http://www.thestarphoenix.com/news/Slamming+brakes+stolen+bikes/8781652/stor
y.html
Slamming the brakes on stolen bikes
Some cities, and even the University of Saskatchewan's Campus Safety, have
experimented with bait bikes, equipped with GPS to track down thieves. (AP
file Photo)
As bike thefts in Saskatoon skyrocket this summer, some cities across the
world are taking a more creative approach to deter cycle thieves.
According to Saskatoon police, reports of stolen bicycles jumped 80 per cent
this year between June 1 and July 31, compared to the same time frame last
year - to 149 from 83.
Reported bike thefts during the same two-month period on the University of
Saskatchewan campus also doubled - to 10 from five.
City police are repeating the usual message, warning bicyclists to always
lock up their bikes and make note of their ride's serial number. Fenced
areas devoted solely to private bicycle parking can be found scattered
throughout the city.
Bike lockers can also be rented on the University of Saskatchewan grounds,
and Campus Safety has experimented with bait bikes - rides equipped with GPS
to track thefts - in the past.
Cities around the world have used these same methods to deter bike thieves,
but some aren't satisfied with the same old tricks.
Researchers at Newcastle University in the U.K. recently targeted thief
psychology with a simple poster, staring down potential stealers.
The posters, each featuring a pair of watchful eyes and equipped with the
warning, 'Cycle Thieves: We are watching you,' were placed around campus,
and led to a 62 per cent reduction in bike thefts over two years in areas
where posters could be found.
"It's amazing that just a picture would have a bigger effect than a camera
recording people," Melissa Bateson, an ethology professor at Newcastle
University and one of the study's authors, told the Toronto Star in April.
Police in Cambridge, Mass. instituted a similar strategy in one of the
city's most frequently cycled areas.
Two cardboard cut-outs of a Massachusetts transit police officer were placed
in the bicycle cages at the Alewife Massachusetts Bay Transportation
Authority subway and bus station, where hundreds of people use the racks
daily and bikes are frequently stolen.
Police only saw one reported bike theft between July 5, when the cut-outs
were placed in the cages, and Aug. 4, according to Deputy Chief Robert
Lenehan. Last year, six bikes were stolen from the area over the same time
period.
"All you see is this imposing figure of a police officer," Lenehan told the
StarPhoenix.
He said the number of reported bike thefts also decreased by 56 per cent in
the Alewife station over a oneyear period from July 2012 to July 2013 with
the introduction of more patrol officers. He said there is no single best
method to reduce bike thefts.
"You can never arrest yourself out of a crime problem," Lenehan said. "There
is no one magical way out of it. If the cut-out is deterring two or three
bike thefts a month, or even two or three bike thefts each quarter, it's
still part of the overall approach to try to drive down the crime."
MBTA transit police were even able to stop a Craigslist bike thief a few
years ago by following him online.
The thief was snapping photos of bicycles locked up on the street and
posting the photos to Craigslist, a popular classifieds website. When users
on the site wanted to buy a bike, the man stole it.
"You have to be aware.
Every time you think you've locked the doors, you find out there is a window
open somewhere," Lenehan said.
Thanks
Dave
o
_ ( \ _
(X)\ /(X)
Ditch the Car: Active Commuting Cuts Risk of Diabetes, High Blood Pressure
By Tamarra Kemsley<http://www.natureworldnews.com/reporters/tamarra-kemsley>
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/3387/20130808/ditch-car-active-comm…
By forgoing the car and opting for a more active commute, a person can cut
their risk of developing diabetes by as much as 40 percent, a new study [
http://www.ajpmonline.org/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/AMEPRE_3837-stamp…]
published in the *American Journal of Preventative Medicine* shows.
Led by researchers at Imperial College London and University College
London, the report examines how 20,000 people throughout the UK traveled to
work and compared this to a number of health indicators, many of which put
a person at greater risk for developing type 2 diabetes.
In doing so, they found that cycling, walking and using public transport
were all associated with a lower risk of being overweight than driving or
taking a taxi.
Specifically, the data showed that 19 percent of working age adults who
used private transportation -- such as cars, motorcycles or taxis -- to get
to work were obese, compared to 15 percent of those who walked and 13
percent of those who cycled to work.
Meanwhile, people who walked to work were also 17 percent less likely than
people who drive to have high blood pressure.
All told, cyclists were around half as likely to have diabetes as drivers.
Based on these findings, the researchers argue that people can reduce their
risk of serious health problems such as heart attacks as well as diabetes
by simply avoiding the use of a car.
"This study highlights that building physical activity into the daily
routine by walking, cycling or using public transport to get to work is
good for personal health," said Anthony Laverty, from the School of Public
Health at Imperial College London.
Though, the researchers note, not everyone has the option to pursue these
more active forms of commuting.
Public transportation, they found, was used most in London, at 52 percent,
compared with just 5 percent in Northern Ireland.
"The variations between regions suggest that infrastructure and investment
in public transport, walking and cycling can play a large role in
encouraging healthy lives, and that encouraging people out of the car can
be good for them as well as the environment," Laverty concluded.
[image: Inline images 3]
Summer is here and with it comes the fun of commuting outdoors! Peg City
Car Co-op wants to see photos of your summer commute featuring themes of
biking, walking, and busing.
It's easy. Check out our Facebook page here <http://a.pgtb.me/7q2dNs> to
enter the contest. Enter your photo and get your friends to vote for it.
Photos with the most votes will win a MEC gift certificate each week! Enter
as many photos as you like to win multiple prizes!
Our grand prizes will be awarded to three lucky finalists including:
1. One years worth of Driving Credit with Peg City Car Co-op
2. One $500 Custom Bike from Natural Cycle
3. One Winnipeg Transit Half-Year Bus Pass
Grand Prize winners will be chosen by our stellar Jury Panel that boast
local artists, Josh Ruth (Art City), Natalie Baird, Lucas Pauls (The
Distillery), and Shawna Dempsey.
We can't wait to see your snapshots!
Peg City Car Co-op
--
Emma Bonnemaison
*Marketing Coordinator
*
emma(a)pegcitycarcoop.ca
+1.778.891.0337
<http://pegcitycarcoop.ca/>
--
*Shoni Litinsky* | Active and Safe Routes to School
Green Action Centre <http://greenactioncentre.ca/>
3rd floor, 303 Portage Avenue* | *(204) 925-3773
Green Action Centre is your non-profit hub for greener living.
Support our work by becoming a
member<http://greenactioncentre.ca/support/memberships/>
Find us here<http://greenactioncentre.ca/content/ecocentre-directions-and-travel-options/>
Vancouver’s bike lanes have made it a city to watch
FRANCES BULA
VANCOUVER — Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Aug. 02 2013
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/why-vancouvers-bike-la…
To many cities, building bike lanes isn’t about serving a small slice of
the hipster set. It’s about showing that the city is planning for a
different, more sustainable transportation future and serving an
increasingly important demographic.
City cycling is no fad, say municipal officials and cycling experts around
the continent: It’s here to stay and should be embraced.
“All of us, in every city around North America, because of demographic
forces, are really seeing an increase in cycling,” says Andrew Stober,
chief of staff for the mayor’s office on transportation in Philadelphia.
“This is not a case of ‘Build it and they will come.’ We are seeing that we
need to build something because they’re already here.’”
As cities get more dense, more people are coming to the conclusion that a
bicycle is often the most efficient and cheapest way to travel within the
five-kilometre radius where they increasingly spend most of their time.
And businesses, looking around the globe at where to locate, factor in the
effort that cities are making to provide for their potential bike-riding
employees. Philadelphia recently got shortlisted as a new location for a
major brewery’s East Coast base because of its robust bike-route network.
As a result, Mr. Stober and many other city officials say they are
constantly scanning the horizon to see what other cities are doing.
One of the places they always look: Vancouver.
Vancouver doesn’t have the biggest cycling network. Montreal has far more
concrete barrier-protected lanes; New York has more miles of bike routes
overall. It doesn’t have the highest percentage of cycle trips (as opposed
to walking, driving and taking transit). Copenhagen, with 40 per cent, and
even Berlin, with 15 per cent of trips by bicycle, far outstrip Vancouver,
which is currently closing in on 5 per cent.
It doesn’t have a bike-share program yet, like other cities aggressively
pushing cycling.
But Vancouver was one of the first cities in North America to create a
low-cost, low-impact network by creating bikeways along residential streets
with relatively light traffic volumes – a system that Portland, Ore.,
copied. That system has helped push cycling trips in some parts of the city
– Commercial Drive, Kitsilano – to the 12- to 15-per-cent range.
“It really has led the way in North American in local-street bikeways,”
says John Pucher, a Rutgers University urban planning professor and author
of *City Cycling*.
But in the last five years, the city has moved into a tougher phase:
increasing barrier-separated lanes and other route improvements that
visibly take space away from cars. It’s the kind of cycling infrastructure
that Mr. Pucher and other researchers say is the safest and the type most
likely to encourage regular people, especially women, to try cycling.
Vancouver’s efforts have meant fights with residents, downtown businesses,
and political opponents who accuse Mayor Gregor Robertson and his Vision
Vancouver councillors of catering to the city’s tiny minority of cyclists.
This week, city council’s decision to approve a new section of bikeway
alongside some of the city’s most expensive properties – and some of its
most vehemently opposed residents – was watched carefully across the
continent.
“They’re one of the leaders,” says Laura Spanjian, sustainability director
for the City of Houston, which has built 300 miles of bikeways recently and
introduced a small but enthusiastically welcomed bike-share program this
spring.
“That huge controversy they had … it’s kind of fantastic for the country.
It shows that even when there’s opposition, if you have strong leadership,
you can move ahead and show the success later. It helps other cities when
you have wins like this.”
Vancouver is one of the models for smaller or more car-oriented cities that
have decided unilaterally to create a cycling culture.
Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the current superstars among cycling cities, are
admired, but not always seen as examples that can be emulated. Amsterdam,
where 57 per cent of all trips are done by bicycle, has had a strong
cycling culture since the bicycle was invented. Its city governments over
the years have mostly strengthened that.
Copenhagen, which has reached the 40-per-cent mark for cycling trips, made
more of a leap, but it had a long history of building separated bike lanes
– called “cycle tracks” by the experts – in its central city. As well, like
many European cities, its public spaces were never taken over by the car to
the extent that North America’s were when cars began fighting for and
winning dominance on the roads over pedestrians and streetcars in the 1920s
and ’30s.
But Vancouver, and other cities like New York, Chicago, Berlin, Seville,
Barcelona, Montreal, and Portland that have had to fight to create a
cycling culture, are the ones showing the way to cities anxious to
transform transportation in their metropolises.
Paris and London mayors may have embraced the bicycle, but they didn’t have
the problems of New York – taxi drivers, truckers and rich people who
fought against bike lanes.
With the fierce Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan leading the
way since 2007, New York has added nearly 350 miles of on-street bike lanes
to its city, including 25 miles of protected lanes, for a total of about
850 miles. It has shut down some streets entirely for car-free days on
occasion.
But not without some serious skirmishing. Wealthy residents in the Park
Slope area of Brooklyn sued over one section of proposed bike lane – a case
the city won. Complaints were also in full flood for the bike-share system,
introduced this spring, from worries that the docking stations were taking
up too much sidewalk space to griping about the technical problems with the
stations.
But something is working. Statistics show the number of bike riders
crossing into Manhattan during a average 12-hour period doubled from 16,000
to 32,000 between 2005 and 2012, a number that is likely to be up again
once the 2013 numbers are counted.
“New York City’s streets are now the safest they’ve been, with the last
five years recording the fewest traffic fatalities since records were first
kept in 1910,” adds Department of Transportation spokesman Scott Gastel.
As Vancouverites were lining up pro and con to argue about the city’s new
Seaside Greenway last week, a University of B.C. researcher pointed out
that Vancouver – contrary to public opinion – has been rather timid in its
push for separated bike lanes.
“Since 2009, Vancouver has added six kilometres of separated bike lanes,”
Kay Teschk says. “Seville has built 120 kilometres of separated bike lanes
in the same five-year period.”
Mr. Pucher, of Rutgers University, calls Seville the most dramatic example
of a complete turnaround: Before the city started its cycling improvements,
only about 0.5 per cent of all trips were made by bicycle. Now, about 6.5
per cent of trips are bike trips, about 85,000 a day.
“Seville is the most interesting because it started with zero tradition of
daily, utilitarian cycling,” Mr. Pucher says.
That was in keeping with elsewhere in Spain, especially cities like Madrid,
where a cyclist on a regular street is a rare sight.
Some German cities, like Hamburg and Munich, have been good cycling cities
for decades. Hamburg had separated bike lanes, complete with little traffic
lights that showed green and red bicycles, back in the 1970s. Not Berlin.
“Berlin has turned to it partially because of financial issues,” says Ralph
Buehler, an urban affairs professor at Virginia Tech and co-author of *City
Cycling*.
The city was struggling economically after re-unification. “It found out
that building bike infrastructure is much cheaper than highway interchanges
or even subways.” Mr. Buehler says.
Between 1990 and 2008, the number of cycling trips doubled, accounting by
the end of that period for 13 per cent of all trips. The figure is now up
to 15 per cent (and as high as 25 in some neighbourhoods), as cyclists now
have access to about 620 kilometres of bike lanes.
Cycling experts gripe about some aspects of the Berlin system – that it’s
inconsistent, with riders sometimes in protected bike lanes, sometimes on
the sidewalk, and sometimes on roads with arrows.
The group Copenhagenize Design, which rates cities on the cycling
facilities, also notes that Berlin is still doing contradictory things,
like pouring money into projects for cars.
*Related stories*:
Bike route approved for Vancouver’s western beaches following passionate
debate
<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouver-to-get-bikew…>
Vancouver’s bike lanes: Gordon Price on when to ignore the opposition
<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouvers-bike-lanes-…>
A little love AT THE LANDFILL WRENCH sets out to salvage 900 discarded bikes
By: Bill Redekop
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/a-little-love-at-the-landfill-218259…
Pat Krawec once found a $5,000 Italian, handmade bicycle at the Brady Road
Landfill, but that's not what drives his passion for repairing and
salvaging discarded bikes.
"It's just such a waste" said Krawec, executive director of the WRENCH
(Winnipeg Repair, Education and Cycling Hub), a local group that is to
bicycles what Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was to the 1970s.
"We're Winnipeggers. We're thrifty. It's a moral outrage. There's still
lots of life left in these bikes," said Krawec.
WRENCH held its annual version of the push, pull and drag sale on Saturday
but at no charge. Volunteers from Winnipeg's half-dozen community bike
shops came by to save and strip parts from bicycles that wound up in the
Brady Road Landfill.
About 900 bikes were being picked over Saturday, including tricycles, kids
bikes, 10-speeds, mountain bikes, trick bikes and even exercise bikes. "The
amount of used bikes being thrown away is crazy, and it shows no sign of
slowing down," said Krawec.
The organization puts a positive spin into the old saying "throw a wrench"
into something, which usually means bungling things up. Here, WRENCH fixes
the situation.
But WRENCH has a larger mission than to just repair bikes. It's more like
bicycle maintenance as a "solution" to many of society's ills. Bikes are
exercise, fresh air, environmentally friendly, and bicycling helps clear
your head. Repairing bikes makes for sustainable cycling.
The main component to the non-profit WRENCH is to educate the public to do
its own bicycle maintenance. It runs programs for everyone from prison
inmates to special-needs people to inner-city kids. WRENCH also runs
Build-a-Bike programs for schools and community centres.
"One reason the programs work so well is that by working on bicycles, you
can get outside yourself. People learn to actually fix stuff," said Krawec.
It receives donations from some heavy hitters including the Richardson
Foundation and Winnipeg Foundation, and government grants from the
Neighbourhoods Alive and waste-reduction programs.
Volunteer-run community bike shops that WRENCH assists include The Big
Dump, The Bike Dungeon and Bike Lab.
"Most of these bikes just need a little love," said Robin Ellis, volunteer
co-ordinator for WRENCH, surveying the tangle of bikes at the Brady Road
Landfill.
Bike culture is growing, said Ellis. For example, she plays in a bike polo
league. "It's like hockey on bikes with mallets." It's played on indoor
rinks, with a street hockey ball and mallets that are typically ski poles
with PVC piping taped to the end. If a player puts a foot down, they have
to retreat to an area and touch the boards.
One might have predicted everyone at WRENCH pedals to work, as staff don't
even own cars. "A lot of people who come to our shops depend on bikes for
their transportation," Ellis said.
More information is at wrench.ca.
bill.redekop(a)freepress.mb.ca
*Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 4, 2013 A4*