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From: AMuzi <am@yellowjersey.org>
Newsgroups: rec.bicycles.tech
Subject: Re: Daytime running light popularity
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2024 07:52:58 -0500
Organization: Yellow Jersey, Ltd.
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On 10/28/2024 9:28 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:
> On 10/28/2024 7:51 PM, Roger Merriman wrote:
>> Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>>> On 10/28/2024 5:40 PM, Roger Merriman wrote:
>>>> Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>>>>> On another forum, a friend of mine claimed Ohio drivers 
>>>>> were
>>>>> hostile to cyclists. She lives and rides around big, 
>>>>> sprawling Columbus.
>>>>> I pointed out that I find our area motorists to be very 
>>>>> cooperative. In
>>>>> general, I think big cities generate aggressive driving.
>>>>>
>>>> Columbus is by no definition a large city it’s barely 
>>>> over 2 million
>>>> people, that’s a fairly standard city size NewYork with 
>>>> 20 ish million or
>>>> london with 15 million are large city’s.
>>> "Large" is relative, of course. Columbus is the largest 
>>> city by
>>> population in Ohio and the 14th largest in the U.S., out 
>>> of about
>>> 20,000. I'd say it qualifies as large by our standards.
>>>
>>> My point was general and comparative - that largER cities 
>>> seem to have
>>> more aggressive motorist than smallER cities. I suspect 
>>> that trend holds
>>> true even when comparing what you'd call two mid-sized 
>>> cities.
>>>
>> I’d to be honest consider Youngstown a town, it’s about 
>> the same size as
>> and history as the largest of the Welsh Valley towns, and 
>> if anything
>> larger cities with more cyclists I’d expect to drivers to 
>> be more
>> comfortable and familiar with encountering cyclists and 
>> other active
>> travel.
>>
>> Whereas a smaller city or town are more car centric, much 
>> less familiar and
>> used to the idea of driving everywhere, driving into for 
>> example Bristol or
>> even though it is if one is driving a perfectly reasonable 
>> choice, London
>> is a entirely different proposition and would take one 
>> many hours!
> In the other forum where I discussed this, I made some 
> guesses as to why I've have almost no motorist problems. One 
> is that this is an older city, meaning much of it is built 
> on a grid plan. That naturally gives multiple choices for 
> routing, and often makes quieter parallel streets available. 
> Inner ring suburbs are not grid plans, but often still 
> provide somewhat winding alternatives to main arterials. And 
> I've wondered if the fact that cyclists are uncommon makes 
> motorists sit up and take notice, as in "Whoa, it's a guy on 
> a bike! What should I do?" (I think that's especially true 
> when I'm obviously at lane center.)
> 
> A further couple details about our metro area in particular: 
> Due to the well known collapse of our steel industry in the 
> late 1970s, population has shrunk; but the number of roads 
> has not, so traffic inside the city is lower.
> 
> My wife and I like to watch Rick Steves travel videos. In 
> one or two of them, he's talked about how charming and well 
> preserved some ancient European towns are, specifically 
> because economic problems caused their "development" and 
> modernization to stop. Sometimes there are benefits to 
> economic downturns.
> 


I have nothing good to say about the current fascination 
with squiggles and loops for a street layout (as opposed to 
a normal grid). Annoying to find an address since knowing 
the cross street doesn't help. Adds cost to construction, 
street maintenance such as plowing, delays (sometimes 
fatally) emergency services, wastes fuel for everyone. Bah.

-- 
Andrew Muzi
am@yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971