Shave your legs and saddle up!

Yehuda Moon had a line that will become a classic today, as quoted in the headline. 2009-08-10 Shave Your Legs and Saddle Up

PSA Opus

Someone needs to make these in a wicking T-shirt

I love Yehuda Moon, and someone needs to make these shirts in a wicking T so I can wear them on my bike. Free Range Vehicle

PSA Opus

Yehuda Moon will be back tomorrow

I know many of you have been in severe withdrawal since Rick Smith took his break from writing and drawing Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery. Well slap those veins because your daily fix of graphic bicycle advocacy is coming back tomorrow. For those of you who didn’t check back in daily at the Kickstand, there were a few teaser strips for the new Joe King Sunday comics and RoS strip with Yehuda in the woods, but tomorrow will be the first of what Rick promises will be 6 days a week of Yehuda and company plus Sundays with Joe.

PSA, Opus

So many wrecks they don’t even get separate articles

Yes we had another area that had so many bike wrecks in one day that all the wrecks were lumped into a single article instead of giving each victim a separate story. That’s twice that has happened in just the last two days. I don’t know if this heralds a trend, or if it just indicates a series of hot spots for bike wrecks combined with lazy or overworked reporters. For me it makes for fewer links that have to be hand-coded, which is good, but I still have to create as individual an account as I can for each wreck. Of course in UK wreck stories I sometimes lump all the links together because of a lack of information, which today has been done for me.

One wreck that got multiple reports, two kids out for a ride on the same bike. Bicycle rider hit by van dies and Police say no charges for bike accident The kid that died would have been dead with or without a helmet (helmet use by either rider is still not released) as he sustained fatal injuries to areas not protected by helmets according to the autopsy report released in the second article linked. This was a story I told you about earlier in the week when less was known about the wreck. The skid marks from the van indicate that the kids on the bike crossed the centerline and hit the van head on, killing the one cyclist instantly and severely injuring the second. Since there was no mention of there being a tandem bike involved I have to assume that one was providing propulsion and/or steering while the other was just sitting or providing steering. Either way, not a legal way to ride a bike.

An IA rider is injured by a right turning vehicle with a driver that was just not paying attention. Cyclist injured when hit by truck If the rider was in the correct lane of travel and got hit there should have been a ticket issued to the truck driver for failure to yield before turning right on a red.

A wreck article that doesn’t say much about the wreck. Simi man seriously injured in AIDS benefit ride All I could find from the article was he “fell” and got injured.

An updated and separate article explains what brought an experienced rider down near Vancouver WA earlier this week. Bicycle crash blamed on stick A piece of road debris almost killed a man, who was actually paying attention to how and where he was riding. Almost as bad as getting killed by a suicidal squirrel. Google that one if you hadn’t heard about it. Or just read this comic with the comments turned on. Lots of good links there.

A homeless man has a run in with a car that required a helicopter ride to a hospital. Homeless bicyclist airlifted to hospital after he was struck by car Typical SWSS wreck except that the driver said the cyclist went from the curb to the left turn lane and back to her lane before she hit him. Darn fast riding for a guy that doesn’t eat regularly… Especially considering he did that from a complete stop, “bicyclist next to a sidewalk in the outside lane.” If she’s watching him make all these lane changes why didn’t she slow down? Why was she still going fast enough to crack her windshield when she hit the homeless man?

A woman dies riding in a bike race, and people ride in her memory and honor. Riding to remember Natalia Hogan RIP

An explanation (?) for the last TT in the Giro. The Explainer – Who decides what’s “safe?” For those who haven’t seen the Universal Sports coverage that stage was a nightmare at racing speed.

Another cyclist is hit in the UK. Cyclist injured in Hatfield road crash This article is unique in that there were detailed photographs of the wreck scene, with the gory bits obscured of course.

This wreck was very nasty as another woman gets tangled in a semi truck. WOMAN CYCLIST INJURED IN LORRY COLLISION You can see that there are 2 shipping containers, one on the tractor and another on the trailer, so this is a huge vehicle that apparently was passing the woman on the road and pinched her off the road and into the rear wheels. At this point it isn’t known if this was a left cross or just not allowing enough room to the left.

And in our final story, from the Beeb, so many cyclists were hit in a small area in separate crashes that they just had to lump them all together, like I sometimes do with UK reports that have no information except that a wreck happened. Cyclists injured in road crashes I hope the survivors recover fully.

And that’s all today.

Billed @$.02, Opus

More stuff happened, and Yehuda Moon has ceased new comics

Yes, Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery has stopped updating for the foreseeable future. The lamentations of disbelief at the web site have extended for 3 pages. I’m half tempted to say, “Get a life, it’s a comic strip” except I feel the same way. After 15 months it’s like losing a family member.

Returning to the Real World for a while, a writer (?) for a college paper makes a terroristic threat against bicyclists and gets called for it, repeatedly. Bicyclists need to stay on sidewalk Umm, yeah Zack, you need to make sure you never even come close to hitting a cyclist for the rest of your miserable life, because even if you think you were joking, the prosecutor won’t be. And FYI riding a bicycle on the sidewalk is illegal in MI. And I don’t think people are going to stop with breaking your head and tail lights out or keying your car either. I think you need to see about getting a volume discount at an auto glass replacement store, I hear windshields are expensive. Not to mention side windows and mirrors

And in the “What were they thinking?” department, a woman passes a school bus with the flag out and all the blinking lights going and kills a kid getting off the bus. Woman gets probation in death of teen at bus stop No bicycles involved, just an illustration of the value placed on human life not protected by a motor vehicle (hey, if he was important he would have been driving himself or have been driven by somebody else instead of riding the bus).

A note from Oregon on why you should never trust a car will stop. Economist’s Notebook: Game Theory and Stop Signs Note the cost/benefit matrix at the bottom of the article and substitute a -1 for the -10 cost for a car (either side of the matrix) compared to a bicycle, and a -100 for the -10 for a bicyclist. You get killed, the car gets minor damage.

It seems like there are a lot of people that have opinions that are given too much credence. New Jersey’s three-foot bicycle buffer bill leaves us spinning I’ll give you a hint, 3 feet is not that hard to judge and probably closer than you would pass another car on the roads. The law would be most useful in cases where cyclists are “buzzed” to “teach them a lesson” and run off the road. I think many of the commenters to the article want to be able to “buzz” cyclists without fear of coming afoul of the law.

There’s just not a lot I can say about this one. Canton man killed in bicycle accident This is the kind of wreck that wearing a helmet could have made a difference. Notice that there were no other vehicles involved in this wreck.

From the UK comes another bike wreck that has parts of the “5 Ws” missing by law. Injured cyclist airlifted to hospital “Nothing to see here, keep moving.”

And a good story about cycling from Jolly Olde, but it could have happened anywhere. Mugger foiled by cyclist £500 is little enough for your services, but thanks anyways.

And that’s it for today, maybe more later.

Billed @$.02, Opus

Well now I know

And to quote that old line from the PSA “Knowing is half the battle”.

To get over my wreck I just have to die first. Fred moves on

PSA, Opus

Where My Mind Is

Yeah, that’s where my mind is, I’m still at the wreck. You can read about that wreck on the “About Opus” page.