Filed under: Uncategorized
NASCAR and bicycling are closely linked, in history and physics. And bicycling is a perfect antidote to sitting in a car all day.
Hey Dale, you don’t have to wear any spandex. None whatsoever.
Source: Dale Jr. enjoys new hobby, but not the spandex or getting flipped off | NASCAR Talk
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Andy Kerr, Colorado, Denver Post, Greg Brophy, Idaho stop, The Dumb is Strong
That was quick.
http://www.denverpost.com/2017/02/07/colorado-cyclists-stop-signs-bill-dies/
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: envirnonmental, EPA, Florida, House of Representatives, Matt Gaetz, The Dumb is Strong
Introduced by Rep. Matt Gaetz, Florida.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/861
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: All Hail Kerr, Andy Kerr, Bicycle Colorado, bicycling, bike, bike law, BikeDenver, bikers, Colorado, Idaho stop, law and order
http://www.denverpost.com/2017/01/26/senate-bill-bicyclists-stop-signs/
Idaho Stop is something I’ve been promoting for many years—in Denver, a place where most riders already practice the technique, it makes even more sense than it does in Idaho—but to say my pleas fell on deaf ears is a bit of an understatement. The advocacy orgs like Bicycle Colorado and BikeDenver were big on the law-and-order stuff.
To hear the local advocacy groups now getting behind Kerr’s bill is extremely heartening. Extremely surprising and somewhat weird. But I’ll take it.
Idaho Stop. There is no fact-based opposition to it. It is proven to work, with decades of data. It makes life better for bicyclists, and so makes life better for all. But that doesn’t mean this will become law. Most people are still idiots about bikes, and even a substantial portion of cyclists are reflexively opposed to the idea, although that portion is clearly getting smaller and smaller all the time. If you’re still in that portion, get on out of it and into the other one.
ALL HAIL ANDY KERR! ALL HAIL ANDY KERR! VIVA LA KERR! AN-DY! AN-DY! AN-DY!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicycle racing, Brailsford, cheaters, Cooke, Cope, cycling, doping, Guardian, motor doping, Sky, Team Sky, Varjas, wankers, Wiggins
British cycling is unraveling with revelations of sketchy at best TUEs and motorized bikes in the Tour de France.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Arizona, autonomous vehicles, douchebags, driverless cars, San Francisco, Uber
Even before I wrote yesterday’s post, Uber, refusing to apply for permits to run driverless cars in the city, had their vehicles officially booted from the Streets of San Francisco. Uber sent them by truck to Arizona, where a coalition of douchebags was waiting to greet them warmly, based on the company’s disdain for permits alone.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: autonomous, driverless, San Francisco, San Francisco Bicycle Coaliton, SF, Uber
Uber says it’s a matter of principle to run these autonomous vehicles in the city before they’re ready to run safely. Really did say that. SF Bicycle Coalition is on their case as the vehicles are observed flailing around bike lanes and running red lights. Is SFBC an ant standing in the way of an elephant? Wait, not an elephant. Elephants are very cool. An ant standing in the way of a steamroller? A DRIVERLESS STEAMROLLER?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anti-bike bias, bicycling, bike, camaro, cycling, cycling fatality, Gothamist, hit and run, Matthew Von Ohlen, NYC, NYPD, pamphlet, urban cycling
http://gothamist.com/2016/07/04/cops_believe_driver_intentionally_f.php
RIP Matt Von Ohlen
Police are currently looking for the driver of the black Camaro who knocked Von Ohlen off his bike then ran over him, then sped away. If they find him/her, may give him/her a bike safety pamphlet.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicyclists, bike safety, bike share, bikeshare, biking, helmets, mineta transportation, transportation, urban cycling, urban transportation
Assumptions and facts, all mixed up.
Click to access 1204-bikesharing-and-bicycle-safety.pdf
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicycle helmet, bicycle safety, bicycling, biking, CPSC, cycling, family biking, helmet, helmet standards, JAMA, Thompson Rivara Thompson, youth helmets
Thompson, Rivara and Thompson M.D.s, “Effectiveness of Bicycle Safety Helmets in Preventing Head Injuries,” JAMA, 1996.
This is probably the most cited of all helmet studies. It appeared at a time when the CPSC was considering the possibility of making new standards for little kids’ helmets. On one side of the discussion, engineers and advocates who thought child and toddler helmets should be made softer to protects kids from the type of head injuries they are most likely to suffer while bicycling. On the other side, helmet company reps who argued that kids didn’t need new standards or softer helmets.
Thompson, Rivara and Thompson’s “Effectiveness of Bicycle Safety Helmets in Preventing Head Injuries” came along just in time to lend the industry some apparent scientific legitimacy to their argument.
The study concludes like this: “Based on our study, changes in helmet certification standards or the design of helmets particularly for younger age groups are less likely to result in major benefit.” The mention of kids’ helmet standards–“particularly for younger age groups…”–comes out of the blue at the end of the paper.
This is quite strange because, earlier in the document, the authors revealed that the study, which included over 3,000 crashed cyclists, included only one helmeted brain-injured subject under 6 years of age. Because of this almost total lack of data, the authors admit that their study cannot estimate any protective effect of helmets for this age group.
Hmm. But in the conclusion, which is the only part of the privately held document that journalists or 99% of the public will ever read, the authors do just that. They claim that helmets give the same protective benefit “to cyclists of all ages…” And then they go out of their way to say that bit about little kids not needing better helmet standards.
I don’t know about you, but I think it’s very interesting that the particular age group that receives the most attention in the conclusion, is the one that received the least attention when collecting data. This seems to be a really smarmy piece of work.
See industrializedcyclist.com and Family Biking: The Parent’s Guide to Safe Cycling for more on kids’ helmet standards.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bicycle planning, bike paths, multi-use path, off-street path, Ohio, toledo
Me likey. http://toledo.oh.gov/media/176457/Bike-Plan-2015-200-dpi-4-24-2015.pdf
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: domestic oil production, global oil production, peak oil, Ron Patterson
Bottom line, I am more convinced than ever that 2015 will be the year world crude oil peaked.
Source: All Roads Lead To Peak Oil – Peak Oil BarrelPeak Oil Barrel
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: China, energy, oil, putin, riyadh, Saudi Arabia
From Zerohedge.com:
In short, if John Kerry and Riyadh did in fact plan to bankrupt the Russians by tanking crude prices, the effort was a miserable failure that resulted not only in a 20% fiscal deficit for the Saudis, but the destruction of American jobs in the oil patch.
Filed under: Uncategorized
On city streets with lots of driveways, alleys, parking and intersections, most of the look-but-failed-to-see errors that affect bicyclists originate from the right side of the road. That’s not to belittle the danger from the left (particularly from left-turning drivers) or behind, which tends to produce more injurious crashes.
As far as I know the best place to start is still the North Carolina Bicycle Crash Data Tool, but here’s a sampling of other stuff from my online bin of bike safety studies ( industrializedcyclist.com/lies.html ):
Ralph Wessels’ study of Washington state police reports 88-93
Fort Collins ’07-’09 all roads
Hunter et al 6-state study ’96
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Americans, climate change, driving, energy, energy consumption, gas prices, pollution, transportation, USA, vehicle miles traveled, Vmt
After a few years of sweet reversal of the VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled) chart, then a few years of bouncing along what looked like a New Normal, things have turned around in a big way. Cheap gas being the primary culprit. Back to our old ways just like that, and making up for lost time.
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring/15augtvt/figure1.cfm
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: babboe, bakfiets, balance bikes, bell, big dummy, bike safety, bike trailers, bionx, bobike, bosch, bullit, burley, cargo bikes, cargo trikes, chariot, christiania, CPSC, family biking, firstbike, gazelle, Giro, helmets, islabikes, kids' bikes, kinderbike, likeabike, madsen, nutcase, onderwater, Safe Routes to School, surly, thule, yepp, yuba
Christie and I both worked on this one. The book includes a comprehensive buyer’s guide for family biking Things like bakfietsen, cargo trikes, longtails, child seats, trailers, balance bikes and kids’ helmets, with in-depth, research-based commentary on safety issues. Is transporting your kid in a child seat as dangerous as people say? Are trailers safe in traffic? When is a child ready to ride by herself?
In answering these questions and dozens of others, we came across some surprising facts. For instance, we learned that approximately half of the kids’ injuries associated with bike seats occur when loading or unloading the child from the seat. We also found out, much to our dismay, that helmet makers have been allowed by federal regulators to make kids’ helmets with the same material that adult helmets are made of, even though kids’ heads are so much lighter—meaning the foam in kids’ helmets almost never compresses to soften the blow when they crash. In our opinion, it’s a scandal and needs to be fixed, by the helmet companies and the CPSC. We hope this book will help make that happen.
I promise this book will be interesting and useful for anyone who rides with their kid(s), or anyone who wants to.
Available now for just 14$ at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Family-Biking-Parents-Guide-Cycling/dp/1493009893
To check out the rest of my books see www.industrializedcyclist.com/books.html
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 55th, 63rd, Arapahoe, bike lanes, Boulder, cycletracks, Folsom Street, Iris STreet, right-sizing
Turns out that new street treatments on Folsom will not continue through the part of town where they are most needed.
A controversial plan to remove vehicle lanes to allow for wider bike lanes on four major streets in Boulder will move forward on three of them: Folsom Street, Iris Avenue and 63rd Street.
A few minutes before midnight, after hearing testimony from roughly 80 people, the City Council voted 7-2 to support the “right-sizing” plan that was developed as a pilot program as part of the Living Laboratory bike facilities project.
via Boulder right-sizing bike-lane project moves forward on 3 of 4 streets.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bike racing, biological passport, cheaters, cheating, cycling, doping, EPO, Garmin-Cannondale, micro-dosing, Vaughters
…except for PR purposes.
“We’d been hearing that the athletes biological passport, which is the latest tool in the fight against doping, is not quite as sensitive as people might want to think,” he says. “What we decided to do, with me being an amateur athlete, is put this passport to the test.”
He writes:It would last for 14 weeks, and have three phases. I would have my blood taken once a week and sent off to a lab for analysis. A doctor would monitor my health throughout.Baseline – weeks 1-3: establish what my “normal” blood levels are. Performance test at end of week 3Loading – weeks 4-10: undergo a program of between 2-3 micro-dose injections of EPO per week. Each injection would be supervised. Performance test at end of week 10Washout – weeks 11-14: critical phase of the experiment, when I stop taking EPO and the passport is meant to be most effective.The plan was to collect 14 blood analyses and have them put through the biological passport software to see if it would catch me.
But he wasnt testing to see if EPO works. He knows it works. He wanted to see if he could get away with doping. He took blood samples each week and sent them to have them analyzed and placed into a biological passport. “And the truth is, I was able to sail through the tests. I got away with it,” he says.
via Reporter dopes to show how easy it is to evade drug tests | Public Radio International.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Continental Oil, energy, fracking, fracking waste, fracking waste disposal, Hamm, injection wells, oil, Oklahoma, OU
…who studied (and found) the link between fracking waste disposal wells and earthquakes. Hamm is CEO of Continental Oil.
Hamm, the billionaire founder and chief executive officer of Oklahoma City-based Continental Resources, is a major donor to the university, which is the home of the Oklahoma Geological Survey. He has vigorously disputed the notion that he tried to pressure the surveys scientists. “Im very approachable, and dont think Im intimidating,” Hamm was quoted as saying in an interview with EnergyWire, an industry publication, that was published on May 11. “I dont try to push anybody around.”
Yet an e-mail obtained from the university by Bloomberg News via a public records request says Hamm used a blunt approach during a 90-minute meeting last year with the dean whose department includes the geological survey.”Mr. Hamm is very upset at some of the earthquake reporting to the point that he would like to see select OGS staff dismissed,” wrote Larry Grillot, the dean of the universitys Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy, in a July 16, 2014, e-mail to colleagues at the university. Hamm also expressed an interest in joining a search committee charged with finding a new director for the geological survey, according to Grillots e-mail. And, the dean wrote, Hamm indicated that he would be “visiting with Governor [Mary] Fallin on the topic of moving the OGS out of the University of Oklahoma.”
via Oil CEO Wanted University Quake Scientists Dismissed: Deans E-Mail – Bloomberg Business.
Industrialized Cyclist Notepad 