Month: April 2010

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Taking smoothies for a spin

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A vendor by the name of Wheely Good Smoothies will sell fruit drinks made in bicycle-powered blenders when the Baltimore Farmers’ Market opens for the season May 2.

Natan Lawson has three bikes, each rigged up so the wheels drive a shaft that drives a blender.

“It’s meant to get your attention,” he said of the bike bit. “But if the smoothies weren’t good, it would just be all show.”

Before launching the business — it debuted at Artscape and Waverly Market last summer, but is new to the downtown market this year — Lawson did a lot of research.

“I bought all the smoothie recipe books on Amazon,” he said. “I went through them all.”
But he wound up developing his own flavors, which he test marketed on neighbors and friends.

Among the blends he’ll be selling: Strawberry Spice, which combines OJ, strawberries and basil; The Fuzz, which has two whole peaches, organic lemonade, and a little chipotle spice; Blueberries and Cream, made with just that, plus some banana and apple juice.

The price for each 16-ounce smoothie is $5.50 — $5 for customers who do the pedaling themselves.
New York Times reporter Scott Shane — full disclosure: a former Sun reporter — gets the scoop on Wheely Good Smoothies last year at the Waverly Farmers’ Market. Photo by Fern Shen, Baltimore Brew.
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Stop the Maryland Unsafe Drive responds to Three-foot rule will not make bicyclists safe

from r by Driver
What needs to happen? Maryland drivers must decide to share the road in a safe manner with everyone else. I have years of experience bicycling on California’s back roads from the San Francisco Bay Area to Lake Tahoe to Mendocino County. There are far more bicyclists per mile there than in Maryland and I felt reasonable safe. One major reason for the difference is not the roads but the drivers who use Maryland’s back roads. The driving culture in Maryland blames everyone and everything but the proximate cause – the aggressive reckless driver.
Slowing and passing a bicyclist is a safe, easy, and polite maneuver. You look for on-coming traffic in the opposing lane, judge the traffic behind you, slow down and wait for a safe opportunity to pass with adequate clearance. Total precious driver time wasted insignificant to the number of lives saved.
The law requires an adequate clearance. I agree, that in a perfect world, such a law would not be required because everyone would have a modicum of common sense. That is unfortunately lacking in Maryland today. Most of our roads in Southern Maryland are of the two-lane country variety. Where are bicyclists supposed to enjoy their hobby if not our quiet6 bay-view country roads?
Until you have been on a bicycle and encountered a rude, reckless, thoughtless driver you do not have an adequate appreciation of the problem. The editorial staff of the Sun needs to get a group together and go bicycling.
I’d guess that one reason we have so many school buses in the country is because drivers have made use of our roads impossible for children. At first it befuddled me why Maryland kids didn’t get themselves to school and then I drove here. It is not safe on the road in front of my own home in a neighborhood with one road in and one road out. The straight away begins at my front door and the race out of the area begins. Drivers are OBLIVIOUS. Our culture of reckless abandon guarantees unsafe roads.
This is a problem solved at the grass roots level. Citizens of Maryland must DECIDE to drive safely. There are too many bad drivers to ticket. This does not however limit the need for enforcement and awareness building that expensive citations provide.
The answer is that all of the Maryland road killers need to slow down and enjoy the ride. Be safe, be happy, arrive alive.
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VA Cyclist Does What Many Would Like To

By Washcycle
A cyclist in Abingdon, VA was brushed by a 19-year old driver (intentionally, he thinks) – not enough to make him fall, but enough to rub off some of the bike’s paint. So the cyclist went looking for the car at the nearby campus. He found it, called the cops and got the guy charged with "reckless driving and, later, hit and run with property damage". So satisfying.
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St Paul Street Bikelane

Favor Placing Bikelanes on Lefthand Side of One Way Street

Putting the bikelanes on the Lefthand side of one way St Paul Street would: (1) Avoid conflicts w/ buses & taxis (2) reduce chance of getting doored (3) decrease chance of getting right hooked. From the photo, it looks like bicyclists who use the righthand bikelane have conflicts with buses, ride in the risky door zone, and face dangers of getting right hooked from right turning traffic. I definitely favor a leftside bikelane.
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The Persistence of Bike Salmon

from Streetsblog.net by Sarah Goodyear

19409792_1ecef67472.jpgThis sign is in London. Do you think anyone got the message? (Photo: Salim Virji via Flickr)

Over the weekend on CommuteOrlando Blog, Keri McCaffrey posted a video showing a bicyclist riding in the wrong direction on a Florida street. After pointing out how this might have ended badly for the rider, she poses the question “Why do they do this?”:

Riding against traffic accounts for 45 percent of bike-v-car crashes in Orlando. The majority of those are intersection crashes because the bicyclist comes from an unexpected direction.… Despite the numerous conflicts people experience from this behavior, they don’t connect the dots. Why?

And how do we change that?

McCaffrey and many others on CommuteOrlando Blog practice “vehicular cycling,” a style of riding in which the cyclist essentially acts like any other vehicle on the road. There’s a long and ongoing debate between vehicular cyclists — who often oppose the construction of bike-specific infrastructure — and those who believe that striped bike lanes and similar facilities are a good way to get more people out biking, thereby achieving safety in numbers and a more welcoming environment for people who might feel reluctant to ride otherwise. There’s no need to reopen that debate here.

But you don’t have to be a vehicular cyclist to wonder, as McCaffrey does, “Why do people do this?” As the streets of New York fill up with spring cyclists, the number of “salmon” is rising — and quite often, they are endangering other bikers as well as themselves with their wrong-way riding. It’s one of the most frustrating and hazardous phenomena I encounter on my bike on a regular basis.

Why do you think people persist in this behavior? Is it simply because they can’t be bothered to ride a block further to get to a street that goes the right way? Do you have any ideas about how to get them to stop?

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Man gets 7 years in fatal hit-and-run

Ran over woman who was walking to church
By SCOTT DAUGHERTY, Staff Writer

A Linthicum man was sentenced yesterday to seven years in prison on charges he ran over and killed a Glen Burnie woman as she walked to church last summer.

The sentence meted out to 27-year-old Matthew Evan Norwood ranks among the longest for an auto manslaughter case in county history, according to prosecutors.

Although most auto manslaughter sentences top out at 18 months so the defendant can serve the time in the county jail, Circuit Court Judge William C. Mulford II imposed a sentence long enough to ensure that Norwood serves at least five years behind bars.

"You had it all in this one," Deputy State’s Attorney William Roessler said, noting how Norwood’s record included four criminal convictions and six traffic convictions – including one for driving while intoxicated.

He also said 59-year-old Mary Bernice Collins worked with a greyhound rescue group and was killed while standing on a sidewalk across the street from her church.

"There was a traffic and criminal record, plus a nightmarish set of facts," he said.
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According to prosecutors, Norwood was driving a minivan north on Baltimore-Annapolis Boulevard about 6:50 p.m. when he jumped a curb near the intersection of Oak Lane. The van hit Collins as she stood on the sidewalk and continued without stopping.

The impact knocked Collins about 100 feet down the road into the front yard of a nearby home, Roessler said. She was on her way to attend Mass at Holy Trinity Catholic Church.

While paramedics were attending to Collins, county police found Norwood at a Royal Farms convenience store about two blocks away standing outside his minivan and looking at a flat tire.

Norwood told police he did not remember hitting Collins, only "clipping a curb."

But Norwood was not drunk at the time of the crash – only tired. A blood test found no alcohol, only two prescription drugs: the antidepressant Xanax and a narcotic analgesic, methadone.

It is unclear if he had a prescription for the drugs, but Murtha said his client knew they would make him tired and that he shouldn’t have been driving.
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Family members went on to complain that the state’s courts had been too lenient with Norwood in the past.

"This lack of punishment has enabled him to take the life of our beloved family member, Mary, and later my beloved brother Donald," James Smith Jr., one of Collins’ brother-in-laws, wrote in a letter to the court.
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New Report Tracks Urban Transit Emissions — Where Does Your City Rank?

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The emissions numbers get worse in less trafficked rail networks, such as the Baltimore Metro (0.919 pounds of CO2 per passenger mile, an average comparable to a car) and Cleveland’s rapid rail transit (0.805 pounds of CO2/passenger mile).

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[B’ Spokes: Seriously lets start thinking about “rubber rail” so we can put rapid transit where it makes sense rather then just where we have room for it.]
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