Waiting on pins and needles, and the Feed

First, there will be some gaps in coverage this week for the blog. I have a trip to the Lab Rat Keeper coming Wednesday, and the consult with the surgeon Thursday, and the surgery could get scheduled at any time after that. Which leads us directly to today’s headline, about the dread and anticipation for this mess to be over. What I want is for this to just be an exceptionally ugly lump of fat sitting on the back of my neck. What I’m prepared for is for this to be something far worse. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst got me through the ’60s and ’70s alive and mostly unscarred (not the kind that you can show off to your GF and brag about). So, my will is written, insurance is paid up, bills are current, in case this turns out to be something worse than “Chris Christie” on my neck. It’s the waiting and not knowing that kills you. Maybe literally, but I have been doing a lot of meditation to reduce stress, and Hephaestus has been poking me about finding a Corvette donor vehicle from this century for the Sprint T to get the weight down to 1580 pounds with 8 gallons of gas on board (can you imagine what that would be like to drive with 380-635 HP on the street?!). All to try to reduce my stress levels to something I can deal with.

Up first is the response to a wreck in Portland OR, America’s Copenhagen. Sunday morning collision at 26th and Powell severs leg of man on bike (updated) is the wreck, what follows are the reactions Campaign looks to raise $50,000 for man who lost leg in Sunday’s collision and Local dad calls for ‘super-legal slow-down’ of Powell Boulevard during Monday rush hour last Protest planned after bicycle rider’s leg severed in Powell Blvd. crash

Speaking of fundraising for people hit by cars while riding bikes. Online fundraiser set for Cary boy killed on bike

Today’s Daily Ted. Morning Links: It’s Bike Week in LA, meet a real American hero, win a free book and ride a tiny new bike lane If they really wanted to show some tiny bike lanes there is a web site devoted to the subject in the UK. Notice how the bike path leads into a shared use bus stop.

In NYC they can’t even be bothered to enforce the law that says hitting a pedestrian in a crosswalk is against the law. Woman Fatally Struck By Taxi On Upper East Side

Still in NYC. Video: Intoxicated Driver Helpfully Takes Off Shirt For Cops After Houston Street Crash At least taking the shirt off makes it easier to get the blood draw for the DUI conviction.

And what it takes to get a conviction and prison time for killing a little girl in the streets of NYC is for the little girl to get hit riding in another car. Driver Who Killed 9-Year-Old While Fleeing Cops Gets At Least Four Years In Prison

A West Canuckistan bike rack that has a six-step locking procedure. A bicycle lockup stand that might be too complicated to use A saving grace to this stand is there appears to be room to lock a helmet inside the stand so you don’t have to carry it around or leave it unlocked with your bike.

These two links go together. First is this wreck. Bicyclist, 26, killed in North Philadelphia accident identified as Temple grad and filmmaker

And then there is this one. Philly Is Racking Up the Bike-Friendly Points Yes you can still count your city as “Bike Friendly” while it kills cyclists.

A Canadian crackdown on sidewalk cyclists is not accompanied by a crackdown on driver behaviors that necessitate sidewalk cyclists. Police ticket e-bike, bicycle riders on sidewalks

Silly season in the UK. MoD pays out £334,000 compensation to cyclists who injured themselves on military bases including £27,000 to one who slipped on mud

Gee the Oz driver that killed (and apparently murdered) a cyclist in a hit-and-run was bonkers angry at cyclists weeks before he actually killed one. Deadly hit and run driver in Geelong ‘harassed other cyclists’ Fascinating how that works, a driver is identified as having harassed cyclists for weeks and finally cracks and kills one.

You think Thai cyclists might be a bit peeved at the lax enforcement against drunk drivers? Cyclists equate drink-driving, murder Gee, ya think?

More about celebrity cyclist Bono. Bono Rides a Bike for the First Time Since His Accident – with a Little Help from Jimmy Fallon

A little Dutch infrastructure news. The solar road in the Netherlands is working even better than expected Yeah! Solar power from the street! And the street does not get potholes. Win-win situation.

Are you that cyclist? Don’t be THAT CYCLIST This is poor behavior to other cyclists for the most part, road rules was just an afterthought on the end of the article.

And this is something we cyclists have to be careful about. Candy company to kids: Don’t eat too much sugar! Wait a minute you say, how does this apply to cyclists? Have you read the nutrition labels on your energy gels?

And it looks like I’m out of links again.

Billed @€0.02, Opus the Poet

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Why are we still killing our kids? Wreck-free Sunday

Where this comes from is an amalgamation of the start of the Dutch cycle re-revolution (see Stop the Child Murder ) and a CDC report on un-natural deaths (see Ten Leading Causes of Death and Injury or if you really like lots of reading GMWKI). As you can see, the most dangerous thing we can do to our kids is put them in a car. The main reason for the decline in motor vehicle deaths in the 0-5 age group is the mandating of child restraint seats up to age 4 or 6 in some states. If motor vehicles were a disease there would be telethons and people protesting in the streets for a “cure”. Instead we just make sympathetic noises and chalk it up to “wrong place, wrong time” or “natural selection” like the kid had any choice in the matter. The number of child <16 YO deaths has decreased pretty much at the same rate as other age groups, except as noted the slight added decrease because of mandated restraints for the under 5 crowd.

So, what can be done about this?

The most obvious answer is to remove children from the most dangerous thing in their lives, the motor vehicle. I mean we are constantly bombarded with messages to parents about not leaving kids in hot cars, that kill a few kids every year, when just putting them in the car and driving is far more deadly to your kids. We have got to get kids out of cars, all the time, not just parked cars in the summertime.

And how do we do that? The American parent spends much of their away from work time driving the kids here, there and everywhere. And when kids are left without immediate adult supervision parents are threatened with jail time and loss of their children. If only there were some way to get kids safely from one place to another and still keep them under adult supervision…

Of course part of the answer is to not get so hyper about children always having an adult around to "protect" them. The fear is of course that some evil pedophile will swoop down on them and steal the kids away, when the facts are that most pedophiles find jobs that place them in the child-supervision business, or are close friends or family of the victim(s). In other words the fact that we require constant adult supervision is a leading cause of children becoming victims of sexual predators. It gets the kids into a known location where they are easy to find and pick over for a victim. Kids that grew up in my era knew that for a perv to make them a victim the perv had to find them first. When kids are widely scattered instead of gathered together it is harder for a predator to select a victim. The answer then is the counter-intuitive dispersal of children away from adults. If an adult is required to move children around, this becomes nearly impossible.

So, we need to get kids out of cars, and then we need a way to move them around in small groups or individually so that they aren't centralized for pedophile shopping convenience. If only there was some vehicle that a child could operate that they could use for the short trips that kids normally need to take, that could be used without adult supervision so that we didn't get kids forced into prolonged contact with a potential abuser… What miracle device could we use that would fit those criteria? And if it also got the kids some exercise in the process to combat the rising childhood obesity rate that would be a plus. But what? What miracle could we use that would allow kids to get around with having to have an adult present at all times? What vehicle can be operated legally by a child?

OK, OK I know, you know, and the preceding paragraph was mainly for the people that have no idea that a bicycle can be used as actual transportation, even for children. Impossible as it is to believe for some of us that read this blog, there are people that still think a bicycle is a toy for riding around a park, not a serious transportation tool.

The Dutch solution for the same problem we are having was to make bicycle infrastructure that even children understood and could use to get around with. The age range touted was 8-80, roads simple and safe enough for an 8 YO, and relaxed enough for an 80 YO. You can find out more by clicking the "Stop the Child Murder" link at the top of this post and reading the rest of the blog, or clicking the "View From the Cyclepath" link in the sidebar.

As a side benefit instead of making kids that don't know what to do with themselves who grow up into adults that don't know what to do with themselves, we get people capable of independent thought and action. People that know what to do without being told what to do, what a concept!

PSA, Opus

Another report from the Front, the Feed

One of the sites I read regularly is At War With the Motorist which describes the trials and tribulations that poor drivers are forced into by the ubiquity of bicycle infrastructure in the UK. The point being of course that there is next to no bicycle infrastructure in the UK and the majority of what is there is placed for the convenience of drivers, not cyclists. If there is a war going on the drivers have us outnumbered, out materielled, out infrastructured, and out gunned both physically and politically. The war goes badly my comrades…

The war goes so badly that the enemy is killing our youngest recruits while still in training. Just a few miles west of where this blog is headquartered, a little girl was killed while riding a bicycle. Bicycle rider killed at Arlington apartments identified The little girl was killed while riding in the parking lot in front of where she lived. This is a children’s play area, why can’t people drive like they have sense in a children’s play area?

Moving to the pacific NW of the US, a driver is arrested in a hit-and-run of a cyclist. Updated: Man Arrested in Fatal Austell Hit and Run Incident Yep, typical. Wait long enough for any intoxicants to be flushed or metabolized from the body then report you hit “something”. That way you can claim you weren’t intoxicated and that you never saw anything out on the road. The problem in this case was that the wreck was witnessed by people that had no problem being able to see the cyclist and who had a good view of the wreck. I’m sure LEO in this case will find some reason to let the guy off the hook somehow.

A SoCal cyclist is hit from behind by a driver that could not manage to stay in a single lane who then left the scene. Hit-and-Run Crash Kills Bicyclist on Highway 101 I think we can safely assume the driver was under the influence of some kind of intoxicant or asleep when this happened. Anyway to avoid hit-from-behind protocols might have helped avoid the wreck, and a rear facing HD video camera might have gotten a clear shot of the vehicle, driver, and the license plate. Someone needs to make a camera that has a shock activated shutoff that stops recording 5 minutes after the wreck so that LEO can identify the perps in hit-and-run against cyclists, and the courts need to accept the video record as evidence in cases against hit-and-run drivers. EDIT: After posting this I got news that this may have been deliberate. Encino cyclist killed in Leucadia; local TV speculates an attempted vehicular serial killer could be at work with links to reports of other similar wrecks with identical vehicles.

Another account of the arrest of the LB Fire Captain who hit-and-run a cyclist. Long Beach Fire Captain Accused Of Drunk Hit-And-Run Free On Bail I’m still trying to wrap my head around why no charges have been officially filed yet. I mean he was followed from the scene by witnesses who identified him as the driver of the vehicle that hit a cyclist IN THE FREAKING BIKE LANE and was drunk at the time, so why no charges yet? Are they having a hard time counting that high before completing the list of charges?

Up to the Great White North, a cyclist is severely injured by infrastructure that was not up to standards. Biker badly injured after yacht club accident The helmet broke which means that it failed to function, but the cyclist also had spinal injuries that were much worse than his head injuries. Basically the helmet failed in use, but the injured parts would have been injured anyway because they were not protected by even a properly functioning helmet. My helmet protects against facial injuries, but it costs a whole bunch and was designed for use by Downhill MTB riders and BMX, not regular road use.

Still in the Great White North but in West Canuckistan, a bike-ped bridge is taken out of service by corrosion. It could be a manic Monday on the Blue Bridge So what’s happening is about 2000 bicycle crossings a day will be moved onto the car side of the bridge, plus an even greater number of pedestrians, with the majority of these crossings taking place during rush hour. This could get interesting in the Chinese Curse sense of the word.

In Oz a weekend so full of wrecks that a cyclist hitting a parked car is only a small paragraph in a huge report. Six dead, numerous injured during horrific weekend on SEQ roads OK back-channel on this one, there is a possibility that the cyclist was forced into the parked car by another vehicle not letting him move over, but that hasn’t been confirmed yet.

Moving on to “Lifestyles of the Bicyclic and Famous” the Tour Of Battenkill is coming up shortly. Tour of the Battenkill a big draw If you’re in the area this is a really fun race to watch.

And last link is to a charity ride that raises money for cyclists hit by people who are uninsured or underinsured, or for cyclists who are injured without a vehicle involved. Off and riding: Tour de Ed bike ride continues its help for cyclists The ride was begun to help the victim of a hit-and-run wreck but has since expanded to help more cyclists.

And that’s all the news that gave me fits this morning.

Billed @$0.02, Opus