Life is better for everyone when more people ride bikes.

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).

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.

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.

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.