Category: Biking Elsewhere

By Stephen Moss, The Guardian
Gilles Vesco calls it the “new mobility”. It’s a vision of cities in which residents no longer rely on their cars but on public transport, shared cars and bikes and, above all, on real-time data on their smartphones. He anticipates a revolution which will transform not just transport but the cities themselves. “The goal is to rebalance the public space and create a city for people,” he says. “There will be less pollution, less noise, less stress; it will be a more walkable city.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/28/end-of-the-car-age-how-cities-outgrew-the-automobile?CMP=share_btn_tw

[B’ Spokes: I think this is significant because it comes from a car centric site, even drivers are getting sick of the carelessness of other drivers. So the big question is how to get people to take responsibility for their actions? Even if someone is “just” changing the radio station, drifted out of their lane and killed someone. The take away message should be that they should have waited for a better time to change radio stations. And most certainly the message should NOT be it was just a accident.]
https://driving.ca/auto-news/news/why-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-car-accident

“Cities, towns, planners and private businesses can’t move forward building safer cars and safer bike environments until they learn more precisely how bike accidents happen. Is a truck’s wide turn to blame? A taxi door opening at the wrong time? These seemingly small details of crashes are critical, says Anne Lusk, a research scientist in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.”
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“After studying hundreds of hopelessly low-tech police reports used to record bike accidents, Lusk and her colleagues are making a nationwide plea: They’re calling on police in all states to step into the modern era and improve reports on crashes involving vehicles and bicycles. Currently, Lusk said in an interview, the details on crashes are handwritten and drawn by police on paper, with few bicycle-specific codes or diagrams.”
https://commonhealth.wbur.org/2015/04/better-police-reports-bike-crashes

[B’ Spokes: I would also add Glympse to this list to let others see your location as you ride. The interface is a bit quirky and you have to search for “Copy to clipboard” if you want just the link to share via some thing other then a text message but it works and gives my family some peace of mind when I go out for a bike ride. Or it helps to see when I might arrive back home or some meeting place.]
https://www.waba.org/blog/2015/07/9-bicycle-apps-worth-checking-out/

Via Free Range Kids
About a week ago, you may recall, a Maine mom was charged with child endangerment for letting her 7 year old play by herself for an hour in the park visible from the family’s porch. This is a letter by a Free-Ranger to the Police Chief there, who defended the summons as well as the fact the girl was taken by cruiser to the precinct, instead of back across the street to her home. It’s everything a letter should be, and everything our country should be, too: Smart, sane, and unwilling to buy into child safety hysteria.
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“What was the particular and specific danger that prompted law enforcement action?”
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So, absent a verified and demonstrable hazard, the rationale for police action would seemingly have to fall to, in essence, “something bad could have happened.” This is an empty argument, and folly of high order. Something could “happen” anywhere. But, following that logic for a moment, law enforcement might take notice that, statistically, the most dangerous place for a child to be in the United States is riding in a car. Would it make sense, then, to pull people over and cite them for endangering their child passengers? The logic applied in this case would demand that you do. After all, children actually DO die in cars – thousands of them.
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To The Police Chief Who Said 7-year-olds Should Not Be Alone, Especially in a Park

By Cian Ginty
COMMENT & ANALYSIS: Media figures painting all “cyclists” as criminals is like an incitement to hatred which polarises some motorists. This clearly does not add to road safety. It should not be tolerated by any right-thinking person, regardless of what mode of transport they happen to use.
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The idea that only “bad” cyclists are in danger is nonsense. A polarised motorist stuck behind the best-behaved bicycle users on a narrow road or street, or while making a right hand turn etc, will not distinguish between law breaking and law abiding bicycle users.
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Here’s why we should not ignore self-proclaimed “cyclist haters”

-> The Safe Routes to School National Partnership Safety for Walking and Bicycling research compilation page identifies patterns of active transportation, injury, environmental attributes associated with pedestrian safety, as well as successful strategies to increase safety implemented by Safe Routes to School projects. Implications of this research suggest infrastructure improvements, traffic education for students, and driver enforcement can provide positive impacts on overall pedestrian and bicyclist safety. [https://bit.ly/1NuuHEY]
from CenterLines, the e-newsletter of the National Center for Bicycling & Walking.

BY NELSON RICE, Bicycling
Here’s more reason to keep riding well after you’ve eclipsed 40 years old: Endurance exercise may keep your brain working at full-tilt as you age, according to a new study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin attempted to determine the correlation between a person’s cardio fitness and cognitive function in middle-aged adults.
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https://www.bicycling.com/training/health-injuries/exercise-makes-you-smarter-you-age

By MICHAEL LEWYN, Planetizen
Some months ago, I wrote that laws against so-called “jaywalking” (that is, crossing in places other than crosswalks or where traffic lights encourage pedestrians to cross) fail to promote safety, because traffic lights are inadequate guides to safety. When crossing midblock, a pedestrian need only watch out for traffic coming in one direction—right toward her. By contrast, when crossing at a light, a pedestrian may be in less danger from cars coming straight at him, but may be attacked by cars making left and right turns. Moreover, it is not at all clear that jaywalking is a major cause of pedestrian fatalities; although most crashes do occur outside intersections, these crashes often occur in places where there is no easily available crosswalk. According to traffic writer Tom Vanderbilt, “While jaywalking is often cited as a cause of pedestrian accidents, less than 20 percent of fatalities occurred where a pedestrian was crossing outside an easily available crosswalk.” And even where a pedestrian is jaywalking, a crash may be caused primarily by driver misconduct.
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https://www.planetizen.com/node/79023/case-against-jaywalking-laws-part-2

“What you see in discourses about cycling is the absolute classic 1960s and 1970s social psychology of prejudice,” he explains. “It’s exactly those things that used to be done about minority ethnic groups and so on – the overgeneralisation of negative traits, under-representation of negative behaviours by one’s own group, that kind of thing. It’s just textbook prejudiced behaviour.”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/01/sabotage-and-hatred-what-have-people-got-against-cyclists
And similar:

Drivers’ antagonism toward cyclists termed ‘classic prejudiced behavior’