Bike parts manufacturer brings jobs to Utah; biking saves Americans $4.6 billion per year; NYC approved mandatory safety classes for commercial cyclists; and more

* The Standard-Examiner reports that a bicycle component manufacturer will bring 324 jobs to Utah. ENVE Composites, an Ogden-based maker of high-end bicycle components, will expand its local manufacturing facility to over 300 more jobs to Utah using tax incentives from the state.

* Biking saves American $4.6 billion each year, GOOD reports. The Sierra Club, the League of American Bicyclists and the National of Council of La Raza took a look at the costs of each ride in a car and the cost of each ride on a bike. While a ride in a car costs about six times the amount a ride on a bike does, the actual dollar amounts attached to each individual decision are tiny: about sixty cents per mile for a car ride and about ten cents per mile for a bike ride. But even in this bike-skeptical country, people are taking more than four billion bike rides each year.

Image

photo by @lavid

* David Byrne of the Talking Heads was spotted bike-in-hand in Seattle last week. Byrne has been riding a bike as his principal means of transportation in New York City since the early 1980s. (photo by @lavid)

* Unable to secure enough local sponsorship to move forward with implementation, bike-sharing company B-Cycle has abandoned plans to build Baltimore's first bike-sharing program, Planetizen reports.

* New York City Council has approved mandatory safety classes for commercial cyclists. New York City Council has approved a measure that’s aimed at cracking down on “kamikaze bikers” and the businesses that employ them. All commercial cyclists (i.e.: bike messengers and delivery services) will now have to attend safety education classes, paid for by their employers. The delivery bikers will also have to wear reflective vests with the name and number of the business that employs them, to facilitate complaints from the public.

* In response to the demonizing of these delivery bikers, Sarah Goodyear of Atlantic Cities comes to their defense in an Op-Ed, stating that ultimately, the reason these cyclists, or "psycho-lists," as the Daily News likes to call them,  ride the way they do is not because they have a death wish, but rather, the simple economics of the job.

* Seattle Times editorial staff discuss bike safety in Seattle and other grey, rainy places, calling on ‘idiots on bikes in dark clothes’ to make themselves visible.

Image

Martin Reis/CC BY 1.0

*As the City of Toronto is getting its first separated bike lane, Tree Hugger’s Lloyd Alter has a few tips on how not to design a separated bike lane.

* A new study out of Canada concludes that bicycling in a cycletrack —a bike lane that’s physically separated from motor vehicle traffic — is safer than riding in the street. The study finds that dedicated bike lanes can cut cycling injuries in half.

* A different bicycling safety study shows that helmets can prevent bicycling deaths, the Globe and Mail reports.  The study, which analyzed 129 accidental bicycle-related deaths in Ontario from 2006 to 2010, found that cyclists who did not wear a helmet were three times more likely to die from brain trauma than those who wore protective headgear while riding.

*40 bikes stolen from Eugene bike safety education program.  One of the 4J Bike Safety Education trailers with 40 Bike Friday bikes and equipment was stolen this weekend from Prairie Mountain School in the Bethel School District.

* The San Francisco Examiner staff call on the city for more bike measures. San Francisco has set a lofty goal of having 20 percent of the commutes in the city occur via bicycle by 2020. But to get beyond rhetoric and actually move more people onto bicycles, Examiner Staff states, San Francisco officials have to look at busy thoroughfares, such as the two in this proposal, to consider how to make them safer for bicyclists.

Image

The Bicycle Library /image courtesy of In Habitat

* Here's a neat interview with  Karta Heal, founder of the Bicycle Library. The Bicycle Library is a London-based business that promote green transportation, by loaning bicycles to people out of  a converted double decker bus.

* UCI draws the curtain on Armstrong’s career. Read UCI’s final decision regarding the USADA-Armstrong doping case, here.

* Bike Hub’s got the scoop on how and where to recycle your bicycle (in the UK). A growing number of bicycle recycling programs across the UK are harnessing the social and economic power of the bicycle, raising money for charitable work or collecting bicycles for dispatch to the Developing World.

* Video: How bicycles can save small town America.