If you talk as an individual in a matter in which your employer may have a stake (think a financial analyst working for a bank) you better make sure your employer does not have a problem with what you are going to say, no matter how many disclaimers you put around your words.
I will never agree to work under such conditions. (If this means I'm never able to work outside academia, so be it.)
The field I work in is likely to also be a field I have passionate opinions on. I don't want to be required to check all my opinions with my employer.
That employers would expect, and employees would agree to, such constraints is a sad statement about the state of our democracy.
The reason is very simple: a given company needs to keep a reputation, in the case of a security company they need to appear to be open and impartial when assesing different products.
The quality of their research should stand or fall on its own merits. As a customer, if anything, I'd prefer to know their biases up front than to have them hidden from me.
As the Fedora site says, "Making things look pretty is the name of the game."
There's a difference between "prettiness" and usability.
A purely commandline OS could be extremely usable. But no linux distribution that I've seen is, mainly because it's so heterogeneous--given a new commandline tool, is it going to use short options or long options? If short options, can they be combined or not? For options that can be toggled on or off, do you indicate this by preceding them by "+" or "-", or by preceding the negative options by "no-"? Do you get the definitive documentation from man pages, info pages, "-h", "--help", or somplace else?
And the gui's used in any linux distribution often have exactly the same problems. It's not a problem when they're not pretty; what sucks is when they're inconsistent and unintuitive.
Even if an end user executed an attachement under Linux, it would only run as an that user, not Administrator or root. The worst that would happen is the users home directory being deleted.
I'm not so sure--if, for example, that user ever uses the root password (e.g., ever uses su--probably pretty common on a home machine that has only one or two users in practice), it'd be pretty trivial to get root access.
Do the IT/IS admins in your place of business choose which services to "offer" to the rest of the company? Must be nice to be the BOFH, eh?
Yep, the only admins are us, because it's a small department. And, yes, it *is* nice.
Here in the real world, the executives dictate which services will be implemented, under what budget, and according to what timeline.
OK, then if you've done your part to explain the problem to them, and they're not listening, I suppose it's not your fault. But that doesn't change the fact there's a serious problem here....
Start thinking of us that operate in the real world. Cocky statements like "We've had plenty of warning about this, so it's only the criminally unprepared that will be hit right" sound outright stupid. The patch was released last Wednesday. To coordinate business departments, users and techincal staff along with testing requirements doesn't happen overnight.
You do your best to patch as fast as possible and take steps to add a firewall layer but you have to deal with business requirements.
In a world where major exploits for a new vulnerability can appear within hours (how long before hours become minutes?), people maintaining infrastructure that takes over a week to update are in serious trouble.
I don't know what you need to do to fix this problem in your infrastructure--you may have to dramatically cut back on the services you offer to your organization--but the one system that is definitely *not* going to meet "business requirements" is the system with which anyone (professional criminals, competitors, random teenagers) can do anything they want, automatically, instantly, and effortlessly.
To be honest, I hope it just trashes boot sectors before writing random crap all over the hard drive. That might actually get the message through. All these soft viruses just make people think of it as an inconvenience. When something bad happens, people might just start sitting up and taking notice.
You're thinking software, not biology.
A virus like Ebola is bad news for its host. It spreads pretty easily and quickly causes violent, bloody death. But it kills its host so quickly that the host doesn't have time to infect anyone outside his immediate contacts, and the severe nature brings all Man's medical defenses to track the contagion to its source and eradicate it.
I'm not sure this analogy works any more for a "virus" that can infect a large percentage of the worlds computers in a few minutes....
However, even if the rate of accidents with self-driving/parking vehicles is lower than with real drivers (and I'd tend to believe it could be) even 1 accident would launch liability lawsuits galore.
Speaking from complete ignorance, just trying to think through the economics of this--if the self-driving system actually lead to less accidents, then in general you'd expect there to be less money overall awarded in liability lawsuits. The difference would just be who would be responsible--some liability that was previously the driver's would become the car manufacturer's. So you'd expect the automaker to end up spending more on liability insurance (raising the cost of the car), but you'd expect the car driver's liability insurance to decrease correspondingly.
The driver's insurer could say "buy this (more expensive, because of the technology and the costs of the maker's insurance) self-driving car and we'll give you a discount."
So naively it's not obvious that the increased liability on the automakers' part would make the whole project impossible.
Maybe an automated highway is more complicated than something like a self-parking mechanism, because many more parties are involved (e.g., the people who built and designed the highway), but still, if they could prove that there would be a decrease in accidents, then it might be possible to distribute the costs of risks in a reasonable way.
I sincerely doubt, however, that it is possible for anyone at this point to *know* that the accident rates will be lower. Without more experience, an automated highway sounds like a risky venture--it might initially seem to be safer, but then a subtle bug might cause something catastrophic to happen after it's been in use for a while. Perhaps it was the difficult-to-forsee problems that they were worried about in the situation you describe. But if the threat of suits here is encouraging caution, that strikes me as a good thing--surely radical changes affecting something as critical as highway safety *should* be undertaken very cautiously.
what we now need are cars that merge onto highways for us.
Unfortunately merging is one of the maneuvers that requires the most communication; in busy traffic you really have to negotiate with the other people on the road--signal and move over a little, watch to see if the approaching driver acknowledges you, and then, depending on the reaction, either move over a little more or retreat and wait for the next gap.
Exactly the sort of procedure I'd imagine to be most difficult to automate....
The fact that he escalted such an issue shows more of how much time he is willing to waste to prove HIS point. Thats really all this was.
What freedom we have is thanks to people who were willing to go to much greater lengths just to prove a point.
Explain why his point is *wrong*, or why it's unimportant, but don't try to claim there's anything inherently rude or self-serving about challenging the status quo.
Too much dependance on editing configuration files by hand. While this can and should always be an option, I've had to do it too many times where it was obvious that the feature should have been accessible through a gui.
I agree that there's a problem, but please allow me to disagree in part on the solution. Too often the solution proposed to a usability problem is "let's slap a gui on top of it!" The real usability problem here is that configuration systems are too complex and inconsistent; programs may store their configuration in any of several different locations, sometimes assembling it out of files in multiple locations, using their own idiosyncratic syntax, documented in any (or, sometimes, all) of several documentation sources: man pages, info pages, files installed in/usr/doc/, gnome help manuals,....
It's not that bad to have to fire up an editor every now and then to edit a configuration file, and plain text configuration files have certain advantages fo their own. Newbies can be taught to edit them too, if necessary. What's terrible (for experienced sysadmins and newbies alike) is having to spend time finding and reading all the documentation first and learning a lot of new stuff to configure each new program.
It would be a shame to spend a whole lot of work on all this problem only to end up with an equally complex, inconsistent, spottily documented, hard-to-find set of gui configurators.
It's because we no longer have to walk 3 miles to school uphill both ways anymore.
If we've gotten to the point where N=3 is now regarded as a large enough number for the "when I was my age we used to have to walk N miles to shool uphill both ways" joke, then we really have reached a sad state. (I mean, c'mon, a 3 mile walk is actually a pretty reasonable commute. That's like 45 minutes. Plenty of people have commutes longer than 45 minutes....)
As much as I hate to say it, I'd rather not see an anti-spam law on the books....
What I would not mind seeing, however, is a system of torts that would allow users to take on spammers the same way that people get to take on telemarketers and junk mailers who do the same things.
You understand that what you propose is pretty much exactly the sort of legislation that groups such as cauce have been proposing for years?
Also, it may be just a consequence of my massive ignorance of the law, but I'm finding the distinction you make between "anti-spam law" and "a system of torts..." a bit subtle.
I wonder if running a NetShare AP rules out running a wide-open free AP.
From their FAQ:
I don't use WiFi but still want to share my connection (Ethernet, carrier pigeons, free-space optics, whatever). What's your policy?
Speakeasy believes that shared wireless networks are in keeping with our core values of disseminating knowledge, access to information and fostering community, provided this usage does not have an adverse impact on the services of other customers, does not involve any illegal activity and is not otherwise in violation of any aspect of our existing Terms Of Service. Please remember that the Speakeasy account-holder is responsible for all activity originating from their DSL line, even if it is the result of other users on a shared wireless connection.
You may use either wired or wireless networks to share your connection, under the NetShare terms of use. Use of NetShare is mandatory if broadband circuit is residential and you intend to collect fees from third parties accessing your network.
What I get from this is that they don't mind your sharing your connection, but that if you want to charge the neighbors than they're requiring you to use this new system to do it.
It also sounds like they'll provide your neighbors with email accounts and stuff if they sign up.
It all seems pretty reasonable to me....
Neighbors won't want to pay if they can get it for free, right?
Speaking for myself, if I were using my neighbor's connection a lot, I'd certainly be more than happy to chip in for it.
--Bruce Fields
Re:Creation of a blue collar computing segment
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Microsoft can't simply drop the price of a Windows licence for a single bottom end manufacturer without pissing off Dell, HPaq, Gateway et al, and causing them to bundle Linux to compete.
I'm still not convinced. There's no reason why they'd need to offer the deal to a single "bottom end" manufacturer--naively I'd think that Dell and the rest could also take advantage of a deal that allowed them to sell low-end machines for cheap.
And I haven't seen much evidence that it really matters much how pissed off anyone is at Microsoft....
They also can't cripple Windows enough to bring it down to $20/licence without losing out on the feature list against a Lindows box.
I'm a big Linux fan--I don't use anything else, in fact, at home or at work--but it's still an open question whether Linux can really compete in the consumer desktop market.
If pre-installed Linux boxes do start making great headway, and demonstrate that there is indeed a great untapped market for super-low-end boxes, then Microsoft can't help but take an interest, and it's hard for me to believe they can't find *some* way to sell to that market. Set the price of the oem's windows license to be a certain percentage of the price of the box? Or make it depend on the clock speed of the CPU? There must be something that'd work.
--Bruce Fields
Re:Creation of a blue collar computing segment
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To get to that $200 price point, you need Linux (or BSD...)
Are you sure? Microsoft's already written the software; additional copies cost them pennies, so if they can figure out a way to charge $20 to the people with $20 without losing the chance to continue charging $200 to the people willing to spend $200, they will. I don't know exactly how they'd do it (more handicapped versions at low price points? Set the price of a license to be a fraction of the systme price?), but there must be a way....
The problem is that not everyone is physically able to ride a bike.
I agree completely. Bikes aren't the solution for everything. But the solution space for bikes is *much* larger than anyone realizes. Virtually everyone seems to believe that riding a bike is very unpleasant, if not impossible, whenever traffic volumes are anything over a couple vehicles a minute or speeds over 30mph (learn vehicular cycling), whenever it's necessary to carry loads of any size (get a rack and some panniers), whenever it's raining or below 50 degrees (learn about fenders and bike rainwear), etc., etc.
Once you learn to overcome a few of these supposedly insurmountable obstacles, and realize that your $200 can do the work you'd previously assumed required a $20,000 vehicle, and that it's a lot of fun besides.... Well, is it understandable that you may find yourself turning into a bike nut?
Besides, if you dedicate land area to roads wide enough for cars, then you'll get cars. You'd have to block every entrance with some sort of staggered fencing which only bikes could negotiate in order to prevent cars using the roads.
Thanks to licensing and such I think cars are actually a lot easier to regulate than that. But I agree that it's silly to talk about banning cars; they're a great solution for certain problems, and people that really need them or want them should be able to use them.
What we can talk about is ways to adjust the balance a bit: by making keeping a car more expensive (making sure gas taxes accurate reflect costs of infrastructure, costs from pollution and other such externalities), and by making riding a bike easier (mainly a matter of education, as far as I can tell--as I say above, most people seem to accept a lot of myths about the limitations of bikes as vehicles).
Right now, it's just too frickin' dangerous to ride a bike (or NEV) because most the cars aren't watching for you, many of them try to squeeze around you so close I'm amazed the side-view mirrors don't hit me every time, and a few of them actually swerve to hit (Not exaggerating.
Yes you are. Anecdotes about how you were almost killed however many times are unconvincing. You should also check out some of the discussion in the literature on bike-lane safety. They're not a panacea.
Quite a few cyclists die because of this every year in the USA.)
Sure. And people get hit standing on the sidewalk every year, too--it's a big country, after all--but we don't think of standing on the sidewalk as "frickin' dangerous". One or two sensational news articles don't make a trend. Bicycling in traffic can be done safely; produce real statistics (not just anecdotes) or you're just spreading FUD.
"so do you think that all bicycles should be off the road?"
If there is an adjacent bike path or shoulder and the speed limit is 45, absolutely. Unless the bicyclists can pedal 45 mph.
Sorry; there's just too many places to go where the most direct route is a street with a 45mph speed limit. At worst that means that cars might have to slow down to bike speed for a few seconds while they wait for a break in traffic to pass. I don't see that as too great a burden.
bikes typically travel 20 - 30 mph? thats interesting, perhaps you can cite sources for this information.
Yeah, that sounds too high, at least for "typical" speeds. Racers certainly can do 30mph on the flat for a while, and obviously anyone can exceed those speeds given a sufficient downhill, but "typical" speeds for bike traffic are probably more like 10-20mph.
On the other hand, once you factor in traffic lights and such, nobody, regardless of vehicle, is likely to be doing more than that on a lot of downtown streets.
It was that one point of slower traffic in a system of faster traffic is a danger.
I can see this on a freeway or urban highway, where people expect to be able to maintain a nearly constant speed for hours on end. In typical urban traffic, where there's constant traffic lights, stop signs, people parallel parking, people loading and unloading passengers, etc., drivers have to be a little more alert. Having to occasionally pass a bike going a little slower than you shouldn't be a big deal.
Please note that I did advocate bike lanes or bike specific routes!
A lot of people like bike lanes, but honestly as far as I know the jury's still out on whether they're safer than just having bikes and cars share lanes all the time. Accidents tend to occur at intersections, so separating the traffic between intersections in exchange for making the intersections themselves more complicated isn't necessarily a good tradeoff.
I'd seriously consider riding a bike on an everyday basis if I didn't have to worry about being run over by a car. AND, for most trips, riding a bike would actually be faster!
Yup. And the risk of getting run over by a car, while not zero (everything has *some* risk), is greatly exaggerated. A couple good sites for tips on riding in traffic:
It's scary the first few times you do it (so was learning to, say, merge onto a freeway in a car, if you remember learning that), but once you learn to do it it really works very well.
Ha! Try riding your bike to work in the winter when it is below freezing for weeks in a row! Sorry, that's just not an option.
Funny you should say that.... In fact, I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where it can be below freezing for weeks, and I do ride my bike to work daily in that weather. It's not that big a deal. People ski in that weather for fun, right? A little exercise warms you up a lot--dress to be a little cold when you leave the house, and in a few minutes you'll be unzipping your jacket....
And people bike commute in much colder weather than I have to; the Icebike web site has some good stories and advice.
I admit to being glad to see the spring when it comes, but winter biking can be fun in its own way.
The biggest problem with non-car methods of transportation is that it is very expensive to build.
No, it's cheap as all get-out. You replace those $20,000 cars by $400 bikes and use all the same road infrastructure. The roads still cost money, but at least they hold up a little better without the cars pounding on it, and less pavement is required to support the same throughput of bike traffic as for car traffic. Plus you can stop spending so much money on parking structures in high-rent downtown areas.
This doesn't solve the problem of inter-city transportation, or deliveries, etc.--motor vehicles still make sense for some things--but most car trips involve just a single car driver going a couple of miles--which you can easily do just as quickly (if not more so) on a bike.
If you want the cheapest, most efficient transportation system money can buy, work on achieving a more balanced mixture of cars, bikes, and peds. Yeah, that means that if you're a car driver you'll occasionally lose a few seconds waiting to pass a slower bike. And if you're a bike rider you'll have to learn to share your space safely with the big stinking automobiles (come on, it's not as hard as you think). Learn to love it. It's the best. And you can do it right now, without waiting for some sort of tremendous revolution in the infrastructure.
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I will never agree to work under such conditions. (If this means I'm never able to work outside academia, so be it.)
The field I work in is likely to also be a field I have passionate opinions on. I don't want to be required to check all my opinions with my employer.
That employers would expect, and employees would agree to, such constraints is a sad statement about the state of our democracy.
The quality of their research should stand or fall on its own merits. As a customer, if anything, I'd prefer to know their biases up front than to have them hidden from me.
--Bruce Fields
There's a difference between "prettiness" and usability.
A purely commandline OS could be extremely usable. But no linux distribution that I've seen is, mainly because it's so heterogeneous--given a new commandline tool, is it going to use short options or long options? If short options, can they be combined or not? For options that can be toggled on or off, do you indicate this by preceding them by "+" or "-", or by preceding the negative options by "no-"? Do you get the definitive documentation from man pages, info pages, "-h", "--help", or somplace else?
And the gui's used in any linux distribution often have exactly the same problems. It's not a problem when they're not pretty; what sucks is when they're inconsistent and unintuitive.
--Bruce Fields
I'm not so sure--if, for example, that user ever uses the root password (e.g., ever uses su--probably pretty common on a home machine that has only one or two users in practice), it'd be pretty trivial to get root access.
--Bruce Fields
Yep, the only admins are us, because it's a small department. And, yes, it *is* nice.
OK, then if you've done your part to explain the problem to them, and they're not listening, I suppose it's not your fault. But that doesn't change the fact there's a serious problem here....
--Bruce Fields
In a world where major exploits for a new vulnerability can appear within hours (how long before hours become minutes?), people maintaining infrastructure that takes over a week to update are in serious trouble.
I don't know what you need to do to fix this problem in your infrastructure--you may have to dramatically cut back on the services you offer to your organization--but the one system that is definitely *not* going to meet "business requirements" is the system with which anyone (professional criminals, competitors, random teenagers) can do anything they want, automatically, instantly, and effortlessly.
--Bruce Fields
I'm not sure this analogy works any more for a "virus" that can infect a large percentage of the worlds computers in a few minutes....
--Bruce Fields
Speaking from complete ignorance, just trying to think through the economics of this--if the self-driving system actually lead to less accidents, then in general you'd expect there to be less money overall awarded in liability lawsuits. The difference would just be who would be responsible--some liability that was previously the driver's would become the car manufacturer's. So you'd expect the automaker to end up spending more on liability insurance (raising the cost of the car), but you'd expect the car driver's liability insurance to decrease correspondingly.
The driver's insurer could say "buy this (more expensive, because of the technology and the costs of the maker's insurance) self-driving car and we'll give you a discount."
So naively it's not obvious that the increased liability on the automakers' part would make the whole project impossible.
Maybe an automated highway is more complicated than something like a self-parking mechanism, because many more parties are involved (e.g., the people who built and designed the highway), but still, if they could prove that there would be a decrease in accidents, then it might be possible to distribute the costs of risks in a reasonable way.
I sincerely doubt, however, that it is possible for anyone at this point to *know* that the accident rates will be lower. Without more experience, an automated highway sounds like a risky venture--it might initially seem to be safer, but then a subtle bug might cause something catastrophic to happen after it's been in use for a while. Perhaps it was the difficult-to-forsee problems that they were worried about in the situation you describe. But if the threat of suits here is encouraging caution, that strikes me as a good thing--surely radical changes affecting something as critical as highway safety *should* be undertaken very cautiously.
--Bruce Fields
Unfortunately merging is one of the maneuvers that requires the most communication; in busy traffic you really have to negotiate with the other people on the road--signal and move over a little, watch to see if the approaching driver acknowledges you, and then, depending on the reaction, either move over a little more or retreat and wait for the next gap.
Exactly the sort of procedure I'd imagine to be most difficult to automate....
--Bruce Fields
What freedom we have is thanks to people who were willing to go to much greater lengths just to prove a point.
Explain why his point is *wrong*, or why it's unimportant, but don't try to claim there's anything inherently rude or self-serving about challenging the status quo.
Some resources:
I agree that there's a problem, but please allow me to disagree in part on the solution. Too often the solution proposed to a usability problem is "let's slap a gui on top of it!" The real usability problem here is that configuration systems are too complex and inconsistent; programs may store their configuration in any of several different locations, sometimes assembling it out of files in multiple locations, using their own idiosyncratic syntax, documented in any (or, sometimes, all) of several documentation sources: man pages, info pages, files installed in /usr/doc/, gnome help manuals,....
It's not that bad to have to fire up an editor every now and then to edit a configuration file, and plain text configuration files have certain advantages fo their own. Newbies can be taught to edit them too, if necessary. What's terrible (for experienced sysadmins and newbies alike) is having to spend time finding and reading all the documentation first and learning a lot of new stuff to configure each new program.
It would be a shame to spend a whole lot of work on all this problem only to end up with an equally complex, inconsistent, spottily documented, hard-to-find set of gui configurators.
--Bruce Fields
If we've gotten to the point where N=3 is now regarded as a large enough number for the "when I was my age we used to have to walk N miles to shool uphill both ways" joke, then we really have reached a sad state. (I mean, c'mon, a 3 mile walk is actually a pretty reasonable commute. That's like 45 minutes. Plenty of people have commutes longer than 45 minutes....)
Hmm, but it looks like you did that *after* a make mrproper. You do know that mrproper deletes .config, right? So what you want to do is something like
mv .config ../ ../patch-2.4.21.bz | patch -p1 ../.config .
bzcat
make mrproper
mv
make oldonfig
--Bruce Fields
You understand that what you propose is pretty much exactly the sort of legislation that groups such as cauce have been proposing for years?
Also, it may be just a consequence of my massive ignorance of the law, but I'm finding the distinction you make between "anti-spam law" and "a system of torts..." a bit subtle.
--Bruce Fields
From their FAQ:
What I get from this is that they don't mind your sharing your connection, but that if you want to charge the neighbors than they're requiring you to use this new system to do it.
It also sounds like they'll provide your neighbors with email accounts and stuff if they sign up.
It all seems pretty reasonable to me....
Speaking for myself, if I were using my neighbor's connection a lot, I'd certainly be more than happy to chip in for it.
--Bruce Fields
I'm still not convinced. There's no reason why they'd need to offer the deal to a single "bottom end" manufacturer--naively I'd think that Dell and the rest could also take advantage of a deal that allowed them to sell low-end machines for cheap. And I haven't seen much evidence that it really matters much how pissed off anyone is at Microsoft....
I'm a big Linux fan--I don't use anything else, in fact, at home or at work--but it's still an open question whether Linux can really compete in the consumer desktop market.
If pre-installed Linux boxes do start making great headway, and demonstrate that there is indeed a great untapped market for super-low-end boxes, then Microsoft can't help but take an interest, and it's hard for me to believe they can't find *some* way to sell to that market. Set the price of the oem's windows license to be a certain percentage of the price of the box? Or make it depend on the clock speed of the CPU? There must be something that'd work.
--Bruce Fields
Are you sure? Microsoft's already written the software; additional copies cost them pennies, so if they can figure out a way to charge $20 to the people with $20 without losing the chance to continue charging $200 to the people willing to spend $200, they will. I don't know exactly how they'd do it (more handicapped versions at low price points? Set the price of a license to be a fraction of the systme price?), but there must be a way....
--Bruce F.
I agree completely. Bikes aren't the solution for everything. But the solution space for bikes is *much* larger than anyone realizes. Virtually everyone seems to believe that riding a bike is very unpleasant, if not impossible, whenever traffic volumes are anything over a couple vehicles a minute or speeds over 30mph (learn vehicular cycling), whenever it's necessary to carry loads of any size (get a rack and some panniers), whenever it's raining or below 50 degrees (learn about fenders and bike rainwear), etc., etc.
Once you learn to overcome a few of these supposedly insurmountable obstacles, and realize that your $200 can do the work you'd previously assumed required a $20,000 vehicle, and that it's a lot of fun besides.... Well, is it understandable that you may find yourself turning into a bike nut?
Thanks to licensing and such I think cars are actually a lot easier to regulate than that. But I agree that it's silly to talk about banning cars; they're a great solution for certain problems, and people that really need them or want them should be able to use them.
What we can talk about is ways to adjust the balance a bit: by making keeping a car more expensive (making sure gas taxes accurate reflect costs of infrastructure, costs from pollution and other such externalities), and by making riding a bike easier (mainly a matter of education, as far as I can tell--as I say above, most people seem to accept a lot of myths about the limitations of bikes as vehicles).
--Bruce Fields
Yes you are. Anecdotes about how you were almost killed however many times are unconvincing. You should also check out some of the discussion in the literature on bike-lane safety. They're not a panacea.
Sure. And people get hit standing on the sidewalk every year, too--it's a big country, after all--but we don't think of standing on the sidewalk as "frickin' dangerous". One or two sensational news articles don't make a trend. Bicycling in traffic can be done safely; produce real statistics (not just anecdotes) or you're just spreading FUD.
--Bruce Fields
Sorry; there's just too many places to go where the most direct route is a street with a 45mph speed limit. At worst that means that cars might have to slow down to bike speed for a few seconds while they wait for a break in traffic to pass. I don't see that as too great a burden.
--Bruce Fields
Yeah, that sounds too high, at least for "typical" speeds. Racers certainly can do 30mph on the flat for a while, and obviously anyone can exceed those speeds given a sufficient downhill, but "typical" speeds for bike traffic are probably more like 10-20mph.
On the other hand, once you factor in traffic lights and such, nobody, regardless of vehicle, is likely to be doing more than that on a lot of downtown streets.
--Bruce Fields
I can see this on a freeway or urban highway, where people expect to be able to maintain a nearly constant speed for hours on end. In typical urban traffic, where there's constant traffic lights, stop signs, people parallel parking, people loading and unloading passengers, etc., drivers have to be a little more alert. Having to occasionally pass a bike going a little slower than you shouldn't be a big deal.
A lot of people like bike lanes, but honestly as far as I know the jury's still out on whether they're safer than just having bikes and cars share lanes all the time. Accidents tend to occur at intersections, so separating the traffic between intersections in exchange for making the intersections themselves more complicated isn't necessarily a good tradeoff.
--Bruce Fields
Yup. And the risk of getting run over by a car, while not zero (everything has *some* risk), is greatly exaggerated. A couple good sites for tips on riding in traffic:
It's scary the first few times you do it (so was learning to, say, merge onto a freeway in a car, if you remember learning that), but once you learn to do it it really works very well.
--Bruce Fields
Funny you should say that.... In fact, I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where it can be below freezing for weeks, and I do ride my bike to work daily in that weather. It's not that big a deal. People ski in that weather for fun, right? A little exercise warms you up a lot--dress to be a little cold when you leave the house, and in a few minutes you'll be unzipping your jacket....
And people bike commute in much colder weather than I have to; the Icebike web site has some good stories and advice.
I admit to being glad to see the spring when it comes, but winter biking can be fun in its own way.
--Bruce Fields
No, it's cheap as all get-out. You replace those $20,000 cars by $400 bikes and use all the same road infrastructure. The roads still cost money, but at least they hold up a little better without the cars pounding on it, and less pavement is required to support the same throughput of bike traffic as for car traffic. Plus you can stop spending so much money on parking structures in high-rent downtown areas.
This doesn't solve the problem of inter-city transportation, or deliveries, etc.--motor vehicles still make sense for some things--but most car trips involve just a single car driver going a couple of miles--which you can easily do just as quickly (if not more so) on a bike.
If you want the cheapest, most efficient transportation system money can buy, work on achieving a more balanced mixture of cars, bikes, and peds. Yeah, that means that if you're a car driver you'll occasionally lose a few seconds waiting to pass a slower bike. And if you're a bike rider you'll have to learn to share your space safely with the big stinking automobiles (come on, it's not as hard as you think). Learn to love it. It's the best. And you can do it right now, without waiting for some sort of tremendous revolution in the infrastructure.
--Bruce Fields