David Feherty: You Rule

The Man Got Hit By a Truck.

And he's livin' on to say awesome stuff like this:

In an 11-day period in June, eight cyclists were struck by Dallas-area motorists. Three of the riders were killed, and one did time in intensive care. The others had “minor injuries” like mine. Ha! Lucky them! Later that month, I witnessed one of Dallas’ finest writing up the cyclist in front of me for going through a three-way stop at a walking pace, an act of gross stupidity by the Police Department that, given the events of earlier that month, further highlighted the astonishingly arrogant and erroneous thinking of city and state officials.

I think that when you get hit by a truck you instantly become right about a lot of things people would have previously ignored. Especially about things which concern traffic safety.

It could just be me, but I doubt it.

Rob Anderson

Jerk of the day.

If you haven't seen his blog yet it's worth a look. He's stopped up a major bike facility improvement in Frisco with a fake bit about a lack of environmental research. It's the perfect example of the abuse of truth by failure to mention scale. His concern is that bike lanes, which will generally remove traffic lanes, will increase congestion and therefore increase pollution.

This is only an issue if:
* The bike lanes go unused. If the cyclists were there, in regular traffic lanes, they were occupying one lane anyway. And if they weren't there, but use the new cycle lanes, then there is less traffic. I know it's the first of those two, but it doesn't matter.
* No one (by percentage, we'll define no one as less than 10%) buys a hybrid. Hybrids don't pollute at rest. They're just that much more efficient from the decreased speed. Although the lost time sure sucks!
* Road use does not change: The roads have to be updated for their real use and their planned use. If road use will increase the congestion point is moot. The city will be building new lanes, or doing something to reduce use, in the future. Now, if these are central areas cycle facilities are a great idea: You probably can't make new lanes for cars. So why not compress traffic by a factor of 10 by getting people on bikes? Because it's impossible? I don't think so. We used to do manual labor, are we so deformed that we can't pedal now?

However, it's much easier to debunk Mr. Anderson: If you read his posts you'll see that he's continually on the attack.

Oregon Bicycle Manualhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

The Manual

I found this in my wanderings today. A pretty good read and it's mostly applicable to most states in the US. It seems like any state could take this, change a few sentences, change the Oregon stuff for their state and have their own bike manual.

All they'd have to do is get past the uninformed voting population that would be shocked to find out that bikes go on the road, not the sidewalk.

New To Cycling

Since this is my first post I thought I'd give a little background on myself with respect to cycling. I bought my first bike (as an adult) in September. I'd known since moving to Lincoln that I wanted to get into cycling, at a minimum, to explore the city.
After several months of mulling it over, and saving, I purchased a new trek road bike (a 1500).

Since then I've ridden around almost all of the cities trails (in later posts I'll clarify what I consider a trail, some things Lincoln calls a "trail" I call a wide sidewalk) and a few of Des Moines' trails.