Re: Last week

On 5/30/2025 9:26 AM, Zen Cycle wrote:

On 5/28/2025 6:09 PM, Mark J cleary wrote:

 Not a fan of Tampa at all. I did like the heat but it was at 6am so not as bad. Got back today and really Illinois is not such a bad place.

 I've had three trips to floriduh over the past couple of decades - only one moderately pleasurable cycling experience (rented a mountain bike in the Miami area and road some kind crappy trails).
 Ironically, the LAB ranks floriduh as 9th in the country:
https://bikeleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/BFS_Report_2024-1.pdf
 As far as I can tell, it's mostly due to the number of railtrails (as "infrastructure") which is rather expansive.

Yes, LAB's "Bike Friendly" is almost all about how many miles of special paths or stripes have been laid down, with little or no attention to quality. Years ago we rode some western city - maybe Durango CO? I forget - that was then rated a "silver level bike friendly city" by LAB. Every bike lane we saw was firmly in the door zone of the many parked cars.
If I were in charge of their standards, a door zone bike lane would blackball the city.

The limitation there of course is that you need to live a reasonable distance from a trail or you're stuck with driving the to trail or riding through unfriendly roads...

Right. So that makes bicycling into a play activity for restricted spaces. How limiting!

(LAB ranks it with the 4th highest cyclist fatality rate in the country, despite the 6th highest per capita spending)..

Bike fatality rates are normally computed per capita, i.e. per resident. I think it would be more valuable (although obviously more difficult) to compute it per mile traveled by bikes. (Some researchers do try to do that, e.g. John Pucher.) States with less cold weather tend to have more bicycling, and while bicycling is generally quite safe, more bicyclists - especially incompetent ones - will cause a larger number of bike fatalities.
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- Frank Krygowski