OK I stepped out of my little niche of looking up bicycle stories and reading wonkish articles about infrastructure that just about require a degree in Civil Engineering to understand, and clicked over to the coverage of Occupy Wall Street. Now my understanding of financial issues is limited to knowing that there were some crooks on Wall St. that nearly collapsed the economy in their greed back in ’08, that we saved their bacon by bailing them out, and that nobody ever went to jail for nearly destroying the world. The collapse of Wall St nearly took out the largest industry in the world because nobody can afford to save up to buy a car before they “have” to have one. If people had to buy cars with cash or more than 50% down, well then people would not buy cars, they couldn’t. It used to be that a kid would buy a pile of junk for 3 months’ worth of pay saved up over a summer and then spend the next winter turning it into a decent running car. Well that doesn’t happen any more because scrap values for a car exceed what a kid can make in a summer, when a car approaches the end of its first life the value of it as scrap exceeds its value as a car, so most cars never get to that second life as a modified vehicle. Anyways, Wall St… What the protest is about is that we never actually punished anyone for nearly destroying the world, and now they are trying to get all the money for themselves. This is a similar situation to the Depression, it wasn’t that farmers couldn’t farm, they couldn’t get loans to buy seed. It’s not that there isn’t demand for product that could fill jobs, it’s corporations not letting go of money to pay those jobs. There is more money in the economy now than there was during the recession, it’s just being held by corporations instead of being used to create jobs, thus slowing the recovery. That’s what Occupy Wall Street is protesting.
As is usual for a Tuesday we had a light Feed, with only two wrecks in North America. Up first is another wreck in the mostt deadliest state in the US to walk or ride a bicycle, FL. Pensacola cyclist injured in wreck Another blind driver hits a cyclist, with non-fatal results this time. The driver was paying so little attention to the road that she pulled out into a cyclist that was already in front of her when she hit him. As a cyclist there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent something like this from happening to you. Once you are crossing in front of a motor vehicle you have to be able to rely on the driver not going until you are clear of their vehicle.
Moving to Canuckistan, we have a wreck between a cyclist and a dump truck. Woman killed after bicycle-truck collision There is so little information given in this article I can only assume the cyclist and her bike was so badly damaged during the wreck that determining direction of travel and first impact was impossible…
Well UK media laws have again thwarted my ability to help you avoid a wreck as the article page changed from a pretty decent description of the wreck to “There was a wreck and the victim was the 13th cyclist to die in London this year.” between the time I first read the article and trying to link it to this post. Seriously, the first article was like a whole page of witness’ accounts, and then suddenly it wasn’t even a decently sized paragraph. From what I can recall the cyclist was left-hooked by the large truck that did not complete the pass before starting to turn and ran over the cyclist with the back wheels. This is a common mode of wreck in London where HGV make turns while passing bicycles (sometimes while passing stationary bicycles in the bike lane) and run over one or two with the back wheels as they cut inside the path of the front wheels. Since they drive on the wrong side of the road over there the cyclists are to the left of the truck when the turn is made.
And that’s all I have today.
Billed @$0.02, Opus
Witch on a Bicycle 