Dreamwidth Velo Club

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.

Gosh, I hope I'm not spamming the comm today. This just came to my attention and I thought it was fantastic and worth sharing. It's an instructional video designed to explain the "Idaho stop law." In the US state of Idaho, traffic law allows bicyclists to use a rolling stop--i.e., an informed slowdown--at stop signs, rather than requiring a full stop in all instances.

"Cyclists are scofflaws and always blow stop signs" is a common complaint by motorists who sometimes seem to think that this fact rules out funding for cycling infrastructure (or, in extreme cases, justifies attempted vehicular manslaughter).

This video, by Spencer Boomhower, is the clearest, most rational explanation I've seen for why the Idaho stop law makes perfect sense as a general cycling strategy on streets and roadways shared with cars. It's well worth showing to non-bike-riding friends and family.

( Check it out! )