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10 thoughts on “Link roundup: August 15”
  1. Just don’t read the comments following the Star article on the new bike boulevard.  We hate Portland, bikes should be registered and pay road taxes and Europe is socialist.  Oops, I forgot the ad hominem fallacies, libtards.  Yowza!

    I had contacted Jim Degrood at the RTA about what the funding sources for roads were.  He said use taxes like gas tax and registration fees. Looking around on the internet this doesn’t seem to be entirely true.  In the case of the RTA is not at all true.  Anybody buying taxable items  in Pima County funds the RTA through sales taxes.  It would be nice to actually pin down how the direct and indirect costs of roadways are funded.  Where does the money collected by Arizona for vehicle registration get spent?  In the case of federally funded highways gas tax does not begin to pay for them.

    The entire phenomena of online commenting is bizarre.  Reading Bruce Weber’s NY Times blog of his trip across the United States by bicycle I was struck by the how mean some of the comments were.  Tucson Velo has its moments but generally speaking this community has an amazing ability to hang in there with the concept of civil discourse. An oasis of reason in a very unreasonable world.  Thanks Mike!

  2. I posed this question on my facebook the other day and didn’t get much response:

    Why
    is it that any time an article is published in ANY publication on the
    subject of cycling, especially commuting by bicycle, an immediate flame
    war starts in the comment section? Articles about cars, transit,
    walking, and “being green” never stir up as much emotion. (this of course usually excludes bicycle focused things like TucsonVelo)

    I really have no idea. The reason is that a last week there was an article on “walkability” in the star. Sidewalks, getting places by foot, exercise were all discussed pleasantly in the comment section, as if it were something we needed to bring back from the good ole days. An article about cyclability would be torn apart.

  3. At a stoplight this morning, I shared compliments on bikes with a fellow cyclist. We agreed on how important  ‘fit’ was to enjoying riding and she said she advises her friends to get a good second-hand bike as opposed to a poorly fitting new bike.
    Do motorists have such exchanges at red lights?
    The point being, and I’m not a bike snob, I feel it is a useless endeavor to look to Walmart as being the great provocateur of cycling and I don’t understand Andy Clarke’s perspective on this. If anything, Walmart has been the detractor to cycling by putting bikes out there that don’t function up to standard. Folks with a weak inclination to ride get discouraged easily and then that’s it. I can’t think of anything that has been in widely-acceptable use and works as poorly as a Walmart bicycle.
    OK, they might not be completely useless, but in the vane of establishing long-term, reliable bike usage……….

  4. James, the answer to the question you ask is found in the nasty comments themselves. 
    Here’s a list of their complaints:

    A) Cyclists block the road when they are driving,

    B) Cyclists run stop signs and sometimes even stoplights, and generally ignore traffic laws,

    C) Cyclists run over pedestrians.

    D) Cyclists ride on infrastructure that car drivers paid for.

    These complaints all have a germ of truth but are generally gross exagerations.  The solution to the negativity is to get everyone out on bikes.  Once people start riding regularly they see that most cyclists abide by the laws as much as practicable.  They’ll learn very quickly that they aren’t stopping at stop signs either and it’s not as dangerous as they thought.  They will also be like everyone else, including bureaucrats, and have no idea where the money comes from to pay for roads and bicycle infrastructure.  By that time tho, they won’t care.  They’ll be having so much fun riding that they’ll wonder why they start long before.
     

  5. Yeah. I mean, I get it, but people walk in the streets, walk through cross walks during the wrong light cycles, jay-walk, don’t pay for their sidewalks… It’s just humorous.

    Glad to see you’re so optimistic about people getting into cycling. After seeing the bike boulevard’s effects already, I’m starting to agree. Build it and they’ll try it, and then it will become part of their lives.

  6. I didn’t mean that I believe they don’t pay for their sidewalks btw. Just pointing that similar logic can be used.

  7. Yeah, those comments about any bike related story are always pretty much the same, and here locally, it’s the same cast of characters that tend to post the most, with the same couple of characters getting their posts deleted.    They are always worried about having “work next to a sweaty bicyclist” or some other such nonsense.   I drove to work today…. yuck…  driving bites so badly compared to riding the bike, even if it is 100+ degrees…  but these poor saps probably will never get it.

  8. An article about pedestrians but it’s apropos to any alternative transportation discussion,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/us/16pedestrians.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

    It’s class warfare .  Getting from point a to point b is not a level playing field.  Going back to the Star comments the theme is I’ve got mine and don’t you even think about taking it away from me.  Entitlement.  And again it is irrational.  Adding up the time any one car driver spends hindered in traffic by bicycles or pedestrians it pales in comparison to the hindrance that other automobiles contribute.  Sure there is a certain trollish element to those comments. The same few with pulses and a keyboard reiteratively spewing their vitriol.  Yes it can be read with amusement but it also means something all you have to do is read the series of articles in the LA Times about Dr Christopher Thomas’s attack on a pair of bicyclists to know that people really do believe this stuff.  The comments running largely in favour of the doctor.  For a quick synopsis of that incident see, http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/la-doctor-jailed-for-road-rage-attack-on-cyclists-24570/

    It’s all fun and games until somebody gets an eye poked out.

  9. An article about pedestrians but it’s apropos to any alternative transportation discussion,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/us/16pedestrians.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

    It’s class warfare .  Getting from point a to point b is not a level playing field.  Going back to the Star comments the theme is I’ve got mine and don’t you even think about taking it away from me.  Entitlement.  And again it is irrational.  Adding up the time any one car driver spends hindered in traffic by bicycles or pedestrians it pales in comparison to the hindrance that other automobiles contribute.  Sure there is a certain trollish element to those comments. The same few with pulses and a keyboard reiteratively spewing their vitriol.  Yes it can be read with amusement but it also means something all you have to do is read the series of articles in the LA Times about Dr Christopher Thomas’s attack on a pair of bicyclists to know that people really do believe this stuff.  The comments running largely in favour of the doctor.  For a quick synopsis of that incident see, http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/la-doctor-jailed-for-road-rage-attack-on-cyclists-24570/

    It’s all fun and games until somebody gets an eye poked out.

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