Day 216 of LA’s Vision Zero failure to end traffic deaths by 2025.
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It’s always the ones who claim to ride a bike.
Or in this case, an adult tricycle, when his knees got too bad for a ‘bent.
A writer for the conservative American Thinker takes issue with a recent Cycling Weekly story, in which a self-identified fat Black woman said “You can’t call yourself a cycling community without fat Black women.”
But he not only takes issue with including fat Black women in the bicycling community, but with the very idea of a bicycling community, period.
By Mike McDaniel’s perspective, unless you’re actively engaged in some form of competition, we’re all just a bunch of individuals riding bikes for our own personal reasons.
Just when you think this kind of manufactured nonsense is on its deathbed, Cycling Weekly resurrects it. We’ve been told “silence is violence,” and so is pretty much everything else. Now we learn unless the cycling “community” “centers” fat black women, that community is “participating in exclusion.” Do we need to buy bikes and other cycling gear for fat black women too? How about old white guys riding old recumbents? And fine, I’ll tell a story: I read about a fat black woman who started riding bikes. Good for her. The end.
That’s a leftist view of reality, where it’s all about one’s identity, which must not only be noticed, but praised. In real reality, one doesn’t join a bicycling “community” by riding a bike. There are people with shared biking interests, largely defined by their machines, abilities and participation in types of competition. Beyond that, no one much cares about anyone not in those particular, narrowly defined interest groups.
Then again, he also has something to say about breasts, which he claims to know something about — and Sydney Sweeney’s in particular.
Oh, and he’s not a Nazi.
Good to know.
Iresha Picot’s point isn’t wasn’t identity politics, though, or some sort of DEI for the bicycling community.
It wasn’t even about fat Black women. Or whether or not there really is some sort of bike community.
It’s that our streets — and our preferred form of recreation and transportation — has to be safe and welcoming for everyone, including those on the margins, who you don’t normally see descending at 30 mph on the club rides.
And if you’re not intentionally including everyone, you are by default excluding some, whether they’re fat and Black, poor and Latino, handicapped, old or just puttering along on an old cruiser bike.
It’s a fair point.
I’ve learned over the years that the biking community includes people of every shape, color and description.
Some who charge up and down hills on carbon racing bikes, and some who ride, well, trikes.
It’s not about politics, identity or otherwise.
And it sure as hell isn’t about Sydney Sweeney. Or her breasts.
Photo: Bikes belonging to the non-existent bike community line the street.
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BikeLA, formerly the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, reminds us that LADOT wants your input on bike safety upgrades on Spring and Alameda streets in DTLA.
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Bike Talk talks about the provincial and old-fashioned views that block progress on streets where people are dying from cars.
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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.
It’s been a long time since we’ve heard from bike writer esteemed Elly Blue, who rebuts the pervasive, and completely untrue, myth that bike riders don’t pay for the roads.
No bias here. A motorist in Killarney, Ireland was “irked” to actually have to slow down for a few moments because a bicyclist was riding in the traffic lane, right next to a new raised bike lane that had been built “at enormous expense.” Even though a photo clearly shows several bike riders were already using it, and the only way to get around them was to take to the street — never mind that he was hugging the curb, and would have been easy to pass.
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Local
Streetsblog editor Joe Linton says the new Metro Bike bikeshare contract remains up in the air and operating on a month-to-month basis, following a “twice-botched process.”
State
Laguna Beach is looking for a location to build a proposed pump track.
A New York website remembers the 28-year old former Central New York man and current San Francisco bike mechanic who gave his life to protect a group of women and children from an attacker at a transit station.
National
Cycling West says the Trump administration’s efforts to slash environmental rules could make it easier and faster to build bike lanes, but could wreak havoc on the natural world, all while GOP budget cuts are hurting bicycling.
This is the cost of traffic violence. A 19-year old Albuquerque, New Mexico woman became the third employee of the city’s bicycle safety center to be killed by drivers in the last two years — two years to the day after a 64-year old man was killed riding his bike home from working at the center.
Now you, too, can star in a commercial for an ebike brand. But you have to live in Idaho.
Speaking of Cycling West, a writer for the website travels to Austin, Texas to find out how the 900-member Breakfast Club became the world’s largest weekly group ride.
The St. Louis edition of the World Naked Bike Ride brought “bikes, butts and body positivity” to the protest against car culture.
You know they’re doing something right when a Maine neighborhood bike parade and ice cream social returns for the 25th straight year.
A New Hampshire writer says riders of a certain age may be too old for the Tour de France, but can still take part in the “Tour de Pharmacy” to manage their aches and pains. Then again, there are those who say the Tour de France was, and possibly still is, a Tour de Pharmacy.
More than 6,000 people took part in two-day Massachusetts fundraising ride benefitting the Dana-Faber Cancer Institute; despite raising $53 million, the fund drive was still $23 million short of the $76 million goal.
International
Writing for Cycling Weekly, a male bicyclist says he was praised for “looking like a real athlete” when he was actually suffering from anorexia.
The Royal Canadian Mounties are looking for a 66-year old Manitoba man who disappeared on Friday while riding his bike.
Canada’s CTV looks at where things stand, and what comes next, in the seemingly endless battle over Toronto’s protected bike lanes, which city officials want to keep, and Ontario provincial officials want to rip out.
A Toronto couple who run a custom bicycle painting shop not only got their stolen bikes back after setting up a sting for the thief, but got a “heartfelt apology,” too.
An English man was planning to ride nearly a thousand miles on a fundraising bike ride, just two years after he was nearly killed when he was stuck by a hearse driver.
Life is cheap in Ireland, where an 82-year old woman got off with fine and lost her license for killing a 78-year old man riding a bicycle, once again raising the question of how old is too old to safely drive a car. And no, I don’t want to see an octogenarian go to the gaol, either. But still.
A Vietnamese resort will pedal a bike to your suite and make the country’s celebrated coffee for you in person.
Competitive Cycling
Pauline Ferrand-Prevot cemented her domination of French cycling, as the Paris Olympic champ demolished her competition in the Alps to win the first Tour de France Femmes for the country, as well.
Finally…
Beyonce’s husband is one of us. That feeling when you get tackled by a cop mid-wheelie.
And when you’re carrying over an ounce-and-a-half of meth on your bike, maybe try riding on the right side of the road.
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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.
Oh, and fuck Putin.
