19 Replies to “O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas”

  4. “With the east span finally open, planners are already at work on the next mega-Bay Bridge project – a $1 billion-plus makeover of the western span that would include a $500 million hanging bike path.”
    Okay, California is not ,as they say, in the pink,financially,so how the hell are they going to pay for this brilliant idea? Car drivers should NOT have to pay an extra toll so bicycle riders can have their own bridge,did they ever hear of “user pay”?
    SO, to pay for it all, they simply MUST enact legislation requiring bike licencing and insurance,and charge the bicyclists a toll. Bike riders should have to have a separate driver’s licence as well.
    Actually,bike licences are a damned good idea.We should do this in Canada too,it’s another source of revenue untapped and a lot less controversial than legalizing marijuana.
    I am going to forward this idea to the Premier,and don’t worry,when I am awarded the Order of Canada, will still grace the blog here at SDA with my wisdom.

  5. So…. this one’s a bit of a Darwin award. Apparently Mr. Zuckermann, an avid pesky bicyclist and namesake for the new lane, discovered that expansion joints are a bit wider than bicycle tires. Exhibit here: http://www.drfphoto.com/image/full/8934.jpg
    His eureka moment resulted in a traumatic brain injury and a bike path costing tax payers millions. Very practical.

  6. Why did you fix the link, I liked it better when it was broken..
    Bike lanes or as I like to call them the ultimate progressive pissing contest.. They just love to whip out their spandex covered member and go on about how biking right next to a road somehow improves your quality of life..
    Where I live there really is no foot traffic.. You could fire a cannon down the sidewalk and never hurt a sole.. You either drive or take the bus/taxi because a bedroom community..
    The city ripped up several miles of road and widened them for the bike lane.. So now we have empty sidewalks on both sides of the road and a empty bike lane.. When we actually needed those bus stop pull over spots so traffic can flow around the bus when it stops for a long pick up.. Gridlock is a problem, lack of liberals is not..
    The sad irony of it all is the local middle aged minority bums have attached dirty small engines to their bikes (illegal) so they can use the empty lanes.. Some rotten mooch zipping past you while your stuck behind some F#&@ing bus.. Progress liberal style.

  7. Wow. The western span looks like it is 1-1/4 miles long so that would mean $100million per quarter mile. That makes it more expensive than a high speed mag-lev train!
    I have a counter proposal. For a mere 2% of the total ($10,000,000) up front, deposited to my account in the Cayman Islands, I will set up a shuttle service of two buses one driven by a left-handed albino lesbian illegal immigrant and the other by a heroin using nudist with a ponytail and ‘F@#% You’ tattooed on his forehead. The buses will be electric of course and depart from a solar powered charging station at each end of the bridge every quarter hour. To further reduce CO2 emissions each cyclist will be hit on the head with a mallet until unconsciousness or a coma occurs.

  10. In a way I support this. Cycling is at least 100 timeshare dangerous than driving a car. Probably closer to 1000 times per km travelled – stats are obviously very difficult to determine with any kind of accuracy.
    So it is Darwinism Run amok. Cycling rates have plummeted since the eighties – kids have the Internet and video games to occupy their spare time. Give cyclists as much opportunity as possible to kill or maim themselves And the problem will solve itself.

  11. Next will be Glider lanes in the air, with balloons for taxis.
    The big one coming to California will be a God send . Literally.

  12. What is it about bicycles that causes the operator said two-wheeled vehicle to suffer severe brain death the moment his or her rear-end touches the seat?

  14. To give this some perspective, Confederation Bridge is 8 miles long and cost $1.3 billion. The west span of the Bay Bridge is 3 miles long and the bike lane alone is estimated to cost $0.5 billion. I know, I know, I’m not comparing apples to apples. I’m comparing fruits and nuts to hard headed realists.

  15. The silliest part about this project is that it was initiated after the old Bay Bridge suffered a partial collapse during the Loma Prieta earthquake during the 1989 World Series (a televised quake). Successive California government put of the project because every subsequent estimate came in higher than the last one (the magic of inflation). In the end it has cost far more than if they had moved on it in the early-mid 1990s.

  16. The same people favouring projects like this easily drop the “how can you do X when there are starving people in Y” without a hint of hypocrisy. Hippy punching: good or bad thing?

  17. Al in Ottawa’s proposal is by far the most financially reasonable one which is why it will likely never see the light of day. I’d cycle if it wasn’t for the idiotic bicycle helmet laws in BC but might do so if I can find a Pickelhaub with a foot long very sharp point on the top to wear. Even when I do the walk to my clinic (uphill all the way) I find my patients looking at me strangely as I drip sweat for the first half hour that I’m there.
    1 billion dollars for a bicycle bridge is lunacy and, if there was such as thing as an investigative journalist nowadays, we’d find out exactly who was getting paid off. I believe that Ottawa’s bike paths cost considerably less and when one wanted to cross the Ottawa river it was a matter of just using the same bridge as the vehicles used. Only time I had any trouble with that part of the journey was coming back from Hull with 24 beer balanced on my rear bike carrier but beer was considerably cheaper in Hull than Ottawa in the 1970’s.
    Cycling to work is only possible for a few months of the year in Canada and after seeing what Vancouver has done with absolutely asinine bike lanes in parts of the city where just driving a few blocks is guaranteed to make the most meek mannered driver experience road rage, the only way I’d cycle in downtown Vancouver would be if I could carry an RPG to defend myself against engraged drivers who see their speed drop to less than tortoise speed as a result of the room taken up by bike lanes.
    As a former cyclist who thought nothing of doing 100 mile daily bike rides just to explore the countryside, I like the ability to both commute and stay in shape. However, once I encountered Chinese drivers in Vancouver, I decided it was far more prudent to drive as large a vehicle as possible in order to provide some protection against a class of drivers who shouldn’t be on the road. Also, a bicycle has rather limited cargo capacity which has probably never occurred to the adherents of bicycle commuting.

  18. I’ve been a reasonably serious cyclist for close to forty years. I still ride about 4,000 kilometers per year. I’m not opposed to bike lanes per se, but I am opposed to bike lanes (or other facilities for bicycles) that cost huge amounts of money.

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