* Fun fact from HistoryLink.org: 133 years ago today, the first bicycle in Washington Territory arrived in Seattle. On November 14, 1879, the first bicycle ever seen in Washington Territory arrives in Seattle aboard a steamer from San Francisco via Portland. Seattle Merchant William H. Pumphrey displayed the boy’s size two-wheeler in front of his store at 617 Front Street (later 1st Avenue)

In an effort to shed bicycling of its association with racing, advocacy groups host style-centric rides.

* Bat-inspired technology lets blind man ride mountain bike. A blind Bristol University student has successfully ridden a mountain bike down a trail with the help of bat-inspired technology that provides advanced warning of obstacles in the path so the rider can steer around them.

* Pedal perfect: Bikers shed spandex to inspire new riders. About 70 people gathered in Decatur, Georgia, on Sunday, Nov. 11, for a celebration of period fashion and cycling. Style-centric rides such as this one have been organized around the world as an effort to shed bicycling of its strict association with competitive racing and make it more appealing to casual riders and potential commuters.

* Mark your calendars for Seattle’s Third Annual Cranksgiving! Coming up on Saturday, Nov. 17, Tom Fucoloro from Seattle Bike Blog is once again organizing this pedal-powered food drive and scavenger hunt to benefit the Rainier Valley Food Bank.

* In an effort to save the controversial bike lanes on Toronto’s Jarvis Street, which the city decided to remove upon the completion of a separated cycle track on a parallel street, a citizen protested by planting himself in the bike lane, obstructing the removal process.

* Bicyclist run over by dump truck,  driver flees the scene.  A 49-year-old man was run over by a truck just after 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning. He was rushed to hospital in critical condition.

* Seattle designer launches Kickstarter for bike-tailored women’s clothing. Ann DeOtte, founder of Iva Jean founder, has launched a Kickstarter to help fund her new line of women’s clothing geared toward women who bike. DeOtte started Iva Jean in early 2010 to encourage women to get on a bike and ride with the style, personality and confidence they bring to every other aspect of their lives.

* If She Can Do It, a documentary by filmmaker Mark Brent and our very own mountain bike celebrity, Kat Sweet premieres Thursday, Nov. 15 at PinkBike.com. Filmed this past July at the Sugar Showdown, Sweet says the significance of this film is enormous for the women of freeride. “This demographic has been largely overlooked by the bike industry for a long time, and people want to see women riding bikes, supporting and pushing each other but keeping it fun.”

* In a Momentum magazine article titled, What Women Want,  Anna Bowen gives a women’s perspective on the gender gap in bicycling, touching on topics such a safety, time constraints,  fashion, and a male-dominated culture.

*  I Put My Bike On The Bus: a music video about the sometimes awkwardness of multi-modal traveling.

* The Standard-Examiner reports that a bicycle component manufacturer will bring 324 jobs to Utah. ENVE Composites, an Ogden-based maker of high-end bicycle components, will expand its local manufacturing facility to over 300 more jobs to Utah using tax incentives from the state.

* Biking saves American $4.6 billion each year, GOOD reports. The Sierra Club, the League of American Bicyclists and the National of Council of La Raza took a look at the costs of each ride in a car and the cost of each ride on a bike. While a ride in a car costs about six times the amount a ride on a bike does, the actual dollar amounts attached to each individual decision are tiny: about sixty cents per mile for a car ride and about ten cents per mile for a bike ride. But even in this bike-skeptical country, people are taking more than four billion bike rides each year.

photo by @lavid

* David Byrne of the Talking Heads was spotted bike-in-hand in Seattle last week. Byrne has been riding a bike as his principal means of transportation in New York City since the early 1980s. (photo by @lavid)

* Unable to secure enough local sponsorship to move forward with implementation, bike-sharing company B-Cycle has abandoned plans to build Baltimore’s first bike-sharing program, Planetizen reports.

* New York City Council has approved mandatory safety classes for commercial cyclists. New York City Council has approved a measure that’s aimed at cracking down on “kamikaze bikers” and the businesses that employ them. All commercial cyclists (i.e.: bike messengers and delivery services) will now have to attend safety education classes, paid for by their employers. The delivery bikers will also have to wear reflective vests with the name and number of the business that employs them, to facilitate complaints from the public.

* In response to the demonizing of these delivery bikers, Sarah Goodyear of Atlantic Cities comes to their defense in an Op-Ed, stating that ultimately, the reason these cyclists, or “psycho-lists,” as the Daily News likes to call them,  ride the way they do is not because they have a death wish, but rather, the simple economics of the job.

* Seattle Times editorial staff discuss bike safety in Seattle and other grey, rainy places, calling on ‘idiots on bikes in dark clothes’ to make themselves visible.

Martin Reis/CC BY 1.0

*As the City of Toronto is getting its first separated bike lane, Tree Hugger’s Lloyd Alter has a few tips on how not to design a separated bike lane.

* A new study out of Canada concludes that bicycling in a cycletrack —a bike lane that’s physically separated from motor vehicle traffic — is safer than riding in the street. The study finds that dedicated bike lanes can cut cycling injuries in half.

* A different bicycling safety study shows that helmets can prevent bicycling deaths, the Globe and Mail reports.  The study, which analyzed 129 accidental bicycle-related deaths in Ontario from 2006 to 2010, found that cyclists who did not wear a helmet were three times more likely to die from brain trauma than those who wore protective headgear while riding.

*40 bikes stolen from Eugene bike safety education program.  One of the 4J Bike Safety Education trailers with 40 Bike Friday bikes and equipment was stolen this weekend from Prairie Mountain School in the Bethel School District.

* The San Francisco Examiner staff call on the city for more bike measures. San Francisco has set a lofty goal of having 20 percent of the commutes in the city occur via bicycle by 2020. But to get beyond rhetoric and actually move more people onto bicycles, Examiner Staff states, San Francisco officials have to look at busy thoroughfares, such as the two in this proposal, to consider how to make them safer for bicyclists.

The Bicycle Library /image courtesy of In Habitat

* Here’s a neat interview with  Karta Heal, founder of the Bicycle Library. The Bicycle Library is a London-based business that promote green transportation, by loaning bicycles to people out of  a converted double decker bus.

* UCI draws the curtain on Armstrong’s career. Read UCI’s final decision regarding the USADA-Armstrong doping case, here.

* Bike Hub’s got the scoop on how and where to recycle your bicycle (in the UK). A growing number of bicycle recycling programs across the UK are harnessing the social and economic power of the bicycle, raising money for charitable work or collecting bicycles for dispatch to the Developing World.

* Video: How bicycles can save small town America.

* On his bike to get a job:  Fed-up with traditional forms of seeking employment, father-of-two bikes 50 miles a day with his resume on his back.

* Massachusetts is getting serious about getting people out of their cars and into biking, walking and more use of public and private transit. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation announced a goal of tripling the share of travel by modes other than automobiles in the next 18 years.

* Calgary City officials are eyeing an aggressive upgrade for inner-city cycling, and are planning for a handful of separated cycling tracks that go well beyond the traditional painted bike lane, but drivers fear the plan comes at cost to on-street parking.

* Seattle unveils the nation’s second electronic bike counter.

* Trying to catch up with the exploding bike culture, The Dallas City Council is ready to spell out the rules of the road for the city’s new bike lanes. One of the shared lanes is on Main Street downtown.

* We won’t get more women on bikes until we have environments that cater to them, pens Alex Baca in Atlantic Cities.

* The city of Portland finds that bike boxes may actually increase crashes, the Portland Mercury reports. Earlier this year, Portlander Kathryn Rickson was killed at an intersection with a bike box, and many people have complained that the bike boxes are still a right hook zone. A 2010 study found that the bike boxes make cyclists and drivers feel safer at the intersections, but we’ve never had hard data on whether the boxes actually reduce the number of crashes.

* Our very own Craig Benjamin writes about riding on Seattle’s first cycletrack, recently completed on Linden Avenue North.

* Bike-wise children ‘make better drivers’. Teaching young children how to ride a bike safely and testing them on road rules can make them better drivers later in life, reports Austalian paper, The West.

* NPR’s inspiring story about a man opting to bike race his way to better health has been making the social media rounds. Ernest Gagnon — a man from Billerica, Mass who tipped the scales at 570 pounds — decided to shed pounds by getting into the often intense, high-adrenaline sport of cyclocross.

* Bike mechanic is one of the fastest growing jobs in the US, according to Bloomberg calculations of US Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it doesn’t pay a whole lot - the average salary of a bike mechanic is $23,660, according Business Week. 

* Biking Seattle has discovered the “universal truth” that bike maps are the best maps.

* The Dutch city of Oosterbrug has installed a new rain sensor for bicycle traffic lights, which turns the traffic light green faster for bicycles when it’s raining or snowing.

* Ever wanted an antique bicycle from the late 1880s? Here’s your chance. One of the world largest collections of vintage bicycles and bicycling memorabilia is hitting the auction block in three installments this winter. Hundreds of bicycles — some dating back to the 1880s and before — will be included in the auction of items once housed at the Pedaling History Bicycle Museum in Orchard Park, New York.