Category: Biking Elsewhere

By Bob Mionske
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But what if the character’s wrath is directed at a group that has historically been the target of violence? Suppose, for example, that the character expresses his dislike of …
Reasonable people would rightly be appalled by such offensive and dangerous hate speech masquerading as entertainment, and would expect that the personality be removed from the air, and even that the station be disciplined by the FCC—particularly if the station had done nothing to prevent the foray into this type of humor, or winked at the jokes afterward.
And yet, as we all know, every now and then, some radio personality goes on a tear about cyclists, and inevitably, tells listeners to lob drinks at them, door them, and of course, run them down. Now, if the radio personality was ranting about Little Leaguers, the incongruity of the rant might seem humorous to some. But Little Leaguers aren’t subjected to threatened or actual acts of violence every day; cyclists are.
Daily, cyclists have drinks lobbed at them, have doors maliciously opened by passing motorists, are run off the road, and even run down, simply because they are on a bike. Sometimes, they’re even “just tapped,” as ESPN’s Tony Kornheiser recently urged . Perhaps the most common threat of violence against cyclists is one we’re all too familiar with—the buzz, where the driver passes within inches of us at high speed. Occasionally, a driver may truly have miscalculated the distance, or just plain didn’t see the cyclist. More often, I believe, the driver is intentionally threatening the cyclist. You can be sure it’s intentional when the driver checks his rear-view mirror for your reaction. In fact, I’m convinced that some “accidents” are buzzes gone awry—the driver intended to scare the cyclist, but didn’t expect that the close pass would result in a collision. And New Zealand police say that drivers are intentionally targeting cyclists. I’m convinced that’s a problem that’s not just limited to New Zealand (or Australia). It happens here too.
So the violence is real, and virtually every cyclist has experienced some aspect of it. This is why entertainment stirring anti-cyclist hatred and urging violence against cyclists is akin to hate speech urging violence against groups that are actually subject to real violence, rather than humor that wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.
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So what was it that triggered Kornheiser’s murderous rant?(( A bicycle lane.
Yes, a bicycle lane. Recently, Washington D.C. announced a plan to extend bicycle lanes currently existing on 15th Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, and along Pennsylvania Avenue, from the White House to the Capitol. Because of this, Kornheiser urged ESPN listeners to go out and murder cyclists at random. Or at least, give them “a tap.”
Never mind that the physically separated lanes that Washington is installing keep cyclists out of the way of drivers, and vice versa. Never mind that the random cyclists who would be the victims of the violence Kornheiser was advocating had nothing to do with the bicycle lanes in the first place. Never mind the fact that cyclists are just people—friends, neighbors, family—trying to get somewhere safely, just like everybody else. Facts and logic have never dissuaded the irrational rageaholics who attack cyclists, and they had no place in Kornheiser’s reasoning either.
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Continue reading “Road Rights- Kornheiser”

from How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt
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I noticed a few people responded to an offhand comment I made in the Streetfilms interview: “It’s too easy to get a license in this country, too hard to lose one.”
By this I mean our driver’s education and licensing system is in need of a number of reforms — we treat driving like a right, as in voting — and the newspapers (and courts) are filled with recidivist drivers. Read a random article about a fatal crash, and I’ll be you, that by about the sixth or seventh paragraph, you’ll begin to see examples of previous incidents or some underlying pattern of behavior that seriously undermines the “accidental” nature of any crash (e.g., the driver in the Taconic minivan crash). And yes, I am aware that many people with suspended licenses simply drive without a license, and yes, we need to look in many cases at the behavioral questions, yadda, yadda, yadda, but why we should continue to legally pander to people with a reckless disregard for human life is beyond me.
I was thinking of this again while watching, in Edmonton, a poignant talk by Melissa Wandall, whose husband was killed by a (repeat) red-light runner (the red-light law she’s worked for has just cleared the Florida senate; and despite what you often hear from the fringes of the right, most people, when polled, actually support such devices, when used judiciously). The offending driver already had 10 points on her license, a number of which kept getting bumped down by visits to traffic schools (the efficacy of which has been seriously called into question by several studies). Shockingly, she’s back on the road today.
Let’s go back to John Stuart Mill: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
It’s that ‘civilized’ bit I sometimes wonder about these days.
Continue reading “2 Easy to Get, 2 Hard to Lose”

“There are two types of road bikers: Bikers who are faster than me, and me.” – Bruce Cameron
“[A bicycle is] an unparalleled merger of a toy, a utilitarian vehicle, and sporting equipment. The bicycle can be used in so many ways, and approaches perfection in each use. For instance, the bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon. A person pedaling a bike uses energy more efficiently than a gazelle or an eagle. And a triangle-framed bicycle can easily carry ten times its own weight – a capacity no automobile, airplane, or bridge can match.” – Bill Strickland
“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit however, it lasts forever.” – Lance Armstrong
“Let’s have a moment of silence for all those Americans who are stuck in traffic on their way to the gym to ride the stationary bicycle.” – Earl Blumenauer
“A bike is the world’s most used form of transportation” – David Byrne
“When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.” – H.G. Wells
Continue reading “Quotes for the day”

Norwegian Motorcycle Union shot an advocacy video to remind drivers motorcyclists are out there. Maybe something similar for bicycles?

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Too many people have been killed by semi truck crashes and trucking accidents. Trucking companies need to do more to ensure that their equipment and their truck drivers are safe. Driving an 80,000 tractor trailer covering hundreds of thousands of miles is an awesome responsibility. Truckers and trucking corporations must be vigilant about safety.
Nationwide, large trucks (known as tractor trailers, semi trucks, eighteen wheelers, diesel, big rigs, or commercial trucks) make up only about 3% of the vehicles on the road. However, they account for far more traffic fatalities. For example, in Missouri, semi truck crashes make up as much as 15% of traffic deaths. In Illinois, tractor trailer crashes cause more than 10% of traffic deaths.
The National Transportation Safety Board ("NTSB") lists the following as some of the most common causes of big rig accidents:
* Poor Driver Training
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[B’ Spokes: According to NHTSA trucks kill more cyclists then cars and I would assume a lot of those trucks are driven by drivers with a Commercial Driver’s License (CDL). In general driver training/education is poor and material in the CDL manual is even worst. }
Continue reading “Trucks that kill”

I thought these were cute:


Continue reading “Hungarian Bike To Work Promotions “

[B’ Spokes: This is a great analogy by Tom Vanderbilt which I’ll skip to the end to emphasize his point but the full story is worth a read.]
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The airport courtesy cart is a wonderful way to travel. Who wants to walk Houston’s or Atlanta’s long dendritic corridors (dodging those spillover queues from Auntie Anne’s) when you could be whisked, in comfort if not exactly style, directly from security to your gate? Sure, there’s plenty of mass transit options, like shuttle trains and moving walkways, and there’s always good old walking (which I frankly find a welcome respite after four hours of impersonating David Blaine’s latest act of extreme deprivation in 12F), but who wouldn’t want that private door-to-door ride?
The problem, of course, is that if everyone wanted to travel this way, the airport corridors would quickly bog down in a teeming, thrombosed mass of Lagosian proportions. Airports are able to process huge amounts of people because of mass transit, or because they walk.
And I think there’s something of a metaphor here for the presence of the car in the city of the 21st Century. On 34th Street, as the NYC DOT reports, one in ten people who travel on the street go by car. And yet they are granted an inordinate amount of space, and they exact a toll in time on the vehicles carrying many more people. It’s not difficult to imagine the car, forcing its way through a crosswalk during a right turn (as so many do), as the equivalent of that individual courtesy cart disrupting the larger flow of the stream of airport pedestrians for the sake of its few passengers. Or the driver honking as he passes a cyclist as that shrill cry of “beep, beep, cart coming through” that so vexed Seinfeld. Imagine now if, at the airport, courtesy carts were given wide swaths of real estate in which to navigate, and people on foot were relegated to a smaller, crowded, space, and you have something of an idea of the routine spatial imbalance that exists in New York City.
As with the courtesy cart, the car is a wonderful way to travel — the problem, of course, is that it gets less wonderful with each additional driver. Beep-beep.
Continue reading “On Airport Congestion and City Congestion”

Brought to you by the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia
Early Bird Registration open until May 1st – Includes discount + free commemorative t -shirt!
Join us at Bike Freedom Valley on June 20th and help us celebrate a 30 year Philadelphian cycling tradition.
Your ride starts on Philadelphia’s historic Boathouse Row and continues for a day of biking on the family-friendly Schuylkill River Trail. Ride as far as Valley Forge or turn around any place you choose.
Looking for a ride that’s more challenging? Choose the 35-mile, hilly route on shared roads that returns you to the trail.
This is a full supported ride with four rest stops, snacks, mechanics, and even a keepsake trail map for a summer of exploring what lies just beyond the trail.
To Register or for more info see: https://www.bicyclecoalition.org/content/bike-freedom-valley
If you cannot register online, please contact Jill Minick at 215-242-9253 x3 or jill@bicyclecoalition.org.
Questions? Interested in Volunteering? events@bicyclecoalition.org

By Steve Magas The Bike Lawyer
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You see it everywhere, I’m sure. In your neighborhood – with your kids. Do you kids wander around town on their bikes? Probably not.
For me, as a teenager in the mid-1970’s, it was nothing to leave the house in the morning on the bike and MAYBE come home for lunch. My and my buddies would be riding all over – from ball diamond to park to ice cream stand. For, I am certain, a variety of reasons that just doesn’t happen any more.
One downside of this is that kids miss out on learning the absolute JOY that comes with the freedom of being on a bike. Kids miss out on being able to MOVE from place to place without a play date and without waiting for Dad or Mom to take them.
Can we develop a SAFE way to encourage kids to ride again without exposing them to the statistical population of cycling fatalities? I guess that is one of the many challenges facing the bike industry, bike safety experts and those encouraging our country to RIDE. Those 1975 cycling fatality statistics were littered with dozens of “dart out” cases – kids jumping from sidewalk to roadway, without paying attention to traffic. Safe Riding means teaching everybody – Kids & Adults – about the Rules of the Road and how to ride safely in traffic.
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Continue reading “Is it safe to ride?”

By JIM SAYER, the executive director of Adventure Cycling Association.
A little while ago, our special projects director, Ginny Sullivan, reported on rumble strip mayhem. We were receiving reports from around the country of the indiscriminate application of rumble strips or stripes to secondary roads, often prime cycling roads in the countryside. For example, a popular connecting road between Memphis and the Natchez Trace had been "rumbled." With only a two foot shoulder, it made it nearly impossible for cyclists to navigate the road without going into a high-speed travel lane.
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Last Friday, while I was in Washington, DC, we were able to secure a meeting with Joe Toole, FHWA’s lead administrator for safety, and David Nicol, the head of the Office of Safety Design. (I was joined by Jeff Miller of the Alliance, Walt Finch of the League, and Caron Whitaker of America Bikes.) We emphasized that we were not opposed to rumble strips when properly applied but that the evidence was demonstrating that states and counties were forgetting about the importance of cyclists’ safe use of secondary roads — and the clear guidance provided by many states and the FHWA on how to apply rumbles in a way that respects the needs of all users. The indiscriminate use of rumbles also contradicts the recent directive of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood that bicycling and walking should be considered as "equal modes" of transportation to motorized vehicles.
Joe and David were cordial, had clearly done their research, and had given a lot of thought to the subject. They promised to follow up with Administrator Mendez and with us, and thought they could provide some form of information to agencies about the proper use and application of rumbles. They also let us know that they are doing an in-depth update of their technical guidance on rumbles, due out later this summer, and asked for our input.
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Continue reading “Rumble Strip Report”