da | Bike Thoughts Three

take_the_lane is a blog hosted by the local paper, by a bicyclist activist of sorts. He occasionally goes on a bit much about the Tour de France, but it's generally pretty interesting.

Thought the second: I wonder if anyone has calculated the average gasoline/diesel wasted when a car (going about 45kph) accelerates to go around a bike (going 25-30 kph). On my morning commute, I often get passed by a car which accelerates to go around me then quick puts on the brakes to stop at the next stop sign, which would amuse me except I wonder how much car-equivalent we've just added to the system, for each and every car that passes me. Hm- say each car revved to 1.5 the RPM for 5 seconds; that's probably more energy used than if they travelled an additional 2.5 seconds worth of distance over the trip, but I'm not enough of a car /engineering person to figure it out. Maybe I'll ask the Car Talk guys!

Thought the third: would car-drivers who never ride bikes, and bicyclists who never drive cars, each learn something from an immersive real-physics video game which graphically shows what happens when they don't share the road well?

Taunt the (newbie bicyclist) with "can you survive 20 minutes in traffic?" then give them a scenario where all the cars turn without signaling and dip into the bike lane. Lots of potential gore and messy accidents. Fun all around, especially if you get to switch roles at the end of the scene to see how well (or crappily) you can do things from the other driver's seat. You could play the game straight, and go for "gold star" points by stopping properly at stop-signs, everyone signaling turns, stopping for pedestrians... Or you could go through and try to kill the nuns crossing the street and go for an evil score. Aside from the entertainment value, I wonder if enforcing some sort of role-switching would actually teach something.

Oh, and a freebie thought the fourth: An Apple developer has bad dreams about the release of the iPhone.