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John Forester Speaks
This was forwarded to me by one of my bike commuter cohorts:
-- Jay Beattie. |
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John Forester Speaks
On Tuesday, October 1, 2019 at 4:39:22 PM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
This was forwarded to me by one of my bike commuter cohorts: -- Jay Beattie. Pretty much the entire commuter bicycle movement is built around John as a starting point. Though all of these bike lanes and bike trails ideas COME FROM BICYCLISTS. And I have to admit, after battling h4qvy traffic getting on a nice quiet bike path has a remarkable calming effect. |
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John Forester Speaks
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.
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John Forester Speaks
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 |
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John Forester Speaks
On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 12:23:22 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
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 A couple of years ago I did a ride with my sister-in-law to Mission San Juan Batista. At one time you could ride on the "highway" after the freeway ended. You wouldn't DARE do that now. We went down over the farmlands and even on the back roads there was dangerous traffic with farm trucks and autos and these crossed dangerously busy roads. The last 5 miles was on a highway with almost bumper to bumper high speed double semi traffic. However it did have a 10 foot wide shoulder. The return trip had 10 miles of the same sort of high speed heavily trafficked highway until we could get up into the western hills which were almost completely empty. Then getting back down into where traffic was we found bike paths and then bike lanes on main roads. Where ever you find people they will be in cars driving at high speeds to get in a great hurry to the next stop light. |
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John Forester Speaks
On Tue, 1 Oct 2019 22:28:33 -0700 (PDT), 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. Heavy taxation? Singapore tried that. They are an island and realized that unrestricted auto use was impossible so they levied a tax on the purchase of a new car and decreed that a car 10 years old had to be scrapped. What happened? Why the Singaporean's simply took out bigger loans with a longer payback period and bought these expensive cars :-) Special facilities for autos? There are in the neighborhood of 250 million cars in the U.S. and depending on where you look I read that 100 million individuals straddled a bicycle at least once in 2017. Given that the U.S. still operates on the democratic theory where will you find politicians to support your proposal knowing that 100 will vote for him and 250 will vote against him You need a Dictator! -- cheers, John B. |
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John Forester Speaks
On 10/2/2019 12:28 AM, 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. Further thought on the subject would lead you to the infamous 'cash for clunkers' debacle, the main result of which is to price waitresses and warehouse workers out of basic transportation to get to work. Don't mistake my point. I love bicycles and cyclists but they do not comprise the sum of all transportation and cannot. -- Andrew Muzi www.yellowjersey.org/ Open every day since 1 April, 1971 |
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John Forester Speaks
On Tuesday, October 1, 2019 at 10:28:35 PM UTC-7, 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. Well, you know that isn't going to happen. What's more, the entire civilized structure of the world is built around rapid high speed transportation via motor vehicle. I agree that the planning COULD have been around high speed rails, small towns and bicycle transportation but there actually is no going back. |
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John Forester Speaks
On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 4:19:52 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Tuesday, October 1, 2019 at 10:28:35 PM UTC-7, 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. Well, you know that isn't going to happen. What's more, the entire civilized structure of the world is built around rapid high speed transportation via motor vehicle. I agree that the planning COULD have been around high speed rails, small towns and bicycle transportation but there actually is no going back. Chloe's plan got screwed by dumb oxen looooong before he was born. From a post by a mate in Utah: '...the story goes that Brigham Young, who led Mormon settlers to the West in 1847, directed that the streets of Salt Lake City be made sufficiently wide so that a wagon team could turn around without “resorting to profanity”.' Makes one wonder about Amish roads... But it isn't only American roads. From a post elsewhere by me: *I'm tempted to say, "Humane city planning takes bicycle commuters into account," but the fact is that, if it is true, it also appears to be irrelevant except in cities that were modernised largely from pedestrian walkways, like Dutch cities. Compare the British "New Towns", designed at a time in the 1950s when close living memory was of a poor prewar underclass which perforce cycled and could not dream of possessing a car, many of which offer interesting and in some cases exemplary cycling infrastructure -- which is mostly stands unloved, unused and empty." From another post elsewhere by me: Baron Haussmann* would be proud of whoever laid out that town [in Utah]: wide, arrow-straight roads running perfectly parallel to each other, crossing each other perpendicularly. *Haussmann was the fellow who gave Paris the aspect it still bears, which was copied by cities around the world. He was arguably the most influential city planner of all time. Whether cyclists have anything at all to thank him for is a different story, as his prime motivation was to create wide boulevards specifically to speed vehicular traffic, precisely the sort of city planning one would perpetrate if the explicit objective was to kill pedestrians and cyclists (yes, I'm aware that Haussmann worked before the invention of the bicycle, but there were surely pedestrians in his time). Nor am I aesthetically all that keen on Haussmann's vision of Paris, all chill, inhuman scale and distance, a perfect prescription for the unlovable fascist cities Mussolini and Hitler created in the 1930's, which are also inhumane aesthetic disasters hostile to cyclists." Andre Jute Though, admittedly, the Musee d'Orsay is my second favourite art gallery in all the world, after only the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge (the one with the good university on the River Cam, not "the jumped-up missionary school outside Boston, Mass," as a literary protege would have it). |
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John Forester Speaks
On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 11:49:45 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 4:19:52 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote: On Tuesday, October 1, 2019 at 10:28:35 PM UTC-7, 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. Well, you know that isn't going to happen. What's more, the entire civilized structure of the world is built around rapid high speed transportation via motor vehicle. I agree that the planning COULD have been around high speed rails, small towns and bicycle transportation but there actually is no going back. Chloe's plan got screwed by dumb oxen looooong before he was born. From a post by a mate in Utah: '...the story goes that Brigham Young, who led Mormon settlers to the West in 1847, directed that the streets of Salt Lake City be made sufficiently wide so that a wagon team could turn around without “resorting to profanity”.' Makes one wonder about Amish roads... But it isn't only American roads. From a post elsewhere by me: *I'm tempted to say, "Humane city planning takes bicycle commuters into account," but the fact is that, if it is true, it also appears to be irrelevant except in cities that were modernised largely from pedestrian walkways, like Dutch cities. Compare the British "New Towns", designed at a time in the 1950s when close living memory was of a poor prewar underclass which perforce cycled and could not dream of possessing a car, many of which offer interesting and in some cases exemplary cycling infrastructure -- which is mostly stands unloved, unused and empty." From another post elsewhere by me: Baron Haussmann* would be proud of whoever laid out that town [in Utah]: wide, arrow-straight roads running perfectly parallel to each other, crossing each other perpendicularly. *Haussmann was the fellow who gave Paris the aspect it still bears, which was copied by cities around the world. He was arguably the most influential city planner of all time. Whether cyclists have anything at all to thank him for is a different story, as his prime motivation was to create wide boulevards specifically to speed vehicular traffic, precisely the sort of city planning one would perpetrate if the explicit objective was to kill pedestrians and cyclists (yes, I'm aware that Haussmann worked before the invention of the bicycle, but there were surely pedestrians in his time). Nor am I aesthetically all that keen on Haussmann's vision of Paris, all chill, inhuman scale and distance, a perfect prescription for the unlovable fascist cities Mussolini and Hitler created in the 1930's, which are also inhumane aesthetic disasters hostile to cyclists." Andre Jute Though, admittedly, the Musee d'Orsay is my second favourite art gallery in all the world, after only the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge (the one with the good university on the River Cam, not "the jumped-up missionary school outside Boston, Mass," as a literary protege would have it). Salt Lake City is also laid out with North and South roads cut by East and West roads. I seem to remember that they are numbered in both directions so even Zen could find his way around. |
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