Danger! Danger! You will die!

[darkemeralds]

American litigiousness meets American bike-o-phobia, a sardonic post by Mikael of Copenhagenize, riffing on a report from Chicago's Let's Go Ride a Bike.

If you join a group bike ride in the US, you may be asked to sign a waiver that, in the words of commenter and Portland Cycle Chic blogger Portlandize, "sounds like if you look at the bicycle funny, it will suddenly throw you 20 miles into the jaws of a waiting Indian tiger, to be chewed up and spit into a pit of boiling lava."

The photos of Copenhagen bike-riders in the post are a wonderful counterpoint to the American madness being reported on. The woman in the first one is older than me! A little better-dressed, too.

If you lean towards the Cycle Chic side of bicycling, and have never visited Dottie's Chicago Cycle Chic blog Let's Go Ride A Bike, I recommend it as a visual feast and a great source of inspiration.

Portlandize covers the Cycle Chic beat here in my hometown, and his occasional updates are what support me in my own slow-bike preferences when I'm surrounded on the bikeway by muscular athletes in barely-there spandex faux-team jerseys.

Copenhagenize is the sometimes-snotty, sometimes-amusing, tolerantly-anti-American blogfather of Cycle Chic. Proceed with caution: Mikael made his case based on photos of pretty schoolgirls in short plaid uniform skirts on bikes, but, that said, he has a good case to make for bikes as daily transport rather than as competitive sporting equipment.

Comments

[sara]

Hey now, spandex is warm and non-chafey. *GRIN* You can have my spandex when you pry it out of my cold damp hands.

People certainly think that waivers are meaningful; what's funny, of course, is that they're usually not.

[darkemeralds]

You're quite right and I apologize. I've got nothing against spandex per se. There's some in the very quick-drying trousers I'm wearing in the office right this minute.

Two cyclists were speeding along abreast on their racing-style bikes, on a major urban commuting bikeway, at rush hour yesterday, and I'm afraid that their logo-covered spandex racing togs were the most iconic thing about their wrong-place-wrong-time-ness. I seized on it unfairly. Sorry about that!

[ironed_orchid]

That waiver seems unnecessarily scary.

But I'm not so keen on the anti-helmet sentiment expressed by Mikael and his readers. I live somewhere that helmets have been required by law for nearly 20 years, and you just get over any objections after awhile. Cars aren't the only danger to cyclists, so even if you have designated bike lanes, which we do, it still makes sense to wear a helmet.

[darkemeralds]

I get the impression that Mikael, while he may be personally anti-helmet, isn't "officially" anti-helmet so much as anti-helmet-requirement.

He IS very much opposed, personally and officially, to the presentation of bike-riding as a dangerous, high-risk activity, and he believes that that presentation, particularly in the US, contributes to low use of bikes. Helmet requirements reinforce the idea that bikes are as dangerous as motorcycles, and more dangerous than driving in a car.

[ironed_orchid]

Hmm. I tend to thing that cars are the most dangerous thing to cyclists, no matter what you do to give cylcists rights on the road and non-road alternatives. But I've seen some spectacular bike accidents in which no cars were involved, which makes me think helmets are good.

[sara]

Yeah, I had similar thoughts -- my most recent head-whacking bike accident involved, er, me and my house, and God knows it's not like I'm not an experienced cyclist with a lot of miles under my tires! Opportunities to whack one's noggin into large dense stationary objects abound.

Also, I can't help noticing that locally, the in-town car-bike accidents which have been fatal, in the last few years? All involved a cyclist who wasn't wearing a helmet. (We did have one fatal accident where a woman road cyclist was wearing a helmet, but she fell under a log truck out on Territorial...and there ain't much a person can do against a log truck.)