Friday’s Headlines Bike to Businesses

New York's 8th Avenue bike lane has doubled profits for neighboring businesses. Photo: Photo: ##http://www.flickr.com/photos/bicyclesonly/3723831856/##BicyclesOnly/Flickr##
New York's 8th Avenue bike lane has doubled profits for neighboring businesses. Photo: Photo: ##http://www.flickr.com/photos/bicyclesonly/3723831856/##BicyclesOnly/Flickr##
  • Small business owners continue to oppose bike lanes, even though research shows they actually lead to increased revenue, because they’re more apt to believe customers’ and fellow business owners’ parking horror stories than data. (Wired)
  • Tier Mobility which bought bike-share company Spin last month and has used hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital to gobble up other companies is now laying off another 100 employees. (Tech Crunch)
  • Repealing jaywalking laws allows states to focus on the real culprits for pedestrian deaths street design. (Transportation for America)
  • If you think you need a three-row pickup truck, just get a minivan already. (Jalopnik)
  • The Congress for New Urbanism’s Public Square offers a sneak peek of its “freeways with no future” in Albany, Austin, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Oakland, Seattle, Tulsa and Youngstown.
  • Two things the Netherlands are known for are biking and reclaiming land from the ocean. Now Amsterdam has combined the two with a 7,000-space underwater bike parking garage. (City Lab)
  • Atlanta city council members are unhappy that transit agency MARTA is revising an expansion plan its CEO now calls “unrealistic.” (AJC)
  • A new Nashville task force will try to achieve what others could not: slow down drivers and reduce traffic deaths. (Scene)
  • Houston is considering letting developers opt out of a requirement to build sidewalks in exchange for paying a fee that will allow the city to close sidewalk gaps elsewhere. (Chronicle)
  • El Paso wants to cap I-10 with greenspace to stitch neighborhoods back together, but the plan could be contingent on the Texas DOT widening the freeway. (Smart Cities Dive)
  • Colorado’s plan to reduce traffic deaths sounds an awful lot like Vision Zero, even if it’s not called that. (Westword)
  • The Tampa streetcar broke a ridership record in December. (That’s So Tampa)
  • Here’s where to head for a bike-friendly vacation. (Momentum)

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Illustration of what Hawthorne could look like with better infrastructure. Scott Mason.

How to Get Skeptical Biz Owners On Board With Bikes

|
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published on Bike Portland is republished here with permission. Though it’s a local story, we thought it spoke well to a national audience about both the potential and the pitfalls of citizen-led grass roots efforts to build bike infrastructure, especially in the context of a commercial landscape whose business […]

Building a Better Bike Lane

|
This weekend’s Wall Street Journal has an massive, full-page report on bike friendly cities in Europe. Initially the arguments for more biking were mostly about health and congestion, but in the last year concern for the environment has become an important factor compelling people to travel by bicycle: Flat, compact and temperate, the Netherlands and […]