You might have seen Bike Rumor’s post on Peugeot’s futuristic concept bike. Peugeot hasn’t sold bikes in years, but the brand still holds cachet with many Europeans. A European cycling company has licensed the name and will sell Peugeot branded bikes through car dealerships and bike retailers in Europe. This 2010 relaunch of Peugeot bikes is done to celebrate the company’s 200th anniversary.

The actual bikes for sale include very utilitarian models like this city bike.

Why are Peugeot designers also releasing unworkable concept sketches like this B1K that seems more at home in a sci fi movie than on an urban street? James at Bicycle Design provides some interesting insight from a designer’s perspective:

Concept designs like this do serve a real purpose for designers. Cutting loose a bit and creating something that is purely conceptual from time to time helps to inspire the design team and “keep the creative juices flowing”. That creative energy can translate to a really nice, and saleable, product line down the road if the company chooses to puts the resources in place for the product development team to succeed.

Read more at Bicycle Design.

The California Highway Patrol posts traffic incident dispatches to the web. A while ago I wrote a script to filter out incidents involving bikes or bicycles, and I finally modified this script to save each bike incident to a web page.

You’ll see a few false positives involving motorcycles, and most of the ‘bike incidents’ seem to be either “1125 – Traffic Hazard” or “Pedestrian in Roadway” when a motorist reports a cyclist somewhere. Still, there are a fair number of “TC” (Traffic Collision) and “Ambulance Responding” incidents.

You can view the list of bike incidents here. If you want to follow this in (near) real time, each new incident is tweeted to @CHPBIKE on Twitter.

If you have suggestions on ways to improve this, I’m all ears. Already on my TODO list:

• Create separate monthly index pages.
• Hover over CHP “10 codes” and jargon so you can see what it means. For example, “XRAY” means “female”; 1097 just means they showed up; JSO = “Just South Of.”
• Replace Dispatch Center code with English language. For example, OCCC is “Orange County.”
• Instead of listing incident number in the link tag, I’ll put the incident type so you can quickly ignore “Traffic Hazard” and “Pedestrian On Roadway” type incidents if you want to, instead of requiring you to link through.
• In addition to the Twitter feed, I might create an RSS feed as well (though the Twitter feed already has an RSS feed built in *shrug*.

It’s important to note that this only captures incidents reported to the California Highway Patrol. Incidents handled by the local police, such as this morning’s cycling fatality in Los Gatos, will not generally be visible here.

Danilo Di Luca was suspended and fined by the Italian Olympic Committee. Di Luca tested positive for EPO after the 2009 Giro D’Italia, in which he placed second behind Denis Menchov. This is the second suspension of his career.

More –> Bicycle.Net.

I’m contributing to Murph’s Bay Area Highway 101 Crossing Project directly to his Holier Than You blog now. This morning, I posted details on the University Avenue crossing between Palo Alto and East Palo Alto.

Next up: Willow Road in Menlo Park.

Back in 1997, then Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco was slipping in the polls. To direct attention away from his failing policies, he set out to crack down on the San Francisco Critical Mass. When 5,000 cyclists showed up at Justin Hermann Plaza in response to Brown’s public challenge to Critical Mass, police responded by arresting (and eventually releasing without trial) 150 cyclists and pedestrians, violently attacking many of them without provocation.

In an apparent repeat of this history, newly appointed police chief George Gascón says a review of Critical Mass is under way at his department. “I am not satisfied with Critical Mass,” he says.

Gascón threw some fuel on the fire with a direct challenge to cyclists, suggesting a (clearly unconstitutional) ballot initiative to ban Critical Mass would “pass with flying colors.”

The SF Chief’s review is supposedly part of his plan to reduce crime in San Francisco by 20%. Cutting down on the number of red light cyclists just might do that!

H/T Murph.