Recent quotes:
Right on Red: The Culture War Comes for Traffic Lights - POLITICO
“The anti-home rule Republican effort to interfere in D.C. traffic laws, a quintessentially local issue, by inserting riders in the annual D.C. appropriations bill is a petty, offensive attempt to meddle in local D.C. affairs,” said D.C.’s non-voting Congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton. “The nearly 700,000 D.C. residents, a majority of whom are Black and Brown, are worthy and capable of self-government. These riders are an antidemocratic attempt to govern D.C. without its consent, and I will do everything in my power to defeat them.”Right on Red: The Culture War Comes for Traffic Lights - POLITICO
“Just about every study that I’ve seen shows that [right turn on red] increases crashes,” Sam Schwartz, the prominent traffic engineer and former New York City traffic commissioner, told me. “Right now we’re seeing this surge in pedestrian crashes. It is often pedestrians and bicyclists who get caught in the crosswalk.” Schwartz doesn’t buy the idea that there’s something unfair about impinging on motorists’ domain. “The pedestrian was here first,” he said, noting that Americans used to be free to cross streets wherever they wanted. “The pedestrian got corralled.” (Schwartz told me that the term “jaywalking” was originally a slam against rubes who would come to cities and not know that you could only cross at the corner: “A jay was a hayseed,” he said.)Cardio exercise and strength training affect hormones differently -- ScienceDaily
Endurance training on a bicycle has such a marked effect on the metabolic hormone that we know ought to take a closer look at whether this regulation of FGF21 is directly related to the health-improving effects of cardio exercise. FGF21's potential as a drug against diabetes, obesity and similar metabolic disorders is currently being tested, so the fact that we are able to increase the production ourselves through training is interesting', Christoffer Clemmensen elaborates.Insomnia and depression: Japanese hospital workers questionnaire survey : Open Medicine
Chronic insomnia is the one of the factors influencing the development of mental illness. In this survey, we tried to clarify the relationship between chronic insomnia and various factors. Although there is no certainty about other possible independent variables, multiple regression analyses suggested that chronic insomnia is an important factor for depression. Koyama et al. found that subjects who suffered from severe sleeping disorders, not just during depression, tended to have decreased blood flow in the frontal lobe of the brain [2]. When SIGH-D was used to evaluate sleeping disorders, an IS of 3 or higher showed that its severity and the reduced blood flow in the frontal lobe are significantly correlated. Based on this biological finding, preliminary research was conducted with 108 working participants, which included healthy participants and patients with mild to moderate depressive episodes. The result showed that the IS was significantly correlated with the severity of depression, subjective fatigue, sadness, and suicidal thoughts. Thus, an IS evaluation has the possibility of identifying depression based on a questionnaire survey related to direct mood changes [3]. There have been robust findings concerning the biology underlying the close relationship between sleep disorders and depression. For example, Buckley has found that a protracted sleep disorder, not depression, induces hyperactivity of the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) system [14]. Furthermore, exposure to extreme stress causes the excessive secretion of corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH) —a cerebral mechanism for stress adaptation. This release of CRH inhibits the activities of the serotonin pathway in the nervous system that extends from the dorsal raphe nucleus to the prefrontal area via the gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) system [15]. It is also known that CRH has a stimulant effect [14]. Therefore, it is inferred that a substantive lack of sleep will lead to a sustained activation of the HPA system once again, thus establishing a vicious cycle. On the other hand, the decline in frontal lobe function due to depression has been established by several earlier studies, including those that used functional brain imaging [15,16,17,18]. The protraction of a sleep disorder activating the HPA system and inhibiting the serotonin nervous system in the frontal lobe is believed to elicit a clinical condition similar to depression. Furthermore, the finding that the hyperactivity of the HPA system increases cortisol secretion, which inhibits the HPA system and damages hippocampal cells, further strengthens the suggested relationship between sleep disorders and depression. This biological finding strengthens the theory that a lack of sleep due to insomnia, exposure to stress, and overwork, leads to depression because of the accumulation of mental fatigue.Bob Lutz: Kiss the good times goodbye
A minority of individuals may elect to have personalized modules sitting at home so they can leave their vacation stuff and the kids' soccer gear in them. They'll still want that convenience. The vehicles, however, will no longer be driven by humans because in 15 to 20 years — at the latest — human-driven vehicles will be legislated off the highways.New study looks at attitudes of drivers toward cyclists, and it ain't pretty : TreeHugger
Tara's original work reinforces this idea of social domination; you see this in many of the survey results. For instance, the most anti-cyclist, pro-drivist drivers are the least likely to bother even to turn their heads to check for cyclists, which is a good way to prevent right hooks and left turn deaths. They really just don't care. The more they dislike cyclists, the more willing they are to kill them.How Cyclists Can Stay Safe on the Road - WSJ
Although fluorescent jackets can make people more visible generally, in this experiment the fluorescent jersey didn’t make the cyclist significantly more recognizable as a cyclist than a black jersey. When the cyclist wore fluorescent leg coverings, however, observers recognized he was a cyclist more than three times farther away on average than when he wore black leggings and a fluorescent jersey.Cycling to work 'halves risk of heart disease and cancer' | Daily Mail Online
The researchers, whose findings are published in the BMJ, studied the commuting habits of 263,450 middle aged men and women. They assessed their health for five years and recorded whether they developed cancer, heart disease or died of any cause. Adults who walked to work – typically six miles a week – were 27 per cent less likely to develop heart disease than those who drove or took public transport. But walking did not protect them against cancer or other chronic health problems – possibly because they were not exercising for long enough. Adults who cycled to work for any distance were more than 40 per cent less likely to get cancer, heart disease or die within the next five years.The secrets of the world's happiest cities | Society | The Guardian
Researchers for Hewlett-Packard convinced volunteers in England to wear electrode caps during their commutes and found that whether they were driving or taking the train, peak-hour travellers suffered worse stress than fighter pilots or riot police facing mobs of angry protesters. But one group of commuters report enjoying themselves. These are people who travel under their own steam, like Robert Judge. They walk. They run. They ride bicycles.Officials to vote on new bike riding trail near RDU :: WRAL.com
County commission chair Sig Hutchinson said he envisions that the area will be known as the "Boulder, Colorado of the East Coast." Apart from the trail's recreational use for hikers, joggers and bikers, Hutchinson and other commissioners believes the project could be a crucial economic driver to the area. Hutchinson suggests that the new project represents $19 billion dollars for the state and that it will support over 190,000 jobs.Workout Pals in Distant Cities Take Spin Class Together, Virtually - WSJ
A Peloton bike costs $1,995 and Ms. Richter pays $39 a month for unlimited classes. Her Peloton bike shoes, which clip to the pedals, cost $125. Her private Pilates sessions cost $65 a 55-minute class.What Is Fatigue? - The New Yorker
As the cyclists pedalled, a screen in front of them periodically flashed images of happy or sad faces in imperceptible sixteen-millisecond bursts, ten to twenty times shorter than a typical blink. The cyclists who were shown sad faces rode, on average, twenty-two minutes and twenty-two seconds. Those who were shown happy faces rode for three minutes longer and reported less of a sense of exertion. In a second experiment, the researchers demonstrated that subliminal action words (GO, LIVELY) could boost a subject’s cycling performance by seventeen per cent over inaction words (TOIL, SLEEP).The secrets of the world's happiest cities | Society | The Guardian
Researchers for Hewlett-Packard convinced volunteers in England to wear electrode caps during their commutes and found that whether they were driving or taking the train, peak-hour travellers suffered worse stress than fighter pilots or riot police facing mobs of angry protesters. But one group of commuters report enjoying themselves. These are people who travel under their own steam, like Robert Judge. They walk. They run. They ride bicycles.Street for Cyclists May Be Solution as NYC Faces Subway Shutdown - Bloomberg Politics
New York is building 18 miles of protected lanes this year, yet officials don’t want to promise more than 10 per year because street changes can have unanticipated consequences, Russo said. The most radical alteration would be to close 14th Street to create more mobility for the hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise be traveling beneath it. The idea of such a transitway reserved for buses, cyclists and pedestrians was first proposed by the Regional Plan Association, an influential policy study group that in 1929 advocated a northern Manhattan site for the Hudson River span now known as the George Washington Bridge. The proposal would open the street overnight to allow truck deliveries. Keep up with the race of a lifetime. Get our politics newsletter daily. Sign Up Much of the infrastructure to support it has already been installed. The East River bridges into Lower Manhattan now handle an average of more than 15,000 bikers a day in warm-weather months, up from about 6,600 a decade ago, according to the DOT. The de Blasio administration intends to build protected lanes from the Williamsburg Bridge, the most heavily bike-traveled, to Delancey Street on the Lower East Side, which could connect via a north-Why cycling in high-vis may be not as safe as you think | Peter Walker | Environment | The Guardian
The authors looked at 12 studies dating back as far as 1969, a number of which seemed to show that a fluorescent jacket or similar garb made riders more visible. However, the paper notes that many of these put the bikes against relatively uniform backdrops rather than the every-varying contrast of a moving landscape. One study, from 2011, appeared to show that drivers saw moving motorbikes more quickly if there was a greater colour contrast between the background and the rider's clothes. Another, from last year, concluded that depending on the road and traffic the most visible rider apparel could be a high-vis jacket, a white jacket or even a black jacket.Cycling as a vehicle to creativity
It is all very well to say to yourself that you are not thinking as you wheel serenely along: but you are, and that sure uncertainty of the cyclist’s balance, that unconsciously watchful suspension (solid on earth yet so breezily flitting) seems to symbolize the task itself. The wheel slidders in a rut or on a slope of gravel: at once, by instinct, you redress your perpendicular. So, in the continual joy and disgust of the writer’s work, he dare not abandon that difficult trained alertness. How much of the plain horror and stupidity is he to admit into his picture? how many of the grossly significant minutiae can he pause to include? how often shall he make a resolute fling to convey that incomparable energy of life that should be the artist’s goal above all? These are the airy tinkerings of his doubt; and as he passes from windy hill-top to green creeks and grazings sometimes the bicycle sets him free. He sees it all afresh; nothing, nothing has ever been written yet: the entire white paper of the world is clean for his special portrait of all hunger, all joy, and all vexation.A Tale of Two Velodromes
London’s two velodromes were built in the 19th and 21st centuries. The indoor track at the Lee Valley Velodrome, one of the fastest in the world, is housed in a beautiful stadium built at cost of £94 million. Its distinctive roof, a hyperbolic paraboloid clad in 5000m2 of custom-cut Western red cedar, is a prominent landmark at the edge of the 2012 Olympic park. The open-air track at Herne Hill is completely hidden in a South London suburb. The entrance lies at the end of a narrow path between two semi-detached houses. Coming out behind them, you see a wall supporting a low bank of rusting metal seats. This little stand is the only permanent structure that was built – at any of the venues – for the 1948 Olympics. The pavilion, also derelict, dates from 1891, when the track opened. In 2015, any spectators sit on folding plastic seats in a small area of open terracing in front of the older stands. There is no café. Competitors change in a portaloo in a cluster of temporary cabins and containers behind the old pavilion.The shame of being married to a MAMIL, a Middle Aged Man In Lycra
