Bicycle Lanes Make Intersections Safer

Once again, nonsense is spread around the web and once again, I have to debunk it.

First of all, I’d like to mention that I became disenchanted with looking at crash data when I found that things varied so much from city to city to country that comparing things was a waste of time. Also, I learned that making vast generalizations was also usually a waste of time.

Furthermore, it has been my position from the beginning to work towards SEC: safety, comfort, AND efficiency and that infrastructure is the only thing that provides all of those in the lowest cost way.

But each time we get cherry picked data:

Here’s the new VC DB:

http://janheine.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/bike-to-work-3-separate-or-equal/

“The danger of being hit from behind or being “clipped” by a car passing too close is very small. It accounts for less than 5% of car-bike accidents.”

This leads to this site:

http://bicyclesafe.com/

Which in turn leads here:

http://www.bicyclinglife.com/Library/TaleOfThree.htm

First of all, you see some strange things which is on the graph there are three data sets, but only a single city Austin has reported motorist overtaking. Note that it is a small amount, n=7 collisions. This is in contrast to the “right hook” where there’s 12 (for Austin).

Thus, overtaking accidents are rare and should not be worried about at all?

I knew that there was something fishy so I dusted off an old chestnut, the VC capital’s assessment of cycling:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CC4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.metroplanorlando.com%2Ffiles%2Fview%2Fbicyclist-crash-study.pdf&ei=pgiVUf_dBMTDqQHsm4CwCQ&usg=AFQjCNGwTEaAQo2aLM40c9Ljj0OZh8Rvjg&sig2=e_c3XsyhWExleb0oJ2pgSQ&bvm=bv.46471029,d.aWM

“Table H shows how law-abiding, daytime, with-the-flow sidewalk and roadway cyclists come into conflict
with motorists.”

There are a few numbers which are significant, but for now, let’s look at “motorist overtaking”. For bike paths AND shoulders (yes the author combined them together in order to inflate the numbers of “edge riding”), we find that there is a grand total of one crash. ONE CRASH FOR OVERTAKING IN THE BIKE LANE. While if we look riding in the road, that’s 19! For every single person who got hit by a car by “edge riding” we have 19 unlucky cyclists who got the “lane prize”.

From the original article:

“Any barrier that separates the cyclist visually from other traffic effectively hides the cyclist. This is counterproductive to safety. Moving cyclists out of the roadway altogether, on separate bike paths, is even more dangerous, because drivers don’t look for (or cannot see) cyclists off to the side.”

What? Why the fuck would you need to see the cyclist if you can’t physically hit her because of a barrier?

“Imagine planning a right turn in the image above. You approach the intersection, the light turns green, you go. If you are vigilant, you can barely see the cyclist behind the parked car. Now imagine if the cyclist was still a bit further back. She’d be invisible. You’d turn right into her path. Let’s hope she has good brakes!”

Oh, so you are saying that the collision happened when the cyclist LEFT THE PROTECTED BARRIER! So this is the same thing as saying that riding in the street is dangerous. So we agree, right?

No! VC DBs like to make everything an argument and every improvement for cyclists becomes a reason to push their goofy (and deadly) religion.

“These are not hypothetical concerns. The police department in Berlin, Germany, found that on streets where “protected bike paths” were installed, the frequency of cycling accidents greatly increased.”

I’m not going to waste my time on this paper b/c it’s in German. Note how desperate this is where he had to find a paper in German?

http://bernd.sluka.de/Radfahren/Radwege.html

But let’s look at the right hook that he mentioned (in Orlando):

Indeed the right hook is dangerous. For those on bike paths AND shoulders combined we get two, count em, two right hooks. So the right hook is twice as deadly as getting rear ended. Let’s look at the right turn for the intelligent vehicular cyclists who ride in a place that’s more visible to motorists: there are six right hooks.

RIDING IN A BIKE LANE HAD THREE TIMES LESS FREQUENT COLLISIONS THAN VEHICULAR CYCLING. THAT’S NOT THREE LESS COLLISIONS, BUT THE COLLISION RATE WAS LESS BY A FACTOR OF THREE.

Thus, my original point, riding in a bike lane is safer than in the road.

Let’s look at the grand totals: Total collisions in Orlando getting hit by any direction including their wonderful “door prize”: twelve cyclists. At the same time riding in the road led to 66 (sixty-six) collisions.

Here’s another way to look at it: IN ORLANDO IN 2003, THERE WERE MORE COLLISIONS BY GETTING REAR ENDED (19) THAN THERE WERE FOR ALL OF THE COLLISIONS COMBINED FOR BOTH THE BIKE LANE AND THE SHOULDER.

In fact there were also more collisions for road riders than for sidewalk riders. Thus, we conclude, riding in the road is the most dangerous place to ride.

The Three Marks of An Advocate

Originally, this post was going to be called the more offensive, “you are not an advocate,” but for once I’m not being offensive for the sake of being offensive.

The germ of the post started when a friend of mine was giving a speech talking about all the advocacy going on and my heart sank because I realized that a lot of energy being put into “advocacy” to me was not advocacy at all.

Unlike other posts (I’m looking at you e-scooters), I don’t wish to get into arguments over the meanings of words.

Thus, for now I’ll let people who talk to one person to get them to ride to work a few days a week think of themselves as an “advocates”.

Personally, though, I do NOT consider myself as an advocate. Not only do I refrain from individual advocacy, but I do not do the hard work that it would take to consider msyelf a full blow advocate. I do think of myself as a researcher for advocacy or if advocates are lawyers, I’m a paralegal.

But there are things you can do to become a real advocate.

1. Data driven: Real advocacy is based on facts and numbers. If you don’t do your research then you don’t know what you’re talking about. This is the main problem I have with VCism; it’s too much of a religion to do proper research. Even their papers are distorted by bizarre question begging that only a zealot can stomache.

2. It has measurable goals: It’s great that you want your friends to bicycle, but what’s success? One friend? All of them? How do you know when things are getting better? Cycling advocacy has been around for decades and mode share has been flat or declining for many years. IF MODE SHARE DOES NOT INCREASE THEN CYCLING ADVOCATES HAVE WASTED THEIR TIME. Weaker advocates avoid having goals because that way they don’t get called out on their lack of progress. When they are forced to make goals, they aim low as to pre-emtively avoid feeling like a failure. Good advocates look at what’s a hard goal then they aim higher. Often they exceed everyone’s expectations. Quisling advocates have vague goals like “rights to the road” that are not only not measurable, but they mean almost nothing which allows them to have a free hand to crush infrastructure under the cloak of darkness.

3. People skills: good advocates know that after one has goals and research on how to get there, the way to convince people is marketing. Poor advocates focus on facts and figures when making presentations. Good advocates work on getting their audience to have faith and conviction in their goals and their ability to get there.

I’m sure there are more things that make a good advocate, but off the top of my head, these are the top three.

Safe Routes For Seniors

Last Friday, I had the great luck to meet someone wearing a Velvet Underground t-shirt. Who does that?

Of course, I had to talk with her, and we had a great things to share including sharing our favorite bands; she likes the Sonic Youth, too. I wound up giving Mars Volta another shot!

The best thing about it was that she, too, had a data driven approach. This is super-important in the world of advocacy. I’ll talk more about this in another post.

Later, I got an email which has some great ideas on advocacy.

I had all ready talked about how we should get young children cycling safely with infrastructure in order to delay childhood obesity. Clearly, the current system is destroying our children’s health and their chance at a happy future.

However, we shouldn’t for get the seniors or “the other end of the spectrum.”

Here’s what my new friend said, “…the other end of the spectrum is a perfect storm of opportunity for bolstering support.

Considering that the population of seniors 65+ in SD is projected to skyrocket 104% by 2030 and we are living longer, now is the time to start focusing on health interventions that promote exercise (i.e. cycling) and fostering an environment safe for cycling.

After all, what good is a longer life expectancy if our quality of life is poor?

Remaining active is a key factor of healthy aging and helps to prevent a host of negative health outcomes, which is crucial for maintaining a high quality of life into old age. Furthermore, there are studies that prove it’s never too late to begin exercising to see positive health benefits.”

Repost: Brilliant Allies in the VC Nonsense Fest

I love this blog and I wanted to comment for a long time:

http://citymaus.tumblr.com/post/50366590032/billdav

“Exactly. Bicycles are not cars and should not abide by the same rules because the same rules do not work for two things that function differently. Gotta change the stupid vehicle code that forces people to become “vehicular cyclists”.”

I thought, yes, my prayers are answered. Finally, finally, I don’t have to hear stupid shit like: “Forester had good ideas for his time” or the insipid: “I see things both way” or “I want infrastructure, but we need to ride vehicularly now!”

NO!

As my friend said, “I rode for two years, and I followed every traffic law to the letter. Now I do what _feels_ safe and I have not had an accident in five years.”

NOTE: UNBOUND LEGAL DOES NOT RECOMMEND BREAKING TRAFFIC LAWS. RIDE AT YOUR OWN RISK. BLAH BLAH WITH THE BLAH BLAH!

Then the silly enemy piped in: “Vehicular cycling works once you fully understand and utilize it.”

“I hate those dumb commentors who just talk about their personal experiences. I didn’t even say anything to provoke some personal response from some random probably old guy.

but, yeah, seems i did with the term “vehicular cycling”. gyahhd these stupid old men still exist (ie. john forester and his cohorts).”

YES!! Fills me with joy!

Here’s the best point at last: “If you fully understood vehicular cycling, you would know that it exists to prevent bicycle infrastructure from being built.”

YES!

Tell it like it is.

Finally, I feel like I’ve been release from my echo chamber!

Savage Cycling: A New Group To Hate

This morning, I was thinking a lot about hate for cyclists and that there’s no group that I belong to which can get hatred.

Thus, I have created a group of my own to be despised by all: savage cyclist!

Savage cyclists are not to be confused with hipsters. Savages think of their bicycles not as a fashion accessory but as their very life itself.

All the men have beards and are sweaty. All the women can fix every aspect of their bicycle.

We aren’t vegan and don’t ride because “it’s good for the environment”, but we’ll toss that out there if it will tweak someone who doesn’t like us.

We don’t follow traffic laws. We don’t harass other cyclists for their behavior and we don’t see ourselves as representatives. We just ride. We’re on bikes, which equals dork in Hollywood. If we really cared what motorists thought of us, we’d just get cars.

Savage cyclists are practical.

We wear whatever the fuck we want. This being said, we usually aren’t too pretty. We don’t really care what you think about our appearance. Hell, I ride around with a garbage bag bungied to my bike, do you think I care?

Savage cyclists are often fast and always proud.

We aren’t vegan: we have no dietary restrictions and have been known to kill our food with our bare hands. We eat bare handed, too.

What did you expect? We’re savages.

Savage cyclists are very close to being homeless and sometimes we are, but unlike homeless, we don’t cycle because we have to. We don’t hate cars and we don’t see our bikes are replacements.

We don’t hate anyone. We don’t judge anyone.

We’d rather ride then sit around, but when we do open our mouths, it’s probably something you never heard before and thus is considered “offensive” by both the softer cyclists and softie motorists.

When we ride, we ride Ninja Style. We are happy riding everywhere; it doesn’t matter if it’s a high speed road or cycle track, if there are peddles, we’ll turn them.

Questions for the Government on Infrastructure

I’d like to know the answer to these:

New Note 435

1. What are the list of projects for cycling which are backlogged?

2. How are areas selected for cycling projects? What criteria is used? How do we know whether sharrows, cycle tracks, bike lanes or other treatments are appropriate?

3. What regulatory hurdles are stopping these projects? Specifically which laws impact which pieces of infrastructure which are identified in #1 are stopping us? Which specific language in the law which stop these bottlenecks?

4. What fiscal hurdles are there? That is how much per project? Where is current money coming from? Who has said “no” to giving money to projects? Are there other places to get the money, but not the staff to write grants?

5. If the bike projects were going at full speed, how many extra staffers are needed? Which positions should be filled to get things going at full speed?

6. What possible ways can the public sabotage an infrastructure plan? Are there legal or other objections that they could raise? If so, what are they? What plans are in place to meet objections. For example, if a private person or business sues, is there money allocated to fight a legal battle? Is it possible to legally build infrastructure before a case is settled? If there is no legal protection, why not? Are there other things that need to be thought of in order to preempt public pressure to with hold cycling infrastructure?

7. Are there any other hurdles or challenges that are unique to cycling infrastructure? Or if the above challenges were met should we expect to see infrastructure on the ground in the next six months? Or are there other things not yet covered?

Cycling Virtues: Patience

Cycling Virtues: Patience

There’s a saying that “patience is a virtue” which is kind of weak because it should be obvious that it is.

The fact that we need to declare it such shows how low on our scale this has become.

However, the love for patience outside of modern life seems near universal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patience

“Patience and fortitude are prominent themes in Judaism.”

“In the Christian religion, patience is one of the most valuable virtues of life.”

“Patience in Islam is one of the best and most valuable virtues of life.”

“In Buddhism, patience (Skt.: kshanti; Pali: khanti) is one of the “perfections” (paramitas) that a bodhisattva trains in and practices to realize perfect enlightenment (bodhi).”

“Patience is recognized within Hinduism in the Bhagavad Gita.”

So why are we so impatient.

I’d argue that advertising and our culture of forced mobility has been a direct attack on patience.

Whenever, you see something about making things faster, more efficient, or labor saving, you see someone promoting impatience.

I saw this obsession with speed and disdain for the wonders of patience invading the cycling world both in the promotion of scooters posing as bicycles (the so-called e-bikes) as well as in _Effective Cycling_ where Forester does the math to see if cycling commuting is worth the time.

But what is “patience”?

To me, it’s being happy wherever you are and whatever you are doing.

Riding my bicycle home is a wonderful experience.

So when people complain about how long it takes to get anywhere on a bicycle, I hear “I hate spending so much time on a wonderful experience.”

Patience, to me, includes happiness with how things are. So the whole consumer cycle which we are all trapped in, including many cyclists, does not mix with patience.

There’s a saying in the bike world that “the number of bikes you need is how many you have plus one.”

I feel that the number of bikes that I need is one.

There is much, much more to patience such as the Buddhist practice of remaining calm even when attacked and insulted. Clearly, I have much work to do on this one.

This is one of the few views that I think meshes perfectly with VCism. When I do ride on our crappy streets which are build with no concern for cycling, I still am happy. I don’t talk about it too much because good advocacy practice is often different from personal development practice.

Also, if VCists really walked the “we can ride anywhere” meme they’d be more than happy to teach cycling in the “door zone” (sic), on sidewalks, on cycle tracks, and on multi-use paths. I do ride on all of these including busy streets with joy.

Finally, hills are the places of greatest practice of patience. Anyone who wants to tell you hills are stopping cyclists are promoting the vice of impatience, and they ought to be ashamed of themeselves.

I do believe, like all major world religions, that patience is one of the highest virtues and that we ought to stop “rebelling against god” and to stop motoring and to get on bicycles.

Cycling Savvy Has Found Strong Towns!

And the result is the usual blend of nonsense and made up shit.

http://www.strongtowns.org/strong-towns-podcast/2013/3/28/show-130-the-federal-connection.html

At first, I found the comment to be highly intriging:

“There seems to be a widespread mental block against looking at a problem as anything but a deficiency of SOMETHING and the solution as anything but acquiring more of that SOMETHING. There might be some debate about what that SOMETHING is, but it is always assumed without question that, whatever IT is, the problem stems entirely from not having enough of IT and the solution is to get more of it, without regard to any other factors.”

Sounds good.

I definitely fall into this camp as well. Let’s see what the other paradigm is!

“…As I teach (http://cyclingsavvy.org), it is still safe and easy to bike on almost all of our current roads.”Walking is a basic activity of life for humans and all other legged creatures. It does not require any infrastructure. The infrastructure required for biking is pretty minimal: a smooth strip of land. People were walking since there were people and people were biking more than 100 years ago, well before there was any notion of “bike/walk infrastructure”.

What!? If we need more education is this not the SOMETHING that they spoke of above. Color me highly confused. This comment which seeks to break out of the horrible duality paradigm falls into the very same duality.

“I use quotes because I think that the notion of “bike/walk infrastructure” is kind of ridiculous.”

LTRs know that this is part of the catachism for being a VC DB.

On the other hand, after riding in great infastructure as well as walking on it, I feel that good infrastructure is AWESOME. And it is still my SOMETHING. I want more!

“Walking is a basic activity of life for humans and all other legged creatures. It does not require any infrastructure. The infrastructure required for biking is pretty minimal: a smooth strip of land. People were walking since there were people and people were biking more than 100 years ago, well before there was any notion of “bike/walk infrastructure”.

All good stuff. I totally agree!

“What does require substantial infrastructure is driving motor vehicles. And as a society, we have built so much infrastructure to accommodate driving motor vehicles, and to make driving motor vehicles as easy as possible, that we have destroyed our older, simpler habitat in which it was easy to things to do a simple thing like walk (WALK!). The problem is one of excess, not deficiency.”

Yes!! Good.

But then they go back to the whole class horseshit.

“… it is still safe and easy to bike on almost all of our current roads.”

No it is not. That’s a total lie. In fact, many people who are highly intelligent, can’t figure it out or just give up. In fact, google engineers found biking to work to be a veritable puzzle where they had to talk to a single cyclist to get the sacred lore. To say that this is easy is a cruel lie.

“It turns out that nobody at his new company knew whether it was practical either. Forty years ago, much of the peninsula was farm country and bucolic suburbs, but the prolonged tech boom has crammed more cars and more roads into the Bay Area. And in a strange way, all of this transit development has made it trickier for cyclists, who prize flat, low-traffic, unimpeded thoroughfares…”

“…Eventually, they heard about a legendary Google biker named Joe Gross, who’d mapped out a route from San Francisco that included a detour through the parking lot of a horse racing track. “

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/google-bikes/all/

While it’s wonderful that they figured this out, the whole thing sounds like a complicated nasty hack. How did they motor to work? They just jumped on the freeway and followed the signs. Why aren’t there signs pointing them to google? Because we want more of SOMETHING.

Yes, I would like some more way finding signs, please.

” The biggest contributor to the problem for biking is a harmful social norm, one that (as Peter Norton describes in his book, Fighting Traffic) was created in the ’20s through automobile industry campaign. “

No! That’s not the problem. The problem is that PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO MIX IT UP WITH HIGH SPEED TRAFFIC BECAUSE IT’S LOUD SMELLY, AND OFTEN DEADLY.

“The next biggest contributor is a deficiency of education, which was once more common.”

“Lack of education” sounds nice, but in this context, it’s actually code for someone who’s out of step with the entire world. Complaining the vast majority of the population isn’t “educated” about cycling is nonsense. Most of us can ride a bicycle, but we prefer not to risk our lives doing it. No set of expensive and proprietary classes is going to change this. Classes have been around for decades and they do nothing but train the next generation of advocates to be contemptuous of normal people who just want to get some excercise and to work and back safely, comfortably, and efficiently.

Also, it’s a contradiction. If riding a bicycle is so easy, why do we need classes?

” But by disregarding the need for a rigorous understanding of the problem, we come up with proposed solutions that are ineffective and often counterproductive. There is a wealth of information on counterproductive bike infrastructure.”

Please point to it, and I’ll read it. I try to familiarize myself with all the available literature.

Also, note that the whole duality, education good, infrastructure can be good but often sucks mentality. How about the notion that Savvy Cycling (sic) is deficient and counterproductive? That’s what I believe, that Savvy Cycling sucks.

I don’t know the details of the classes, because I am not allowed to see their holy texts unless I pay, just like some other religions, but I do know that the people who espouse these classes are always uninformed when it comes to designing good streets.

“Even if we assume that the money designated for “bike/walk infrastructure” is well spent, it is still just a tiny band-aid on the problem caused all of the other transportation money.”

No, well build infrastructure is a game changer. Once we have infrastructure, we’re done. People will learn to cycle by themselves, and we’ll realize that we don’t need useless propaganda like Savvy Cycling.

“It is ridiculous to ask for more money to fix a problem out of the same fund that is sustaining the problem in the first place. “

This person sounds like they have Multiple Personality Disorder. They went to say that there could be good infrastructure, and now they say that this “sustains the problem.” If so, how to fix things then?

Instead of building good infrastructure, we could:

1. Continue to block good infrastructure and allow anti-cycling things to be built. This is the common “old guard” VC DB tactic. As Forrester said, to raise any kind of doubt in infrastructure, including the threat of lawsuits in order to make sure we get nothing built.

(These days are over. People are on to your old tricks.)

2. Build nothing and allow no roads to be maintained, effectively going back to the Stone Ages.

This is also a non-starter, so building good infrastructure, is really the only sane choice for someone who’s not peddling a useless class that would be made totally obsolete by good infrastructure.

” If someone takes your money and says they’re going to use it to buy a knife to stab you with, you don’t ask them to pick up some band-aids for you while they’re out. “

Wow! This is the heart of the problem. It’s a belief that “government is evil and anything that gets built with cycling involved will be bad.” This is wrong. We have one of the most open and transparent governments in history.

Yet, this belief that the government can’t do anything right or is actively hostile towards cyclists is pervasive in the classes approach.

Not only is this view wrong, but it’s insane. If the government is against you then you can do nothing to protect yourself. A class won’t help.

The fact is the government is made up of many different people. The vast majority of people like cycling as an option. There is no real bias against cycling in the left nor on the right.

People pick their mode rationally. They are not as stupid or as uneducated as Cycling Savvy makes them out to be.

In fact, Cycling Savvy people have lots of contempt for the average person. I have recently listened to part of Dan’s video on the fabled “door zone” and the contemptuous and self-superior laughter at an average cyclist’s attempt to navigate the scary streets by riding outside of traffic. To me, that’s an intelligent and rational response, but cycling savvy douches know everything so they say to ride in traffic even if it’s around a blind curve!

Not me. When there’s a blind curve, I’m on the sidewalk b/c I know that people tend to ride on the inside and that it’s a matter of time before I get hit in this manner. So when someone does die, while riding in the lane around a blind curve, I’m laying it at the feet of these Cycling Savvy and other VC DBs.

DON’T RIDE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD. DON’T BE AN IDIOT AND GET YOURSELF KILLED!

“You ask, Why build schools in unsafe places and then try to fix them and make them safer?”

I totally agree with this.

” It’s not like they’re just naturally unsafe. They’re unsafe because we built them that way, and at great cost. It’s not like we couldn’t afford to make them safe at the time. They were safe to begin with until we spent a lot of money to do stuff that made them unsafe.”

Do they read my blog? I totally agree with this.

But now that the schools are where they are and the roads are the way they are, they need to be fixed. If we are going to check out of the “fixing the roads” business and proffer only useless classes, then we are part of the problem as well.

Thus, I find this comment highly contradictory. On one hand, we have the recognition that money has been spent to make things insanely dangerous. Then we have the fight against making them safe. Then we have the notion that we can somehow go back and time and rebuild things. I just don’t get it.

I suggest that we study those who have taken dangerous areas and fixed them. In cases where we don’t know about how to fix things, this is a great opportunity to build better infrastructure. Let’s stop wasting our time criticizing other cyclist’s riding styles and focus on fixing things so we naturally can figure out, without lameass classes, how to ride safely and effectively by ourselves.

Door Zone Problem: Solved!

A well known fear that causes people to not ride a bicycle is the “door zone.” This is actually an artificially created space due to faulty door design.

For decades, standard design for cycling lanes puts cyclists next to parallel parked cars. This should be a safe option because the cars are motionless, and it keeps the bicycles away from faster moving, motor vehicle traffic.

However, there are a great deal of collisions, 100% of which are due to motorists not looking before they open their doors.

There have been numerous “public awareness campaigns”, “educational classes”, and the cycling community has even decided that, despite the law being on their side, that the blame and punishment for doorings should fall on the shoulders of cyclists.

Since motorists are unable to take the time nor care to open their doors in a safe manner and law enforcement has been soft on dooring crime _even when the cyclists died due to the motorist’s negligence_, we need to look to other solutions to the problem.

Thankfully, we have had the solution for over fifty years, but for some reason we have failed to implement it.

Long before the wide spread use of safety belts and air bags, all standard safety equipment in American cars, we still have failed to adopt the Gull Wing Door as mandatory for new cars and trucks.

“Gull-wing door (German: Flügeltüren) is an automotive industry term describing car doors that are hinged at the roof rather than the side, as pioneered by the 1952 Mercedes-Benz 300SL race car (W194) and its road-legal version (W198) introduced in 1954.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gull-wing_door

There is no good reason why this was not adopted, for all automobiles, at this time. There are many good reasons why it should be adopted now.

Meeting Objections:

Cost.

Cyclists and cities are bearing a huge cost right now due to the common, faulty doors which open into the street. The costs are in terms of totally preventable injury and deaths that we are promoting by our reluctance to make this sensible change mandatory in new automobiles. Furthermore, there is a high cost in terms of lost opportunities for people to ride a bicycle. Too many people are told that they should stay “away from the door zone” and ride in the middle of the travel lane. Rather than taking this risk, many people are choosing to drive instead, and they bear the cost in both monetary and health terms. The cities must accodate the extra vehicle traffic caused by these people who wisely choose to avoid the unfair dilema of getting rear ended by a car of by getting hit by a car door (then getting rear ended by a car). Cities bear the costs both indirectly in terms of extra traffic, noise, accidents, and parking that excessive motoring causes, all due to the lack of safe space for cyclists. Also, there’s the direct cost of having to create “buffers” to protect cyclists from the door zone. Each of these costs adds up to billions annually; the total cost is impossible to estimate. It only makes sense that those who choose to motor should be protected from themselves by providing a gull wing door which will make it impossible for them to suffer the pain and guilt of injuring someone.

Thus, the opportunity cost for not doing something is very high. People are paying quite a bit of money just so we can support defective doors.

Inevitability:

The history of motoring is a history of increasing safety standards. The NHTSA has played a role in this area, and it should continue to be the leader. In other countries, there is research into making motor vehicles safer to non-motorists, and it’s only a matter of time before this is standard for foreign cars. Once again, the American car industry will fall behind, and we’ll watch as foreign competitors, once again, enjoy safer, classier cars, while raking in American dollars for their products.

Let’s get in front of foreign competition once again, and have the NHTSA, once again, become the leader in safety rather than being a relic which only seeks to protect American motorists from themselves to the detriment of safety, quality of life, reason, and common sense.

E-Bikes Are Not Bicycles V: Gloves Come Off

Previously, on Cycling Unbound, I was acccused this for my original anti-e-bike post: “It manages to cram in almost every anti ebike sentiment I have ever heard to the point of being just plain funny. Can anyone else smell the stench of inadequacy from the poster?”

Not by a long, long shot!

But I will rise to the challenge now that the guantlet has been thrown down.

I can show you how e-bikes are the ugly duckling of transportation. No matter what the advantages of e-bikes there’s something else that does it better.

Yes, I know it seems unfair to compare every vehicle to e-bikes. Too bad. It’s unfair to lie to people about a shitty form of transportation. It’s unfair to claim to sell these things to “increase mobility in those who are unable to ride a bicycle” then have the bike paths illegally over run by 20 something assholes who can ride a regular bike but choose not to because they have been decieved by unethical advertising. It’s unfair that e-bikes tell people that they will be healthy then they wind up sitting on their ass and getting fat anyway.

Also, e-bike riders think that they are superior to all modes in all ways so they beg me to make this kind of comparison. I oblige.

1. E-bikes are slower than everything else on the road including bicycles:

“…a reasonably fit rider can ride at 50 km/h (30 mph) on flat ground for short periods.” Similarly, a scooter does 30 MPH. Does that make e-bike riders feel “inadequate and jealous”?

E-bikes are throttled, by law, at 20 MPH and are thus slower.

2. Greenwashing. Bicycles shift pollution from the street to “dirty coal” power plants while cyclists generally get their energy from food which they grow themselves using compost from their toilets.

3. No crash protection unlike a car which has air bags and crumple zones.

4. Can’t read while riding an e-bike unlike what I do on buses and on my bicycle on bike paths.

5. No protection from rain.

6. Too fast for bike lanes and they are banned from bike paths.

7. Lack of excercise. Just as bad for you as sitting in a car, but wastes more time on your commute as they are vastly slower than cars thus you waste even more time in transit. Hello obesity.

8. No sex appeal. Cyclists look dorky on our bikes but our bodies are to die for. Motorcyclists are sexy. And you can fuck inside of all but the smallest and messiest of automobiles.

9. Promote bad values.

a. Impatience and hurry sickness. Not all the references on how much faster their commutes are compared with regular bicycles. Note a typical e-bike rider is slow on a regular bike because they are out of shape while average daily cyclists soon adjust to their commute and become stronger and faster every day they ride.

b. Laziness.

c. Dishonesty and cruelty. E-bike riders like to pretend they have a normal bicycle then they laugh at us while they zoom up a hill. I like to mock people in lycra, too, but I don’t go around lying to them. Also, the seldom used peddles are there to pretend that their under-powered e-scooter is a bicycle.

Summary: When it comes to downsides, e-bikes have all the same downsides of bicycles. When it comes to upsides, bicycles have more upsides than e-bikes. Most of the virtues of e-bikes are shared by higher powered motorized vehicles which share little to none of the downsides to e-bikes.

Get a smart car if you don’t want smog (next to you, the power plants still make it to power smart car). If you want to go fast get real motorcycle. If you want to pretend you are riding a bicycle and saving the planet while really riding a dorkier and lower powered motorcycle then get an e-bike.