Before we get started, let me offer my apologies to anyone who sent me links to the stories below.
With all that’s been going on, I’m afraid I’ve lost any record of who sent me what. So please accept my thanks in advance; I am truly grateful to everyone who forwards bike stories for this site, today or any other day.
Photo of Fred Mackey taken from his GoFundMe page; see below.
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Sometimes I wish the people fighting traffic safety projects in Los Angeles could see the damage done by careless — and too often, cowardly — drivers.
Case in point, this crowdfunding page for yet another bike rider who was seriously injured by a hit-and-run driver while crossing La Brea Ave.
The campaign to help Fred Mackey pay the medical expenses his insurance won’t cover has raised a little over $3,000 of the $25,000 goal after four days.
I sort of met Fred while he was in the hospital; after learning about his crash, I popped in to say hi since he was on the same floor as my wife. Unfortunately, he was busy with his doctors at the time, and by the time I could make it back a few days later, his bed was occupied by an Asian woman who was wondering what the hell I was doing there.
And yes, there’s something seriously wrong with a country where people have to go online to beg for money to pay their medical bills.
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CiclaValley offers what amounts to a painful Gravel Mob gag reel.
He follows that up with a compendium of bad drivers he encountered while riding to work.
Then again, looking for bad drivers in Los Angeles is like looking for ice in Greenland.
Except the bad drivers aren’t going anywhere.
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A foul-mouthed excuse for a comedian seems to think running bike riders off the road is amusing, and that share the road means bike riders have to get the hell out of his way.
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As long as we’re watching videos, let’s make the short leap from the seriously unfunny to a serious whackjob convinced LA is intentionally creating traffic jams to force drivers out of their cars and onto bikes and transit.
Unfortunately, though, he’s not the only one who believes this crap; you’ll find similar comments on almost any news story about or bike lanes or road diets.
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Local
Maybe LA is finally getting the message that it’s cheaper to fix broken bike lanes than pay out multi-million dollar settlements to injured bike riders, since they repaved bike lanes in Lincoln Heights and Eagle Rock last week.
The Daily Breeze looks at the arrival of the LimeBike dockless bikeshares in Watts, San Pedro and Wilmington.
As we mentioned before, Pasadena is threatening to put a stop to the popular Rose Bowl Loop rides by installing a number of stop signs around the route. Something tells me they’ll also park a patrol car next to each one to enforce it, too.
Glendora and South Pasadena are establishing Bicycle Friendly Business Districts, as The Source confirms something we’ve said many times — that bikes are good for business.
Cities in the western San Gabriel Valley are developing a $1 billion wish list for projects they want to install with funding originally set aside for the cancelled 710-N freeway tunnel.
Sad news from Santa Clarita, where a coach for the SCV Mountain Bike Team was killed in a car collision Monday night.
Long Beach is beginning work on reconfiguring Bellflower Blvd to remove parking spaces and add bike lanes.
State
Dockless bikeshare is being held up in San Diego due to the city’s exclusive contract with the under-performing DecoBike bikeshare.
San Diego is moving forward with plans for a $140 million replacement for a Mission Bay bridge; the new bridges will include bike lanes and space for walking.
Continuing our all San Diego theme, a kindhearted stranger donated a new bike to an Imperial Beach man after the one he used as his only means of transportation was stolen.
National
The US is now an outlier when it comes to traffic safety, with some of the deadliest roads in the industrialized world.
Chances are, you already know making carbon bikes isn’t an environmentally friendly process, but Outside is here to remind you that your carbon mountain bike ain’t exactly green.
Bicycling offers tips on how to deal with road raging drivers. In my experience, the best move is to remove yourself from the roadway; pull up onto the sidewalk if possible, preferably in a public place. And make a public display of taking a photo of the driver and his or her license plate.
Forbes looks at the best holiday gifts for women cyclists.
Bike Snob asks if riding with headphones is really such a big deal.
This may be LA’s future, as a Seattle paper looks at some of the strange places people have left dockless bikeshare bikes in the city.
A Colorado bike shop is teaching life skills to low-income kids and people with disabilities, while providing them with low-cost or free bikes.
Seriously, who the hell would steal St. Paul MN’s egg-shaped, solar-powered literary arts ebike and trailer?
Detroit is about to get a spanking new world-class velodrome.
The parents of one of the victims of the New York bike path terrorist attack are suing the city for not installing safety barriers until after the attack. Meanwhile, prosecutors have filed 22 charges against the attacker, including eight possible death penalty charges.
The Pennsylvania bike rider who served 20 months behind bars for obstructing traffic has filed an appeal, claiming the judge in the case was biased and didn’t understand the law.
Now that’s more like it. An unlicensed Florida driver got 12 years for the hit-and-run death of a bike rider, after getting his girlfriend to claim she was behind the wheel. Note to women: If your boyfriend, husband and/or significant other wants you to take the fall for his crimes, get a new one.
International
A road raging Canadian bike rider is facing weapons charges after threatening a couple in a car with a knife.
There’s a special place in hell for whoever stole and vandalized a handicapped British boy’s specialized adaptive bike.
An English man gets nine and a half years for plowing into a bike rider during a Jack Daniels-fueled rampage, after telling his girlfriend he was cheating on her, followed by carjacking a woman’s car.
Life is cheap in the UK, where a truck driver walks after seriously injuring a bike rider, despite his admission that he was “avoidably distracted.”
A drunk driver who was high on coke got three and a half years for the death of a British bike rider in a head-on crash while he was speeding to get another drink. Although that’s still just a fraction of what it should have been.
American cities can’t even get Vision Zero right, yet Sweden is already Moving Beyond Vision Zero to encourage safe bicycling and walking while designing roadways to make fatal collisions impossible.
A Norwegian researcher concludes ebikes are good exercise, while a Swedish retail company predicts they will be the country’s Christmas gift of the year.
Paris vows to reimburse customers as the city’s famed Velib bikeshare system grinds to a halt due to a series of strikes.
Once again, a bike maker is determined to demonstrate just how sexist the industry is, as Italian brand Pinarello’s new ads for their forthcoming ebike fall flat. To put it mildly.
Don’t sexually harass a woman on the street while riding by on your bike like this Aussie jerk, especially if she has her camera on. Or, better yet, just don’t do it. Period.
Competitive Cycling
No, you didn’t win that pro cycling contract by pedaling inside; a young New Zealand cyclist won the Zwift competition to join the Team Dimension Data under 23 team.
In the best news of the day, Italian cyclist Claudi Cretti is back on her bike, just four months after she suffered major head injuries in a crash at the Giro Rosa.
Finally…
If you lose your cellphone while stealing a bike, probably not the best idea to walk into the police station to ask if they’d found it. Who needs headphones when you can ride with your own piano?
And sometimes a dog’s best defense is just being too fat to attack anyone.
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On a personal note, let me offer my sincere thanks to everyone who has expressed their best wishes for my wife’s recovery from her recent surgery; it’s helped get us through a difficult few days.
And if you’re riding this weekend, remember that drivers will be far more focused on shopping and finding a finding parking space than watching out for you. So ride safely and defensively; I want to see you all back here next week.
