For various values of the word 'skilled'. I've been working in electronics for over 30 years. To 'repair' something used to mean 'replace components', but after a certain point it became 'replace an entire circuit board', which will always be a weak substitute so far as I'm concerned. But the real problem is that with the advent of surface-mount components, the door to repairing a circuit board largely became shut and locked to the vast majority of people. When you need (high) magnification and some specialized soldering equipment and supplies just to replace common passive components (YOU try to remove and replace 0402 SMCs with the naked eye!) it puts the job just out of reach of many. Of course most times passive components aren't the problem, and when the integrated circuits are in BGA (ball grid array) packages, and you need a $3000 setup just to remove one, and help from a diety to install a replacement, for 99% of anyone thinking of trying it, it just went entirely out of reach. This is not even touching on the subject of schematics for the device you're trying to repair, which for many/most things you're not getting your hands on for any amount of money, and in some cases you might get threatened with legal action just for trying to get it. Then there's the subject of proprietary software tools that might be necessary, and you're not getting those for any reason from a manufacturer. Even the manufacturers themselves often don't bother repairing anything, they'll just 'recycle' it and send you a new one because the cost in labor alone to repair exceeds what the thing costs.
Of course I'm going to be reminded that nobody is trying to repair the circuit board in their phone, they just want to replace the battery or cracked screen or whatnot. Manufacturers have never wanted consumers repairing their own devices, so yes they make it as difficult as possible sometimes. It's always been like that. Don't expect that to change, either. You're always going to have to go to 3rd party sources for parts and supplies and information. When we really need to cry 'Foul!' is if they try to make it illegal, though.
It's also a bit of a boon to the professional repair people. No need to get into deep diagnostics and testing and so on, just swap the entire board out. A friend of mine has an electric oven, and the temp display (just numbers, not a whole graphics screen) has died. The only replacement part is the entire electronics module for a couple of hundred bucks. Foolproof, but not thrifty.
Reminds me of what a friend of mine said about why it's so much easier to fix the older car he owns than something newer; "It's just a bunch of car parts put together".
That's my point, really; there is no technoligical reason to do that, you'd do it only to protect your intellectual property. Being the manufacturer they know what IC is what so they don't need part numbers on them, just what refdes it is on the PCB. It's just another barrier against the less skilled/more casual tech pirates copying their product.
If it's interesting to you at all: back in the day arcade games were more hardware than they were software, and 'knock offs' weren't all that uncommon. If the PCBs were all common logic then it was just a matter of directly copying the PCB and EPROMs/bipolar ROMs and cranking out copies.
It's probably less to prevent users from fixing their broken gadgets than preventing Chinese factories from making counterfeits and knock-offs.
Lights.
Rather, lack thereof.
Even our massive noisy cages are covered in reflectors that can be see in daylight and now come with mandatory daytime-running lights.
Well, lights and size. And running signs; most people who t-bone a car that blew through a stop sign without stopping say they didn't see the car failing to stop (even if they did see the car), which makes sense since most of the cars I see roll signs do slow down (as though they're going to stop) before rolling on through; the same is probably true for bikes.
On a bike, you are at a disadvantage. A natural disadvantage, not one caused by cagers (though inattentive cagers do compound the problem). Act like it.
You bet. At night, I'm festooned like a Christmas tree. More than once (in my car) at night I've barely missed a bike only because of the pedal reflector.
if you're riding on street where the cars regularly travel at 50+mph, and there's a convenient sidewalk or bike path alongside the road, however winding, use the sidewalk or bike path.
And if I'm walking on it (what kind of idiot would walk on a sidewalk?) with my kids and we have our backs to you just feel free to shoot the gap and if you misjudge it and knock my five year old flat on his face feel free to yell at him because he didn't walk in a straight line. And then when I yell at *you* call the police and accuse me of assault.
that's where everything gets moved down one notch, so to speak. on the road, bike is to car, as on the sidewalk pedestrian is to bike. i.e. the guy with the most momentum is ethically responsible for making every possible effort to avoid collision.
Yeah, one major part of the problem is that even in supposedly "bike friendly" towns where they have a "bike lane", that lane ranges from 8 inches wide to less than a meter wide. Sometimes several times within a stretch of 1/3 of mile. There is often crap in it -- branches, leaves, rocks, bottles -- or open grates over storm drains. In the summertime south they can even have middling large poisonous snakes in it, especially early morning or late evening.
I'd love to ride my bike to work, and sometimes do in spite of the fact that the "bike lanes" I ride in have all of the features on the list above -- averaging around 18 inches in width (but actually disappearing altogether without warning as the road passes under an overpass where the pylons come down right on the edge of the road so there isn't any shoulder either). I've been blown past by full-scale dump trucks going 55+ mph and missing me by whole feet.
I lived in Durham for decades without hearing of a single bike fatality and few accidents. In the last few years, friends of mine have been killed or been dumped in the ICU for weeks, all because of precisely the conditions you list above -- you're damned if you ride in the lane because it provides the illusion of having enough room but when it is 8" wide, it doesn't, and you're damned if you ride out in the lane because there are folks on the road you don't think you should be there or are drunk and are driving massive vehicles at unsafe speeds even before you show up in their sights.
Personally, I think that if official policy is "riding bikes is good, reduces energy consumption, promotes good cardiovascular health" then government needs to make a serious commitment to making safe bikeways. In my opinion, that means unobstructed, clean bike lanes at least 1 meter wide NOT including gutter/grate or curb if present, and not borrowing from the road shoulder. It also means providing protected dedicated function bikeways that parallel things like 4 to 6 lane roads where biking will NEVER be safe, so you aren't forced to ride on roads that are dangerous to cars, let alone bikes, to get from point A to point B.
Finally, yeah, it wouldn't be crazy to license bike riders who plan to ride on non-neighborhood streets, even if it is a one time license that you get after you prove you understand the rules of the road and how they practically pertain to bikes. Accidents are often caused by bikers, not just by car or truck or motorcycle drivers. I've watched people biking down the road on the wrong side, thinking that they are some sort of pedestrian.
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or: the bike lane that's between the parked cars on the curb and the driving lanes, so you get the benefit of the people abruptly pulling out into traffic as you come by as well as the ones opening their door in your face.
and Lawyers buying $3-5k bikes they have no business riding. If you're into road biking you know about this and if you're at the lower end of the economic spectrum they're the bane of your existence. They moved into the sport back in the mid 2005. I was shopping for my first real road bike and the price of a decent carbon fiber frame shot up a grand (Boeing's new planes didn't help either). I ended up with an Aluminum Cevelo (which ironically some old person hit me on and ruined:(... ).
Anyway you've got rich people in OK Shape buying ridiculously fast bikes. I see them all the time at the little charity runs I like to do. If you're smart you steer as clear as you can. They don't have the riding chops to handle the bike they just bought but they're usually in OK enough shape to be dangerous (the fat ones end up on cruisers:P ).
those would be the guys riding two or more abreast in heavy traffic, I bet. Lycra clad from head to toe.
see also, guy with the $2k mountain bike who never takes it off the paved trail because it might get damaged
...because I hated running and it hurt my knees. Which is much the same reason George W. Bush took it up.
It's also easier to do in the Texas heat than running, thanks to the airflow, and doubles as a means of transportation.
It's great if you work in a lab or somewhere that has a walk in fridge or freezer where you can go as soon as you bike in until your temp gets to normal.
Is there really a story here? It seems that these numbers are normalized to a random population and not to the cyclist population. According to http://bikeleague.org/commutin... the number of cyclist rose sharply in that period as well.
As far as I can tell, there are more cyclist injuries mostly because there are more cyclist. Per mile accident rates are more meaningful than an absolute out of context number.
That being said, I chose not to bike to work because the drivers where I live (Charlotte,NC) are complete nuts and there are no bike path I can take.
the baseline number is also suspect; i venture that the count of bike accidents for ages 1-16 includes a lot which should really be counted as "playing in road"
And nobody sees you doing it. The reason everyone who sees you riding your bike thinks you're an asshole is because the only cyclists who disturb traffic enough to actually be noticed are assholes; literally the only cyclists most people ever actually notice (not see, but actually realize they are seeing) are assholes. Cyclists like yourself who, assuming you're being honest with us, obey traffic laws and don't disrupt the flow of traffic, largely go unnoticed. The end result is that you all look like assholes, even though the majority of you are not. If cops would start enforcing traffic laws equally, the problem would largely solve itself; short of that, though, the cyclist community is going to have to start self-policing before things improve.
yes and no; somehow, the assholes get noticed more than the riders who aren't.
but not getting noticed is how bike riders get killed; the idea is to get noticed, without being an asshole.
so why don't people notice those guys?
I'm fully convinced most motorists don't know about blinkers or if they do they think it means "I'm coming over to your lane now get the fuck out of my way." As for headlights I recently drove in a blinding rain where I could barely see 25 feet in front of my car. I was amazed at how many shapes in the grey wall appeared suddenly and were cars flashing by. The grey and silver cars are particularly hard to spot. It's gotten to the point now I don't drive in the rain at all if I can help it since about 15 percent of the ignorant fuckers haven't figured out how to turn their lights on in a driving rain. Here's a hint, if you have to turn your wipers on then turn the damn lights on too! They should hard wire the headlights to the wipers so they come on automatically.
As far as I can tell, the idea behind blinkers is that if you're so oblivious or drunk or texting or whatever that you find yourself in the middle of a lane change or turn unexpectedly, you turn the blinker on at that point in hopes that any cop watching will think you meant to do that.
There was a study done one this, mostly pointing out that there was a lot of confirmation bias in play - that people who were incensed at bicyclists not obeying traffic laws generally did not noticed automobile drivers committing similar acts. (This is, of course, a general observation, I can't say jack about you in particular.)
I think there are a lot of factors here - some are cultural, where people think of bicyclists and interlopers and inappropriate in their use of space, and bicyclists regard automobiles as both physical and idealistic threats. But some of them are design - I've spent most of my time commuting in areas with very low commuter rates (and often high speeds - I am extremely polite and painfully aware of my lack of exoskeleton thank you*.) Some urban designs really don't encourage bicycles and cars to play well together.
I'm currently living in a midwestern city where the streets are generally not in the best repair but the shoulders are especially dire. Now, really, I'd prefer to ride on the shoulder as much as possible, and be out of everyone's way, but often the state of the shoulder makes that too dangerous. For my commute, and for places I go frequently, I've found routes that don't have this problem, but it's not a great situation (even though local drivers for the most part are considerate if sometimes clueless - I don't need a full carwidth's distance between me and a car, nice thought, not really helping traffic here.)
* In my Microsoft days, pretty every week at least one person would post to the internal discussion board about having joined the "roadkill club", which is to say having sustained a major injury while commuting.
person in car is approximately equivalent to person in comments column on internet, i.e. feeling of anonymity removfes inhibitions against appearing to be an asshole, and the inner character comes out.
I don't know it works in Toronto, but here in California everyone is required to pull over to permit passing when possible if there are five or more vehicles being held up by them. Well, many a time I've been a part of a chain of more than five vehicles being held up by some douche taking up a lane in the city, or practicing his downhill on the mountain roads, and not doing very well. In either case, the cyclist is required to simply pull over and permit the vehicles to pass, just like any other user of the road. Guess how often that happens?
I'm also fuck-tired of cyclists who feel like they should ride right on the line because there's some sharp things over on the right hand side of their lane. Get better tires. That's what we have to do. It's not legal for us to drive over a cyclist to avoid a larger road hazard, like some jerkoff in our lane coming the other way for example. If you want everyone to follow the same standard, suck it up and plan for the roads you have, not the roads you want, and leave the race tires at home.
Right... just like those guys in the left lane all move over to allow vehicles to pass on the highway, or the lumbering semi-trailers making delivery in the city pull over to let the vast lines of cars behind them get by....
but it's the bikes, dammit! the bikes, I tell you!
I know the minimum separation distance is a meter and it's total BS.
I knew from the kindergarden whine tone of your post that you would turn into chicken shit when confronted to the facts.
For instance I can't give you a meter of room is that means I have to drive in the wrong lane, because that would violate other laws. I can't give you a meter or room when the entire lane isn't a meter wide. I can't give you a meter of room when you don't hold your fucking [very mature] distance steady and bike on the curb.
If you can't give a meter then you must follow behind until you can find the space to safely pass. That is what the law says. Laws you seemed to care so much about when they were bottle feeding your baby tantrum and now you try to dismiss so quickly when they work against you.
And by the way, I'm a driver not a cyclist. I just simply have no respect for 2000 pound iron driving cowards complaining about 20 pound cycling vehicles.
As an American, or a Torontonian, it is my right to haul a 4000 pound 12 X 6 foot chunk of metal around with me everywhere I got, to emphasize my superiority from those who merely have a skinny little 20 lb bike; and as such, it makes no sense for me to refrain from killing them.
I think it's less about who's an idiot, and more about who has what share of the responsibility. It seems sensible to me to think that the level of responsibility you should take for your actions scales with the amount to damage your actions can do. A pedestrian can afford to be an idiot-- if he runs into someone, he probably won't kill them. A truck driver, on the other hand, can easily kill a handful of people with one mistake.
So there are idiots among all of those groups? Fine. I don't disagree. But take away the licenses of the idiots among the drivers. If we can't stop them from being idiots, the least we can do is minimize the damage they do by making them walk.
We forget, in the years pre the mass adoption of automobiles, the streets belonged to people. You were free to walk in the street. Sidewalks were there as much to keep your feet out of the pre-sewer crap in the street (including horse crap) as anything. Kids would naturally play in the street, where else would they play? And collisions between horse-drawn vehicle and human were rare. Note that the term 'jaywalk' was originally considered a shocking slur used by those who could afford a car against those who could not. http://www.todayifoundout.com/...
Drivers, cyclists and pedestrians all draw from the same general population and none of them has the moral high ground. But watch this thread devolve into endless, ignorant sniping among the groups. I have a car, ride a bike and walk to work and I see members of each group act incredibly stupidly and selfishly. It's just a fact of life that people are generally terrible and their actions frequently endanger and even kill one another, bu they'd rather withdraw into their little cultural groups to claim the high ground. And nothing ever changes.
I hate to say it, but in this city, the majority of the bicyclists are apparently trying to win Darwin Awards.
On an average day, you'll see at least a dozen of them, and about 6 times a year you'll see one that's actually following the rules.
They go through red lights. Go the wrong direction in the lanes. Shoot out into traffic from behind large objects in the middle of the block. Jump back and forth between the sidewalk and the road with no warning. etc.
In short, they are suicidal incompetents that should be allowed near anything with wheels in the first place, much less actually be allowed on the roads.
I don't know what the hell happened, but it didn't used to be that way. When I was a teenager, I wasn't even allowed to ride past my block until I had read and learned all the road rules. My mom gave me a state drivers manual for me to study. It's true that most of these idiots aren't teenagers, but WTF don't they what they are doing is suicidal? In a collision between a car and a bike, I guarantee the bike will lose by at least half a ton! Speaking of which, I saw the aftermath of a recent bike-car collision a couple of months ago. It wasn't a head on, but both wheels on the bike were bent like chalupas. As to the rider, I don't know, the paramedics had a blanket and were blocking any clear view. (I wasn't driving that day, so I could afford to look.)
And of course, if someone wants to scream at me for being a car driver and not a bicyclist so it's obvious I wouldn't understand, I ride my bike most days of the week, and it's in a busy traffic area. It's not me that's mentally deficient.
A lot of it is the nature of the bike. Coming to a dead stop at a light or stop sign? Then you're obstructing traffic for the time it takes you to get moving again with your piddly one human-power. Whereas, you have enough visibility to detect a car that's approaching. So you treat all stops as yield signs. (Note that sailboats have the right of way on the sea, for similar reasons) Go the wrong direction in lanes? (I don't do that myself) but they always tell you to walk facing the traffic if there's no sidewalk, so you can dodge, presumably same thinking.
Dodging in and out of traffic? (again, not me) but they tell you to stay as rightward as possible. Jump between sidewalk and street? I do that, but I look first. Given the evident wish for drivers to have me NOT on the street, I'm happy to comply and ride on the sidewalk whenever possible (i.e., when it's not full of pedestrians).
Like you said, they're just acting as if everyone is purposely trying to kill them. After all, the best way to handle someone that's trying to kill you is to kill them first, right?
This leads to my theory that there would be fewer bike accidents if Gyrojet pistols were still manufactured. A regular handgun has way too much recoil for a bike rider.
Some drivers are malicious. One of my wife's students was rear ended after stopping for a stop sign. He went flying and broke his arm. The driver told him to get off the road and drove off. I stopped riding a bike in the 80s after multiple cars sideswiped me, once when I was on the sidewalk. It seemed like it was safer in the 70s and then in the early 80s drivers starting hitting cyclists like it was a sport.
My wife and I are riding again, but only on the rail trails.
Same here; no injuries, but bike got bent. Mid afternoon, a dozen witnesses stepped forward; the license plate all reported for the car "didn't exist" according to the police dept. Oh well.
Actually the typical advice given to bikers is to ride thinking that everyone around you is actively trying to kill you. It works because most people grossly underestimate how others can be *incompetent* but have much less difficulties in thinking about how others could be *malicious*. This is helpful in getting enough caution out of them.
And helmets are only rated to protect against low impact forces. Most people think that helmets off much more protection than they actually do. Safe Cycling skills are much more important.
The force a bike helmet needs to withstand is approximately equal to what your head would experience if it just fell 5 feet. Any increased impact from getting thrown by a serious collision, you're on your own.
Since energy is probably the single largest input into most products, businesses already have a strong incentive to reduce energy usage, and have had that incentive since long before carbon taxes and government subsidies for "clean energy".
Sure, but that usage isn't zero...
The trick is, clean energy costs more than dirty energy... that is what he was talking about...
I can get clean power for my business, but it costs about 3 cents more per kWh than dirty energy.
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clean energy costs more, if you don't count the externalized costs of dirty energy. it's like saying crapping on my neighbor's lawn is cheaper than using my toilet and paying the water and sewer bills.
if you count the costs of pollution simply on human health and agricultural production, the costs of coal in particular would make it prohibitive.
Unfortunately our governments at best don't have balls to do it and at worst are in the pockets of the businesses they're supposed to be regulating.
That's only a tiny part of it. Public enthusiasm for CO2 reduction wilts pretty quickly when the public is asked to make sacrifices.
that's why you point out to them after 9/11 that stopping our dependency on oil would get us out from being stuck with the Middle East, and they see that the "sacrifice" is worth it. Instead, in typical Republican fashion, we double down on the bad idea, recommit to fossil fuels, and send troops into the Middle East.
'Appropriately regulating businesses' is a concept diametrically opposed to the way capitalism works, though, and the organism of the genus capitalism, like any life-form, will fight tooth and nail to it's dying breath trying to preserve itself -- and it doesn't care how much collateral damage it causes in the process. We'd have to do away with capitalism entirely. But doing that starts people pointing fingers and yelling 'socialism!' or 'communism!', which while they're not terrible concepts on paper, they, like most all things involving humans, overlooks a fundamental fact: Humans can't be trusted with the sort of power that leading a socialist or communist society gives them; power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We need to evolve further as a race before many of the problems we have as a race will be solved. I fear that won't happen before it's too late, though.
there are plenty of european countries which have neither done away with capitalism entirely, nor become absolutely corrupt.
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For various values of the word 'skilled'. I've been working in electronics for over 30 years. To 'repair' something used to mean 'replace components', but after a certain point it became 'replace an entire circuit board', which will always be a weak substitute so far as I'm concerned. But the real problem is that with the advent of surface-mount components, the door to repairing a circuit board largely became shut and locked to the vast majority of people. When you need (high) magnification and some specialized soldering equipment and supplies just to replace common passive components (YOU try to remove and replace 0402 SMCs with the naked eye!) it puts the job just out of reach of many. Of course most times passive components aren't the problem, and when the integrated circuits are in BGA (ball grid array) packages, and you need a $3000 setup just to remove one, and help from a diety to install a replacement, for 99% of anyone thinking of trying it, it just went entirely out of reach. This is not even touching on the subject of schematics for the device you're trying to repair, which for many/most things you're not getting your hands on for any amount of money, and in some cases you might get threatened with legal action just for trying to get it. Then there's the subject of proprietary software tools that might be necessary, and you're not getting those for any reason from a manufacturer. Even the manufacturers themselves often don't bother repairing anything, they'll just 'recycle' it and send you a new one because the cost in labor alone to repair exceeds what the thing costs. Of course I'm going to be reminded that nobody is trying to repair the circuit board in their phone, they just want to replace the battery or cracked screen or whatnot. Manufacturers have never wanted consumers repairing their own devices, so yes they make it as difficult as possible sometimes. It's always been like that. Don't expect that to change, either. You're always going to have to go to 3rd party sources for parts and supplies and information. When we really need to cry 'Foul!' is if they try to make it illegal, though.
It's also a bit of a boon to the professional repair people. No need to get into deep diagnostics and testing and so on, just swap the entire board out. A friend of mine has an electric oven, and the temp display (just numbers, not a whole graphics screen) has died. The only replacement part is the entire electronics module for a couple of hundred bucks. Foolproof, but not thrifty.
Reminds me of what a friend of mine said about why it's so much easier to fix the older car he owns than something newer; "It's just a bunch of car parts put together".
That's my point, really; there is no technoligical reason to do that, you'd do it only to protect your intellectual property. Being the manufacturer they know what IC is what so they don't need part numbers on them, just what refdes it is on the PCB. It's just another barrier against the less skilled/more casual tech pirates copying their product. If it's interesting to you at all: back in the day arcade games were more hardware than they were software, and 'knock offs' weren't all that uncommon. If the PCBs were all common logic then it was just a matter of directly copying the PCB and EPROMs/bipolar ROMs and cranking out copies.
It's probably less to prevent users from fixing their broken gadgets than preventing Chinese factories from making counterfeits and knock-offs.
A billion? No, more like 300k. But that's half the number you would have found a generation ago.
OK, let's split the difference and call it 750k. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/C...
Lights. Rather, lack thereof. Even our massive noisy cages are covered in reflectors that can be see in daylight and now come with mandatory daytime-running lights. Well, lights and size. And running signs; most people who t-bone a car that blew through a stop sign without stopping say they didn't see the car failing to stop (even if they did see the car), which makes sense since most of the cars I see roll signs do slow down (as though they're going to stop) before rolling on through; the same is probably true for bikes. On a bike, you are at a disadvantage. A natural disadvantage, not one caused by cagers (though inattentive cagers do compound the problem). Act like it.
You bet. At night, I'm festooned like a Christmas tree. More than once (in my car) at night I've barely missed a bike only because of the pedal reflector.
And if I'm walking on it (what kind of idiot would walk on a sidewalk?) with my kids and we have our backs to you just feel free to shoot the gap and if you misjudge it and knock my five year old flat on his face feel free to yell at him because he didn't walk in a straight line. And then when I yell at *you* call the police and accuse me of assault.
that's where everything gets moved down one notch, so to speak. on the road, bike is to car, as on the sidewalk pedestrian is to bike. i.e. the guy with the most momentum is ethically responsible for making every possible effort to avoid collision.
Yeah, one major part of the problem is that even in supposedly "bike friendly" towns where they have a "bike lane", that lane ranges from 8 inches wide to less than a meter wide. Sometimes several times within a stretch of 1/3 of mile. There is often crap in it -- branches, leaves, rocks, bottles -- or open grates over storm drains. In the summertime south they can even have middling large poisonous snakes in it, especially early morning or late evening.
I'd love to ride my bike to work, and sometimes do in spite of the fact that the "bike lanes" I ride in have all of the features on the list above -- averaging around 18 inches in width (but actually disappearing altogether without warning as the road passes under an overpass where the pylons come down right on the edge of the road so there isn't any shoulder either). I've been blown past by full-scale dump trucks going 55+ mph and missing me by whole feet.
I lived in Durham for decades without hearing of a single bike fatality and few accidents. In the last few years, friends of mine have been killed or been dumped in the ICU for weeks, all because of precisely the conditions you list above -- you're damned if you ride in the lane because it provides the illusion of having enough room but when it is 8" wide, it doesn't, and you're damned if you ride out in the lane because there are folks on the road you don't think you should be there or are drunk and are driving massive vehicles at unsafe speeds even before you show up in their sights.
Personally, I think that if official policy is "riding bikes is good, reduces energy consumption, promotes good cardiovascular health" then government needs to make a serious commitment to making safe bikeways. In my opinion, that means unobstructed, clean bike lanes at least 1 meter wide NOT including gutter/grate or curb if present, and not borrowing from the road shoulder. It also means providing protected dedicated function bikeways that parallel things like 4 to 6 lane roads where biking will NEVER be safe, so you aren't forced to ride on roads that are dangerous to cars, let alone bikes, to get from point A to point B.
Finally, yeah, it wouldn't be crazy to license bike riders who plan to ride on non-neighborhood streets, even if it is a one time license that you get after you prove you understand the rules of the road and how they practically pertain to bikes. Accidents are often caused by bikers, not just by car or truck or motorcycle drivers. I've watched people biking down the road on the wrong side, thinking that they are some sort of pedestrian.
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or: the bike lane that's between the parked cars on the curb and the driving lanes, so you get the benefit of the people abruptly pulling out into traffic as you come by as well as the ones opening their door in your face.
and Lawyers buying $3-5k bikes they have no business riding. If you're into road biking you know about this and if you're at the lower end of the economic spectrum they're the bane of your existence. They moved into the sport back in the mid 2005. I was shopping for my first real road bike and the price of a decent carbon fiber frame shot up a grand (Boeing's new planes didn't help either). I ended up with an Aluminum Cevelo (which ironically some old person hit me on and ruined :( ... ).
Anyway you've got rich people in OK Shape buying ridiculously fast bikes. I see them all the time at the little charity runs I like to do. If you're smart you steer as clear as you can. They don't have the riding chops to handle the bike they just bought but they're usually in OK enough shape to be dangerous (the fat ones end up on cruisers :P ).
those would be the guys riding two or more abreast in heavy traffic, I bet. Lycra clad from head to toe.
see also, guy with the $2k mountain bike who never takes it off the paved trail because it might get damaged
It depends on the roadway really. If it's 50-60 mph traffic take the sidewalk. Seriously, it is better to break the law than to die.
Indeed. My bicycle commuting days were in the city core, where the traffic would be pretty slow at best. Out in suburbia, I'm too terrified to ride.
...because I hated running and it hurt my knees. Which is much the same reason George W. Bush took it up.
It's also easier to do in the Texas heat than running, thanks to the airflow, and doubles as a means of transportation.
It's great if you work in a lab or somewhere that has a walk in fridge or freezer where you can go as soon as you bike in until your temp gets to normal.
Is there really a story here? It seems that these numbers are normalized to a random population and not to the cyclist population. According to http://bikeleague.org/commutin... the number of cyclist rose sharply in that period as well.
As far as I can tell, there are more cyclist injuries mostly because there are more cyclist. Per mile accident rates are more meaningful than an absolute out of context number.
That being said, I chose not to bike to work because the drivers where I live (Charlotte,NC) are complete nuts and there are no bike path I can take.
the baseline number is also suspect; i venture that the count of bike accidents for ages 1-16 includes a lot which should really be counted as "playing in road"
Ummm, excuse me, but I fucking do obey the law.
And nobody sees you doing it. The reason everyone who sees you riding your bike thinks you're an asshole is because the only cyclists who disturb traffic enough to actually be noticed are assholes; literally the only cyclists most people ever actually notice (not see, but actually realize they are seeing) are assholes. Cyclists like yourself who, assuming you're being honest with us, obey traffic laws and don't disrupt the flow of traffic, largely go unnoticed. The end result is that you all look like assholes, even though the majority of you are not. If cops would start enforcing traffic laws equally, the problem would largely solve itself; short of that, though, the cyclist community is going to have to start self-policing before things improve.
yes and no; somehow, the assholes get noticed more than the riders who aren't.
but not getting noticed is how bike riders get killed; the idea is to get noticed, without being an asshole.
so why don't people notice those guys?
I'm fully convinced most motorists don't know about blinkers or if they do they think it means "I'm coming over to your lane now get the fuck out of my way." As for headlights I recently drove in a blinding rain where I could barely see 25 feet in front of my car. I was amazed at how many shapes in the grey wall appeared suddenly and were cars flashing by. The grey and silver cars are particularly hard to spot. It's gotten to the point now I don't drive in the rain at all if I can help it since about 15 percent of the ignorant fuckers haven't figured out how to turn their lights on in a driving rain. Here's a hint, if you have to turn your wipers on then turn the damn lights on too! They should hard wire the headlights to the wipers so they come on automatically.
As far as I can tell, the idea behind blinkers is that if you're so oblivious or drunk or texting or whatever that you find yourself in the middle of a lane change or turn unexpectedly, you turn the blinker on at that point in hopes that any cop watching will think you meant to do that.
There was a study done one this, mostly pointing out that there was a lot of confirmation bias in play - that people who were incensed at bicyclists not obeying traffic laws generally did not noticed automobile drivers committing similar acts. (This is, of course, a general observation, I can't say jack about you in particular.)
I think there are a lot of factors here - some are cultural, where people think of bicyclists and interlopers and inappropriate in their use of space, and bicyclists regard automobiles as both physical and idealistic threats. But some of them are design - I've spent most of my time commuting in areas with very low commuter rates (and often high speeds - I am extremely polite and painfully aware of my lack of exoskeleton thank you*.) Some urban designs really don't encourage bicycles and cars to play well together.
I'm currently living in a midwestern city where the streets are generally not in the best repair but the shoulders are especially dire. Now, really, I'd prefer to ride on the shoulder as much as possible, and be out of everyone's way, but often the state of the shoulder makes that too dangerous. For my commute, and for places I go frequently, I've found routes that don't have this problem, but it's not a great situation (even though local drivers for the most part are considerate if sometimes clueless - I don't need a full carwidth's distance between me and a car, nice thought, not really helping traffic here.)
* In my Microsoft days, pretty every week at least one person would post to the internal discussion board about having joined the "roadkill club", which is to say having sustained a major injury while commuting.
person in car is approximately equivalent to person in comments column on internet, i.e. feeling of anonymity removfes inhibitions against appearing to be an asshole, and the inner character comes out.
You have a choice, which is not passing.
I don't know it works in Toronto, but here in California everyone is required to pull over to permit passing when possible if there are five or more vehicles being held up by them. Well, many a time I've been a part of a chain of more than five vehicles being held up by some douche taking up a lane in the city, or practicing his downhill on the mountain roads, and not doing very well. In either case, the cyclist is required to simply pull over and permit the vehicles to pass, just like any other user of the road. Guess how often that happens?
I'm also fuck-tired of cyclists who feel like they should ride right on the line because there's some sharp things over on the right hand side of their lane. Get better tires. That's what we have to do. It's not legal for us to drive over a cyclist to avoid a larger road hazard, like some jerkoff in our lane coming the other way for example. If you want everyone to follow the same standard, suck it up and plan for the roads you have, not the roads you want, and leave the race tires at home.
Right... just like those guys in the left lane all move over to allow vehicles to pass on the highway, or the lumbering semi-trailers making delivery in the city pull over to let the vast lines of cars behind them get by....
but it's the bikes, dammit! the bikes, I tell you!
I know the minimum separation distance is a meter and it's total BS.
I knew from the kindergarden whine tone of your post that you would turn into chicken shit when confronted to the facts.
For instance I can't give you a meter of room is that means I have to drive in the wrong lane, because that would violate other laws. I can't give you a meter or room when the entire lane isn't a meter wide. I can't give you a meter of room when you don't hold your fucking [very mature] distance steady and bike on the curb.
If you can't give a meter then you must follow behind until you can find the space to safely pass. That is what the law says. Laws you seemed to care so much about when they were bottle feeding your baby tantrum and now you try to dismiss so quickly when they work against you.
And by the way, I'm a driver not a cyclist. I just simply have no respect for 2000 pound iron driving cowards complaining about 20 pound cycling vehicles.
As an American, or a Torontonian, it is my right to haul a 4000 pound 12 X 6 foot chunk of metal around with me everywhere I got, to emphasize my superiority from those who merely have a skinny little 20 lb bike; and as such, it makes no sense for me to refrain from killing them.
I think it's less about who's an idiot, and more about who has what share of the responsibility. It seems sensible to me to think that the level of responsibility you should take for your actions scales with the amount to damage your actions can do. A pedestrian can afford to be an idiot-- if he runs into someone, he probably won't kill them. A truck driver, on the other hand, can easily kill a handful of people with one mistake.
So there are idiots among all of those groups? Fine. I don't disagree. But take away the licenses of the idiots among the drivers. If we can't stop them from being idiots, the least we can do is minimize the damage they do by making them walk.
We forget, in the years pre the mass adoption of automobiles, the streets belonged to people. You were free to walk in the street. Sidewalks were there as much to keep your feet out of the pre-sewer crap in the street (including horse crap) as anything. Kids would naturally play in the street, where else would they play? And collisions between horse-drawn vehicle and human were rare. Note that the term 'jaywalk' was originally considered a shocking slur used by those who could afford a car against those who could not. http://www.todayifoundout.com/...
Drivers, cyclists and pedestrians all draw from the same general population and none of them has the moral high ground. But watch this thread devolve into endless, ignorant sniping among the groups. I have a car, ride a bike and walk to work and I see members of each group act incredibly stupidly and selfishly. It's just a fact of life that people are generally terrible and their actions frequently endanger and even kill one another, bu they'd rather withdraw into their little cultural groups to claim the high ground. And nothing ever changes.
http://www.aish.com/j/j/166678...
I hate to say it, but in this city, the majority of the bicyclists are apparently trying to win Darwin Awards. On an average day, you'll see at least a dozen of them, and about 6 times a year you'll see one that's actually following the rules. They go through red lights. Go the wrong direction in the lanes. Shoot out into traffic from behind large objects in the middle of the block. Jump back and forth between the sidewalk and the road with no warning. etc. In short, they are suicidal incompetents that should be allowed near anything with wheels in the first place, much less actually be allowed on the roads. I don't know what the hell happened, but it didn't used to be that way. When I was a teenager, I wasn't even allowed to ride past my block until I had read and learned all the road rules. My mom gave me a state drivers manual for me to study. It's true that most of these idiots aren't teenagers, but WTF don't they what they are doing is suicidal? In a collision between a car and a bike, I guarantee the bike will lose by at least half a ton! Speaking of which, I saw the aftermath of a recent bike-car collision a couple of months ago. It wasn't a head on, but both wheels on the bike were bent like chalupas. As to the rider, I don't know, the paramedics had a blanket and were blocking any clear view. (I wasn't driving that day, so I could afford to look.) And of course, if someone wants to scream at me for being a car driver and not a bicyclist so it's obvious I wouldn't understand, I ride my bike most days of the week, and it's in a busy traffic area. It's not me that's mentally deficient.
A lot of it is the nature of the bike. Coming to a dead stop at a light or stop sign? Then you're obstructing traffic for the time it takes you to get moving again with your piddly one human-power. Whereas, you have enough visibility to detect a car that's approaching. So you treat all stops as yield signs. (Note that sailboats have the right of way on the sea, for similar reasons) Go the wrong direction in lanes? (I don't do that myself) but they always tell you to walk facing the traffic if there's no sidewalk, so you can dodge, presumably same thinking. Dodging in and out of traffic? (again, not me) but they tell you to stay as rightward as possible. Jump between sidewalk and street? I do that, but I look first. Given the evident wish for drivers to have me NOT on the street, I'm happy to comply and ride on the sidewalk whenever possible (i.e., when it's not full of pedestrians).
Like you said, they're just acting as if everyone is purposely trying to kill them. After all, the best way to handle someone that's trying to kill you is to kill them first, right?
This leads to my theory that there would be fewer bike accidents if Gyrojet pistols were still manufactured. A regular handgun has way too much recoil for a bike rider.
Some drivers are malicious. One of my wife's students was rear ended after stopping for a stop sign. He went flying and broke his arm. The driver told him to get off the road and drove off. I stopped riding a bike in the 80s after multiple cars sideswiped me, once when I was on the sidewalk. It seemed like it was safer in the 70s and then in the early 80s drivers starting hitting cyclists like it was a sport.
My wife and I are riding again, but only on the rail trails.
Same here; no injuries, but bike got bent. Mid afternoon, a dozen witnesses stepped forward; the license plate all reported for the car "didn't exist" according to the police dept. Oh well.
Actually the typical advice given to bikers is to ride thinking that everyone around you is actively trying to kill you. It works because most people grossly underestimate how others can be *incompetent* but have much less difficulties in thinking about how others could be *malicious*. This is helpful in getting enough caution out of them.
And helmets are only rated to protect against low impact forces. Most people think that helmets off much more protection than they actually do. Safe Cycling skills are much more important.
http://bicyclesafe.com/helmets...
The force a bike helmet needs to withstand is approximately equal to what your head would experience if it just fell 5 feet. Any increased impact from getting thrown by a serious collision, you're on your own.
Since energy is probably the single largest input into most products, businesses already have a strong incentive to reduce energy usage, and have had that incentive since long before carbon taxes and government subsidies for "clean energy".
Sure, but that usage isn't zero...
The trick is, clean energy costs more than dirty energy... that is what he was talking about...
I can get clean power for my business, but it costs about 3 cents more per kWh than dirty energy.
\ clean energy costs more, if you don't count the externalized costs of dirty energy. it's like saying crapping on my neighbor's lawn is cheaper than using my toilet and paying the water and sewer bills. if you count the costs of pollution simply on human health and agricultural production, the costs of coal in particular would make it prohibitive.
That's only a tiny part of it. Public enthusiasm for CO2 reduction wilts pretty quickly when the public is asked to make sacrifices.
that's why you point out to them after 9/11 that stopping our dependency on oil would get us out from being stuck with the Middle East, and they see that the "sacrifice" is worth it. Instead, in typical Republican fashion, we double down on the bad idea, recommit to fossil fuels, and send troops into the Middle East.
'Appropriately regulating businesses' is a concept diametrically opposed to the way capitalism works, though, and the organism of the genus capitalism, like any life-form, will fight tooth and nail to it's dying breath trying to preserve itself -- and it doesn't care how much collateral damage it causes in the process. We'd have to do away with capitalism entirely. But doing that starts people pointing fingers and yelling 'socialism!' or 'communism!', which while they're not terrible concepts on paper, they, like most all things involving humans, overlooks a fundamental fact: Humans can't be trusted with the sort of power that leading a socialist or communist society gives them; power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We need to evolve further as a race before many of the problems we have as a race will be solved. I fear that won't happen before it's too late, though.
there are plenty of european countries which have neither done away with capitalism entirely, nor become absolutely corrupt.