Yay!  I hope it goes through.  Equal consideration for walking and cycling on the roads!

Obama Bicycle Policy Wins Love From Cyclists, Scorn From Trucking Industry

WASHINGTON — Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a weekend bicyclist, might consider keeping his head down and his helmet on. A backlash is brewing over his new bicycling policy.

LaHood says the government is going to give bicycling – and walking, too – the same importance as automobiles in transportation planning and the selection of projects for federal money. The former Republican congressman quietly announced the “sea change” in transportation policy last month.

“This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized,” he wrote in his government blog.

Not so fast, say some conservatives and industries dependent on trucking. A manufacturers’ blog called the policy “nonsensical.” One congressman suggested LaHood was on drugs.

The new policy is an extension of the Obama administration’s livability initiative, which regards the creation of alternatives to driving – buses, streetcars, trolleys and trains, as well as biking and walking – as central to solving the nation’s transportation woes.

LaHood’s blog was accompanied by a DOT policy statement urging states and transportation agencies to treat “walking and bicycling as equals with other transportation modes.” It recommends, among other things, including biking and walking lanes on bridges and clearing snow from bike paths.

Transportation secretary is normally a quiet post, a Cabinet backwater. But LaHood has been the administration’s point man on an array of high-profile issues, from high-speed trains and distracted drivers to runaway Toyotas.

The new policy has vaulted LaHood to superstar status in the bicycling world. Bike blogs are bubbling with praise. A post on Ridemonkey.com calls him “cycling’s man of the century.” The Adventure Cycling Association’s Web site calls LaHood “our hero.”

“LaHood went out on a limb for cyclists,” Joe Lindsey wrote on Bicycling.com. “He said stuff no Transportation secretary’s ever said, and is backing it up with action.”

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The policy has also been embraced by environmentalists and many urban planners.

Word of the policy change is still filtering out beyond the bicycling and transportation communities, but the initial reaction from conservatives and industry has been hostile.

The National Association of Manufacturers’ blog, Shopfloor.org, called the policy “dumb and irresponsible.”

“LaHood’s pedal parity is nonsensical for a modern industrial nation,” said the blog. “We don’t call it sacrilege, but radical is a fair description. It is indeed a sea change in federal transportation policy that could have profound implications for the U.S. economy and the 80 percent of freight that moves by truck.”

LaHood said he has been surprised by the response.

“It didn’t seem that controversial to me,” he wrote in a second blog item. “After all, I didn’t say they should have the only voice. Just a voice.”

At a recent House hearing, Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio, suggested jokingly to a Transportation Department official that one explanation for the new policy is that the secretary’s thinking has been clouded by drugs.

“Is that a typo?” LaTourette asked. “If it’s not a typo, is there still mandatory drug testing at the department?”

The new policy is not a regulation and, therefore, not mandatory, Transportation undersecretary for policy Roy Kienitz responded to LaTourette.

But it’s LaHood’s view “that the federal government should not take the position that roads and trains are real transportation and walking and biking is not,” Kienitz said. “His view is it’s all real transportation, and we should consider it based on what benefits it can bring for the amount of money we spend.”

That didn’t satisfy LaTourette.

“So is it his thought that perhaps we’re going to have, like, rickshaws carrying cargo from state to state, or people with backpacks?” asked the congressman.

Bicycling advocates have been blasting LaTourette. Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists, with 300,000 affiliated members, called his comments “a little childish.”

LaTourette said in an interview that he thinks bike paths, bike lanes and projects that make communities more walkable are fine but shouldn’t be funded with money raised by a gasoline tax paid by motorists. The federal gas tax pays for most highway and transit aid, although lately general Treasury funds have been used to supplement the programs.

LaHood noted that LaTourette supports federal funds for a bike path in his district.

“The point is, on his Web site he’s bragging about the fact that he got some money for a bike path,” LaHood said. “He knows people in his district like them.”

LaHood, 64, said he and his wife have biked on weekends for years. Three days before his announcement of the new policy, LaHood stood on a table to speak to a gathering of hundreds of bike enthusiasts in Washington. He drew cheers when he vowed the Obama administration will put affordable housing next to walking and biking paths.

“I’m not going to apologize for any of it,” he said in the interview. “I think this is what the people want.”

On the Right Track from Mayor Sam Adams on Vimeo.

I suspect most local cyclists have read the most recent road wars article in the Sentinel. As is typical, the comments are full of hate and threats of violence from the typical lowlifes who frequent newspaper comment sections. I don’t recommend you read them. I do, however, fear that some lowlifes are emboldened by what appears to be solidarity and support for their hate. The last time our local media fanned the flames of road rage, I felt the effects immediately the following weekend. Friends reported a notable increase in hostility on their rides as well.

Beyond our local venue, the haters have set up a group on Facebook, called “There’s a perfectly good path right next to the road you stupid cyclist!” Their profile photo shows a passenger dooring a cyclist and knocking him off his bike. Other photos include one of the horrific crash in which a drunk driver slammed into a sanctioned race, killed a rider and injured others. Below the photo it says “My Way – Get the F___ out of it.”

This is clearly a hate group and it’s managed to attract 32,000 fans from the shallow end of the gene pool. The content purposely incites hatred and violence against cyclists. As someone who has ridden in an area with predatory sociopaths who think it’s OK to assault cyclists, I don’t believe this can be written off as harmless venting any more than if it was directed at ethnic minorities or gays. The last thing these scumbags need is a sense of solidarity to egg them on and make them feel righteous in control of a 4000lb missile (which happens to offer anonymity and easy escape).

Facebook has a policy against offensive and hateful content. That is why every profile, photo, page, post and comment has a “report” button associated with it. The FAQ on the safety policy says:

What do I do if I find an explicit, hateful or otherwise objectionable group on Facebook?
You can anonymously report offensive group pictures and content by clicking on the “Report Group” link located under the group’s picture. You will be asked to specify the offensive content. Facebook will review your complaint and will act to ensure all users comply with our Terms of Use so that Facebook remains a trusted environment where people can interact safely.

What do I do if someone has posted an objectionable photo on Facebook?
You can anonymously report photos that violate our Terms of Use (e.g., pornography or copyrighted images) by clicking on the “Report This Photo” link below the picture. Facebook reviews these complaints and takes down photos as necessary. It is not a violation of our Terms of Use to post a photo that is unflattering, so please don’t report a photo just because you don’t like the way you look in it.

This group and many associated photos have been reported repeatedly over the last 2 months. Yet Facebook has failed to respond or uphold its policy of removing hate groups. Therefore, a group has been formed for cyclists to unite in demanding that Facebook uphold it’s policy and remove both the group and its creator. If you are a Facebook member, I urge you to join HELP REMOVE this HATE GROUP against cyclists!.

(UPDATE: the group name has been changed)

A doctor convicted of assaulting two bicyclists by slamming on his car brakes after a confrontation on a narrow Brentwood road was sentenced today to five years in prison.

Christopher Thompson, wearing dark blue jail scrubs, wept as he apologized to the injured cyclists shortly before he was sentenced.

“I would like to apologize deeply, profoundly from the bottom of my heart,” he told them, his right hand cuffed to a court chair.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Scott T. Millington called the case a “wake-up call” to motorists and cyclists and urged local government to provide riders with more bike lanes. He said he believed that Thompson had shown a lack of remorse during the case and that the victims were particularly vulnerable while riding their bicycles.

The case against Thompson, 60, has drawn close scrutiny from bicycle riders around the country, many of whom viewed the outcome as a test of the justice system’s commitment to protecting cyclists.

Millington said he did not take into account more than 270 e-mails and letters from cyclists that were filed with the court urging a tough sentence.

The July 4, 2008, crash also highlighted simmering tensions between cyclists and residents along Mandeville Canyon Road, the winding five-mile residential street where the crash took place.

One cyclist was flung face-first into the rear window of Thompson’s red Infiniti, breaking his front teeth and nose and cutting his face. The other cyclist slammed into the sidewalk and suffered a separated shoulder.

At his sentencing hearing at the county’s airport branch court, Thompson cited the Bible in urging cyclists and residents of Mandeville Canyon to try to resolve their differences peacefully.

“If my incident shows anything it’s that confrontation leads to an escalation of hostilities,” Thompson said.

Thompson, a former emergency room physician who described the crash as a terrible accident, testified during his trial last year that he and other Mandeville Canyon residents were upset that some cyclists rode dangerously and acted disrespectfully toward residents and motorists along the street, a popular route for bike riders.

On the day of the crash, Thompson said he was driving down the road on his way to work when several cyclists swore at him and flipped him off as he called on them to ride single file. He said he stopped his car to take a photo to identify the riders and never intended to hurt anyone.

But the cyclists said the doctor was acting aggressively from the start. They said he honked loudly from behind them and passed by dangerously close as they moved to ride single file before he pulled in front and braked hard.

A police officer told jurors that shortly after the crash that Thompson said he slammed on his brakes in front of the riders to “teach them a lesson.”

Prosecutors said Thompson had a history of run-ins with bike riders, including a similar episode four months before the crash when two cyclists told police that the doctor tried to run them off the road and braked suddenly in front of them. Neither of the riders was injured.

Jurors convicted Thompson in November of mayhem; assault with a deadly weapon, his car; battery with serious injury; and reckless driving causing injury.

– Jack Leonard at the L.A. County airport courthouse

Photo: Christopher Thompson weeps as a judge sentences him to five years in prison for assaulting two bicyclists by slamming on his car brakes after a confrontation on a narrow Brentwood road. Credit: Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

Getting people out of cars and onto bicycles, a much more sustainable form of transportation, has long vexed environmentally conscious city planners. Although bike lanes painted on streets and automobile-free “greenways” have increased ridership over the past few years, the share of people relying on bikes for transportation is still less than 2 percent, based on various studies. An emerging body of research suggests that a superior strategy to increase pedal pushing could be had by asking the perennial question: What do women want?

In the U.S., men’s cycling trips surpass women’s by at least 2:1. This ratio stands in marked contrast to cycling in European countries, where urban biking is a way of life and draws about as many women as men—sometimes more. In the Netherlands, where 27 percent of all trips are made by bike, 55 percent of all riders are women. In Germany 12 percent of all trips are on bikes, 49 percent of which are made by women.

“If you want to know if an urban environment supports cycling, you can forget about all the detailed ‘bikeability indexes’—just measure the proportion of cyclists who are female,” says Jan Garrard, a senior lecturer at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, and author of several studies on biking and gender differences.

Women are considered an “indicator species” for bike-friendly cities for several reasons. First, studies across disciplines as disparate as criminology and child ­rearing have shown that women are more averse to risk than men. In the cycling arena, that risk aversion translates into increased demand for safe bike infrastructure as a prerequisite for riding. Women also do most of the child care and household shopping, which means these bike routes need to be organized around practical urban destinations to make a difference.

“Despite our hope that gender roles don’t exist, they still do,” says Jennifer Dill, a transportation and planning researcher at Portland State University. Addressing women’s concerns about safety and utility “will go a long way” toward increasing the number of people on two wheels, Dill explains.

So far few cities have taken on the challenge. In the U.S., most cycling facilities consist of on-street bike lanes, which require riding in vehicle-clogged traffic, notes John Pucher, a professor of urban planning at Rutgers University and longtime bike scholar. And when cities do install traffic-protected off-street bike paths, they are almost always along rivers and parks rather than along routes leading “to the supermarket, the school, the day care center,” Pucher says.

Although researchers have long examined the bike infrastructure in Europe, they have only just started to do so for the U.S. In a study conducted last year, Dill examined the effect of different types of bike facilities on cycling. The project, which used GPS positioning to record individual cycling trips in Portland, compared the shortest route with the path cyclists actually took to their destination. Women were less likely than men to try on-street bike lanes and more likely to go out of their way to use “bike boulevards,” quiet residential streets with special traffic-calming features for bicycles. “Women diverted from the shortest routes more often,” Dill says.

Other data support those findings. In New York City, men are three times as likely to be cyclists as women. Yet a bicycle count found that an off-street bike path in Central Park had 44 percent female riders. “Within the same city you find huge deviations in terms of gender,” Pucher remarks.

Good infrastructure alone won’t improve women’s cycling rates, researchers caution. In an automobile-dominated culture, “attitudinal variables” also play a role, says Susan Handy, a professor of environmental science at the University of California, Davis. In a survey to be published in Transportation Research Record, Handy found that “comfort” and “needing a car” were important factors influencing women’s cycling rates—but not men’s. Needing a car is likely tied to the household errands women often perform, Handy says, and could be addressed in part by outreach programs showing that women can “jump on a bike the way they jump in a car.”

A few municipalities are beginning to implement a “second wave” of strategies aimed at broadening the cycling demographic. In Portland, a city already renowned for its urban cycling, a Women on Bikes program targets such concerns as fixing a flat tire. The city is also building its first cycle track—a European-style bike lane that is separated from cars and pedestrians. Across the country state and federally funded Safe Routes to Schools programs are creating practical bike routes for kids so they don’t have to be driven by their parents.

Ahead of the curve may be New York City, where about five miles of traffic-protected bike lanes have recently been installed. Credit goes to the new Department of Transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who is upending the department’s long-standing focus on trucks and automobiles. Remarks Pucher: “A woman cyclist became head of the DOT, and wonderful things started happening.”

I saw these little ‘Zefal’ half-clips in a catalog, and was curious enough to order a pair to try. These worked out great for me! While you can’t really pull ‘up’ on the backstroke (a myth anyway, IMO…), they do allow you to move your feet in a circle rather than just pushing down thru only a part of the pedal stroke. I find that you can deliver power thru at least 3/4 of the rotation of the crank and not have to worry about your feet slipping forward off the pedals. Entry and exit from these clips is super quick and easy; a very nice feature in city traffic riding.

Since becoming a commuter cyclist recently, I’ve found these clips to be invaluable for all the above reasons, foremost of which is the easy in/out. No, they’re perhaps not as efficient as full clips & straps, or clipless, but for people who ride in their street shoes or joggers, they’re perfect.

There are several brands of these, ranging from the rather minimal ‘Zefal’ brand to a more robust style marketed under the ‘Winwood’ brand. I found the Winwood brand at a LBS here in Austin, and they’re by far the best ones I’ve used so far. They appear to be molded from a glass-filled Acetal type plastic, and are quite stiff, rigid, and stout. ‘Pyramid’ is another brand I’ve seen. Nashbar sells some that look exactly like the Winwood brand to me, so I suspect that they’re just rebranded for Nashbar. While these may or may not sound like something you’d be interested in, I believe that it would be well worth your $6-10 to try some. You might be very surprised at how well they work.

Oh…and for you folks with more money than common sense, Bruce Gordon Cycles makes mini-clips from titanium or stainless steel tubing: $92/pair for the titanium, $72 for the stainless. These represent some serious overkill in my opinion, but they surely do look extremely cool, if you can afford that kind of ‘style’.

When I was in my mid 30′s, I was overweight, out of shape, and not very healthy at all. Then I got into cycling. This was in the Houston area…where cycling is easy, because the place is pancake-flat. So, I got my weight down, my energy level way up, and my general health back under control. Then when I was at age 41, my daughter was born. You parents know how a baby can literally suck the spare time right out of your life. Not that I resent her for that, of course… I’m just saying that the cycling got seriously back-burnered. And I gained all the excess weight back, and got all out of shape again.

For years, I’d wished I could live close enough to work to commute by bike, but if you know anything about Houston, you know that many people there live a minimum of 15 miles from their jobs, often with only high-traffic routes available to get there…not good for cycle-commuting at all.

Years passed, and I found a job here in Austin, so we all moved up here about four years ago. The kiddo was in middle-school by then, and thus lower-maintenance in terms of parental free-time constraints. So I dug out the bikes and serviced them up, figuring to get back into it. Needless to say, the hilliness here was a major shock to a flatlander’s system, especially since said flatlander hadn’t ridden much in several years!

A few months after that, one of our cars croaked, and it was too expensive to justify fixing so old a car. So, I started walking down to the bus stop and taking Cap Metro to work. Finally, it dawned on me that I could save a lot of time by biking down to a farther bus stop, eliminating a transfer and long wait at the Park & Ride. So now, I ride about 1.5 miles to a stop on the 1M route, ride the bus about 4 miles, then hop off and bike the last mile to work.

The experience of using my bike to get to work is growing on me, still, two years later. I enjoy it immensely, and will eventually migrate to cycling the full distance to & from work. I do that occasionally as it is, especially when the bus comes along with a full bike rack, and I just don’t feel like waiting for the next one and praying that its bike rack isn’t also full. BD,DT!

My commute is in the far north part of town, from Wells Branch down Metric to Rutland, so I don’t see the kind of traffic congestion that y’all see in the central part of town. Plus, the streets and bike lanes in the newer parts of town are wider and (I feel) safer. I’ve never had an altercation with a driver, other than one hollering at me one early morning to “Git on th’ sidewalk!”, and this from a smoke-belching old Buick with only one headlight and one taillight working (Harumph!).

Anyway, now, at age 55, I’m feeling better than I have in 15 years. I really haven’t dropped all that much weight (it’s much harder when you’re older), but I feel pretty doggone good. I have way more energy now, definitely more phsyical stamina, and a much greater feeling of overall well-being. And I attribute all of this to the cycling, because I don’t get much exercise otherwise.

I figure I’m killing several birds with this one stone:
1. Saving tons of money by eliminating one car
2. Getting a lot of exercise that I wouldn’t otherwise have time for
3. Appreciating the old saying ‘…& smell the roses’
4. And as a bonus, reducing my ‘carbon footprint’ by roughly half

Perhaps I’m ‘preaching to the choir’ by expressing all this in this particular venue, but I have to say that I’m truly enjoying (after all these years of wishing I could) the experience of cycling to work. I’ve also even used my bike (and the bus system) to get around to other places around town on weekends. Sure, it takes longer, but at my age, speed doesn’t hold the importance that it once did. And then there’s that ‘smelling the roses’ thing, too…

Thanks to Adriel for allowing me this opportunity!

while you watch this, just think to yourself, when you do not deserve to be arrested and people are arresting you, should you resist?  Would you?  Basically every person in america that has the audacity to not get handcuffed peacefully and go to jail without being happy about it is a criminal.

http://www.nbcphiladelphi…ged_Assault_Philadelphia.html

Read the whole story here:

http://www.nbcphiladelph…Brutality-Case.html