Map of California roads for cyclers (1895)
loc.gov
loc.gov
Not like some website where you hardly know what the name is supposed to mean, or who in virtual land you're submitting information and payment to.
The last 100 years are known by the state of California to cause cancer and you will be sued.
Limiting liability is surely behind the change you describes
Also I want to point out that the notion of riding from Coalinga (then: Alcalde) to Panoche (then: San Benito) via New Idria, on a bicycle, is lunacy. It's a major workout on a modern dirtbike with modern roads. I can't imagine that was a reasonable bicycle ride in 1895, or that anyone had a reason to undertake it from and to these unimportant sites. Must have been different back then.
I bet a fair amount of modern cyclists would be willing to ride an 1895 bike on 1895 roads if it meant zero cars.
Plenty of people do tool around on ebikes in socal. But it is a lot fewer people than I might have guessed would be doing it today if you asked me 5 years ago. Not even all that many people rent the scooters anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Cycleway#:~:text=Th....
A massive[note 1] lake that does not exist any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake
And not on this map(for two reasons), the salton sea, a massive lake that did not exist yet. the other reason it is not on this map, besides not existing yet, is the map does not cover that corner of the state.
1. in surface area, not volume, my understanding is it was really a sort of deep swamp.
It's amazing.
Examples I see here: San "Gregoria" (for Gregorio), San "Ignocia" (for Ignacio).
Some I've seen in another source, but not this map, were "Sausalita" (Sausalito), "Colmo" (Colma).
This reminds me of how older Americans born around the early 20th century, including one of my late grandparents, but also people in old movies, used to pronounce words like window ("winda"), tomato ("tomata"). Hearing "San Francisca" or "Sausalita" in those dated accents is totally not far off.
What??
The Cooper Cycle Company advert is centered below the map in the margin.
The Union Crackajack was evidently a Union bicycle for real "Crackajacks" or a riding group by that name and they chose to ride the "Barnes Special" which evidently was painted white as noted in the other advert and according to the description was well-made for the time period in that welds at frame joints were ground down so there were no obvious seams at the connections. It apparently was a quality product.
It looks like several of the bicycle ads reference specific colors for the brand they advertise so that may have been a distinctive maker mark from back in the day.
For example moving around the margin from UL corner - Fenton bicycle described as Blue Crown (maybe a trademark); along UR margin - March-Davis Cycle Company was the "Speedy Pink and Blue"; LR margin and LC both mentioning the Barnes Special; and I suspect that the left margin advert for National and Deere Implement Company bicycles were distinctively colored.
Just my guess.
EDIT: As a matter of fact I found a 1900 Barnes "White Flyer" Cushion Frame bicycle [0] listing in a UK museum site.
That description supports my guess that each manufacturer used color to distinguish their products from the competition. I got lucky.
Here's a little more history of a bicycle racer, Eddie "Cannon" Bald, who rode a Barnes Special and an example of the bicycle. [1]
There's also an eBay listing for a Barnes "White Flyer" frame [2] that is not cheap.
And finally, someone really knows their Barnes bikes and has a great example. [3]
[0] https://onlinebicyclemuseum.co.uk/1900-barnes-the-white-flye...
[1] https://thecabe.com/forum/threads/barnes-white-flyer-special...
[2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/163237177987
[3] https://thecabe.com/forum/threads/barnes-white-flyer-special...
- Pedestrians are expected to yield to cyclists (de facto)
- Motorists are expected to yield to cyclists
- Cyclists can choose to bike at a slow pace on a busy highway, taking up the whole lane (motorists will be cited for impeding traffic)
- They are allowed to bike on the road at night with barely any visibility aids
- They aren't required to have liability insurance or pass any traffic exams
- The police is very lax about enforcing traffic laws for them
I am all for a good bike ride in the mountains, where there is no traffic, but surely the way we treat cyclists is unreasonable?
We force places of business to build parking, forcing lower density, and higher cost to business. We build many neighborhoods without sidewalks at all, and with no bike access, forcing pedestrians and cyclists out of dedicated lanes and into traffic where they need to contend with multi ton SUVs. We do not penalize against designing vehicles with extremely poor visibility and excessive height, which directly translates to fatalities of those not in an armored shell on the roadway.
I would strongly encourage you to read more about building our cities and towns not directly around the automobile. We need to build around people, and bikes, and not strictly around the car.
- Motorists are provided with massive road construction subsidies
- Motorists are provided with government-mandated parking spaces
- When a motorist hits and kills a cyclist or pedestrian, punishments are usually laxer than for other forms of manslaughter
- Public spaces and shopping areas are designed with motorists in mind
- Zoning layout of cities and suburbs presumes car ownership
- Environmental costs of driving are paid by society at large
I am all for a good drive at NASCAR, but surely the way we treat motorists is unreasonable?
(I assume you mean Florence/Firenze in Italy, if there's an American city called Florence known for its lack of cars I'm unaware of it.)
Since cyclist don't carry liability insurance, they likely have to be personally sued in court for damages, with all associated costs to both parties.
Are you claiming this is a fair responsibilities and risk distribution? How is it appropriate to "risk your own life" by breaking traffic laws on a public road?
Traffic laws are in place to ensure each other’s safety and also reasonably get folks places. Cars are an extreme risk to peds and cyclists, not the other way around so yes, they have more rules and must follow them more strictly. My 3 year old toddler on her trike doesn’t need a license to ride down our neighborhood street because she isn’t risking anyone’s life but her own.
Cycling accidents definitely happen, and they’ve become a lucrative industry. Just look up "bicycle injury attorney" and you will see tons of ads claiming that they "have recovered over 50 million for bicycle injury clients". The market here speaks for itself. Of course, a reasonable person doesn’t set out expecting to mow down a cyclist, but accidents happen despite the traffic laws designed to ensure everyone’s safety, and, to follow your example, a 3 y/o toddler doesn’t need a license to ride her trike down the street, but there’s nothing in the law, aside from common sense, stopping the child from continuing down the street and joining a major highway. At least "a multi-ton piece of steel" is visible and moves at the speed of traffic.
What I don't understand, why is it accepted, that both pedestrians and motorists should "watch out for cyclists", yet there is absolutely no campaigns for cyclists to watch out for cars and pedestrians and to follow the law. The easiest solution, imho, is to make the requirements equal for all - if someone wants to use a public road, they should be licensed and insured.
Because that's what happens a lot. Cars are deadly.
The anger against cyclists is so weird to me. Like I can relate to seeing a cyclist taking up a whole lane on highway 1 somewhere they shouldn’t be riding and me thinking, this is ridiculous, they shouldn’t be risking their own life and slowing everyone down like this (and feeling some anger). But I have only encountered this a few times and even then, it’s just a minor inconvenience… Most cyclists ride relatively responsibly through city areas and are a net positive on the community, environment, parking, traffic, city budget, etc. Look at some data instead of coming up with some narrative in your head based upon some immediate emotion.
This negative sentiment towards cyclists is real, I see it on Facebook all the time and at first I thought it was a joke. Maybe they should add a few questions to the drivers test
But please continue theorizing that this zero effort google search you went in to knowing nothing about is instead evidence for a world in which there is a large market for attorneys forcing payment by cyclists causing significant damages.
Next, have your last word because this conversation appears completely disingenuous and I will not be continuing it.
There are several reasons:
First, your assertion is simply not true. There are campaigns to educate cyclists, and markings for them to yield. I’ve seen them first-hand in multiple US cities.
Second, there are far far fewer cyclists than cars, therefore you need to expect there to be proportional spending. More education for drivers mirrors the (many) more drivers.
Third, cars are heavier and faster by a huge factor. Cars cause far more deaths in practice than bikes. There is a much much bigger problem with cars than there is with bikes. Over 40000 people die in the US in car crashes. As far as I can tell, fewer than 10 pedestrians die from being hit by a cyclist. The number of minor injuries of pedestrians caused by cyclists is dwarfed by the number of cyclists or pedestrians kills by cars.
https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-myth-of-th...
Cars require way more education because they’re way more dangerous. As a cyclist, if I hit a car, I die. If a car hits me, I die. It seems really weird that your arguments are ignoring basic facts of physics and ignoring the realities and statistics of accidents and fatality rates.
The vast majority of serious bike accidents would cause damage only to the rider, I would guess. It's just not worth regulating or mandating anything.
At a minimum any vehicle going 15+ MPH should be making enough noise to get people’s attention.
Personally I’d like to see insurance and licensing requirements on any e-bike with more than 50w of assistance. Because constantly going moderately faster means dramatically more danger as KE = V^2. So going a little bit faster and slightly less in control can be a lot more dangerous to others.
Cars are so much more likely to kill people that I think you'd increase road casualties by making the alternatives harder to use. Yes, an ebike is faster, heavier and less safe than a conventional bike. No, an ebike is nowhere near as dangerous as a car, and in general I don't think they should be regulated. The current thresholds most places are setting (250W/25kph or thereabouts) are plenty conservative anyway.
Tangentially, this is why it's also good to give bikes their own space. They are not pedestrians, and they shouldn't be mixing with pedestrian traffic. That's why they're on the road. They act more like a car than a pedestrian.
In a 2D layout there’s going to be an intersection between pedestrians, bikes, and buses etc.
> anything is better than driving around in a 2T vehicle
While your gut feeling is that discouraging use is harmful the statistics are more questionable.
In the US, statistically E-bikes are roughly as dangerous as cars on a per mile basis. It’s got almost nothing to do with the bikes themselves and is almost totally related to the infrastructure and how people use them. The rates people on bikes ignore basic traffic safety and do things like speeding between stopped cars and then going through a red light is insane. Further, they are directly used around pedestrians with little concern for people’s safety.
PS: There’s lots of ways to slice these numbers, but we don’t actually know the exact numbers for miles biked per year.
If we're going to talk anecdotally, I think we need to read between the lines. Many locations in the US don't have good support for bike riders beyond telling them to ride on the road. This is going to encourage/force many to ride (unsafely) on the footpath because they don't want to share space with cars, and thus into conflict with pedestrians.
I'd like to see a breakdown of ebike accidents between them and pedestrians vs them and cars. I would bet that the vast majority of accidents are into (or from) cars. Almost all of the fatal accidents are almost certainly from accidents with cars as well.
You could try regulating them, but that's not going to fix the core issue that in many places they are expected to share space with cars, and cars are just plain more dangerous than everything else.
Also, I will point out that even if bike riders are supposedly less law-abiding (maybe, I don't know), the consequences are almost entirely isolated to themselves for doing so. They are simply far less likely to hurt someone else. The same is not true for heavy motor vehicles.
It seems counterintuitive that despite being human car interactions being vastly more common in urban areas you see so many rural fatalities but accidents occur in unusual situations.
> They are simply far less likely to hurt someone else.
There’s nuance here. They are more likely to injure a pedestrians in a bike pedestrian crash. However cyclists will be more likely to die because they end up in traffic after an accident.
Old people just don’t handle falls well.
I don't quite follow the second point - my presumption is that the chance of a bike hurting a pedestrian is lower than a car doing the same, and the chance of causing a fatality is, in general, reasonably low compared to getting hit by a car.
Stats would probably be hard to gather - there's probably quite a few bikes hitting pedestrians, but in all likelyhood many incidents go unreported if no one is injured.
IE the number of serious accidents depends on the number of accidents times the risk of each individual accident and bikes are far less segregated from pedestrians than cars.
In the end I burned through the whole $50K in medical expenses without having to pay for for somebody else's screwup out of pocket. Despite being clearly at fault, the driver was not held accountable due to systemic bias against bicyclists even when we obey the law.
All these things needed to be created solely because cars are extremely dangerous machinery, like forklifts.
Saying that cyclists should need liability insurance because drivers need liability insurance is like saying that it's unfair that people who lift boxes by hand don't need licenses when people who operate forklifts do.
It isn't required because bicycles simply aren't anywhere near as dangerous to people other than the person riding them as cars and the conditions that necessitates these requirements being created for cars don't exist for bikes in the first place.
In Denmark (where I live) pedestrians and cyclists will generally yield to each other according to circumstances. Almost everyone knows what it's like to ride a bike, and that it's easy (no extra effort) to pause for 1 second while walking to allow a bike to pass, which can save the cyclist having to stop and restart.
Thus zero licensing requirements etc.