Monday’s Headlines

By Blake Aued |
  • Startups are abandoning suburban office parks in favor of urban areas with good transit. (City Lab)
  • Vice gets to the heart of Uber and Lyft’s desperate battle against a California bill reclassifying drivers as employees rather than contractors: It could destroy their unsustainable business model by increasing the already unprofitable companies’ labor costs.
  • Likewise, a University of Colorado professor writing in the L.A. Times recognizes how e-scooters and other tech companies are disrupting cities’ ecosystems — and not in a good way.
  • An Uber glitch last week charged customers 100 times their actual fares. (CBS News)
  • New Jersey transit stranded 12,000 wrestling fans for hours after a WWE event on Friday. (Deadspin)
  • Houston could add park-and-ride lots or other projects back into November’s $3.5-billion transit referendum, thanks to $400 million in cost savings. (Chronicle)
  • Not only is Philadelphia’s Spring Garden Street in need of bike lanes in its own right, they would complete the city’s portion of a 3,000-mile bike trail connecting South Florida and Maine. (PlanPhilly)
  • Cars are the lowest priority for Midtown Atlanta residents, a transportation survey found, ranking even behind controversial e-scooters. And almost everyone in the neighborhood wants better walking and biking infrastructure. (Curbed)
  • Maryland is in trouble with a $2-billion shortfall in transit funding. (WTOP)
  • Early voting on the future of light rail in Phoenix starts in two weeks. (CBS 5)
  • Seattle’s Link light rail has seen 134 million boardings since it started running 10 years ago, and it’s still growing. (Kent Recorder)
  • Hey, Triad City Beat: Reverse parking isn’t un-American — it’s un-dangerous (or at least less dangerous than backing out).
  • And, finally, everyone is talking about the 50th anniversary of the first manned mission to the moon, but Wired asked, “How long would it take to bike to the moon?” Now that’s a mission not even JFK had the guts to order up.

Friday’s Headlines

By Blake Aued |
  • The Trump Administration is still holding back billions of dollars in funding for public transit. (Curbed, Streetsblog)
  • Cities need new infrastructure to handle the rise of e-commerce as deliveries add to congestion. (Bloomberg)
  • Google Maps is now displaying bike-share docks in 24 cities. (Engadget)
  • A Blue Line power shutdown on Wednesday and last month’s Red Line derailment show that Boston’s T is in crisis, say transit advocates, who are asking Mayor Martin Walsh for more funding. (Herald)
  • Minneapolis has received a grant from the Bloomberg American Cities Climate Challenge to build two bus-only lanes. (Southwest Journal)
  • Washington state is considering shifting from a gas tax to taxing drivers by the mile. (Tacoma News Tribune)
  • The Washington, D.C. suburb of Arlington County, Va. has passed a Vision Zero resolution, but offered few details on how it intends to meet that goal. (ARL Now)
  • Last week, we linked to a story on how the homeless are affected by cities reducing parking spaces. San Francisco recently set aside a parking lot for people who live in vans or RVs. (Chronicle)
  • A Detroit man spent three nights in jail after police threw him to the ground and arrested him while he was crossing the street. (WXYZ)
  • A Cleveland driver had a completely rational response to a cyclist who reminded him of the rules of the road. Just kidding, he flipped out. (Scene)

Thursday’s Headlines

By Blake Aued |
  • Unless people drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures all over the country will rise to dangerous levels in the coming decade (Mic). The Union of Concerned Scientists has created an alarming interactive map that tells you how hot your community could get. (Spoiler alert: some hobbits might show up and throw a ring at you.)
  • Creative crosswalk designs slow down drivers and keep pedestrians safer, but the Federal Highway Administration isn’t always a fan. (NPR)
  • Bike boulevards are an inexpensive way to improve safety for all modes of transportation. (OnMilwaukee)
  • The Houston City Council is considering doing away with minimum parking requirements in parts of the city. (Chronicle)
  • E-scooters are here to stay in San Francisco — if companies can show they won’t just serve rich white men, they will report safety figures and can clean up after themselves. (Examiner)
  • Cincinnati transit advocates are pushing for a sales tax to improve bus service, as well as upgrade roads and bridges. (WCPO)
  • San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer is standing up to transit opponents and leaving the door open for congestion pricing — a new direction for the city. (Voice of San Diego)
  • Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’s surprise veto of a downtown road safety redesign led journalist Maria Saporta to argue that the car-centric city must shift toward a multimodal transportation system.
  • The price tag for a Phoenix light rail expansion hasn’t really tripled. As the head of Valley Metro Rail explained, the cost estimate is up to $1.35 billion from $550 million because a second extension was added, and the new figure also includes contingency. (KTAR)
  • Washington, D.C. residents want more dedicated bus lanes and free transfers between buses and rail, a recent survey found. (Greater Greater Washington)
  • Detroit’s MoGo bike-share is expanding into suburban Oakland County. (Daily Tribune)
  • Riders keep leaving bikes on Pittsburgh buses — 63 so far this year. Were they stolen? Who knows? (Post-Gazette)

Wednesday’s Headlines

By Blake Aued |
  • A New York Times story about self-driving cars focuses on whether the technology is feasible and doesn’t stop to question if or how it will get vehicles off the roads.
  • Scooter rental companies Lime and Bird are starting to get serious about safety. (City Lab)
  • The mobility tool Populus now has the ability to show city officials where people are riding shared bikes and scooters — useful for planning. (Smart Cities Dive)
  • Despite strong community opposition, Louisiana is still intent on ramming a freeway through inner-city Shreveport like this were the 1950s. (Strong Towns)
  • Fares are up and on-time performance is down, but Denver transit officials are still puzzled about why ridership has dropped 14 percent since last year. (Denver Post)
  • Austin — which is seeing more intensive development on formerly suburban roads — is starting a speed management program to slow traffic. (Monitor)
  • Uber and Lyft rides are down in New York City as fares rise. NYC recently limited the city’s number of ride-sharing drivers and starting charging passengers a congestion surcharge. (Bloomberg)
  • A Free Press columnist criticizes Michigan Republicans’ plan to sell pension bonds to fix roads, rather than raise the gas tax. It’s the same budget gimmick that helped bankrupt Detroit.
  • A Milwaukee bus rapid transit line is expected to be up and running by 2021. (urbanmilwaukee)
  • The first trolley on the first light rail built in the U.S. after World War II is back on the streets in San Diego. (Times of San Diego)
  • Get ready to share the bike lane with R2D2. (Digital Trends)

Tuesday’s Headlines

By Blake Aued |
  • Lyft’s courtroom victory making it the sole bike-share provider in San Francisco is also a big win for the company in its war with Uber. (Business Insider)
  • A scooter skeptic has seen the light. (Washington Post)
  • The ride-hailing bubble is about to burst, part infinity. (National Review)
  • Parking in Los Angeles is a blood sport, but that’s not because the city doesn’t have enough parking — it’s because it has too much. (LAist)
  • Citi Bike announces a massive, but slow, expansion in New York City (Streetsblog)
  • Philadelphia’s third two-way cycle track is its most promising yet. (Philly Mag)
  • Arlington, Va. is committed to low-stress bike routes, but the results on the ground are a mixed bag. (Greater Greater Washington)
  • Drivers are allowed to park in some Raleigh, N.C. bike lanes, making the incomplete network even less effective. (CBS 17)
  • A temporary shuttle is bridging a light-rail gap in Baltimore caused by a sinkhole that forced six stations to close. (Baltimore Sun)
  • Even the tiny California town of Nevada City has realized the folly of cheap parking. (City Lab)
  • Former world champion boxer Pernell Whitaker was killed by a driver Sunday night in Virginia Beach while trying to cross a busy eight-lane road on foot. The driver has not been charged. (Virginian-Pilot)
  • The “Milwaukee Slide” isn’t a popular wedding dance — it’s when a driver uses a bike lane to pass another car. Stick with the Macarena, please. (Journal Sentinel)
Helmets are too flimsy to protect cyclists says one British surgeon.

Helmets Do Nothing, Says British Surgeon

By Aaron Short | | 39 Comments
Many cyclists believe bike helmets will protect their skull if they ever get into a crash, but a British neurosurgeon claimed they are not worth the trouble. Dr. Henry Marsh, a neurosurgeon at St. George’s Hospital in London who treats patients with cycling injuries, argued that most helmets are ineffective and “too flimsy” to keep […]
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