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The driver of a box truck that struck and killed five bicyclists on a stretch of Nevada highway last week, and told investigators he fell asleep at the wheel, had a high level of methamphetamine in his system, prosecutors said Wednesday. Jordan Alexander Barson, 45, of Kingman, Arizona, faces 12 felony charges, including driving under the influence and reckless driving, in a criminal complaint filed in Las Vegas. "Choices have consequences," Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson said after a Las Vegas judge issued a warrant for Barson's arrest in the Dec. 10 crash on U.S. 95 between Boulder City...

BREAKING: Biden has chosen Pete Buttigieg to lead the U.S. Transportation Department - Reuters

Welcome to The Bicycle Thread. A monthly PING List for bicycle enthusiasts to share experiences, information and ideas.

Cyclists searching for stolen bikes in Denver's homeless camps Cyclists turn to social media to find bikes By: Jaclyn AllenSep 28, 2020 DENVER -- A homeless camp or a bicycle chop shop? In Denver, they can certainly at least appear to be one and the same. So many bikes have been stolen across the city, some people -- encouraged on social media -- are now going from camp to camp looking for their property. "I would rather have my car stolen than this," said Carter Haun, pointing to his custom mountain bike. "It would be easier to get another car."...

Fitness junkies locked out of gyms, commuters fearful of public transit, and families going stir crazy inside their homes during the coronavirus pandemic have created a boom in bicycle sales unseen in decades. In the United States, bicycle aisles at mass merchandisers like Walmart and Target have been swept clean, and independent shops are doing a brisk business and are selling out of affordable “family” bikes. Bicycle sales over the past two months saw their biggest spike in the U.S. since the oil crisis of the 1970s, said Jay Townley, who analyzes cycling industry trends at Human Powered Solutions. “People...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wants you to have a bicycle license as well as a helmet to legally ride a bike and promises to regulate cyclists with stricter law enforcement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2zks7lxTmA  

Did you know that there are more fatal accidents involving children and bicycles than there are involving children and guns?It is documented in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) fatal injury database. As you can see from the illustration, for the last 19 years, from 1999 to 2017, there were 2,467 children killed in fatal accidents involving bicycles, versus 1,994 children killed in fatal accidents involving a firearm.Total accidental deaths of children (unintended deaths). Data from WISQARS database, Image created by Dean Weingarten, 14 August 2019. Both of the rates are very low. The firearm rate is...

Yes! Le Tour is here. The 106th edition of the race begins Saturday, in next-door Brussels, a nod to the stern-faced Belgian cycling titan Eddy Merckx, who won five overall Tours and 34 stages beginning in 1969... It’s got a case as the craziest and most beautiful event in sports, but it’s clearly an acquired taste. I’m really super-duper into it. You know this. ...the four-time Tour winner Chris Froome, was badly hurt in a crash, suffering a broken leg and other injuries. Froome would have been a favorite for this year. One of the more intriguing newbies is Mike...

The mobility needs of people who walk and cycle – often the majority of citizens in a city – continue to be overlooked, states Share the Road Programme Annual Report 2018. Even though the benefits of investing in pedestrians and cyclists can save lives, help protect the environment and support poverty reduction. Meeting the needs of people who walk and cycle continues to be a critical part of the mobility solution for helping cities de-couple population growth from increased emissions, and to improve air quality and road safety. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), safe infrastructure for walking and...

The stakes are high – will we be able to keep our much envied “antiquated” American way of life, our very freedom and mobility which defines who we are? Americans hold constitutional elections in order to choose, among many positions in government, the local mayor. But a non-governmental organization (NGO), Bycs, which created the bicycle mayors’ program, wants to change that. How can an unelected ‘mayor’ be constitutional? “It is nice to have one, centralized voice,” … “And, honestly especially in the U.S., it’s so much easier to do as a party of one, than a committee, meeting, month to...

VanMoof Sometimes, to make a product truly great, a company must think outside the box. But for Dutch bike manufacturer VanMoof, thinking about the box itself solved a major problem when it came to shipping.According to CNN, the company reported that more than 25 percent of its bikes were damaged before even being delivered last year. The problem was especially bad when shipping to the U.S."Your covetable products, your frictionless website, your killer brand — they all count for nothing when your delivery partner drops the ball," Bex Rad, Vanmoof's creative director, wrote in a Medium post last year.RELATED: Strava Will...

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is recovering after undergoing surgery to repair a broken bone suffered in a cycling accident. A department spokeswoman says DeVos is resting at home after the Thursday surgery. She is expected to recover fully. The spokeswoman did not immediately answer questions about the accident or the nature of DeVos’ injury. (Snip. Not much more article after this...)

You're headed down the road in your car and a kid, on a bike, heads straight for you and pops a wheelie right next to your car, or near a parked car. It's dangerous and it's a fad that just won't die in New Jersey, police say. The stunts are called "swerving" -- or intentionally biking in the path of vehicles while performing tricks. Sometimes, large groups of teens will do this together, just to confound traffic. In response, N.J. towns have taken to local Facebook groups and public forums to air concerns about this dangerous practice, and local police...

“More protected bike lanes!” was summer’s war cry for take-no-prisoners cycling advocates. But the roughly 98 percent of New Yorkers who get to and from work by other means than bicycles need protection from the young, testosterone-fueled white males who comprise the vast majority of two-wheel desperadoes.

"Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans." A progressive young American couple was killed in an Islamic State-claimed terrorist attack last month while on a bike trip around the world. Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, who were both in their late 20s, quit their jobs in 2017 to embark on a trip around the world. Austin, a vegan, and Geoghegan, a vegetarian, decided that they're were wasting their lives working. "I’ve grown tired of spending the best hours of my day in front of a glowing rectangle, of coloring the best years...

Back in March, I posted “The Bike-Share Oversupply in China: Huge Piles of Abandoned and Broken Bicycles,” showing just some of the millions of bicycles that had been rapidly built and dumped into Chinese cities by bike-share companies looking to get in on the next big thing, only to crash hard. In the months since, more of those bike-share startups have gone bankrupt or consolidated, and the bicycle graveyards remain. Municipal governments are still wrangling with the fallout, confiscating derelict or illegally parked bikes, crafting new laws, and working out what to do with millions of abandoned bicycles. In a...

Two weeks ago we endured the third anniversary of the death of my beloved pastor and father-in-law, David Fitzpatrick. David was killed by an impaired (alcohol and drugs), hit-and-run motorist. David’s killer pleaded guilty to first degree vehicular homicide, among other charges, and is now spending many years in prison. … I recall vividly the gut-wrenching moments on May 4, 2015 when we knew there was a bicyclist down in the area where my father-in-law used to ride. The calls to David’s cell phone that would never be answered; the rushed and lonely drive from my job to the crash...

As an innovator and early adopter of freeways, California became the symbolic capital of car culture. But the ease of movement conferred by the massive postwar freeway building boom was short-lived, turning the dream of car travel into a nightmare of congestion and long commutes. The story of how Californians went from getting around to getting stuck behind the wheel is deeply entwined with the history of the urban freeway, an enterprise that advanced earlier and on a larger scale here than anywhere else in the country. Half a century ago, there was reason for optimism about cars. Los Angeles...

When JoJo McKibben was the victim of a hit-and-run on April 3 as she biked to work, she wasn't all that surprised. She was hit while biking by a drunk driver last summer and has come to expect that cars won't realize she's riding on two wheels. McKibben's boyfriend Brendan Sharpe said he has also been seriously injured by cars while he's biked in Austin, once in 2009 and again in 2015... Katie Delleoz, the executive director of Bike Austin, said she personally has nearly been struck at the same intersection McKibben was hit at last week

Sir Bradley Wiggins took drugs to boost his performance before winning the 2012 Tour de France, a devastating report said last night. In a bombshell conclusion, MPs rejected claims that the five-time Olympic gold medallist took triamcinolone before the Tour to treat his asthma. They concluded it was, in fact, being used – within anti- doping regulations – to ‘prepare’ Team Sky rider Wiggins for the gruelling event. ‘The purpose of this was not to treat medical need, but to improve his power-to-weight ratio ahead of the race,’ they said.