same thing.

Life is cheap in Michigan, where a sleepy driver got just 20 days for the fiery crash that killed a postal worker after lawmakers wiped negligent homicide off the books, which would have carried a two-year penalty. Thanks to Robert Leone for the heads-up.

It takes a real schmuck to steal a ghost bike installed for a Pittsburgh area man. Or any other ghost bike, for that matter.

 

International

Mexico City is expanding its bicycle network to encourage more riding during the Covid-19 crisis.

Kindhearted strangers pitched in to buy a new bike for a British Columbia boy after his BMX bike was stolen.

He gets it, too. A writer for the conservative London Times calls on officials to stand up to anti-cycling NIMBYs if the “golden age of cycling” promised by Prime Minister Boris Johnson is ever going to become a reality.

David Beckham is one of us, although Esquire seems more impressed with the former LA Galaxy and English soccer great’s shorts than anything else.

No bias here, either. A British taxi site blames an elderly man for damaging a cab with his bike and fists during a road rage incident, when the cab driver interfered in a dispute the older man was having with someone else after “purposely inconveniencing” other people on the road. Purposely inconveniencing people usually just means legally riding a bicycle in the roadway in front of impatient drivers.

The founders of music sharing platform SoundCloud are starting an all-inclusive ebike subscription service, beginning in Berlin.

Tern’s e-cargo bikes were among the first to exceed Germany’s still new safety standards.

German arts curator Hella Mewis was kidnapped by unknown assailants as she was riding her bicycle home from her office in Bagdad, Iraq Monday night.

Four Australian kids were killed by an alleged drunk and stoned in a horrifying crash as they walked on a sidewalk to get ice cream this past February; of the five cousins, only one boy who was riding a bicycle behind the others survived the brutal crash.

Despite the pandemic, bike and pedestrian deaths in Australia’s Queensland state are going the wrong way, with fatalities more than doubling compared to last year.

A road raging Singapore driver had his appeal for intentionally swerving into a bike rider denied, and will spend the next seven weeks behind bars; the rider he was arguing with got a $2,800 fine for his part in the dispute.

 

Who needs a front wheel when you’ve got a ski? Block parties are out, bike the block parties are in.

And bicycles are officially cool again.

As if they ever weren’t.

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Be safe, and stay healthy. And wear a mask, already.