Loud City Labs, Bike Research

Cycling transforms cities and lives, yet our streets remain dominated by cars. We explore the science behind these stories from biomechanics to health and urban design.

About

I’m Jonathan Lansey, a data scientist, inventor, and founder of Loud Bicycle, where I’ve spent more than a decade working on car-horn-loud safety horns for bikes. My carreer connects road and traffic safety, human perception, and machine learning. This site is where I publish lightly edited, AI-generated essays that explore niche questions in safety, infrastructure, and behavior along with the occasional product review. The essays are usually drafted with OpenAI’s Deep Research or latest reasoning model. Everything here reflects my own opinions, not those of my employer Cambridge Mobile Telematics, React Neuro or Loud Bicycle.

Research Articles

The Right Hook: Why Protected Lanes Still Kill at Intersections

Protected bike lanes save lives mid-block, but many serious crashes still happen at intersections. Here’s why right hooks remain deadly—and how better design plus tools like Loud Bicycle horns can help.

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The Importance of Covering Your Eyes When Biking

Why cyclists should treat eye protection as essential safety gear, from debris and UV to glare, reaction time, and long-term vision health.

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How a Traffic Filter in Oxford Became a Global Conspiracy

How a mundane traffic filter scheme in Oxford morphed into a global ‘15-minute city’ conspiracy, and what it reveals about car-brain politics and urban planning.

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The Reason Our Streets Switched to Cul-De-Sacs

How federal housing policy, neighborhood-unit planning, and engineering manuals pushed North American streets from walkable grids to cul-de-sacs—and what that means for safety, traffic, and active travel.

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Paris After the Car

Paris shows how a car-choked capital can quickly become quieter, cleaner, and more livable, and what other gridlocked cities can copy.

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Super Commuters and the Price of Distance in the American Dream

How housing costs, megaregions, and policy choices turned long commutes and super commuting into a normal part of American life—and what it would take to live closer to everything again.

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Barcelona’s Superblocks: When Traffic Lanes Became Public Squares

How Barcelona’s superblocks reclaim streets from cars, cut pollution and noise, and spark fierce debates about business, gentrification, and the right to the city.

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Berlin’s Bike Budget Cuts: How a Climate Capital Got Cold Feet

Berlin went from climate-mobility poster child to cutting bike and pedestrian budgets in half. What happened, and what can other cities learn before they backslide too?

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Bike Theft by the Numbers: Which US Cities Are Worst and Why

Bike theft in the US is a multi-billion-dollar problem concentrated in a handful of states and cities; this data-driven guide explains where theft is worst, why it clusters there, and what actually reduces the risk for everyday riders.

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Do E-Bikes Actually Replace Car Trips? What Studies Show

Do e-bikes really replace car trips? A research-based look at how much driving they actually displace, and what it takes for e-bikes to cut car use.

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