Elephants on Bicycles

Opening up this weeks Upper Arlington News SNP was actually a joy because it felt like opening up my RSS feed. Three stories related to bicycling, some stories about the Tremont Rezoning and Trash issues (just interesting to me), Lynette’s article about UA Arts and a great article about students podcasting. The article about podcasting spawned another set of thoughts of mine that you can find on andrew-miller.com here.

Of the three bicycle related stories one of them is very sad as it is about motorist rage taken out on a cyclist here in UA.  According to the police blotter a bicyclist was assulted by a man who had been riding in a car with his father. The article explains that the motorists had an argument with the cyclist (no doubt something such as “get off the road”) which resulted in the son hoping out of the car and striking the cyclist in the head, knocking him off the bicycle. I believe this only highlights the reason that UA needs to get serious about showing strong support for both bicyclist and pedestrian rights, and enforce those rights. If UA taxpayers are unwilling to build the physical infrastructure necessary to create a truly pedestrian friendly community the least that could be done is heightened signage and enforcement of motorists surrounding the interaction with cyclists and peds. I hope that the cyclist in the most recent incident is doing well and that the attackers loose their driving priviledges for some amount of time so that they can experience what it is like to deal with motorists as a bicyclist or pedestrian.

As for the other articles they are both editorials which support bicyclists, the new bicycle 2012 plan and a discussion of the proposed bicycle helmet legislation. You can read those articles here and here. If you’re looking for some greater discussion about both of those issues pop over to the CU message boards.