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@Dewey 192683 wrote:

Sit-down scooters, a new class of personal mobility device.

Really?

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@zsionakides 192516 wrote:

If a car drove the wrong way down a highway and caused other vehicles to have collisions, but was not actually in a collision themselves, they should certainly be found liable as the negligent party.

Which isn’t the same thing as “does the hit and run law apply”. Note the language of the statute quoted talks about being “involved in an accident”. What’s the legal meaning of “accident” in this context? It’s not in the definitions section, but later the section talks about “person struck and injured” or “vehicle collided with” or “other damaged property”. It does not talk about “person who caused someone else to hurt themselves whilst trying to avoid a collision with the first person”. If nobody was struck or collided with, does this statute apply? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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I’d forgotten about Courtland Milloy and the WaPo-sanctioned anti-bike screed, could have let that memory lie. The one-night-stand bike recovery question, OTOH, was pure gold.

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@kwarkentien 192376 wrote:

They truly don’t have any authority to require the driver to stay but I would’ve hoped that they would’ve at least tried to convince the driver to stay until PD arrived to “take a report.”

Even that is pretty deep into “not their job” territory. Lesson learned: take pictures of the car and the driver?

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@lordofthemark 192344 wrote:

Was it improper for the EMTs to respond that she could leave?

IMO, it would be improper for them to tell someone they couldn’t leave.

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@bentbike33 192299 wrote:

Try more like 80 years of purely political promotion of the diamond frame. UCI banned recumbents from competition in the 1930s after some Cat-2 French racer broke the hour record on one.

Well, upright vs recumbent is a different thing (though still a good example of the UCI being putzes ). I was thinking more of what might be possible with different materials, which companies started playing with back in the lotus 108 and y-foil days until the doors got slammed shut. They’ve started playing around again on tri bikes, which don’t have to listen to UCI, and we’re seeing things like the P5X. It’s just a shame that we lost all those years of R&D and trickle-down…I think it would cool if we had light & affordable utility bikes with integrated storage, etc, but that won’t happen without a lot of money spent on the high end working out how to make that happen.

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@Boomer2U 192295 wrote:

Amazing how not a whole lot has changed in the basic design of the bicycle other than materials used to build it!:-0

It doesn’t seem possible to improve on the diamond frame if you’re building a bike out of tubes. That said, it also seems to be the case that UCI slammed the brakes on advancing the state of the art by using carbon fiber to build non-diamond-frame bikes so it’s hard to say how things would look without 30 years of purely political promotion of the diamond frame.

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@creadinger 192164 wrote:

Unless you’re a short person on a small bike it’s impossible for 2 cyclists to pass each other too. Except maybe in the straightaways. Just going around a turn that tight at a slow speed I have to lean well over the other lane just to get around. I hate them, and the primary reason I won’t take that route. When it comes to stupid infrastructure that ramp and the switchbacks rank right up there with the 1-lane MVT under Memorial Bridge, and the stupidly tight sidewalks on the Douglass Bridge.

In general the driver for ramps is ADA compliance, not cyclists, so it’s not surprising that they tend to be crappy for cyclists. I’d personally prefer stairs with a wheel gutter most of the time over a narrow twisty ped ramp, but they rarely ask me. A wide path with large turning radius is the cadillac, but it does cost more than the bare minimum and there just doesn’t seem to be a budget for that most of the time.

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@Steve O 192154 wrote:

With practice, as with most things, it will become easier.
What’s annoying, though, is that it is not even necessary. A straight line from the top curve to the point where the trail meets the walkway would be no more steep than the switchback (trust me, I did the math). So the whole connection could have been built with just a single 90 degree turn. D’oh.

There’s a maximum slope standard and also a standard for maximum run based on the slope. (The idea AFAIK is to limit how far/fast your mobility assist device will go if you lose control on the slope. Running into a railing sucks, but less so than flying over a curb or railing at high speed and into the street or the water.)

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@ursus 192152 wrote:

they finally decided about a week ago that the only way to fix the hole near the northern end of the northbound PBL was to repave a section. Just throwing stuff into the hole was not working at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AAa0gd7ClM

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@LhasaCM 191957 wrote:

I think it is highly unlikely with a tube, but it is possible. (Happened to me as a kid; bike was stored under the porch for a few weeks in the heat and the inner layer delaminated enough to let the tube poke through and bulge out.)

Well, I’ve learned something new about tire hernias.

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@LhasaCM 191953 wrote:

From what I’ve read on the Internets, I think by construct tubeless tires are more susceptible to something like this happening “early” in the tires life where it should be covered by warranty.

I don’t think you can get this kind of a failure on a tire with a tube–it looks like a delamination, and a very small pinhole on the inside layer. A tube wouldn’t be able to squeeze through the pinhole and then into the space between the layers.

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Of course they should be allowed to do this, the only reason to forbid it is because of concern trolling. There would be an immense net increase in safety if cycling advocacy organizations could teach cyclists how to do it properly instead of pretending that everybody isn’t already doing it and saying “always stop at stop signs” for liability reasons. I don’t expect to ever see this in VA unless NoVA secedes from SWVA.

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@phog 191856 wrote:

I don’t have time to see the flick but feel that taming the beast must be done on the supply side- China no longer wants our nasty crapola, and I don’t blame them.
Go to you local obeseomarket and see the 8 ounce packs of slimy deli-like product, pumped full of chemically-infused, saline water, thickened with starches so it doesn’t run. It will be sealed in a plastic bag, which is in turn encased in a semi-rigid plastic clamshell, which, in a coup de grace, has a cardboard wrapper around it. Bloody hell.

The problem AIUI is that in reality the US isn’t responsible for much of the plastic pollution because we tend to have a good infrastructure for putting waste plastic in trash cans and getting it to landfills. (Jerks aside.) The numbers I’ve seen suggest that most of the plastic in oceans and other undesirable places come from areas which lack the infrastructure to collect and dispose of the plastic (especially from people who can’t afford dump fees). Reducing the US contribution to zero wouldn’t materially affect the amount of plastic in the ocean. I’m not sure what would be effective, maybe a global fund for creating landfills and free trash disposal or something.

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@Steve O 191855 wrote:

Only if she catches up.

I miss the ELITE button

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