Moronic Cyclist Stupidity!

In article , Dennis P.
Harris wrote:

On Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:19:40 -0400 in rec.bicycles.misc, Luke
wrote:

Bloor is a major east/west artery in the heart of the city, it bisects
the U of T campus, it is a commercial and entertainment corridor; and
it links up with the bike lane on the Bloor St Viaduct, a major route
for commuting cyclists: IT IS THE MOST LOGICAL PLACE FOR BIKE LANES.

bike are traffic. they don't need to be stuck in a cycling
ghetto on the edge of the street where they can be doored and
squeezed against the curb by bus and truck drivers.

You're right. Through intimidation and duress that's where they're
compelled to ride now, hence the initiative to install *properly
designed* bike ways.

Or, we can just say that a more bicycle friendly city must require of
prospective cyclists that in order to access their own streets they
possess unusually steely nerves, tree trunk sized legs to keep up with
cars, and a generous tolerance for auto imposed hazards and hostility.
Yeah, that's a good way toward beneficial change: discourage those that
contribute to a solution.

bike lanes are useless.

Yawn.

...a wider outside lane with room for
cyclists is actually useful.


No kidding. But around here such lanes when they exist are given over
to auto parking, and direct cyclists to ride within the door zone.

In article ,
Sir Ridesalot writes:
Hi there.

I am 57 and I am a long time resident of Toronto and am an avid
bicyclist who commutes 30 kms daily via bicycle.

I saw in the Saturday, May 31, 2008 edition of the Toronto Sun that
200 cyclists decided to have a protest demanding bicycle lanes on
Bloor Street. In their infinite wisdom (full sarcasm mode here) they
decided to ride their bicycles up the Jarvis Street on-ramp around 7
PM. Apparently they took over three lanes of the westbound Gardiner
Expressway - YES! you read that right EXPRESSWAY! Some of these
cyclists even had children with them.

No doubt a bunch of car drivers also did.

What on earth were these people thinking? The Gardiner Expressway is
an elevated road that is usually quite busy. They are lucky no one was
injured or killed.

Same for the car drivers on there.

Bicycle lanes on Bloor Street? Are these people serious? Bloor Street
is a *VERY* busy east to west arterial road that does not have room
for bicycle lanes.

Take a lane away from the car drivers, and do some re-striping.

If the city of Toronto were to remove the parking
along this road it possibly could help traffic flow better because you
would have at least two lanes each way.

Blocking traffic on the Gardiner Expressway is a really good counter-
productive way to protest. I wonder how many motorists who were held
up by these irresponsible cyclists or read the newspaper about it now
think all cyclists are idiots? Such behaviour is not conducive to
promoting bicycling (and cyclists) as a sane and efficient
transportation alternative.


Putting-up inner-city freeways is a most evil impingement
upon citizenry.

I find it really hard to believe that any parent would take a child up
onto the Gardiner Expressway either on a bicycle or in a bicycle
trailer whilst *KNOWING THAT TRAFFIC WAS NOT BEING STOPPED BEFORE THAT
ONRAMP!*

What, is the Gardiner Expressway some G-d-given thing to drivers?
Anyways, yes -- we /must/ think of the children! For G-d's sake,
won't anyone think of the children?!

What you Torontonians need is for some Vancouverites to come over
there and rid your town of expressways. Open the city up.
Render it accessible. Make it a place more for people than for
cars. Tear down a bunch of those concrete overhead expressways,
and let some sunlight in. You Canadians could use a good hit
of vitamin D anyways. We Vancouverites have long had to put up
with you Torontonians coming over here and trying to turn Vancouver
into another Toronto. Fortunately our LotusLand lifestyle co-opts
you guyz before you get the chance to do too much damage. We'd come
over there and fix you guyz up, but ... shrug we don't feel like it.
We're happy enough where we are.


As far as I am concerned all 200 of these cyclists demonstrated
irresponsible, negligence and pure idiocy.

So do the POV drivers on there. And I'm sure they daily
outnumber the cyclists by a very wide margin.

Three of them were
arrested. Pity that. There should have been far more.

Meanie!

There would have
been but many of the cyclists threw their bicycles over the fence at
the Dunn and Jameson exit and escaped on foot.

Kewl. I hope they got their bikes back.

Unfortunately the
responsible cyclists are the ones who will be the ones to experience
the rise in driver ire that this protest is liable to have generated.

Bull****!

Driver /ire/? Gimme a break. If anybody should have ire,
it's the victims of self-centred pigs who greedily keep
other people from being able to get around.

But ire gets nowhere except for raising blood pressure.
Better to just make positive change.

Just get rid of the Gardiner Expressway and its ilk, and
there'll be no further problems on there. Then maybe you'd
have a civil city again, instead of a massive interchange,
omnipresently impeding everybody's progress from A to B,
except commuters who just shoot through your city as if it
wasn't even there.

Freeways within cities are garrots to the citizens.
You've gotta expect some self-defence & fightin' back.
Even from otherwise docile Canadians.

Actually, it's kinda nice to see Canadians finally
getting their danders up about sumpthin'.


cheers,
Tom

--
Nothing is safe from me.
I'm really at:
tkeats curlicue vcn dot bc dot ca

On Sat, 7 Jun 2008 08:24:37 -0700 in rec.bicycles.misc, "Bill
Sornson" wrote:

Why did you delete any and all /context/ to the above /opinion/?!?

because the context for your idiotic opinion doesn't matter. i
don't know why you fell out of my killfile, but you're back there
now.

sorry, but i'm just not going to waste time and bandwidth reading
your nitpicking quibbling crap.

On Sat, 7 Jun 2008 16:31:34 -0700 in rec.bicycles.misc,
(Tom Keats) wrote:

We Vancouverites have long had to put up
with you Torontonians coming over here and trying to turn Vancouver
into another Toronto. Fortunately our LotusLand lifestyle co-opts
you guyz before you get the chance to do too much damage.

yeah, it's the rain that does it. makes brain cells actually
grow. cycling in the wet makes us tougher too.

and it rains even more where i live, a little further up the
ecotopia coast.