On Sunday, June 14, 2020 at 5:08:17 PM UTC-7, John B. wrote:
On Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:37:06 -0700 (PDT), jbeattie
wrote:

On Sunday, June 14, 2020 at 9:42:52 AM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 6/13/2020 8:52 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, June 13, 2020 at 10:14:16 AM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 6/13/2020 1:02 PM, wrote:
On Saturday, June 13, 2020 at 6:50:45 PM UTC+2, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 6/13/2020 9:59 AM, AMuzi wrote:
On 6/12/2020 11:31 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 6/12/2020 2:51 PM, AMuzi wrote:
On 6/12/2020 11:55 AM, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 6/12/2020 12:41 PM, wrote:
On Friday, June 12, 2020 at 4:41:57 PM UTC+2, Frank
Krygowski wrote:
On 6/12/2020 6:09 AM, wrote:
On Friday, June 12, 2020 at 12:06:56 AM UTC+2, Frank
Krygowski wrote:
On 6/11/2020 4:32 PM, wrote:
On Thursday, June 11, 2020 at 9:35:56 PM UTC+2,
jbeattie wrote:
On Thursday, June 11, 2020 at 11:13:38 AM UTC-7,
wrote:
On Thursday, June 11, 2020 at 7:23:34 PM UTC+2,
Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 6/11/2020 11:53 AM, AMuzi wrote:
https://bikerumor.com/2018/06/23/com...nx-gx-x01-xx1/





For those who fondly recall 13~17 freewheels,
there's a new 10~50 cassette!

50 teeth! Wow, I never thought I'd see the day when
my 34 tooth biggest
cog was considered too small.

I'm getting a little out of date. I gotta catch up.

--
- Frank Krygowski

Ah, you give us a voucher to make fun of your dorky
handlebar bag and all the other stuff you bolted to
your bike one more time. Keep up the good work.

You are not a true utility cyclist.Â* Be quiet. You
probably wear a helmet, also known as a head-shackle.

-- Jay Beattie.

I'm certainly not a true utility cyclist. Hauling
gallons of milk or crates of beer seems silly to me if
you have a car on your driveway.

That's interesting. The U.S. currently has an
enthusiastic industry and
publicity machine saying we should build
Netherlands-style bike paths
everywhere.

Why? Because then people will stop driving their cars!


--
- Frank Krygowski

What has that to do with the fact that I prefer using my
car for groceries and not my bike. I only use my bike
for non fun rides if it is more practical.

??? Your question amazes me. You are a direct rebuttal to
their claims.

Of course you don't use your bike if your car is "more
practical." And
as I recall, you mocked things like handlebar bags - so
carrying more
than one liter volume means your car will almost always
be "more
practical." For almost all Americans, that is also true.
They will use
it as an excuse to never bike for utility.

Also, any trip requiring muscular exertion will make
their car "more
practical." Temperatures above 22 C will be too hot to be
practical.
Temperatures below 20 C will be too chilly. Rain, or the
possibility of
rain will have the same effect. So will snow, of course.
And darkness.

The U.S. will never be a bicycling nation. Your own
preference for the
car, except for "sport" rides, even in a nation renowned
for its cycling
culture adds evidence.

--
- Frank Krygowski

Last year:
mileage car: 7500 km
mileage bike(s): 12000 km.

Give me the numbers for utility riding, as opposed to sport
riding.



You're back in the realm of taste and fashion there.

Who's to say that one cyclist's experience is better or
more pure or more admirable than another's? Not me.

My point immediately above was that America's dominant
"taste and fashion" will be driving cars for the foreseeable
future. That's true even if quasi-protected bikeways are
magically built to every destination.

If a 12000 km/year cyclist won't bike to the grocery in a
country famed for world-record bike facilities, the average
American isn't going to do it no matter what gets built in
the right-of-way.

That's fact. Whether it's good or bad can be discussed, but
the good or bad is beside the point.


I disagree.

I think you disagree because you're not understanding my point, or my
context. Perhaps I didn't write clearly enough.

The specific point I was making had nothing to do with practicality of
any type of bike. It was about the propaganda avalanche claiming that IF
we just build the right kind of bike lanes, THEN Americans will switch
from cars to bikes in temendous (or at least, very significant) numbers.
In r.b.tech, that's been espoused mostly by Scharf and by Joerg, but
there are organizations daily pumping out that sort of propaganda..


How did we end up with this discussion here? You brought it up again. I didn't see sms or Joerg show up in this thread. Was it too long ago that you could impose your opinion?

Hmm. Should I email you for prior permission regarding points of discussion?

Yes. I vote for Lou to moderate.

And I vote against. A moderator should be moderate. Someone who rails
against putting a bag on a bike used for long rides is in an extreme
fringe.

For you, Frank, everything is deceit or propaganda if it doesn't fit your agenda...

Baloney. You're constructing grossly over-generalized straw men.

which is sometimes opaque and/or contradictory. You want to increase utility cycling, but you rant against basically any facilities.

Really? And yet, I'm almost solely responsible for some local
facilities, and worked on a small committee that's responsible for
another. I've spoken publicly in favor of another besides those, and I
worked on a statewide committee that funded many more.

If you want to rationally discuss facility benefits and detriments,
let's do it. Don's snipe about them in a rambling rant.

Hardly rambling. I don't recall that you have ever endorsed a bicycle facility. Which ones do you endorse in your community versus which ones were actually built?

And unless you are very wealthy, I doubt that you were solely or primarily responsible for any facility. CABs and clubs give testimony, and elected or appointed officials and their staff make the decisions. Maybe your testimony was super-good.


Separated facilities are what account for the NL's high bicycle mode share. There is no question about that...

That's simplistic nonsense, and probably backward. Netherlands' history
and bicycle culture account for its separated facilities. It had high
bike mode share when it had almost no such facilities. And places with
Netherlands-style facilities but without its other attributes still have
tiny mode shares.

WTF? https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...ng-kindermoord The bike facilities in the NL are of relatively recent origin.

A bit more research might be in order as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclin...he_Netherlands
" by the 1890s the Dutch were already building dedicated paths for
cyclists. By 1911, the Dutch owned more bicycles per capita than any
other country in Europe."

But yes, there was a later movement:
This protest movement was known as the Stop de Kindermoord [nl]
(literally "Stop the Child Murder" in Dutch). The success of this
movement, along with other factors, such as the oil shortages of 1973
and the publication of the CROW Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic
turned Dutch government policy around and the country began to
restrict motor vehicles in its towns and cities..."

As an aside, as of 2012 there are something like 35,000 kilometers of
bicycle paths... and 75% of secondary school students cycle to
school, rising to 84% riding for those living within 5 km of school.
Even for distances of 16 km (9.9 mi) or over, some 8% of secondary
school children cycle in each direction to school,

snip

And in Portland we were building dedicated bike roads in the 1890s. https://tinyurl.com/y96hs5p6 The bike roads were better than the car roads. There was a bicycling craze in the 1890s in the US and Europe -- that craze basically vanished with the auto, at least in the US.

In the NL they did keep riding, but numbers dropped after WWII and dropped precipitously after the '60s, and apparently road deaths skyrocketed, resulting in the big infrastructure changes in the '70s and onward. https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2...nfrastructure/

It appears from the video that the modern separated facilities we associate with NL were built after the '70s. To quote the narrator "build it and they will come in the Netherlands." They won't come in Omaha and a lot of other places, and yes, I get it that the US is not the NL (for a lot of reasons), but that doesn't mean some infrastructure isn't worthwhile. It has improved my (pre-COVID) daily commute which is now all bike lane when before it was a painted fog line with 50mph traffic. There are some excellent rail-trials (except for the surge of COVID walkers) -- and some really bad facilities. I'm not sold on infrastructure, but then I'm not the target audience. I would go crazy in NL in a week.

-- Jay Beattie.