Blog
While riding, most bicyclists are focused on their safety and their ride, rather than their rights. “Can I make this light?” “What is that car doing?” Rarely, a person riding may notice that they pass from one jurisdiction to another. Maybe there is a Bicycle Friendly Community sign celebrating that jurisdiction’s efforts to improve bicycling conditions, maybe there is a general purpose sign saying that you have entered or are leaving the great city of Wherever. Perhaps, but hopefully not too frequently, the change from one jurisdiction to another will be met with an ominous sign that affects your rights as a bicyclist. The most common may be “No bicycling on sidewalks in the Central Business District,” but depending upon the powers of a local government there may be few, if any, limits on what restrictions you may face. In this edition of Bike Law University, I’m digging into the authorization of local regulations as they relate to riding a bike from one community to the next — and how that might affect your ride.
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Organizations often have a culture that doesn’t allow women to thrive as leaders. Ashley Fullenwider and Laura Todd of Nuu-Muu want to inspire women to take stock of their authentic selves and create the space they want to be in. With a wealth of experience in this realm, we’re excited the duo will be leading a breakout session at this year’s National Forum on Women & Bicycling that will encourage participants to “discover their core motivations for doing the work that keeps them bright.”
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For Mychal Tetteh, the old adage proved true: Necessity is the mother of invention. Portland may be his hometown, but when he started as the Executive Director of the Community Cycling Center in 2013, he felt like he was working from a disjointed map, an incomplete playbook on how to make streets safer in his community. “As soon as I got the job, I wanted to know everything,” he recalled. “From a regional standpoint, I wanted more complete information. I wanted to know who all the stakeholders were, a categorical list of all the advocacy organizations and agencies and neighborhood institutions.” He quickly discovered he wasn’t alone.
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Leah Shahum had a jarring realization in 2013. In the wake of a particularly fatal year for bicyclists and pedestrians in San Francisco, it became clear to her that the slow, piecemeal approach to create safer streets wasn’t moving nearly fast enough. It was time to redraw the lines of the debate, shift the cultural compass for the city, the public and advocates to no longer accept traffic deaths as tragedies out of their control. So, at the start of 2014, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition launched a Vision Zero campaign, calling for a reduction of all traffic deaths to zero in 10 years.
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At first glance, Ellen Dunham-Jones doesn’t seem to fit the part. A car-free architect. An urban designer with a focus on sustainability. A creative thinker with a passion for problem solving. Even her colleagues, she admits with a laugh, have asked her incredulously: “What are you doing out in the ‘burbs?!” Dunham-Jones is one of the nation’s leading experts on “Retrofitting Suburbia” — in fact, she wrote the book on the topic. But she thinks outside the (big) box (stores).
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It is with great sadness that we received the news that on December 27 41-year-old Baltimore resident, Thomas Palermo, was struck and killed while riding his bike. As details emerged, and prosecutors alleged the intoxicated and text-messaging driver left the scene initially and had an arrest record for drunk driving, our sadness and exasperation increased. The specifics of the case -– that the driver was one of the highest ranking officials in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland; that her blood-alcohol level was 0.22 when the Maryland legal limit is 0.08; that charges were not immediately filed; that the crash occurred in a bike lane –- have made this a particularly high profile event. But preventable fatalities on our roadways are all too common.
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In the latest edition of Bike Law University, the League’s Legal Specialist Ken McLeod looks at dooring laws nationwide. Read more of his bike law analyses here. Dooring laws are laws that require people in a vehicle to open their door with a degree of care for moving traffic. A typical dooring law requires that a person opening a vehicle door ensure that it is reasonably safe to open the door, that opening the door will not interfere with moving traffic, and that the door is not open for any more time than necessary.
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We’re excited to announce the featured speaker at the opening plenary of the 2015 National Bike Summit: Maya Rockeymoore, the President of Center for Global Policy Solutions and director of Leadership for Healthy Communities, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Rockeymoore is an expert in equity in policy, specifically in health care. As a part of her responsibilities as director of Leadership for Healthy Communities, Rockeymoore is dedicated to helping state and local elected and appointed officials advance policies that support healthy eating, active living, and childhood obesity prevention. At the Summit, Rockeymoore will be discussing targeted universalism in policy and how that relates to transportation equity.
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“Bikeyface” [bahyk-e-feys] noun 1.The face you make unconsciously when you bike. Bekka Wright coined the term, which came to be her bike-centric and hugely popular webcomic, in the summer of 2011. Wright’s background is in fine art painting — drawing cartoons was an after-thought, mostly a fun gift for family and friends. But not long after he move from Los Angeles to Boston, and her commitment to biking for transportation grew, Wright saw an opportunity. The artist will be presenting at the 2015 National Bike Summit. Her big idea? Laughter. I spoke with Wright last week about Bikeyface and the power of making someone smile.
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Last month we hosted a webinar featuring the work of Liz Jose and Casey Ashenhurst of WE Bike NYC. WE Bike NYC is a community of women who ride bikes. They envision a community of bicyclists as diverse as the neighborhoods that comprise New York. In order to conduct more effective outreach to Spanish speaking participants, WE Bike NYC Founder Liz Jose and 2014 Women Bike Mini Grant recipient set out to create a toolkit that provides beginning Spanish language resources for bike clubs.
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