shaboi

Chicago has been doing a pretty good job of building out bike lanes. But it needs to be taken further still, and more quickly.

However, the initiative needs a more robust implementation, with more consideration of driver behavior and parking needs. This is evident as many delivery trucks, Ubers etc. park in the lane (albeit, with emergency blinkers on, but it's a moot measure regardless) and push bicyclists into traffic. So while the bike lanes probably improve safety and reduce deaths overall, it can and does introduce a new, very real hazard: the necessity of bicyclists to suddenly merge into traffic. And this abuse is pretty rampant.

The hanging fruit is simply implementing stiffer penalities for such violations but this seems lacking. Coupling this with more temporary parking zones might be a solution. Then again, I'm not a civil engineer, just my observations and half-baked thoughts concerning the matter.

This is bit nit-picky of me, but it's a thread I've been noticing lately in some international news, so I'd like to know if anyone has observations or thoughts.

In South Korea, China, and Japan (to the extent of my observations), it seems when some culturally significant norm, craft, or product begins to lose said status, partit chalked up to a result of (what tone usually conveys as destructive) "Westernization". But a significant amount of the advances (i.e., emergent products or norms that have supplanted the ones in question) themselves tend to be celebrated and attributed to the progressive trajectory of their culture & state. It's just an odd bit of nationalistic hypocrisy that gives me an itch.

Of course, I do not think for a moment this is the case for everything, or that their peoples even embrace this view (as I believe to have been conveyed by the media). And I'm sure the West has behaved or.continues to behave in a similar manner, either now or (surely) in the past.

Perhaps I'm completely amiss, which, in that case, all the better.

For what it's worth -- an anecdotal as tentative counterpoint: my mentor in my teenage years, an academic and just an excellent man, was an avid cyclist with a diet that supported said hobby. To the extent that he rode daily and would cycle from around lake Michigan every other year. He repaired and built ham radios in his basement, next to his de facto bike repair shop. He was a socialite and happily married. This is how he spent his days.

Yet he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's at 72, six months after mild symptoms started appearing. He passed less than two years later, and his personality & mind a year before that.

Just six years before that he was detailing vector calculus proofs with me at his dinner table.

I try not to be too cynical but I just can't help thinking of him and his bitter end when reading about these albeit preventative measures.