Get yourself ready for the weekend with a good MTB video. [twitterer]

Take a tip

Bicycle-Safety Tips. Read ‘em and dweeb.

Foldin’ fender

The Quickfix and Foldnfix Foldable Bike Fenders are mudguards that slip over your back wheel, keeping you from getting that damp grey stripe up your arse. More protection than a seat posted mounted mudguard but not as much coverage as full-length guards, they’re a clever design. They look a bit rough-and-ready to me but then I reckon that’ll make them pretty rugged when it really counts. [twitterer]

Turning pedals, turning pages

Kent Peterson recommends:

• 50 Good Bicycle Books
• 50 More Good Bicycle Books

Seven things

Seven things you should give up to be a happy cyclist.

Baillieu ♥ bikes…umm, not

The Victorian Government remains fixated on the costly east-west link , with little relief for public transport commuters and funding for bike works turned down to zero. I don’t often use the term but to me this all seems nothing short of retarded.

[twitterer]

See also: the state of Melbourne’s public transport…yeah, it’s crap. Oh, and no one likes Myki. [twitterer]

Economies of bike

Why bicyclists are better customers than drivers for local business

the economic benefit of bicycling for communities doesn’t end with cyclists’ expensive cappuccinos and impulse buys. Properties near bike paths increase in value 11 percent…access and proximity to walking and biking facilities, especially greenways, makes homes easier to sell.

And on The Conversation Brad Pettitt argues that bike lanes’ economic benefits go beyond jobs:

the economic benefits of bike paths are not simply limited to jobs created during path construction. Long after the bike path concrete has dried the economic benefits can keep rolling, so long as the bike path is well planned and integrated into a broader cycle network.

[twitterer]

Shared paths: not safe?

A study reported in the Canberra Times which “examined the characteristics of bicycle crashes in different cycling environments” with the aim of finding “strategies to reduce bicycle crashes” has concluded in part that:

The number of crashes involving pedestrians and the relatively high speeds of some of the cyclists on shared paths and footpaths suggests that the regulation of cycling in shared areas should be reviewed, formally recognized as a part of the road reserve and appropriate speed limits applied. Such measures would be in the interests of cyclists and pedestrians, as cyclists who crashed on shared paths sustained higher average injury severity scores than those injured in any other road environment.

While I don’t see how shared path speed limits could be enforced, I actually find this report fairly convincing. I found alternative routes for my daily commuting years ago when the daily tangle with bike path racers started getting just a bit too scary.

See the press release from The George Institute for Global Health and the full report is available from NRMA – ACT Road Safety Trust.

[twitterer]

Downright scary

This video of a crazy mobile phone driver ramming a police officer is downright scary. But it’s important to remember that homicidal nutters like this are rare, fortunately. [twitterer]

Driving Mr Hitler

Observes Ian Walker: “So car sharing ads were perfected in the 40s?” Case in point: When You Ride Alone You Ride With Hitler!

Envy

National Geographic has some seriously cool travel biking photos. [twitterer]

And Live Free or Drive is a blog full of lush bike touring photos. [twitterer]

See also Bike tour + Twitter = Map.

How to steal a bike redux

Remember this? How to steal a bike.

Well after seven years, still nobody cares if Casey Neistat’s bike gets stolen.

Of course, there may be very good reasons for that…

[twitterer]

Sting like a butterfly

Having trouble with free-roaming pedestrians cutting you up on your daily commute? Slightly gullible? Well, help is at hand. Maybe. One frustrated London commuter got so tired with SMIDSY peds that he came up with a novel approach to the problem: the Bike Butterfly.

OK, this is getting just a bit ridiculous…

World’s brightest bike light at 100,000 lumens apparently (whatever that means) it sounds awfully bright. [twitterer]

For your own sake, don’t

Nine Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Ride to Work. [twitterer]

Spring classics

Paris–Roubaix: better in black and white. [twitterer]

Hit and run

The fact the people can do hit-and-run makes my stomach churn. So it was good to see this video showing a driver attempting to flee after hitting a bicyclist being blocked by a quick-thinking bus driver. Check it out: Salute to a Heroic Bus Operator. [twitterer]

Then there’s this one caught on camera, which looks deliberate or at least wildly negligent. Unsurprisingly, the car was later reported stolen.

As a follow-up, Cyclelicious summarised recently reported hit and runs. This one particularly caught my eye: “Hit & run with injury. Small child on bike hit by gray pickup truck. Driver of the vehicle gave juvenile $20 and left the scene.” Lovely.

“Need any help, buddy?”

We’ve all stopped to offer help to another cyclist but not all of us have had our good deeds recorded on Google Streetview. [twitterer]

Will make you cry

Take a private 10 minutes to watch this beautiful film Boy, featuring the wonderful Timothy Spall.

For the kids

On Momentum Mag, Tiny Helmets, Big Bike:

Since I’ve started biking for transportation, I feel like a better mother. I am more excited about each day, and less rushed because the journey becomes as fun as the destination. I am healthier and happier and able to watch the world go by at a child’s pace. We still have days where it is difficult to get out of the house and even days where we can’t avoid taking the car. However, knowing that with each pedal stroke I am creating a better future for my children gives me that extra push.

On the other hand, watch out for undesirable self-fulfilling prophecies. [twitterer]

Apropos, could urban planning reduce childhood obesity?

And Northern Ireland’s Health Minister says ‘Cycling can help us tackle obesity epidemic’ [twitterer]

But Grow-up, Australia! – we’re pathetic (link to article in the Hun). Seriously, there are more important things to get outraged about. [twitterer]

What was I thinking?

A selection of rants on one of my favourite ranting topics:

• No play please, we’re American
• Fat-arsed schoolkids
• Unwrap the cotton wool and get real
• What precisely is wrong with playing on the road?

Costly

Create your own cost of driving infographic thanks to Karl’s spreadsheet.

While we’re on the subject, what’s wrong with a car-centric system? [twitterer]

Why do you ride like that?

“Biking in the middle of the lane like that sure looks dangerous.”

No tribes please

Interesting discussion sparked by a cartoon in the New Yorker.

My key point: don’t try to tell me that any flavour of cyclist is more pure at heart—we all love our bikes, we all love cycling—we just do it differently.

Some good follow-up added to the original post later.

For what it’s worth, I thought the New Yorker cartoon was amusing.

History

The Queensland Police Serivce on bicycles, then and now. Cool. [twitterer]

See also these stunning vintage photos of early 1900s Australian bike culture [twitterer]

Holding up traffic

Melbourne’s peak hour myth: it’s more like three. [twitterer]

Suggestion: ride a bike. [twitterer]

Contest this

Elly Blue has opened The Bad Streets for Bicycling Photo Contest.

Design it, print it

Print your own bike parts. I really want a 3D-printer…

Get my drift?

Trike Drifting. Yeah, you’ve probably seen this sort of thing before…doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy watching it again!

A car-load of hoons ploughed into a group of 13 cyclists who were on their way to the starting point for yesterday’s Around the Bay in a Day ride.

Police said the riders were north-bound on the Nepean Highway at Mount Eliza about 4am when the car, said to be a burgundy EB Falcon, drove past the cyclists before the driver doubled back and deliberately swerved into them.

Words cannot describe the kind of imbecile that would do something like that. If this knob gets caught he should be barred from driving for life because he’s clearly incapable of accepting the serious responsibility of controlling a motor vehicle.

From the cyclists’ point of view, this was clearly a terrifying experience:

Mr Oxford said the group first knew of the carload of hoons when they drove past and yelled abuse through some kind of loudspeaker.

“They yelled out ‘wankers’. They said ‘bloody bike riders, we’re going to kill you bastards’,” he said.

They threatened the riders. They carried out the threat. Premeditated. That’s not a hit-and-run “accident”, that’s assault with a deadly weapon and should be prosecuted as attemtped murder. I bet it won’t be though.

Other weird stuff

A couple of other worrying things cropped up following this incident. Firstly, note the comments attributed to Senior Constable Danny Lean of Mornington Police

“People do get frustrated with cyclists on the road, there are cyclists out there who don’t obey the road rules, don’t stay in their designated lanes.

“We all bloody get jacked off with it because the cyclists are on the road and they are travelling two or three or four abreast chatting away to each other, but it doesn’t justify the behaviour that’s happened in the early hours of Sunday morning.”

Gee, thanks Senior. Is that really the best way you can do to endorse cyclists as legitimate road users? Is there any suggestion whatsoever that the cyclists who were targetted by this moron were doing anything wrong at all? Talk about avoiding the real problem.

And on a related matter, where the hell does the Herald Sun get off? At the bottom of their coverage of this story, they tacked on a survey question: Are cyclists responsible road users? Excuse me?!? Just who in this situation was acting irresponsibly? Clearly in the addled mind of some News Corp hack, the brain-impaired yobbos lobbing beer bottles and insults from a moving vehicle were just quietly on their way to church when they were assaulted by a marauding band of cyclists (no doubt travelling three or four abreast and chatting away to each other).

As Neil Kearney put it in the same august journal:

If those hooligans had bowled over a bunch of grannies going to church, would readers be having their say on whether senior citizens are responsible road users?

Well put, as is his key message to all road users:

If this culture of intolerance continues, people will die because of it. And other people will have blood on their hands.

What we need is an understanding between road users. We need everyone to realise that the global popularity of cycling is here to stay, and that bikes and cars must safely coexist.

Everyone just relax and share the road. Sheesh, it’s not that hard.

1800-JASON

But I’d just like to add my few cents worth on the laughable explanation “Jason” offered on talkback radio last week:

1. If his engine misfired/stalled as he claims, he would have been in the middle lane, as he accelerated “to kick it back a gear”. When you have engine trouble, your first instinct is not to veer into another lane or to brake heavily—how much more dangerous is it for you if you become stranded across two lanes? No, when your engine fails you coast as far as you can and pull in safely.

2. He claims to have been stationary for “a good 20 seconds” before the first bike hit him. If that’s the case, there is absolutely no way that he had just overtaken the group as he described. Measure it for yourself: 20 seconds is a long time. The cyclists claim to have been travelling at 60 km/h, not unreasonable for an elite pack but let’s be conservative and say they were doing 40 km/h: in 20 seconds they would have travelled well in excess of 200 metres—that just does not fit with Jason’s claim that he was accelerating to get past the cyclists when his car stalled. Even if he had been several car lengths in front, the whole pack would have still be well past him in 20 seconds.

3. It might be possible to argue that being in genuine fear of your personal safety may be legitimate grounds for leaving the scene of a collision, but being distrustful or intimidated by the police is nonsense. Why didn’t he call the police? And for that matter, why didn’t he call an ambulance?

4. At no point does Jason express any concern or remorse over the injuries to the other road users, but we hear several times that there is no significant damage to his car. Such nice priorities aside, this lack of concern doesn’t reasonably fit with someone who has innocently and accidentally caused injury. I’d suggest that it does, however, fit with someone who has deliberately tried to maim other people and is doing a bad job of covering his tracks.

5. The statement that the driver in front was “more interested in what was going on around him than doing the speed limit” speaks volumes. Every driver should be more interested in what’s going on around them than doggedly doing the speed limit—if conditions dictate slowing down then so be it. If Jason was able to be concerned about travelling at or near the speed limit, how does that jell with claims made elsewhere (e.g. by NSW Roads Minister Roozendaal) that the pack was out riding in heavy peak hour traffic? Clearly they were not.

OK, that’s all pretty speculative but then I understand that civil actions are settled on the balance of probabilities not beyond a reasonable doubt. Better get a lawyer, Jason. And if your brief thought it was a good idea for you to go on radio, start looking for a good lawyer.

Blog commentary

Many of the responses to this crazy incident in the newspaper trollfests and from various talking heads have been unintentionally comic (and therefore rather tragic), but I’ll leave discussion of that topic to other bloggers who sum it up better than I could; among them (in no particular order):

• pedaller, and again, and again

• giant chimney

• cfsmtb

• Surly Dave

• Cycling the Yellow Brick Road

• Dave Moulton

Laugh

Oh yeah, and I fell off my chair laughing when I saw that Alan Odds had been quoted by The Age. Keep up the good work, that man.

tough sentencing guidelines will be introduced later this year for excessive speeding, racing, speed trialling and hit-and-run offences.

That’s good to hear. The current maximum penalty of three years in jail for dangerous driving (or five years if intoxicated) will be increased:

Mr Beattie said under the proposed amendments the dangerous driving category would be widened and a five-year penalty also would apply to cases of excessive speeding, racing or speed trialling.

Dangerous driving causing death or grievous bodily harm, which currently carries a maximum seven-year penalty, will increase to 10 years.

In addition, the offence, which currently carries a 10 year penalty if the offender is adversely affected by alcohol, will increase to 14 years and also takes in excessive speeding, speed trialling or leaving the scene of an accident.

If I read this right, it means failing to stop at the scene of an accident could carry a penalty of up to 14 years imprisonment. That’s got to be a good thing, provided there is a realistic chance of it being imposed.

Wishlist

But I wonder if it wouldn’t be more effective to make the penalty for hit-and-run even more severe than the other penalties. Aside from the basic “failure of humanity” that leaving the scene entails, all matters are resolved much faster if the police don’t have to track down the offender. If someone has little to gain by running away — because of harsher penalties that arise if they do — then they may be more likely to stick around and face the consequences of their action.

And while he’s at it, Mr Beattie ought to consider permanent license cancellations for hit-and-run offenders.

To my mind, part of the solution seems to be to make the consequences of running away noticeably more severe than those for staying and accepting one’s responsibilities.