Of course, your safety and the feeling of being safe should be prioritised. I was knocked off my bike by a car running a giveway/yield sign and that did cause me to massively change my cycling habits and choose safer routes even if it means going well out of my way. As a result I have minimised time in traffic dramatically, but I am in a city where that’s an option. Sadly not the case in most places :-/ I know it would be hard not being able to continue biking in a way that felt safer to do so.

Enjoy the trails you do have and keep the pressure on your local council representatives every chance you can to try and get more!

Yeap, it is so frustrating! If you discharge a firearm in a busy street, even if you didn’t hit anyone, I doubt they’d say “Well you probably shouldn’t own a gun for say a year or two, but after that, have at it, I mean you’re otherwise a top bloke!” Super frustrating!

Please don’t let one idiot ruin it for you! One time I was wanting to turn at an intersetion but it was a busy’ish road and I slowed, pulled over, checked behind and then pulled into the centre and signalled my turn. It took some time to do all this. In the meantime a car that was on a STOP sign, pulled out in front of me (they were probably unclear what my intentions were) and stopped in the middle of the road, leaned over to wind down the opposite window and yelled at me. Again, they were on a STOP sign but no, I was the problem!

Did I stop biking forever after? No, I recognised that they were an idiot that massively over reacted to a simple misunderstanding and put everyone at risk to have a tantrum in the middle of the road!

Awesome! Now vote representatives in based on their active transport infrastructure plans! 18% would swing almost any election! Cargo bikes and the ever growing range of micromobility options are great but as ever safe infrastructure is key! The great news is that once it’s built out ongoing maintenance is negligible compared with the endless march of pothole repairs, adding ‘one more lane’ and resurfacing car infrastructure requires!

Every single person I’ve talked to about this, including those that have traveled to the US as tourists in recent years, say they wouldn’t currently travel there. The non zero chance of being “administration error’d to a gulag” is pretty off-putting?! What a time to live!

Wow, the delay is real LOL I replied from Mastodon but it hasn’t shown up here so I’m replying from vger.app and will see what gets here from where and when :-D It’s cool that it’s possible though, even if it’s not super practical.

EDIT to say that this comment showed up on Mastodon basically immediately but my Mastodon comment still hasn’t shown up here 1-2 hours later?! Weird??

Sadly it came out in 2016 and was as timely then as it is now, some 8-9 years later :-/

Oh man, that rail-to-trail sounds great! I hope it gets completed sooner than later!

Make sure you email whoever is working on that and tell them how much you appreciate their work and are looking forward to biking it! I’ve written to my local council on a few occasions and told them how much I appreciate what they’re doing with specifics about how it effects me personally which can be anything from increased safety, lower environmental impact, improved physical & mental health, just plain fun, or connecting more with your family/friends/community etc. The more they hear that they’re having a positive impact on people and their community the more they’ll be motivated to push ahead with new projects!

Aren’t you basically doing what this shop owner is complaining about? Conflating properly regulated, speed-limited e-bikes (which are mostly pedal-assist) with overpowered, illegal imports that function more like motorbikes (often with a throttle).

Admittedly, the line can blur, especially with unregulated imports bypassing local laws. But in places with sensible regulations, e-bikes are capped at speeds like 25 km/h—slower than conventional bikes can reach, but that’s a good thing, given their added weight and potential for greater harm in collisions.

The battery issue is real, but it’s not unique to e-bikes. Cheap, poorly made power cells plague everything from hoverboards to scooters. The problem isn’t e-bikes themselves—it’s sketchy imports circumventing safety standards.

Nice! My beach is 20km each way as well. 15km if I go by a more direct route but the way I go adds 5km and is marginally safer. Part of the more direct route is being improved this year but it still doesn’t quite link up but instead will go out to another beach north of my current fave spot. Looking fowards to having an alternative place to go but it’s not quite as scenic as the coastal route I currently enjoy. It does mostly follow a river, so still pretty nice, but the other way you get to see the sea a lot more!

My prefered ride is out to the beach and specifically to a seaside cafe to sit and have a coffee while staring at the ocean! I’m fortunate that as long as I go via town there are cycleways almost the entire way. Also, we have cycleways to neighbouring small towns that are often entirely separated from the road. I still haven’t biked along all of them. So in general just explore and get to know any cycleways you may have nearby and see where they take you.

Also don’t forget to be a tourist in your own back yard and visit all the places people come from far and wide to see. It’s easy to take things for granted just because they’ve always been there.

Why aren’t they made to bring all of them back!? “Guilty until proven innocent” would be an improvement right now because they’re deemed guilty without the chance to prove their innocence?! Throwing out “Innocent until proven guilty” and all other tenets of due process is insanity!

They’re running the country on a “move fast and break things” mentality and it’s madness because the things they are breaking are the Justice system, the Constitution and peoples lives! They’re relying on “outrage fatigue” and I get it, that’s super effective! I’ve seen the images of the protests and there’s a hundred different things people are mad about but something has to happen quick, before it’s too late and everyone who isn’t 100% Red WHITE Blue and MAGA gets swept up?!

I know it’s easy for me to say this from afar and the protests so far have been truly impressive but they need to be massively ramped up and fast! Because once the system is broken it’s gonna be reaaaly reaaaaly hard to put it back together again!

Come on, CamOWLflaged was right there! :-D

Precisely! That’s what I don’t get about drivers complaining about cyclists!? More cyclists means less bumper to bumper traffic crawling painfully through clogged up city grids! You should be embracing separated cycleways even more so, then you don’t even have to see us! You just get to enjoy less traffic, quicker travel, reduced stress/road rage incidents etc!

LOL even in a lunatics running the asylum world, they would know not to put the town drunk in charge of the nukes! Sure, they would do all sorts of inexcusable, irrational, funny as hell to them but really not funny at all things, but they would immediately stop in their tracks if someone said lets give the keys to the nukes to drunk Pete!?! They would give him the keys to his car sure, but NOT to the flippin’ nukes?! I don’t know what reality we’ve entered into but I don’t like it and I’m at a pretty safe distance form it all, at least for now!?

Who will stop him? Who’s going to die on that hill? He ignores Judges orders already right? I mean, I don’t know the system that well but if he just does what he wants and ignores those that usually have the power to say no, then what?

Clarity over what can and can’t use “bike lanes” is sorely needed in this day of electric bikes/scooters/wheel chairs/mobility scooters etc blurring lines and shifting goalposts. There’s been a welcome explosion of micro mobility options and there needs to be clarity around what can go where as it’s all over the show at the moment?! It’s part a public awareness campaign issue, laws and regs, as well of course a major infrustructure issue.

It appears to be a play on Lawrence Welk of “The Lawrence Welk Show”?!

I’m wasting my time commenting on a comic about many lives wasted by people reading comics produced by someone wasting their life making them! It’s waste-ception! It’s waste all the way down! Woo woooh, it’s the waste train!! Jump on board!!

It’s an important reframing. A reminder to not blame the victim. Roads bisect ecosystems. Some flora and fauna can’t ever cross them. Some like deer can but risk being killed. All this has a dampening effect on genetic diversity by bisecting populations into ever smaller areas of smaller populations. For these deer maybe it doesn’t matter so much, but for some species it matters a lot. Roads everywhere cut the landscape into islands (especially for insects for example) meaning populations are often divided into smaller ones of less genetic diversity. Less genetic diversity often means less robust populations. I am not an expert but this is how I understand it. The poster barely hints at this but there’s only so much you can achieve in a poster but the reframing is a start. Jaywalking laws were a reframing that was designed to transfer the blame from the car and driver to the pedestrian in accidents. The new laws said that cars weren’t the problem, the victims being run down were the issue as they shouldn’t have been in the way of the car.