What I’ve seen in the past week that I wanted to share with Austin Bike Blog readers:

Brain Pickings, a side which focuses on “brilliant ideas” has an interesting post about bike culture innovations. A couple of the ideas are pretty good. Unfortunately, two of them are also on our Dumbest Product of the Week list.

In world news, a bomb strapped to a bicycle killed five people and injured twenty more in northwest Pakistan. I suppose this puts a little more perspective on the bicycle ban at the Presidential Inauguration.

In London, a design student has come up with another “bike up a tree” type of idea which involves hoistng bicycles up on the sides of buildings to keep them safe. While Rob might go for this solution considering he just lost two bikes of his own, I have to say it looks incredibly tacky on the old, classic buildings featured in their photograph. That, and it makes every single building look like it’s a bike shop.

Urban Life Lab has a great idea to help stimulate their local economy while providing a transportation solution for people who really need one.

By the way, since we’ve been talking so much about bike lanes lately, I will add in that yes, people in Dallas really do want them.

Lastly, Streetsblog San Francisco has a series starting about modal priority in their city, and how, while the city has a “transit first” policy, things may not always turn out that way. From my perspective, though, having visited San Francisco twice and never needed a car to get anywhere, I’m pretty envious of the infrastructure they do have.