Day 192 of LA’s Vision Zero failure to end traffic deaths by 2025.
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The Department of Homeland Security has issued a warning that just riding a bicycle or skateboard at a protest demonstration can be considered a “violent tactic,” creating a pretext for an aggressive police response.
According to Wired,
Threat bulletins issued during last month’s “No Kings” protests warn that the US government’s aggressive immigration raids are almost certain to accelerate domestic unrest, with DHS saying there’s a “high likeliness” more Americans will soon turn against the agency, which could trigger confrontations near federal sites…
Protesters on bicycles, skateboards, or even “on foot” are framed as potential “scouts” conducting reconnaissance or searching for “items to be used as weapons.” Livestreaming is listed alongside “doxxing” as a “tactic” for “threatening” police. Online posters are cast as ideological recruiters—or as participants in “surveillance sharing.”
At least DHS knows there’s a “high likeliness” they’re going to piss a large segment of Americans off, if they haven’t already.
But if you’re not outraged by that warning, read on.
Vera Eidelman, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, says the government has no business treating constitutionally protected activities—like observing or documenting police—as threats…
“Exercising those rights shouldn’t be justification for adverse action or suspicion by the government,” Eidelman says. Labeling something as harmless as skateboarding at a protest as a violent threat is “disturbing and dangerous,” she adds, and could “easily lead to excessive force against people who are simply exercising their First Amendment rights.”
Whether you’re on the right or left, or — like me — somewhere in between, we all have a 1st Amendment right to protest the actions and policies of our government.
We also have a right, under state law if not the Constitution, to ride a bicycle on a public street, as long as you don’t create a disturbance. Even if you’re riding it to or at a protest, or while filming the police.
I took the local cops to court as editor of my high school newspaper to establish that we did, in fact, have the right to photograph them in public, as long as we didn’t interfere with their actions.
So I’m pretty well versed on that one.
Just riding your bike at a protest like the one above could invite an aggressive police response.
Thanks to Erik Griswold for the heads-up.
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Anyone want to start a GoFundMe?
The Malaysian road cycling team’s hopes of winning gold at the Thailand SEA Games this December have seriously dimmed after the country’s National Cycling Federation turned down their request to buy six new time trial bikes.
They need roughly an additional $140,000 to match the latest tech employed by regional rivals Thailand and the Philippines, but only have about $38,000 left in the budget after competing in the Asian Cycling Championships earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the head of the aforementioned Malaysian National Cycling Federation reminds everyone that bicyclists have a right to the road.
Yes, even there.
He urged the government to protect bike riders from death threats on the road, as well as on social media, following a viral confrontation between bus drivers and a group of bicyclists.
It would be nice to be protected from that here, too.
On both counts.
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Bicycling highlights the best deals from yesterday’s penultimate Amazon Prime Day.
And a writer for Cycling Weekly says the only earbuds she’ll wear while riding, because they allow her to be aware of her surroundings, are on sale now for Prime Day, which enters it’s final day today.
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Sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.
The British government is pausing the rollout of one type of floating bus stop following complaints from bus passengers, especially blind passengers, that they had to cross a bike lane in front of bike riders who too often didn’t stop for them as required.
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Local
The Pasadena Complete Streets Coalition is hosting a Beginner’s Bagel Ride on Sunday. Which works whether you’re new to bicycling or bagels.
State
San Diego has reopened Bachman Place, a popular shortcut from the Mission Valley to Hillcrest neighborhoods, after two years of reconstruction, with a sidewalk-level bike lane in one direction and a buffered bike lane in the other.
California’s newest lift-served mountain bike park has just opened at Mountain High Resort in Wrightwood, just 90 minutes outside of Los Angeles. Then again, it can easily take more than 90 minutes to cross Los Angeles just to get outside of it.
Sad news from Santa Cruz County, where a 78-year old Soquel man was killed when he somehow veered off the road on his Specialized ebike, and crashed into a dirt embankment.
The Santa Cruz Country community of Scotts Valley hosted a kids bike parade for the 4th of July.
Apparently, San Francisco is no safer for pedestrians than it is for bike riders, as 400 people took to public stairways to raise funds and call for safety improvements, after pedestrian deaths reached a ten-year high last year.
National
Seattle Bike Blog says that despite “five years of process and some scary collisions,” Seattle’s mayor removed safety improvements from an “already watered-down” street project at the insistence of wealthy homeowners along the route.
Nevada US Senator Catherine Cortez Masto celebrated former Reno resident Greg LeMond’s newly minted Congressional Gold Medal.
A Washington mountain biker used his own helmet straps to slow the bleeding and save his own life after falling over 500 feet down a mountain side.
After a New York PE teacher was quoted in the local paper saying she’d like to start a bike program for her students, a kindhearted retired physical education professor from her alma mater dipped into her own pocket, and mailed a check to cover the cost of the bicycles.
A British artist has just 17 days to bike around New York, while drawing a map of key points in all five boroughs.
Hats off to 23-year old Floridian Alisa Cade, who stopped at 2 am to help a total stranger who had been knocked out following an ebike crash, and could have been there for minutes or hours; the victim ended up hospitalized with multiple brain bleeds, a broken skull and a fractured pelvis. But she’s alive, thanks in part to a Good Samaritan who wasn’t afraid to help.
International
Momentum looks at ten “incredible” bike bridges around the world. None of which are in Los Angeles. Or the US, for that matter.
Seriously? A British Columbia letter writer says she and her husband are very concerned about the “dangerously high speeds” of ebikes on a local trail, while noting that the bikes have a top speed equivalent to just 18 mph, which most people can do on a decent road bike without any electric boost.
A British bike industry trade group is trying to identify the challenges and barriers that keep women from advancing and being underrepresented in the field. In other words, exactly the kind of program the Trump administration is committed to stamping out.
Police in the UK say they’ve seized over 500 illegal electric bikes, scooters and motorbikes so far this year, claiming they’re cracking down on their use in serious crime, reckless criminals and antisocial behavior, rather than law-abiding bicyclists.
Life is cheap in Ireland, where a taxi driver was fined the equivalent of $1,168 for breaking a bike rider’s leg when he ran him down from behind, after concluding the driver’s vision was obscured by a roundabout — but at least he said the fact the victim wasn’t wearing a bike helmet was of “no relevance.”
In a first for the city, a Parisian bike lane was officially dedicated in honor of a 27-year old man who was killed by a driver while riding his bike there nine months earlier. But you’ll have to subscribe to read more than the first few paragraphs.
Iran has finally confirmed the arrest of an 18-year old French and German citizen who disappeared after hostilities with Israel broke out as he was bicycling through the country last month; two other French citizens have been held for three years in conditions “akin to torture.”
Competitive Cycling
Dutch pro Lorena Wiebes won her second Giro Donne stage of the week, beating Marianne Vos and Liane Lippert in a sprint to the finish, after crosswinds blew the peloton apart, as Marlen Reusser held on to the pink leader’s jersey.
Ireland’s Ben Healy soloed to an easy victory on stage 6 of the Tour de France — easy being a relative term — by breaking away from the breakaway group with about 26 miles to go, while American Quinn Simmons and his long locks finished an “agonizing” second.
The yellow jersey switched hands, or rather torsos, once again as mountain bike star Mathieu van der Poel reclaimed the Tour leader’s jersey from yesterday’s leader Tadej Pogačar.
Former Welsh cyclist Luke Rowe wrote in his soon-to-be-released memoir that Chris Froome once stormed onto the Astana bus, grabbed Vincenzo Nibali by the throat and told him “to never fuck with him or his team again” following a crash he evidently blamed the Italian for. Although social media seemed to think the anecdote strained credibility just a tad.
An insurance site looks back fondly to the good ol’ days when The Cannibal was supported by a fleet of orange Volvos.
Finally…
Yep, that just about sums the situation up.
And what’s a 4th of July celebration without a stuntjumper?
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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.
Oh, and fuck Putin.
