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?

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

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

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