Posts by Bart Janssen
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the cranks and self-seekers
Like those working at The Herald?
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“what’s better”.
Benevolent wise dictatorship is the best form of governance. The trick is finding a benevolent one.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to WH,
maybe 85% of people
Made up nonsense number is made up
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Hard News: Lowering the Stakes, in reply to BenWilson,
a WOF for bicycles is interesting, but I don’t think it would fly. It would make cycling considerably more costly, and they’d be giving tickets to children all the time. Way to kill cycling off.
Far from it. In Davis, CA all cycles had to be registered. And cycle cops could and would remove unsafe cycles from use. Yet Davis is full of cyclists because the city is designed to allow cyclists safe and convenient routes. It's also flat.
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Hard News: Lowering the Stakes, in reply to BenWilson,
never, never, never buy a second hand helmet
Ok I have to address this because it is a failure to understand how bicycle helmets are constructed and worse it leads to the belief that cycle helmets can protect from all kinds of impact.
This statement is absolutely true for motorcycle helmets. It is also true that a motorcycle helmet if dropped even once loses much of the ability to save your life. The reason is because the material inside the helmet is designed to collapse and absorb impact energy even at very low impact forces.
Bicycle helmets are different. Having just read more than I ever expected to about bicycle helmets it appears that most cycle helmets are constructed of a hard shell and a plastic foam inner. The shell is fine until it breaks, it is not designed to absorb energy by compression, rather it is designed to spread the energy of the impact from a point across the whole helmet. Unless it is cracked it will continue to do that.
The foam inner is designed to absorb energy by compression. BUT and this is the key difference between motorcycle helmets and cycle helmets and a major reason why cycle helmets suck, the foam does not start absorbing energy until quite high impact forces. High enough to actually start to compress the foam. At low forces the foam absorbs no energy and remains as functional (or non-functional depending on your point of view) as the day it was sold.
Providing the cycle helmet has no cracks in the hard outer shell and no compression of the inner foam then it is just as useless (er I mean useful) as the day it was made.
All the above doesn't mean all old helmets will be perfect, it's possible there will be cracks and flaws you can't see. But the difference in safety between a new helmet and an old (second-hand) one is likely to be negligible.
If you actually care about the safety of your brain it seems like you'll have to go to much more effort and expense than any standard brand new helmet will provide. Meanwhile a second hand helmet in good condition (even if it had been dropped) will protect your head pretty much the same as any new helmet.
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Hard News: Lowering the Stakes, in reply to Sol K,
give a supplier some free publicity
I couldn't find anything either - I failed at intertubes
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Hard News: Big Friday Music: Counting…, in reply to Danielle,
PO BOY
Sadly it isn't an alligator Po Boy, but man that food sounds great.
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Hard News: Big Friday Music: Counting…, in reply to Chris Waugh,
the capsule flying the helicopter and vacuuming bugs out of lungs
I saw some guy with a tiger mask about to use a back-scratcher for something other than his back
This is making the big finger in the sky seem reasonable ...
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Hard News: Lowering the Stakes, in reply to Matthew Poole,
We can’t put traffic lights at every intersection just to give cyclists priority.
No we can't.
But because we can't fix ALL the intersections is not a reason to not fix the ones we can and fix the ones with the most problems.
And I'd probably say that it wouldn't need to be all intersections with lights - just those where bicycle traffic is higher frequency.
It does seem Tamaki drive is a special case and needs a radical solution, given it is now a major bicycle commuter route perhaps a physically separated (by raised kerb) cycle lane is needed and not the shared Sunday rider lane on the footpath.
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Hard News: Lowering the Stakes, in reply to Russell Brown,
This is good: the Herald’s new(ish) data journalist Harkanwal Hothi has mapped recorded NZ cycling crashes 2008-2012.
One thing obvious from that map, and no real surprise, is that like most car accidents, it's mostly about intersections.
To some degree bike lanes along roads have little impact on the safety of intersections for bikes. Only when you separate bikes from cars at intersections can you improve the safety.
The obvious way to separate bikes is to have a physically separate bike path.
But bikes could be separated temporally fairly easily by giving bikes a time of their own to cross the intersection. Much the same way we allow pedestrians to cross intersections at a different time from cars.
A bike button at the intersection that gave bikes a 10 second "lead" on the green light would do it.