Just another WordPress.com weblog
A big problem in talking about about bicycle safety and making safety-related laws is the pervasive opinion that bicycles are toys, bicycle rides are recreational, that means their use is optional, their riders are frivolous, irresponsible, and unaware of laws and safety issues . This means both that people think bicycles need more heavy-handed regulation, and [ ]
Sometime this year I crossed 50,000 miles of commuting to work and running errands on cargo bikes since 2006, starting first on a Specialized hybrid extended with an Xtracycle FreeRadical attachment, then upgraded to a Big Dummy, and then, also, an Xtracycle Edgerunner. Until earlier this year, none of these had e-assist, now the Big [ ]
I bike to work and to lots of other places because I don t like traffic (and the Boston area has traffic) and I don t like looking for parking. Lots of other people choose to drive despite the traffic, but almost every single person in traffic complains about traffic. I don t want to just go with [ ]
About a year ago, I helped move some young relatives in and out of Boston, one leaving Chinatown, the other moving in on September 1 (locally, the day when most of the students renting in the area move in; it causes predictably awful traffic and parking problems). Because of the parking problems, I did most [ ]
I managed to collect a video recently that might help explain why protected bike lanes? TLDR: a thing that bike lanes help with, is simplifying safety even when they cannot completely eliminate risk. This is one of the reasons they re less stressful. One problem with a lot of bicycle safety discussions is that people tend [ ]
For years I ve heard people talking about how motor-assisted bicycles are safer because they can match traffic speed , but I think this is mistaken. Here s three reasons why. For me the most compelling reason comes from a 2007 paper by Laurie F. Beck, Ann M. Dellinger, and Mary E. O’Neil in the American Journal of [ ]
I wrote this up because I saw some articles that were obviously the result of someone feeding some bullshit debunking the Pinto vs Cybertruck catch-fire-and-kill-you comparison to some credulous journalists. There are tools for making sense of this, instead of flapping our hands and going math is hard! Given an event that occurs 8.5 times [ ]
Cars are useful, but cars have problems. Some of this is obvious but we don t want to notice it, so we don t, some of this is obvious but we treat it like some sort of weird we-have-no-alternatives dilemma (it s not). Or, we make lame excuses. This is all pretty objective stuff, the main reason we [ ]
(to 311@cambridgema.gov) Possible change to light timing at Garden, Huron, and Sherman. I bike on Garden to and from work every day, I get plenty of chances to study this light s behavior. Right now it has a sensor trigger for Garden traffic, and a button-requested all-ways pedestrian signal. The default timing when traffic is present [ ]
The new bike light on Highland at Davis Square is hard to see and makes the intersection configuration more confusing; there is a risk that someone on a bike will not notice it, see the main light go green, and proceed into the path of a right-turning vehicle. The light is located to the right [ ]
In words, there is a parking-proteected bike lane on the north side of the street at 1575 Cambridge (and Dana), and it approaches a crosswalk. When the lane was installed (there s a picture in Google Maps, I attached it) there was a small utility box just before (east of) the crosswalk, shorter than a person [ ]
Just for a little context, note that I wrote this BEFORE Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Truly leave the rails, indeed. Do you want more of that? How about those floods in Spain? Looking at greenhouse gas emissions, and how the weather has lately started to truly leave the rails, and how various temperature metrics are [ ]
For my brothers, and for future me, who may find ourselves tinkering with this stuff (again!) after the next tropical-storm-induced power failure. Other people may benefit from this. I did this in wired mode because I need to get the internet through some annoying walls and wires do that better. You need to use the [ ]
I am glad that Harris is our (presumed) candidate now, I need to add my bit to the wave of contributions that has been rolling in after Biden s announcement. That said, the media-driven effort to force Biden s resignation was appalling. Some background: I am in my 60s now, I have some idea of what is [ ]
I have good friends and colleagues in New York State, and visit at least once a year. I heard that you were considering a ban on masks, and I urge you to reconsider this. First, Covid is not at all over. At least in the Boston area we are still monitoring its presence in wastewater, [ ]
To: Omnissa communications@omnissa.com Hi, I wish to have nothing to do with your company or your new owners, and please sever all business relations, ESPECIALLY repeat billing arrangements, that we might have. If any appear on my credit card statement henceforth, I will dispute them, and report you to the state attorney general for fraud. [ ]
I ve been copying the Covid RNA-in-sewage measurements from the MWRA s website for a few years now, mostly so I could replot it on a log scale, but also to answer (vaguely, sort of, with caveats) questions about how we are doing. The short answer is we are not doing any better than we were last [ ]
This is just a brief (I hope) gripe about the popular idea that Florida will be underwater in not too many decades. This is for the most part, wrong. I don t live in Florida right now, but I grew up there, my father grew up there, my grandfather grew up there, and my great-grandfather stumbled [ ]
I ve been in Amsterdam for a little over a week, spouse is in the middle of a long work trip and I am hanging out with her in her off time and otherwise I am touristing. I managed to put 40 miles on hotel guest bikes while here, 30 of that urban, 10, in North [ ]
I started utility biking seriously, and regularly, almost 18 years ago, and since then I ve put about 46,000 miles on large, heavy cargo bikes. One useful thing about this is that I am regularly engaged in the same exercise, day after day, and even small changes can have noticeable effects, and over the years, I ve [ ]
I am on Team Yimby because housing supply has not met demand for years, that causes prices to spike, and makes life hard for very many people younger and/or less lucky than me. However, building more houses means someone needs to build them, and that ends up being real estate developers. My experience with them [ ]
Thought I would harass y all (again) about stuff I care about, I ll try to make it short and not show too much of my work. (This would be shorter if we didn t have so much broken stuff that needs fixing.) DENSITY/UPZONING We need MBTA-zoning-but-more. I ve become even more convinced of this since studying the problem [ ]
One thing that completely baffles me about some of the delay in doing things — for example, in building wheel-chair accessible ramps at train stations, or experimenting with different ramps and elevations for complex portions of bicycle lanes — is that for some reason we insist on making them only from incredibly permanent materials, thus [ ]
A few observations changed my mind from “pro housing but we need deal with these problems” to “pro housing”. The first observation is that in the face of high housing demand, our zoning laws are completely indifferent to the demographics of who can afford to move into a region, and only speak to the shape, [ ]
This is one of those things that I never noticed till I did, and now I can’t not know it, and makes me internally snark at anyone in conventional US road safety institutions discussing/promoting “road safety”. There’s three reasons to think we suck at safety. First, international comparisons by the OECD. “But wait”, you say, [ ]
For a while I’ve believed that too much of popular (and sometimes legal) approaches to road safety are built around fairy tales. For example, the idea that horns are a safety signaling device for anything other than “that guy is backing into the front of my car” is just a fairy tale. In forward motion, [ ]
Area under the curve versus peak height of curve Distance traveled is the integral of speed over time; that is, if you graph speed over time, the area under that curve is distance. The tortoise wins the race because it applies a low speed, but continuously, whereas the hare attains high speeds for only a [ ]
This time in the Boston Globe, spilling over to a receptive audience on NextDoor. Y all are not bringing anything interesting to the table for a compromise. The votes all went well against you, and nobody but y all believes the oppressed small businesspersons because they re always crying wolf, and have been wrong (in other places) about [ ]
I’ve been collecting videos on my bike for years now, enough that I can collect them into collections with various themes. Lately I started poking around NextDoor, which I can best describe as “the social network for old people who like to confirm all the stereotypes about old people”, and I’ve started to use the [ ]
Just spent 3+ weeks in Europe (spouse had work, I was along as a vacationing assistant more or less), we visited Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, and spent part of a day in Malmo. Is it perhaps necessary to point out that Cambridge is a wealthy city in a wealthy state in an actually-wealthy nation (that fails [ ]