The Yakima Canyon will be mostly* car-free on Sunday for a bike ride. The weather is looking mild in terms of temp and wind. The road is closed from 9am to 3pm so you can ride up and down as many times as you like. https://www.crimestoppersyakco.org/sitemenu.aspx?P=custom&D=6&ID=700
what local traffic there is is supposedly limited to 25mph but some people are impatient jerks
In which the travel demand modeling community at least now acknowledges that they are not accounting for induced demand in part because they don't know how to. (That's okay, we can correct in our traffic models while they figure it out.) A Snapshot of Travel Modeling Activities: 2023 Update from Federal Highway Administration: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/74282
If the MTUCD tells you where to put the signs and how to stripe the street, the Highway Capacity Manual tells you how wide to make the road. There's an open request for proposals to update the seminal text. https://trb.secure-platform.com/a/page/HCMRFP
The mom message chain is sharing that another one on my middle schoolers' friends who lives on our neighborhood got hit by a driver on his way to school today. He usually bikes on the sidewalk in the area of the arterial streets.
I'm sure people think I'm pathetic not letting my kid bike 1.5mi to/from school and carpooling/city bus home. These kids were going the safer 2-mi route. I'm exhausted. This is now the 4th, 5th & 6th kids in his IMMEDIATE friend group struck by drivers going to/from this specific school from our neighborhood.
These three 13yo kids bike train to jazz band/orchestra at 6:50am. They ride on the sidewalk along the 30mph street. They cross at the signal. They do exactly what they are supposed to do. They must have been stuck by a driver in the intersection.
Yesterday I biked my teen's possibly taco'd, I-didn't-wanna-try-truing-it wheel to the bike shop, into the wind & on Turbo. I caught up to a dude on a vintage AF bike with an internally geared hub. Just as I was about to say "cool bike!" he looked at me and said "That's cheating."
So I said, "Really? Was I supposed to take my car instead?"
He looked visibly pained with the cognitive dissonance.
I'm saving a copy of this Teams meeting transcript that I'm cleaning up so I can go back afterward and count just how many times this one dude interrupted me.
Five years ago, I volunteered a shift at the community bike shop and a grandma came in with her 9yo granddaughter looking for training wheels. I put her on the back of the tandem and did a few laps of the parking lot to build her confidence, them I took the pedals off a BMX and sent her out for a few more laps before putting them back on. Her grandma told me, as she watched her pedal around happily, that it was one of her best life memories.
@fbaum@HayiWena yeah I wonder how much the ride on a tandem (or, in my case, xtracycle) contributed to learning balance, if it's just becoming comfortable with the feeling of leaning into a turn. The key seems to be learning that steering and balance are linked.
I'm feeling grumpy so I'm finally gonna say some stuff about the book Killed by a Traffic Engineer and why it's a stupid title for a book if you want it to create change in how streets are designed. https://islandpress.org/books/killed-traffic-engineer
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@enobacon And also, the idea that in prioritizing safety you have made safety worse is a MASSIVE cognitive dissonance that makes people hella uncomfortable on its own, so don't go there unless you have solutions to offer or people will lean HARD into the alternative way of resolving their dissonance, which is to prove to themselves that you're the one who's wrong and they are doing it the right way. https://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html
@HayiWena thanks for your insights, always grateful for your posts. You're not wrong about the title, I immediately thought it should have been at least "Killed with a Traffic Engineer", just as we often get that wrong in the killed by a car headlines, or even the more fashionable attempts in some circles to reframe the language and cast the driver as the sole actor. I'm, as-ever, still looking for the fulcrums that will move politics and actual streetscapes out of this rut.
It is with great irony that the internet is reminding me that on this day six years ago my then-6yo rode the 2-mi journey home from school alone for the first time, but now that he's in middle school he gets driven because 4-lane arterial roads and greater risks from larger vehicles and worse driving.
Autocentricity is the cops stopping a Latino kid who's truant and making him wait on the sidewalk for a parent to pick him up half a mile away from a bus stop.
Community policing is walking him back to school one block away.
When the 13yo girl texts you from her vacation on the opposite side of the country to ask you to finish her bike, you finish the damn bike even though your knee dislocated half way through. I cannot get the front derailleur to work so she's gonna have a 1x and learn to increase her cadence from about 40.
@enobacon I took the cockpit off the Fuji my then 12yo (now 17yo) frankenbiked together from parts in the bike coop bins with his dad. It's 2x9 brifters that may or may not match that were used before they got wrecked a few times by the 12yo. I think the cranks and derailleurs are from the Bridgestone but the cassette and shifters are from the Fuji. The derailleur can move but the shifter doesn't have the pull to get it over there. We ordered brifters from this century. 🤞