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#121
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Can you make it to the market on a bike?
"Edward Dolan" wrote in message news:VuGdnerdydRgRzrbnZ2dnUVZ_ualnZ2d@prairiewave. com... "Bill Z." wrote in message ... "Edward Dolan" writes: "Bill Z." wrote in message ... "Joe the Aroma" writes: Your idiotic platitudes aside, the reason why bike lanes won't happen is because of democracy, the vast majority of people do not bike and therefor do not demand bike lanes. Democracy in action. We have plenty of bike lanes around here. Many are along routes children use to ride their bicycles to school. It may surprise you, but a "majority of people" have children and will support anything that they think will reduce the chances of their children being injured. Bike lanes are also popular with commuters, who feel more comfortable when there is one. And our traffic engineers like them as well - on expressways or similar heavily used road, the bike lanes double as breakdown lanes or as areas where cars can merge into to let emergency vehicles get by. The cost difference between a bike lane versus a striped shoulder is basically zero. Bike lanes are not as safe as many imagine them to be. An idiotic driver can easily wipe you out and then claim that he never saw you. We weren't talking about how "safe" they were. The issue was whether the government would install them given that most people don't ride bicycles. I pointed out that most voters have children and those children ride bicycles. No, you confounded idiot, it is all about safety. No one in their right mind gives a damn about anything else. I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. For instance, we know that having railroad tracks at grade with car and pedestrian traffic is less safe than separating the two. However, often the unsafe situation is allowed to remain for cost or other reasons (such as people don't want the disruption of the construction involved). Another example is that the absolute safest you can keep your child is if you lock him or her into a bubble made of diamond. There are a lot of reasons why you might make choices to allow him or her to be less safe than that. Hence children on bike trails ;-). |
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#122
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Can you make it to the market on a bike?
"Tony Raven" wrote in message ... Amy Blankenship wrote: I have no idea about cows, but it's probably fairly similar. If you divide the amount of methane produced per annum by cows with their annual milk production and multiply by 30 to allow for the fact that methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 you end up with about 3.5kg of CO2 equivalent per gallon of milk. That is about 17 miles of a 200g/km car or 35 miles of a low emission car like the Prius. And that allows nothing for the fossil fuel consumption of agriculture in farm vehicles, fertiliser, transport and distribution. Wouldn't that methane be produced anyway, though, by the natural breakdown of the vegetable matter that they eat? |
#123
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Can you make it to the market on a bike?
"Tony Raven" wrote in message ... Amy Blankenship wrote: I have no idea about cows, but it's probably fairly similar. If you divide the amount of methane produced per annum by cows with their annual milk production and multiply by 30 to allow for the fact that methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 you end up with about 3.5kg of CO2 equivalent per gallon of milk. That is about 17 miles of a 200g/km car or 35 miles of a low emission car like the Prius. And that allows nothing for the fossil fuel consumption of agriculture in farm vehicles, fertiliser, transport and distribution. http://www.newrules.org/agri/netenergyresponse.pdf http://www.newrules.org/de/archives/000172.html |
#124
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Can you make it to the market on a bike?
"Amy Blankenship" wrote in message news I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. For instance, we know that having railroad tracks at grade with car and pedestrian traffic is less safe than separating the two. However, often the unsafe situation is allowed to remain for cost or other reasons (such as people don't want the disruption of the construction involved). Another example is that the absolute safest you can keep your child is if you lock him or her into a bubble made of diamond. There are a lot of reasons why you might make choices to allow him or her to be less safe than that. Hence children on bike trails ;-). I think it's generally nearly always your fault if you're a car or a pedestrian and you hit a train. If you're that stupid you deserve it. |
#125
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Can you make it to the market on a bike?
On Wed, 25 Jul 2007 22:46:37 -0500, "Amy Blankenship"
wrote: No, you confounded idiot, it is all about safety. No one in their right mind gives a damn about anything else. I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. For instance, we know that having railroad tracks at grade with car and pedestrian traffic is less safe than separating the two. However, often the unsafe situation is allowed to remain for cost or other reasons The "unsafe" conditions and/or situations are sought out and savoured by a significant portion of the population. There are whole industries devoted to "danger sports" for adrenalin junkies and weekend-warriors. Eddy, Donny and Walt Mitty will always be JAFO. Scraping their knees and claiming a hat saved their lives epitomises their feverish attraction to danger. They have the ability to fictionalise life in order to show how safety conscious they are. Or conversely, how "unsafe" you are. Living on the edge, or simply riding your unicycle across the bridge - on the handrail, is, well, just edgier than hiding under the bed. -- zk |
#126
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Do Cars REALLY Save Time??
On Wed, 25 Jul 2007 18:33:28 -0700, Zoot Katz wrote:
They get invitations to coffee klatch, wine & cheese parties, buffets and barbecues from the local automobile dealerships where they're customers. Really? People used to go to church halls and pubs for social intercourse and a sense of community. How times have changed. |
#127
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Can you make it to the market on a bike?
Amy Blankenship wrote:
Wouldn't that methane be produced anyway, though, by the natural breakdown of the vegetable matter that they eat? Not methane, CO2 which is approx 30 times less potent as a greenhouse gas. Tony |
#128
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Can you make it to the market on a bike?
Bill Z. wrote:
We have plenty of bike lanes around here. Many are along routes children use to ride their bicycles to school. It may surprise you, but a "majority of people" have children and will support anything that they think will reduce the chances of their children being injured. It doesn't surprise me at all, but all the same it would be much, much, much better if they supported things that *actually* reduce the chances, rather than things that they assume reduce them, but have no clear track record of actually doing so. Bike lanes are also popular with commuters, who feel more comfortable when there is one. For some values of "comfortable". I doubt that the several documented cases of commuters being crushed (fatally, in several cases) against roadside railings by left turning trucks (that'll be equivalent to right turn if you drive on the right where you're reading this) as they "comfortably" made their way up the inside on cycle lanes just as the lights turned green were too comfortable as they had the life squeezed out of them. And our traffic engineers like them as well - on expressways or similar heavily used road, the bike lanes double as breakdown lanes So when I'm cycling along there's asuddenly a broken down vehicle in my way, and now I have to go out into the main traffic flow /where nobody expects me because there is a bike lane/. That's not a Good Thing. They are liked by traffic engineers because they involved no effort and they get to think they're doing something useful. The most common effect of these lanes is to force cyclists closer to the kerb than it's often wise to cycle, and allows drivers to think it's fine to overtake with minimal clearance just as long as there's a white line between them and the cyclist. Compare and contrast to how you should overtake on a road with no such lane: http://www.highwaycode.gov.uk/15.htm#139 In case there is any confusion, a bike lane is part of a road and should not be confused with a bike path, which is a completely separate facility. The paths are popular too, as they are really bicycle/pedestrian paths. They are popular amongst people who /assume/ they are a safety benefit. They are less popular among cyclists who've read the record of what they actually achieve. See http://www.cyclecraft.co.uk/infrastructure.html Pete. -- Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK net http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/ |
#129
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Can you make it to the market on a bike?
Jeff Grippe wrote:
No matter how small the odds are of this happening to me again, they become zero if I simply refuse to cycle where there are cars. Not really: look at the traffic accident figures and you'll see nasty injuries occur to road users where there are motor vehicles, not just where there's a mix of motors and bikes. In other words, if you want to avoid serious road accidents you need to give up driving as well as cycling. You might have a steel box around you, but you're a bigger target, moving faster with more energy less effective reaction time. Give up a large proportion of cycling and your general health will probably lower. The resulting death may not be as dramatic, but it will quite possibly happen several years earlier. Would you have given up driving amongst cars and trucks if you'd had a similarly nasty accident while driving? Would you have given up being a pedestrian along streets if a similarly nasty accident had happened to you while being a pedestrian? If you don't want to cycle with traffic any more then it's your life and I'm not trying to force you, but I don't see it pays you to treat cycling differently to walking or driving, which can get you killed similarly easily. Pete. -- Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK net http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/ |
#130
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Do Cars REALLY Save Time??
Jack May wrote:
"Zoot Katz" wrote in message ... On Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:39:44 -0700, breeze "Jack May" missed it when he wrote: Car addicts don't like to figure in the externalities connected with their transportation choice. Those externalities end up costing non-drivers $2.70 for every dollar the driver spends on their car. Oh here we go again with somebody throwing everything they can think of into a cost number to pump it up as high as possible. Useless approach. Similarly useless as all those approaches externalising many of those costs produced by cars. Your census figures only demonstrate that the average commuter's destination is well within bicycling range. So what. If people consider a bike an inferior way to commute, then all your arguments are worthless. All technology survives or fails in an evolutionary process. Bikes have lost the evolution game. Hey Jack, if you would have a clue about evolution, not just using it as a fancy pseudo argument, then two basic evolutionary principles would come to your mind, that directly contradict your repeating claims: 1. Evolution aint over, till it's over. Mamals once were also only a rather small portion of life, and the dinosaurs, if they were able to with their tiny brains, probably also thought "Mamals have lost the evolution game, he he he". 2. Evolution always goes the maximum efficiency / minimum energy expenditure per purpose way in the long run. That modern/western world's fossile fuel consumming and polluting transport system does not fit nature's principles is figured out by every elementary school pupil. So go figure it out for yourself. Tadej -- "Vergleich es mit einer Pflanze - die wächst auch nur dann gut, wenn du sie nicht jeden zweiten Tag aus der Erde reißt, um nachzusehen, ob sie schon Wurzeln geschlagen hat." Martina Diel in d.t.r |
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