SUBSCRIBE TO THE I.C. RSS 2.0 FEED.     HURST IN THE DENVER POST QUESTIONING FUNDAMENTAL LOGIC OF BIKE-TO-WORK DAY AND PICTURED SWOOPING. MUSTA BEEN A SLOW NEWS DAY. HURST ON COLORADO PUBLIC RADIO USING 'MALFEASANCE' IN NON-TRADITIONAL MANNER. CHECK OUT SOME VIGOROUSLY UTILIZED TOOLS-OF-THE-TRADE IN THIS  PHOTO SPREAD OF DENVER MESSENGER BIKES. WE GOTS INFORMATIONS: BICYCLE SAFETY STATISTICS AND INFORMATION ON THE I.C. RESEARCH PAGE. MORE THAN YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW, AND LESS. PLEASE VISIT THE I.C. ENERGY & TRANSPORT HUB. NEW: ENCIRCLING THE PEAK OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTION Link to the prescient 1999 article by Duncan and Youngquist. CONTACT THE INDUSTRIALIZED CYCLIST: ROBERT AT INDUSTRIALIZEDCYCLIST DOT COM.

A few weeks ago I was standing on the front porch here watching a tornado form about one mile due west. The funnel came out of the swirling mass of dark green cloud and started to streeeetch its way toward the ground with an impossible sinister black point, like the spike of an ancient goathead. That'll get the blood pumpin'. Just as soon as I convinced everyone including Paul the Cat that it was time to huddle in the basement, however, the funnel petered out and disappeared back up into the storm, making me look somewhat like a dork. That's the way it goes sometimes. And some other times, that mutha tornado hits the ground, leaves a trail of destruction and hurls witches, dogs and Chevys miles away from their original locations. A few hours before the start of the Tour de France, I can't help but feel that there is a sort of tornado brewing. With the return of a shrewdly trained Lance Armstrong to the race he once owned, and riding on a weird team with no fewer than four G.C. contenders, there looms the potential for a juicy intra-squad rivalry recalling yet surpassing the Lemond-HInault joust of old. Drama. Recent statements by LA, race favorite Contador and team leader Bruyneel have only added to the confusion and intrigue. Only one thing is certain. The race will be mired in controversy, and all the contenders will be creepily doped up and transfused, and race officials will have to change the winner three or four times after the race is over. And it will be awesome. That's right, the crazy Tour starts in the morning. It's probably on right now. Check it out and see if the tornado hits the ground or dissipates. We may have a clearer picture of how this plays out after the opening time trial in Monaco. Or not. Here is the TOUR DE FRANCE TV SCHEDULE ON VERSUS NETWORK. In general the live freakshow gets rolling at 5:30 am for the Left Coast and 8:30 am in the East; a shortened version repeats all day, with expanded coverage in the evenings. I'll be watching in the basement under a pile of matresses.

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Walt Chrysler was ferociously busy fixing locomotives and entire railroads in the early years of the 20th century. His railroad career took him from Ellis, Kansas to Salt Lake, to "bleak and scary" Trinidad, Colorado to the Middle of Nowhere, Texas and on to a town in Iowa called Oelwein, which seemed plenty large to him with its 6,000 inhabitants. In Oelwein he found heavy-duty responsibility as the Superintendent of Motive Power for the Chicago Great Western Railroad. Immersed in his work, with scarcely a moment to eat or sleep let alone think about topics other than the relentless and flawless operation of his railroads, Chrysler probably wasn't at a great vantage point to observe the tremendous changes taking place in transportation as a whole during these years. While he surely knew of their existence it's quite possible that he didn't see very many cars at all. Like the bicycles that preceded them, the early autos were exceedingly expensive machines and were not in widespread use until Ford started producing them cheaply some years later. They would have been scarce in towns like Trinidad, far from the nearest big city, and those that did happen to rumble down the Santa Fe Trail Main Street among the disgruntled coal miners no doubt engendered less than positive reactions, as they were still viewed as symbols of upper class frivolity. In 1908, Chrysler traveled from Iowa to an auto show in Chicago and lingered there four days, drooling over a four-door Locomobile touring car, white with red interior. Chrysler's head-over-heels tumble for the auto came more than a decade after the automotive swoons of Henry Ford, Alexander Winton, Hiram Maxim and a few dozen other mechanical-minded individuals, many of whom were bicycle makers. Unlike Chrysler, these earlybirds fell in love with a vision that awaited realization, an idea. Chrysler was late but intense with his lust, which was directed at an actual shining machine, the manifestation of the dream, a thing. Ford and Maxim built quadracycles that were as much bicycle as automobile. The Locomobile touring car, despite its chain drive, gave the appearance of a vehicle that had almost completely smothered its two-wheel heritage. The Locomobile's price tag was problematic -- $5000 -- much more than Chrysler would make in a year working for the Chicago Great Western Railroad. He set out to borrow the sum anyway, and managed to do it. When he told his wife (the deliciously named Della Forker) -- who had been traveling all over the sticks having kids and living in these shotgun shacks in the middle of fields to support his railroad career -- that they were in debt for over a year's salary on an automobile of all things, she got a bit hot under the collar. She slammed the screen door on him. An automobile??! However, when a team of horses pulled the Locomobile into their yard, with Walt at the wheel, he watched his wife's eyes light up and his young daughter jump for joy. It was a critical moment of his life. Della's reaction had nothing to do with a realization of the potential practical and utilitarian uses of the car or the convenience it might provide for their family life. Her reaction was like his own -- it was pure sex. It was about the sheer beauty and explosive power of the thing, the status and excitement. It was a primal attraction. "My wife was wild with enthusiasm then and wanted to take a ride immediately. But I put the car in the barn, and it stayed in there so long that she despaired of ever getting a ride. Sometimes she sat in it when I cranked up and let the engine run." Chrysler had no idea how to drive it. He got to work right away taking it apart. Piece by piece he dismantled the Locomobile and laid it out on newspapers in the barn. He recorded the deconstruction with notes and sketches, then put it all back together. Three months he fiddled before finally driving out of the barn, engine purring. There was an audience of neighbors gathered for the event. They had all been waiting impatiently these months along with his wife. Chrysler recalled that some were whooping and yelling and others were offering derisive commentary and laughter as he promptly lurched off course and buried the front wheels to the axle in a neighbor's garden. TO BE CONTINUED...

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It happened sometime in the mid-1970s. My grandmother, her second husband Tom and his two teen-aged kids were in a car, driving back from a family reunion in Oklahoma. North of the town of Trinidad on I-25, Tom apparently fell asleep at the wheel. The car left the pavement, went over an embankment and rolled. Tom and Tom Jr. were killed; Tom's daughter and my grandma survived, just barely. She clawed her way up the embankment far enough to catch the attention of a passing driver. My dad boarded a small plane and went to Denver -- 140 miles round-trip from C.S. to pick up blood to match my grandma's unusual type -- then flew back down to Trinidad. By the time he landed there was no need for his special cargo as a successful call for volunteers had already gone out over the radio in southern Colorado. Turns out that there were far worse places to suffer a critical injury than just-north-of-Trinidad, as grandma not only got her blood but ended up in the care of an excellent surgeon, the same guy who would later become famous for performing transsexual operations. I was maybe six at the time and too young to really understand the thousand-yard stare my grandma had for years afterward. Now I get all choked up thinking about that tremendous sudden loss and about my dad flying back and forth along the Front Range in the back of a little plane, tossed by turbulence and wondering if his mom might not be alive by the time he reached her. He was probably thinking of the last time he saw her and what they said to each other. Can you imagine? Many of you can, and, unfortunately, many of you don't have to, as such tragic wrecks are not uncommon in this world. Trinidad remains a source of deep emotions for my family needless to say. It's also an interesting place from a historical perspective. The town lies at the intersection of two very old wagon routes, and is one of the older settlements in the western United States. It's said that Main Street in Trinidad was actually part of the Santa Fe Trail itself. I find the place quite lovely, but that is, how you say, a nonstandard view among people who have been spoiled by the many other more strikingly pretty garden spots in Colorado. Most Coloradans' experience of Trinidad involves driving right past it on the edge of sleep. In the late 19th century Trinidad emerged as one of those raucous centers of commerce, where several railroads converged in the early decades of railroading, a major hub for agriculture as well as coal mining. Along with the mining came a civil war known as the Colorado Coalfield War, which culminated in a frenzy of killing in 1914. The Ludlow Massacre of that year occurred very near the spot where my step-grandfather, a labor organizer himself, veered off the highway about sixty years later. At the Ludlow tent city, where striking miners and their families were living after being evicted from their company houses, eleven children and two women were suffocated in their hiding place when the National Guard burned and looted the camp after an all-day battle between strikers, militia and company goons. This incident sent the miners on a rampage. They went into the hills and attacked as many mines as they could, burning whatever they could burn and killing any company guards they could find. When one young fellow arrived in Trinidad over one hundred years ago, he described it as a rough town full of desperados, hustlers and whores. "That was a bleak and scary place..." he later recalled. That fellow happened to be Walt Chrysler, who had accepted a job there as foreman for the Colorado Southern Railroad in 1903. Like his father, Chrysler was a railroad man, quite unusual background among automobile pioneers. Growing up in Kansas and servicing the expanding net of railroads in the western states, Chrysler quickly built a reputation as a master of touchy locomotive engines and began moving up the ladder. He had to turn in his union card when he became a foreman in Trinidad, but he continued to identify with the workers. While his outfit proved it could tune any locomotive around with precision, legend has it that those machines that were supposed to pull government troops or scab workers to the mines around Trinidad somehow managed not to function after they left Chrysler's roundhouse. TO BE CONTINUED...

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There are certainly streets that could be improved with a nice bike lane, right? Maybe I can think of a few right now. But there are a disturbing number of bike lanes and pseudo-separated bike lanes (behind rows of parked cars or some other sort of physical border) being installed on streets that previously had been considered pleasant bicycling routes -- a well-meaning attempt to attract timid riders to bike transport. The new facilities often result in some overall degradation of freedom and even safety for cyclists on those streets, unfortunately, which will bungle the whole plan in the end. Meanwhile, the really nasty streets for bicyclists continue as ever, untouched, and the city planners feel they have already done their bit for bike transport. This is a rut we need to escape while we still can. I'd like to urge planning departments and bicycle advocacy organizations to consider street treatments and facilities that are really much more ambitious than bike lanes. Here are four superior ways to make bicycling easier, faster, safer and more attractive as a transportation option in American cities: BIKE BOULEVARDS. A quiet residential street parallel to a busy arterial street can be transformed into a haven for truly efficient transportation of the two-wheeled variety, by turning the stop signs and discouraging or prohibiting motorized through traffic. Bike-actuated signals at major crossings, street sweepers, etc. Instead of sequestering them to one small section of street, Think Big -- turn entire streets over to bicyclists. This is not a new idea but one that so far has remained over on the Left Coast, Portland, Berkeley, Palo Alto. Let's spread it around already. It's time to expand upon and improve this ambitious idea. SUPER SHARROWS. The new generation of shared-use marking is sharp and effective, an undeniable message for both drivers and bicyclists -- at least until it wears away. If these sharrows are good, wouldn't larger sharrows be better? I don't know, I say let's try it. The standard sharrow size leaves something to be desired. They could easily be, say, twice as large and still be reasonably sized. Sharrow standards have not yet been fully finalized, so there is still time to super-size them. A large enough marking will have the added benefit of making wear and faulty placement less critical problems, perhaps non-issues. Let's try extra large Super Sharrows and see if they can improve streets as much as I imagine they could. Along with the Super Sharrows, it would be a good idea to place smaller (maybe one-half the size of the current marking) sharrows, Mini Sharrows, in the center of left-turn-only lanes. FULLY SEPARATED PATHS. Unlike the current facility flavor-of-the-month known as the 'separated bike lane,' a fully-separated path (Class 1 bikeway) can carry bicyclists right through the guts of a crowded city at speed for miles without encountering a single street intersection. So good, man. In sharp contrast, the so-called cycle track or 'separated bicycle lane' in favor today will necessarily take its users for a ride into one intersection after another, constant streets and driveways, alleys and Old Navy parking lot entrances -- really just a rehashed version of the sidepaths that were discredited in the 1970s. There aren't going to be too many potential locations for fully-separated bike highways in your town or any town. They need to be laid down next to rivers, canals, rail corridors, highways, things like that, which tend to be in limited supply. The beauty of it is, these fully-separated facilities are so powerful that you only need one or two of them to make a huge positive impact. This is exactly what we've seen in Denver with the CHERRY CREEK PATH and Platte River Trail. These paths should be about 11-15 feet wide for two-way traffic. LOWER SPEED LIMITS ON CITY STREETS. American bicycle advocates have been dreaming about European sidepath networks and forgetting about a load of other factors that are just as important if not more important in fueling bike transport over there. If you want to get Euro, go for it. Don't half-@$$ it. This proposal is so ambitious as to be, perhaps, politically impossible. You get the idea. Instead of attempting to smooth the fears of beginning riders or potential new riders with faux-separation on highly questionable sidepath-like bike lanes, let's break that vicious cycle. Instead of abandoning the streets, work on improving them. Make the streets better for bicycling (and walking) and augment the bicycle-friendly street network with a few nice fully-separated paths.

 

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In my new book I rant incoherently about several different subjects, including the domestic auto industry and the bailout of Chrysler -- the original bailout of Chrysler -- that occurred thirty years ago. The dominant narrative on that bailout has held it up as a success, because Chrysler continued to fog a mirror, kept its workers employed and even paid back its government loan with interest. It seems to me that ye olde Chrysler bailout can only be viewed as a success if one stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the big picture. Let's be realistic about what happened to this company. It was never back in the game, it made mediocre products, its bright spots being the minivan and K-car, it got bounced around like a hot potato between a few companies and it finally came back to lock its giant mouth entirely onto the grotesquely distended U.S. government teat. Sorry for the most unpleasant visual. Chrysler became somehow far more voracious for and dependent on public money than it was under Iacocca, when it was profoundly dependent on it. And not just Chrysler this time but the whole domestic auto industry. That 1.5 billion-dollar bailout turned into a near 100 billion-dollar bonfire. As I write on page 156, "with interest, my ass." "Would it have been a better choice to let Chrysler go down in '79? It was hard to imagine all those folks losing their jobs, but look what's happening now. If we had let the failed business fail in '79, would this have helped the remaining domestic auto industry to grow richer, stronger, less clueless? We'll never know." [p. 156] These haven't been very popular questions to ask. In fact the Chrysler bailout has been nominated by members of the new administration as a model for bailouts to come, and the same criteria used to judge the Chrysler bailout a success are now being trotted out to whitewash the much larger bank bailout. Lately, however, I have noticed more authoritative voices speaking up to clarify the Chrysler story. One is Barry Ridholtz, who, in his book Bailout Nation  (inadvertantly sharing a title with a chapter in my book, I swear), wonders what might have happened had Chrysler been allowed to fail. In a recent interview with Bloomberg's Tom Keene, Ridholtz says "part of the reason we're rescuing GM and Chrysler right now is because we didn't let Chrysler go through its normal process." Expanding on my lament that 'we'll never know' what might have been, Ridholtz says "We don't have counterfactuals. We don't have the situation where, what would have happened if we didn't bail out Lockheed, if we didn't bail out Chrysler. ... Imagine Chrysler was allowed to fend for itself in 1980 and died. What would have happened. And unlike you or I, corporations don't just, you know, shuffle off this mortal coil, never to be heard from again. They have intellectual property, and physical plants, and manpower and knowhow and markets and partners. So someone would have come along, some vulture would have bought them for pennies on the dollar, and a) that would have created a new, lean Chrysler, but more important to our story, what it would have done was b) scared the bejeezus out of GM and Ford management, and c) really put the fear of God into the UAW. That never happened, and that's a classic unintended consequence of the bailout." We constructed a political system in which it is somewhat inevitable that elected representatives will succumb to pressure to prolong the miserable existences of giant failed companies llke Chrysler -- to kick the can down the road to their successors. We should all be forced to buy and drive new Chrysler/Fix-It-Again-Tony F-Car hatchbacks as punishment. Actually I think I just described Obama's energy policy.

 

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One of my favorite Public Enemy moments occurs at the beginning of the song called Can't Truss It, when, by way of introduction, Chuck D announces helpfully "Here come the drums" at the exact moment that court jester Flava Flav blurts out a single word -- Confusion! Flav's exclamation is a judgment and warning about all sorts of heavy things, from the modern history of slavery to heroin overdose, but also about the music itself, the obtuse wall of sound conjured by Terminator X and the stream of brilliant and highly objectionable rhyme about to be delivered by Chuck D as only he can to your shellshocked white boy ears. Good stuff, Maynard. Confusion! These days, that single word pronouncement of Mr. Flava Flav is about as comprehensive an analysis as one can hope to find on many a well-studied subject. From energy to the environment, the economy to Afghanistan, Confusion! rules the day. Look at the energy markets for instance. Back in January there was a sort of consensus brewing that 2009 was shaping up to be a pretty non-exciting year in the oil markets (see PREDICT-O-RAMA) during which we would see the price rising modestly off its lows but ultimately held down by a beaten economy; the consensus price forecast for the year hovered at a fifty-dollar average. With oil now back around sixty-five bucks a barrel, a gain of roughly one hundred percent off its recent lows, there are compelling arguments that it will continue to rise from here and compelling arguments that it will collapse again. There is now a huge range of opinions among traders on what the price should be and will be. This translates into tremendous price volatility and Confusion! Will demand in India and China resume growing and drive global consumption and energy prices higher? Some see it as inevitable, and they make an argument bolstered by the seeming incontrovertibility of population growth. Considering the ongoing depletion of most of the world's largest oilfields and the lack of new discoveries there is a strong argument that supply won't be able to pace demand unless demand continues to fall. But will the Great Recession, combined with the ever-growing impact of efficiency measures, usher in an era of declining demand for oil from which there will be no return? A good argument for that too, bolstered perhaps by history: After the oil spike of '79-'82 demand was crushed and didn't return to those levels for ten years. These days, in what could be the early stages of the electrification of car travel, with Chrysler and GM gone full zombie, against a general backdrop of depressed consumption due to a lame economy, it is easier to imagine that we have already seen Peak Demand for oil. Confusion! There is a wicked Catch-22 hovering over the whole picnic. Is it even possible for oil prices to spike unless the economy rebounds in a big way? Is it even possible for the economy to rebound in a big way if oil prices are high? Confusion! Beware of anybody who claims to know what comes next. They are probably trying to sell you something. When you hear somebody trying to tell you what's coming next, just think of Flava with his crazy oversized clock, and exclaim the single word Confusion! into their face, perhaps with some spittle. You may find it necessary to add "Bass in yo face!" And a smile went along with that.

 

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Lately I've been recommending that folks take a look at a new book by a Cambridge professor named David MacKay. The book is an ode to no-nonsense back-of-the-envelope realism, and therefore a swift knee to the groin of mass media and popular culture, at least to that sector of it which fosters and consumes the illusion that current levels of energy consumption can be satisfied with renewable sources. MacKay patiently explains why the illusion doesn't add up, using the simplest terms possible. Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air is meant to jolt an English reader out of his/her stupor but works even better on Americans. There are Big energy items and activities and Little ones. In our newfound fondness for 'green' this and that, we like to focus on the Little ones, things like changing lightbulbs and unplugging cell phone chargers, as cover for ignoring the Big ones, driving, home heating, plane travel and general mass consumption of consumer goods. Our tiny gestures toward sustainability only provide psychological comfort, distraction, and leave us worse off than we were before in terms of energy security. As MacKay says, if everybody does a little bit, it does not add up to a lot as is commonly believed and expressed; a tiny percentage of savings from each individual adds up to a tiny percentage of savings overall. And that gets us nowhere. MacKay has been battling feel-good energy myths by unleashing his book on the masses for free, baby. He has encouraged the free distribution of it so I've made it available for download directly from here (pdf). It can also be viewed in part and dowloaded on this site. It's always an uphill battle when you're fighting against mythology that makes people feel good about themselves. MacKay is one of the floating disembodied heads featured on my evolving ENERGY AND TRANSPORT PAGE.

 

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This has been your Industrialized Cyclist Economic Update for May 8, 2009. Keep calm and carry on.

 

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When an experienced bicyclist busts a red light or stop sign in plain sight of crossing traffic, the move can seem rather dangerous to people watching from their cars, even if it's not. Quite often when the motorist first notices the rider crossing in front of them, the rider's head and eyes are not pointed in the direction of the car, but straight ahead. To the uninitiated driver, the bicyclist appears oblivious to his surroundings as he breaks the law. While some riders are indeed oblivious, what has most likely happened is that the bicyclist saw and tracked the approaching vehicle for sufficient time prior to the driver's first noticing the bicyclist. In that case such a bicyclist may properly be labeled rude, criminal, selfish perhaps, a scourge and demon seed, all sorts of mean and nasty things, but it is really the motorist who is the oblivious one here, a full step behind. By the time the driver grasps the situation, the bicyclist has re-directed his attention right where it should be, up the road at the next set of potholes and potential collisions. What the driver perceives is a dude on a bike staring straight ahead as sure death bears down on him from the side -- and it is only through sheer luck that this yahoo is able to escape unharmed. He busted the light and didn't even look! Deathwish IV! This common bit of motorist misunderstanding adds another confounding layer of resentment to the whole situation. Bicyclists can assuage this in a few ways. 1) Stop at all red lights and stop signs. I honestly believe this is the best policy for the cycling public, until the so-called Idaho Stop is installed in more states. However, I also feel it's a completely unrealistic expectation at this point. Looking around, I see bicyclists of all types and from all walks of life taking liberties with the red lights, and, for the most part, doing so safely. Trying to scold this behavior away amounts to a Just Stop It approach and can be expected to achieve similar success in stopping scofflaw bicycling as Nancy Reagan's anti-drug message had in stopping drug abuse. The only riders who are constrained under this regime are those who least need to be constrained. 2) Avoid busting red lights and stop signs in front of crossing traffic, even if there is space for the move. 3) When perhaps inadvisably busting red lights and stop signs in front of crossing traffic, at least try to let the drivers in question know that you see them and recognize their existence. Know which moves will be perceived as audacious and try to acknowledge that perception, false though it may be, to your audience of the moment with a sort of peace offering. One way to do this and still keep eyes forward is with a hand gesture of some kind, a half-salute, a full wave perhaps or just a few fingers dropped off the bars a bit-- not unlike the way Harley-riding dentists greet each other on the blue highways of this fine country. Done with art, such a gesture can impart a howdy, thank you, sorry, excuse me, and have a good day all at the same time. Not that this has any chance of canceling the PR problems associated with red light violations, but it can at least help motorists grasp that the bicyclist's decision to roll through a stop sign or red light is not nearly as foolhardy as it often appears from behind the windshield. Sometimes motorists need a lot of help understanding just what is transpiring in front of them. A really good traffic cyclist can guide our motoring friends to enlightened serenity and decreased resentment, and make the streets safer while burning them to a crisp. Or you could Just Stop It. Thanks for reading, now you should probably go ride.

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Anybody who's ever had the misfortune of reading one of my books knows I'm not always the sharpest awl in the drawer. So don't take my word for it. Listen to Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. This is excerpted from an interview yesterday on "Bloomberg on the Economy with Tom Keene" (download podcast):   ...The people who were in favor of laissez faire, people in the financial markets, are coming to the public sector, coming to the government, coming to the taxpayers and asking for, literally, hundreds of billions of dollars. So the people who were the previous defenders of laissez faire have surrendered. What they want is a peculiar form of capitalism -- what I call "ersatz capitalism" -- where the private sector gets the gains, the public sector bears the loss. That's a recipe for disaster, because that's assymetric incentives, it leads to excessive risk-taking, it creates an unjust society. It creates an inefficient society... ...This is really "Corporate Welfarism"... And in fact, I think it's in many ways the worst of all possible systems. Because it doesn't have efficiency. It's a kind of redistribution, but going in the wrong way, from ordinary Americans to rich Americans. So, it's a system that I think will not be economically viable, and in the long run will not be politically acceptable.   In the short run, however, the People seem more or less fine with the 'worst of all possible systems.'

 

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This new book is full of highly objectionable pronouncements, and lots of things that can be taken out of context to make its author look like an imbecile. That's just what you want in a book, right? But there are also some blatant mistakes, statements that are demonstrably false, and these should be corrected. It's maddening that these mistakes somehow survived multiple revisions by myself and several different editors, then smacked me in the face immediately the first time I opened the book in its final printed form. Now they are enshrined forever as beacons of idiocy, monuments to lameness. I have no good excuse, but, realistically, we shouldn't be too surprised to find some lapses in a book that was typed entirely on one roll of paper in a remote hermit shack. Mistake. On page 109, in the chapter called "Law and Order," I imply that Idaho's stop-as-yield law for bicyclists is a new thing. In fact, the law has been quietly and successfully on the state's books since 1982; the rules regarding red lights were changed by the legislature to their present form in 2005-6. This is a bad mistake as well as a lost opportunity from an author's perspective. I stabbed myself with an ice pick multiple times over this one, and lost some sleep, and not just because I was bleeding profusely from ice pick stabs. Mistake. On page two, then again on 143, I write that the recent decline in oil consumption in the US, that which began in 2008 and continues, was the first decline in oil consumption in this country in over twenty years. False. It could be described as the first "major" decline in over 25 years, but the US experienced clear declines in consumption from 1990 - 1991, and slight pull-backs after 2000 and 2005, as shown by this EIA chart of product supplied to refineries. 2005 was in fact the high point for domestic consumption, not 2007, although the decline shown in 2008 is massive compared to anything that happened in the prior two decades and is clearly reminiscent of the 1980 cliff-dive. So my mistaken pronouncement could have been made passable with a qualifying word or two, but, unfortunately, was not. Mistake. On page 125 and 128 I misspelled kerogen. Should be an o, not an a. I think Keragen was one of my old neighbors from Detroit Street. Authors really should spell correctly those things about which they are pontiffikating. Mistake. Page 91, I write that Forester was President of the League of American Wheelmen "in the 1970s." He was President 1979-80 and was a Director prior to that. Undoubtedly, there are more errors to be listed. But these are the ones that have hit me in the face so far. I am thankful for the opportunity to correct them here and can only hope that some small percentage of my six loyal readers will be able to look past these factual errors to the highly objectionable lunatic ravings that form the core of the book.

 

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SLIGHTLY LESS RECENT ENTRIES: 4/9/09 HIDING THE LOSSES 4/3/09 WEIRD LITTLE BOOK 3/25/09 CYCLE TRAPS 3/18/09 BONUS SHMONUS 3/01/09 NATION OF SUCKERS 2/18/09 MYANMAR BY BIKE

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