Hello....he's the Science guy!

Bill Nye explains why the city of the future is bike-friendly | Grist

Why our roads are not good for bikes and pedestrians explained

I posted this a couple years ago but I felt that it needed some more playtime!
Enjoy.

Raising awareness

City park will honor memory of killed cyclist | The Journal Gazette

From the Atlantic Cities

A Biking Crash-Test Dummy Could Make Us Smarter About Cycling

• Sarah Goodyear
• Apr 17, 2012
• 4 Comments

Shutterstock

Bicycling is increasingly seen as a legitimate form of urban transportation – 2010 bike commuting rates in the United States were up 50 percent from 2000. So it’s about time that two-wheelers got some serious safety equipment: a crash-test dummy custom-designed to measure cycling injuries.
The dummy, a project of engineering students at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, is the first of its kind, and it could reveal some very interesting data about what happens to cyclists’ bodies when they hit the pavement.
Crash-test dummies for cars don’t measure the same kind of impacts that bike riders face, according to an article about the project in the Ottawa Citizen:

When engineers crash a car, they use one type of dummy for a frontal crash, and a different type for an impact from the side. Neither type is considered quite right for a cyclist who hits something, or slams on the front brakes hard, and flies over the handlebars….
The dummy wears a helmet. But like a human cyclist, it keeps the important stuff inside its head.
This includes one sensor that deforms under the force of impact, to show the stress that a real cyclist would endure.

With bike share on its way to the two biggest cities in the United States, New York and Los Angeles, cycling safety will be an increasingly mainstream concern. For now, the biking dummy may just be a student project. But it could develop into a useful tool that would provide hard data on, among other things, the much-disputed value of helmets. Bike riders deserve to be taken seriously as road users, and a scientifically accurate dummy can help to make that case.
The Ottawa Sun has a video of a crash test.
Photo credit: Fotocrisis /Shutterstock

Keywords: Safety, Bicycling, Helmets, Bike Sharing Systems

Sarah Goodyear has written about cities for a variety of publications, including Grist and Streetsblog. She lives in Brooklyn.

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More Conservative=less walkable

Politically conservative cities suck for pedestrians | Grist

So according to this, all hope is lost?

From the Washington Post

Want more bikers? Build more bike lanes.

Posted by Brad Plumer at 10:24 AM ET, 04/16/2012

Is there anything cities can do to encourage cycling? Portland, for instance, has twice as many bike commuters per 1,000 people as Washington. But maybe that’s just because Portland has nicer weather or more young people. It’s not clear that there’s an actual policy issue here.

A bike lane in action. ((Photo by Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post))

Yet in a new study (pdf) in the journal Transport Policy, Ralph Buehler and John Pucher suggest that cities might actually be able to influence how many cyclists are on the road. Perhaps all they have to do is — and this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise — build more bike lanes and bike paths.
Buehler and Pucher found that the presence of off-road bike paths and on-street bike lanes were, by far, the biggest determinant of cycling rates in cities. And that’s true even after you control for a variety of other factors like how hot or cold a city is, how much rain falls, how dense the city is, how high gas prices are, the type of people that live there, or how safe it is to cycle. None of those things seem to matter quite as much. The results, the authors write, “are consistent with the hypothesis that bike lanes and bike paths encourage cycling.”
If that sounds overly obvious, the authors do note that previous research was somewhat scattered on this question. A few studies had found that more bike lanes in a city were associated with more cycling, though it was unclear which was causing which. Perhaps cities were building bike lanes because they already had a group of devoted cyclists. And this causation question still hasn’t been fully settled, but Buehler and Pucher’s regression analyses — going through a dataset of 90 of the 100 largest U.S. cities — suggest that the relationship between bike lanes and cycling is quite robust. (Previous studies on biking had often just looked at single cities in isolation.)
The question, they note, is an important one because of a “mounting body of evidence” that encouraging bike commuting can improve health, reduce pollution, and other fatalities.
Note also that the United States is still very different from Europe in that regard. Portland is the most bike-friendly major city in the United States, but just 4.2 percent of commuters in that city bike to work. In Copenhagen, Denmark, that number’s hovering around 37 percent. And Copenhagen gets a fair bit chillier than Portland for part of the year, consistent with Buehler and Pucher’s hypothesis that weather doesn’t seem to affect cycling rates very much.