Who is a real cyclist ?

On Sat, 01 Sep 2018 15:25:58 +0200, Emanuel Berg
wrote:
lou.holtman wrote:

Yesterday just after a corner I came across three cyclist from a bike
club from a neighbouring town and just after I recognized their
teamshirts and said 'hello' I hear 'helmet'. I am not wearing a
helmet when I ride alone on flat terrain, which is becoming rare but
people telling me to wear a helmet **** me off.



Yeah, I think most people would be ****ed off by such an answer no
matter the setting when oneself is saying something polite/neutral and
get the arrogance back.

One has to wonder tho why all this ravage to begin with between
cyclists? Why do they care so much what other cyclists do?

That's immature, right?

I don't know if that happens in other countries, but in the US it is
part of our social Puritan heritage: do right, be seen publicly to do
right and admonish others to do right. The problem, of course, is the
inherent assumption that what we do is right and therefore what others
do differently is wrong. Those of us who are saved are obligated to
enlighten the heathen unwashed.

A friend of mine has a standard response- if someone asks him "where's
your helmet?" his reply is "where are your manners?"

On 9/2/2018 10:33 AM, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 6:56:14 PM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:

About the talking guy: Weird stuff like that happens in other places. I've
had it standing in line at the pharmacy. I couldn't really say "Leave me alone,
I just want to buy my deodorant and pills to cure my ailment." So I said
something like "Uh huh" and hoped he would get the hint. It happens.

Speaking of the pharmacy, the pharmacist at the local supermarket was admiring my pink Peter Sagan t-shirt. He was a fan. https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/12...g?v=1521668774

Crossing threads a bit: At our pharmacy, I'm known as "the guy who rides
the bicycle."


--
- Frank Krygowski

On 9/2/2018 1:19 PM, Tim McNamara wrote:
On Sat, 01 Sep 2018 15:25:58 +0200, Emanuel Berg
wrote:
lou.holtman wrote:

Yesterday just after a corner I came across three cyclist from a bike
club from a neighbouring town and just after I recognized their
teamshirts and said 'hello' I hear 'helmet'. I am not wearing a
helmet when I ride alone on flat terrain, which is becoming rare but
people telling me to wear a helmet **** me off.



Yeah, I think most people would be ****ed off by such an answer no
matter the setting when oneself is saying something polite/neutral and
get the arrogance back.

One has to wonder tho why all this ravage to begin with between
cyclists? Why do they care so much what other cyclists do?

That's immature, right?

I don't know if that happens in other countries, but in the US it is
part of our social Puritan heritage: do right, be seen publicly to do
right and admonish others to do right. The problem, of course, is the
inherent assumption that what we do is right and therefore what others
do differently is wrong. Those of us who are saved are obligated to
enlighten the heathen unwashed.

A friend of mine has a standard response- if someone asks him "where's
your helmet?" his reply is "where are your manners?"

Hah! I used _exactly_ that response once!

(It was in response to a fellow member of our bike club who happened to
see me ride up to a store.)

--
- Frank Krygowski

On 9/2/2018 12:24 PM, Andre Jute wrote:

It's never occurred to you that the entire conception of Vehicular Cycling is a roadie elitism that will forever keep everyone else out of the bicycle-commuting pool precisely because it forces cyclists to keep up with traffic, which everyone but the roadies know is a ludicrous impossibility?

Yeah, just look at these elite roadies: https://cyclingsavvy.org/

Wallow in ignorance and spew it all you want, Jute. I stopped reading
after that paragraph, as usual.

--
- Frank Krygowski

Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 9:33:49 PM UTC+1, Duane wrote:
Andre Jute wrote:
On Wednesday, August 29, 2018 at 11:35:29 AM UTC+1, OK wrote:
Probably a homeless guy with depend on two-wheels is the real cyclist in
my view. Not guys with riding $5k bike on the bike lane who just use bike for
exercise or fun and these guys never use bike for main transporter.
And next real cyclist would be Dutch and Denmark cyclist using for a main transporter.

Mmm. I'm not homeless, but I gave up the car altogether in 1992 and have
cycled everywhere I wanted to go since then.

I don't claim to be a "real cyclist" but I get fed up with assholes who
own several automobiles telling me this or that class of cycling is "real cycling".

Here on RBT the underlying assumption is that only those who ride road
bikes with thin tyres and drop handlebars to work at not less than 25mph
are real cyclists. It's that foolish elitism and its counterproductive
presentation (together with the history of the growth of the automobile
and the associated infrastructure development) which will forever assure
that there will be no mass cycling movement in the States. It's what
makes the question of who are "real cyclists" and therefore the natural
"spokesmen for bicycles" so important. It's why I have consistently
stepped on Krygowski's dumb dream of himself as "a spokesman for
bicycles": he's a mindless moron with a bee in his bonnet.

Andre Jute
Recreational cyclist, and proud of it


Hmm. It seems to me just the opposite here. I’ve never seen someone
saying you have to be a roadie to be a cyclist.

You've never seen Jay (and others -- I'm just picking on Jay because he's
an attorney well able to defend himself) complain that if he's forced to
use the dedicated cycle path, he'll be slowed down by comparison to when
he happily keeps up with the motorized rush hour traffic?

Yes but I get the impression he’s talking about the number of cyclists and
not the type. We get crowded bike paths here as well but they’re not just
VC guys. Anyway, aren’t bike paths anathema to VC guys? Forester
certainly seems opposed to them.


It's never occurred to you that the entire conception of Vehicular
Cycling is a roadie elitism that will forever keep everyone else out of the
bicycle-commuting pool precisely because it forces cyclists to keep up
with traffic, which everyone but the roadies know is a ludicrous
impossibility? (Yes, I know, we've in the past agreed that all of us
active cyclists at times when it is unavoidable do the VC signature
thing of taking the lane, but that isn't the key to our riding.)


Honestly when I discuss VC with my riding buddies most have no idea what
I’m talking about, much less have any idea who John Forester is. Not a
popular read here.


But it’s common here to
read the opposite.

It's exactly because the underlying assumption is roadie-biased and
therefore doesn't need to be explicitly stated that everyone else has
repeatedly to mention that there are other forms of cycling with pretty
good rationales for their own existence.

We have our intrepid Jeorg ranking on weight weenies
that won’t carry a growler and an iron lung with them.

Joerg wouldn't get half as hard a time if he were a roadie.

I’m not sure about that.


We have our
resident Vehicular Cyclist rep with his purple Lycra kit stuff.

For all the good it does him! I burst out laughing when I read that
sentence. Thanks for the giggle.

Even the
OP in this post is saying basically that only people depending on bikes for
their sole transport are real cyclist.

Well, even where I live (Range-Rover land) it is eccentric to ride a
bike, and not to have a car is clearly a sign of dire poverty. But the
same people would think that the woman with the most bikes (teenage-sized
offroad bikes) on the roof rack is the real cyclist. Hell, I see them
deliver the kids by car to the concrete stunt track the authorities put
in beside the town park. My benefice of the old curmudgeon this week:
those aren't cyclists at all, and never likely to become cyclists either.

As a roadie who commutes, I find it ridiculous.

I decided it was a bit of a troll and let that aspect of it pass me by.

As did I until I replied to you. :-)

Anyone riding bikes is a
cyclist and all have to be taken into account.

You'd think so, at a superficial level. But if you look closely at some
people on bikes, your opinion starts to change. One of the reasons I
stood up for Mike Vandeman, when that was a wildly unpopular thing to do,
is that I really can't abide these offroaders who have a deliberate
policy of "shredding" the environment. They're not cyclists, they're
antisocial scum. Vandeman did the moral thing in exposing and opposing
them, and I did the moral thing by turning the "victory" of those who by
perjury sent him to jail to ashes in their mouths.

There are some people it is simply counter-productive to include in your
"side", and that goes for cycling too.

You have a point there.

Andre Jute
There is no such thing as community -- Margaret Thatcher (one of the few
times that The Lady got it wrong)




--
duane

On Sunday, September 2, 2018 at 10:56:14 PM UTC+1, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 9/2/2018 12:24 PM, Andre Jute wrote:

It's never occurred to you that the entire conception of Vehicular Cycling is a roadie elitism that will forever keep everyone else out of the bicycle-commuting pool precisely because it forces cyclists to keep up with traffic, which everyone but the roadies know is a ludicrous impossibility?

Yeah, just look at these elite roadies: https://cyclingsavvy.org/

I know what you mean, Franki-boy: it is a long time since I saw such an unappetizing collection of "cyclists". But I'm afraid your English has let you down again. My phrase "a roadie elitism" describes the offensive quality of a concept held by a subset of people, not the quality of the people in the subset who hold that opinion. Don't worry if you cannot grasp the difference: it is pretty subtle and held to be important only by people who wouldn't let you into their house anyway.

Wallow in ignorance and spew it all you want, Jute. I stopped reading
after that paragraph, as usual.

Is that right, Franki-boy? Methinks the lady protesteth too much, complete with lithp. See, Franki-boy, every time you tell us that you don't read my posts, everyone else hears, "I, Frank Krygowski, have no answers to Andre Jute's entirely reasonable points, so I pretend not to read him."

--
- Frank Krygowski

Always great to hear how you have no answers except ad hominem, Franki-boy. Pity you had to drag in those probably harmless fatties. I wonder whether they would want you as their "spokesperson" (heh-heh!) once they discover that at the slightest disturbance in your smug arrogance you throw them under the bus.

Andre "Chuckles" Jute
Impossible to top that, so fade up Maurice Ravel's "Bolero"

On Sunday, September 2, 2018 at 4:27:10 PM UTC-7, Duane wrote:
Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 9:33:49 PM UTC+1, Duane wrote:
Andre Jute wrote:
On Wednesday, August 29, 2018 at 11:35:29 AM UTC+1, OK wrote:
Probably a homeless guy with depend on two-wheels is the real cyclist in
my view. Not guys with riding $5k bike on the bike lane who just use bike for
exercise or fun and these guys never use bike for main transporter.
And next real cyclist would be Dutch and Denmark cyclist using for a main transporter.

Mmm. I'm not homeless, but I gave up the car altogether in 1992 and have
cycled everywhere I wanted to go since then.

I don't claim to be a "real cyclist" but I get fed up with assholes who
own several automobiles telling me this or that class of cycling is "real cycling".

Here on RBT the underlying assumption is that only those who ride road
bikes with thin tyres and drop handlebars to work at not less than 25mph
are real cyclists. It's that foolish elitism and its counterproductive
presentation (together with the history of the growth of the automobile
and the associated infrastructure development) which will forever assure
that there will be no mass cycling movement in the States. It's what
makes the question of who are "real cyclists" and therefore the natural
"spokesmen for bicycles" so important. It's why I have consistently
stepped on Krygowski's dumb dream of himself as "a spokesman for
bicycles": he's a mindless moron with a bee in his bonnet.

Andre Jute
Recreational cyclist, and proud of it


Hmm. It seems to me just the opposite here. I’ve never seen someone
saying you have to be a roadie to be a cyclist.

You've never seen Jay (and others -- I'm just picking on Jay because he's
an attorney well able to defend himself) complain that if he's forced to
use the dedicated cycle path, he'll be slowed down by comparison to when
he happily keeps up with the motorized rush hour traffic?

Yes but I get the impression he’s talking about the number of cyclists and
not the type. We get crowded bike paths here as well but they’re not just
VC guys. Anyway, aren’t bike paths anathema to VC guys? Forester
certainly seems opposed to them.

I have no problems with bike lanes -- they're shoulders with right-of-way and very handy in either fast or stopped traffic. My gripe has been with a particular local cycletrack that has been deemed a dream facility when it is in fact a nightmare. It was the low-functioning brain child of the "Portland can be the next Amsterdam" crowd. It's also in a pop-up condo tower community that is trying to beat the human-density record of the Kowloon Walled City.

OTOH, I did a ride today with the first 20 miles on a rail-trail MUP conversion, the Springwater Corridor. Apart from the homeless staggering across the trail or parking their shopping carts in it, the trail is a very usable facility and a straight shot to the hinterlands. https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3693/9...4c3c668c_b.jpg


And yes, on my morning commute, I do keep up with vehicle traffic. A person in a wheel chair could keep up with vehicle traffic in many spots. I'm usually breaking many Super-Smart Cycling rules (but not the Oregon VC) by riding up lines of stopped traffic.

And my parting thought: hate on e-scooter riders, and particularly the one going the wrong way in the bike facility and the road on my ride today. The new bane of my existence.

-- Jay Beattie.

On Monday, September 3, 2018 at 2:16:01 AM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
I did a ride today with the first 20 miles on a rail-trail MUP conversion, the Springwater Corridor. Apart from the homeless staggering across the trail or parking their shopping carts in it, the trail is a very usable facility and a straight shot to the hinterlands. https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3693/9...4c3c668c_b.jpg

Looks like a tarmac track straight to Mount Fuji. That's the Japanese heartland, not the hinterland.

I thought you live in Portland, Oregon.

Andre Jute
Bring on the sushi

On 9/2/2018 7:27 PM, Duane wrote:
We get crowded bike paths here as well but they’re not just
VC guys. Anyway, aren’t bike paths anathema to VC guys? Forester
certainly seems opposed to them.

I enjoy several well-designed rail-trails, particularly when they're
empty. And I favor useful bike/ped paths that serve as shortcuts and
thus reduce competition from motor vehicle traffic. For example, I love
that several schools near me have back way access for kids on foot or on
bikes.

I object to bad designs. Our club certainly has far more crashes per
mile on the local MUPs than on the road. Examples in the last year have
included hitting an unseen bollard and falling after running off a
path's sharp edge.

And I object to the fear mongering that's used to sell those and other
facilities as the only "safe" place to ride. I was in a meeting maybe 6
months ago where several bicyclists were speaking up. I heard a
middle-aged woman lean over and ask her husband "Are they talking about
riding on the ROAD?" Her husband nodded, and the look of disgust and
fear on the woman's face was amazing.

Honestly when I discuss VC with my riding buddies most have no idea what
I’m talking about, much less have any idea who John Forester is. Not a
popular read here.

Forester probably did more than anyone else alive to preserve our rights
to the road in North America. He rarely gets credit for that.

And he, more than anyone else in North America, was responsible for
showing that the normal rules of traffic do work for cyclists. That's
really the fundamental point of Vehicular Cyling: That the bicycle is
legally a vehicle, and that cyclists do best riding as operators of
vehicles. And you can learn to do that right now, and ride wherever you
like.

The Paint-n-path crew hates that, of course. "Kiddie paths everywhere!!"


--
- Frank Krygowski

On 03-09-18 17:54, Frank Krygowski wrote:
And he, more than anyone else in North America, was responsible for
showing that the normal rules of traffic do work for cyclists. That's
really the fundamental point of Vehicular Cyling: That the bicycle is
legally a vehicle, and that cyclists do best riding as operators of
vehicles. And you can learn to do that right now, and ride wherever you
like.

The Paint-n-path crew hates that, of course. "Kiddie paths everywhere!!"

I never heard the term "vehicular cycling" before, but I like it. It's
what I do just about every day unless I'm off somewhere on a mountain
bike tour.

As I think I already mentioned here some time ago, in Switzerland (at
least in Zurich) we have the "bike exam" (Veloprüfung). Groups of kids
about 12 years old ride in the city on fixed routes that include turning
onto and off of busy streets. There are policemen leading and following
the group, and others standing at the most dangerous turnoffs. In this
way the kids learn to deal with traffic, to clearly signal their turns,
etc. So they're soon ready to be vehicular cyclists.

Ned