Bike Items that Have Little to Nothing to Do With DC - 1/31/10

People in power feel more justified stealing a bike.

All of the volunteers were then asked to rate how immoral it would be for someone to take an abandoned bicycle rather than report the bicycle to the police. They were also asked, if they were in real need of a bicycle, how likely they would be to take it themselves and not report it.

The “powerful” who had been primed to believe they were entitled to their power readily engaged in acts of moral hypocrisy. They assigned a value of 5.1 to others engaging in the theft of the bicycle while rating the action at 6.9 if they were to do it themselves. Among participants in all of the low-power states, morally hypocritical behaviour inverted itself, as it had in the case of tax fraud. “Legitimate” low-power individuals assigned others a score of 5.1 if they stole a bicycle and gave themselves a 4.3. Those primed to feel that their lack of power was illegitimate behaved similarly, assigning values of 4.7 and 4.4 respectively.

The Ohio Turnpike is now treating cars with a bicycle roof rack as Class Two vehicles and charging 75% more. I guess the GMC Granite can corner the Ohio cyclist market then.

AskMen Rank the Top 10 Bicycling Cities.  Portland is the only one in the States. (Via CommuterPageBlog)

1. Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2. Copenhagen, Denmark
3. Bogota, Colombia
4. Curitiba, Brazil
5. Montreal, Canada
6. Portland, Oregon
7. Basel, Switzerland
8. Barcelona, Spain
9. Beijing, China
10. Trondheim, Norway

German pro cyclist Matthias Kessler was severely injured in a single bike crash. He wasn't wearing a helmet.

Kessler, 30, a former rider for the Kazakhstan-based team Astana, swerved to miss a cat, crashed headfirst into a wall and suffered a fractured skull.

The next time people complain about bike messengers and how crazy they are and how they never follow the law, you can point out how they saved the world.

The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 not only showed how close the United States and Soviet Union could come to a nuclear war, but also the sorry state of the communication channels needed to avert it. During one point in the crisis, the Soviet ambassador to Washington had to rely on a bicycle courier to take his urgent messages for Moscow to the local Western Union office.

LA city council votes to study ways to protect cyclists.

Comments

[Contrarian]

In fairness to Ohio, the toll isn't targeting cyclists, any vehicle over 7'6" total height gets the class two toll. It's due to new automated equipment. Rear bike racks are unaffected.

It is pretty steep though -- 18 bucks!

[Steve]

The Washington State ferry system also considers cars with bikes on a roof rack to be Class Two vehicles and charges extra for them.

[TWK]

In fairness to the law of unintended consequences, Ohio made a very poor choice in automated equipment. Why should the manner in which a bike is transported by a vehicle, without a trailer, change the cost by $18? The foot print and weight on the road are not impacted. This is stupid.