Violence against cyclists symptomatic?

A fireman in Asheville NC shot a cyclist after he turned to leave an argument on safety. The cyclist was carrying a three year old in a child seat. The fireman thought it was unsafe to subject children to the dangers of auto traffic by transporting them on a bike. "Police said the driver, Charles Diez, claimed he was upset that the victim was bike riding with his child on the heavily traveled Tunnel Road."

I'm not sure how he thought the three year old would get home after the parent was killed. However the parent was not injured- amazingly the helmet stopped the bullet. But cyclists put up with violence regularly in how the roads are laid out and how they can get around. So is this incident an anomaly or a result of a violent system?

Is shooting a cyclist different than running the cyclist of the road or sideswiping or driving by too close ignorantly, or being distracted and killing them? Yes at least in how the law perceives it. And riding while poor carries its own penalties. The police will ignore the folder irrespective of how egregious the driving fault was because as they said in one recent case in NY they were too busy to follow up. Even threatening someone with death by car is your word against the driver unlike threatening them with a gun which can bring down every homeland security swat team in the region.

Just riding a bike has this violence associated with it that could be worse if we slip up by trying to avoid a pot hole or brick in the road without looking. On the road from Yellowstone to Glacier I hit a dead raccoon. The bike flew about five feet into the road and surprisingly landed upright. I corrected the front wheel and regained the shoulder. Ahead and behind me were logging trucks. What fortune do I owe for my brief inattention?

Socially we get used to the driver side violence from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to the traffic in front of our homes. So when someone flips out its easy to think of them as illogical. Or irrational. Or a confusing blend of the two. Road rage, distracted driving, speeding are all defensible unlike waving a gun. Instead these incidents are a logical extension of an accepted pattern of violence.

Don't keep rewarding agressive driving

I ride my bicycle, but constantly risk being killed by lung destroying irresponsible motorists, driving aggressively, because government rewards them for saving time, to access sprawled out services, like doctors and schools spread out over large areas that should be open space and functioning creeks, with infrastructure that penalizes walkers and cyclists today, for some Clean Air Act fix in the future, like a TDA-3 over-crossing of Ralston at 101.

Bike boulevards every one mile would help walkers and bicyclists while deterring the near 100% infrastructure dedicated to aggressive driving.

restore the food shed on a walking perimeter

Peak everything around us. We have problem. So city leaders convene green committees. Green committees look around and think bikes and walking a no brainer since you don't have to be a doctor to know that you should take your heart for a walk.

But now the bigger problem. City leaders have spent the last 70 years chaining us to Al Queda and Saudi Arabia. As they have expanded roads and raised the speed limit to get to the development permitted in the outer reaches of their jurisdictions they have made walking impossible and bicycling dangerous. Self sufficiency is dangerous and illegal in places with no walking closures at some intersections. So dangerous that leaders like Sue Lempert and Coralin Fierebach now say that they will not attempt to bike on these road they labored decades to proudly build. They want separate bike paths- ceding the public space to Bush and Al Queda they want to go build a another network to get around slowly without pollution and in peace.

But how to grade separate this new facility? And connect community scattered to the outer reaches of the jurisdiction? It will be too expensive so we have to live with what we got. There is nothing to be done. One way is to move services into the neighborhoods on an 1/8 mile walking radius and then connect these centers via bicycles boulevards. Ideally if we have Transfer of Development Rights we restore the food shed on a walking perimeter and have a complete neighborhood.

The Bay Trail

Trails go over bridges
with names from the past

Cordilleras Creek, San Francisquito Creek
reminder of river valleys, river people, red wooded hillsides
coursing through us creasing the landscape.

Water tags to the past are calming
terrorizing moms with strollers, toddlers on trikes
plastic bags in the marsh the air damp with dust and diesel

Can't let the past slow us down
got appointments to make, shows to watch
socially speed is responsible.

A goose chick through the front wheel.
A child's gasp.
We are all crowded on this little trail.

More on 20 mph streets

18 mph streets benefit all. They would also encourage more walking and bicycling. Instead of waiting for separate paths people would see fit to use the road. People are scared to use the streets for bicycling and walking because hostile traffic makes it preferable to be surrounded by steel. Presently over-designed streets would be simple and cheap to reuse; streets space can be allocated for other modes at 18mph. More importantly since slowing down traffic can be seen as increasing congestion, instead of congestion management we need congestion design.

Quote from Vanderbilt
We consistently get urban speeds wrong in the U.S. In Germany, the land where speed is supposedly worshipped, the speed-limit free sections of the autobahn are contrasted by a mandatory, heavily enforced 30 KPH (that’s 18 mph, folks) limit in residential areas.

Quote from Streetblog comments on the Times article
The case for traffic-calming and automated enforcement is already strong. This makes it even more airtight. Drivers are basically ignoring posted limits on roads designed to accommodate speeding. (Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt wrote a great post last month about the multi-pronged wrongheadedness of this approach to street design. Since drivers respond more to the threat of tickets than the inherent dangers of speeding, automated devices like red-light cams and speeding cams are essential to thoroughly deter this behavior.

Another quote-
The fact that this story was picked up by health reporters is an encouraging sidenote. Livable streets advocates will have powerful allies if public health authorities recognize unchecked speeding as the catastrophe that it is.

What does it take to keep bad drivers off the road?

How easy is it to get a license in CA? A bus driver in a fatal crash had a history of arrests, tickets, had his license revoked, just got it back, had a history of substance abuse and then was put behind the wheel of a bus.

The articles states:

• Watts was arrested as he lay critically injured in his hospital bed. His mother said he had wrestled with drug and alcohol problems, was jailed several times on drug charges and had smashed a car carrying a friend into a tree a few years ago, though neither was seriously hurt.
• He was a longtime truck driver, but had been unable to find a trucking job since being released from jail on a domestic violence charge six months ago, his mother said.
• Chaney Mae Watts said she believed the crash came on her son's first day behind the wheel of the bus after several training trips watching the owner drive. She and her husband told their son they were uncomfortable with him driving a vehicle that carried people instead of cargo.
• "He wasn't the best driver," she said. "He knew we didn't want him to drive."

The DMV has struggled with the problem of licensing most recently setting some tougher standards that appear to target seniors involving a revised vision exam as well as memory and reflex assessments. However its had a problem keeping people with a bad record and impaired driving record off the road. In addition many people with revoked licenses still drive so the question remains what other form of electronic monitoring can be used on bad drivers.

Commuter benefit small token of real problem in bailout bill

Why does the LA Times think auto makers will face an either or demand situation for gas guzzling planet toasting SUV vehicles? Won't higher fuel prices, declined home value, reduced 401k, declined job markets, and other economic pressures put a damper on spending for larger items?

Instead of reading the front page they write: Falling oil prices could prove a blessing or a curse to automakers. When fuel costs were soaring, firms retooled their lineups to emphasize small and efficient vehicles. If prices continue declining, they could be unprepared for renewed demand for SUVs and trucks.

This nonsense reflects the conventional thinking mired in the age of dinosaurs, of drilling, of building with a wish-we-could-afford-green attitude, of nature as property to hand off to corporations. Going to a meeting on a bicycle should mean not spreading asthma and cancer for the kids of the other attendees. But more likely than not a homicidal attitude will pervade- knowing how I drive I think its crazy that you biked here.

Congress naturally is the place where the employees of the fossil fuel industry hand out the free market prerogatives for a toxic planet to burn and a motorcide intensive warfare state. The credit bill bailed out the fossil fuel industry. Here's how:

What sprawl did was extend the area where banks could function. The result was exponentially larger consumption of resources like water and wetlands and deterioration of both the commons and the resource basins (like air) and their ecological services. For example rice harvest in CA was delayed this year because smoke from the fires stunted growth. Even in sparsely populated areas fire departments were restricted by sprawl to "save lives" instead of keeping large tracts from burning.

Housing has collapsed on the outskirts of the driving economy, like Modesto, Merced and even the suburbs of Sacramento- the new ghettos. Gas prices by raising budgets 25% pushed stupid negatively amortized keeping-up-with-the-jones families over the edge on the outer rings of sprawl nation. And as these home compete in the foreclosure market, and future gas prices and related food and energy prices rise, the effect of increased poor quality inventory, will continue to be felt in declining home values.

So if a H.R. 1424 bailout is to occur it should change the way we get around in the fossil fools economy. The Senate Bailout Bill, signed by W, of W (MD) fame included a commuter benefit for Bikers of $20/mo. Instead of being seen as pork, $20 to bike makes sense since its a minor incentive (a penalty with a gas tax ladder for example would have been better) for connected communities via zero CO2 transport. With Bluemenauer and Obestar in the house who in the Senate found enough brains to put section 211 in? Hopefully the employer will cash out the $20/- to the employee. The reduced parking demand should (another incentive that could have been written in) reduce the parking ratio allowed employers to make higher uses of land.

$20 per biker per month is a small start to ridding us of a fossil fuel destroyed future because the time for solutions is now.