This has been on my mind the past few days. Momentum on a bicycle makes the ride go oh so much easier. However, the traffic calming devices are in place for a reason.

I find that my personal experience dictates this “stopping and starting” does not create a dilemma for me. It takes me about 30-40 feet from dead stop to resume nominal travel speed. Experience and condition levels will dictate different results.

What I dislike is the red lights that have short cycles. Thinking you may have the timing right, only to stop in quick fashion, you don’t have ample time to gear down to a feasible starting gear. Try starting off in the 2/7 gearing setup sometime. Now, there is inconvenience for you!!

Overall, I see no inconvenience, just hoping to time things right to get back rolling as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

These arguments for red light running are coming from some very childish and inexperienced people. For instance, I fail to see how making motorists pass you a second time (especially with a narrow lane) makes you safer.

My latest cycling mantra: Want respect? Act respectfully.

Yes!! And about moral integrity. I think the saying goes something like “Integrity is doing what’s right even when no one is watching (or even when it’s not convenient).”

This is a major peeve of mine. We cannot replace enforcement with engineering. Just like we can’t manufacture “friendliness” with engineering.

Both lawlessness and lack of civility stem from the same cultural problem — an imbalance between individuality and community. It’s all about MEEEEEEEE!

It amazes me how humans can find endless diversions to avoid meaningful solutions.

This has been a long time coming.

There is something else that has changed over the years and that is a reduction in the number of law enforcement officers. In particular, the reduction of TRAFFIC law enforcement officers.

I pointed out in a separate post what happened to the Florida Highway Patrol, but what I didn’t mention was that outside of the cities, the FHP handled ALL the traffic problems. The County Sheriff’s deputies handled all the burglaries, robberies, theft and general crime. There was a pretty clear division of duties. For a deputy to stop a car for a traffic offense, the driver had to have done something really stupid, like run a red light.

Nationwide, there were a lot more traffic officers. San Francisco alone had 150 of them whose only job was traffic. If you violated a traffic law, you had a pretty good chance of getting caught.

But then came MADD and then came “civil forfeiture” of property and suddenly, the Sheriff’s became interested in traffic because it could become a “Revenue Enhancement” stream. That stream later dried up, so they lost interest again.

At the same time, the traffic engineers in the ’70′s were saying THEY had all the answers. It was all in the infrastructure. A sign here, a new traffic light there, an elevated restricted access roadway and that would fix everything.

So here we are. The most lawless place in the country are the roads.

I read an article that made the “safety” argument that running red lights keeps cyclists from being right-hooked. The article stated that women were more likely to be run over by turning trucks (this was a British article so it was “left turning lorries” which, here, would be “right-turning trucks”) because they don’t run red lights. And that men avoid this fate because they [are incorrigible scofflaws]. Of course, this problem is correctly avoided by not riding up the right side of a traffic queue. Where bike lanes are involved, it means merging out of the bike lane before the intersection (that’s why the stripe is broken leading to the intersection). So, yeah, it’s a bogus reason justified by an incompetent cycling behavior.