Bicycling

Imagine you live in Havre de Grace, Maryland. Congratulations: It’s a lovely, quaint little town. I’ve enjoyed stopping by on my way between DC and Philly, eating ice cream and watching sailboats bobble in the water where the Susquehanna River spills into the Chesapeake Bay.

FiveThirtyEight went viral in our circles earlier this month, with a post titled "Bike Lanes Don’t Cause Traffic Jams If You’re Smart About Where You Build Them." Our colleagues and friends, people who love to ride bikes and want to make cities more bikeable, sent this article zooming around the tightly-wound corner of the internet that is all about #bikes. The post had a much-welcomed conclusion, backed by data, charts, and statistical tests: Bike lanes have a negligible effect on congestion. Streetsblog noted the implication that complete streets need not be a zero-sum game, while arguing that bike lanes should be measured by safety, connectedness, and other measures beyond congestion.

Leading up to Earth Day, the New York Times ran an editorial, "Time Is Running Out," lamenting the lack of urgency in the United States to prevent a very urgent problem: catastrophic climate change. Today, Brad Plumer at Vox explained why it may be too late to keep average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels -- the threshold that climate scientists have been warning about.

How well does your state fund infrastructure for walking and biking? Or perhaps we should say, how poorly?

How good are your state's policies on walking and biking?

New data from the Alliance for Biking and Walking's 2014 Benchmarking report bears out the notion that people tend to be healthier in cities where walking and biking are more prevalent.

Which state has the highest share of people who walk to work? It's not temperate California.

The Alliance for Biking and Walking released its big biannual benchmarking report today, a 200-page document that measures the scope, status, and benefits of biking and walking across the United States, using 2011 and 2012 data to update its previous reports.

It wasn't a total surprise, but exciting nevertheless for bicycle advocates gathered at the NACTO "Cities for Cycling" Road Show in Oakland last night. Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty announced that the agency will endorse the use of the National Association of City Transportation Officials Urban Street Design Guide, giving California cities the state DOT's blessing to install modern infrastructure like protected bike lanes.