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 ;-).

"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?

"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

"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.

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

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.

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

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/

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/

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