I didn’t get to cycle in Amsterdam, but in three days of wandering around I got a reasonably good sense of the city from a transport standpoint.
That sense tells me that despite lots of pedestrians, cars, trains, ferries, trams, and scooters/motorbikes, the dominant mode of transportation in Amsterdam is the bicycle.
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This is a rather cool video:
3-Way Street from ronconcocacola on Vimeo.
I gotta say, cyclists in NYC seem to be significantly crazier than cyclists here. It’s probably necessary given New York traffic, but still.
Lots of food for anarchist thought in that scenario. I doubt many of my readers would try to justify the cop’s actions, but some of you might try to defend the state here, and more of you would likely defend the concept of the state.
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I just ordered some new bike lights. I’ve been considering helmet-mounted lights for a while, and randomly stumbled across this product, which looks pretty good to me. I like that they’ve focused on weight, and that they’ve clearly put some thought into the design. I am skeptical about their idea that the amber side-lighting allows for jogging the head from side to side to easily make turn signals to drivers—I just wouldn’t trust drivers to correctly interpret those signals—but apart from that I like their approach.
I love the fact that the batteries for the lights are recharged via Micro USB. That detail is what pushed me from considering to buying.
This isn’t a review; I don’t have them yet and it’s possible I’ll be disappointed, although I suspect otherwise. I’ll review them after using them for a while.
But rather, a very safe and rather normal, indeed innocuous and beneficial, activity. Via MetaFilter I came across a series of sociological essays on attitudes towards cycling, most of them concerned with the idea that cycling is a dangerous activity. The series, by Dave Horton, is titled “Fear of Cycling”:
My friend Stephen posted this to Facebook earlier today, and it’s just too good not to share:
I don’t know much about bike trials, but there’s no way the stuff in that video is anything but amazing.
I just read this article about women cyclists at risk in London, having come across it on a friend’s LiveJournal. The basic gist is that women are more likely to be accident victims because they’re less assertive on the road, and in particular because they don’t run reds and are thus more likely to be in the blind spot of large trucks about to turn at an intersection.
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After using a Trek 4300 since mid-2000, I decided it was time for a new bike. The old one was in need of some serious work, and had been unreliable for quite some time—only a couple of the gears were effectively usable, for example. I use my bike a lot and hope to use it more, so reliability is rather important, and I decided that I would both repair the old one and get a new one.
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I came out of it almost without injury and am fine, but yesterday I had my first collision with a car while riding my bike in San Francisco—a span of more than seven years of near-daily cycling.
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There’s some of this in other automobile-centric countries too, but somehow it seems worse in America. A significant proportion of drivers here seem to really hate cyclists. I have a hard time understanding it, but I’ve encountred a lot of articles recently where commentary is virulently anti-cyclist, to the point of advocating violence against people on bicycles.
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I’ve been thinking more about biking recently, perhaps as a result of going mountain biking for the first time, perhaps because of some of the anti-cyclist vitriol I’ve seen online. I’ve never been particularly political about my cycling, it’s just an efficient, non-polluting, mostly-enjoyable, convenient and cheap way to get from A to B. Another reason I haven’t been political about it is because I haven’t had particularly bad experiences, and my employers have always been bike-friendly.
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I’m making an effort to use Zipcar a little less (despite how great it is) and cycle more. Naturally, the first time I choose to cycle where I’d previously been using Zipcar, it rains.
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The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Matier & Ross discussed an ugly incident that happened during the Critical Mass bike ride last month, in which some cyclists ended up attacking the minivan of a family visiting from Redwood City. Critical Mass is already controversial, and Matier & Ross do a great job of axe-grind reporting to add fuel to the fire. Bike/car politics aside, I think it’s a highly instructive example of how to slant a story.
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