Comments on: Happiness on Two Wheels

By: dc

dc — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 06:07:45 +0000

Nice—one more convert discovers that peace of mind has two wheels and pedals.

By: nnyhav

nnyhav — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 01:30:18 +0000

Caleb Crain’s got a new bike:
http://www.steamthing.com/2009/07/pole-position.html
http://www.steamthing.com/2009/07/bike-salmon-omen-or-harbinger.html

By: dc

dc — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:29:39 +0000

Officials in San Francisco ~~are voting~~ voted today ~~on whether~~ to approve a long-delayed bicycle plan that will double the number of bike lanes, add more bike racks, etc., to make the city safer and more welcoming for cyclists. Part of the reason that reckless maniacs predominate among SF cyclists is that you almost have to be a reckless maniac to brave those steep hills and narrow, busy streets (not really, but you do have to be pretty confident on a bike and be used to riding in very close quarters with cars). Hopefully new bike infrastructure will increase the number of non-reckless cyclists, and maybe even shame some of the asshole riders into behaving themselves more. Now, those reckless riders tend to see the world as them against everyone else---maybe if they are sharing the road with a lot more civil cyclists, some of them will lose the us-against-them mentality that causes them to behave so anti-socially. Or at the very least, they won't dominate the cycling ranks so much that they give the rest of us a bad name.

By: eric

eric — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:10:12 +0000

I was speaking off the cuff, and I was a little off about pedestrian/cyclist fatalities, but not far off. According to the recent WHO report, 46% of the 1.3 million car accident deaths worldwide were deaths of people not in a car. In the US and Europe it’s different, but in much of the world cars are another way that the rich kill the poor, that the strong, as Carol says, destroy the weak.

http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/road_safety_status/2009/en/index.html

In the US, of course, most car deaths are of people in cars (although in DC pedestrians are something like 27% of deaths!)–which makes sense, because in the US most people are in cars and almost no one is out walking or biking. Which is of course why car deaths are very relevant, as buffalo cart deaths would be, too, if we lived in a world where buffalo carts were the 10th leading cause of death and effectively kept everyone else from walking or biking the streets. Carol seemed to be saying in her first comment, Bikes are nice but scary and dangerous; I just wanted to point out that cars, the dominant alternative, are much, much more dangerous. But again, I’d like to see cyclists act more civil (civilly?), and my guess is that if we could somehow get some of the cars off the streets, the jacked-up cyclists might calm down a bit and learn to appreciate the more pedestrian cycling pleasures that David described so well.

By: wordnerd

wordnerd — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:17:55 +0000

Don’t act like giving someone his due respect is doing him a favor. That would involve giving him MORE than he’s due.

By: dc

dc — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:34:09 +0000

Some 2007 numbers for U.S. motor vehicle crash fatalities, from a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration factsheet:

Total fatalities: 41,059
Pedestrian fatalities: 4654
Bicyclist fatalities: 698
Motorcyclist fatalities: 5154

Pedestrians account for 11.3 of the total deaths. If anything, that might be an even higher percentage than I would have guessed. The number of cyclist fatalities might be lower than I would have guessed, although I guess there just aren’t that many of us out there on the roads in the first place. Ultimately, I think I’m more a pedestrian than a biker at heart, with all due respect to wordnerd’s theories about miraculous harnessing of abstract geometric objects.

By: Carol

Carol — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:30:37 +0000

You guys are sweet. Probably would never run over me. BUT, however many folks die in car accidents (or by buffalo cart in some places), it’s irrelevant. Most of those car deaths (and I tend to think the numbers are greater than eric indicates, since I place less reliance on Asian statistics) are caused to the driver and passengers and don’t kill pedestrians (although that does happen).

Nothing happens between cyclists and others that is not a reflection of all relationships. The stronger destroys the weaker. It’s all in the great chain of being. Keep yours well greased.

By: eric

eric — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:30:56 +0000

I’m sorry to hear about your accidents, Carol. Some cyclists can be obnoxious, that’s for sure. On the other hand, over a million people die every year in car accidents worldwide, most of them car-less pedestrians. Many, many fewer people die in bike accidents; most of those are cyclists hit by cars, and almost none are pedestrians hit by cyclists. Of course, just because you don’t die doesn’t mean it’s not awful to get hit, and I do hope cyclists can learn to be more civil.

By the way, where I live it’s not “rare” to see cyclists follow the rules. I ride my bike to work every day, I almost always follow the rules, and I see many other cyclists doing the same. Of course, often bikers and pedestrians run red lights, but I also often see cars running red lights and making un-signaled turns–at much greater risk to others!

By: dc

dc — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 05:30:08 +0000

Carol: Yikes! I’ve seen a lot of reckless, aggressive bikers, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of them hit a pedestrian. For whatever it’s worth, I do think that SF has the highest ratio of reckless to “reckful” cyclists of all the places I’ve ever been. Even in NYC, which has a lot of messengers (and chinese food delivery guys etc) who ride recklessly, my sense is that they tend to put their own skin at risk more than that of pedestrians (I’m sure some pedestrians would dispute that, however). On this side of the bay, where life is slower, we do have a lot of hipsters on bikes, but very few actual messengers, so there is much less financial incentive to ride like a maniac. Most people I see on bikes around here are actually very civilized, whether they are students or commuters or recreational riders wearing their thousands of dollars worth of gear.

By: Carol

Carol — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 05:06:30 +0000

I’ve never been hit by a car, and that may be why I’m still here. But I have been hit and hurt twice by bicycles, once by a bike messenger going the wrong way on a one way street and once by a guy on the sidewalk who thought he knew that I wasn’t going to turn around and take a step toward the bus pulling up beside us. Both offenders rode away as rapidly as possible, wounding me in spirit as well as in flesh. I wish you and your fellow riders only good will as long as you do the right thing. It’s rare, however, to see cyclists obey any of the relevant rules.

It is San Francisco, of course, where the sense of entitlement is a serious disease.