Tag Archive for CSUN

Morning Links: CSUN dean looks to ban skateboards, bikes and scooters from campus, and bike election results

CSUN skateboard users may soon find themselves on double-secret probation.

Like the Deltas in Animal House, skateboards are being targeted by a college dean who apparently wants them booted off campus.

And bicycles and scooters, too.

Dr. Jerry Stinner, the dean of the College of Science and Mathematics at California State University Northridge, writes in an email to faculty members that he was recently knocked down by someone on a skateboard.

Which is a bad thing.

And for which the person responsible should be held accountable. Not everyone who tries to get around the CSUN campus by any means other than walking or driving.

Just wait until someone tells him about cars, and the dangers they pose to students and faculty on campus.

Although the image of a college dean pointing a speed gun at unsuspecting students making their way across the massive campus, undoubtedly from his hidden vantage point, is pretty laughable.

But for someone who heads up the mathematics department, he doesn’t seem to have a solid grasp on statistics and polling. His survey questions are clearly slanted to elicit an anti-skateboard/bike/scooter response, rather than any clear gauge of actual attitudes.

Maybe he could have one of those statistics professors draft an actual, unbiased poll that could go out to everyone, including students.

Let’s hope CSUN has some Deltas of their own who are willing to throw a toga party or two to fight injustice.

And show Dean Stinner, and the rest of the CSUN administration, just how ridiculous this is.

Or the next time a pedestrian bumps into him, he may try to ban walking.

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Streetsblog rounds up the transportation-related issues on California ballots in Tuesday’s election, saying Democratic super-majorities in the state Senate and Assembly bode well for climate change issues and a balanced transportation system.

Meanwhile, Bicycle Retailer catches up with bike-related elections around the US, including the failure of California’s Prop 6. The article notes that Madeleine Dean, wife of the CEO of Performance Bicycle parent company Advanced Sports Enterprises, was elected to represent Pennsylvania in Congress, which should give a good voice for people on bikes.

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Local

Sandra Marie Wicksted was due in court today to enter a plea in the murder of fallen bicyclist Leslie Pray, and the attempted murder of four other riders, in Claremont last Saturday. However, the hearing was delayed until Friday.

Metro Bike is bringing ebike bikeshare to Union Station in DTLA as part of a pilot program before rolling them out throughout the county.

Three public meetings will be held to discuss closing the eight-mile long gap in the LA River bike path from Elysian Valley to Vernon; the first meeting will take place at 6 pm tonight at Metro Headquarters in DTLA. If you’ve ever tried to make it through that gap section on surface streets, you know how badly the closure is needed.

The Santa Monica Daily Press looks at SaMo’s efforts to establish scooter and bikeshare parking on the streets; doing that throughout the LA area could eliminate complaints about haphazardly parked and abandoned scooters. Although the first thing that jumped out at me was not the parking space in front, but the stripped bike locked to a rack in the background.

 

State

The CEO of ebike maker Pedego is now officially one of Orange County’s most influential people.

A San Diego exhibition, titled I Love to Ride My Bicycle, explores the relationship between artists and their bicycles.

Ventura’s Channel Islands Bike Club will host a presentation on international bicycle tourism tonight, following an ebike demo last month.

More protected bike lanes are sprouting up on the streets of Los Altos.

Interesting study from San Francisco on bicycling’s gender gap, and what prevents women from taking environmental action.

 

National

Bike Index talks with the Russian developer of a free Android app for the bike registration service.

Bike Snob says stop dooring people, already. Bad enough that the illustration shows motorists hitting a bike rider and pedestrian with their doors; dooring a corgi is just going too damn far.

Ford went shopping, and scooped up e-scooter provider Spin for a mere $40 million.; the carmaker also runs San Francisco’s bikeshare program.

Portland’s newly elected city commissioner envisions a carfree future centered on the ability to have bicycles, and free and fast public transit.

Utah will once again consider an Idaho stop law, allowing bike riders to treat stop signs as yields. Which is only fair, since most drivers don’t come to a full stop, either.

A Montana couple rides a singletrack trail in the Bitterroot Mountains that they fear could disappear in the next few years.

A Dallas website says the city may only have 10.4 miles of bike lanes, but it does have some lovely paths and trails.

A New York letter writer says bicycling “idiots” are a menace to “the 99% of New Yorkers” who don’t ride bikes, and police should shred lawbreaking riders on the spot (second item). I’m oaky with that, as long as the same policy applies to people in cars, as well.

This is also the cost of traffic violence. A driver charged with killing the four-year old daughter of a Tony Award-winning actress and another one-year old boy in a crosswalk while they were in a crosswalk has killed herself. Knowing you took an innocent life would be a damn hard thing to live with for the rest of your life.

DC’s mayor tells the postal service, FedEx and UPS to stop parking in bike lanes. Good luck with that.

A Baltimore woman has made a career out of teaching kids how to ride a bicycle.

Florida is building a 2.4-mile, $2.6 million dollar bike path to close the final gap in a 100-mile trail connecting two counties, part of what will eventually be a 250-mile trail across the state.

 

International

London’s Sun newspaper asks what’s the point of lowering more speed limits to 20 mph when most drivers ignore it anyway — up to 94% during early morning hours. In that case, we might as well get rid of stop signs, legalize drunk and distracted driving and remove turn signals from cars, since many drivers ignore those laws, too.

Cellphone data from a British delivery service proves that bicycles really do move through an urban environment faster than motor vehicles.

A UK bicycling magazine says the Netherlands is ahead of the game once again by proposing to ban cellphone use while riding a bicycle.

Here’s a couple more for your bike bucket list. Cycling Weekly suggests that Madeira, Portugal may be the ultimate adventure cycling destination. Unless you’d prefer a bike tour through Hemingway’s Spain.

No bias here. An Israeli writer says forget the drunk driver, let’s blame the ebike-riding victim because some people don’t ride them safely.

 

Finally…

Your next bike light could be powered by magnets. This is what happens when you put a new bike path between two shooting ranges.

And Homer Simpson is definitely not one of us. Especially when he knocks a bike rider down as a result of donut-distracted driving .

https://gfycat.com/tinyjollygalago

Thanks to Steve for the heads-up.

 

Morning Links: Los Angeles leads nation in pedestrian deaths, and CSUN petition to save campus LimeBikes

We’re #1.

Preliminary data from the Governor’s Highway Safety Association ranks Los Angeles as the deadliest county in the US for pedestrians, with twice as many deaths as the second-leading county.

San Diego and Orange Counties also ranked in the top ten nationwide.

Clearly, we’ve got a long way to go.

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The student association at Cal State Northridge has started a petition to save the school’s LimeBike program, after Councilmember Mitch Englander introduced a motion to temporarily ban dockless bikeshare from the streets of LA.

Thanks to Steve for the heads-up.

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Place your bids.

The CBS2/KCAL9 cycling team is auctioning off a new Giant TCR Advanced 2 road bike on eBay to benefit BikeMS.

Sounds like a good bike for a great cause.

And thanks to the cyclists at CBS2/KCAL9 for their efforts to give back to the community.

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Evidently, not everyone likes Santa Monica’s Bird scooters.

Thanks to David Drexler for the video.

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Local

Great letter to the editor from Jonathan Weiss saying if CD5 Councilmember Paul Koretz really wants to understand how to save lives while keeping traffic moving, he should stop killing traffic safety studies.

Good piece for Streetsblog from Don Ward, who questions how Vision Zero can work when LA continues to prioritize speed.

Rapha offers a guide to bicycling in Los Angeles. Although anyone who comes to LA looking for “movie stars around every corner” is going to go home sadly disappointed. And there seem to be large, mostly non-white, sections of the city missing.

State

Santa Barbara gets its first protected bike lane, the first completed project from the city’s new Bike Master Plan. Although I have a hard time calling something separated from traffic by flimsy plastic bollards “protected.”

The rich get richer. San Francisco approves plans to extend a parking-protected bike lane in the South of Market neighborhood.

 

National

The road-raging Sante Fe NM driver who allegedly backed into a group of bicycling senior citizens says he just stopped in the middle of the road to confront the cyclists he claims flipped him off, and didn’t do anything wrong. Because apparently, he thinks slamming on his brakes in front of other road users and stopping in the middle of a highway is perfectly acceptable. Not that his story strains credibility or anything.

No surprise here. Aspen CO business owners are up in arms over plans to remove just 15 parking spaces to make room for a bike lane. Just like business people almost everywhere, they seem to like cars more than customers.

One way to keep homeowners from opposing a new Minneapolis bikeway — make sure they don’t have to pay for it.

This is why people keep dying on our streets. An Ohio driver who spent four years in prison for killing a bike rider while driving drunk is headed back to jail for once again driving drunk, despite a lifetime driving ban.

More employees are biking to New York’s La Guardia airport, even though that Port Authority has failed to come through with long-promised bike lanes.

Not surprisingly, New York’s Citi Bike bikeshare is having trouble getting users to ride bikes back uphill to higher stations.

DC is now a gold-level Bicycle Friendly Community, something bronze-level Los Angeles can only envy.

International

Cycling Weekly offers advice on how to recover after hard rides.

Bicyclists in London — no, the one in Canada — criticize a half-billion dollar plan for bus rapid transit lanes, saying they don’t do enough to accommodate bicyclists and other non-motorized road users.

A Halifax, Nova Scotia letter writer says no, it’s the drivers who are hogging the roads.

A British correspondent living in India offers an outsider’s perspective on bicycling in the country — Manali-Leh highway good, New Delhi, not so much.

A letter writer in The Guardian says riding a bike isn’t an “act of ‘culture war,’ it’s a positive choice to make things better.”

An Irish paper explains why bicyclists need a safe passing distance.

Treehugger examines why car-crazy Germany is safer for bicyclists and pedestrians than the United States.

Some Indian high schools are providing all their students with bicycles, not just to provide access to school, but to level the playing field with better off students.

A planning student from Kathmandu finds echoes of Jane Jacobs in the ancient layout of Nepal’s major cities, and suggests emulating the Dutch and their bikeways is a better alternative than destroying the city to widen the roads.

A South African woman had her bike and cellphone stolen at knifepoint.

A New Zealand company is offering employees $10 a day to ride to work. Thanks to Jon for the link.

Caught on video: A Singaporean bike rider was wrestled to the ground after allegedly braking in front of a bus after the driver honked at him for riding too slowly.

Competitive Cycling

CNN looks at the efforts of the Kenyan Riders to become the first all-African team to qualify for the Tour de France. South Africa’s MTN Qhubeka, now Dimension Data, competed as a wild card entry in 2015.

A team of British cancer survivors will take on this year’s Race Across America, aka RAAM, to prove it’s possible to lead an active life after cancer.

Finally…

When the punishment for your shoplifting attempt is anything but kosher while trying to make a getaway by bike. Pity those poor, put-upon drivers.

And a writer for Outside says enough with the podium girls, already.

Enough indeed.

Morning Links: Dockless bikeshare comes to CSUN, and bikeshare systems explore interoperability on Westside

bikeshare

For a few short hours, we seemed to have a real scoop.

This morning, Steve S forwarded a photo showing hundreds of LimeBike dockless bikeshare bikes massed on the Cal State Northridge campus, apparently being readied for distribution.

While we speculated on just what they were doing there, I scrambled to figure out what council district they were in, assuming one of the San Fernando Valley’s councilmembers had made a deal with LimeBike for a pilot bikeshare program, like Joe Buscaino had in the Southside’s 15th District.

But before I could get a response, it turned out the bikes were on the CSUN campus because that was their destination.

According to an article in the school’s CSUN Today, the university is rolling out 400 of the app-based bikes to be spread out across the campus, and available to check out from any existing bike rack.

The bikes’ GPS system will also be used to track where they are used to determine the best routes for new bike lanes on the campus.

But unlike shopping carts, the wheels don’t lock when they reach the edge of the university. So it will be interesting to see where the bikes actually end up.

Maybe they’ll go far enough off campus to spur approval of dockless bikeshare throughout the Valley.

And maybe even encourage more and better bikeways for students, and the rest of us, as well.

Thanks to Steve for the photo and his help with the developing story.

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Big bikeshare news in West Hollywood, too, where the city’s WeHo Pedals will soon be interoperable with other Westside bikeshares — and could one day be free.

Meanwhile, the bikeshare program has been losing money in its first year of operation, bringing in only 19% of projections.

Which begs the question of how they intend to pay for the possible free usage for city residents.

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And as long as we’re on the subject,

The majority of low-income bikeshare users in the Bay Area are in San Francisco.

Social Bicycles has changed its name to Jump Bikes, and raised $10 million dollars to bring dockless pedal-assist e-bikeshare to San Francisco.

China’s Ofo dockless bikeshare comes to Prague; however, British police say the company can pick up their own damn dumped and vandalized bikes.

A Japanese bikeshare company hopes to bring tourists back to the country’s Fukushima prefecture, which was devastated by a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear meltdown.

Chinese dockless bikeshare companies are teaming with Japanese tech firms to solve the problem of abandoned and vandalized bikes.

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Local

Streetsblog reports on Saturday’s groundbreaking for the Alhambra Blvd street improvements in El Sereno, including a road diet and bike lanes to tame the dangerous street. Nice to see that at least one councilmember isn’t afraid of angry LA drivers demanding a halt to road diets.

A bike rider reportedly suffered “significant” injuries in a hit-and-run crash in Azusa Monday evening. But instead of asking for the public’s help, the police withheld any details of the suspect vehicle to avoid compromising the investigation. Thanks to Erik Griswold for the heads-up.

Actress and author Jenifer Lewis is one of us, too.

The LACBC is hosting their first Team LACBC training ride for this year’s Climate Ride on Sunday.

Also on Sunday, the League of Women Voters is holding a discussion on the Future of Transportation in Los Angeles with Move LA’s Denny Zane. As opposed to Keep LA Moving, which seems to want the opposite.

State

Berkeley considers changing the law to make it easier to install stop signs.

No bias here. A Marin County supervisor is calling for the removal of a protected bike and pedestrian lane on the San Raphael Bridge, and converting it to a third lane for motor vehicles — before it’s even built.

Speaking of Marin, mountain bikers will be blocked from ten of the county’s open space trails during owl breeding season for the next five years.

There’s something hypnotic about watching a fatbike rider with studded tires on frozen Caples Lake in Kirkwood.

 

National

Pittsburgh streets may be clear, but the bike lanes remain covered in snow and ice.

New York plans to add raised bike lanes along the center divider on a street crossing the border between Brooklyn and Queens, while banning left turns to eliminate dangerous conflict points inherent in a center bikeway.

NBC News looks at New York’s ludicrous ban on ebikes, which harms the city’s low-income food delivery workers. It also hurts disabled people, as well as others for whom a pedal-assist bike could provide an invaluable mobility tool.

A Florida letter writer says no, it wasn’t the sun’s glare that resulted in a bike-riding politician’s death, it was someone who decided to keep driving when he couldn’t see where he was going.

International

Caught on video: Pro-Brexit protesters outside London’s No. 10 Downing Street rip a European Union flag out of the hands of a bike rider.

A British driver gets a well-deserved six years for the high-speed hit-and-run crash that killed a bike rider.

A writer for Bike Radar says anti-bike stories in London are poisoning the streets for riders in the rest of the UK.

A British man says bicyclists should be banned from riding on pavements — aka sidewalks — even though it’s already illegal.

You’ve got to be kidding. A Kiwi driver won’t face charges for intentionally ramming a bike rider after first rear-ending him, then becoming impatient when it took too long to dislodge the bike’s wheel from under the car’s bumper. Even though police called the driver’s actions “completely unacceptable.”

After frightening readers with horror stories about the abuse bike riders face on the roads in Auckland, New Zealand, a local news site says the real problems are the condition of the streets themselves.

A Singapore delivery cyclist is facing charges for killing a 73-year old pedestrian after running a red light; while the paper says he was riding a bike with a faulty coaster brake, it sounds more like he was riding a brakeless fixie.

Competitive Cycling

Next year’s Tour de France will start in Brussels in honor of the 50th anniversary of The Cannibal’s first Tour win.

America’s only remaining Tour de France winner says Chris Froome’s failed drug test will be the end of Team Sky.

Jeremy Powers and Stephen Hyde discuss their epic battle in this year’s US men’s cyclocross national championships.

USA Cycling named the national team for next month’s World Cyclocross Championships in the Netherlands, including 14-time defending US champ Katie Compton.

Belgian pro Philippe Gilbert says the legendary Paris-Roubaix really ain’t that hard.

Finally…

Forget pedaling, your next bike could be hydrogen powered. Who knew bicycling is a guy-rich environment in which to meet Mr. Right?

And apparently, the way to get rich in haute couture is to rip the chamois out of bike shorts, and sell them for $400 a pair.