Wiggle ref quits, game goes on
San Francisco Citizen reports that the Wiggle referee publicity stunt yesterday was a bust. What exactly was the bike guy ref going to publicize? Apparently he thought he was going to reveal how awful motorists behaved on the Wiggle, but of course the Wiggle is famous as a city-sanctioned bike route wherein cyclists speed through that residential neighborhood, running stop signs and scattering pedestrians in their wake, on their way downtown or wherever they're in such a hurry to get.
Below is the kind of reporting by Stanley Roberts that bike guy Morgan Fitzgibbons doesn't like:
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| Morgan Fitzgibbons of the Wigg Party |
Labels: Anti-Car, Cute Movement, District 5, Morgan Fitzgibbons, Pedestrian Safety, Punks on Bikes, The Wiggle, Videos
posted by Rob Anderson @ 10:20 AM
9 comments
9 Comments:
That is exactly the attitude I have seen for years now. Not just on this topic but on the "street people" issue as well. "I wont talk to you". If you offer a competing point of view they they flip you off and walk away. They have all the correct answers and cannot be challenged. Actually that is a very dangerous attitude, not unlike authoritarian or dictatorial governments.
As a "bike guy" I can say only "weak sauce Morgan"
Did you happen to see any of those vehicles in the background actually come to a complete stop?
enough said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvUSSUkf2to&feature=youtu.be
This doesn't look like the Wiggle, or any street in San Francisco for that matter.
The "enough said" video posted is of Amsterdam. I recognize the area. What is interesting is that Amsterdam seems to be the hoped for biketopia paradise of the bike crowd, BUT, there is one huge problem they ALWAYS ignore, and that is that the San Francisco Bay Area is a much larger population base living in a vastly larger sprawling region. The Bay Area has a larger economy than the entire Netherlands, not just Amsterdam, and the Bay Area has made an enormous impact on the world in the last 50 years.
So what do the biketopia people want? The city to wall itself off from the rest of the Bay Area and become some sort of historic bike zone that has as its major industries tourism, restaurants and marijuana shops?
Yes, they want to turn American cities into cutesy little European cities where streets were designed more than a thousand years ago.
But my takeaway from the video is how slow the traffic was moving. Seems like people there are using bikes strictly as a transportation "mode," whereas many cyclists in San Francisco and the US in general---especially the guys---see it as a speed/thrill trip. Mountain bikers are more honest about that motivation than city cyclists are.
It amazes me that you can't take anything from that video other than "it's not in america so it doesn't matter"
Have you seen the "mode" of traffic on Market street? All 3000 of them every day? Can you respond to this question like a normal, rational human being that's capable of taking new and different information and coming to a non-preconceived idea?
You put a statement in quotes that I never made.
This European city street is like no street in our country. My other point: there are evidently significant cultural differences illustrated in the video, since the obvious motivation of cyclists in the US---especially guys---involves speed and thrills, not just using a transportation "mode."
In San Francisco in particular, the pseudo-rebel ethos of bike messengers tainted cycling from the beginning.
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