Just a quick note before we get started that I have another new T-shirt design behind that SWAG button over there on the right — this time in multiple type and fabric colors to suit anyone’s taste.
Maybe even yours.
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Apparently, the Trump administration meant it when they threatened to go after “DEI bike lanes.”
Because not only did US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy transfer nearly $2 billion in transportation grants from bike lanes to roads and bridges, now they’ve removed any reference to bike lanes and speed cams from the list of Proven Safety Countermeasures on the department’s website.
According to NPR, which broke the story yesterday,
The FHWA says the changes to its website, which have not been previously reported, are part of a broader review of safety countermeasures to ensure they align with current DOT policies and the administration’s priorities. But critics say the Trump administration is undermining safety strategies that have already been proven to work.
“We should be making decisions about safety based on evidence,” Stephanie Pollack, the former acting administrator of the FHWA under President Joe Biden, told NPR. “It’s hard for me to understand how you could say you’re putting safety first, and then make arbitrary decisions about what does and doesn’t improve safety.”
No shit.
So instead of reducing traffic deaths, the plan seems to be to see just how high they can drive them.
Pun intended.
Then again, maybe that’s why they defunded public media, in an effort to keep them from reporting on this administration’s Dr. Evil-ish machinations.
If you question that wording, consider this statement from a USDOT spokesperson.
“Drivers paying taxes and vehicle fees expect their dollars to be reinvested into our roads, not social initiatives that burden their commutes,” the statement said. “Under Secretary Duffy, the Department is getting back to basics and putting safety first.”
So, they’re putting safety first by taking actions that put safety last.
Got it.
Again, according to NPR,
“It’s not just changing the web page, but it’s really going to put lifesaving projects at risk,” said Josh Naramore, a policy expert at NACTO, the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
“That list of approved safety countermeasures and all the research really helped change the game for local agencies and even for states to have conversations with the federal government, with state departments of transportation, and even with regional planning agencies,” Naramore told NPR. “So you’re essentially taking tools out of the toolkit that would be available for them.”
For instance, among the measures no longer considered best practices, speed cams have been shown to reduce crashes on urban arterial roads by as much as half, while adding bike lanes on a two-lane road cut crashes by as much as 30%, jumping to 49% on four-lane road, according to a 2021 brochure published by the Federal Highway Administration.
Then again, those figures were backed up by scientific studies. And we’re not supposed to believe in science anymore.
So drivers, start your engines. Speeding is legal once again, and bicycles are just speed bumps on your road to freedom.
And let’s get those traffic death back up to those heady days of the pandemic.
Thanks to Andy for that first link — and sorry it took so long — your email got caught up in spam folder hell.
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Boston is still in an uproar over the recent bicycling death of a city transportation planner.
As we discussed yesterday, 36-year old bike advocate and Boston transportation planner Louisa Gag was killed by a truck driver while riding her bike to work last Thursday.
To make matters worse, she was killed at an intersection where safety improvements had been promised for years, only to be put on terminal hold by the very mayor she worked for.
Today, an open letter to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu signed by 4,000 people — 2,300 Boston residents — was delivered to Wu’s office.
“For years, we have told you, in public and to your face, that continued delay on street safety would cost lives,” the letter reads. “Last week it cost the life of Louisa Gag — a transportation planner in your own administration, a person who devoted her career to making our streets safe…”
“For at least eighteen months, your administration has stalled and re-studied safety projects that were designed and funded,” the letter continues. “You have told us these projects need more process, more consensus, more perfection. But consensus never arrives for the dead, and a study protects no one.”
Four hundred people rode their bikes to Boston City Hall to personally deliver that letter.
Yet somehow, we can’t even get 1,000 people to sign an open letter calling on Los Angeles officials to declare a Traffic Violence State of Emergency, no matter how many people get killed.
And when was the last time you saw hundreds of people turn out on bikes for anything but CicLAvia or Critical Mass? Let alone demand that someone, anyone, in city office actually give a damn about the safety of people biking or walking?
Or the city’s mayor joining the vigil, for that matter.
Mayor Michelle Wu gave an emotional speech to those remembering Gag.
“I can’t stop thinking about Louisa, but especially the Boston that she wanted to live in,” she said. “A Vision Zero city. A city where everyone could access every opportunity.”
“I really struggled with whether I should come here tonight or not,” Wu said through tears. “Whether it would help the healing that is so needed for a community in such grief in pain, and whether I would be able to get any words out at all.”
If it’s happened here, I don’t know about it. But then again, I’ve only been doing this advocacy thing for about 20 years now.
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So when was the last time you had a deadly poisonous snake stuck in your bike chain?
A woman in Australia was bitten by an eastern brown snake — the second most venomous land snake in a country known for deadly critters — when she accidentally rode over the bigass snake on her bike, and it somehow got caught up by her bike.
Fortunately, it turned out the bite was dry — aka, no venom — after she was rushed to a hospital.
Then again, so was the snake.
An expert snake catcher rushed to the scene, and held the viper’s head as cops dismantled parts of the bike to free it. And yes, they rushed the injured reptile to the nearest wildlife hospital, where it had to be euthanized due to the extent of its injuries.
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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.
Schumck. A Florida man faces charges, including aggravated assault and child abuse, for intentionally running a stop sign and driving into an 11-year old kid riding an ebike, then getting out of his car to slap the boy and smash his cellphone, because he said the neighborhood kids were harassing him.
But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.
Police in San Antonio, Texas shot and killed a man riding a bicycle after he refused a traffic stop, then led them on a brief pursuit before he allegedly pointed a gun at them. No word on what they were originally attempting to stop him for, and whether it was worth killing him over.
A 43-year old woman remains in a coma after a 26-year old man riding an ebike hit her from behind in New York’s Central Park ten days ago, while the rider was allegedly speeding and riding the wrong way in the running lane; there’s no word on what kind of ebike he was on, though witnesses said he appeared to be a delivery rider. But if he was going the wrong way, how could he hit her from behind, unless she was going the wrong way, too?
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Local
The Los Angeles Times belatedly picks up the story about merchants on Pico Blvd fearing the effects of planned protected bike lanes, just like merchants everywhere else, while failing to mention that studies show sales usually go up after protected bike lanes go in, and most people will later fight to keep them.
KNBC-4 reminds us about the Meet the Hollywoods CicLAvia and World Cup final watching party, as well as Santa Monica’s COAST26 open streets event and World Cup watching party, leaving out only the Beach Streets open streets and World Cup watching party in Long Beach, all on Sunday.
A pair of 15-year old boys have been identified and detained by Santa Clarita sheriff’s deputies after one allegedly threw a rock at a man riding a bicycle on a Valencia bike trail, while they passed in the opposite direction illegally riding an electric motorcycle on the bike path; fortunately the victim captured their images on his bike cam.
State
The Bicycle Film Festival comes to San Diego next weekend.
Damn. A 50-year old Palo Alto woman remains on a ventilator two weeks after she was struck by the driver of a bus, and dragged underneath until a riding companion caught up to it and pounded on the side to get the driver to stop; according to friends, she suffered multiple fractures, including a broken femur and tibia, a fractured pelvis and a collapsed lung, and has already gone through seven surgeries.
San Francisco is closing another street to cars and converting it to a pair of parallel pathways; the former Twin Peaks Blvd is planned as part of a 550-mile trail tracing the city’s ridge lines.
National
PeopleForBikes goes back to their City Ratings to look at which US cities are investing in youth bicycling. None of which are Los Angeles.
That’s more like it. An 18-year old Nevada driver was sentenced to a whopping 25 years behind bars for killing a 62-year old woman and significantly injuring her husband in a head-on crash as the couple was riding their bikes, after the driver admitted to smoking weed prior to the crash; however, he’ll be eligible for parole after just nine years.
The family of 17-year old fallen cyclist Magnus White settled their lawsuit against Yeva Smilianska, the allegedly intoxicated Colorado driver who killed the US National Cycling Team member in 2023, for just a measly $25,000, saying they just wanted to get her out of their lives. Then again, the Ukrainian refugee likely didn’t have any assets, and that’s probably all her insurance would cover — which is why you need to max out the uninsured motorist section on your car insurance, which will cover you when you ride your bike.
Hie thee to my bike-friendly Colorado hometown for a beer-infused fondo this weekend. But is it really a “tradition” if it only goes back a decade?
Hats off to Laramie County, Wyoming for their new stagecoach-inspired, e-cargo bike powered bookmobile. And no, it’s not the least bit confusing that Cheyenne, Wyoming is in Laramie County, but Laramie is in Albany County, and Albany, Wyoming is in Albany County, too.
A Houston suburb is surrounding 330 homes priced up to $1 million with 2,100 acres of trails and bike lanes. No word on whether they will follow the new FHWA best practices, and pave over all those trails with eight-lane highways.
The new documentary Cycles of Resilience follows the Black History Bike Ride, an Austin nonprofit founded by cyclist Talib Abdullah to teach people through bike treks to historical sites; according to the MovieMaker site, “learning shouldn’t have to be an act of resistance. But it is, given the efforts of many states and the Trump Administration to erase Black history.”
A Minnesota man took distracted driving to a new level, watching animated porn on his phone as he ran down and seriously injured a man riding a bicycle, leaving the victim with a fractured pelvis, multiple rib fractures, fractured lumbar requiring spinal surgery, a closed head injury, an acute kidney injury and acute anemia. But other than that, he was just peachy.
The Canadian wildfires are casting a pall over the 400-mile Cycle the Erie Canal bicycle ride, with more than 600 cyclists from 37 states and Canada riding from Buffalo NY to Albany along the Erie Canalway Trail.
As predicted, New Jersey’s new law requiring a license and registration for every ebike, regardless of whether it’s a ped-assist cargo bike or an e-motorbike, is turning out to be a total shitshow that no one’s happy with.
The Washington Post explains how people get trapped by obscenely high car payments, as $1,000 monthly payments become more common. Never mind that you can buy a decent used bicycle for a hundred bucks.
International
Cycling Weekly says modern bikes are becoming more like F1 cars, but we’re still sending them to the equivalent of a quick oil change shop for repairs. I, for one, like the idea of an F1-style pit lane, where you can get your tires changed, your bike lubed and your glasses cleaned, and be back out on the road in under ten seconds.
Competitive Cycling
Ouch. Australian cyclist Chris Harper says he’s now “ten grams lighter” after losing part of his thumb in a horrific crash on stage 10 of the Tour de France.
Multiple riders went down like dominoes in a high-speed sprint at the end of Thursday’s stage 12 of the Tour de France; Belgium’s Tim Merlier outsprinted what was left of the field for his third stage win in this year’s Tour.
Forget doping. Cyclists at the Tour are now loading up on Urolithin A, a naturally occurring substance derived from pomegranates. Then again, psilocybin and hemlock are derived from naturally occurring substances too, but that doesn’t necessarily make them decent bicycling supplements.
Outside asks the burning question, if Tadej Pogačar is so great, why isn’t he a global superstar?
Bike Radar offers 24 “remarkable” photos from the Tour de France, from hosing off riders with a firehose in the ’40s, to that gut wrenching shot of Johnny Hoogerland caught up in a barbed wire fence after crashing in 2011.
Finally…
Rasta Rolling on a Penny Farthing through the streets of London. Now you, too, can buy the long-awaited Tesla bike, though you may enjoy if more if you’re still a toddler.
And at last, someone has designed coat hangers, not for your coats, but for your bicycling kit.
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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.
Oh, and fuck Putin.
