Morning Links: Armed man threatens black teens, Americans buy climate change, and yes, Harrison Ford is a man

Here’s a truly disgusting story from Miami.

A racist asshole white motorist was arrested for pulling a gun on a group of young black teens riding their bicycles in the city’s Martin Luther King Day Wheels Up, Guns Down protest.

He got out of his expensive Mercedes SUV with the weapon when the woman he was with complained that one of the teens ran over her foot, after she had gotten out to demand that the riders get the hell out of their way.

He then approached them, gun in hand and screaming racist taunts, according to the Miami New Times.

“Get the fuck out of here!” the man yells as he confronts the teens. 

“You fucking losers. You fucking stupid n*****s. You’re all fucking dumb-ass fucking n*****s,” he says while he paces around the group. Even as he finally walks away, he continues to call the kids the N-word…

On Instagram, Miami Commissioner Keon Hardemon said Bartlett should be hit with more serious charges. “Assault with a deadly weapon and calling them n——rs sounds like a hate crime to me,” he wrote. 

Sounds about right to me.

See for yourself.

………

Apparently, it only takes an unending series of major natural disasters for Americans to finally accept climate change.

According to a Yale study, 73% of Americans now accept that climate change is real, and 72% say it’s personally important to them.

Unfortunately, our current president remains in the remaining 27%.

And time is rapidly running out.

………

In today’s LA edition of He’s One of Us, we look at the age 70+ celebrity contingent rolling on our streets.

If Arnold Schwarzenegger wore a camo jacket and rode a camo fat ebike through Los Angeles in hopes no one would notice him, it didn’t work.

Seriously? A British tabloid zooms in on Harrison Ford’s bike shorts as he goes for a ride in Marina del Rey, and seems surprised to discover he’s a man.

………

Local

UCLA’s Daily Bruin looks at LA’s controversial speed limit increases, which allow police to once again use speed guns to enforce them.

LA’s favorite ex-pro cyclist is teaming with the LACBC this Saturday for the 4th Annual Clean Up Mulholland With Phil Gaimon to clear trash from one of the city’s most popular riding routes.

Pasadena is looking for input for their proposed Complete Streets Blueprint Tool to guide the makeover of the city’s streets.

State

A new San Diego company will come out and pick up all those unwanted e-scooters and dockless bikes for free, charging the dockless companies to come pick them up.

San Jose’s mayor talks with a local radio station about his recent “scary” bike wreck. As opposed to all those calm and relaxing bike wrecks, I guess.

Once again, a man has been found dead on the side of the road near his damaged bicycle as the result of an apparent hit-and-run, this time near Covelo in rural Mendocino County. So when the hell will officials finally take this deadly crime seriously, and do something to crack down on the statewide epidemic of drivers who flee the scene of a crash?

National

CityLab considers the great divide in how Americans commute to work, saying the country is cleaving into separate nations where one favors biking, walking and transit, while the other continues to revolve around their cars.

Seattle’s bike hating shock jock says city leaders will pursue congestion pricing and more bike lanes at their peril.

Speaking of Seattle, bike commuting has spiked in the first week of the Seattle Squeeze — the period between the closure of a major coastal highway and before a new tunnel opens in a few weeks. Maybe some of those new bike riders will decide they like it and keep riding. And support for those bike lanes will go up.

Bighearted Las Vegas school police pitched in to buy a boy a new bicycle after his was stolen off his grade school campus.

The overwhelming majority of Minneapolis bike crashes take place on just 3% of the city’s streets.

Life is cheap in Indiana, where a stoned driver got off with just two years behind bars and six years probation for killing an eight-year old boy as he played in his own backyard; she felt the bump as she ran him down, but kept going because she thought it was a bicycle and she might as well finish parking. I would have given her the full eight years for killing the kid, with another eight for fucking stupidity.

New York safe streets advocates rallied outside the studio where The View is shot to protest Whoopie Goldberg’s anti-bike lane comments.

DC gets serious about Vision Zero following a rash of traffic deaths, creating a dedicated Vision Zero office and hiring a new director. Maybe Los Angeles could take the hint and follow their example.

A New Orleans bike rider was critically injured after somehow crashing with a motorcycle cop escorting a funeral.

I want to be like him when I grow up. An 87-year old Pensacola man affectionately known as Bill the Bike Man refurbishes bicycles and gives them to homeless men and women.

International

Good idea. Bike Magazine suggests putting a spare car key on your bike’s multitool. Although a better idea might be just getting rid of your car altogether.

A St. Vincent bike thief swears he just borrowed it and was bringing it back when he got busted. Sure, let’s go with that.

If you build it, they will come. A Toronto newspaper says the city should get moving on expanding a network of separated bike lanes after a pilot program resulted in a tenfold increase in ridership, while collisions dropped 73%. More proof that safe bike lanes work — if they actually connect and form a real network. Even in cities where the average January temperatures are just a tad below LA’s balmy 68°.

On the other hand, Toronto advocates say the city has failed to deliver on its ambitious bike plan. Sort of like a certain SoCal city I could name that adopted an ambitious bike plan back in 2010, then put it on the shelf.

Finishing our trifecta from north of the border, Toronto police cracked down on distracted drivers, writing 670 citations in just two days.

When police in an English city were too busy to help a newspaper editor recover his stolen bike, his staff jumped into action and stole it back for him.

British bike exports rose 16.1% ever the past five years to the equivalent of over $93 million; exports to Asia more than doubled. US exports, not so much.

The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes goes on. Especially in the UK, where a bicyclist was lucky to avoid injuries when a jerk in passing a van reached out and pushed him off his bike.

Apparently Britain has a problem keeping elderly drivers off the road, as the 92-year old queen goes for a drive just days after her 97-year old husband rolled his Rover, after cutting off another driver.

The European Parliament decides that EU ebike riders won’t have to carry liability insurance after all.

When bike stunts go wrong. Popular Italian bike collective Dafne Fixed posted their blooper reel.

A bike-riding Pakistani woman writes that the government should have protected women planning a bike rally, and men “need to reflect on their own culpability for making this country so unsafe for women.”

A Ugandan entrepreneur is specializing in building bamboo bikes for just $350 to $450 apiece.

A South African website offers advice on flying with a bike. I’ve flown mine several times, but seldom on purpose. And the landings usually weren’t very pretty.

Competitive Cycling

The BBC offers beautiful photos from the 14th annual Strathpuffer 24-hour mountain bike challenge in the Scottish Highlands.

BMX Freestyle competitions have been axed from the first-ever Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC) World Beach Games, set to take place in San Diego this September.

Finally…

The game to play when you have a burning urge to do a backflip off the Eiffel Tower on a tandem bike. No, you can’t just dump a privately owned dockless bikeshare bike in the dump.

And when you’re carrying meth and riding a stolen bike, stop for the damn red light, already. And if you lost a $2,500 bicycle around Santa Monica lately, check with the police.

8 comments

  1. Matt Kelley says:

    If calling the young men in Miami a racial epithet is a “Hate Crime” (a stupid and unconstitutional term), does that mean that the “Black Hebrew Israelite’s” use of the term “cracker” at the Covington Catholic school (and many others, just check Youtube) is also a “Hate Crime”?

    • bikinginla says:

      Hey DQ, I had to remove your response to this comment. The policy of this site is you’re allowed to say anything you want, as long as you are respectful and avoid threats or personal insults.

      Even if I agree with you.

    • bikinginla says:

      The hate crime was not calling these kids a racial epithet, which, while stupid and offensive, is protected by the 1st Amendment. The hate crime is threatening them with a gun in what appears to be a racially motivated incident.

      But you already knew that. You’re just trying to twist this hateful incident to support your own misguided sense of victimization. Take it somewhere else.

  2. Penny Sputh says:

    The racial tension today is comparative to the 60s. With so many guns and such high levels of aggressive anger I fear we’re in for some more intense times.

    • bikinginla says:

      Unfortunately, I couldn’t agree more.

    • easy reader says:

      The equity debate in Seatle is noted as racial but the bad guys are trying to threaten office as if voters to be won’t find out there very survival depends on resisting the propaganda about real estate historically blighting by a lawfully loitering otherwise useless at the time ‘car’having sentience when it is only our past idiocy and lunacy now to argue greater sense in putting the land to work again is murderous to the space as if everytime someone died we put a gravestone calmer in that spot that was invisible so people merely going to kill someone else would be killed as if flooring there suspicious hummer when approached by guard on base who has a button to pop up the wanna be road warriors dam. The lives saved do not kill space. The retiring politicians who have told themselves “no” till now for fear of box rejection resulting owe there legacy unbridled governing- the reason senators get half a dozen years it is supposed to enough to spare us reelection just perhaps even? The premise of resistance is nonvoters are not gonna protect recovered paths. Over need to do so, to defend lifesaving leadership, it is our duty to so fight for them to claim the right and help us END despacing roads aka parking spaceS STUCK where we need to ride blight.

  3. David says:

    That is one disturbing video.
    The unrest and division in the United States seems like its ready to boil over.
    That is why I always tell people that I am happiest just riding my bicycle.

  4. easy reader says:

    in your linking you kind of tease that good writing against mayhem can be found but insteadjust a gory pile of hubris was loaded regarding ignoring protests from a scooter and burying it being ok or not.

    also the renting with service included of soon scaled successfully in many cities ebikes… a killer success promising modern tech beyond tv screens in place of radium painted speed clock face metering ratherDELIVERED ON LUSTER WELL.

    SO shared vehicles are only found abandoned on private property if somebody ‘stole’ them. so there- ‘money’ never rAIns

Discover more from BikinginLA

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading