League of American Bicyclists

At this point, we’re not expecting any movement on a transportation bill, in either house, before the August recess. (After that, get ready for a panicked frenzy of activity ahead of the September 30 deadline.)

Nice, right? This table of bike data from Albuquerque is one of 244 handy info charts compiled by the League of American Bicyclists using census information in the 2009 American Community Survey.

Despite having the coldest winter weather of any major U.S. city, Minneapolis has the second highest rate of bike commuting in the country, after Portland. Ridership throughout the city is up 21 percent since 2007 and in some neighborhoods, it’s up as much as 132 percent. Clearly, chilly Minneapolis has become a hot place to ride a bike.

The National Bike Summit, organized by the League of American Bicyclists, culminated Friday morning with a Congressional Bike Ride. This year's ride was held in support of Rep. Gabrielle "Gabby" Giffords and was the largest in LAB history. At the beginning of the ride, Executive Director Andy Clarke held a moment of silence for all the victims of the Tuscon shootings and riders wore flags, pins and bracelets in their honor.

Every year, the cyclists that gather in Washington for the National Bike Summit meet with hundreds of Congressional offices to ask for expanded bike funding. This year, they’re just asking lawmakers not to cut it.

On the first night of the National Bike Summit, Secretary Ray LaHood told an enormous hotel ballroom filled with cycling advocates about his childhood riding bikes in Peoria, Illinois and reminded them that they need to work harder than ever to convince Congress to support cycling.

The National Bike Summit begins tomorrow, bringing together an estimated 750 cycling advocates. They'll hear from NYCDOT Chief Janette Sadik-Khan, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and they'll descend on Congress in droves, plastic bike pins fastened to their lapels, to deliver a message about safe cycling access.

The country’s crisis of crumbling infrastructure could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand bicycle access.

Via the League of American Bicyclists, new information is out about how much the feds are spending on bike-ped  projects. While federal funding for bicycle and pedestrian projects is down a bit from last year's all-time high, it still comes in at more than a billion dollars. A third of the money is from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which begs the question of what will happen to bike-ped funding once the stimulus funds dry up. We got some somber foreshadowing last week of what could happen to bike-ped funding if Republicans cut the transportation bill to the "core program."