 |
VELORUTION!
This article describes how cyclists are at the bottom of the food chain, even in a place known for traffic safety. Which means there needs to be a worldwide change for cyclists' rights... VELORUTION!
Cyclists are Victims of the Law of the Jungle
And in reference to the above article about London, this reader states that cyclists should not have equal rights as automobiles, but actually MORE rights.
Again, before there's war, it's better to separate.
Velorution in the mind The Financial Times has a worthy but dull article on the resurgence of urban cycling in the UK, with a focus on London. It cannot escape from the cliche' of the number of people riding through red lights; it is like if every article about digital photography mentioned people taking illegal pictures at museums. Of course figures of injuries caused by riding through red lights are never offered.
The torpor in the journalist's mind is evident in the last few paragraphs:
There's no doubt that car drivers need to clean up their act. Taking speed limits down to 20mph in built-up areas will make the roads safer for motorists, cyclists and pedestrians alike. Enforcing the ban on mobile phone use will help drivers become more attentive. And applying the Highway Code more strictly will make many people think twice about engaging in the current bully-boy hierarchy of bigger is better.
...
Now, saying that motor vehicles should have the same rights as pedestrians or cyclists is like saying that water skiers should be allowed on all waters in front of a popular beach. The Highway Code by instigating this non-sensical equality status, that inevitably leads to the law of the jungle, is bunk. It has the same moral standing as the South African Pbutt Law.
It is not abiding to rules that we should exhort, but consideration to all other people and especially to those who are more vulnerable than ourselves. Yes there are definitely inconsiderate bicycle riders in London, and it is absolutely no excuse to say, 'It is a jungle out there, I need to defend my self'. We need to raise the level of social responsibility, starting by ourselves. The roads are a commons to be enjoyed by everyone, starting by people on foot. Then the greater or more dangerous the vehicle one chooses to use, the fewer rights one has and the more consideration one needs to give to more vulnerable people.
(http://www.ugroups.com/driver/Cyclists-are-Victims-of-the-Law-of-the-Jungle-4890.html)
OK, let's assume the revolution (by and for cyclists) gets voted into
office (or gains rights by other means), WHAT WOULD THE ROAD
BE LIKE FOR CYCLISTS?
Like the article VELORUTION says, not all vehicles are equal... The
smaller, the more protection they need; the bigger, the more
responsibility. On urban multi-lane roads, the right lane has a set
speed of 20mph, monitored by speed cameras. Bikes ride the lane. Do
they get tickets for running red lights? Nah, they hurt no one but
themselves.
In other words, predators will be in the cage, and prey will be free
once again.
***
This sounds to me like trying to convince a dinosaur to evolve...
Here's an actual interview with one:
Q: What's up. How does it feel to be on the verge of extinction?
A: Nah, there will never be one.
Q: All the reports point to a mass extinction.
A: Don't pay attention to that. Those are rumors spread by those little furry mammals...
Q: But your behavior is obviously stupid. All that voracity and violence...
A: Only necessary to keep the size that I've got.
Q: And why do you need that size?
A: Because I rule the jungle.
Q: And why do you need to rule the jungle?
A: You ask too many questions... Remember I've got a pea-sized brain.
(And here the interview was terminated. Then the dinosaur killed a few more mammals, and went to sleep --65 million years ago...)
***
Originally Posted by Treespeed
"Like most revolutionaries you spout utopia, but at heart you are a closet totalitarian.
You spout and spout and I don't think you have an idea in your head about what you are talking about.
You might want to check out the following from Vaclav Havel, a true revolutionary:
VACLAV HAVEL"
Vaclav Havel is part of the lie-on game. He comes to Miami (capital of the Banana Republic) to lecture about democracy in Cuba. Dali Lama too, and so is Mandela. They all part of the power game.
The heroes are the Proles (the survivors of both Capitalism and Communism) who know the truth is beyond the media and Nobel Peace Prizes. In capitalism you are enslaved by unncessary consumption just as you are by the Party in communism. There's no democracy just as there's no communism. But there's hope: just grab a bike and a banana...
'Of course, you and I know that BICYCLES ARE SEXIER THAN CARS, right? And yet I suspect that you, too, have friends who just don't see it. Well, help is at hand. Get these benighted souls a copy of Pryor Dodge's book, 'The Bicycle.'
The bicycle, perhaps surprisingly, has always been faintly suspect and subversive -- something of a threat, as the poet says, to lucrative patterns of repression, even before there were cars... cyclists have all the responsibilities and limitations of both cars and pedestrians, but none of the privileges of either.
The car is best seen as a mechanization of the horse, that archetypal appurtenance of a privileged class. But the bicycle, on the contrary, is a device for magnifying the truly personal, physical powers of the individual human body. The car creates a lumpen-aristocracy of ersatz cavaliers -- a particularly unlovely version of Yeats' "beggar on horseback"; but the bicycle gives Everyman and Everywoman seven-league boots. The car recruits low-quality junior-grade auxiliaries to a devalued gentry. It does nothing for the human material, apart from moving it into a different box on the social Monopoly board. But the bicycle works its magic on the most essential, intimate and inalienable possessions of humankind -- blood and muscle and sinew. It does not purport to make the prole a patrician (although, under present social circumstances, it does rather have the opposite effect, at least pro tem). But then, the bike-borne prole need no longer assume or aspire to a shoddy, Brummagem, third-class gentryhood in order to get quickly across town; the prole who puts a bike between his legs appropriates to himself the freedom of the city, without restriction of caste or guild. It is surely this radically democratic character that has made cycling, from its infancy, a source of such uneasiness for those heavily invested in order and control, or in the maintenance of privilege and inequality.
Auto-mobility substitutes a mechanical slave -- the car -- for a biological one; and as Hegel tells us, in the master-slave nexus, the master is enslaved as profoundly as the flunky. Hegel would have found abundant confirmation of his insight on Lexington Avenue at rush hour, as the lords of ample horsepower sit and stew in their own stink; while we ambiguous creatures, needing no fuel beyond our own breakfast, glide to our destinations, self-propelled and self-determined.'
('History Is Bike' below)
BIKE FOR PEACE
WHY THE BANANA REVOLUTION?
RIDING A BIKE COSTS PEANUTS!
History Is Bike
HOMEPAGE
Send E-Mail to: comandante.banana@yahoo.com
Copyright © 2008 . All Rights Reserved