Bicycling

Excuse me?

“Since nearly 80% of the population uses cars to get to work and their important medical appointments, we are taking a closer look at federal guidance to ensure American families have the infrastructure they need,” the spokesperson said. “This is a common sense approach despite the Left’s belief that everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda.”

I actually saw someone claim bike lanes are DEI, apparently in earnest.

These people just parrot. No conscious thought.

Oh and we all remember how bicycles helped liberate women, by giving them mobility they did not previously have.

My brother and I got into long distance road bike cycling. Lots of half-centuries and centuries and whatnot. We even did a couple of those weeklong supported rides where you just ride to your next campsite and Boy Scouts unload your gear from a big truck. I built an electric bike and rode to work on it. I loved bicycles.

My dad died in 2019. He was a huge Trump supporter. He wore the hat. He drove a big dually diesel truck and he thought that coal rolling cyclists and passing by way too close and way too aggressively was the funniest thing imaginable, even when my brother and I both were with him. And then later he'd email us something about a big ride like RAGBRAI and say that looks petty cool.

For a while I used to wonder what he'd think about all this shit that's going on now and hope that he'd be like, nope, this is not it. But I know for sure that he would have loved this news about the government's official position to objectify cyclists as nuisances and bike lanes as libtarded DEI waste. He would have sent me 10 email forwards about it. So I don't wonder about that anymore.

For all the talk about how Trump is losing support among magas for whatever current madness has finally affected them enough to make them feel uncomfortable about something, news like this where people you already don't like will be punished, made to suffer, or forced to carry a greater burden is the kind of primal bridge that will always keep that command channel open to him in their minds and hearts.

Here are the publications that matter. Everyone should be watching these for updates. When a change is proposed they hold public hearings that lists the contact information for the committee members and feedback phases open to the public.

Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH), 2016, AASHTO

These are the engineers who are responsible for running the experiments that determine safety standards.

Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD)

"The MUTCD is the law governing all traffic control devices. Non-compliance with the MUTCD ultimately can result in the loss of federal-aid funds as well as in a significant increase in tort liability."

Notes:

• the MUTCD's compliance deadlines are hard to nail down.
• each state's regulatory traffic laws (search for "standard drawings") often exceed the MUTCD's requirements. Actually suing a state for non-compliance would be extremely difficult, but might be good publicity.
• the state's DOT engineers can avoid having to cater to bikes or peds by simply changing the classification of a road, e.g. lowering the speed limit from 40 to 35 in dangerous areas.