Forty years ago, in 1970, little Lisa Brown was riding her totally rad banana-seat bike through the woods of Cape Cod. She approached the Herring River, but the only way to cross it was a rickety plank board bridge. When Brown started out on the bridge it was two feet wide, but halfway across it narrowed to 12 inches, and she had to turn just a little bit to stay on track.

In a split second, she was in the river.

“I went in with the bike, I floated to the surface, I kicked away from the bike, and I must have pushed it down way into the mud,” she told Cape Cod Times.

Brown came out “smelling like a snapping turtle,” and her bike was nowhere to be found. Until one recent day, when her wife Deirdre spotted a glint of metal off a nearby path.

The vinyl banana seat, you’ll note, is still intact. Deirdre laughs that the vinyl is “the toxic waste of the world.” But in this one case, at least, its indestructibility has led to a reunion of woman and (definitely no longer rideable) bike.

“It was like finding a long lost friend,” Brown said.

She’s off to school, with helmet on head and doll in tow. (Photo by carfreedays.)

A small federal program is punching holes through the unsafe barricade of freeways, busy roads, and rushed drivers that surround the nation’s schools. Yet despite the program’s success, Congress is now threatening to terminate it — not to save money, but to redirect its funds toward more car-centric infrastructure.

In 2005, Congress initiated a Safe Routes to School (SRTS) national partnership. The SRTS program coordinates infrastructure improvements across the country to make walking and biking to school safer and more practical for students and educators. By most measures, the program has been a resounding success.

Testifying to Congress about a pilot project, director Deb Hubsmith stated, “In only two years, we documented a 64 percent increase in the number of children walking, a 114 percent increase in the number of students biking, a 91 percent increase in the number of students carpooling, and a 39 percent decrease in the number of children arriving by private car carrying only one student.”

Children represent over 12 percent of pedestrian fatalities. And bicycle-related injuries send over a quarter million children to hospitals annually. But SRTS currently receives just 0.2 percent of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s safety budget — and even that tiny slice is now in jeopardy.

The Senate transportation bill, currently in a conference committee, would relegate SRTS funds to a shared pot called “additional activities.” Depending on the compromise bill’s final language, states may be allowed to shift bike and pedestrian funds to road construction or other priorities. House Republicans would prefer to go one step further, eliminating bike and pedestrian funding altogether.

Walking and biking are inconvenient in the United States compared to most other industrialized nations. Most Americans live in a physical, legal, economic, and social terrain designed over a period of many decades to accommodate motor vehicles above all else, making alternative forms of transportation unpleasant and even unsafe.

For instance, a student environmental group at Bridgewater-Raritan High School in New Jersey raised money for a bike rack only to have their principal reject it, citing safety risks. Similarly, a principal at Island Park Elementary School in Mercer Island, Wash., an avid bicycler herself, vetoed a proposed bike route, pointing out that a fifth-grader had recently been killed while walking his bike through a street crossing. A principal in Walker, Mich., recently suspended a group of students for biking en masse to school.

If Europe’s experience is any guide, the success of bikeable neighborhoods will depend on the ability of communities to establish a bicycling culture. Amsterdam and Copenhagen were not always bike-friendly cities, yet today they embrace bicycling and walking as legitimate and esteemed modes of transportation.

A study [PDF] by researchers at Rutgers University and the European Commission identifies six key steps for planners and policy makers trying to design safe and convenient bikeable and walkable communities:

1. Improve facilities for walking and cycling
2. Prioritize urban designs sensitive to the needs of non-motorists
3. Introduce traffic calming in residential neighborhoods
4. Place restrictions on motor vehicle use in cities
5. Deliver rigorous traffic education to both motorists and non-motorists
6. Strictly enforce traffic regulations protecting pedestrians and bicyclists

The researchers claim that such strategies are flexible to a wide array of neighborhood layouts, simple to institute, and return rapid paybacks in terms of public safety, quality of life, and energy footprints. Furthermore, prioritizing walking and biking policies reduces long-term infrastructure maintenance costs.

If the United States Congress is serious about cutting costs, it may eventually have to stand up to thirsty car-culture lobbies and back infrastructure that pays durable dividends.

On Monday, 64 Kenowa Hill High School seniors biked to school in Walker, Mich. Nice, right? Well, the principal didn’t think so. She suspended the kids for the day and threatened to keep them from walking in their graduation ceremony. Somehow, this one story manages to encapsulate everything that is wrong with American attitudes towards biking.

The group ride was conceived as a less-destructive alternative to the traditional vandalize-the-school, get-everyone-out-of-class brand of senior pranks. Skipping lightly over the fact that a few dozen students riding bikes qualifies as a “prank” rather than a “Monday,” these kids actually deserve a lot of praise for organizing a group activity that’s healthy for them, the planet, and the community, instead of just pulling fire alarms.

And indeed, they got some praise — the mayor even showed up to hand out donuts. But when the “bike parade” arrived at school, the principal had a major freakout and sent the kids back home.

Someone with a cell phone captured her panicking over the risk the students took:

“If you and your parents don’t have sense enough to know your brains could end up splattered on Three Mile and Kinney, Fruit Ridge, then maybe that’s my responsibility,” she is heard telling students on the cellphone video obtained by 24 Hour News 8.

Now, the kids were actually pretty safe because they had a police escort to school. The worst consequences of the biking were some traffic delays, which made some teachers and students late for school (which I believe is one of the classic senior prank goals — delay of class, if not all-out chaos that means all students miss a day of school). But it’s sad in its own way that for just a small portion of this school’s students to safely arrive by bike, they needed a police car guarding their rear. And it’s way sadder that the kids arranged a safe, healthy, sustainable, mayor-approved activity and got punished for it.

Update: The principal apologized for freaking out.

And here is my face right now: 8O

Seriously, I thought the bike-hugging dog was the pinnacle of two-wheeled canine amazingness, but that bitch rides bitch! Norman here can PEDAL. And he looks like a muppet!

Like other stuff that is good for your health (not smoking, sobriety, living slow, and dying old), bike helmets are uncool. But you can’t really enjoy your coolness with a giant crack in your skull. How do you protect your noggin without sacrificing your mojo? Swedish company Hovding has the answer: airbag bike helmets.

Unless it’s called upon to perform, this helmet stays safely stowed in a futuristic-looking black collar that you can pretend is a scarf. (Hovding also offers printed shells that go around the collar, to make it even more chic.) But if you get hit, presto, it bursts open like a popcorn kernel:

(Fast-forward to 00:36 for the slow-motion version.)

Hovding’s been working on the Invisible Bike Helmet since 2005 — Grist even wrote about it years ago. At that time it only came in black and could only be purchased by Swedes, but now Hovding is preparing to launch the product in the United Kingdom. It’s possible to order it online, but be warned, you will pay a price not to wear a geeky helmet. And that price will be $560, before tax and shipping.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of our Ask Umbra advice column, and to celebrate, we’re pulling one particularly poignant question or tidbit of eco-advice out of the archives each week. Today, May 18, is Bike to Work Day. After we hung up our helmets and checked out the news cycle, we took a trip down memory lane with this Umbra video classic on commuting by bike. 

What’s that you say? You’re already in your cubicle, miles from your trusty single-speed? We have two more weeks of National Bike Month. Even if you missed the chance to ride with all the cool kids today, there’s still plenty of time to get your fixie fix.

Find more of Umbra’s pearls of wisdom here.

Oh sure, you could hang around with lizards and cavemen and pink-haired spy chicks and that irritating “Fran” woman, trying to save a few bucks. Or you could cut to the chase.

We haven’t been able to find the original source for this picture — we first saw it tweeted by @frucool — so if you’re responsible, pipe up! And also, put it on a T-shirt, because you’ll get rich, and on a bumper sticker, for irony.

The folks who brought you Walk Score, an online tool that ranks neighborhoods based on whether you can get anywhere on foot, are expanding to appeal to the biking crowd. This tool is a little more limited (only 10 cities have been scored) but it’s also more in-depth: Walk Score will assume you can stroll to the grocery store down the shoulder of a four-lane road, but Bike Score also covers bike path availability, terrain, and how many people will be joining you on your two-wheeled commute.

Walk Score works basically everywhere — even if you live in the suburbs, you can punch in your address and then feel shitty about your neighborhood. (Mine only hits even 51 because Walk Score counts the local beer/wine/lottery tickets corner shop as “groceries,” and thinks that there are sidewalks on state highways.) Bike Score, though, has only been implemented for the top 10 most bikeable cities (and even then it only covers the city proper, not the outlying metropolitan area). But they’re expanding. If your city isn’t on the list, you can tweet a vote for it to be added to the Bike Score pantheon.

The fact that the most bikeable city, Minneapolis, only achieves a score of 79 out of 100 is pretty sobering — seriously, we don’t have a single city that gets even a B-minus? Still, it’s cool to see how your area stacks up, so if you live in one of these dubious bike Meccas (Portland only got a 70? Portland?), check it out. If not, get voting.

This video is probably what Ralph Steadman sees when he takes half a tab of acid and looks at a map of Budapest, but it’s also a data visualization of the city’s bike usage during a 24-hour period. The size, location, and direction of the bubbles reflect how many people are on bikes at a given time, and where they’re going.

The video is a collaboration between Kitchen Budapest (the mapping tech) and UrbanCyclr (the bike data). It’s not likely to drive policy or anything — it’s hard to tell which specific routes are being used or exactly how many people are using them. But it does illustrate how Budapest’s growing bike community is transforming the city. Or it illustrates what it looks like when a map gets indigestion.