DUBAI (AFP) - A bomb attack in a market killed seven Yemeni civilians, including a photographer for a UAE television channel, in the government-controlled town of Mokha, medics and military sources said on Tuesday (Jan 29).

At least 20 people were wounded in the overnight blast in the Red Sea town, where pro-government forces backed by a Saudi-led coalition battling the Houthi rebels are based.

The improvised explosive device was planted on a motorcycle parked in the middle of the market, an official in the pro-government forces told AFP.

Seven people were killed, the official and a hospital source said.

A photographer for Abu Dhabi TV, Mr Ziad al-Sharabi, was among the dead, the official Saba news agency quoted Information Minister Moammer al-Eryani as saying.

A correspondent for the same network, Mr Faisal Al-Zabhani, was among the wounded, he said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but Saba blamed it on the Iran-aligned Houthis.

The city of Mokha has enjoyed relative calm since coalition-backed government forces seized it from the rebels in July 2017.

Yemen's war escalated in March 2015, when President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia and the coalition intervened.

Since then, the conflict has killed nearly 10,000 people and unleashed the world's worst humanitarian crisis, according to the UN.

UN aid officials say 80 per cent of the population - 24 million people - are in need of aid and nearly 10 million are just one step away from famine.</s>Bike locks aren’t a foolproof way to protect a bicycle–a fact that’s obvious to anyone who walks by a bike rack and sees a pile of twisted, empty U-locks lying on the ground. A London bike hacker designed another level of protection: If a bike is moved, the “ Bike Mine ” explodes, sounding like a gunshot. In theory, it will scare would-be thieves away.

After his own bike was stolen in the middle of the night, designer Yannick Read wanted to create an alarm that could also wake up owners in time to come outside before a thief finished hacking through a lock. “I don’t know that it will help with cycle theft generally, but with the specific problem of bikes being stolen from your own property at night, then I think it can help a great deal,” he says.

The Bike Mine kit includes titanium wire that attaches to part of your bike (or other property stored outside, such as a motorcycle), a spring-loaded trap, and a small detonator held on with Velcro. When the wire is tripped, the detonator fires a 150-decibel blast of sound.

It’s startling and different enough that Read thinks people will actually respond to it, unlike the annoying car alarms everyone ignores.

Of course, one of the potential pitfalls of attaching a mine to your bike is that you might accidentally set it off yourself. “If you forget it’s armed, then yes, it will go off, but unless you’re lying on the floor at the time it won’t go off in your face,” Read says. “If you do it more than once, you’ll annoy your neighbors.”

Bike Mine is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter.</s>Bike Tech added To RAGBRAI’s list of official bike shops</s>In mid-February of this year, Brent van Assen, the operations director for the Amsterdam-based bike company VanMoof , saw an alert come through the company’s network: A VanMoof customer in Paris had just reported their bike stolen. The Dutch company debuted what they call “the world’s first smart bike” in late 2015 ; when these bikes are pilfered, their owners can report them missing through an app, and a GSM tracking device embedded in the frame will show the bike’s location on VanMoof’s proprietary SmartBike tracking dashboard.

Recovering stolen VanMoofs is the job of the company’s team of “bike hunters“—a group made up of van Assen and another colleague in Amsterdam, another in Berlin, and one in New York who are charged with upholding the company’s pledge to return all stolen bikes to owners within two weeks or replace them, as part of VanMoof’s Peace of Mind guarantee. For the most part, bike hunting is a satisfying but not too difficult venture—most stolen bikes, van Assen tells Fast Company, rematerialize within a mile of where they were taken from.

But in February, van Assen watched as the GSM device tracked the bike from Paris to a harbor town in the south of France, where it disappeared for a while. When the signal came back online, the bike was in Casablanca. “I booked a flight there right away,” van Assen says. He and a photographer gave themselves three days in the city to track down the bike. Right away, they ran into problems: The GSM signal was directing them to one of the most unsafe neighborhoods in the city; they had a hard time convincing taxi drivers to take them there. When one did, van Assen says he saw a passerby drag his finger across his throat and point at them through the window.

So then, van Assen took a different route, and sought out where people can buy bikes in Casablanca. A different driver lead him to a massive warehouse, where van Assen saw around 300 bikes, many of them brand-new roadbikes valued in the thousands. The owner of the warehouse told van Assen that he buys all the bikes from trucks that come from Brussels and Paris; all of the bikes in the warehouse were, like the one van Assen was trying to find, stolen.

Van Assen gave up on repatriating the VanMoof lost in Casablanca, and the company replaced the bike for the owner. But his experience tracking a bike all the way to Morocco, and watching others disappear to other overseas countries like Algeria, signaled to van Assen that VanMoof’s noble promise to provide their customers with peace of mind was also beginning to shed light on the largely obscure patterns of global bike theft.

It was also a far cry from the more common experience of bike hunting. Usually, VanMoof tracks bikes that are secured on the street not far from where they were reported missing; in that case, bike hunters like van Assen will find the bike, lock it with a special lock (so the thief can’t move it), and come back with a lock cutter to saw through the thief’s lock. Once the bike is free, they bring it back to the VanMoof office, where the owner comes to collect it. More often than not, the cops are left out of the process. Bike theft is such a common crime, van Assen says, that they generally don’t drum up the concern to pursue a report.

But with all the information VanMoof is collecting on transcontinental bike theft, that will change. “We’re trying to solve bike theft globally,” van Assen says. He and his fellow bike hunters have tracked down 43 of the 62 reported stolen SmartBikes, and traveled over 18,000 miles in the process; they’re in talks with law enforcement about how to recognize the patterns they’ve discovered. “We want to expose how this system works,” van Assen adds. “And by collecting all this data, we already know more about bike theft than governments or other bike companies.”</s>Many parents in Scandinavia use cargo bikes or trailers to transport their kids. In Copenhagen, the bike lanes are full of them at school rush hour. But cargo bikes are really heavy, and can’t be used as regular bikes. The usual alternative is a trailer, and that’s cool, but also makes for a long, tricky-to-maneuver vehicle. The Scandinavian Side Bike is an awesome solution to this problem. Not only does it let you convert any bicycle into a kid-carrying trike, it has a clever coupling that avoids the instability of most other sidecar designs.

The Side Bike clamps onto the bike’s chain-stay–the tube that reaches out from the pedals to the rear wheel–and sits next to the bike. You can squeeze two kids in there, and they sit in line, instead of side-by-side, to keep the whole package bike lane-friendly.

If you ever rode a bike or motorbike with a sidecar, you’ll know that cornering is no fun, because the bike can’t lean. Or, when turning, the outside wheel lifts off the ground. The Side Bike avoids this by making the sidecar stable itself, with two wheels, and by joining to the bike with a pivoting bracket, so the bike rides as normal.

The pod is made in Denmark, and is so far only on sale in the EU. There are fiberglass and carbon fiber versions, priced at $1,500 and $2,070 respectively. The carbon version only saves a few pounds over the glass fiber model–22 pounds versus 26 pounds–thanks to the wheels being mounted onto a steel frame that makes up a good part of the overall weight. That frame is removable, and then the Side Bike becomes even more awesome, turning into a sled, or what is called a pulk in Denmark. Pulk is “the Nordic word for a pod-like sled used to transport children or goods.” The pulk comes with its skate-like runners already attached, so all you have to do is disconnect the wheel frame and hop into the snow.

This combination means that the Side Bike might be just the most Scandinavian thing ever made, but it’s also a pretty great solution to cargo-carrying in a city. If you don’t have space to park a cargo bike, or don’t fancy taking such a huge vehicle out when you just want to nip across town to meet friends, then this clamp-on kiddie-carrier may be ideal.</s>Using a bike-sharing scheme is way safer than hopping on your own bike and speeding off through the city streets. In fact, not a single person has died on a shared bike in the U.S. since bike sharing began in 2010. But why? What makes clunky public bikes, ridden by inexperienced cyclists, safer than journeyman commuters used to weaving through traffic on high-end bikes?

According to findings from the Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI), the crappy bikes and plodding, cautious cyclists might be the very reason bike sharing is so safe.

MTI’s study looked at existing data in many cities, spoke to focus groups of cyclists, non-cyclists, and bike-share participants, and also interviewed experts. Their result is that bike sharing is safer than private cycling on almost every count:

Partly, this is due to bike design. Road bikes encourage faster use because the rider typically sits high and leans forward. Public bike-sharing bicycles tend to be heavier with wider tires, painted bright colors, and fewer gears. Also, riders–even experienced cyclists–don’t trust the bikes as much.

The other big factor in increased safety is the cyclists themselves. Inexperienced riders are often more cautious, they ride slower, and they avoid risks. They probably won’t run red lights. The study’s experts “believed that when accidents did occur, they were less severe because of the lower roadway speeds in these urban areas.” However, inexperienced cyclists are less likely to know the road laws, or to be able to extract the self from a jam. For example, regular cyclists know how to avoid the classic “right hook” maneuver, where a large vehicle turns right, crushing the cyclist that’s in their blind spot. It’s a big killer.

Less certain (according to the study), but observable if you live in a bike-share city, is the “safety in numbers” argument. More cyclists on the roads force drivers to pay attention, bringing increased safety not just to the cyclists, but to pedestrians, thanks to the increased awareness of non-car traffic at intersections and crossings. There may also be a psychological effect–if the local government has mandated the bikes, and provided them infrastructure (bike lanes), then drivers may be more likely to see them as legitimate traffic, rather than as a nuisance.

There is another “network effect” at work here too–that of spreading the word about cycling. “Specifically, the experts said that by getting novice users into bike sharing, these users spread the word of cycling among other non-cycling users, which helps to raise awareness among drivers and non-cyclists.”</s>Since 2006, Detroit has painted 170 miles of new bike lanes on city streets. People on bikes followed: The Motor City now has the fastest-growing rate of bike commuters in the country.

Bike commuting grew over 400% in Detroit from 2000 to 2014, according to a new report the League of American Bicyclists, which pulled from census data. The city doesn’t have as many new bike lanes as some cities (Tucson, for example, has over 600 miles of lanes). But culture might be pushing some of the growth, like Slow Roll Detroit, a weekly bike ride that can pull in more than 4,000 riders at a time.

“Slow Roll started out completely grassroots, but it’s something that even the city of Detroit is starting to embrace as a way for more people to be introduced to biking, to see what it feels like to bike on the streets,” says Amelia Neptune, a program manager at the League of American Bicyclists. “For a lot of people, that might be the only time they’re on a bike in Detroit, but I would not be surprised if there was a correlation between people participating in that ride regularly and then maybe the next Monday thinking ‘Okay, I can do this, I’m going to try it on my own on my way to work.'”

The total number of bike commuters is still low–less than 1% of the population, compared to 23% in the uber-bike-friendly town of Davis, California, or almost 10% in Berkeley. But the fast growth rate is likely to continue; Detroit rolled out its first protected lanes this summer. Cities like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati also have skyrocketing growth.

New bike lanes are a big part of the growth, but not all of it, Neptune says. “We talk about the building blocks of a bike-friendly community, and it really takes several pieces–focusing on not just the infrastructure but also on education, the policies and laws to protect cyclists, and planning.”

And there’s a long way to go, if you compare U.S. cities to bike utopias like Copenhagen, where around half of commuters ride to work. “That hasn’t always been the case there,” she says. “They’ve put in really amazing infrastructure and the culture over time changed. In the States you see the same thing, in places like Davis, [California] that had the infrastructure and staff time dedicated to becoming a bicycle friendly community, those are the places where you see really high numbers of bike ridership. So I think over time it’s going to keep growing.”

The most interesting part of the list of fastest-growing cities for bike commuting might be the fact that many on the list are unexpected. Bike commuting is growing throughout the entire country, not just in the traditional coastal hubs. “You see rural communities, you see small communities, you see places geographically spread out. It’s diverse across the country,” says Neptune.</s>Gone are the days that you would walk into a bike shop and pick the first bike in sight. If you still do this, it is time to adjust your perspective. Bikes cater to various market segments. There are those looking for bikes that address the racing, ornamental, mountain cycling, or technology thrill needs. Thus the different bike choices in the market. Take a look at some important aspects that play a significant role in helping you decide on what bike to purchase.

There is a need a bike buyer seeks to address when buying a bicycle. This need is functionality. Different bicycles are manufactured to address the various cycling desires exhibited by cyclists. For example, an adrenaline seeker may opt for a mountain bike to suit the cycling conditions in mountainous regions. A professional cyclist, on the other hand, will opt for a flat bar road bike.

You do not want to buy a bike to satisfy the need for one. A bike is a statement about who you are, your taste and preferences. It should, therefore, suit what you like. Analyze the features of the bicycle, that is, its frame, suspension, tires, color, brakes, and contact points. Satisfy yourself that these features when combined, give the right appeal; one that you are comfortable with. This will help you choose from the wide range of options available on xds bicycles official Websites.

Bike purchases are no exception to the law of, ‘Spend what you can afford.’ You need a budget plan before you go bike shopping. The budget is key in shaping your decision. If you cannot purchase at the time, you can always opt for another day. If the price tag of the bicycle is well within your budget limits, you can then make the purchase. The plan is also critical when negotiating for some few dollars to be knocked off the asking price, all in a bid to help you buy a bike you can afford.

Vendors to Buy the Bicycles from

Different vendors offer various service packages. Some specialize on offering brand-specific bikes, and others pride themselves in selling better prices, while some have a wide-variety business concept. All these are options available to you. The selection of a bike vendor rests on what you as bike buyer value. If it is brand specificity you seek, go for brand specific vendors. If the price is your item of concern, seek out vendors with competitive prices. If variety is what you are looking for, then vendors with bike variety are your ideal choice. Therefore, it is best to know what you value the most and who in the market is best placed to offer what you seek.

No one aspect is said to be the only factor that can affect your buying choice. All the above elements plus more put together offer a holistic view of what you need to consider before buying a bike. The variety that xds bicycles official Websites provide is a testament to this school of thought.</s>Walder, who had previously held the top jobs at New York City’s MTA and then Hong Kong’s MRA, had just announced that he would be the new CEO at the company that operates New York City’s Citi Bike system. It was the first good news the company, then called Alta Bicycle Systems, had shared in a while. After launching in 2013, Citi Bike delivered shoddy maintenance and software (which would soon be detailed in a city audit), sustained damage to equipment during Hurricane Sandy, and, according to reports, had been scrambling for a new investor to keep it afloat. In July, REQX Ventures, an investment company formed by the principals of gym chain Equinox and its parent company, Related, bought its parent company. And now Walder, who was standing behind a podium wearing a buttoned-up suit, had a laundry list of positive developments. Citibank, the program’s biggest advertising sponsor, had agreed to extend its licensing deal from its planned end date in 2019 to 2024, adding $70.5 million to its initial investment. The company REQX had set up to buy Alta would invest $30 million in the project, and Goldman Sachs had increased its credit line to Alta. The Partnership Fund for New York City committed to expand Citi Bike to more neighborhoods, and Citi Bike said it would add 6,000 new bikes to the system by 2017–a target that would more than double its current fleet. I thought it would be an opportunity to shape a whole industry that was in its most nascent stage. For Walder, who had left his position in Hong Kong amid controversy over a delayed high-speed rail project, fixing Citi Bike’s problems and leading its expansion were relatively small-scale problems. While he was the CEO of the MTA, the subway alone had moved more than 5 million people each day. Citi Bike, the largest of Alta’s programs in nine cities, had on its busiest day that month facilitated just 38,956 rides. It was the potential impact that had made the job appealing. “I thought it would be an opportunity to shape a whole industry that was in its most nascent stage,” he says. Instead of looking at bike sharing as “an extension of the corner bike shop,” Walder wanted to make it “a part of the transit system of major cities.” Trains and buses, with their set schedules and stops, left an unmet gap in mass transit that, he believed, bike sharing could fill. “The patterns where we’re living and working have become completely different than what was imagined 100 years ago when the subway was created,” he says. “Bike sharing is creating effectively personalized mass transit. The idea that my trip is defined by station has been removed.” Proving that bike sharing could work well in New York City would help other cities sign on to this vision.

Throughout the next year, Walder would trade his suit for a baseball cap. He would hire 28 people to the corporate team. His team would replace Citi Bike’s buggy software, launch a new app, replace 12,000 docking points, install 134 stations, and change the name of the company from Alta Bikeshare Systems to Motivate. Last October, though, he didn’t know how to fix Citi Bike. After the press conference, as he pedaled with his new colleagues from Long Island City to Alta’s new headquarters in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, what he did know was that he had to fix it fast. “We’re a seasonal business,” Walder says. “We were either going to start to show improvement by the summer of 2015, or we would lose another year.” Alta Bicycle Share, the company that launched Citi Bike, began in 2009 as a spinoff from Portland-based infrastructure design firm Alta Planning + Design. Bike sharing had already taken off in European cities like Paris, but cities in the United States were just beginning to consider large-scale programs. Recently formed programs in Minnesota and Virginia hired Alta to consult on their projects, and the firm then realized there weren’t many large bike-sharing operators in the United States. “We said, this is coming to the United States, it’s clearly going to be something our communities are interested in,” remembers Mia Birk, Alta Bicycle Share’s cofounder and former CEO. “We already know more than most other companies do about this, so let’s dip our toe into this water.” It teamed up with PBSC Urban Solutions, a bike-sharing equipment company funded by the city of Montreal, and started to bid for contracts. Its first, in the summer of 2009, was with a program in Melbourne, Australia. The second was Washington, D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare system. Throughout the next couple of years, Alta launched similar programs in San Francisco, Boston, and other cities. But it won its highest-stakes contract in 2011, when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Alta would operate New York City’s first bike sharing program. It would not only be the largest bike sharing program in North America, but the first major system to be subsidized by advertising and designed to run without public dollars. Citi Bike launched in 2013, almost a year behind schedule, with 6,000 bikes and 300 stations. By the end of its second month, 49,000 people had signed up for $95 annual memberships. By the end of the year, memberships had reached 94,125.

But the business proved more complicated than expected. Riders reported malfunctioning bike docks and empty stations, and many of them did not renew their annual passes. After the year anniversary of the program in May 2014, membership dropped from 105,355 in May to 96,318 in June. In July it fell further, to 93,501 members. An audit conducted between May 2013 and May 2014 concluded “that the bike sharing program’s spotty maintenance, poorly cleaned bikes, and substandard docking stations inconvenienced riders and discouraged growth in the system.” Even organizations that had advocated for bike sharing in New York City, like Transportation Alternatives, had grown frustrated with Alta. “The owners were out in Portland, and they didn’t really seem too motivated to bring it up to a suitable state of service,” says Paul Steely White, Transportation Alternatives’ executive director. “The customer service was dismal. The app wasn’t working.” The price system had been set up so that one-day and seven-day passes would subsidize the relatively low $95 annual membership. While more people than expected became annual users, they struggled to sell short-term passes, so the program found itself in financial trouble. In March 2014, New York City Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg said that Citi Bike faced “a number of financial and operational challenges.” Later that month, reports indicated Citi Bike had been scrambling to raise tens of millions of dollars. Alta, meanwhile, was overwhelmed. “Everything was new,” Birk says. “It’s like doing a startup company. And then we did two of them in the first summer. We basically did nine startups in just a few years’ time.” It wasn’t only Alta that was struggling in the bike-sharing world, either. The company’s main supplier for bikes and software, PBSC, had filed for bankruptcy. “What happened to Alta and Bixi [How PBSC’s bikes are known in Montreal and Toronto] was too much growth,” says Luc Sabbatini, who bought PBSC in January. “They couldn’t manage that growth.” By the time Walder took the helm at Alta in October 2014, membership had dropped to 89,286. Before it could start expanding, Citi Bike had to fix the problems in its existing system. “We started with the idea that our goal was to fix Citi Bike by summer,” Walder says. The question he posed to his staff every Wednesday at 9 a.m., during the “fix Citi Bike meeting,” was exactly how they should do it. Walder was dismayed to discover that bike repairs only happened five days each week. “I said, so what you’re telling me is that every week we accumulate a number of broken bicycles and we allow that to pile up, so that on Monday we start with really bad service because we don’t operate the shop on Saturday and Sunday?” The repairs operation added weekend shifts and did more repairs on the street without bringing bikes back to the shop.

It also began to monitor stations with low batteries so that it could replace them before a disruption in service, instead of reacting to a malfunctioning station after it had become unusable. The technology team expanded from two to 10 people, and the company launched an app that tracked users’ trips. “It was just a new infusion of talent and resources that we noticed right away,” Transportation Alternatives’s White says. “I do think that they have fixed it,” says Veronica Vanterpool, the executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. “We’re hearing fewer complaints, fewer gripes, less dissatisfaction with Citi Bike overall.” The press agreed: “Overall,” wrote one Wall Street Journal reporter this summer, “the new Citi Bike experience is like cruising on a different planet: A magical world where a bright blue bike waits on every third street corner to provide fun, convenient transport—assuming you don’t get clipped by a cab.” By August, Motivate had installed a new back-end operating system, replaced its old kiosks with new kiosks, and replaced or repaired 12,000 docking points. According to internal data, time spent to fix issues at stations had decreased by 80%. Compared to the same month a year earlier, customer service calls, which is how riders typically report problems, were down from 4.3 calls per 100 rides to 2.07 calls per 100 rides. The team gathered for what Walder calls “a high-five day.” Plastic cups of champagne in hand, they huddled together in a circle and placed their other hands in the center like they were about to start a sports a game. “1, 2, 3,” they counted down, before lifting their arms into the air. “Expansion!” Walder likes to watch a digital map of Citi Bike stations to see new locations come online, which has happened 134 times since he’s been CEO. Citi Bike completed its expansion to Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Greenpoint, Long Island City, the Upper West Side, and the Upper East Side up to 86th Street, and as of September there were 7,454 Citi Bikes in the fleet, about 25% toward the 2017 goal. Citi Bike designed a new, better-functioning bike that looks almost identical to the older model, and has installed 2,400 of them in New York City. Other than some concerns about the density of stations on the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan, all of this has happened without major disaster. Now that Citi Bike is back on track, Motivate has turned its focus to expanding to other cities. Its program in Chicago grew 60% in 2015, adding more than 1,700 bikes, and the company recently won approval from five Bay Area cities to expand its program there from 700 to 7,000 bikes. This fall, its program in Washington, D.C., will grow to 50 stations, and Citi Bike Jersey City launched with 350 bikes in October.</s>A decade ago, riding a bike in Washington, D.C., could be a lonely experience. “One of the things we hear from our long-time members and bike commuters is they remember pulling up to the traffic signal and being the only person on a bike,” says Greg Billing, executive director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association. “There may not have been a bike lane. There certainly weren’t any other people nearby. That’s just not the case anymore.”

Since 2005, the percentage of bike commuters in D.C. has more than tripled, to 4%. It now ranks second in a ranking of the big cities where people bike the most, according to a new benchmarking report from the Alliance for Biking and Walking. For “active transportation” in general, including people who walk to work, it ranks first, tied with Boston at 16.7%.

San Francisco follows, then Seattle, Portland, New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Baltimore.

D.C.’s success didn’t happen by chance. Ten years ago, when the city had 17 miles of bike lanes, it made a master plan calling for 60 miles of completed lanes by 2015. Last year, the 69th mile was built. Capital Bikeshare, one of the country’s most successful bike share programs, started running in 2010. That same year, a bike lane was built down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, in view of the White House.

The culture has shifted, too. “Everybody from your employer to the place where you live is starting to really think about how to make biking possible, and every year we see more people doing it,” says Billing.

It’s something that’s also happening in other cities, as better infrastructure makes it safer to ride and fewer city dwellers have cars. Walking to work—at least in the biggest cities—is also slowly increasing, from an average of 4.4% in 2005 to 5% in 2013. (In places such as Alaska, where more people walk to work than in New York state, pedestrian rates are high not because of better infrastructure but because many people can’t afford to drive).

In states where people are more actively commuting, the report found that they’re also more likely to be a little healthier—fewer people have diabetes, fewer have hypertension, and fewer are obese.
Seven people were killed and 26 injured in a bike bombing at a market in Mokha, Yemen. Houthis were blamed for the attack.