An occasional update on items from the Velo-city.

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ANOTHER ROUND ON HELMETS AND SAFETY

This time in the Guardian:

The danger of road safety

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Cyclists in Amsterdam are fearless: no helmets, no protective kit. Yet they may be safer, too

Who wants to lug heavy helmets between office and home? Who needs to put on modern body armour to take a bike ride? Helmets and the rest don’t increase safety overall. In practical terms, they shrink cycle use – and the more it shrinks, the more people (walking, driving) get killed. In short, doing the safe thing is the stupid, unsafe thing. Far, far better to create an easy-going environment where ladies in tight trousers holding umbrellas can wobble down Hooftstraat unmolested. Far better to plonk all human life in a big picture frame.

And lots on Ron van der Eerden’s  Charter of Rights and Freedoms challenge against British Columbia’s 15-year-old  mandatory helmet law.  Here in The Province,  National Post and Vancouver Sun.

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“WE WON’T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER”

A wonderfully over-the-top piece of promotion:

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“NO MORE RIDICULOUS CAR TRIPS”

Kind of self-explanatory – but it’s a campaign in Malmo, Sweden (‘a bicycle city in the making’) to encourage bike use for short trips, under 5 km.  Starts getting interesting at around 3 minutes:

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THE DUTCH WAY

The Swedes, the Danes, the Dutch – yes, all very nice what they do there.  But talk about social engineering!  And how distasteful all that is to freedom-loving Americans who don’t like bike lanes.

That’s the point  author Russell Shorto makes when comparing the differing cultures in a New York Times article:

America’s famed individualism breeds an often healthy distrust of the elite. I’m as quick as any other red-blooded American to bristle at European technocrats telling me how to live.

But he does give an example of how the Dutch ‘hard-wire’ the accommodation of different modes of travel into their culture – something that may happen here eventually:

Dutch drivers are taught that when you are about to get out of the car, you reach for the door handle with your right hand — bringing your arm across your body to the door. This forces a driver to swivel shoulders and head, so that before opening the door you can see if there is a bike coming from behind.

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BETTER THAN RE-EDUCATION CAMPS

Michigan Puts Road Engineers on Bikes

Since 2005, MDOT has been putting traffic engineers, planners and public officials behind the handlebars for a view from the other side of the windshield. Hundreds of transportation officials and decision makers have received training in bike planning, but perhaps more importantly, experienced the streets from a cyclist’s perspective.

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