Wahots

Er, sorry. Misspoke. Ground-based telescopes!

I don't need a folder right now, but that's good to know in case I need to hop on a bus with a bike for work :)

It's great for cities that have the budget and manpower to build protected bike lanes everywhere. But even the North American cities that are at the forefront of bike infrastructure are still decades away from having a system competent enough to remove 50% or more of cars and car roads from their cities. :/

Until the time when most cities and small towns are safely bikable, I see class III speeds being the only rapid bandaid on a complex and unfortunately, quite political problem in both Canadian and American cities.

In the meantime, we will fight NIMBYS tooth and nail for every square meter of bike lane, boneheaded decisions from city governments, and federal governments complete resistance to funding major continental projects like HSR, or anything that doesn't remotely rely on cars. I just wish we had the time, but we really don't, with climate deadlines getting awfully close.

Damn, they have some folding bikes on sale for $419. That is shockingly affordable.

My buddy started balding at 16. He held on for a number of years, but eventually we helped him rip the bandaid off and he shaved himself bald. Instantly looked younger again just because he didn't have a ring of hair at 27 anymore. Honestly, it can look really cool if you shave it.

Poor man. I wish the Project Veritas "journalist" a very interesting life for inflicting so much pain and suffering on some normal person.

Oooh, you guys are scraping the vertical paint for zippers. Our city dabbled with zippers, but immediately had to put orange cones up, as drivers just ran over them. Zippers would be much more effective if they were rotated 90° so that they were head on instead of a glancing blow to cars.

But at that point, you might as well throw in concrete crash barriers or orange construction barriers instead. Zippers don't really do much.

Or flexposts covered in anti-slip, high grit sandpaper.

The speed, too, is a safety issue. Studies show that differences in speed between vehicles sharing a road are a statistical cause of crashes, and many of New York's streets are shared between bikes and cars. A bike that can do the 25-mph speed limit is safer than one that can't.

The future of personal mobility shouldn't be autonomous EVs, it should be e-bikes. E-bikes that are lightweight, that don't spew tire microplastics into the environment, that require little power to move a person from point A to point B.

This is the sort of safe, common-sense stuff that should be a boilerplate on every article.

The other thing that's kinda cool is that you get to see a bunch of people who normally are kinda invisible, but make up a considerable part of your city and life. It's incredibly fun to see people from all walks of life and backgrounds all having fun together. It makes us all stronger and more unified. It reminds me that we absolutely can do anything when we all work together as a team. Also, about 60% of the crowd there is probably running your city's IT infrastructure ;)

Also, the triangle part is just really cool as well. I love both, but the progress pride one feels much more officially flaggy to me :)

Gearing, tires, and geometry make all the difference in the world.

My Transition Sentinel is only geared for mountain biking. It's a terrible city bike. Tons of shock, high torque gears for steep hills, cannot go very fast. But it's insane when you need to climb or descend mountains. It has knobby, 2.4in tires.

My city bike is an ebike, and even though it's a single speed, it's pretty comfortable going between 10-30mph on that gear alone. The battery allows me to haul lots of groceries or baggage (and climb steep hills), and it's tires are wide enough to not get stuck in tram rails or gaps in the concrete road. I have knobby tires to avoid popping tires, but smoother, thinner tires will be more efficient.

Edit: if you have a shock, try locking it out if it has lockout.

I'd also recommend checking out city bikes, such as road, gravel, and upright bikes. There's an incredible amount of diversity, and a downhill mountain bike is about as far from a road bike as one can get. One can roll over a rock the size of a watermelon, the other can coast for meters off of a pedal stroke. Ebikes also are phenomenal as car replacements (or even just as car offsets), but generally cost $1,500+ with tariffs.

I lived too close to a hospital. Apparently, the road I lived next to was the road that all fire, EMS, and police used. Tons of sirens at all hours of the night and day. I toured the place on a quiet day, so it never occurred to me about the noise. That was a bit of a suffer fest.

One funny thing about that place, someone always swore consistently on the street between 17:00-20:00 each evening. It was always someone new, but it was like clockwork. Guests wouldn't believe it at first, but it became a thing, lol. Sometimes it was someone on a skateboard eating shit in the protected bike lane, other times it was a pissed off pedestrian, someone having an argument, someone having fun, or someone clearly off their medication. No apartment has had that before or since.