Bad news outta St. Louis

From: Big Shorty
Subject: St. Louis isn’t too bike friendly lately
St. Louis has one of it’s major interstates closed pushing a ton of cars
onto surface streets and they aren’t playing too nice.
www.stltoday.com

More from St. Louis –

From: Mark
Subject: Another cyclist hit
Big Jonny,
My friend’s boss, who rides centuries for fun and does all those crazy
endurance events, was struck last night when a car made a left turn right
into him. It appears that the cyclist had the green light and was
completely in the right.

My friend has asked that I not include his name, but it happened here in
St. Louis and the resulting injuries are a broken hand and hip.

These kinds of situations are well beyond the “broken record” phase. When
will drivers actually pay attention and realize that we have an equal right
to the road?

I may not know who he is, but I wish him well all the same.

About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

9 Replies to “Bad news outta St. Louis”

  1. …sad news today with the passing of the wonderful sheldon brown…

    …the man was not only encyclopedic in his knowledge, he worked hard to share that information w/ anyone who had need for it…

    …tear in my eye…RIP, beloved bicycle man…

  2. driving for some is just tooo much it seems.. come on people wake up!! if you drive a 2ton SUV POS get a clue..

  3. You think maybe a system for cars like we already have in place for aircraft might be the answer. Every time you change aircraft, you have to get a checkout ride with an instructor and endorsement before you can fly PIC (I’m simplifying things here for brevity), with different classes of aircraft requiring not just an endorsment, but and upgraded licence with verified training and experience. We could expand this to large vehicles and SUVs, requiring time in school, and another test, before they could legally drive their BehemothXXL2000 off the lot, with criminal sanctions against dealers that sold vehicles to people not possessing the proper licence(s).

    Hopfully this could at least stem the tide of destruction a little, combined with a reinforcment of the knowledge that driving is a revokable privelege, not a right.

    Opus

  4. I live in saint louis, lots of folks getting hit. People detoured from the highway don’t know to look for cyclists. Building a new highway so people can kee supporting their 45 mile commute lifestyles

  5. Guys-

    I’ve driven around St. Louis a little, and I hate to be negative, but in my opinion traffic there was generally aggressive and rude. Lots of DMPL-BITTs.

    I think it’s a matter of education. I think drivers in Portland OR and places like that are calmer and more sensible around bicycle traffic, because they see and hear about it. So I reckon some of them aggressive and rude DMPL-BITTs should be dragged out of their trucks and beaten with a floor pump. It’s all good.

    Mikey

  6. Pingback: ComputerCyclist.com » Tough as nails…