My apologies again for yesterday’s unexcused absence.
Let it serve as yet another reminder that on a scale of one to ten, diabetes sucks. If you’re at risk, do everything you can to avoid getting it — ride your bike, stay active, lose weight, eat better.
Whatever it takes. Because you don’t want this crap.
Trust me.
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Let’s start with Wednesday’s ghost bike ceremony for Lenny Trinh, the Burbank postal worker and father killed in a dooring on Monday.
Steve S sent moving photos from the installation ceremony, which appeared to draw over 100 people.
Meanwhile. CiclaValley agonizes over the recent rash of bicycling deaths as he helped organize the ghost bike ceremony for Trinh.
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In today’s most surprising news, Lance Armstrong has settled the $100 fraud lawsuit against him for a relatively paltry $5 million.
A quarter of that could go to former teammate and fellow doper Floyd Landis, with the balance going to the federal government.
Meanwhile, Business Insider catches up with where the members of Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Team are now, most of whom have also admitted to doping.
Although Landis appears to be the only one who went from doping while pedaling to pedaling dope.
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Bike Snob asks if this is the golden age of cycling, before concluding probably not. For reasons that should be obvious.
On the other hand, you’ve got the cars. Some call them “freedom machines,” others call them destroyers of cities and harbingers of impending environmental apocalypse. But no matter how you feel about the automobile, there’s no getting around the fact that cars and bikes have an intensely symbiotic yet ultimately disastrous relationship. They’re like George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or that couple at the party who are always one more cocktail away from either hurling crockery at each other or having hate sex on the dining room table, and you never know which until it happens.
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Local
In addition to the $91 million in Vision Zero funding announced earlier this week, Mayor Eric Garcetti’s new budget for the City of Los Angeles includes increased funding for street safety, repairing LA’s crumbling streets, and fixing broken sidewalks.
Curbed examines the rash of hit-and-runs in South LA.
Retired UCLA parking meister Donald Shoup has a new book. ‘Nuff said.
KCRW wants to know what it’s like for you to ride a bike in Los Angeles. Go ahead, don’t hold back.
Speaking of KCRW, the station’s Madeleine Brand talks hit-and-run with with Streetsblog’s Sahra Sulaiman in a short seven-minute segment.
If you’re headed to Sunday’s Heart of the Foothills CicLAvia, MetroLink is offering additional bike cars, while Metro is providing free bus and train service for Earth Day.
A columnist for the Daily Bulletin attempts to learn how to ride a bike to before Sunday’s CicLAvia. And fails.
State
Sunset ranks the top ten bicycling towns in the west, with Davis coming in fourth and San Francisco tenth; not surprisingly, Portland took the top spot. Needless to say, Los Angeles was not on the list.
Not only did the driver who killed Grossmont College professor Brian Jennings as he rode near El Cajon in East San Diego County tell police she fell asleep at the wheel, she also had four children under the age of ten in her minivan at the time of the crash.
Two bicyclists suffered minor injuries when they apparently were collateral damage in a crash between two cars in Thousand Palms; the wreck occurred on the same road where Mark Kristofferson was killed by an alleged speeding DUI driver during the Tour of Palm Springs. Thanks to Victor Bale for the heads-up.
Bakersfield is in the process of adopting new wider standards for bike lanes, though they won’t apply to existing lanes.
An 18-year old Los Osos woman has been sentenced to seven years behind bars for the drunken hit-and-run death of a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo student as he was riding to class last year.
San Francisco is extending the carfree pilot program for the Twin Peaks road by another two years.
Sad news from Shasta County, where a bicyclist was killed in a head-on crash with a motorcycle rider; the victim was a grad student at UC Davis.
Chico is experimenting with a pilot bike lane project for the next few weeks, using electrical tape to mark off buffered bike lanes instead of paint.
National
Bicycling says it has the facts on concussions and what to do if you think you have one. But in talking about helmets, they fail to mention that only MIPS helmets are designed to prevent concussions, and cite the long-discredited study claiming bike helmets reduce the risk of injury by 85%.
Great news, as The Inertia website says cycling only ranks fifth on the list of sports most likely to kill you, behind things like BASE jumping and extreme skiing.
The Wall Street Journal discovers the nationwide bikelash, with motorists fighting for their convenience over everyone’s safety. As Treehugger’s Lloyd Alper put it, anywhere there’s a bike lane, it seems there’s a backlash.
Arizona becomes the ninth state to follow California’s lead in passing regulations for ebikes.
Colorado’s legislature passed a bill allowing local jurisdictions to decide whether to allow bicyclists to treat stop signs as yields and red lights as stop signs, aka the Idaho Stop.
Houston’s mayor continues his efforts to make the auto-centric city safer and friendlier for people on bikes, committing another $10 million to the effort. Anyone who’s spent any time in the Texas city can attest that if they can do it, so can Los Angeles.
An Ohio man has gotten the death sentence for abducting and killing a 20-year old woman as she was riding her bike last year; he had committed an almost identical crime nearly 30 years earlier.
A bicyclist was killed by a hit-and-run driver at New York’s La Guardia Airport back in February. So naturally, they respond by restricting bikes, not cars.
A Charlotte SC writer concludes that dockless bikeshare bikes don’t suck after all.
A New Orleans man faces up to 10 years behind bars after being convicted of the hit-and-run death of a 65-year old bike rider.
A new report says Florida’s 1984 Complete Streets law saved as many as 4,000 lives over a 30-year period, even though the state remains one of the most dangerous for bicyclists and pedestrians. And it didn’t end auto-centric design.
International
The UN’s Share the Road program released their 2017 Annual Report. Although it would help if the link actually worked.
If you’ve questioned whether World Bicycle Relief is worth supporting, consider that they gave out nearly 55,000 bicycles to change lives in nine nations.
Bike Radar considers the all-time worst bike tech.
If the price of that new bike seems too good to be true, it probably is.
A Vancouver bike nonprofit says riding a bike to work may be the key to happiness.
A new study says swapping cars for European bikeshares could save 73 lives a year.
The UK’s largest grocery chain is now experimenting with delivery by e-cargo bike.
If you build it, they will come. Aukland, New Zealand experiences its busiest bike month ever, with 430,000 trips taken on the city’s bikeways.
A Kiwi columnist says people who stir up road rage against bicyclists are dangerous. Someone please tell that to KFI’s John and Ken.
An Australian professor says forcing bicyclists to register to prevent bad behavior would cause more problems than it would solve.
A Korean physician says the dangers of bicycling under the influence is underestimated, but has no figures to back that up.
Competitive Cycling
Swiss businessman and BMC cycling team owner Andy Rhis passed away Wednesday at age 75; he was also behind the Phonak team that disbanded after team member Floyd Landis was stripped of his Tour de France title.
Austrian cyclist Marco Haller will miss this year’s Tour de France after suffering multiple fractures in his left knee when he was struck by a driver who ran a stop sign, while on a training ride.
More bad news, as New Zealand cyclist Alexander Ray faces facial reconstruction surgery after he was left crossed by driver, leaving him fighting for his life.
A 25-year old Belgian cyclist died in his sleep, the second rider from that country to die under questionable circumstances, after Michael Goolaerts died of a heart attack during the Paris-Roubaix classic.
Heartbreaking news, as a 21-year old Palestinian cyclist lost his leg to an Israeli bullet after joining what he thought would be a peaceful rally in Gaza, ending his hopes of competing in the Asian Games.
Perhaps overstating the obvious, world champ and Paris-Roubaix winner Peter Sagan says being the pope is much harder than being a cyclist. Although you do get to wear more interesting hats.
Finally…
A new study from the University of Duh shows bike crashes happen for exactly the reasons we already thought. We may have to deal with angry drivers, but at least we don’t have to worry about road raging elephants. Or bison, for that matter.
And get those applications in; you have just five more days to become the bicycle mayor of Bengaluru.
