I’ve Moved!
November 20, 2008
So I’m sure that most people have noticed that the site has been offline for a few days. There’s a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. But first, let me just say this:
In fact, I am blogging at a new site I have just finished setting up: kennethhynek.net. A full explanation for the reasons behind the move can be found here
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That said, this is not the end of Time Immortal. My wife Grace has expressed interest in taking over blogging at this domain, and I am working to make sure that she gets set up here as soon as possible.
Also, my profound apologies for the modification to the site face; the move was not as seamless as I would have hoped, and many of the image files for this theme, and in the gallery, were corrupted during the course of their evacuation from my previous web host’s servers. Until such time as I have repaired them, I’ve put a clean-looking template in place of the previous one.
Update: for the purposes of further traffic shaping, new posts from kennethhynek.net will be excerpted below. Full articles can be read at the new blog.
Second Edmonton cyclist killed by vehicle
September 18, 2007
One question the news article doesn’t ask is how fast the Camaro must have been going when it struck the teenager’s bicycle. Bikes are pretty strong pieces of material…you have to hit one with a fair bit of force and energy to spread pieces of it along a 10-metre stretch of roadway.
Edmonton motorists and cyclists have never really…gotten along, shall we say. And yes, I know that some cyclists are reckless with how they ride…but then, so are some motorists. I walk to work every day, and every day I see the same black truck race away from the traffic light at 99th Street and the westbound exit ramp from Whitemud Freeway. He’s gotta make the light up the street, I guess…and he’s willing to go from zero to eighty to do it. And it’s those sort of people who pose a real danger to even law-abiding cyclists (who cannot, legally, ride on many of the city sidewalks, and who are entitled to a minimum of 1 metre of distance between themselves and the curb).
It’s those sort of people who, upon realizing that they’ve run down a cyclist, stop only to extract the bicycle from the front of their Dodge Ram before speeding away.
Heck, I’m a fairly careful cyclist when I actually care to get up on two wheels, and I don’t try do anything reckless. I keep to my metre and fire off signals when there’s traffic around and I need to make turns. I’ve been hit by a car once, clipped once, and nearly run down at least five times that I can recall. The incident where I was hit, the driver sped off…fortunately, I managed to twist as I landed, and got her plate number. The incident where I was clipped, the guy swore at me, even though I was riding straight through a green and he was making a left turn across my lane. And in all but one of the cases where I had a near miss, the most I got from the motorist was a honk of the horn…again, in each case, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t in the wrong, “rules of the road”-wise.
And it’s not just cyclists that are in danger on the streets of this city. I don’t know how many times I’ve been crossing at a crosswalk, and some idiot coming on in a hurry thinks that the stopped car in the right lane provides him a passing opportunity on the left. In winter, I carry a snowball with me when I cross the roads…if I hear someone coming on in the second lane as I begin to cross, I lob it lazily in front of me — if the driver tries to go through, he’ll have a nice snowy windshield, and hopefully will crap his pants in the fear that he just ran a kid over.
Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in more than a decade as a law-abiding cyclist and reasonably cautious pedestrian, it’s that Edmonton drivers generally don’t care that other things besides cars will sometimes be on the roads.
