Posts by BenWilson
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Not sure if this is referring to cycling or driving...?
Driving. Soz. Cycling's not that much of a danger to others. It should be approached with a lot of care for yourself, a big part of that is empathy with the other people on the road. See it their way, and live.
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You take your life into your hands every time you get in the car, too. Cycling is not a special death-defying feat.
Yup, it should be approached with the same caution, and a higher duty of care to others.
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@Jack, you got my number that fast?
Side note, I just upgraded my bike, 20 mins ago. Brand new hybrid. Yay! Now I have to sell one - a man doesn't really need 4 bikes.
So the corollary of that is that for relatively lower-performance vehicles, a lower level of engineering is justified. Which implies that bicycles aren't underengineered - they're appropriately engineered for their level of performance.
Perhaps. I'd probably say that cyclists simply accept a higher danger threshold than most vehicle users apart from motorcyclists.
@RaggedJoe
:-) I get the feeling trying to see things with balance is considered anathema to healthy debate sometimes. Or perhaps it's just not expected of me .
@Steve, my feeling was that the book was a giant cash-in. Cunning bugger, I wish I could do that.
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Yes, I made the mistake of going into philosophy thinking I could find the answers. Instead, all I got was more questions. Good questions, but.
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@Jack
Ha, pwned. Fair enough, but you did assume earlier in the thread that I didn't drive, so we're even. :)
Actually, I only assumed that you might not have been a driver when you had your accidents. Were you? I knew that you drive now, you said so. But it's all good. So long as every realizes I'm also a cyclist, seeking mentality balance, rather than just a cyclist, or just a driver, pushing one barrow.
but I'm assuming there's a fair bit of engineering work gone into it.
Probably. But the difference between it and a car is probably something like the difference between a car and a jumbo jet, proportionally. Which is in turn considerably less than goes into a space shuttle. Because these things are doing much more work, at much higher speeds, in much more dangerous conditions, the level of engineering is justified. Yes, quite a lot of people have died in space shuttles, proportionally. But they are doing something pretty incredible.
Surely it's the quality of the engineering that's important, rather than the quantity?
In engineering, a lot of effort has been spent over the years quantifying quality. It's not really as hard to measure as people think.
So...@Keir
No, the amount of engineering is irrelevant. It's like saying Windows is a better operating system than Linux, because Windows has some indefinable thing called more engineering.
It can be defined. And guess what, generally, things that are better engineered have taken a lot more time. Kind of stands to reason, really.
Window is most likely quite a lot less engineered than Linux. The Open Source community keeps constantly working on it, with way more people than the 100 or so who might be employed to develop Windows.
The reason that a bicycle has very little engineering involved these days is that it is a classic product of the Victorian hero-engineers. It is like the wheel; one doesn't need to improve it really. Wells didn't write any books about cars, did he?
Yes, there isn't really much room for improvement, without changing the nature of it quite a lot. Which isn't really as good a thing as you think. Push bikes could, for instance, have ABS. But then they'd be beyond amateurs to fix, and they'd probably weigh a precious kilo more.
Don't get me wrong, I like bikes. I like the simplicity of them. In fact I think expensive, highly engineered bikes actually move away from the whole point of the things. I don't want a bike that costs more than my car (well I do want one, but I don't want to pay for it). I'm just not going to kid myself that I don't take my life into my hands every time I get onto one. I don't think it's fair to think of that as everyone else's fault.
@Recordari, I'm sorry to hear about your friend.
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But the whole current set-up in cities is crap
I don't reckon. It seems pretty good to me, the entire thing is decentralized, we can all go pretty much anywhere we like with ease, except for people who work in the center of big cities who have to put up with commuting. Personally I think that's what's antiquated, people going into these giant centers en-masse every day. They should either live there, or not work there. Then commuting would be a thing of the past, and infrastructure would not even need to be capable of splurging so many people in and out.
Personally, I commute on foot, all the way out to my office in the garage. When I need to see people I can jump in the auto, and be anywhere in Auckland in 30 minutes, excepting those 3 stupid hours every day, which I try to spend sleeping or eating. Considering that most of my colleagues are soundly asleep in bed for most of my working day, this is easily arranged.
For all those people that simply must, for some reason, work in the city, how hard would it really be for them to just consider moving there? Apartment living is pretty awesome, actually. I'd do it myself if I had to work in the city. I have done it before and I really liked it. But I still had a car, and I got to see a whole lot more of the place because of that. I could socialize with people who lived miles away. My wife lived 20 kilometers away (when she was just my girlfriend), and traveling to her house, even though it was on a train stop, was a PITA on public transport by comparison to just jumping in the wheels. I frequently went to Bell's beach, which was several hundred kilometers away, and to any number of other beautiful places. In one job I was required to go out into the countryside frequently. I tried doing it by train but it was just a total bastard.
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Ben, you do realise that a rusty old Edwardian banger is probably more efficient than any car on the road today, right? (In kms for energy used. (& `As engineered as' is meaningless.))
So what? We were talking about safety, not fuel efficiency. And the amount of engineering is not irrelevant, it's the difference between a good car and a bad one, after all. Why is it not the difference between a car and a bike? Cars have massive redundancy of safety features built in.
This really isn't a useful way of thinking about bicycle braking at all.
Care to elaborate? What is it that actually stops a bike, if it isn't the rubber on the road?
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As for the obsolescence of automobiles, yeah right. For massive megalopolises, sure, the center could possibly be designed to restrict access only to specific service vehicles. But for every massive centre, there is usually a much, much more massive suburban area around it, in which the automobile will continue for a long, long time to dominate. And the bulk of the surface area of the earth that is not city at all, will continue to have almost nothing but automobiles.
Personally I'm quite glad about this, I think cars are amazing devices. Tonight, I took my whole family to see my parents in one. If I had to use public transport, I would most likely not see them very often at all. And they don't even live very far away. The trip took ten minutes, and the kids slept most of the way home. If I had to wake them up at 8pm and then get them organized into a pram, push them all the way up the hill to the bus stop, wait for a bus to take me into the city (the opposite direction from my house), arsing around carrying all the paraphernalia of child care, including in this case a port-a-cot, it would have taken me about 2 hours to get home. And it rained a little bit as well so we'd have all been wet and cold. To say automobiles are something crap, that they stifle humanity, is profoundly ungrateful, IMHO. They open the world up for us. You don't have to take your car. It's just a bloody good option, a huge amount of the time.
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@Stephen, yes current infrastructure in NZ is designed around the automobile. I'm like that to change too. But until it does, cyclists can expect to be considered occasionally as nuisances, and should think about other road users. Pedestrians aren't allowed to dawdle 3 abreast down the road, and I've heard many a cyclist barking at them to get the F&^% out of the way, and fair enough too. People honk at motorists who are being similarly inconsiderate, crawling along looking at something. In London, I recall people doing it on the escalators too. It's fair enough, standing to one side to let people run through is simply a good idea, good manners, and it makes things work better.
Fair enough, there are times when the safest thing to do is take up the whole road. Motorists need to learn to live with this, and "militant cyclists" are also wise cyclists. But they are not wise when they're riding 2 abreast along Tamaki Drive (which even has a cycle lane, admittedly a really shit one, but still) for miles, forcing cars to go to the other side of the road to pass them. Then they are being twits.
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@Jack
I've got to ask here: when were you last on a bike?
Of course you do, it shows in the whole way you've been talking. Sunday, is the answer. That was the last time I went for a reasonable length ride. Actually the real truth is yesterday, I rode to the dairy to get some milk, but we can discount that one.
Most people riding do NOT ride a $5k bike and there is NO WAY it's as engineered as even a lame weak car. Cars are designed by teams of hundreds of people, assembled by thousands. They are rigorously tested at every step along the way, then they have to pass strict certification guidelines to get onto the road. The safety is tested by law frequently, by independent experts. Massive redundancy is built into most features to make sure that they continue to work. Everything is stronger and heavier duty than on any pushbike. Of course, this is necessary because they do a hell of a lot more work, cover far more distance, are much more capable, faster, more potentially dangerous.
I was not talking about braking power, obviously. I was talking about traction. Stopping power is all about traction. Most people on pushbikes, seeking to get a little more speed and a little more longevity, take active steps to reduce their traction. Also, what do you think is safe about a vehicle that sends you over the handlebars when you brake? That just shows that the centre of gravity is way high and forward. If you've gone over the handlebars, that means 100% of the braking was being done by the front wheel, which might have something like 2 square inches of rubber on the road. Your feet have better traction.
The visible cross section of your profile on a bike is little more than a pedestrian's. In a car people see something 2m wide and about 1.5 tall, for an average sedan. It tends also to make quite a bit of noise. Obviously SUVs and other trucks are even more visible. Cars have built in high powered lights at night, and horns that are audible at 100m.
Wobbling? Sure, some riders are rock solid, even going up hill. But one heck of a lot aren't. The task requires balance, a great deal more balance than it requires of a motorcyclist. I know this because I ride both. Children are all over the show. Old people and unfit people and untrained people wobble like anything, particularly at low speed. This doesn't happen so much with cars.
I'm not speculating about rider psychology. I live it. I watch cyclists a lot, and most of the time, their eyes are fixed on the road about 20 ft in front of them, scanning for minor obstacles, like stones and glass. Their heads are angled downwards making it hard for them to look backwards. When they look backwards, they tend to also turn in that direction, it requires real skill to suppress this habit. Getting tired is pretty normal for the vast majority of people on bikes who are not trained to laugh off a 200km ride, and it's distracting to them. They get hot, then cold, then hot. They're in pain, got a sore bum, etc.
Then there's all the distractions drivers also have. But cyclists have extra ones.
There is also the tendency, mostly absent in powered vehicles, to resent giving up momentum, so they're not exactly heavy on the brakes.
Most riders have little more protection than a flimsy little helmet that doesn't cover their faces. They are basically wearing underpants on the rest of their bodies. A pedestrian has more protection, except on their heads.
I do think that cycles are amazing machines nonetheless. But be honest about their limitations and the risks you are taking riding them.
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