New York City’s began installing small, colorful signs with poetic safety messages at high collision rate locations to remind walkers and cyclists to watch for hazardous death monsters.
Jackie Dishner aka “Bike Lady” celebrates the joy of bikes and biking with a few haiku. Thanks, Jackie, for the inspiration! Here’s my baiku of the day:
Bradley the True Geek posted a spring time bike haiku.
Bradley masterfully shows us the change of seasons from winter to spring in his baiku when he describes the gray roller dust coating his bike tires.
Besides the well known 5 / 7 / 5 syllable pattern, haiku is defined by the use of words that evoke a season. A bike race on a beautiful March day, then, inspired in me this bike haiku last weekend.
Carl ran a bike club for students at Columbine Elementary School in Longmont, Colorado. The bike club was for the Walk Or Wheels (“WOW”) program at the school, which encourages students to walk or bike to school and which has an astounding participation rate of over 90%. Carl started the club as an additional impetus to get the kids out of their parents’ cars and to teach them to ride safely.
He assigned some homework to the children, asking them to write some “bike haiku” or baiku. Read the student’s baiku here.
Enjoy the weekend, all!
Frank has an nice winter CX baiku in Illinois. He also pointed me to a old set of baikus from last summer.
Carlton talks about “get off the road for your own safety” individuals in the Netherlands(!), India and Nazi Germany. Perhaps there’s a connection with this “bicycle neglect”. Alan makes the point that the American Automobile Association — which is a motorist lobbying group — has more than 300 times the membership of bicycling advocacy groups. He writes:
In fact, cyclists are so utterly overpowered that the motoring interests hardly even have to show up. In Olympia and Salem, according to leading cycling advocates, the trucking, development, and manufacturing industries lobby fairly heavily on transportation issues. But car manufacturers, car dealers, and auto clubs rarely flex their muscle. Says [Bicycle Alliance of Washington executive director Gordon] Black, “They don’t have to show up very often, because they know the government is doing their bidding. They don’t feel threatened. They don’t see us as a threat.”
CycleDog points us to an online driving test. I scored 95%.
Now let’s ge to the boring news: Diesel shortages in South Dakota, North Dakota (in spite of record production at the state’s lone refinery) and Iowa, where the presidential hopefuls are stumping for the January caucus. There’s even a shortage of hops for beer manufacture. The state of Connecticut plans for fuel shortages. Some French equestrians are pushing horses for transportation. And in Zimbabwe, a brand new biodiesel factory isn’t quite living up to the hype. One of the problems? Not enough feedstock to go around: the farmers have to choose between starvation or running their cars, trucks, generators and irrigation pumps.
Carl is a member of Bicycle Longmont in Longmont, Colorado, where he’s active in the local Safe Routes to School program at his school. The Longmont and St. Vrain Valley School District Safe Routes to School program is among the most successful in the United States, with up to 90% participation at one of the schools.
Carl now has a blog: Getinlost in…, which I’m obligated to link to because he posted a bicycle haiku.
Via Carl’s blog I also found the Alex Draude’s Straight Chain blog about fixie riding in Kyoto and other areas in Japan.