March 4, 2011Leave a Comment
An anonymous individual in Toronto stops cyclists to hand them thank you notes and cash for “bringing cleaner air into Toronto while going from point A to point B on a bicycle instead of in a car. The anonymous donor is extremely grateful and wants to show gratitude with this small token of appreciation.”
How cool is that? More at Toronto Cranks, and via my bike and bus riding pal Joanna from Santa Cruz.
March 4, 20117 Comments on MapQuest adds worldwide bike directions
MapQuest adds a bicycle option to the “Open” version of their online directions service.
March 3, 20111 Comment on Bicycle Photo
This is a bicycle blog, so I figure I should post a bicycle photo every once in a while.
Bicycle News
New York Assemblyman Michael DenDekker withdrew his controversial bike registration bill after heavy criticism. He’s calling instead for increased enforcement of existing bike laws.
Placer County, California (which stretches from the eastern suburbs of Sacramento up into the Sierras to Lake Tahoe) has a Bucks for Bikes program. You can get up to $200 toward the cost of a new bike after attending a bike clinic. Via.
Everybody’s pretty excited about the Los Angeles Bike Plan.
George Will strangely believes public transportation promotion is a commie plot, while heavily subsidized roads with everything that entails (mandatory licensing and registration; huge government bureaucracies to build, maintain and oversee the infrastructure; more government bureaucracies to address public safety, health and environmental consequences; billions of extra dollars just to police the system; a military infrastructure larger and more expensive than the rest of the world combined just to ensure the system keeps running, and so on) is somehow freedom. Ezra Klein has a somewhat more balanced view, IMO.
In Communist China, meanwhile, authorities combine technology and the road system to keep tabs on their citizenry.
Overopinionated’s NAHBS awards: Best Imitation of Last Year’s “Best of Show,” Finest Application of Paint to Hide Shoddy Work, Most Expensive Townie, Most Cryptic Dialect, etc.
Bike advocacy and ethnicity.
Cycling to LaGuardia, with much discussion afterwards.
Carlton is writing a book on road rights and posts about changing attitudes about cars from the turn of the century.
Bike Hugger has a cool new messenger bag.
James has his thoughts on NAHBS 2011 at Bicycle Design.
Orange man on bicycle hit by truck dies. 🙁
Range Rover does a concept bicycle.
Sorry, GEICO, but I don’t trust bicycle safety info from auto insurance companies, though the supposed effort to “increase the number of [University of Florida] students who wear helmets while driving” sounds interesting.
Lodi has California’s third highest rate of bike-vs-car collisions for cities their size. That city’s solution to reduce the accident rate? Ticket kids who ride without helmets. Because helmets magically reduce your chances of getting hit. Right. As far as I know, there’s no bicycle advocacy anywhere in San Joaquin County beyond a mountain biking club and a group of road cyclists in Stockton.
March 3, 20115 Comments on Skepticism in renewable fuels
These days, I mostly ignore claims of breakthroughs and innovations in renewable and alternative fuels that the technology and green blogs so breathlessly report on. Energy from plastic bags, algae, sewage waste, hemp fibers and so forth sounds wonderful, but a lot of energy reporting comes across a lot like what I pass along as “news” here on this cycling blog — just a rehash of press releases and marketing fluff.
March 3, 2011Leave a Comment
This infographic from a 2009 issue of an oil industry journal is a little bit dated — the graph shows thousands of barrels per day from each country. We now import 2700 thousand barrels per day from Canada, for example. Imports from Saudi Arabia are up to 1100 thousand barrels per day. Venezuelan imports have dropped to 917 thousand barrels per day. But you still get the gist of what’s going on.
You can see discussion and a larger version over at Oil & Gas Next Generation.
Gas prices punched through $4/gallon this week in San Jose, California. That’s a record for this time of year.
March 2, 20116 Comments on Point6 Cycling Socks
For some reason, Ted of Commute By Bike believes I have a sock fetish of some kind. I won’t admit to anything, but he recently turned me on to Point 6 Cycling Socks and I like what I see so far.