Never let your government get away with claiming that #bikeHelmets are "the first rule of bike safety".
Rule number one is infrastructure, and the 2nd is air+brakes+chain mechanical soundness of the bike, upright geometry of the bike, traffic awareness, ride with fingers on your brake levers and having practiced emergency stops, twenty is plenty... Helmets are for stunts or a footnote to "don't fall on your head" rule that applies to walking moreso than biking.
You know, if those trips were going to be taken on bikes without motors, they already would. #eBikes are the bikes that don't gather dust in the back of the garage, that actually replace car trips. Some people don't need them, but the people still in cars clearly aren't those ones.
Reminder that a device which makes cars obey the speed limit could cost $50 each and be plug-and-play for the vast majority of cars. Do it at registration renewal and we'll have them all finished in 2yrs.
Testing this flexible solar panel for the electric bakfiets roof, looking at 20-50W realistic rate with sub-optimal exposure and a lot of clouds, it's a 100W panel. With the 1.6lb box it's 5.2lb, probably 10-12lb by the time I have a stiff enough roof mounted, (articulated?) and charging the bike battery. What should I make the roof out of?
In the last five years, #eBikes caused only 3.8% as many injuries as bathrooms. Wear your bathroom #helmets, and shame your friends and family until they stop taking baths
Of all the levers you have available to pull on for #ClimateAction, the big long one labeled "ride your #bike instead of driving" requires a moderate effort and you might need to wear a hat when it rains, but the rest of the levers are too short for you to move them.
Of course PBOT is going to immediately launch operation "think about it for a while" after driverists cut down their signs they stuck in the street for telling cars what to do, not like they always send crews out ASAP removing any guerrilla devices that potentially obstruct cars (oh wait...) Department of Letting Cars Boss Us Around here needs a better acronym. #Vision60or70something#PBOT#Portland#transportation#LowTrafficNeighborhoods#CarSupremacy#pdxBikes
The idea that you can have transit extend the range of walking distance without embracing bikes as a transportation utility, in the sprawling american suburbs, is just delusional. But it's the delusion that most of our city budgets and plans are built on. Biking in Portland is faster than walking+transit for most values of A to B but I can nearly guarantee you need to elbow your way through car traffic somewhere on that trip. Land use and transit need bikes for glue.
Scene: a wasteland of fascist car supremacy, stroads, millions dead per year, many more maimed, most of the rest coerced into working for their car and sitting in traffic awaiting extinction
Bike Advocate: "we should consider policy that prioritizes bikes, somewhat"
People: "not everyone can ride a bike."
😒
#PBOT's "traffic calming" projects are such kid-gloves weaksauce that doesn't pretend to control the kinds of drivers who are actually making our streets feel unsafe. Their machines are 5-7000lb lumps of steel being flung around at 30mph with 400hp and Portland has, after a decade of organizing by neighbors and careful work by professional #trafficEngineers, delivered like a dozen rubber bumps and some paint. #tacticalUrbanism is this stuff but overnight, & then iterate
"Universal #farelessTransit makes fiscal sense. The report notes that for every fare dollar Metro collects, Metro spends $0.75 on the expenses of collecting & enforcing fares." 💸
US #transit agencies that must scale 5-10x to meet CO2/GHG emission reduction goals in the next decade need to learn how to run #trolleyBuses + create a sustainable funding source that can deliver that level of service, not nickle & dime riders while play-acting as a business. #transitTooter 🚎
What would it take for cities to retrofit or supplement their #bike counters with #eBike detectors? The growth of #eBikes for #transportation trips should not be underestimated. Maybe an EMF or heat signature? How do the standard ones distinguish multiple bikes at once? #pdxBikes#bikeTooter
"the average modern American, by one estimate, travels 7,500 miles a year, and put in 1,600 hours a year to do that, they are travelling five miles per hour."
Now if we could all learn to see the hidden potential of pushing one lane of cars off the road.
I guess I'm somewhat of an expert on #eBikes at this point, but I'm kinda surprised they don't already have some resources they could ask about this. 😏
if you want to change the culture, fire cops (and traffic Engineers) who say stuff like "there are motorists out there that are driving in a way that kills people. Absolutely. But there are also people that are on bikes or pedestrians that need to be also more careful with what they’re doing. So it is a shared responsibility ..."
I've been running ubuntu with the default gnome desktop for a week on one computer, and the clock in the top middle of the screen... cannot be moved? I cannot ever find it without looking at the bottom right, top right, and top left corner first. 😒
"while shrinking our individual “carbon footprints” alone certainly won’t save the world — and that responsibility certainly cannot be asked of the least advantaged —
many of us do
have far more
privilege and power to reduce emissions in our everyday lives than we admit.
Many of us can walk, or roll, or share rides whenever we possibly can, rather than shrugging at how quickly we believe those actions will be dwarfed by a few dozen moneyed special interests."
Did you get a $15k quote for #HeatPumps swap from your central #methane furnace? Are heat load calculators really still this hard to use or are sales bros just not doing the work? We had cardboard #sliderules that did it in the 80's. LMAO just wait for the coldest day and measure it @TechConnectify 🤣
