How to prevent bike theft, from a bona fide bike thief.

Velotopia reports on the Bike MS ride this past weekend in Mount Vernon. We used to do the mountain bike MS ride and had a great time.

2001 MS Ride: Mountain bike racing greats John Loomis and Ned Overend

Affectionately known as SDOT, the Seattle Department of Transportation has backed off its proposal for a “road diet” on Admiral Way Southwest in West Seattle. SDOT seems to be changing its mind a lot these days — mostly for the better in our opinion. In many of the cases where SDOT dithers, it winds up improving the plan. But there’s also a “not quite perfect” aspect to its deliberations. More on this later, but for now SeattleLikesBikes deconstructs the Admiral Way situation.

It makes sense that if you steal a bike because you’re very poor and need a way to get around, the police give you one of those unclaimed bikes that every police station collects.

The electric bike is now available in a mountain-bike configuration. Good? Bad? Can’t decide, although as much time as we spend riding trails, it’s definitely not for us.

What do women mountain bikers think?

Fixing the Mercer Mess in Seattle will be good for bikes.

Boulder is one of America’s top bicycling communities. And it’s on fire.

You don’t have to have a retired police officer on your side to prove it’s OK to claim the lane on a bicycle, but it helps.

Of all the ways you can hurt yourself riding a mountain bike, this has to be the worst.

We took the bike lanes for a video test ride.

Cyclelicious intriguingly analyzes “The Invisible Gorilla” vis-a-vis cycling on city streets … or as we’ve referred to it, trying to “become uninvisible.”

Pursuant to the large terrestrial beast theme, a bicycle that unless ridden safely can kill an elephant!

“Road dieting” does pay off, according to new Seattle Department of Transportation study.

But bike facilities “need to be more than lines on a map,” notes SeattleLikesBikes.

New York Times article on helmets has sparked a return of the Frequently Argued Waste of My Precious Time thread on Ecovelo.

We had wondered whether Seattle, which experienced a 15 percent gain in downtown ridership from 2007 to 2009, had collected 2008 numbers as well. The reason: Portland, which trended upward from 2007 to 2009, actually had a drop in rider count from 2008 to 2009, according to a preliminary report analyzed by BikePortland.org.

Seattle took a bike count in 2008, SDOT told us, but it did not include the same locations as the 2007 and 2009 counts. In 2008 the city inaugurated a city-wide survey. The 2007 and 2009 counts were for downtown ridership.

The city-wide and downtown counts are done on a rotating biennial basis. Next year (2010) will be another city-wide count, while the next commuter count won’t be till 2011.

So it’s an apples and oranges thing. But for the curious, we’re posting the 2008 city-wide bike count.

The reasons for Portland’s somewhat astonishing drop have not yet been officially published and may involve guesswork in any case. But Virginia Coffman, manager of SDOT’s bike and pedestrian program, noted that Portland’s unemployment rate is higher than Seattle’s (Bureau of Labor stats put Seattle at 9 and Portland at 10.7 percent as of October). And infrastructural saturation, a factor raised by BikePortland, may be playing a role as well, Coffman said.

We’ll look forward to publication of Portland’s official report after the first of the year.