German links

As Tad from Minneapolis Rad asked me about some German sites, I'll present a small collection of interesting blogs and websites here that I know of. It will always be incomplete, but if something else comes up that is interesting, I will post it with a "german links" tag, so that you can find this stuff easily.

Since German is an official language of many countries - Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and also parts of Italy, Belgium and Luxembourg -, there is definitely a lot of interesting material on the Internet that I don't even have a clue about. So in case there is something I completely missed out, please add it!

If you can't speak German, it will of course be impossible to understand what is written on all this websites so there's no need to click on them unless you maybe want to see some pictures (that's why I wrote the titles in English - so that you know what the websites are about). In case you're just missing some words, I highly recommend to use the online dictionaries Leo (it is really good and so far translates German to English, Spanish, French, Italien and Chinese and the other way round) and FreeDic (German to English).

Bicycle magazines
There's Fahrradzukunft from Germany (they currently have a very interesting article about how to transport babies and kids without a car), Velojournal from Switzerland and Velosophie from Austria.

Websites
I've already posted Radlust the last time. I don't want to add many bike advocacy groups, maybe just the Austrian Radlobby in case you're interested to see what kind of political discussions go on here.

Not so serious but also not so far from the truth are the more than 50 reasons to avoid a bike path. There's also a short text about the insecurity of bike paths with some interesting numbers that show where accidents on bike paths are likely to happen and how bike paths (don't) work by Bernd Sluka. As you might already have read in an older post, I'm not against bike paths, but there are certain things that one needs to know in order to be able to design and maintain a proper bike path. By the way, here's an interesting study that investigates why so many accidents with right turning trucks and cyclists happen and what can be done to avoid them.

There's the Embacher Collection in Vienna, a collection of many rare and strange bicycles (the website is available in English and German). I should actually go and see that myself..

Here are 10 reasons to ride a bike by Global2000. I also quite like the 25 reasons against a private car by Christian Felber. In Die Zeit (a weekly German newspaper) there was a very interesting interview with the well-known Viennese traffic planner Hermann Knoflacher called "Das Auto macht uns total verrückt". Actually I plan to write a post about him, cause I think he has many intelligent ideas concerning traffic planning.

Blogs
In fact, there are not so many German blogs that I read regularly, but here are some I know and like: Das gute Rad by Marianne Lang from Vienna, Autolos by different Swiss people that don't own a car, Rad-Spannerei by cyclists from Berlin, Les Lanternes Rouges (a blog about repairs on bikes) from Berlin as well. Recently I also came across Zweiradler's blog Montezuma D6106307 named after his bike. And there's also the radgefahren blog from Cologne with lovely pictures.. Well, I'd say on all this blogs you can find many links to further interesting blogs and websites ;-).