Morning Links: Ask for your $1,100 road rebate, and SGV Bicycle Education Center officially opens

The next time someone says bicyclists need to pay their share of the road, ask them to give you $1,100 instead.

That’s the amount a new report says every household pays to subsidize car ownership, whether or not they drive.

Which means, instead of not paying our share, bike riders are dramatically overpaying. Especially those who don’t own cars.

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Bike advocacy group Bike SGV officially opened the new San Gabriel Valley Bicycle Education Center on Sunday.

Plans are for the center to offer classes for bike riders of all levels, along with bicycle repair courses.

They also intend to go beyond education by offering bike repairs and rentals of donated bicycles. Along with serving as a central point for bike advocacy in the San Gabriel Valley.

The SGVBEC is open Saturdays from 9 am to 1 pm inside El Monte’s Jeff Seymour Family Center, 10900 Mulhall St.

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A paddle out was held Sunday for Logan Lipton, the 12-year old Oceanside surfer killed in a collision while riding his bike to school on Thursday.

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In a heartbreaking piece, the tragic and needless death of a local rider makes a Pittsburgh woman examine her own mortality, and the real-world costs of our dangerous streets.

Thanks to Matt Ruscigno for the heads-up.

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Local

A Vancouver website looks at six ways LA is looking beyond the automobile.

A Long Beach cyclist is finishing a seven-month, 3,000-mile trip to the other Long Beach in New York to raise funds for Alzheimer’s research.

 

State

The Victorville city council agrees to cover a $274,000 shortfall to construct a key connector in a proposed regional bike path network.

Oxnard police will conduct a bike and pedestrian safety operation Monday afternoon. Someone should tell them that bicyclists aren’t required to wear helmets unless they’re under 18, though.

Police decide a Milpitas high school student was somehow at fault for a minor collision, even though he was in a crosswalk and the driver admitted he didn’t see him.

The US Bicycling Hall of Fame in Davis is preparing to induct its newest class of honorees next month.

A San Francisco writer insists on pitting Millennials against Baby Boomers, saying the city does not consider the needs of older people, and that it’s hard to ride a bike safely when you get older. Even though countless older people do exactly that every day, and if they can’t manage to pedal uphill, an e-bike provides an effective alternative.

 

National

A Portland bike rider finds a hit-and-run driver who injured another cyclist. This is why police need to release information even on hit-and-runs that don’t qualify for a Yellow Alert; we have a lot more eyes on the street than they do.

Casper WY responded to the death of a bicyclist by creating a new bike master plan calling for over 100 miles of street improvements; the city’s first road diet, with bike lanes on either side, opens this week.

More bighearted people, as community members pitch in to replace a bike stolen from an Ohio special needs girl.

A writer for the Nashville paper takes a six-day, 150-mile bike tour through the Great Allegany Passage.

Negotiations have hung up on acquiring a railroad right-of-way that will be part of a Maine to Massachusetts bikeway, eventually lead to a coastal pathway stretching from Maine to the Florida Keys.

A man was critically injured in a collision with a bike rider on the University of Delaware campus. Ride carefully around pedestrians; they’re the only one more vulnerable on the streets than we are, and less predictable.

 

International

Bikes are making a comeback on the crowded streets of Central America. So is bike-friendly former Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa, who was re-elected to the post after 14 years in the politcal wilderness.

The CBC investigates whether cyclists should be required to have licenses. Must have touched a nerve; at last count, there were over 450 comments in less than 24 hours. Although being Canadian, many were excruciatingly polite.

Once again, cyclists are heroes, as an Ottawa man jumps into a river to save the life of an 83-year old man who had fallen in.

Caught on video: A British bike rider captures a helmet-cam view as he’s hit by a right-turning car. Although rather than slowing down as he approaches the intersection, he forces a couple of jaywalking pedestrians to run out of his way. And he probably wouldn’t have been hit by the car if he had waited for them to cross.

A 71-year old English woman has died after going over her handlebars in a collision with another cyclist while riding on a bike path. Another tragic reminder that bike paths can be dangerous places, even if there aren’t any cars.

Dutch racer Theo Bos expresses his gratitude to the United Arab Emirates woman who not only paid for his medication after a fall, but drove him back to his hotel, and stopped at a restaurant to buy him food on the way; she said any Emirati woman would do the same.

A new video from Australia’s Tasmania state puts the1.5 meter passing distance — the equivalent of a five-foot passing law — into perspective.

A new one meter, or three foot, passing law goes into effect in South Australia, so police naturally warn cyclists instead of drivers. Meanwhile, an Aussie rider tests it out and gives drivers a passing grade.

A Kiwi writer says do like the Dutch and get on your bike, even if it could be safer.

A 28-year old man is riding across India to spread a message of cleanliness, hygiene and sanitation.

An elderly Chinese man publicly beats and humiliates a bike-riding boy who accidentally ran into him on his way to school.

 

Finally…

Palm Spring seems shocked to see local homeowner Leonardo DiCaprio riding a bike around the city. Probably not the best idea to post a photo of yourself flipping off the cops while standing over a stolen police bike on your Facebook page.

And why bother riding your bike when you can use it to clean up before bed?

 

One comment

  1. Cantalouped says:

    The $1,100 figure you use to link up to more then a soundbite is quickly found within it by the screen search, and is not likely anything but a vast understatement locally.

    Infrastructure is among the least fairly provided resource everywhere.

    As someone who is willing to claim obvious truths without being hindered by rigid data to justify any speech as a rule the cost of roads being our greatest cost, the primary source of almost all our ills, can not be overemphasized.

    Roads presently in use that requires ongoing use to have any chance of being maintained control every aspect of our public policy, from making showing up at school not in a car a expellable offense to immunity from future awesome liability for parents who encourage there teenagers to lust for and ultimately purchase a car of there own nearly decades before they are old enough to even run for president- which of course absent it a very large number of millenials would now be employing juries worldwide to transfer wealth, loot 401k’s big time, for such grooming and perpetration of death and much worse as our greatest tradition.

    The roads are of course fodder for a future viral horror immersive reality by the minute ‘bomb.’ Like snakes, like mold, like any cancer they facilitate about half of global warming presently. Instead of paths to with any sanity or intelligence move ourselves on we have them instead- places for cars to get worn out so new ones can be sold to us on essentially and little beyond that ever.

    Eleven million if offered to such a coder would we can only hope be spit upon. Yet we know that billions of dollars is instead being realized by literally countless numbers of us for choosing to do other then precisely that.

    How do we rid ourselves of supporting the roads and those threatened? Not by understating or resisting a close reading of
    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving-true-costs/412237/?utm_source=SFFB

    On Halloween we will be tricked into believing that even six million is too much to spend saving just one life from wrongful loss on our rails. IN my other comment I noted a recent claim- “three kids”… “a minute”…. “an entire trillion dollars a year”… “just for replacement cars”

    Such phrasing I assume to be accurate enough. It is just more Coal, while we find ourselves deep in caves of the dusty worthless black crap of earlier era’s, piling on, unsportslike detail that is as Ms. Klein notes over increasing boring, tedious, without real context beyond “avoid eating anything that farted audibly before being cooked” sillyness.

    We simply must provie ways for people to get around without having to hog big rubber wheels and braking systems being applied over and over to just grind more and more padding away from reserves entirely lacking.

    Our culture being to get someplace you have to sit, hold still, spend fortunes, pull the trigger on weaponry pointed at our own heads over and over again despite knowing enough bullets are loaded for doing that even once to be the essence of evil. Our awe at the roads, there horrific roar, stink, the drains as much for our blood as the rain, there tapestries and filth infecting entire cities, poisoning people but in California absurdly failing to so decimate property values sufficiently for people who actually
    _all_ vote to afford even the very worst homes.

    Rather we see claims that cars have at times contributed more help then harm. Our fraud laws fail to police such nonsense,and consequently most of us are unashamed to appreciate the beauty of a Rolls Royce, wish we could be so lucky as to be at risk of being caught in a Bentley, are not horrified by a magazine catering to those who pay for it’s paper to be mailed to them or watch it’s propiganda with ratings off the scale of a vehicle heavy enough to smother an entire football team for it’s excellence.

    As if to tease us the car gets named with the letter that if sounded would be that of the slithering devil’s presence in the garden. Even better the X emphasizes our porn culture making judgement only for the unwashed, with too few of us catching the riddle- cars once where not for the elite only, there was a moment if only in fantasy where everyone could use them and willingly even work to buy them in some defendible fashion.

    Back then there was no transistor- there was though journalism, roads allowed cars to kill more and more people, and quickly helped to silence such publication of truth so that now months or years can go buy without many of us realizing the decision to enter into a car is to tear a child apart with brute force, unhumanely, several times every ten minutes or so. We instead of learning our ABC’s sing DUI parodies with overtones one can find in a film like “The Pledge” where a good man is reduced to a crazy person shouting at the wind with it being far too easy to ignore a child, many, for his devotion, where in fact protected.

    The damage done by people intoxicated is so insignificant to even be familiar with those letters is shameful. Sober driving, roads wider then the sidewalks, remains the problem. We can pretend windmills exist to tilt at absurdly while we put our own pedals firmly to the metal and let it just sit there, pressed, while we day dream or literally purchase some silicon to join our unseemly lonely nonteam drive as we ream out all life everywhere without gleam.

    If we are to have cities then we need to provide transportation when appropriate for people. Roads are not that! Opposite is a word.

    A road is after all a clearing- not a place where things are installed, but just a vacuum, an ungoverned area where shills are free to make us rut everything into ruins.

    As a society we must understand that collectively what we need is a place where people can go, find some space to be and then be where they choose without being ten steps back for every one apparently taken. Roads and the cars not people they serve prevent us from having that,not just kill and render extinct not just our species forever far too soon.

    We must say- keep your money- we want a society. We want to ride our bikes, we want the Willy Wonka elevator, the door Curious George’s all grown up can build if allowed, the leader’s being allowed to lead, not just do the bidding of those for whom the roads are built, those who only step into helicopter’s unless it is for a photo.

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