[SDCBC] Fwd: Now playing on YouTube - The Rights and Duties of Cyclists

[John Eldon]

Thanks for forwarding Schubert's message, Serge. The first paragraph below should be required reading in Portland OR, while the final paragraph further reinforces my own call for general traffic calming and speed limit reduction on prime arterials, because the current crop of neiborhood electric vehicles is restricted to streets with posted speed limits of 35mph or less, rendering them pretty useless in most of San Diego County. 

Serge Issakov <serge at issakov.org> wrote:[from John Schubert]

... Note that Copenhagen reported a 30 percent increase in the accident rate from their cycle tracks; Berlin reported a sharp uptick in accidents
 when they installed sidepaths; Toronto has documented a large
 percentage of dooring accidents.
 ...

 -- Roads of the coming century will accommodate an increasingly strange
 mix of vehicles.  I'm waiting for small-displacement motorcycles to
 come back; they're extremely widely used in many other countries.
 Electric versions of same become more and more practical every year.
 The Twike (side-by-side human/electric powered faired recumbent) and
 similar machines are waiting in the wings.  Every month, Popular
 Science seems to have a story about another machine that's somewhere in
 the continuum between roller skates and the traditional car.  Many of
 these devices are closer in speed to a bicycle than to a regular car.
 Are we going to build special lanes for all of these categories of
 conveyance?  No, and I sure hope we don't even try.  From the
 standpoint of making viable public policy to accommodate all these
 conveyances safely, I believe we already have a superb plan in place:
 one set of rules, with speed positioning and destination positioning by
 individual need.
 


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.bikesandiego.org/pipermail/sdcbc/attachments/20080401/da291c5d/attachment.html