speed limit

I got _The Cyclist's Manifesto_ on kindle because it looked like it had a bunch of bicycle history in it, so I thought I'd give it a try. Very short distance into the book (loving the authorial voice, btw), and I learn that New York (one assumes city) had a speed limit of 5 mph for vehicles when bicycles were included in "vehicles" for rights and responsibilities purposes.

!!!

I open my laptop, I google a bit, and I found this:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/05/dayintech_0521

From this I conclude:

(1) When B.L. said most of the problems associated with motor vehicles would be mitigated and/or eliminated if we just said no one goes over 15 mph any more, B.L. was not being wacky. B.L. was being utterly reasonable and, in fact, had vast historic precedent on his side. He convinced me at the time, and I hadn't forgotten, but whoa and like damn.

(2) I love the idea of jailing a cabbie driving an electric taxi at the breakneck speed of 12 mph.

and

(3) Wow. The layout of NYC makes so much more sense when you assume the travel lanes should be moving at about 5 mph.

race and cycling

Well, H. brought this up as a possibly interesting avenue of investigation and boy, howdy, was she right. The League of American Wheelman, which eventually became the League of American Bicyclists, passed a whites only amendment to their constitution in 1894, according to _The Cyclist's Manifesto_, an amendment which stood until...1999.

Notes for a review

Location 280-4: "It could simply be that the bicycle itself is a beacon of darkness, bitterness, and ill will that transforms anyone who climbs on top of it.

Since bicycles were invented, self-proclaimed masters of that domain have erected walls and placed arbitrary filters, riddles, clothing requirements, and icy glares -- racial requirements--in front of anybody hoping to become a bicyclist. Clearly any effort to popularize the bicycle for basic transportation purposes will have to overcome some of the bicyclists themselves. A more annoying foe could hardly be imagined."

Location 1093-6: "But I like the streets. I like the American streets, the dance of traffic, the occasional flashes of terror and drafting off ambulances. The Amsterdam cycle path paradigm is nice in different ways, but it's kind of a plodding enterprise. Kind of slow and clogged up, confining. We bicyclists in America are surely in more danger than our Euro counterparts, perhaps less accepted in the national culture, but we may also have a little more freedom overall. We can ride with a little more speed, a little more zing. The trade-off goes largely unappreciated."

Hey -- just because I post a quote doesn't mean I agree with it. I'm including these because they really stand out as very different from the usual rhetoric.

Location 1107-10: "Thinking we can steadily transform Portland into Oulu is nothing but a trap.

The American way of bicycling does not need to be fundamentally changed, it only needs to be enhanced. We in the States could actually do Europe one better in our bicycling future. We could ride farther, and faster, on sportier bicycles, and just generally have more fun with it."

Location 1188-91: "As a child driver he impaled a '73 Volkswagen Type III on a hydrant while playing four-wheel drift on a snoy night. "Radioactive" by the Firm was on the radio."

If that's factually true in every respect, I think that implies Not a Boomer, as "child" would imply no older than 17 when "Radioactive" could have been on the radio, which would have been no earlier than 1985, thus, born no earlier than 1968, unless my math or research sucks.

Location 1194-99: "I must have been about fourteen or fifteen years old...Mid-1980s."

Location 1214-18: "About a dozen sixteen-to-nineteen-year-olds are killed in wrecks every day, about four thousand to five thousand per year. Close to half a million go to emergency rooms each year after hitting something in their cars."

Makes you wonder why people get so freaking uptight about making kids get an MMR vaccine. I mean, by comparison? Tiny, tiny, tiny risks.