NY Times article - Cycling will kill you!

On 11-11-2013, 14:51, Phil W Lee wrote:
Wes Groleau considered Sun, 10 Nov 2013
23:32:58 -0500 the perfect time to write:

On 11-10-2013 20:28, Phil W Lee wrote:
If a driver is following too close and honking, you are being
threatened.
If you flip him the bird, you are clearly not/feeling/ threatened.

How about if I instead whip out the cell phone and take his picture?

Even better if it's video.
Then you get to embarrass them on Youtube, which could even impact
their motor insurance premium if you put the license number in the
description.
By making it searchable in that way, you also provide evidence of the
pattern of misbehaviour for any future victim, which could be crucial
in establishing blame when their behaviour adversely impacts somebody
else.

Even if I do none of that, he's going to spend a few days wondering what
I plan to do with that picture.

In other words, the effects last longer than a little bit of sign
language. Unless he didn't see me whip it out. :-)

--
Wes Groleau

Armchair Activism: http://www.breakthechain.org/armchair.html

On 11-11-2013, 03:07, davethedave wrote:
We can't just blame the truck driver all the time. Cyclists need to be

Of course we can, ...

educated in to not doing stupid stuff like going up the inside of trucks
as well.

.... as long as we're smart enough to still be alive to do so.


--
Wes Groleau

Armchair Activism: http://www.breakthechain.org/armchair.html

On 11-11-2013, 10:10, Jay Beattie wrote:
It's legal in Oregon to pass stopped traffic on the right so long as it is done safely. I pass stopped traffic all the time. It is an ordinary feature of my commute and cuts out ten minutes in a half-mile stretch of basically stopped, downtown traffic. I can't understand cyclists who sit in traffic, twenty cars behind the light and then wait through two or three light cycles. I'll do that if passing is unsafe or impossible, but that is rare.

I might modify my current practice for ten minutes,
but not for ten seconds. Around here, it is quite rare
for me to miss a light due to traffic.

--
Wes Groleau

Armchair Activism: http://www.breakthechain.org/armchair.html

On 11-11-2013, 15:11, davethedave wrote:
[2]I suspect though that you, Frank, may have ancestry involving the land
of pierogi, Żywiec, Zubrowka, Szymanowski and a "W" sounding "ł". I could
of course be wrong.

My wife did. After LONG searching, I gave up on finding info on her
ancestor Victoria Slomianna. Then one day, I discovered the immigration
record by pure accident, looking for something else.

Seems that the clerks in Ellis Island knew about the Polish alphabet, so
they got the first part correct, "SÅ‚omi-" which English-speaking
descendants had written "Slomi-" But they (the clerks) did not know
that Polish names change according to gender, and so they wrote the
masculine form they were accustomed to seeing. "-iany" instead of "-ana"

And then, decades later, indexers who did NOT know anything about Polish
indexed it as "Stomiany"

--
Wes Groleau

Armchair Activism: http://www.breakthechain.org/armchair.html

On 11-11-2013, 15:11, davethedave wrote:
I disagree completely. Being from the land of your ancestors, [1][2] and
a well trained motorcyclist and cyclist. We have always been told to make
progress and filter. If we stop behind a car and wait the police will
speak to us and ask why we are sat there like a lemon taking up valuable
car space, instead of making our way to the front.

If that's the law over there, fine. Over here, if a police officer were
to ask me why I am complying with the law, I would likely say
"to compensate for the scoff-laws who make motorists hate cyclists."

--
Wes Groleau

Armchair Activism: http://www.breakthechain.org/armchair.html

On 11-11-2013, 06:35, John B. wrote:
Sorry, I can't handle that concept, I've always assumed that the
ultimate responsibility for one's survival was oneself.

Good on you. But do you actually believe the majority
of the human race has that much common sense?

--
Wes Groleau

Armchair Activism: http://www.breakthechain.org/armchair.html

On 11-11-2013, 15:31, davethedave wrote:
Not all bike riders disavow responsibility for their own safety just
those with inadequate knowledge and training, who are cosseted by the
artificial feeling of security provided by the white line of the bike
lane. It is however not a knowing abandonment of safety but more naïvety.

Training of some form is I think necessary.

A seemingly irrelevant (bear with me) story:

One of the residents of my house bought groceries and forgot to put away
a bottle of pancake syrup. It sat on the dining table for a week,
fifteen inches in front of the face of anyone who sat there to eat.
Anyone who passed through on the way to the kitchen or laundry room
had it in his field of vision for at least ten seconds.

After a week, I got tired of seeing it there and put it away.

The same day, another resident griped, "We ran out of syrup."

This guy ain't stupid--he aces all his math, computer science, and
Japanese language classes.

Common sense is not "common."

--
Wes Groleau

Armchair Activism: http://www.breakthechain.org/armchair.html

On 11-11-2013, 07:05, Stephen Bauman wrote:
On Sun, 10 Nov 2013 23:48:38 -0500, Wes Groleau wrote:
On 11-10-2013 22:40, Stephen Bauman wrote:
A salute you for your ± 50 degree vertical field of vision, although I
remain skeptical of the empirical methods you used to determine this. I
have 20/15 vision in one eye thanks to a cataract operation. The doctor
told me this vision places me in the top 0.5%.

snip

20/15 means you can identify objects twenty feet away that the so-called
"normal" person can't identify till fifteen feet.
This acuity measurement has absolutely no relationship to width or
height of field.

It does not. It does determine how large traffic sign lettering needs to
be for for people to read them at a certain distance.

The American Optometric Association agrees with me (or rather, I agree
with them). http://tinyurl.com/nhcl57r

Highway traffic control devices are designed to accommodate all motor
vehicle drivers. They are designed for those with +/- 15 degrees of
vertical vision and 20/40 vision. This is overkill for +/- 50 degrees of
vertical vision like you or 20/15 vision like me.

Overkill, yes. Designed so people with poor visual acuity and poor
width of field can still see them. Is this somehow an injustice for
those of us closer to the "standard" ?

Traffic control devices should also be designed for all users: motor
vehicles; bicycles and pedestrians. Unfortunately, they are designed to
speed motor vehicle traffic at the expense of other users. The case of an
inadequate red clearance cycle for traffic signals is but one instance of
this shortcoming.

They have the effect (usually) of benefiting motorists. Whether that is
the intent of non-bicycle-savvy legislators is not worth arguing.

I may have been taught incorrectly, but I was taught that the person IN
the intersection has the right-of-way over the person not in the
intersection, even if he got there illegally.

I've also been taught that it is legal to enter the intersection while
the light is yellow, but that stopping if safely possible is
recommended. On a bike, "not safely possible" is when I'm so close that
attempting to stop would flip the bike.

No doubt there exist motorists who are stupid enough to pop the clutch
on a green light with a cyclist directly in front of them. If I thought
very many of them are lucky enough to stay out of jail (they're
obviously not smart enough), I would be neither driving nor biking.

--
Wes Groleau

Armchair Activism: http://www.breakthechain.org/armchair.html

On 11-11-2013, 00:26, Dan wrote:[i]
Dan writes:
Now, while we're thinking, why should I stop at the stop
sign?

(The usual response to that question is incredulity that
I ask it. If pressed for an answer, the usual answer is,
"Because said so.")

That was not my response when you asked it a few weeks ago.

--
Wes Groleau

Armchair Activism: http://www.breakthechain.org/armchair.html

On Monday, November 11, 2013 5:59:03 PM UTC-5, Wes Groleau wrote:

Even if I do none of that, he's going to spend a few days wondering what
I plan to do with that picture.

In other words, the effects last longer than a little bit of sign
language. Unless he didn't see me whip it out. :-)

The other day, my wife was driving on the freeway while I was in the passenger seat. As she was passing a slow truck, some guy zoomed up behind us at high speed, then sat no further than ten feet behind our rear bumper. Very aggressive tailgating.

I very visibly grabbed my cell phone, turned around and glared at the guy, read his license number out loud a couple times, and pretended to dial and talk.

He immediately dropped back, and when my wife was past the truck and back in the right lane, he went by carefully at a speed barely faster than ours. As he did, I held the phone in photo mode. He proceeded cautiously down the road in front of us until we reached our exit.

I _really_ don't like tailgaters.

- Frank Krygowski