Official Coli Bike/Cycling thread
Road to my job on Tuesday for my longest ride so far with the 4130 (~20 miles round trip). I over-tweaked my rear derailleur so it's skipping gears again, and the seat post started randomly dropping down towards the end of my last ride.
Recent weather has made it harder to consistently ride & work out the kinks thru trial and error. Also, the bike path has moved from a relaxing ride to an obstacle course with slush to dodge, unavoidable puddles, and excess salt making for nerve-wracking turns. Also, I lost my skinny gloves on some drunk ish and my backup gloves make it harder to grip the brake levers. My anxiety is on 10 for most of my ride.
Riding was how I used to destress but it's been stressful AF for the last two months
Once the weather turns, things should fall into place hopefullyAmerica’s Best-Selling Electric Vehicles Ride on Two Wheels
America’s Best-Selling Electric Vehicles Ride on Two Wheels
Import data shows e-bikes outpacing electric cars in 2021.
Photographer: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg
By
Ira Boudway
January 21, 2022, 12:40 PM EST
The U.S. electric bike market continues to boom according to the latest figures from the Light Electric Vehicle Association. The U.S. imported nearly 790,000 electric two-wheelers in 2021 according to LEVA’s estimate, up from 463,000 in 2020. While not a sales figure, LEVA’s tally is a useful proxy for the state of the U.S. e-bike market. The trade group’s research suggests that e-bikes are the best-selling EVs in the country. Americans bought 652,000 electric cars in 2021, including plug-in hybrids, according to data from BloombergNEF:
E-bikes vs. EVs
Import data shows e-bikes surpassing electric cars in the U.S. market.
Sources: BloombergNEF, Light Electric Vehicle Association
*Includes plug-in hybrids
Comprehensive sales data on e-bikes is hard to get. The NPD Group collects point-of-sale data from bike shops, outdoor stores, and other big-box retailers but does not capture direct-to-consumer brands such as Rad Power Bikes and VanMoof. NPD’s data also shows e-bike sales continuing to rise in 2021, with 368,000 units sold through the first 11 months of the year, compared to 273,000 in all of 2020.
Ed Benjamin, founder and chairman of LEVA, sorts through customs data to identify shipments of e-bikes, electric conversion kits for traditional bikes, and other battery powered two-wheelers coming into the country. Since nearly all e-bikes sold in the U.S. are imported and most retailers are selling inventory as fast as they can restock it, the import number is a good stand-in for sales.
E-bikes were part of a broader pandemic boom in outdoor goods. Their continued growth in 2021 suggests that they will be more than a fad. “The pandemic gave us a boost and that boost resulted in a lot of people finding that electric bicycles have a valid use in their life,” says Benjamin, “and I think that's now driving the sales.”
As the U.S. climbs toward 1 million in annual e-bike sales, it still lags far behind Europe and Asia, where annual sales are about 3 million and 35 million respectively, according to Benjamin’s estimates.
America’s Best-Selling Electric Vehicles Ride on Two Wheels
Import data shows e-bikes outpacing electric cars in 2021.
Photographer: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg
By
Ira Boudway
January 21, 2022, 12:40 PM EST
The U.S. electric bike market continues to boom according to the latest figures from the Light Electric Vehicle Association. The U.S. imported nearly 790,000 electric two-wheelers in 2021 according to LEVA’s estimate, up from 463,000 in 2020. While not a sales figure, LEVA’s tally is a useful proxy for the state of the U.S. e-bike market. The trade group’s research suggests that e-bikes are the best-selling EVs in the country. Americans bought 652,000 electric cars in 2021, including plug-in hybrids, according to data from BloombergNEF:
E-bikes vs. EVs
Import data shows e-bikes surpassing electric cars in the U.S. market.
Sources: BloombergNEF, Light Electric Vehicle Association
*Includes plug-in hybrids
Comprehensive sales data on e-bikes is hard to get. The NPD Group collects point-of-sale data from bike shops, outdoor stores, and other big-box retailers but does not capture direct-to-consumer brands such as Rad Power Bikes and VanMoof. NPD’s data also shows e-bike sales continuing to rise in 2021, with 368,000 units sold through the first 11 months of the year, compared to 273,000 in all of 2020.
Ed Benjamin, founder and chairman of LEVA, sorts through customs data to identify shipments of e-bikes, electric conversion kits for traditional bikes, and other battery powered two-wheelers coming into the country. Since nearly all e-bikes sold in the U.S. are imported and most retailers are selling inventory as fast as they can restock it, the import number is a good stand-in for sales.
E-bikes were part of a broader pandemic boom in outdoor goods. Their continued growth in 2021 suggests that they will be more than a fad. “The pandemic gave us a boost and that boost resulted in a lot of people finding that electric bicycles have a valid use in their life,” says Benjamin, “and I think that's now driving the sales.”
As the U.S. climbs toward 1 million in annual e-bike sales, it still lags far behind Europe and Asia, where annual sales are about 3 million and 35 million respectively, according to Benjamin’s estimates.
Is the U.S. becoming more bike friendly?
Cyclists ride along a street in New York City on April 6, 2021. Some U.S. cities are committing to making road biking safer.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ED JONES, AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Is the U.S. becoming more bike friendly?
In many cities, the pandemic has reinforced a trend: They're building out the infrastructure needed to make cycling safe.
BYILANA STRAUSS
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 21, 2021
• 6 MIN READ
If you’ve noticed more people biking in town over the last year or two, it’s not just in your head. Biking has exploded during the pandemic, with millions of Americans mounting bicycles for the first time in years. Is it the start of a long-term trend?
There are good reasons to hope so. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse emissions in the U.S., and cars and light trucks account for 58 percent of transportation emissions. Switching from cars to bikes cuts emissions much faster than switching to electric cars.
And motor vehicle accidents still kill more than 39,000 Americans a year—including more than 700 cyclists.
Clearly the U.S. is not a bike-friendly country overall. Only one percent of all trips that Americans take—to work, to the store, on vacation—are by bike, compared with 87 percent by car or truck.
According to League of American Bicyclists (LAB), a nonprofit that collects data on biking in the U.S., the total number of bike rides Americans take each year had actually been falling in the years leading up to the pandemic. The number of people who ride their bikes to work fell from around 900,000 in 2014 to just over 800,000 in 2019—about .5 percent of all commuters.
“Commute to work rates have been down, bike fatalities have been up,” said Ken McLeod, policy director at the LAB.
Compare that to the Netherlands, say, where 27 percent of workers commute by bike. But Dutch cities didn’t used to be that bike friendly, said John Pucher, a professor emeritus of urban planning at Rutgers University who specializes in biking.
“Americans have this image, ‘Oh cycling is just paradise, and it’s always been paradise in Europe,’” Pucher told me when I interviewed him for Overheard, the National Geographic podcast. “Wrooong. Not true!”
If some European cities look heavenly to American cyclists today, he said, it’s because over the past few decades they’ve actively reclaimed space in the urban landscape from cars. And some American cities today have started on that same trend.
(Read about how Minneapolis is fostering a bicycling boom.)
Safety first
Some 70 percent of people surveyed in the 50 biggest metro regions in the U.S. say they’re interested in biking. Why don’t they bike more? It comes down to safety. Half of the people surveyed said they were, understandably, too afraid to bike on the street.
Bike safety isn't about painting bike lanes on every street, Pucher said. It’s about creating bike networks—webs of bike paths that can take you safely from point A to point B. Good bike networks are made of things like greenways (off-road paths that often run next to rivers and lakes, or along old railway corridors), protected bike lanes with physical barriers separating riders from cars, and quiet streets.
“Cycling has to become boring to become really successful,” said Ralph Buehler, chair of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech. “Putting a painted biking lane on a 40-mph road is not going to appeal” to the potential cyclist afraid of a close encounter with a car.
The good news is that bike networks were expanding in the U.S. even before the pandemic. Between 1991 and 2021, there was a six-fold increase in paved, off-road trails, from 5,904 miles to 39,329 miles, Pucher said. Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles more than doubled their city bike lanes from 2000 to 2017, while New York and Seattle more than tripled theirs.
And the increase in protected bike lanes is even more dramatic: Their total length, nationwide, went from only 34 miles in 2006 to 425 miles in 2018. With the surge of activity in the pandemic, Pucher estimates that number is now well over 600 miles.
New York City alone already has 200 miles of protected bike lanes and plans to keep adding more at the rate of 50 miles a year. “They’re really pushing,” Buehler said.
In fact, most American cities are building more bike lanes. Cities in the West and East are leading the pack, but the trend is nationwide.
“It’s in the plan of every single city I’m aware of,” Pucher said. “I see this happening in Raleigh. Raleigh! If even North Carolina cities are gung-ho … I just see, in the coming years, a big expansion.”
City versus country
The national statistics showing a decline in bike ridership are a bit misleading, McLeod said. Biking infrastructure and ridership are indeed down in rural and suburban areas—but cities tell a different story, especially cities that have invested in their bike networks.
In Santa Cruz, California, about 9 percent of workers bike to work; in Boulder, Colorado, it’s just over 10 percent. In Davis, California, it’s 19 percent—an almost European level.
Bigger cities have seen big increases in ridership too. “D.C. has really had a dramatic change,” McLeod said.
In the late 1990s, only 1 percent of D.C. commuters traveled by bike. The city started building protected bike lanes in the early 2000s—and by 2018, the number of bike commuters had jumped to 5 percent.
By comparison, in the German city of Frankfurt in the late 1990s, 6 percent of workers were commuting by bike. That city too installed a bunch of bike infrastructure, and by 2018, its bike-commuter rate had reached 20 percent. Buehler, who worked on a study comparing the two cities, said that if D.C. stays the course, it’ll look like Frankfurt in another decade or two.
Other cities are evolving similarly, including Seattle (from 4,179 bike commuters in 1990 to 17,092 now), Chicago (3,307 to 20,268), San Francisco (3,634 to 20,268), and Portland (2,453 to 21,315).
The pandemic may have sped things up, according to an analysis done by Buehler and Pucher.
“In every single city we looked at, there has been an increase in cycling,” Pucher said.
During lockdowns, some cities installed temporary lanes as trial runs. Boston threw together a bike lane made of orange traffic cones on Boylston Street, a major thoroughfare. The city has since made the change permanent, trading the cones for bollards.
“That’s happened in New York, that’s happened in Seattle, it’s happened in Oakland,” Pucher said. “COVID demonstrated how many things can be done in even a very short period of time.”
Cyclists ride along a street in New York City on April 6, 2021. Some U.S. cities are committing to making road biking safer.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ED JONES, AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Is the U.S. becoming more bike friendly?
In many cities, the pandemic has reinforced a trend: They're building out the infrastructure needed to make cycling safe.
BYILANA STRAUSS
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 21, 2021
• 6 MIN READ
If you’ve noticed more people biking in town over the last year or two, it’s not just in your head. Biking has exploded during the pandemic, with millions of Americans mounting bicycles for the first time in years. Is it the start of a long-term trend?
There are good reasons to hope so. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse emissions in the U.S., and cars and light trucks account for 58 percent of transportation emissions. Switching from cars to bikes cuts emissions much faster than switching to electric cars.
And motor vehicle accidents still kill more than 39,000 Americans a year—including more than 700 cyclists.
Clearly the U.S. is not a bike-friendly country overall. Only one percent of all trips that Americans take—to work, to the store, on vacation—are by bike, compared with 87 percent by car or truck.
According to League of American Bicyclists (LAB), a nonprofit that collects data on biking in the U.S., the total number of bike rides Americans take each year had actually been falling in the years leading up to the pandemic. The number of people who ride their bikes to work fell from around 900,000 in 2014 to just over 800,000 in 2019—about .5 percent of all commuters.
“Commute to work rates have been down, bike fatalities have been up,” said Ken McLeod, policy director at the LAB.
Compare that to the Netherlands, say, where 27 percent of workers commute by bike. But Dutch cities didn’t used to be that bike friendly, said John Pucher, a professor emeritus of urban planning at Rutgers University who specializes in biking.
“Americans have this image, ‘Oh cycling is just paradise, and it’s always been paradise in Europe,’” Pucher told me when I interviewed him for Overheard, the National Geographic podcast. “Wrooong. Not true!”
If some European cities look heavenly to American cyclists today, he said, it’s because over the past few decades they’ve actively reclaimed space in the urban landscape from cars. And some American cities today have started on that same trend.
(Read about how Minneapolis is fostering a bicycling boom.)
Safety first
Some 70 percent of people surveyed in the 50 biggest metro regions in the U.S. say they’re interested in biking. Why don’t they bike more? It comes down to safety. Half of the people surveyed said they were, understandably, too afraid to bike on the street.
Bike safety isn't about painting bike lanes on every street, Pucher said. It’s about creating bike networks—webs of bike paths that can take you safely from point A to point B. Good bike networks are made of things like greenways (off-road paths that often run next to rivers and lakes, or along old railway corridors), protected bike lanes with physical barriers separating riders from cars, and quiet streets.
“Cycling has to become boring to become really successful,” said Ralph Buehler, chair of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech. “Putting a painted biking lane on a 40-mph road is not going to appeal” to the potential cyclist afraid of a close encounter with a car.
The good news is that bike networks were expanding in the U.S. even before the pandemic. Between 1991 and 2021, there was a six-fold increase in paved, off-road trails, from 5,904 miles to 39,329 miles, Pucher said. Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles more than doubled their city bike lanes from 2000 to 2017, while New York and Seattle more than tripled theirs.
And the increase in protected bike lanes is even more dramatic: Their total length, nationwide, went from only 34 miles in 2006 to 425 miles in 2018. With the surge of activity in the pandemic, Pucher estimates that number is now well over 600 miles.
New York City alone already has 200 miles of protected bike lanes and plans to keep adding more at the rate of 50 miles a year. “They’re really pushing,” Buehler said.
In fact, most American cities are building more bike lanes. Cities in the West and East are leading the pack, but the trend is nationwide.
“It’s in the plan of every single city I’m aware of,” Pucher said. “I see this happening in Raleigh. Raleigh! If even North Carolina cities are gung-ho … I just see, in the coming years, a big expansion.”
City versus country
The national statistics showing a decline in bike ridership are a bit misleading, McLeod said. Biking infrastructure and ridership are indeed down in rural and suburban areas—but cities tell a different story, especially cities that have invested in their bike networks.
In Santa Cruz, California, about 9 percent of workers bike to work; in Boulder, Colorado, it’s just over 10 percent. In Davis, California, it’s 19 percent—an almost European level.
Bigger cities have seen big increases in ridership too. “D.C. has really had a dramatic change,” McLeod said.
In the late 1990s, only 1 percent of D.C. commuters traveled by bike. The city started building protected bike lanes in the early 2000s—and by 2018, the number of bike commuters had jumped to 5 percent.
By comparison, in the German city of Frankfurt in the late 1990s, 6 percent of workers were commuting by bike. That city too installed a bunch of bike infrastructure, and by 2018, its bike-commuter rate had reached 20 percent. Buehler, who worked on a study comparing the two cities, said that if D.C. stays the course, it’ll look like Frankfurt in another decade or two.
Other cities are evolving similarly, including Seattle (from 4,179 bike commuters in 1990 to 17,092 now), Chicago (3,307 to 20,268), San Francisco (3,634 to 20,268), and Portland (2,453 to 21,315).
The pandemic may have sped things up, according to an analysis done by Buehler and Pucher.
“In every single city we looked at, there has been an increase in cycling,” Pucher said.
During lockdowns, some cities installed temporary lanes as trial runs. Boston threw together a bike lane made of orange traffic cones on Boylston Street, a major thoroughfare. The city has since made the change permanent, trading the cones for bollards.
“That’s happened in New York, that’s happened in Seattle, it’s happened in Oakland,” Pucher said. “COVID demonstrated how many things can be done in even a very short period of time.”
Seattle Bike Helmet Rule Is Dropped Amid Racial Justice Concerns
Seattle Bike Helmet Rule Is Dropped Amid Racial Justice Concerns
Analysis showed that the King County regulation was enforced disproportionately against homeless people and people of color. Critics say the repeal will jeopardize safety.
Protesters in Seattle formed a bicycle line while protesting George Floyd’s murder.Credit...Jason Redmond/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Sophie Kasakove
Feb. 18, 2022
In Seattle, home to one of the largest populations of bike commuters in the country, officials have overturned a decades-old regulation requiring cyclists to wear helmets because of what they called discriminatory enforcement of the rule against homeless people and people of color.
The King County Board of Health voted to repeal the requirement on Thursday, with only one member opposing the decision to roll back a measure that even critics acknowledge has saved lives.
“The question before us yesterday wasn’t the efficacy of helmets,” said Girmay Zahilay, a board member who is also a member of the King County Council. “The question before us was whether a helmet law that’s enforced by police on balance produces results that outweigh the harm that that law creates.”
Seattle is the largest city in the country to enforce a bike helmet requirement. The city of Tacoma, Wash., repealed its requirement in 2020, citing similar equity concerns, as did Dallas in 2014 for those 18 and older, as a means of encouraging more bike-sharing.
In a county that has made racial justice reform a priority — the King County health board declared racism a public health crisis in 2020 — the regulation pitted the need to address racial equity against the obvious safety benefits of helmets.
“We have to have a broad view of public health: Yes, we have to think about brain injury, and we also have to think about the impact on our criminal legal system,” Mr. Zahilay said.
The board of health, made up of elected officials and appointed medical experts from across the county, began to scrutinize the helmet rule in 2020 after an analysis of court records from Crosscut, a local news site, showed that it was rarely enforced, and enforced disproportionately when it was. Since 2017, Seattle police had given just 117 helmet citations, over 40 percent of which went to people who were homeless. Since 2019, 60 percent of citations went to people who were homeless.
A separate analysis from Central Seattle Greenways, a safe streets advocacy group, found that Black cyclists were almost four times as likely to receive a citation for violating the helmet requirement as white cyclists. Native American cyclists were just over twice as likely to receive one as white cyclists.
Neither study looked at whether homeless people or people of color wore helmets less frequently than other groups, but the Central Seattle Greenways study did look at racial demographics of cyclists and found that people of color were less likely to ride bikes than white people.
A Seattle police officer monitoring the area where a homeless encampment was cleared. Since 2019, 60 percent of citations for cyclists not wearing a helmet went to people who were homeless.Credit...Ted S. Warren/Associated Press
“It was a law that really just allowed the Police Department, the Seattle Police Department, to harass Black and brown community members,” said K.L. Shannon, an organizer for Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and police accountability chair for the Seattle King County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P.
Ms. Shannon’s nephew was just 8 years old when he and three friends were stopped by an officer a few blocks from their houses for not wearing helmets, Ms. Shannon said. She said the officer accused them of stealing the bikes.
“Until this day my nephew doesn’t ride a bike,” Ms. Shannon said. “He’s never forgotten that.”
In an incident in 2016, a Black man was stopped by the Seattle police for riding a bike with no helmet. In a dashcam video of the tense, 19-minute stop, one officer shared with another that the suspect “matches the description of a burglary suspect,” suggesting that the helmet regulation was used as a pretense.
In 2019, Daniel Oakes was stopped for not wearing his helmet while riding his bicycle on a sidewalk near a homeless encampment and then charged with an unrelated offense. A judge dismissed the case after Mr. Oakes’s lawyer argued that the helmet requirement had been unconstitutionally used as a pretext to make the stop.
In a statement to Crosscut in response to its analysis of bike stop data, a Seattle Police Department spokesman, Randall Huserik, said the traffic stops were often used to educate riders about the benefits of wearing a helmet.
“The focus is the behavior, not the status,” he said. “A risk of serious brain injury/death remains just as dire for someone experiencing homelessness as it does for someone who is housed — that is the risk these citations are intended to mitigate.”
Last month, the department announced that it would no longer use bicycle helmet infractions — along with a few other low-risk safety violations — as primary reasons for a traffic stop.
As the largest city in King County, Seattle is the biggest jurisdiction affected by the rollback. Seventeen jurisdictions outside Seattle — making up just over one-third of the county’s population — have their own mandates requiring helmet use and will not be affected by Thursday’s vote.
Opponents of the repeal have warned that it could have serious safety consequences.
“No helmets means more death and more serious injury,” said Richard Adler, a lawyer who works with clients who have suffered brain injuries. “Access to helmets is already an issue, and repealing this disincentivizes everybody to not wear their helmet over time.”
Helmets reduce the likelihood of serious head injury by 60 percent, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. In cases where it was known whether cyclists were wearing helmets, 79 percent of those who were fatally injured in bike crashes between 2010 and 2017 were not wearing them.
Advocates for the repeal said they believed that people would continue to wear helmets even in the absence of a legal requirement.
Seattle is the largest city in the country with a bike helmet regulation, which was repealed on Thursday. Credit...Lindsey Wasson/Getty Images
When the requirement was first enacted in 1993, helmet use was not widespread, said Joe McDermott, a board member who voted in favor of the repeal. But times have changed, he said.
“The law and the public education around creating the law helped change behaviors and norms,” Mr. McDermott said. “And 30 years later it’s essential that we do re-evaluate our intended purposes when we adopted the helmet law and the unintended consequences of having it in place.”
Helmet use in the city is as high as 91 percent among private bike riders, according to one study. In nearby Portland, Ore., advocates for repeal noted, use is similarly high, despite the fact that the city does not have an all-ages helmet law.
Access to helmets is a particular challenge for low-income people: according to a study from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, people in the lowest income bracket were about half as likely to wear a helmet for all rides as people in the highest income bracket.
But Mr. McDermott said he doubted that those disparities accounted for the extent of the disproportionate enforcement of the rule. And he said the county could address the disparities without policing: The county recently budgeted more than $200,000 to buy helmets and expand education on bike safety.
Across the country, other kinds of biking regulations have also been found to be enforced in discriminatory ways.
In Chicago, a study found that tickets were issued to cyclists eight times more often in majority-Black parts of the city. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice found that 73 percent of bicycle stops in Tampa, Fla., between 2014 and 2015 involved Black cyclists, despite the fact that Black people made up 26 percent of the population.
“The data revealed that the stops did not reduce crime or produce any other positive outcome,” such as reducing bike crashes or injuries, the report said.
“The best investments to keep people safe while riding bikes is creating safe streets, safer transportation systems,” said Bill Nesper, director of the League of American Bicyclists. “Those are the types of investments that are going to keep people walking and biking safest in our communities, instead of investing in laws like this that could be a barrier to people riding bikes and that may be enforced in a discretionary and discriminatory way.”
Seattle Bike Helmet Rule Is Dropped Amid Racial Justice Concerns
Analysis showed that the King County regulation was enforced disproportionately against homeless people and people of color. Critics say the repeal will jeopardize safety.
Protesters in Seattle formed a bicycle line while protesting George Floyd’s murder.Credit...Jason Redmond/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Sophie Kasakove
Feb. 18, 2022
In Seattle, home to one of the largest populations of bike commuters in the country, officials have overturned a decades-old regulation requiring cyclists to wear helmets because of what they called discriminatory enforcement of the rule against homeless people and people of color.
The King County Board of Health voted to repeal the requirement on Thursday, with only one member opposing the decision to roll back a measure that even critics acknowledge has saved lives.
“The question before us yesterday wasn’t the efficacy of helmets,” said Girmay Zahilay, a board member who is also a member of the King County Council. “The question before us was whether a helmet law that’s enforced by police on balance produces results that outweigh the harm that that law creates.”
Seattle is the largest city in the country to enforce a bike helmet requirement. The city of Tacoma, Wash., repealed its requirement in 2020, citing similar equity concerns, as did Dallas in 2014 for those 18 and older, as a means of encouraging more bike-sharing.
In a county that has made racial justice reform a priority — the King County health board declared racism a public health crisis in 2020 — the regulation pitted the need to address racial equity against the obvious safety benefits of helmets.
“We have to have a broad view of public health: Yes, we have to think about brain injury, and we also have to think about the impact on our criminal legal system,” Mr. Zahilay said.
The board of health, made up of elected officials and appointed medical experts from across the county, began to scrutinize the helmet rule in 2020 after an analysis of court records from Crosscut, a local news site, showed that it was rarely enforced, and enforced disproportionately when it was. Since 2017, Seattle police had given just 117 helmet citations, over 40 percent of which went to people who were homeless. Since 2019, 60 percent of citations went to people who were homeless.
A separate analysis from Central Seattle Greenways, a safe streets advocacy group, found that Black cyclists were almost four times as likely to receive a citation for violating the helmet requirement as white cyclists. Native American cyclists were just over twice as likely to receive one as white cyclists.
Neither study looked at whether homeless people or people of color wore helmets less frequently than other groups, but the Central Seattle Greenways study did look at racial demographics of cyclists and found that people of color were less likely to ride bikes than white people.
A Seattle police officer monitoring the area where a homeless encampment was cleared. Since 2019, 60 percent of citations for cyclists not wearing a helmet went to people who were homeless.Credit...Ted S. Warren/Associated Press
“It was a law that really just allowed the Police Department, the Seattle Police Department, to harass Black and brown community members,” said K.L. Shannon, an organizer for Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and police accountability chair for the Seattle King County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P.
Ms. Shannon’s nephew was just 8 years old when he and three friends were stopped by an officer a few blocks from their houses for not wearing helmets, Ms. Shannon said. She said the officer accused them of stealing the bikes.
“Until this day my nephew doesn’t ride a bike,” Ms. Shannon said. “He’s never forgotten that.”
In an incident in 2016, a Black man was stopped by the Seattle police for riding a bike with no helmet. In a dashcam video of the tense, 19-minute stop, one officer shared with another that the suspect “matches the description of a burglary suspect,” suggesting that the helmet regulation was used as a pretense.
In 2019, Daniel Oakes was stopped for not wearing his helmet while riding his bicycle on a sidewalk near a homeless encampment and then charged with an unrelated offense. A judge dismissed the case after Mr. Oakes’s lawyer argued that the helmet requirement had been unconstitutionally used as a pretext to make the stop.
In a statement to Crosscut in response to its analysis of bike stop data, a Seattle Police Department spokesman, Randall Huserik, said the traffic stops were often used to educate riders about the benefits of wearing a helmet.
“The focus is the behavior, not the status,” he said. “A risk of serious brain injury/death remains just as dire for someone experiencing homelessness as it does for someone who is housed — that is the risk these citations are intended to mitigate.”
Last month, the department announced that it would no longer use bicycle helmet infractions — along with a few other low-risk safety violations — as primary reasons for a traffic stop.
As the largest city in King County, Seattle is the biggest jurisdiction affected by the rollback. Seventeen jurisdictions outside Seattle — making up just over one-third of the county’s population — have their own mandates requiring helmet use and will not be affected by Thursday’s vote.
Opponents of the repeal have warned that it could have serious safety consequences.
“No helmets means more death and more serious injury,” said Richard Adler, a lawyer who works with clients who have suffered brain injuries. “Access to helmets is already an issue, and repealing this disincentivizes everybody to not wear their helmet over time.”
Helmets reduce the likelihood of serious head injury by 60 percent, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. In cases where it was known whether cyclists were wearing helmets, 79 percent of those who were fatally injured in bike crashes between 2010 and 2017 were not wearing them.
Advocates for the repeal said they believed that people would continue to wear helmets even in the absence of a legal requirement.
Seattle is the largest city in the country with a bike helmet regulation, which was repealed on Thursday. Credit...Lindsey Wasson/Getty Images
When the requirement was first enacted in 1993, helmet use was not widespread, said Joe McDermott, a board member who voted in favor of the repeal. But times have changed, he said.
“The law and the public education around creating the law helped change behaviors and norms,” Mr. McDermott said. “And 30 years later it’s essential that we do re-evaluate our intended purposes when we adopted the helmet law and the unintended consequences of having it in place.”
Helmet use in the city is as high as 91 percent among private bike riders, according to one study. In nearby Portland, Ore., advocates for repeal noted, use is similarly high, despite the fact that the city does not have an all-ages helmet law.
Access to helmets is a particular challenge for low-income people: according to a study from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, people in the lowest income bracket were about half as likely to wear a helmet for all rides as people in the highest income bracket.
But Mr. McDermott said he doubted that those disparities accounted for the extent of the disproportionate enforcement of the rule. And he said the county could address the disparities without policing: The county recently budgeted more than $200,000 to buy helmets and expand education on bike safety.
Across the country, other kinds of biking regulations have also been found to be enforced in discriminatory ways.
In Chicago, a study found that tickets were issued to cyclists eight times more often in majority-Black parts of the city. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice found that 73 percent of bicycle stops in Tampa, Fla., between 2014 and 2015 involved Black cyclists, despite the fact that Black people made up 26 percent of the population.
“The data revealed that the stops did not reduce crime or produce any other positive outcome,” such as reducing bike crashes or injuries, the report said.
“The best investments to keep people safe while riding bikes is creating safe streets, safer transportation systems,” said Bill Nesper, director of the League of American Bicyclists. “Those are the types of investments that are going to keep people walking and biking safest in our communities, instead of investing in laws like this that could be a barrier to people riding bikes and that may be enforced in a discretionary and discriminatory way.”
Houston bike share hopes to expand transportation options in underserved communities | Houston Public Media
*Audio of interview available on the site
Houston bike share hopes to expand transportation options in underserved communities
BCycle’s new board president says she’d like to see a network of neighborhood stations along with more payment options to access the system.
GAIL DELAUGHTER | POSTED ONJANUARY 5, 2022, 1:40 PM
Gail Delaughter / Houston Public Media
Maya Ford, President of the Board of Directors of Houston BCycle.
After starting with just a handful of bikes in 2012, Houston's nonprofit bike share has expanded to more than 130 stations citywide.
The bikes have been popular with Houstonians looking for recreation during the pandemic. Now Houston BCycle wants to expand its focus to provide more transportation options for people in underserved communities.
Houston Public Media spoke with Maya Ford, the new president of BCycle's board of directors, about how she hopes the program can change to serve more Houstonians.
As we go into 2022 you tell us there's kind of a cultural shift that you want to work toward with Houston BCycle. A lot of your efforts have been toward recreation cycling up to this point, but you want to begin operating BCycle in a very different way.
We’ve had so many natural disasters and environmental shocks, from storms to floods to hurricanes, but now with COVID-19, and conversations about equity and who has access to resources and who doesn’t, bicycling and transportation as a whole has come to the surface and BCycle has a fantastic opportunity to solve different transportation problems in ways that really matter to Houstonians.
For the most part we started the system recreationally. We were able to maximize high density and people who wanted to have a fun ride along a beautiful place like Buffalo Bayou. For the most part that’s how our network continues to operate through the downtown area.
Now as we’re looking into how we can use the bicycle infrastructure and network differently, we’re able to set up communities to be able to use this in replacement of single-occupancy vehicle drives. I won’t say that everybody is looking to replace their vehicle but we can use bike share in a way that allows us to replace driving for certain types of trips and we can use it for fun as well.
One of the challenges of operating the bike share system is that for the longest time, you had to use a credit card or a debit card to check out one of the bikes and that posed problems for people who don’t have those financial instruments or may not have a bank account. How much of a challenge is that right now and what are you working toward in that area?
My dream with Houston bike share is to make it like a public utility, the same way Houston Metro might work, where you have lots of options to be able to access a pass, access the network, and you’re not prohibited by economic ability. We’re not there yet.
So right now, we do have one option which is called the GO Pass and it allows persons who have limited income to be able to access the network for $3 a month. It currently has a cash option, they go into the location and they’re able to get a fob that then allows them access to the network. This can be sponsored really easily by organizations and housing complexes. We can subsidize this in many different ways but we just need willing partners.
How much is this a shift for BCycle, moving toward what you call a public utility and making the system more accessible to people who need to make essential trips?
The shift has come about because we don’t naturally think of multimodalism as being truly different ways to get from point A to point B. And that’s all it is. We may be able to walk in our neighborhoods and have everything accessible to us within a six-block radius. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
But in this case, we’ve seen that the shift has come about in seeing bicycling as a viable option for environmentalism, for safety, fun, and to get from point A to point B in a really healthy energy efficient way. It just solves so many problems with one solution and we haven’t always seen it that way.
Join Now
BCycle | Best-in-class bike share
*Audio of interview available on the site
Houston bike share hopes to expand transportation options in underserved communities
BCycle’s new board president says she’d like to see a network of neighborhood stations along with more payment options to access the system.
GAIL DELAUGHTER | POSTED ONJANUARY 5, 2022, 1:40 PM
Gail Delaughter / Houston Public Media
Maya Ford, President of the Board of Directors of Houston BCycle.
After starting with just a handful of bikes in 2012, Houston's nonprofit bike share has expanded to more than 130 stations citywide.
The bikes have been popular with Houstonians looking for recreation during the pandemic. Now Houston BCycle wants to expand its focus to provide more transportation options for people in underserved communities.
Houston Public Media spoke with Maya Ford, the new president of BCycle's board of directors, about how she hopes the program can change to serve more Houstonians.
As we go into 2022 you tell us there's kind of a cultural shift that you want to work toward with Houston BCycle. A lot of your efforts have been toward recreation cycling up to this point, but you want to begin operating BCycle in a very different way.
We’ve had so many natural disasters and environmental shocks, from storms to floods to hurricanes, but now with COVID-19, and conversations about equity and who has access to resources and who doesn’t, bicycling and transportation as a whole has come to the surface and BCycle has a fantastic opportunity to solve different transportation problems in ways that really matter to Houstonians.
For the most part we started the system recreationally. We were able to maximize high density and people who wanted to have a fun ride along a beautiful place like Buffalo Bayou. For the most part that’s how our network continues to operate through the downtown area.
Now as we’re looking into how we can use the bicycle infrastructure and network differently, we’re able to set up communities to be able to use this in replacement of single-occupancy vehicle drives. I won’t say that everybody is looking to replace their vehicle but we can use bike share in a way that allows us to replace driving for certain types of trips and we can use it for fun as well.
One of the challenges of operating the bike share system is that for the longest time, you had to use a credit card or a debit card to check out one of the bikes and that posed problems for people who don’t have those financial instruments or may not have a bank account. How much of a challenge is that right now and what are you working toward in that area?
My dream with Houston bike share is to make it like a public utility, the same way Houston Metro might work, where you have lots of options to be able to access a pass, access the network, and you’re not prohibited by economic ability. We’re not there yet.
So right now, we do have one option which is called the GO Pass and it allows persons who have limited income to be able to access the network for $3 a month. It currently has a cash option, they go into the location and they’re able to get a fob that then allows them access to the network. This can be sponsored really easily by organizations and housing complexes. We can subsidize this in many different ways but we just need willing partners.
How much is this a shift for BCycle, moving toward what you call a public utility and making the system more accessible to people who need to make essential trips?
The shift has come about because we don’t naturally think of multimodalism as being truly different ways to get from point A to point B. And that’s all it is. We may be able to walk in our neighborhoods and have everything accessible to us within a six-block radius. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
But in this case, we’ve seen that the shift has come about in seeing bicycling as a viable option for environmentalism, for safety, fun, and to get from point A to point B in a really healthy energy efficient way. It just solves so many problems with one solution and we haven’t always seen it that way.
Join Now
BCycle | Best-in-class bike share