Been doing some thinking, and the Feed

Interesting things have been happening here at WoaB! I have a student, and I didn’t even know I was a teacher. I have been approached by a person who wants me to teach them about magick (with a “k”) and religion (because they’re intermingled and inseparable in how I learned). The reason why I’m posting this is to warn people that Wreck-Free Sundays are going to get… “different” for a while. I’m going to post the public part of what I’m teaching on Sundays, starting with the ethics of magick (with a “k”) and just teaching religion in general. My student will have to tell me (or send an e-mail) what they understand I said about ethics, not just regurgitate word for word. Second thing: I’m thinking of changing the focus of this blog. As people have been telling me for years, it isn’t healthy to wallow in all this death and mayhem when there ain’t a damn thing I can do about it. As it is now I have probably read more wreck reports about bicycles than any currently living human. That number is so large I lost count years ago. I think it’s somewhere over 6000, but that’s just a SWAG based on the number of links average per post and the number of posts I’ve done. That doesn’t count the reports I read but did not link to because there wasn’t anything I could teach from them, so maybe 10K counting them? That is a crap ton of broken bodies and souls. And it just occurred to me that the last day in March would have a better time to make this announcement, just so that you could spend the next two days thinking that this was all an elaborate April Fool’s joke while I posted cat pictures to my blog and left recipes for love potions.

Anyway, expect the blog to veer away from wrecks and more into infrastructure, because I have discovered that more than 95% of the wrecks I post to this blog are either directly related to bad infrastructure, or could have been prevented by good infrastructure. That means I’m going to have to learn a lot more about creating good bike infrastructure than I know right now, which can be summed up as “Keep the cars away from the people riding bicycles.” I think the best metaphor I have for that is this picture I swiped and edited from Subnormality:

Up first is a blind driver running over a cyclist wearing clothes in CA. Cyclist Hit, Killed in Turlock and Bicyclist killed in fatal collision The cyclist was riding in the right side of the lane and the driver did not see him until just before hitting him, and instead of blaming the driver for not watching the road they blame the cyclist for “failure to wear glow-in-the-dark clown suit”. And don’t get me started on how they de-humanized the cyclist: “The report states Medina didn’t see the bicyclist until it was a short distance away.” Last I checked the AP style sheet required referring to members of the human race by either gendered pronouns when the gender of the subject was known, or as “they” when gender was unknown. In this case not only did they have a gender, they had an age and a name to go with that gender, “39-year-old Jose Borjes“. Also note that the lights and reflectors on the bike were never mentioned just the cyclist’s wearing normal clothing. TANJ!

Up in MN a cyclist was doing everything right (including the glow-in-the-dark clown suit) but is still dead. Bicyclist fatally run over was new to Minneapolis, careful about bike safety Hit-from-behind by a drunk driver with snowbanks cutting off the escape route, which moots the protocols. There was infrastructure present, under the snowbanks. This demonstrates that if you want the infrastructure to do its job it has to be maintained.

A driver is convicted of killing a cyclist in FL. Driver guilty in accident that killed bicyclist in Tampa Now to see what kind of pansy “sentence” he gets. He was also convicted of driving without a license in the wreck which should be an aggravating circumstance especially as he was racing on the street at the time, but I have my doubts since the victim was a cyclist riding in the bike lane in a park…

What appears to be a SWCC in NC. Police: Bicyclist injured in wreck The “crossing west into the southbound lanes” combined with “Hit in the inside southbound lane” has the cyclist coming from the left when hit, but no place for the cyclist to have come from. As you can see from the Street View this was an undivided 4-lane highway in the middle of a residential area.

A weird wreck in Jolly Olde. Cyclist’s lucky escape as bike skids under bus Not sure how this happened but kid, bus, crushed bicycle, and no blood makes it “not bad”.

An unknown type of wreck in Oz. Australind cyclist injured in mystery crash The cyclist was found on the ground with head injuries and an undamaged bicycle, pretty much the calling card of a buzz job. Hit-from-behind protocols to avoid, get the infrastructure right to prevent.

What to do if you’re first or one of the first on scene at a bicycle wreck. Guest Column: Bikes Have Rights™*

A conflict-free commute on You Tube. Count the number of moving cars in my bike commute video Yes, it happens.

As someone pointed out if you have an activity that demands you be crazy to participate, you get people being crazy, but if you make the activity appear safe enough for everybody to do it, the ratio of crazy to not declines from over unity to under. NYC Cyclists Are Getting More Considerate, Study Shows And you get results like this.

And those are all the links that I could find about bicycles, that may or may not have given me fits.

Billed @€0.02, Opus

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