Don't take this the wrong way, but your hero is an ignoramus. There are plenty of idiots out there whether they are: cyclists, pedestrians or motorists. I know, I'm all three (never at once!), and have had negative experiences with both other types when acting as each. Posting one anecdotal example of a cyclist-idiot only exposes your bias (though, to be fair, the bolded does a lot more). If infrastructure examples from Denmark and the Netherlands are used as a template for other urban settings, you get less traffic, better bicycle safety and a lot less road-rage in general. YMMV.
There are, but if you are bigger and faster I think you need to be more responsible on the roads. That's why I'll criticize bikers going through red lights before I criticize pedestrians jaywalking. Just like I would criticize vehicle drivers going through red lights before bikers (of course cars going through red lights or driving the wrong way on a one-way street is a phenomenon I witness maybe once a year, not every 3 minutes like with bicyclists. ). Anecdotal like the post I was responding to? If you want to be Mr. Serious my anecdotal incident outweighs the other one for the safely issue implied above.
Personally, I'm in favour of design that incorporates cycling and pedestrians instead of treating them like the red-headed stepchildren of traffic planning. This does a lot more to limit bad behaviour for cyclists and pedestrians. As was mentioned earlier, an ordinance permitting and adding proper signage, allowing wrong way cycling on a one way street makes sense - so does intersection design that discourages jaywalking in dangerous areas. Far too often the road design is car-centric and requires a major inconvenience to cross the road for any other type of traffic - which leads to the behaviours you witness. To wit, none of this shit happens in the Netherlands. Not excusing the cyclist who disregards pedestrians, but if you honestly think a cyclist-pedestrian encounter is more unsafe/dangerous than a truck-cyclist encounter, I've got a dead cyclist and injured pedestrian for you to meet (likely worst cases).
typical affect heuristically distorted remark. i've even heard people who know generally what they're talking about make them.
Yup, the Netherlands have the ideal set-up. Also encouraged by law enforcement. If you blatantly ignore laws as a cyclist in Holland you run the risk of getting fined. A cyclist in New York couldn't get fined if s/he tried. Let me go put the champagne on ice!
not excusing at all. i've offered enough criticism of bad cycling behavior here to have no complex about that. but if one is neutral and objective, this conclusion is inescapable : urban motorists are on average the least responsible, least respectful, most selfish and most dangerous category of road user, and by far. a conclusion which can be reached either inductively or deductively. just think: would someone reasonable and civilized insist on something so obviously daft as using a ton and a half of iron, steel, plastic and rubber to get 80kg* of person around a crowded city? one can further posit that the more expensive and SUV'ish the vehicle is, the more aggravated their incivility, and indeed daily experience seems to confirm this. *in the USA, two tons and 120kg.
how long did you live in the netherlands? i can assure you you are very grievously wrong on both counts.
Well, I don't drive much (8 year-old car now with 30,000 miles on it). But if you have another person and a week's worth of groceries and wine with you, the bicycle isn't going to work. I agree with you about the SUVs and other gas guzzlers though. Largely unnecessary for city-dwellers. And commuting to work in any sort of vehicle is just ridiculous.[/quote]
Not really true about the fines in NL, rather the culture is far more geared to acceptance of cycling. The stink-eye was preferred method of enforcement, I got more dirty looks from people when jaywalking than anything else at first, after a while I figured it out and waited - or did as the locals did. The problem as I see it, is there is a massive urban design bias, a massive subsidy for car commuting (roads built, supply lines defended, oil subsidies), which results in a massive sense of entitlement for car users of road infrastructure. Thing is (and I'm agreeing with you here), it's all in favour of a horrible means of conveyance inside cities, that politically is a sacred cow (mostly because the other options are non-existent). So I have to suffer some damn fool yelling at me to get off the road cuz his taxes paid for it (like mine didn't somehow). As long as the dialogue is where it is, I don't see the needle moving much away from car centric commuting.
in holland there's a "new city" on the flevoland polder called lelystad. designed for 100,000 people. two stoplights. excellent point! it would be more accurate to point out that your taxes are paying to repair the road his behemoth is chewing up. [/quote]30K miles in 8 years is not much! you seem too reasonable to have someone who callously aggressed me with his SUV and then brazenly insulted me as a hero. that said, two people... can ride two bicycles. and the more people do their shopping once a week at big peri-urban centers the more reasonable solutions like local shops will go out of business. my wife shops every day or almost, at places right in our neighborhood. expensive waste of time you say? 5 times 15 minutes takes no longer than one big haul to hell on earth (the saturday grocery run is the "normal" french family's weekly torture session) and once you add in car expenses no more expensive either. but i admit that all the above solutions have gone the way of the horse and buggy in the US.
Depends where you live I guess. The tiny, "neighbourhood" grocery stores are rip-offs in Brooklyn. So I prefer to go to the giant one that is further away and spend half the money for equal quality in a less chaotic store. Unfortunately it got buried and destroyed with a 15 foot tidal wave during the recent hurricane so now I'm back to fifteen minutes of torture, 5 times a week.
To be fair, Almere is next door and it has a few more lights, though it was built on the same polder. Not to mention most places can't reclaim land for whole cities to be built from scratch like the Dutch have (not that that was even the intention). Either way, both are well designed cities. <sigh> I have all these lines rehearsed and ready for the inevitable lunatic motorist, but what I fear is that all my wit is lost over the roar of their engine and whoosh of the air through the open window as they drive by.
i'm not talking about the neighborhood arab (and i mean that in a friendly way). i'm talking about real supermarkets the size i knew when i was a kid. how far do you have to go for a pharmacy? a doctor? a dentist? a florist or a bakery? cities are what we make them. and with bicycles, we make them better.
did guignol do a naughty thing this morning? or is he a bloody hero? i'll let you judge. on one section of my route to work there's a new bike path, not bad in itself, but unfortunately on the sidewalk side of the parked cars on the street, whereas the paths before and after it are on the street itself. one parking spot at each end was converted into a decent junction between the two types, but the problem arose that people continued parking in them anyway, thus blocking the whole thing up. this was solved by putting two big planters at opposite corners of the rectangle leaving only the necessary parallelogram for a bike to get through. not ideal but it works more or less. that's the preface. the heart of the matter is that an ill-intentioned person who evidently doesn't like bikers puts his garbage can where it blocks the way off this path. to get through you need to get off your bike and move it out of the way. i only started noticing it last week because now that it gets light earlier i go by there before the garbagemen have emptied the can (and placed it out of the way). it's clear it's the homeowner who does this, and on purpose too, since it's precisely at the point between the two planters where it is the most effective obstacle, and he has other possibilities that are actually more convenient for him. this morning something else dawned on me : the can is the green one provided by the city for recycling, but it wasn't recycling day this morning. everyone else had their gray cans out (which one must buy and maintain oneself). so i look i the can. it's regular garbage. which means mr. niceguy is skiving off the city instead of having his own can. worse, it's his regular garbage mixed in with all the things he should be recycling. in other words he's breaking every law of god and man. so this morning instead of just placing the can to one side, i grabbed the handle and wheeled it two blocks down the street. it will still get picked up... but mr. niceguy will never see it again. now he'll have to buy his own can. they run around €40.
he's just putting the sacks out w/o a can, and in the same place. which is also against the rules since whether you see them or not, lyon, like all cities, has rats.
I'd suggest a tastefully done photo showing the garbage bags in the foreground, with a nicely framed background of his house - including the house number if at all possible. I'll leave it to you to figure out the right arm of the local bureaucracy to send it to.
i don't think there's any level of behind-the-wheel muppetry that would surprise me enough merit posting it here anymore. after a while you've seen it all and a tidy bit more. but this morning there was something enough out of the ordinary. i turn the corner into a street and see a huge cloud of smoke about halfway down the block, a mass thick enough you can't see through it and three stories high. at first i thought a building must be on fire but as i get closer i see it's a land rover defender idling at about 2000rpm and probably burning oil too. the guy had just pulled it out of his garage, closed the door, and must have gone back in the house for something because there was no one at the wheel. he's blocking both the sidewalk and the southbound lane (a line of honking cars back past the next intersection), but hey, he's only going to be 2-3 minutes. and if he turns the engine off the heater's not going to warm up and it's 2°! be reasonable people!
Don't ever move to the USA, that's all the advice I can offer you. Everyone has massive vehicles! I can see in some places its sort of necessary - like rural New Mexico - but even in New York City a high percentage of vehicle owners have land rovers or something bigger. Obviously unnecessary, but getting a normal sized car would be tantamount to admitting they have a small dick.
too late with the advice, i was born in california and lived more than half my life there. volvo XC80's with V8 engines and sierra club bumper stickers? they're everywhere chief. as far as organ size goes i've always suspected the contrary, that big car = wee weenie. it's called compensation.
Spring has finally sprung here - remarkably I've managed two commuting days a week for the last 5-6 weeks - though with the rain/snow of late I've been pushing my comfortable-without-weather-gear ethos to manage that. Last few weekends have been sweet for riding around to run errands and such - and it sure beats any other mode for soccer matches at the stadium.
spring has been out for the last two weeks here M-F... only to go into hiding for the weekends ! but it does make for more pleasant commuting; i have done away with the windbreaker; i still need light gloves and sweater in the mornings (i'm very sensitive to cold) but coming home i'm down to a t-shirt. i usually sing to myself as i ride; the tune can be anything from opera to nursery rhymes to football chants, the words i tend to make up as i go along, and generally very filthy. but the song that works the best at this time of year is:
Bravo! on the singing - but that's far too European to attempt here. Our cycling music must be introverted via headphones in public - the extroverts prefer the obnoxious car stereo noise. Thusly, I have my phone to play Radio Free Pete* *the irony is "last.fm crazypete13" googling returns the Polish site - go figure - I live in a Polish neighbourhood
cool you can share your tunes that way. but CP don't ride with headphones! it's deadly dangerous! what you hear can save your life as much as what you see!