>> Those fires aren’t so great for cyclist’s lungs. Damien Newton at Streetsblog LA’s surveyed local bike experts on how cyclists should deal with the air pollution from the conflagration. A shocking tip: Bike less!

>> Watch local cyclist Will Campbell’s video of the Station Fire, which condenses an hour of smoke down to 4 minutes: “with the spewing white plumes that power up above the hanging haze of ash and smoke, it makes me imagine gargantuan steam locomotives unseen behind a curtain of poison, destroying everything in their predatory paths.”

>> Cyclists can take a biking safety class, but a Toronto study found that car drivers caused 90% of bike-car crashes. That’s just one telling stat cited in “Cycling Health and Safety: A Review,” put together by Chris Cavacuiti, a Staff Physician at St. Michael’s Hopsital in Toronto. (via Freakonomics)

Read the whole document to get the whole picture, because that 90% stat is location specific, due to wildly differing urban infrastructure, policies, education, etc. Make the roads less bike-friendly, and accidents go up and stats change. In fact, “U.S. cyclists are three times more likely to be killed than German cyclists and six times more than Dutch cyclists, whether compared per-trip or per-distance traveled.”

>> In more sanguine cycling news, L.A. Times did a feature on Eastside bike shop Flying Pigeon’s monthly Get Sum Dim Sum rides that brings together cyclists hungry for yummy dumplings.

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