On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 6:28:35 AM UTC+1, Chalo wrote:
I don't want special bike-specific infrastructure. I want the cars gone, restricted to special motorsports facilities during limited hours and with extremely heavy taxation to help mitigate their pollution and noise.

You might have to emigrate to that utopia, Chalo. American infrastructure is unsuitable to your dream; it is very likely a complete political non-starter too. I have a little experience. I've been car-free since 1990, and I get along just fine, but I have worked at home almost all my life and live in a place where bus drivers think it normal to drop me in front of my house rather than at the top of the hill; and it is notable that in that generation since I gave up the car, the cars have grown bigger, there are more of them, and in more of them than back then there is only one person. Back then my mates and I thought nothing of cycling after dinner on the main roads and returning at midnight in pitch dark; now we can't go on those roads in broad daylight because the traffic is too thick and too fast-moving. Fortunately there are plenty of lanes and small roads to ride in greater tranquility.

Jay, someone put up a wooden cross beside the main drag out of town on the verge at a dangerous crossroads. Into it was burned "John Forester" and some dates. Unfortunately, County engineers building a roundabout there bulldozed the trees and the cross before I could return to photograph it. I wonder if it was a celebration of his life, or some weird joke, or totally unrelated: Forester is not an uncommon name to these islands and it is done to put some small memorial beside the road when someone dies on it; in fact, I often cycle past a formal if small gravestone where a traveller (gypsy) family buried someone literally right up next to the tarmac of the road, not to mention on the other side of town cycling past a large cemetery on the gate which the County Council has affixed a notice to the effect that they will not be responsible for the consequences of DIY grave digging...

Andre Jute
Conservationist (not the same thing as an environmentalist at all atall*)

*An emphatic neologism often heard in these parts which I shall have immortalised the next time a chum makes a dictionary of slang