BikinginLA

Day 128 of LA’s Vision Zero failure to end traffic deaths by 2025. 

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No surprise here.

New York bicyclists say the new police crackdown on bike riders is excessive, requiring them to appear in criminal court for violations like rolling a stop light or riding salmon, which are usually just ticketable offenses.

Which isn’t to say those infractions aren’t serious.

But you’re not likely to see a driver get the same treatment for speeding or using a smartphone behind the wheel, even though motor vehicles and the people in them pose significantly more danger to everyone around them.

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Bike Culver City says take a photo of your favorite bicycle “in front of your favorite relic” at Saturday’s car show, and show ’em which one is really the future of transportation.

Just don’t try to take a picture in front of me, or I’ll wack you with my walker.

Seriously.

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It looks like we can count on at least one pit stop for Bike to Work Day.

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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.   

Seriously? Life is cheap in New York, where a man caught redhanded sabotaging a mountain bike trail faces a lousy month behind bars, as protectors treat it like a silly prank instead of a serious attempt to injure or kill people on bicycles.

Ontario, Canada will appeal the court order blocking the removal of Toronto’s bike lanes, after the provincial premier had the law changed giving him the power to rip them out.

No bias here. A former British weatherman calls for a law prohibiting “idiotic” bike riding, writing “A speeding bicycle with only a bell as a warning is a dangerous weapon.” Because no one knows more about traffic safety than an ex-TV weather guy. Maybe he’d be happier if we just yelled “Get the f*** out of the way!”

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Local 

Metro is offering 30 day Metro Bike passes for just one buck during May’s Bike Month, as well as free use of Metro Bike Hubs.

A Streetsblog op-ed urges Metro not to hire Lyft to manage the Metro Bike program, given their demonstrated hostility to mass transit and workers rights.

 

State

A Cardiff letter writer says the protected bike lanes on the Coast Highway are the most dangerous area for bike riders along the entire coast, and it’s not a good look for a local politician to continue to support it despite the dangers.

A Change.org petition is calling for immediate fixes to San Diego’s confusing and chaotic intersection where Park Blvd, El Cajon Blvd and Normal Street converge, with one man saying he feels very exposed riding his bicycle or a Vespa there.

Huh? An Imperial PD captain says a 14-year old was arrested for riding an ebike on a local highway because ebikes aren’t street legal, without explaining why this particular ebike wasn’t. Because most electric bicycles and electric motorcycles are both very street legal, although 14-year olds aren’t allowed to ride some of them; only illegally modified ebikes and those that violate California’s ebike regulations are banned.

Police in Goleta wrote 100 citations to drivers last month for violating the state’s hands-free cellphone law. Just imagine how many tickets they could write if they actually tried, since the feds estimate that 6.4% of all drivers are using a handheld phone at any given moment. Which seems like a massive undercount, given how many drivers you can see using one just riding a bike or standing on any given street. 

A San Luis Obispo bike rider was lucky to escape with non-life threatening injuries after being struck by the driver of a pickup while walking their bike in a bike lane, and dragged 30 feet under the driver’s truck; the driver was booked on suspicion of driving under the influence of narcotics.

A 33-year old driver was booked on charges of vehicular manslaughter and hit-and-run after police tracked him down for killing a 53-year old man riding a bicycle in Visalia over the weekend.

The San Francisco Examiner continues its focus on the failure of San Francisco’s Vision Zero, as a new report says the city lost $2.5 billion over five years due to traffic collisions.

Work is nearly finished on moving San Francisco’s highly unpopular Valencia Street bike lanes from the center of the street to the curb.

 

National

This is who we share the road with. A road-raging Oregon driver is under arrest after intentionally swerving his car into a motorcyclist in the next lane and knocking him off the highway, in an attack caught on dashcam from a trailing truck.

An Arizona judge refused a defense request to dismiss 11 of the 12 misdemeanor charges against Pedro Quintana-Lujan, the commercial driver slammed his truck into a group of bicyclists in Goodyear AZ, killing two people and injuring 19 others. As if misdemeanor counts weren’t already a gift, after the DA refused to file felony charges.

An Albuquerque TV station remembers the woman credited with founding the city’s bicycle advocacy efforts; she passed away in 2010, just months before the bike and pedestrian bridge name for her opened.

The US Forest Service wants ebike riders to bail out their $380,000 in red ink for Colorado’s Maroon Bells, with a proposal to charge everyone on a electric bicycle $5 to access the area. That’s half of the entry fee for drivers, even though people on ebikes don’t cause any significant damage to the roadway or the environment, unlike the people in the big, dangerous and yes, stinky machines.

A Wyoming woman considers why bicyclists trigger road rage for some drivers, after encountering punishment passes and a driver rolling coal on an Idaho highway, concluding that it’s just prejudice against the “other.”

After a Pennsylvania woman ordered groceries from Uber Eats, she was shocked when the delivery man showed up riding an ebike, so she tracked him down through social media, and established a crowdfunding campaign to get his car fixed so he didn’t have to ride a bike anymore. Although he’s probably better off on the bicycle. 

According to an Alabama arsenal, the US Army is challenging military members to ride their bikes 1,000 kilometers, or 621 miles, over the next four months, which works out to an easy five miles a day.

A Haitian immigrant will spend the rest of his life behind bars, with no possibility of parole, after pleading no contest to the stabbing death of a married couple as their were riding their bikes back home from Bike Week in Daytona Beach, Florida three years ago.

 

International

Bike Radar offers a complete guide to buying a secondhand ebike. Which beats the hell out of waiting for California’s moribund ebike voucher program.

Frustrated Winnipeg, Manitoba bike riders are complaining about the city’s new  speed limits for bicyclists on bike paths, instead of doing anything about the speeding drivers on a road where a man riding a bicycle was killed almost a year ago.

A British doctor won a £4.5 million settlement, the equivalent of nearly $6 million, after he was paralyzed when the carbon fork of his Planet X gravel bike sheared in two on a grassy hillside.

A writer for Cycling Weekly explains how she managed a six-day gravel ride through Sri Lanka, even though she didn’t own a gravel bike, and had only ridden a total of 29 miles in the previous ten months — and with just six weeks to train.

 

Competitive Cycling

Colombian cyclist Miguel Ángel López lost his appeal against a four-year ban for doping in the international Court of Arbitration for Sport; Ángel López was caught using and holding Menotropin, a female fertility drug that can stimulate production of testosterone in men, during the 2022 Giro. But the era of doping is over, right?

Geraint Thomas, 2018 Tour de France champ, looks forward to one final TdF before he retires after the Tour of Britain.

US cycling legend Dave Zabriskie, the first American to win stages in all three Grand Tours, is launching a “groundbreaking initiative focused on concussion recovery and long-term cognitive health” called Cognitive Protocol, saying he learned the hard way that you can’t ride through a concussion.

 

Finally…

That feeling when you go riding through Moroccan deserts in search of camels. Apparently, race motos are no longer the most dangerous problem with pro cycling, interfering fans are.

And now you, too, can own your very own plastic Volvo bicycle for the low, low price of just $133.

Even if it is a featured exhibit in Sweden’s Museum of Failure.

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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin.