Video: Groningen - The World’s Cycling City

A video about Groningen, a Dutch city with a population of 190,000 and a bike mode share of 50 percent, where cycling is easier and more natural than any other city in the world. The sheer number of people riding at any one time will astound you, as will the absence of automobiles in the city center, where cars seem extinct. It is remarkable just how quiet the city is.

Links:
> Streetfilms: Groningen - The World’s Cycling City
> A view from the cycle path: Excellent video from Streetfilms in Groningen plus more information about the city

Video: Abundant Access (Jarrett Walker)

Jarrett Walker, who authors the blog Human Transit, explains his concept of "abundant access" - designing cities so that "as many people as possible are able to reach as many destinations as possible as quickly as possible so they have as many real choices as possible and are therefore truly free.”

Links:
> Vimeo: Jarrett Walker Presentation "Abundant Access"
> Human Transit: "Abundant access": a map of a community's transit choices, and a possible goal of transit

Related BetterByBicycle Posts:
> See the access and urban freedom category.

Video: Why buses represent democracy in action (Enrique Peñalosa)

A TED talk on how Bogota was transformed with infrastructure for buses, cycling and pedestrians and the huge opportunity for emerging cities to take this path.

Links:
> TED: Enrique Peñalosa: Why buses represent democracy in action
> Big Think: Enrique Peñalosa videos
> Project for Public Spaces: Enrique Peñalosa

Review: Changing Gears: A Pedal-Powreed Detour from the Rat Race (Greg Foyster)

Greg Foyster used to be an ad man, until a chance viewing of  An Inconvenient Truth opened his eyes to the effect his profession was having on humanity, and the planet in general. He abandoned advertising and wanton consumerism, and hit the road with his girlfriend Sophie on a cycling trip from Melbourne to Cairns, visiting others who’ve decided to live simply along the way.

Links:
> Goodreads: Changing Gears: A Pedal-Powreed Detour from the Rat Race (Greg Foyster)
> Crikey: Greg Foyster on Changing Gears and living simply
> Greg's Simple Lives blog

Related BetterByBicycle Posts:
> Why Mr Money Mustache's biggest secret of financial freedom is to ride a bike

Review: Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities (Jeff Mapes)

Jeff Mapes explores the growing urban bike culture that is changing the look and feel of cities across the U.S. Mapes, a seasoned political journalist and long-time bike commuter, explores the growth of bicycle advocacy while covering such issues as the environmental, safety, and health aspects of bicycling for short urban trips.

Links:
> Goodreads: Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities (Jeff Mapes)
> NY Times review of Pedaling Revolution by David Byrne

Review: Green Illusions (Ozzie Zehner)

Tom Zeller Jr reviews Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism by Ozzie Zehner which convincingly argues that there is no such thing as "clean" energy, all alternatives are dependent on fossil fuels, and that tech-fixes can't address the real issues of overconsumption and growth as an end in itself:

"'Alternative energy is not a free ride, just a different ride and there's no reason to believe it will offset fossil fuel use in a society that has high levels of consumption and is growing exponentially.' Put another way, renewable energy only makes sense if undertaken in concert with other, more fundamental changes in the way we deploy and make use of energy in our everyday lives. At the moment, we're really paying attention to the technology end of things, Zehner argues, and without a holistic approach, these innovations get us nowhere."

Links:
> Huffington Post: Ozzie Zehner's 'Green Illusions' Ruffles Feathers
> Goodreads: Green Illusions (Ozzie Zehner)
> Green Illusions website

Related BetterByBicycle Posts:
> The green illusions and false promises of the electric car (including Tesla)

Site: The Guardian Bike Blog

The Guardian Bike Blog has a regular stream of articles about the urban cycling in the U.K, U.S. and Australia.

Link: The Guardian Bike Blog

Article: Dude, Where's Your Car?

Tom Vanderbilt explains how not having a car became Hollywood shorthand for loser:

"Greenberg is just the most recent film in which a character's non-automobility—whether for lack of a car or for lack of the ability to drive—is used for comic effect, whether as a metaphor for a deeper personality flaw or as a token of marginality and/or plain creepiness. As the humorist Art Buchwald once observed, 'People are broad-minded. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there's something wrong with him.'"

Link: Slate: Dude, Where's Your Car?

Web App: Ride With GPS

Ride With GPS is a useful bike route mapping app. The main advantages it has over Google Maps are for plotting some trips in advance (using the web app) as it has:
(a) The ability to have both the Google Terrain and Bicycling layers turned on at the same time.
(b) The ability to see gradient information for climbs as well as elevation. The gradient makes the biggest difference as to how difficult the hills are on a route.

Links:
> Ride With GPS web app
> Ride With GPS mobile apps

Related Better By Bicycle Posts:
> How to maximise your cycling when faced with hills

Long Read: It’s an Automatic

Jonathan Geeting writes for Next City about the road to a future of driverless cars, dense streets and supreme mobility.

Link: Next City: It’s an Automatic

Video: Bicycle Culture by Design: Mikael Colville-Andersen at TEDxZurich

"The focus on re-establishing more liveable cities continues unabated. The primary problem however is that 85 years of traffic engineering revolving around the car has failed miserably. It's time for modern thinking. Design can help. Historically, streets were human spaces. Let's design our cities like we design toasters or smartphones, following the desire lines of our citizens. Using basic design principles instead of engineering is the surest route to developing thriving, human cities."

Link: Bicycle Culture by Design: Mikael Colville-Andersen at TEDx Zurich

Long Read: Rage Against Your Machine

Tom Vanderbilt asks: "What is it about cyclists that can turn sane, law-abiding drivers into shrieking maniacs? The author ponders the eternal conflict with help from bike supercommuter Joe Simonetti, who each week survives the hostile, traffic-clogged rat race between the New York exurbs and Midtown Manhattan."

Link: Outside Online: Rage Against Your Machine

Long Read: Murder Machines - Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

Hunter Oatman-Stanford explains how as "automobiles have been woven into the fabric of our daily lives, our legal system has undermined public safety, and we’ve been collectively trained to think of these deaths as unavoidable “accidents” or acts of God. Today, despite the efforts of major public-health agencies and grassroots safety campaigns, few are aware that car crashes are the number one cause of death for Americans under 35."

Link: Collectors Weekly: Murder Machines - Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

Article: It’s time to love the bus

Will Doig explains how unloved buses may be the affordable, flexible answer to our necessity to create better public transport and shift away from car dependency. Including Bus Rapid Transit (BRT).

Link: Salon: It’s time to love the bus

Article: Carmaggedon is coming!

Will Doig discusses the growth in the developing economies - particularly China, India and Brazil - and whether this will inevitably lead to congestion nightmares or if these cities can avoid the car-centric mistakes the developed world made.

Link: Salon: Carmaggedon is coming!

Article: Why don’t we do it in the road?

Linda Baker discusses a new school of traffic design which says we should get rid of stop signs and red lights and let cars, bikes and people mingle together. It's called shared streets or shared spaces.

Link: Salon: Why don’t we do it in the road?

Article: How should we design the cities of our dreams?

Will Doig discusses changes in people's aspirations of how they want to live and how cities are being redesigned.

Link: Salon: How should we design the cities of our dreams?

Article: How cars conquered the American city (and how we can win it back)

Henry Grabar talks to John Massengale about his book -  Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns. Massengale explains how the street shapes the city, how they got taken over by cars and why cities need to take them back.

Link: Salon: How cars conquered the American city (and how we can win it back)

Story: My year without a car

Wayne Scott with a lovely piece on the travails and pleasures of a year's commuting by bike in Portland for a brand new cyclist.

Link: Salon: My year without a car

Article: New cycling stories

Dave Horton persuasively explains that cycling advocates have been too pragmatic about fitting proposals into other's agendas (health, congestion, the evironment) and speak of evolution not revolution. The cost is that there is no compelling vision to share with others:

"We have jumbles of ideas, impulses and convictions around cycling’s worth. But we lack the confidence to develop these jumbles into coherent visions, because they’re about bicycles, and bicycles don’t count. We work towards visions we can’t articulate, and we are shy in sharing our ambitions for cycling... How powerful is the dominant ideology that it stops us articulating even to ourselves, let alone asking for, what it is we really want! Thus our silence contributes to cycling’s continued repression.

We believe bikes should replace cars. We think half of all journeys could easily be made by bike. We see a bicycle-based society as better than a car-based one. We look forward to the time when bicycles proliferate as cars disappear and die. People won’t know these things unless we tell them, so we should tell them. We need to make our stories, to help make sense of the changes we’re calling for."

Link: Thinking About Cycling: New cycling stories

Review: Happy City (Charles Montgomery)

Tom Vanderbilt, author of the seminal book Traffic, reviews the book Happy City by Charles Montgomery. He agrees with Montgomery's prescription for happy cities, but identifies a key barrier - that we have conflicting desires that pull us in different directions:

“Although it is true that most of us say we would prefer a walkable community to one that forces us to drive long distances,” Montgomery notes, “most of us also want to live in a detached home with plenty of privacy and space.”

Links:
> Columbia Journalism Review: Human nature - Do conflicting desires prevent us from building happy cities
> Goodreads: Happy City (Charles Montgomery)

Feature: A planet of suburbs

The Economist has a major feature (with lots of photos) on the rise of urbanisation throughout the world and its predominant form (suburbs):

"The simple truth is that as people become richer they consume more space, just as they consume more energy, more goods and more services. Even if they live in towers, those towers are likely to be widely spaced, and the households that live in them will be small - wealth also being associated with small families."

Link: The Economist: A planet of suburbs

Article: Why do cyclists fear being banned from busy roads?

David Hembrow has a typically comprehensive, logical and illustrated rationale to answer both why cyclists fear being banned from the road and also why some claim its faster to cycle on roads than cycle-paths. The answer turns out to be that you need the highest quality cycling infrastructure that is wide, smooth, connected and efficient to suit all types of cyclists:

"Given infrastructure of high enough quality it actually doesn't matter terribly much if you can ride on the road because there is no advantage to riding on the road. When cycle-paths are more pleasant and more convenient than the roads, people simply don't opt to ride their bikes on the road."

Link: A view from the cycle path: Why do cyclists fear being banned from busy roads?

Article: Innovation in, lycra out: what Copenhagen can teach us about cycling

Mikael Colville-Andersen shares the key lessons he believes Copenhagen has to offer to emerging cycling cities like London. They include: green wave priority signals, fixing potholes, only a few consistent types of cycling infrastructure, design contributing to better behaviour, focusing on subjective safety and experimenting to find what works.

Link: The Guardian: Innovation in, lycra out: what Copenhagen can teach us about cycling

Article: The power and pleasure of grids

Jarrett Walker explains that a big key to efficient, convenient, equitable transport access is a grid system:

"Suppose you're designing an ideal transit system for a fairly dense city where there are many activity centers, not just one big downtown...you want people to be able to travel from literally anywhere to anywhere else by a reasonably direct path, at a high frequency. Well, you already know that to serve a two-dimensional city with one-dimensional transit lines, your system has to be built on connections, and for that you need high frequencies.  Frequency is expensive, so it follows that you need to minimize the total route distance so that you can maximize the frequency on each.  That means you can't afford to have routes overlapping each other. Play with this problem yourself, but it turns out that the answer is a grid."

Link: Human Transit: The power and pleasure of grids

Article: Should repealing the bicycle helmet law be a priority?

Alan Davies argues that while some advocates focus on repealing Australia’s mandatory bicycle helmet law, the only major impact is on bike share. For broader urban cycling, the likely gains of a repeal are minimal compared to those from better, sufficient cycling infrastructure, traffic calming, bike parking, coordination with public transport, traffic education and sympathetic traffic laws.

Link: The Urbanist: Should repealing the bicycle helmet law be a priority?

Article: Self-Driving Cars Are Still Cars - Which Means They Won't Improve Your Commute

Ben Walsh argues that neither Google nor anyone else can revolutionise and majorly improve transport in cities by focusing on the private motor vehicle:

"Google, to use a technology cliché, has chosen the wrong platform. If the company wants to revolutionize mobility, it shouldn't waste its time with cars. They're intractably inefficient uses of energy and space, and building our communities around them has failed."

Link: New Republic: Self-Driving Cars Are Still Cars - Which Means They Won't Improve Your Commute

Article: Separated Cycle Paths - Who Asks the Cyclists?

Jan Heine argues that experienced cyclists, in cities without a high quality network of separated cycle tracks, have a very different view on creating separated cycle tracks compared to advocates and current non-cyclists:

"Experienced cyclists don’t want to ride on segregated cycle paths (except in the very rare instances where they actually make sense). For the most part, they prefer to share quiet streets with slow-moving cars, rather than ride on “protected” paths that put them in harm’s way at each intersection. And if they have to ride on busy streets, they prefer on-street bike lanes that keep them visible and predictable to other traffic.

On the other hand, if you ask non-cyclists what they would be afraid of – if they were on a bike – many will tell you that it’s cars. To those unfamiliar with riding in traffic, it can make apparent sense to “separate” cars and bikes in order to provide “protection.” But many non-cyclists don’t understand the real risks of riding bikes… which occur at intersections."

Link: Off The Beaten Path: Separated Cycle Paths - Who Asks the Cyclists?

Guidance: Bicyclist Behaviors & Crash Risk

Vehicular cycling is a philosophy that cycling is generally safest when cyclists use roads in the same way as motor vehicles. While most urban cyclists come up with more pragmatic approaches, where required to share roads with vehicles, understanding the principles of vehicular cycling is worthwhile.

"Successful bicyclist behavior is driven by knowledge of common crash types and the behaviors needed to successfully avoid those crash types. Bicyclist behavior comes in a spectrum with three main behaviors, and in this article we aim to briefly describe the spectrum and show how those behaviors fare in common crossing conflict crash scenarios with diagrams and supportive video."

Link: I Am Traffic: Bicyclist Behaviors & Crash Risk

Article: Hey, list-makers - Most millennials don’t want to live in sprawling, car-dependent cities

Ben Adler argues that lists of the top cities and neighbourhoods for young people need to pay special attention to transportation costs and urban access:

"Millennials are relatively averse to driving, and especially concerned about the costs of doing so. If you have to drive a car to get around, that can cancel out savings from living in an area with cheaper housing. The average cost of owning, insuring, maintaining, and gassing up a car is more than $9,000 a year, according to AAA. Beyond cost of living, there’s quality of life. The average commuter in Houston wastes 58 hours a year stuck in traffic..."

Link: Grist: Hey, list-makers - Most millennials don’t want to live in sprawling, car-dependent cities

Article: Why bikers should live by the same laws as everyone else

Ben Adler argues that cyclists shouldn't get relaxed road rule exemptions like being allowed to proceed through intersections when safe. Instead more discretion in enforcement is needed:

"Pedestrians cannot legally jaywalk, and responsible parents still teach their kids not to. Of course people do, and they rarely get ticketed. And that provides a good model for bikes. Idaho stops, like jaywalking, should not be legalized; they should be winked at, with the law going unenforced except in truly egregious cases. But officially allowing bikes to steal a pedestrian’s right-of-way would go too far. It might encourage even worse behavior: If most people, using any mode of transportation, will tend to go a little further than the law allows, looser laws would make cyclists more inclined than they are already to blow through reds without stopping and through stop signs without slowing down."

Link: Grist: Why bikers should live by the same laws as everyone else

Opinion: Enough about the bikes, bikes, bikes

Joe Wos argues that Pittsburgh has bigger transportation issues to solve than biking, and which are relevant to far more residents. Conversely, he claims cycling is of interest mainly to white elites. The counter-perspective in the second article is provided by Brentin Mock that biking isn't a useful way to deal with racism or privilege.

"The Bicyclists have become religious zealots in the first church of the perpetual Schwinn. They are firm believers that the path to salvation is via a bike lane leading through Downtown. They hail bikes as solving issues as diverse as traffic congestion, pollution and obesity. They make bold claims of bicycling cities having lower rates of diabetes and heart disease and a greater love of kittens. Rather than attempt to solve Downtown’s parking issues, narrow lanes, traffic and public transportation issues, they point to bikes as the great solution to Pittsburgh’s ills."

Links:
> Pittsburgh Post Gazette: Enough about the bikes, bikes, bikes
> Grist: Please, people, stop using bikes to whitesplain privilege

Article: Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck

David Roberts has an outstanding recap of how Seattle managed to end up with a nightmare transportation mega-project - a massive new tunnel with major issues. This article and the linked prior articles provide critical lessons to all urban residents about the need to be informed about these projects and campaign persistently to kill or change the terrible ones. The project's flaws were known before it started and are now becoming obvious to all:

"In short: There is no plan to resolve the dispute over cost overruns, which are ubiquitous on projects like this; at $4.2 billion, it’s the most expensive transportation project in state history. The tunnel will have no exits — no ingress or egress — throughout the entire downtown core (which makes the support of downtown businesses all the more mystifying). It won’t allow transit, only cars. It will be tolled, highly enough, by the state’s own estimates, to drive nearly half its traffic onto the aforementioned side streets. It will be a precarious engineering feat, the widest deep-bore tunnel in history, digging right between a) Puget Sound and b) the oldest part of Seattle, with vulnerable buildings and God-knows-what buried infrastructure. Also: Pollution. Climate change. It’s the 21st f’ing century. On and on. People said all this and more, in real time, to no avail."

Link: Grist: Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck

Related BetterByBicycle Posts:
> Why you should campaign and vote to kill bad infrastructure projects

Article: In Memoriam

Brad Aaron from Streetsblog NYC put together a list of all 128 pedestrians and cyclists killed in incidents with motor vehicles during 2013. The work done by organisations and websites behind these lists and stories can force change. Indeed, 2013 was the year this issue finally broke through in New York:

"This was the year, however, when mothers and fathers, along with friends and neighbors, said “No more.” Backed by StreetsPAC and Transportation Alternatives, New Yorkers raised the profile of vehicular violence such that city and state politicians ignore it at their peril. As a direct result of their efforts, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio pledged to work toward dramatically reducing injuries and deaths caused by drivers, and Bill Bratton, de Blasio’s pick to succeed the indifferent Ray Kelly, has indicated his NYPD will take Vision Zero seriously."

Link: Streetsblog NYC: In Memoriam

Related Better By Bicycle Posts:
> The facts about cyclist deaths on Australia's roads

Article: Personal Privilege and Biking: It Takes More than a Bike Lane to Start Riding

Barb Chamberlain argues that while access to quality cycling infrastructure is necessary to facilitate cycling for transport, there are a lot of hidden factors that make it far easier for the "privileged" including: education, health, wealth, living in a safe neighbourhood with good access, fitting into the dominant social strata, having access to fallbacks (transit, a car), being able to fit work around biking, etc. Cycling policies and programs can only affect these equity issues at the margins but the more consequential issues do explain much of the variations in cycling rates.

Link: Washington Bikes: Personal Privilege and Biking: It Takes More than a Bike Lane to Start Riding

Article: Why cyclists should be able to roll through stop signs and ride through red lights

Joseph Stromberg argues that: "while it's obviously reckless for cyclists to blow through an intersection when they don't have the right of way, research and common sense say that slowly rolling through a stop sign on a bike shouldn't be illegal in the first place. Some places in the US already allow cyclists to treat stop signs as yields, and red lights as stop signs, and these rules are no more dangerous — and perhaps even a little safer — than the status quo."

Link: Vox: Why cyclists should be able to roll through stop signs and ride through red lights

Web and Phone App: Google Maps

Overall, Google Maps is by far the most comprehensive, useful and efficient mapping app for cyclists in any location. If riding somewhere new the first thing you should do is look it up in Google Maps and turn on the Bicycling layer. While the recommended routes in Biking Directions are generally not optimal they are a starting point and provide useful elevation profile comparisons. Street View offers an excellent heads up on actual route conditions. Turning on the Terrain layer tells you where the biggest hills are in your area. Saving destinations as Favourites allows you to easily look up routes from your smartphone or get directions between your Home/Work (favourites) and the destination. Using GPS, it can also provide Turn by Turn voice and visual directions on your smartphone (which you can attach to your handlebar with a Finn).

Google Maps is not perfect though. Open Street Maps typically has much more accurate cycling infrastructure (Google Maps often marks non-existent bike lanes). Ride With GPS is more useful for plotting routes in hilly areas as it shows gradients in addition to elevation - gradients are more critical to plotting an easier route. The Strava Labs heatmap can show you which routes most cyclists currently take (though it combines transport and recreational). For Melbourne, my Melbourne Grid Map provides a connected, non-redundant grid of recommended routes. Similar, "subjective grids" are worthwhile finding for your city.

Links:
> Google Maps web app
> Google Maps for Mobile

Related BetterByBicycle Posts:
> See the routes and maps category.

Web App: Is It Better to Rent or Buy?

This New York Times powerful web app enables you to explore financial scenarios for buying a house vs renting. As a general rule, I would argue that for many life stages and circumstances, renting is financially superior to buying when the ratio of House Price / Annual Rent is over 20. Plugging in realistic figures (such as limited further house price growth) to this web app makes this very clear. Renting often makes living in more walkable and bikeable locations much more affordable.

Link: NY Times: Is It Better to Rent or Buy?

Related Better By Bicycle Posts:
> See the lifestyle choices category of the blog.

Article: Why Aren’t American Bike-Share Systems Living Up to Their Potential?

Jon Orcut, policy director at the New York City Department of Transportation from 2007 to 2014, discusses research on the factors influencing the usage of bike share - including station density, the existence of a safe-enough Grid of routes, and locating stations for residents not just tourists.

Link: StreetsBlog USA: Why Aren’t American Bike-Share Systems Living Up to Their Potential?

Opinion: Shafted Again (Bike Snob NYC)

Bike Snob NYC mercilessly takes apart the argument that cyclists need to obey the road rules all the time to earn respect on the roads and justice if injured:

"It's impossible, and in fact downright stupid, to "obey the letter of the law" on your bicycle when you find yourself in a situation where the streets and the laws are designed specifically for cars, which describes most of the United States.  Moreover, it's gone way, way past the point where cyclists should need to prove to (that's drivers and police officers) that we "deserve respect."  We deserve respect for being human, and it ends there."

Link: Bike Snob NYC: Shafted Again

Article: The American right-of-way

"Motorists in America generally receive no punishment whatsoever for crashing into or killing cyclists, even when the accident is transparently their fault. This insane lacuna in the justice system reflects extreme systemic prejudice by drivers against cyclists, and would be easy enough to fix. All that America would have to do would be to adopt traffic regulations like the ones in place in the Netherlands... In the Netherlands, if a motor vehicle hits a cyclist, the accident is always assumed to have been the driver's fault, not the cyclist's."

Link: The Economist: The American right-of-way

Opinion: Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists?

David Duane provides examples of cyclist fatalities going unpunished to argue that social and legal norms haven't adjusted to the growth in cycling as a legitimate form of transport that needs to be protected: "There is something undeniably screwy about a justice system that makes it de facto legal to kill people, even when it is clearly your fault, as long you’re driving a car and the victim is on a bike and you’re not obviously drunk and don’t flee the scene."

Link: NY Times: Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists?

Site: Grist - Cities

Grist covers news and ideas relating to climate, energy, food, cities, transport and green living.

Link: Grist - Cities

Site: A view from the cycle path

A view from the cycle path is the world's leading site on best practice cycling infrastructure design and policies to facilitate transport cycling. It is written by David Hembrow who lives in the Netherlands.

Link: A view from the cycle path

Site: Next City

Next City is a nonprofit organization with a mission to inspire social, economic and environmental change in cities. It provides news and longform articles on the policies and innovations driving progress in urban areas across the world.

Link: Next City

Long Read: Why Isn’t It a Crime To Kill a Cyclist with a Car?

Andrew Zaleski with a lengthy piece on why injuring and killing cyclists mostly goes unpunished and why the law and enforcement hasn't yet changed after so many incidents.

Link: Next City: Why Isn’t It a Crime To Kill a Cyclist with a Car?

Web and Phone App: Strava

Strava lets you track your rides and runs via your iPhone, Android or dedicated GPS device and helps you analyze and quantify your performance. The Strava Labs: Global Heatmap also enables you to see the most popular cycling routes used by Strava riders in your city. Many of these are recommended transport routes.

Links:
> Strava web app
> Strava mobile apps
> Strava Labs: Global Heatmap

Phone Mount: Finn

Finn is a simple, universal smartphone mount for every bike. I highly recommend it as it is super light, robust and stable. It will also fit virtually any phone and handlebar combination.

Links:
> Get Finn
> Road.cc - Finn review

Web App: Walk Score, Bike Score, Transit Score

Walk Score (includes Bike Score) is a website and web app that enables you to identify locations (cities, neighbourhoods) that are walk-friendly, bike-friendly and transit-friendly. It is available for locations in the U.S., Canada and Australia.

Link: Walk Score

Facebook Group: Better By Bicycle

This is the Facebook Group for the Better By Bicycle blog. Join if you're interested in connecting with other's around the world who have an interest in enabling more people to cycle for transport. All members can post to this group - including ideas, links, questions, news and events.

Links:
> Better By Bicycle Facebook Group
> Better By Bicycle blog