Like I said, FM 1960 area was the worst area I rode in regularly, even worse than Pasadena. I was in the Corner Stone sections where Spring, Klein, Champions Forest and the Gunspoint office park area more or less meet. Falling Creek and FM 1960 is where I used to live. There was especially a lot of targeting, taunting and insults along Bammel North Houston where the out of the way grass was easy to ride, the traffic lanes were wide, and it was easy to get away post targeting.
Clearlake it's not so much people trying to target as it is traffic density and lack of a place to ride. I've yet to figure out a reasonable safe route from where I live in Webster to the Johnson Space Center even though it's only a few miles. Highway 3, El Dorado, El Camino, and Bay Area Blvd are all suicidal to cyclist, and pedestrians for that matter. Most the cyclist I see in this area cruise down Space Center Blvd and maybe Saturn, but I could only get to those safely if I drove my bike to work in the back of my vehicle (which I am known to do) and take off from there.
For the record - I do not ride in a manner that obstructs motor traffic in any way. When beer bottles have been thrown at me in the past I was either on the shoulder of a large road that had one or riding through the grass off the side of the road. I do not ride my bike smack in the center of a lane when it's a major through fare. As a courtesy to motorist and the protection of my own hide I try to keep my much slower than them ass out of the way. I've never been hit by a beer bottle or soda cup, or any other thing thrown at me except for liquid coming out of said cup, but each time it was the motorist being the jackass, not because I was an in-the-way jackass.
On another note, I actually agree with the grandparent post. I ride my bike in a method that does NOT impede other travelers, I live my whole life in a "if I'm not involved get out of the way" manner. I drive a car the same way, rarely do I make a driving action that would cause another driver to change course or speed because of what I just did, why would I expect any different when I bike? I ride on the shoulder - if there is one, or on a sidewalk - again, if there is one, through parking lots, back roads, etc. every chance I get.
Hey cool! I have another freak now, that earns you a fan!
Re:Great, still doesn't fix the Houston problem.
on
The Year of the E-Bicycle
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Phoenix was a dream to me, I lived there for a year and half and it was growing, so it might suck now. Back in 96 and 97 I rode all over the place on my bike, I took off from my apartment at 27th ave and Camelback, rode around American West Arena, the big downtown library, went to 27th street and Camelback to hang out at my favorite coffee shop, then rode home all the way down Camelback, I estimated that trip to be over 30 miles by looking at a map site years ago, I'm sure I could a more accurate guess by using Google maps now, but it was a dream. I rode on sidewalks I could drive a car down nearly the whole way.
I don't want to hear that lycra shirt wearing cyclist douche talk about sidewalks being a dangerous place for bikes. I was a BMXer, completely different from your useless breaks Trek bike. In Arizona it's perfectly legal to ride on the sidewalk and they went over this with me when I was in defensive driving (yes, speeding in my truck). If you're on the sidewalk you follow pedestrian laws, if you're on the street you follow motor vehicle laws. I did a lot of curb hopping to hit the greens.:-)
I've put many miles on a bike in the Mojave in Phoenix, and in the Chihuahua in West Texas (why are those separate? They're connected). Granted, the desert isn't as bad as the rice cooker, but I've put in my fair share around Houston. I'll admit, the sweat and stink factor in Houston is worse than most places, but that's not the factor that stops me.
I'm a BMXer. I'm a bit too old and big for my old 20" BMXing ways, so I now have a 24" BMX. When I'm biking it's jeans and a T-Shirt, or shorts and a T-Shirt, maybe an over shirt of some type and a Ramones cap.
I can actually get around Houston on a bike better than most. When I lived on Bammel North Houston (off of FM 1960, bad area) I used to get up and down Bammel N. Houston by riding down the grass part of the boulevard hopping up and down the curbs when I came to the U-Turn/Left turn breaks. I was harder to hit with beer bottles in the boulevard because the best bottle throwers are right handed people riding shotgun and the boulevard put me on the drivers side.
wow, I should have double checked my spell checkers suggestion: that was prosperousness not obstreperousness. I had to look up obstreperousness to figure out what that even meant.
Walking does not fix the beer bottles aimed at pedestrians problem, nor the no sidewalks problem with fences that go right up to the curb on incredibly busy streets problem.
I'm not saying there's no way to walk from point A to point B, but if you're talking in Kilometers you're probably thinking European, which is a lot different than thinking urban sprawl in a city designed by drunk monkeys.
In the Houston area if your starting point is 1 mile from your ending point by car there's a good chance to get there on foot anywhere near safely you will have to walk 8 miles to get there or more. Often, many destinations are "road locked" meaning there is NO safe way to get there under human power. I've crossed freeways on foot before, I've crossed no-pedestrian areas on foot before, I've trespassed before just so I can get from point A to point B in under an hour. I did all of that in Baton Rouge which is bad, but still not as bad as Houston.
It's not a matter of lazy, at least not for everyone.
Your vote reference, ever see the Southpark episode about voting for Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich? That's about it.
Leaving the Houston area, I wont get into why I'm pretty much stuck here for the time being. I work at the Johnson Space Center for one of the good reasons that isn't to personal, but that's not all of them. If I can move just a little closer to work I can get there safely, there's a pocket area surrounding the space center that is semi pedestrian/bike friendly, that stretches to U of H, but doesn't go much beyond that and only in one direction.
The U.S. is nothing like Europe. Most of Europe is old construction with old ideas in mind when new construction is built. Too much of the U.S. was built during an era of obstreperousness that saw automobiles as the wave of the future and the old ways as being no longer relevant. Most U.S. cities have pocket areas where old areas are biking/walking friendly and 1960's to modern decade construction that isn't.
Good news, much, but not all new construction takes into account the whole cars only thing was a bad idea and they are trying to change it back. The bad news is most urban sprawl construction was 60's, 70's, and 80's.
Re:Great, still doesn't fix the Houston problem.
on
The Year of the E-Bicycle
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· Score: 3, Informative
Try Houston - a low-density urban sprawl city.
We have a huge city, with a few acres of land here and there with cattle roaming all over the place. Your Razor scooter wouldn't have enough power to get me past one of these mini-ranches, not to mention the fact there's no safe place to ride it. If I can't ride a bike safely just a couple of miles anywhere I need to go I certainly can't ride one of those.
For that Wired Article, I nominate Houston for the counter point of that article. Probably not #1, but it should be on that list.
Most of the cities I have in mind for being worse than Houston are affected more by bullets that civil design.
Re:Great, still doesn't fix the Houston problem.
on
The Year of the E-Bicycle
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· Score: 5, Informative
Yes, and people sticking their hands out the window trying to smack you on a high speed drive by, and attempting to side swipe you. This is worse in the FM 1960 area where I used to live as opposed to the Clear Lake area where I now live. The Clear Lake area has a bit higher class of people around.
Neither is bike friendly as both areas are built by the same Houston. I saw a guy in an electric wheelchair get stranded off of FM 270 about a year and half ago do to lack of good ways to get around, I was in the process of making my way over to help him out when someone beat me to it. There are NO sidewalks in most areas. Bike lanes are a rarity and qualify more as a vehicle sprawl lane for our many commercial vehicles, a good percentage of which are driven by unlicensed illegal immigrants.
Just try to use one of these to get around random parts of Houston - not isolated to JUST the Montrose, downtown, or historical/old areas. I hear people argue they have no problem getting around a few areas of Houston, especially the older areas, but not everyone lives in these areas nor are they the destinations for everyone.
Show me someone willing to commit to using one of these to commute Houston without limiting their travel horizons for a year and I'll show you someone who wont be alive in a year to claim their prize.
A train would be nice. Coast to coast bullet trains would be awesome in the US. A Northern Route, a Southern Route, and some North and South bound routes. Heck, the Northern and Southern route could be the same trains making a big circle and the North and South bound routes could be smaller circles bridging the line. Amtrak is a joke, and we as Americans should take issue with the French having awesome train when we don't have one - we don't let them show us up on anything else, why do we allow them to do it on this?
I think we could do it without spending much tax money at all if we just spend the tax money to clear the paper trail for private developers and investors to get in on the deal. Personally I would prefer a good high speed train setup over the airline industry.
Great, still doesn't fix the Houston problem.
on
The Year of the E-Bicycle
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· Score: 5, Informative
I love the idea of using one of these bikes for my daily commute to work and back, however they don't come anywhere close to solving the beer bottles from pickups aimed at cyclist problem, or the Houston has no safe way to ride a bike much of anywhere problem.
I love to ride my bike, but Houston is a city built by politicians with pockets lined from oil companies. The oil companies decided people in Houston should drive individual cars to get around and dammit, the politicians not only saw that it happened, they made sure the public transit system sucked as well. Sure there's a great bus to get downtown and back, but you still have to drive locally to the bus stop, even if it's only a mile or two away unless you want to become road pizza. Then it's only to downtown, not across town. You can go around your area, you can go downtown, but getting from one area of Houston to another isn't easy, and unlike Phoenix and certain other cities putting a bike on a bus is hit and miss. Some drivers forbid it if they don't have a bike rack and bike racks are rare.
Could it be on Slashdot? Yeah, that's the ticket, Egypt tried to copyright the pyramids and the sphinx no less. I haven't heard anything else about it, but I'm pretty sure that answer was "how about no".
Considering I know insiders, and I remember the time period BNET-D came out I will say the battle.net servers absolutely sucked at that time. StarCraft lagged and crashed out all the time, and when Diablo 2 came out both became worse (I didn't do much Diablo 1 online, only LAN)
Back then, I was a Novell guy anyways, and we already had IPX running everywhere I went, so LAN wasn't bad, but that didn't take care of things when you didn't have your buddies over. BNET-D was a fix to a problem that existed.
Nobody had a problem playing pirated version anyways, there was a universal key that was all 1's and 0's that all of us had memorized back then, when we played on the LAN we used that key anyways that way we could multiple "severs" and if we wanted to swap which one we played on we didn't have to reinstall the spawn.
Spawns were a good idea BTW - you could argue the GBA, DS and PSP picked up on this idea when the PC world abandoned it.
but my buddy who is still semi-involved in the BNET-D legal debacle can use this type of thing in that court case.
I for one think the whole company run server idea is a good one, but I think they should release code for every game as well for this very reason. Custom servers were half the fun of old Unreal Tournament games, and I know a lot of people who are into custom Enemy Territory servers.
Remember, the reason BNET-D started to begin with is Bizzards servers sucked back in the day, as far as I'm concerned this sort of bull shit justifies that sort of thing.
I suppose you're going to say the city I lived in as a municipality - and for that matter nearly every city on the planet - was part of the problem for not giving cops, firemen, and swat teams the night off.
why were you scared enough or "prepared" yourself by packing
Who said anything about scared? I don't wear my seat belt because I'm scared, I don't wear a helmet when I'm on my motorcycle because I'm scared, I don't keep smoke detectors and fire extinguishers because I'm scared. I do all those things because I'm prepared.
BTW - carrying a large knife in a briefcase usually isn't referred as packing - though the term does work.
Last year I was advocating the DTV transition should have happened at midnight New Years. I had this vision of 1,000's of people doing the countdown watching the ball in New York on TV, then when they hit 1 STATIC! I would have been so epic.
Re:The Kooks who cashed out of modern society in 1
on
The Long Shadow of Y2K
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· Score: 1
They decided it was a good idea to grow tomatoes on their farms to sell to Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee and made their living in a new way?
Slashdot Mirror
Like I said, FM 1960 area was the worst area I rode in regularly, even worse than Pasadena. I was in the Corner Stone sections where Spring, Klein, Champions Forest and the Gunspoint office park area more or less meet. Falling Creek and FM 1960 is where I used to live. There was especially a lot of targeting, taunting and insults along Bammel North Houston where the out of the way grass was easy to ride, the traffic lanes were wide, and it was easy to get away post targeting.
Clearlake it's not so much people trying to target as it is traffic density and lack of a place to ride. I've yet to figure out a reasonable safe route from where I live in Webster to the Johnson Space Center even though it's only a few miles. Highway 3, El Dorado, El Camino, and Bay Area Blvd are all suicidal to cyclist, and pedestrians for that matter. Most the cyclist I see in this area cruise down Space Center Blvd and maybe Saturn, but I could only get to those safely if I drove my bike to work in the back of my vehicle (which I am known to do) and take off from there.
For the record - I do not ride in a manner that obstructs motor traffic in any way. When beer bottles have been thrown at me in the past I was either on the shoulder of a large road that had one or riding through the grass off the side of the road. I do not ride my bike smack in the center of a lane when it's a major through fare. As a courtesy to motorist and the protection of my own hide I try to keep my much slower than them ass out of the way. I've never been hit by a beer bottle or soda cup, or any other thing thrown at me except for liquid coming out of said cup, but each time it was the motorist being the jackass, not because I was an in-the-way jackass.
On another note, I actually agree with the grandparent post. I ride my bike in a method that does NOT impede other travelers, I live my whole life in a "if I'm not involved get out of the way" manner. I drive a car the same way, rarely do I make a driving action that would cause another driver to change course or speed because of what I just did, why would I expect any different when I bike? I ride on the shoulder - if there is one, or on a sidewalk - again, if there is one, through parking lots, back roads, etc. every chance I get.
Hey cool! I have another freak now, that earns you a fan!
Phoenix was a dream to me, I lived there for a year and half and it was growing, so it might suck now. Back in 96 and 97 I rode all over the place on my bike, I took off from my apartment at 27th ave and Camelback, rode around American West Arena, the big downtown library, went to 27th street and Camelback to hang out at my favorite coffee shop, then rode home all the way down Camelback, I estimated that trip to be over 30 miles by looking at a map site years ago, I'm sure I could a more accurate guess by using Google maps now, but it was a dream. I rode on sidewalks I could drive a car down nearly the whole way.
I don't want to hear that lycra shirt wearing cyclist douche talk about sidewalks being a dangerous place for bikes. I was a BMXer, completely different from your useless breaks Trek bike. In Arizona it's perfectly legal to ride on the sidewalk and they went over this with me when I was in defensive driving (yes, speeding in my truck). If you're on the sidewalk you follow pedestrian laws, if you're on the street you follow motor vehicle laws. I did a lot of curb hopping to hit the greens. :-)
I've put many miles on a bike in the Mojave in Phoenix, and in the Chihuahua in West Texas (why are those separate? They're connected). Granted, the desert isn't as bad as the rice cooker, but I've put in my fair share around Houston. I'll admit, the sweat and stink factor in Houston is worse than most places, but that's not the factor that stops me.
Lycra? I'm not one of those.
I'm a BMXer. I'm a bit too old and big for my old 20" BMXing ways, so I now have a 24" BMX. When I'm biking it's jeans and a T-Shirt, or shorts and a T-Shirt, maybe an over shirt of some type and a Ramones cap.
I can actually get around Houston on a bike better than most. When I lived on Bammel North Houston (off of FM 1960, bad area) I used to get up and down Bammel N. Houston by riding down the grass part of the boulevard hopping up and down the curbs when I came to the U-Turn/Left turn breaks. I was harder to hit with beer bottles in the boulevard because the best bottle throwers are right handed people riding shotgun and the boulevard put me on the drivers side.
wow, I should have double checked my spell checkers suggestion: that was prosperousness not obstreperousness. I had to look up obstreperousness to figure out what that even meant.
There have been attempts to move into that direction.
Walking does not fix the beer bottles aimed at pedestrians problem, nor the no sidewalks problem with fences that go right up to the curb on incredibly busy streets problem.
I'm not saying there's no way to walk from point A to point B, but if you're talking in Kilometers you're probably thinking European, which is a lot different than thinking urban sprawl in a city designed by drunk monkeys.
In the Houston area if your starting point is 1 mile from your ending point by car there's a good chance to get there on foot anywhere near safely you will have to walk 8 miles to get there or more. Often, many destinations are "road locked" meaning there is NO safe way to get there under human power. I've crossed freeways on foot before, I've crossed no-pedestrian areas on foot before, I've trespassed before just so I can get from point A to point B in under an hour. I did all of that in Baton Rouge which is bad, but still not as bad as Houston.
It's not a matter of lazy, at least not for everyone.
Your vote reference, ever see the Southpark episode about voting for Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich? That's about it.
Leaving the Houston area, I wont get into why I'm pretty much stuck here for the time being. I work at the Johnson Space Center for one of the good reasons that isn't to personal, but that's not all of them. If I can move just a little closer to work I can get there safely, there's a pocket area surrounding the space center that is semi pedestrian/bike friendly, that stretches to U of H, but doesn't go much beyond that and only in one direction.
The U.S. is nothing like Europe. Most of Europe is old construction with old ideas in mind when new construction is built. Too much of the U.S. was built during an era of obstreperousness that saw automobiles as the wave of the future and the old ways as being no longer relevant. Most U.S. cities have pocket areas where old areas are biking/walking friendly and 1960's to modern decade construction that isn't.
Good news, much, but not all new construction takes into account the whole cars only thing was a bad idea and they are trying to change it back. The bad news is most urban sprawl construction was 60's, 70's, and 80's.
Try Houston - a low-density urban sprawl city.
We have a huge city, with a few acres of land here and there with cattle roaming all over the place. Your Razor scooter wouldn't have enough power to get me past one of these mini-ranches, not to mention the fact there's no safe place to ride it. If I can't ride a bike safely just a couple of miles anywhere I need to go I certainly can't ride one of those.
For that Wired Article, I nominate Houston for the counter point of that article. Probably not #1, but it should be on that list.
Most of the cities I have in mind for being worse than Houston are affected more by bullets that civil design.
Yes, and people sticking their hands out the window trying to smack you on a high speed drive by, and attempting to side swipe you. This is worse in the FM 1960 area where I used to live as opposed to the Clear Lake area where I now live. The Clear Lake area has a bit higher class of people around.
Neither is bike friendly as both areas are built by the same Houston. I saw a guy in an electric wheelchair get stranded off of FM 270 about a year and half ago do to lack of good ways to get around, I was in the process of making my way over to help him out when someone beat me to it. There are NO sidewalks in most areas. Bike lanes are a rarity and qualify more as a vehicle sprawl lane for our many commercial vehicles, a good percentage of which are driven by unlicensed illegal immigrants.
Just try to use one of these to get around random parts of Houston - not isolated to JUST the Montrose, downtown, or historical/old areas. I hear people argue they have no problem getting around a few areas of Houston, especially the older areas, but not everyone lives in these areas nor are they the destinations for everyone.
Show me someone willing to commit to using one of these to commute Houston without limiting their travel horizons for a year and I'll show you someone who wont be alive in a year to claim their prize.
Train.
A train would be nice. Coast to coast bullet trains would be awesome in the US. A Northern Route, a Southern Route, and some North and South bound routes. Heck, the Northern and Southern route could be the same trains making a big circle and the North and South bound routes could be smaller circles bridging the line. Amtrak is a joke, and we as Americans should take issue with the French having awesome train when we don't have one - we don't let them show us up on anything else, why do we allow them to do it on this?
I think we could do it without spending much tax money at all if we just spend the tax money to clear the paper trail for private developers and investors to get in on the deal. Personally I would prefer a good high speed train setup over the airline industry.
I love the idea of using one of these bikes for my daily commute to work and back, however they don't come anywhere close to solving the beer bottles from pickups aimed at cyclist problem, or the Houston has no safe way to ride a bike much of anywhere problem.
I love to ride my bike, but Houston is a city built by politicians with pockets lined from oil companies. The oil companies decided people in Houston should drive individual cars to get around and dammit, the politicians not only saw that it happened, they made sure the public transit system sucked as well. Sure there's a great bus to get downtown and back, but you still have to drive locally to the bus stop, even if it's only a mile or two away unless you want to become road pizza. Then it's only to downtown, not across town. You can go around your area, you can go downtown, but getting from one area of Houston to another isn't easy, and unlike Phoenix and certain other cities putting a bike on a bus is hit and miss. Some drivers forbid it if they don't have a bike rack and bike racks are rare.
Could it be on Slashdot? Yeah, that's the ticket, Egypt tried to copyright the pyramids and the sphinx no less. I haven't heard anything else about it, but I'm pretty sure that answer was "how about no".
Considering I know insiders, and I remember the time period BNET-D came out I will say the battle.net servers absolutely sucked at that time. StarCraft lagged and crashed out all the time, and when Diablo 2 came out both became worse (I didn't do much Diablo 1 online, only LAN)
Back then, I was a Novell guy anyways, and we already had IPX running everywhere I went, so LAN wasn't bad, but that didn't take care of things when you didn't have your buddies over. BNET-D was a fix to a problem that existed.
Nobody had a problem playing pirated version anyways, there was a universal key that was all 1's and 0's that all of us had memorized back then, when we played on the LAN we used that key anyways that way we could multiple "severs" and if we wanted to swap which one we played on we didn't have to reinstall the spawn.
Spawns were a good idea BTW - you could argue the GBA, DS and PSP picked up on this idea when the PC world abandoned it.
but my buddy who is still semi-involved in the BNET-D legal debacle can use this type of thing in that court case.
I for one think the whole company run server idea is a good one, but I think they should release code for every game as well for this very reason. Custom servers were half the fun of old Unreal Tournament games, and I know a lot of people who are into custom Enemy Territory servers.
Remember, the reason BNET-D started to begin with is Bizzards servers sucked back in the day, as far as I'm concerned this sort of bull shit justifies that sort of thing.
Monday - Worried a Jew or American Capitalist pig might fly a plane into it or something?
Aqueducts?
moron
I suppose you're going to say the city I lived in as a municipality - and for that matter nearly every city on the planet - was part of the problem for not giving cops, firemen, and swat teams the night off.
why were you scared enough or "prepared" yourself by packing
Who said anything about scared? I don't wear my seat belt because I'm scared, I don't wear a helmet when I'm on my motorcycle because I'm scared, I don't keep smoke detectors and fire extinguishers because I'm scared. I do all those things because I'm prepared.
BTW - carrying a large knife in a briefcase usually isn't referred as packing - though the term does work.
The editor of Mad Magazine would like to have a word with you.
Parody is derived is it now?
Now I'm curious and I'm going to have to hunt down a copy of that movie, that I would never have heard of had Nintendo just let it be.
Last year I was advocating the DTV transition should have happened at midnight New Years. I had this vision of 1,000's of people doing the countdown watching the ball in New York on TV, then when they hit 1 STATIC! I would have been so epic.
They decided it was a good idea to grow tomatoes on their farms to sell to Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee and made their living in a new way?