One Street News

February-March 2015

Vol. 8, Issue 2

1. Bike Shift Lever Licensees Needed
2. Havana Bikes
3. Resources - San Diego Long-Term Transportation Planned Toppled
4. Hot Topics – Proposed CA Helmet Law Shows How Unprepared Bike Advocates Are

Bike Shift Lever Licensees Needed

Now that our Bike Shift Levers are popping out of the mold here in Prescott, Arizona, it’s time to find our first license partners who want to receive their own mold and make them for their own area. License partners need to be a nonprofit bicycle organization and have a safe place to cast aluminum. You can read more about the details involved in our book Backyard Aluminum Casting: for Bike Shift Levers and Nearly Anything Else, available through our website as well as book vendors around the world.

If you would like to become a license partner to make Bike Shift Levers for your bicycle program and area of the world, please email sue{at}onestreet.org.

Havana Bikes

Imagine a place with a thriving bike culture that has no access to new bikes or parts. Now imagine you are a bicycle mechanic in such a place. How would you fix the most simple brake problem without parts? How would you repair a worn out chain? This is how bicycle mechanics must work in Havana, Cuba. Read more and watch an eye-opening video in our Defying Poverty with Bicycles blog.

Resources - San Diego Long-Term Transportation Planned Toppled

Have you ever been frustrated trying to explain to transportation planners why widening roads will only make traffic congestion and pollution worse? You’re not alone. Most transportation planners only see the seemingly logical solution—widening roads, endlessly. Bicycle and community advocates in San Diego managed to win the argument by using an explicit graph that broke that wrong assumption. Take a look at this article and use the graph in your own campaigns to shift transportation spending toward bicycling, walking, and transit solutions.

Hot Topics – Proposed CA Helmet Law Shows How Unprepared Bike Advocates Are

By: Sue Knaup, Executive Director

Regular readers of the One Street Newsletter know that we oppose overzealous bicycle helmet promotions, including mandatory helmet laws, because they do immeasurable harm to bicycle advocacy. In fact, bicycle helmet promotions and laws are the antithesis of bicycle advocacy because they drive away potential new riders by making bicycling seem far more dangerous than it is. Read more about One Street’s concerns on our Bicycle Helmets page.

Unfortunately, One Street is one of only a few bicycle advocacy organizations that dare to speak out against bicycle helmet promotions. Most try to skirt the issue. Others learn about funding from companies that benefit from helmet promotions and laws and become their foot soldiers for lies about bicycling and helmets. Even those who understand the limits of bicycle helmets and the harm of helmet promotions trip over their tongues when asked about helmet laws. They make confusing statements like: “We think everyone should wear a helmet, but we oppose a mandatory helmet law.” Any lawmaker would take a statement like that as full support of a law.

The recently proposed law in California that would change their current mandatory bicycle helmet law from children to all ages offers many examples of how unprepared bicycle advocates are for opposing such laws. Just Google “California bicycle helmet law” under news to find a deluge of articles and opinion pieces that either twist or dismiss the advocates’ opposition to the bill.

Skirting this threat should no longer be an option. Any other movement that had a festering flow of constant misinformation that undermined their work would cut and discard the disease. Imagine if environmental organizations were regularly coerced into promoting car driving or discouraging people from recycling. Would that even happen? And yet bicycle advocacy organizations readily take up the banners of helmet promoters that show bloodied children and quote adults describing their near-death bicycling experience.