Cities and Countries

Here are tipster-submitted pics from the bike-and-ride Radstation in Muenster, Germany -- where a train depot sits adjacent to a massive bike parking garage, featuring, among other amenities, a bike washing machine. Price per wash: 3.25 Euros (about $4.13 currently, thanks to the leveling exchange rate).

Via the Bike-Sharing Blog, this vid shows a modular bike-share station getting set up in what must be record time. It's part of a trial system in Montreal called Bixi (contraction of "bike" and "taxi," rhymes with pixie), which launched last month and is set to ramp up with 2,400 bikes next April. Bike-Sharing Blog's Paul DeMaio explains what sets Bixi apart:

Vision Zero is about more than looking both ways.

How effective are bike lanes at enticing people to ride? Portland State University professor Jennifer Dill has been looking into that question for more than a year, and her research is starting to get some attention. Using GPS trackers to map more than 1,700 bike trips, Dill found that about half of all bike travel occurs on dedicated infrastructure like bike lanes or bike boulevards, even though such routes comprise only eight percent of Portland's street network.

Check out this video, via BikePortland.org, on bicycle safety, part of a Portland Water Bureau campaign to reduce truck-cyclist collisions there. Last month, the Water Bureau held a bike safety seminar, which involved cyclists climbing into the cab of a city truck to see (or not see) driver blind spots for themselves.

The people over at CTA Tattler ("seen and heard on the Chicago Transit Authority"), as part of their tireless efforts to monitor the movements of the Chicago Transit Authority, have turned to the microblogging tool Twitter and created a Twitter feed with the user name ctatweet. It's a way for people using the city's transit system to post updates about train delays and breakdowns from their cell phones or PDAs.