January 20, 2021 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on Fighting for civil rights on bikes, a close call caught on video, and the war on bikes keeps going on…and on
Yes, Dr. King was one of us.
We’ve seen photos of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on a bicycle before.
But it never occurred to me to consider the role bikes played in the Montgomery bus boycott kicked off by Rosa Parks.
Although maybe it should have, because in retrospect, it’s not surprising that Black men — and presumably women — would take to their bikes to get around town while boycotting the city’s bus system to demand an end to segregated transportation.
Just one more way bicycles have helped change the world.
The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes keeps going on.
A 12-year old South Carolina boy suffered dozens of puncture wounds when he was repeatedly shot with a BB gun by a group of teenagers after passing them on his bike. This shouldn’t be treated any differently than any other random shooting. It’s a violent assault, not a prank.
A London borough counselor says she’s finished with riding after being attacked by two men in a car for failing to get the hell out of their way. We’ll never get people out of their cars as long as driveway vigilantes can use their cars enforce their often mistaken interpretation of the law. And too often, get away with it.
A woman from DC is suing a Florida city for $200,000, the maximum allowed under state law, despite having over $1 million in medical bills after a careless garbage truck driver hit her bike, leaving her with “multiple compound fractures, a crushed pelvis, eight broken ribs, a punctured lung and a traumatic brain injury.”
The world watched in awe as paraplegic climber Lai Chi-wai fell just short of his goal of pulling himself to the top of a Hong Kong skyscraper, climbing 800 feet while raising $700,000 for charity. But what’s not mentioned is the cost of the traffic violence that left him confined to a wheelchair in the first place.
January 18, 2021 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on LA King Day bike ride, help ID injured Black bike rider, and cars cost more than you think — even if you don’t drive one
Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!
I’m old enough to remember asking my dad about a sign saying “N****r don’t let the sun set on you here!” as we passed through an Arizona town when I was a kid.
So we may still have a long way to go to get to that promised land King spoke of.
But let’s take a moment today to appreciate how far we’ve already come.
In honor of King Day, the LACBC has put together a family friendly ride marking his visits to Los Angeles.
A new LACBC Family Friendly Ride is out now: (Some of) Dr. Martin Luther King's Visits to Los Angeles
This family-friendly seven mile ride starts at Exposition Park and makes its way south, with a turnaround point at the South Los Angeles Wetlands Park. pic.twitter.com/8fgAu73VS8
He was riding a red and black bicycle, apparently without identification.
He’s described as around 30 years old, 5 feet 5 inches tall and 156 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair.
Anyone with information is urged to call Harbor-UCLA Medical Center at 424/306-6310.
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Stories like the one above are why I always urge everyone to carry some form of ID with you every time you ride. And one you won’t have to worry about getting stolen if you’re incapacitated — unlike your wallet or cell phone.
I always carry my emergency contact numbers written down on a small card tucked into my seat pack.
But I also wear a Road ID, just in case. In fact, I use it as a medic alert bracelet for my diabetes any time I leave home, not just when I ride.
Although someone might want to mention that bikeshare providers and users pay fees for the privilege. And probably a lot more than drivers do relative to their actual costs to the city.
Apparently, disappearing cats aren’t the only thing you have to worry about in the UK’s Cheshire County, where someone has been boobytrapping a popular trail with nail-spiked boards that could result in serious injury to people on bikes, as well as people walking and their pets. Thanks to Megan Lynch for the link.
Maybe they really are out to get us. A Dutch driver starts a major conflagration by deliberately crashing into an ebike warehouse before the bikes can make it onto the street.
Streets For All is urging you to contacted newly elected LA Councilmember Kevin De León to support the Beautiful Boulevard plan in Eagle Rock, which would keep the existing bike lanes on Eagle Rock Blvd while adding lanes for the North Hollywood to Pasadena Bus Rapid Transit project.
A Santa Rosa woman gets three years behind bars for the hit-and-run death of the founder and CEO of an artificial intelligence startup as he was riding his bike last year. Although under the current conditions, she’s likely to serve far less time before she gets out.
AARP is hosting a webinar on New Insights on Biking Among Older Adults on the 27th. Personally, I’d rather learn about biking for older adults, but I suppose it’s important to learn how to ride among them, in case you ever get swarmed by senior citizens. Thanks to an anonymous source for this one, since she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to share it.
Easily confused motorists call for the removal of whimsical nautical street decorations intended to guide bike riders and pedestrians around a seaside English town, saying they’re too much of a distraction. Or they could just make drivers slow down and pay attention, which would improve safety for everyone.
A Dublin bike advocate says focus on prevention, because chances are if your bike gets stolen, you won’t get it back. Not to beat a dead horse, but an important part of that prevention is registering your bicycle, which greatly increases your chances of getting it back if it ever is stolen.
Eight-time BMX world champ Simon Tabron is on the slow path to recovery after suffering a heart attack and a subsequent stroke while on the front porch of his Bonsall CA home; it could take as long as a year for the 47-year old father of two to get his full speech back.
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
In the short course of my own lifespan, I have seen our country grow from separate and unequal to a land where opportunity may not always be equal, but at least exists for more than just a single class.
Where civil rights battles have gone from integrating schools and lunch counters to dreamers and diversity, equal pay and the right to be who you are and marry who you love.
We are not there yet. We still have so very far to go to be the nation Dr. King dreamed we could be.
Yet we have come so far.
I would argue that the greatest achievement of the last half century was not putting a man on the moon, but that a man of color, born when Jim Crow still roamed the earth, could be elected President of these United States.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
Yet in one civil rights issue, we have failed miserably.
And that is the right of all children to grow up. And of all people who leave home, by whatever means, to return again safely and live out their lives in peace and freedom.
Not to be stolen from us under a bloody shroud on the streets of our cities, ripping a gaping hole in the lives of their loved ones, in our society and our world.
I have a dream that we will finally take traffic violence seriously.
That our nation will conclude, once and for all, that the 93 deaths that occur on our streets every day are 93 too many. That our world will wake up to the fact that far too many children will never grow up due to our infatuation with the motor vehicle; traffic deaths are, in fact, the leading cause of death among children worldwide.
And that most, if not all, are preventable.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream that the leaders of our cities — my city, especially — our states and our nation will say, finally, enough. And call for a Vision Zero, as has recently been done in New York and San Francisco.
And God only knows how many pedestrians and motorists.
Because it’s not about the mode of transportation. Or the race, creed, class, social status or orientations of the victims.
It’s about the greatest right of all. The right of everyone to grow up, and grow old.
And enjoy the freedoms that are their birthright as Americans. And human beings.
I, too, have a dream.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
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