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@eminva 23415 wrote:

Good Morning —

Work crews were setting up orange cones on the Custis Trail, just south of I-66 right before the underpass (going EB, just after the trail head). When I went through, they were extending the cones into the underpass. I don’t know how long this work will continue, but I thought I’d post because WB cyclists wouldn’t see the cones until they were right in the middle of the scene, and it is possible to pick up quite a bit of speed at that spot. Be careful passing through there this morning at least.

Liz

note: it is never good to pick up speed in this spot

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I got caught in the storm on someone’s porch on a country road somewhere around Lovettsville. The people who live there were very nice, and hopefully not too freaked out by the strange guy taking shelter from the enormous lightning bolt that freaked him out.

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@jnva 23029 wrote:

What I’ve been saying is that on the Arlington MUP’s, having seen accidents happen right in front if me, I do think it’s always the cyclists fault. I see no reason to think otherwise in this case. I also am not comparing accidents on roads and accidents on MUP’s. Two very different things. I always assumed that bikes had to watch out for pedestrians no matter what on the mup. There are lots of signs that give me that impression.

Obviously I am alone and nobody shares the same opinion, but hopefully this discussion makes people think twice about passing elderly people walking on the trail. Maybe slow down more and try to be extra cautious.

There you go, continuing to make assumptions about what happened in a particular case that you didn’t see. If you want to talk generally about specific dangerous behaviors, fine. If you want to talk about particular incidents you have personal knowledge of, fine. (Though, frankly, anecdotes are boring and have replaced relevant statistical data in public discourse to an excessive degree.) What isn’t fine is to pontificate about a particular incident you don’t know anything as a springboard to making sweeping claims which ultimately result in no useful basis for discussion.

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@eminva 23021 wrote:

Now that I am noticing them, I see quite a few out in Fairfax County, too, although I suppose we have bigger challenges around here.

It seems standard to put them at every access point and road crossing for every park trail in Fairfax, generally the padlocked kind that allow park service vehicles to pass. (Which kind of implies that the trails can, in fact, support the weight of the occasional car.) For extra bollard bonus points, you’ll sometimes find bollards at forks in trails which already have bollards at the trail heads. Few things beat finding a useless bollard at 90 degree turn on an uphill in the middle of the woods.

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@jnva 22984 wrote:

It’s not all about biking. This is a cycling forum, so what was I thinking posting an anti-cycling opinion? Must be crazy. It’s not all about simply obeying the rules. An 80 year old woman dies, oh well she wasn’t obeying the rules. A toddler gets run over – he shouldn’t have been there. This is what I am hearing from a lot of folks here. I hope that if I hit and kill someone on the trail that you all will stand up for me in the same way!

Assuming you’re not just trolling, what you’re missing is that a lot of the criticism comes from the fact that we simply do not know all the facts of the case, and any pronouncements about what did or did not cause the accident or who is responsible have no basis in fact. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone suggest that the cyclist can’t be the one responsible, what I’ve mostly seen is people refuse to accept that, in the absence of facts, it should be assumed that the cyclist has to have been responsible.

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@jordash 22962 wrote:

My Park Tool BBB tells me about 1 drop per roller, back-pedal, repeat once chain appears dry.

…followed by wiping off any lube on the chain?

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it’s possible you’re using too much lube, and dirt is sticking to the chain

[mstone]

the quick quick summary is to search for “mountain bike shorts”. they generally look like shorts, and not superhero costumes.

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@DOS 22719 wrote:

I dont use a bell and its not because I am “not logical” or because I “do not give a crap”. I also know alot of cyclists and do not believe that above post describes any of them. I can only speak for myself but when I did use a bell, it was generally received negatively — like I was telling folks to “get out of my way” as opposed to a warning I was approaching. I may start using one again (although having stopped using trails for most part, maybe not), but on the increasingly rare occasions when I find myself on trails or otherwise among pedestrians, I never get the kind of negative reaction (flipped birds and the like) to a spoken “passing on your left” that I used to get to a bell. I do take the point that a bell is more easily heard and less likley to result in a pedestrian turning into the oncoming bike in response, however. So perhaps the risk of aflipped bird in worth the trouble.

good grief, what were you doing with your bell?

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@5555624 22668 wrote:

Based on the rider’s own message, from sfist, “I couldn’t see a line through the crowd and I couldn’t stop, so I laid it down and just plowed through the crowded crosswalk in the least-populated place I could find” he did chose to run into people, just fewer people. I may be reading it wrong, but it seems to me he is saying there was no clear path and picked one with fewer people.

The important point is the “I couldn’t stop”. In other words, his accumulated bad decisions left him with no options. But you can say that about just about any accident–better decisions leading up to the moment of impact could have altered the outcome. It’s a stretch to claim that the quote indicates that he deliberately hit someone (i.e., that he intended to hit someone that he could otherwise have avoided hitting). He wasn’t deliberate, he was dumb and went along with social norms that condone dangerous behavior. And the response to that problem isn’t to pick people essentially at random to “be examples”, it’s to consistently enforce laws targeted at correcting the most dangerous behavior. In this case, speed was almost certainly the primary factor–and if the response was to enforce the limit on everybody using that road, I’d be all for it. But given the enormous backlash that occurs any time any jurisdiction tries to crack down on speeding, that seems unlikely.

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@MCL1981 22649 wrote:

Because you’re still not getting the difference. This guy saw the pedestrians “in his way” and made the conscious decision to simply mow them down.

And you don’t seem to get that his conscious decision to intentionally run into people exists in your own mind. He made a number of stupid decisions, mostly involving speed, and found himself in a place where he had no good options left. But in this society, making stupid decisions about speed seems to be ok as long as you’re didn’t have anything to drink that day. I haven’t seen any evidence that he set out from the top of the hill with the intent to hit someone, which is the bizarre distinction you’re trying to make.

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@MCL1981 22644 wrote:

Really? I’ve been saying throughout this that I am speaking of people who operate their two or four wheeled vehicles with reckless disregard for human life. I haven’t changed or re-written anything. For some reason, some of you are trying to downplay this by comparing it to a motorist who accidentally almost hits someone making a right turn on red. That is comparing apples to bananas.

And some of us wonder why when the motorist kills someone while breaking the law it’s an “accident” and when a cyclist kills someone it’s “reckless”. Any time you’re careless while operating a multi-ton motorized vehicle you’re exhibiting a de facto “disregard for human life”, because it’s trivially easy to kill someone with a car (to the tune of more than 30,000 people — a good sized town — every single year). Attention, enforcement, and societal mores should be focused there, where there is a real problem. That real problem can be addressed primarily by making people understand that their “minor offenses” like turning right on red without stopping or looking anywhere but in the opposing vehicle lane, or routinely exceeding the speed limit, are an everyday “reckless disregard for human life” far more likely to kill someone than is an asshat on a bike.

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@MCL1981 22621 wrote:

Which further makes my point for me. His arrogant own the world attitude is not rare. Its a wonder more peds are mowed down my morons like him. He would probably blame the driver if a car with a green light hit him after he ran a red. This idiot’s own account also that the situation is NOT the same as someone making a right on red and not seeing the pedestrian. This guy, and everyone else on two wheels that does this all the time, sees the peds, sees the red light, and decides to just plow through with reckless disregard. I hope he rots in jail and they mount his bike on a poll as a warning to others.

Yeah, it’s completely different from the line of cars turning through an intersection in disregard of the walk signal and the pedestrians in the intersection that I see EVERY DAY. And it’s completely different than the excessive speed I see on the roads EVERY DAY. Because, you know, this guy was on a bike and must have reckless disregard, whereas the cars are just engaged in the normal kind of lawlessness that doesn’t matter because it’s normal.

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@MCL1981 22533 wrote:

If a motorists blows a red light and mows down a pedestrian, then yes I think they would be charged in the same manner.

Well, you’d be wrong in most cases. You exemplify in a later post how society excuses unsafe behavior by motorists, and is hesitant to enforce the LAWS because societal norms excuse a great deal of law-breaking as long as the person breaking the laws is in a car.

One of the reasons I get really annoyed by anyone who buys into this “bikes need to be held to the same standard meme” is that bikes aren’t being held to the same standard until we see basic enforcement for things like residential speed limits, stop lines at crossings, etc. Put the enforcement where the bodies are, not where the sanctimonious point fingers.

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@rcannon100 22549 wrote:

Vehicles colliding with obstructions in roadways is predictable. Therefore you built the obstructions to break – so that the vehicle or the human in the vehicle does not. This is true of roads that have guard rails designed to crumple. This is NOT true of bike paths that have bollards that will, frankly, kill.

This. Note that anything built today alongside a roadway is designed to crumple or deflect so as to avoid killing people in cars. E.g., the highway signs designed to break off at the ground, the tanks of sand/water at exits, the way jersey walls are arranged to overlap such that the overlapping section is toward the traffic. If only cyclists were shown the same care…

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