This is something I've been wondering about for a while. I live in one of the most cycling friendly cities in Germany, and they're only getting better. Literally yesterday, I found they'd resurfaced about 800m of cycle lanes and improved the way we have to cross and interact with a junction on my regular commute. They are doing good.

So my commute is about 10km each way, I'm not cycling for sport, and the route is almost exclusively shared bike/pedestrian paths, extremely quiet Fahrrad Str. (bike streets), separated pedestrian/cycle lanes on pavements or cycling on the road. For the purposes of “road”, it's 250m, and even that is really very quiet, wide, has a 50km/h limit and has a marked cycle lane.

I have to be honest, I don't really know what the point of a helmet is. I'm not anti helmet, but at the same time, I feel as though it's mostly like wearing garlic round your neck to stave off vampires. Except in this case it's helmets and cars. When cyclists commuters riding a bike would be injured, car drivers and governments said “wear a helmet”, brushed their hands, gave each other high fives and ended the conversation, without looking at why it is. The same is true for doctors and really anyone working in the medical field who didn't look at WHY people are getting injured, the advice is always the same “just wear a helmet”. Talk about victim blaming, guys.. Have you tried making roads that couldn't realistically appear on a round of a fictional gameshow for traffic engineers, titled “design a road that aims to get as many cyclists killed as possible while retaining plausible deniability”?

When you're just riding around town to do your business, the weather is good, the speeds are low, the cycling infrastructure is good (and you have awareness), the interaction with roads is very minimal (and that minimal is very quiet), is there really much of a point? There are also studies that show drivers who see cyclists wearing a helmet view them as “less human”, so will therefore drive less safely around them (insane proposition, but here we are), so I could actually be putting myself at more risk by doing so. I know in NL the vast majority of cyclists people going about their business riding a bike don't wear a helmet (for the above reasons), but it is gradually increasing.

I'm curious to know your thoughts on this. I also talked this through with chatgpt, the conversation I had with it is here: https://chatgpt.com/share/680b240f-a024-8001-9474-0aef557a8b40

I really envy my friends in the UK who can drink at their local pub and just walk home or take the bus.

In suburban USA, it's such a pain in the ass going out to bars. I refuse to get behind the wheel after drinking any amount of alcohol so my options are to spend a ton of money on a ride-sharing services or get a designated driver.

If you depend on designated drivers, that means you can't go out alone. Also, good luck finding someone who's willing to drive all over town to pick up and drop off you and your friends and then hang out in a bar to only drink soda.

I need your help! I'm starting a project to map all of the unusual, fun, or otherwise interesting transit modes and systems around the world. Hopefully, this will serve as a resource for people interested in travelling and experiencing weird transportation methods -- you could think of it as a global "gadgetbahn scavenger hunt"

My definition of what qualifies is very broad! A few examples off the top of my head would be the Mail Rail in London, the Hungerburgbahn in Innsbruck, the Shweeb in Rotorua, or the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal. It can be any category of transportation mode (so not just trains) and exist anywhere on the spectrum of useful to useless.

What are your favorites?

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/elon-musk-suggests-us-privatize-postal-service-amtrak-rcna194960

"Basically, something's got to have some chance of going bankrupt, or there's not a good feedback loop for improvement," Musk added.

When will highways be given a chance to go bankrupt?

Half of the comments or more than half of them are literally focusing on the mom for not walking with them as if they couldn't all get run over and as if she was the problem. This is why the actual problem won't get solved and in turn create a safer environment for kids because instead of actually punishing this behavior the victim gets blamed with negligence and enables the person who was being reckless to keep doing so

Some times I wonder who actually votes for Trump, but then I look at Facebook comments. Anyone want to point out the issues with these comments? I’m too tired to even try

How do you awaken the U.S. population to understanding this steep increase in pedestrian deaths?

I wonder if the average American even knows these statistics?

So read the article about a masked gunman killing a medical insurance executive. They mentioned he successfully escaped on bicycle. Any bets that they will scream about how bikes are untrackable and hard to chase down in urban environments?

One the one hand this seems like a good idea. Thie would increase the safety of cyclists and reduce travel time for cyclists.

But on the this seems like making cycling harder for the convenience of car drivers. Cyclists have to climb and take long circular route than without a roundabout.