Where's mee washboard?

Hello!

 It's been a long summer without posts, sorry. I did take some photos during the summer, but I've been busy and with limited net access the whole summer so when I had time it was mostly to check my email.

The photo below is a gravel path. It's not part of the official bikeway network, and if I recall correctly it doesn't get plowed in the winter. Still, it's a path and can be used as a shortcut so it gets it's share of people on bikes, not just dog walkers and people taking their evening stroll around the block. If I recall correctly this photo was taken in late July.

The whole summer has been rainy, as in "most rain in 100 years" rainy. Low pressure zones kept coming and it has rained almost every day. Or at leat it feels like it. There were a few cases of heavy rain causing floods in downtown, where the plumbing is old. There was so much water in the underpasses going under the railway track that some cars couldn't get through and stalled when they sucked water inside the engine. And when the whole area is pretty flat rivers flooded too. There's been reports about a dairy farm that was blockaded by water for a week, and others lost all their crops for the year when the fields had two meters of water in them.

So these gravel paths might get some rain damage with the runoff washing away the gravel or the whole path turning muddy. Looking at the path it's obvious there's no damage because it has been maintained.

But I wonder if they did the washboard on purpose to get cyclist off the path to the real bikeways, or did it happen naturally? Because that path was rather nasty to ride on. And I think it would wake up a baby in a pram too.

Guess what was in the news again?

I couldn't believe my eyes today. At the newspaper stand there was a tabloid with the headline: WAS THIS THE LION?

Just a few days after I blogged about it, the lion sighting from 20 years ago is news again. Unbelievable. Coincidence? Well, it is July.

Man bites... a lion!

I've been following a few blogs from around the world, many of them cycling related. In one of the British ones, there was a post named Man Bites Dog how a cyclist injuring a pedestrian gets big headlines while thousands of pedestrians are injured by motor vehicles every year and they rarely get mentioned. Someone said the newspapers would be full of such articles and there would be no room for anything else!

On the local papers, the scale is smaller and also smaller traffic incidents can be newsworthy. It's more interesting to hear something happened at a place you know or have visited. You might even know the people involved, so unless anyone died it's just good material for gossiping.

On the TV sport news, there was a few reports on some Jamaican sprinter not winning some race. I wasn't paying very much attention because it wasn't the Olympics or a new world record. Maybe it was important for his qualification to the Olympics, but who cares? It happens every day. Much more interesting to me was the news about a local getting a medal in triathlon race. Because she's local!

Even if all incidents were reported on the news, the 'man bites dog' incidents would still get the most attention. The fact that they're rare makes them interesting, makes them stand out. Until they're forgotten.

Like the case of the 'Waving Woman' a few months back. I don't think I wrote about it before. At the time it got some headlines on the tabloids, now it's all but forgotten.

The Waving Woman was a motorist who would stop in front of the pedestrian crossing as if to let the children cross. When they stepped on the street she's accelerate at the kids. And she'd done this several times on different days. I recall reading she'd injured some kids but nobody had been killed. The police was searching for clues. Parents were alarmed. Kids learned to be wary of cars while crossing the street, which might have been her motive.

What ever happened? Did the police catch her? Or was it all a hoax? An April's Fool joke that resurfaced a month later as a rumor, with kids using their imagination to exaggerate the events? I don't recall reading anything more about the case. It was in May, and the news has moved on. In July, most of the country is on holiday and the news are slow, even lion sighting stories can stay alive weeks.

Yes, a lion! And thus I can one-up the headline: Man bites Lion! :-D 

On the other hand, Bear sightings are so common they're rarely mentioned in the news.

"Mopedcars"

Last week a moped car ( a lightweight, fourwheel vehicle that looks like a car but goes only 45 km/h) crashed with an ambulance on an emergency. Two were killed.

Car drivers seem to be annoyed with such imposters and complain about their lack of training, running red lights etc. Pretty much the same complaints they have with mopeds and cyclists ( and pedestrians, too).

The police put a comment on their web page about microcars and their accidents. The insurance claims for accidents for microcars are 1 per ten vehicles, cars are 1 per 42 cars and mopeds 1 per 50. So the moped cars are four or five times more often in accidents that cars. Injury rates for microcars are about the same, both are two or three times worse than people in cars. The cars have a better steel cage. :-/

Microcar accidents are often at intersections or rearendings. Both are symptoms of lack of experience on the part of the driver (mostly teenagers). Also because most moped cars are in cities which have intersections and other cars to rear end with.

And more often than not the driver is at fault. Before only a theory test was needed to get a drivers license for a microcar. The regulations have been tightened and now there's also a driving exam which should help a little.

Summer Schedule

You'll find there will be less updates during the summer. I''ve decided to limit my time on the computer in the summer and I'm out there enjoying the sun and warm weather while they last. Including riding a bike at midnight.

The Midsummer Day is a few days and as some people already say the summer is almost over after that and the winter is coming back. Not everyone wants to hear that before they even have had their summer holidays in June. :-) Although it's true!

Right now there's lots of flowers and trees in blossom like the rowan in the photo. Smells nice too!

Enjoy your summer, folks!

Riding in the noise

Another boring video clip to keep you entertained. This one is from a ride from a few weeks back, when the grass was still brown. The chunks of ice in the underpasses had melted though, so it must have been May.

It may look like  it but this is not out of the city, but it certainly is out of the downtown grid streets. Maybe it'd be the suburbs then. Noisy motorway is not a nice thing to live next to, so very often there's a noise wall or some woods to give some protection. Maybe I should've included a clip from the non-short-cut route to see if the noise levels are noticeably lower.

Construction blocks the path

In the last few weeks several blogs have posted videos of construction blocking the bikeways. As expected, in the Netherlands there usually is a good alternate route with clear signage.

A few days ago the path near a supermarket was closed by construction huts. So the next time I took the camera with me to get a video. Starts with a good, wide bikeway...

When there was only the huts, I got around them by going left through the empty parking lot that is hardly ever used. On a later ride, they had put a fence around the work area. Nobody wants people milling about their work space, and especially not when you're working on ladders. So now I had to ride through the car park on the right. Oh, the horror. :-)

How about  the signage? Well, there was the rather useless round red-and-yellow sign saying you can't go through here. Some kind of arrow pointing which way to go would have been nice so I wouldn't have tried going left first. And there was no sign for drivers to look out for people going around the fence, but maybe they expected the drivers to use their brains and do it anyway. There are no temporary paths marked by bollards or fences or any limitations on the parking so the drivers are not inconvenienced by the construction.

Sure, this is only one of the three routes for bikes and pedestrians (not counting going through the parking lot). So maybe there could have been a detour sign earlier, like 50 meters before the beginning of the video where I could have turned right and taken the other route.

And another clip to provide some comic relief for an otherwise gloomy post. Evening sunshine (the video was shot after 7pm yesterday) , green grass, new leaves growing on the trees and...