Bicycling

Congratulations to Todd Consentino and Chris Chaney, winners of the Ortlieb Showers & Snow photo contest by the Alliance for Biking & Walking and Streetsblog.

It's Bike to Work Day, and despite pouring rain, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx came out to the Washington Area Bicyclists Association event in Freedom Plaza, getting soaked in shorts and a baseball cap.

UPDATE: Well, this is embarrassing and a little maddening. We have been hacked through our hack-proof captcha coding. So, we're shutting this sucker down and calling the winners based on voting as of May 10, when the hacking started. We will steer clear of Google polls in the future, and we sincerely apologize to everyone who voted and most especially to everyone who submitted photos. Winners will be announced tomorrow.

We were so excited about the first-ever Census report exclusively on biking and walking that we devoted this entire episode of the Talking Headways podcast to an interview with its author, Brian McKenzie.

The U.S. Census Bureau just released its first-ever report exclusively on walking and biking [PDF]. Using data from the American Community Survey, the report shows how rates of active transportation vary by age, income, education, race, and the availability of a vehicle. It's a lot more detail than the usual Census data release on how people get to work, which only breaks active commuting down by gender.

UPDATE 5/13: Hey folks, we got hacked. Deadline extended, vote in our new-and-improved, more secure poll by 11:59 p.m. May 14!

Any bicyclist knows that maps can be quite deceiving at first glance. The first time I tried to traverse San Francisco on a bicycle, I foolishly set out from the bike-rental shop on Fisherman's Wharf with a basic street map, and decided that I'd avoid downtown traffic by heading south across the grid. While I was correct that the city's connected street grid offered many direct routes, I neglected to notice the huge ridge of Pacific Heights looming directly ahead, or the numerous full-stop intersections along the way that would further sap my momentum.

Strava may be making the leap from feel-good gadget for hard core exercise buffs to serious planning tool for cities looking to improve active transportation.

This week in Kentucky, a judge held up the right of a single mom to ride her bike to work, after she was ticketed three times by local law enforcement for "reckless driving."