It’s getting hard to keep up on items from the Velo-city.
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MONTREAL: Bike tourism booms
MONTREAL – Not everyone coming to Montreal is jumping aboard the city’s famed horse-drawn carriages to see the sights. A lot of people are taking a spin at seeing Canada’s second-largest city from behind the handlebars of a bike.
Its 600 kilometres of bike paths and the arrival of the Bixi rent-a-bike system put Montreal in first place for bike-friendly cities in North America, according to rankings by the Copenhagenize consulting firm. …
Bruno Lajeunesse, head of the bike section of Montreal’s professional tourist guide association, says more than 450 bike tours were conducted by certified guides in Montreal in 2012, compared with 386 in 2011 and 190 in 2010.
The demand is so strong that it has resulted in a shortage of personnel.
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AMSTERDAM: Dutch prize pedal power but a sea of bikes swamps Amsterdam
From the New York Times and the Globe and Mail:
While cities like New York struggle to get people onto bikes, Amsterdam is trying to keep its hordes of bikes under control. In a city of 800,000, there are 880,000 bicycles, the 
government estimates, four times the number of cars. In the past two decades, travel by bike has grown by 40 percent so that now about 32 percent of all trips within the city are by bike, compared with 22 percent by car. …
Mr. Smit’s problem is largely what keeps Thomas Koorn, of Amsterdam’s Transport and Traffic Department, awake at night. “We have a real parking issue,” he said in a conference room overlooking the IJ. Over the next two decades, Mr. Koorn said, the city will invest $135 million to improve the biking infrastructure, including the creation of 38,000 bike parking racks “in the hot spots.”.
And check out all the comments in the NYT piece.
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VANCOUVER: B.C. Business
As Ken Ohrn observes:
… two of the three featured stories on BC Business’s front web page are cycling-related, insightful and positive, all about the growing number of urban cyclists.
Closing the Gender Gap in City Cycling
According to the latest City of Vancouver data on the often controversial Hornby Street separated bike lane, the per cent of female cyclists using that corridor jumped from 28 per cent of all adult bike trips in 2010 …
“We are becoming a safer city to cycle in,” a beaming (City Active Transportation Manager Dale) Bracewell said.
Here’s proof: citywide cycling levels jumped 41 per cent between 2008 and 2011, while bicycle-car collisions fell by 17 per cent over the same time period. We now suddenly find Vancouver home to that coveted safety in numbers effect active transportation advocates have been praising for years, which means, like them or not, more separated bike lanes will soon be coming down the pipe.
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Cafés Cash in on Cycling Trend
Savvy entrepreneurs are hoping that new bike-centric hangouts will entice the growing number of urban cyclists to hop off the saddle—at least for long enough to grab a coffee
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