Category: Biking Elsewhere

By David Hembrow
An online TV station for Dutch speaking people who live and work in other countries recently ran a survey to ask what Dutch people most miss about their homeland.
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Actually, "Cycling" came in at 6th out of 213 categories nominated by the public, and another ten related categories helped to water down the "cycling" vote.
The other ten categories about cycling were "The bike", "Cycling without a helmet in the dunes", "Cycle-paths", "Mostly cycle-paths and cycling", "Going along with friends and family by bike", "Wonderful cycling with a warm jacket against the headwinds", "The cycling, my bike, riding through Amsterdam", "Good Cycle-paths", "The bike", "Family, croquettes, real chips, licorice, cycling and the Dutch language".
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https://hembrow.blogspot.com/2011/12/what-people-miss-about-netherlands.html

By CHRIS RUBICH Of The Gazette Staff (highlight)
Harold "Hal" Conrad, of Lewistown, was just a couple of months out of school when he rode a bicycle eight miles to meet military recruiters and joined the Army Air Corps in August 1940.
Read more: https://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/montana-survivor-recalls-pearl-harbor-raid/article_07d07d52-02a2-50b2-b3a2-b8e2bfa7be8c.html

https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2011/11/04

by WILL HARLAN (excerpts)
The Blue Ridge Parkway is the single most popular road for bicyclists in the Blue Ridge. Cyclists cherish the Parkway’s 469 scenic miles from Shenandoah to the Smokies. Even Lance Armstrong pedaled the high-elevation road during his Tour de France championship training.
Unfortunately, the Blue Ridge Parkway’s newly released draft management plan could limit cycling on the Parkway. The draft plan focuses exclusively on the Parkway being “actively managed as a traditional, self-contained, scenic recreational driving experience.”
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What You Can Do
Submit written comments on the Blue Ridge Parkway Draft Management Plan by December 16, to:
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Or formally submit comments through the on-line system,
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https://www.blueridgeoutdoors.com/outdoor-blogs/editors-blog/blue-ridge-parkway-closed-to-cyclists/

Excerpt from Streetsblog Capitol Hill by Ben Goldman
Unfortunately, today’s news didn’t sound as good outside of a car as it did inside one. After several progressively safer years, 2010 saw a 4.2 percent increase in pedestrian deaths—to 4,280, a difference of 171 human lives—and a whopping increase of about 11,000 nonfatal injuries. Bicycle deaths decreased 1.6 percent, but bike injury rates didn’t change at all. Clearly, safety gains for motorists have not extended to more vulnerable road users.
https://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/12/08/good-news-bad-news-2010-traffic-fatalities-could-fill-juneau-alaska/

by Tanya Snyder
Live in a town where bicyclists and pedestrians are personas non grata and buses get stuck in automobile congestion? Do you put on your walking boots only to find that your city’s street design conveys the message, “These roads were made for driving?” It’s time for a complete streets upgrade, then – but often, when concerned citizens propose accommodating other road users on the streets, local officials tell them it’s just too expensive.
Are complete streets really too expensive? According to Norm Steinman, planning and design manager for the Charlotte Department of Transportation, design elements to turn an incomplete street into one that accommodates all users are usually a very low percentage of the total cost of street planning, design, and construction. “Sidewalks will turn out to be somewhere around 3 percent of that compilation of costs,” he said last week in a seminar sponsored by the National Complete Streets Coalition for communities participating in the CDC’s Communities Putting Prevention to Work program. “Bicycle lanes, around 5 percent — and that’s adding bicycle lanes, of course, to both sides of the street.”
“On the other hand,” Steinman said, “reducing the width of a lane by a foot can reduce the costs by 2 percent.” Indeed, in Richfield, Minnesota, when 76th Street needed to be rebuilt following work on the sewer lines, the city decided to implement a “road diet.” Narrowing the street shaved $2 million off the estimated $6 million cost of the sewer work – while at the same time improving mobility and safety for pedestrians and cyclists and making for a more enjoyable community.
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Continue reading “Combating the Myth That Complete Streets Are Too Expensive”

By: MARY ANN MOON, Family Practice News Digital Network
Unless rules specify that schoolchildren get more of both physical education and recess, schools are likely to trim time from one to boost the other, therefore leaving kids’ total level of physical activity ultimately unchanged and inadequate, researchers say.
According to a study published online Dec. 5 in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, both state laws and school district policies mandating or recommending increased physical activity during the school day are effective at increasing PE class time and recess time among elementary students.
©Linda Kloosterhof/iStockphoto.com
Without state laws or school policies enforcing both recess and physical education, kids are unlikely to receive an adequate amount of physical activity.
But schools tend to "compensate for any increased physical activity in one area by decreasing other physical activity opportunities," an important finding for policy makers to understand, wrote Sandy J. Slater, Ph.D., of the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, and her associates.
Dr. Slater and her colleagues examined this issue in what they described as the first study to assess nationally the impact of state- and district-level policies on public grade-school PE and recess time practices.
They cited previous research indicating that fewer than 20% of third-grade students at public schools in the United States are offered both 150 min/week of PE as well as one or more 20-minute session of recess per day that are recommended by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education.
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Continue reading “Laws Can Raise Physical Activity Time for Kids”

Nicely done interview which got me thinking maybe Baltimore needs to institute some "pilot" projects. We need "more lets wait and see how this works out" then giving one community the power to rip out a bike lane withing a week that could effect half of Baltimore cyclists.
https://video.msnbc.msn.com/rock-center/45562585/#null

From the Gothamist (follow the link in Read More for the links and a list of horrific stories where the driver went without charges.)
About 100 people gathered outside NYPD headquarters this morning to call on the NYPD to hold reckless drivers accountable, instead of routinely letting them cruise off into the sunset with "no criminality suspected." Many of those in attendance identified themselves as cyclists—or relatives of killed cyclists—but others turned out to represent pedestrians, including one Park Slope resident who was nearly killed while crossing Carroll Street in 2009. Witnesses, including a reporter for the NY Times, said the driver was speeding when he ran over Hutch Ganson at the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Carroll, but no charges were filed.
"I lost half my head," Ganson told us, adding that he sustained traumatic brain injury, a broken leg, all his ribs were broken, as well as the bones in his face, he was in a coma for a month, and wasn’t released from the hospital until four months after the accident. Formerly an executive at AIG, he has been unable to work since the accident, and he now suffers from aphasia. Ganson and his wife Donna said they attended the rally because they want reckless drivers to face consequences for their actions.
Relatives of deceased artist Mathieu Lefevre, who was killed by a flatbed truck driver while biking in Williamsburg last month, were also at the rally, once again demanding an explanation from the NYPD about why the man who ran over their son and left the scene wasn’t charged. Lefevre’s mother Erika Lefevre told reporters, "I never expected to be standing in the same spot today where I stood over a month ago, asking the NYPD to please release the information it has about the death of Mathieu. In that month, we have made many, many requests to the NYPD for information, including Freedom of Information requests. But we’ve gotten almost nothing." (FYI, here’s the accident report.)
Mathieu Lefevre (Courtesy Lee Brunet) Lefevre’s family is seeking a copy of the coroner’s report, the videotapes that the NYPD says they have, and any other evidence. As previously reported, the detective at the NYPD’s Accident Investigation Squad has not been responsive, and Lefevre’s mother only learned that the driver—who was not found for several days—would not be charged by reading it in the media. Last month, an NYPD spokesman told us simply that the driver "did not know that he hit the cyclist." Lefevre’s former wife, Juliana Berger, also spoke, and said that after the driver parked his truck two short blocks away, he drove past the scene of the accident in his personal car. "Why didn’t he stop then?" she asked.
Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Paul Steely White announced this morning that the group would launch a comprehensive investigation into the NYPD’s traffic crash investigation practices. The investigation will "closely review and evaluate" the NYPD’s reports on scores of recent crashes that resulted in serious injuries or deaths. The group, which brought almost 3,000 letters from New Yorkers demanding "traffic justice," hopes the probe "will uncover whether police investigators followed proper procedures." The NYPD’s "cavalier attitude to the epidemic of lawless driving is absolutely unacceptable," White said.
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio also announced that his office is looking into the NYPD’s Accident Investigation Squad. Spokesman Wiley Norvell told reporters, "To New York State’s credit, recent laws enacted in Albany have put new tools in the hands of prosecutors to hold accountable people who kill or seriously injure others through negligence behind the wheel. One such law—Elle’s Law—serves the critical purpose of taking dangerous drivers off the road. But we must ensure those laws live up to their potential and intent. To do so, today my office requested data from the New York City Police Department on its enforcement relating to Elle’s Law and regarding the circumstances under which it deploys its Accident Investigation Squad."
Transportation Alternatives announced that between 2001 and 2010, 1,745 pedestrians and bicyclists have been killed in New York City traffic and 142,485 have been injured. According to an analysis of 80 contributing factors associated with crashes tracked by the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, 60 percent of fatal pedestrian and bicyclist crashes with known causes are caused by driver’s dangerous and illegal behavior. Yet the NYPD routinely declines to charge drivers involved in these accidents, and today the group released this heavy tally of carnage, from 2011 alone:
Continue reading “NYPD’s Handling Of Traffic Crash Investigations Will Be Investigated”