REI's little cargo ebike that could, the Generation 1.1e and Generation 1.2e are on sale right now for $900 and $1140, respectively. (For $240, you get a front rack and a bigger battery.) These things are light, zippy, and capable if you are looking for an entry-level ebike from a durable brand. https://www.rei.com/product/189967/co-op-cycles-generation-e11-electric-bike
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.
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 got my city council to talk earnestly about revising the parking code. All it took was to baffle them with math concluding that a hypothetical development in a zone they have targeted for high density would literally be more than half parking lot. I need to buy a white board so I can Katie Porter them properly.
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
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.
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.