dammit I am tired of the passive and the aggressive war on bicyclists in this city. way too many “No bike parking” signs, drivers driving in bike lanes without regard to anyone’s safety, (or almost as bad) driving JUST behind us out of eye sight as if we impede your driving lane. Scary to see how many drivers who cannot calculate safe distance on either side. Trucks using dedicated bike lanes for parking even when there is ample parking to pull into, thieves running amok with tools to cut even the best locks in less than a few minutes and entirely too many people immediately blaming the DEAD cyclist when an accident happens.The fact that the cyclist is often no longer among the living should tell you that an accident involving a car and anything human-powered is not a fair fight. What is really going in in many cases is the driver either “doesn’t see” the cyclist at all (which tells you about the level of distraction and road awareness among many drivers) or the driver felt the cyclist had no right to the road and encroached on their space, resulting in a tragedy for one side. And yes, I am also tired of the few cyclists I see who have a disdain for bicycle traditions, including communicating with savvy drivers when possible with hand signals, using eye contact and acknowledgement and ceding the road to pedestrians when necessary. I see those cyclists, but I do not believe they actually number as a significant number of us. In order to ride a bike for a long period, one has to believe in those rules and to honor them. And those few who disregard the rules are just that, few. They are just more visible to those looking for examples of bad cyclists.
There seems to be a belief that the “grown up world” is about owning an auto and bicycles are for the immature, the Peter Pans of the world. That the rights of car drivers extend to the ownership of the road and that their decisions should override every other conveyance, even while they using their car as a weapon or wreaking havoc on the streets because of the distractions they have added to their driving time. For those who believe in auto-only roads, I would be happy to cede the highways to you and to take back the city streets for pedestrians, for cyclists and for low-powered motor vehicles. I am sure we’d all be a lot safer.
Category Archives: activism
Weighing In On A Confederate Past
It’s amazing to be alive at the moment of the tipping point for a social movement: For my lifetime, they already include the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid in South Africa, Arab Spring, the extension of legal rights for women and for same-sex unions among many others.
What all of these have in common is that they happened well before the formal governing entity signaled that it was ready for the change or even in some cases, before the solid majority had decided to back the change.
All were hard-fought and seemed destined to fail at many points in their campaign. All had active opposition.
The removal of statues of Confederate leaders from public space is another tipping point in a country that is heading toward a time when whites will be a minority (by 2043).
The affronted use mockery (“Why don’t we remove all traces of Washington? HE owned slaves! Where will this end?”) or condescending treatises on what they view as “the real history”, as understood through a lifetime of racist schoolbooks and likeminded family members (“The war was about states rights and not about slavery, duh.”)
To me, the arguments stated above mask the bigger truth: The public lionization of the Confederate past of the South is a barrier to working together for the future and signals to people of color that whiteness is a privilege earned, when it is not. I don’t care what version or scope of history you subscribe to, although I may pity you; have a statue of Lee in your backyard, but holding on the “Lost Cause” narrative in public places is a recipe for the continuing disintegration of our region. It also masks the true vibrancy of the South: that it is based on a multi-cultural, multi-generational belief in place, extreme socialization and culture handed down from person to person.
I wish we had the ability and forethought as a people to have created realistic evidence of the world of slavery and the brutality of the Civil War as Eisenhower ordered to be done with the concentration camps after WW2, but we did not. Instead we have inherited this soft and “heroic” narrative that does not truly represent the history of that ugly time.
Statues of those who brought a civil war to defend a system that allowed people to be sold as chattel should not be kept in public spaces.
Keep all of the statues and throw some Mardi Gras beads on em if you’d like, but put them in the Custom House or another place to properly frame their history as those who ignored the opportunity to expand human rights for their neighbors, along with information on when the statues were commissioned and by whom.
And thank you to Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of “The Warmth Of Other Suns:The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” for writing this piece in the NYT about how symbols do help to define their time:
With the lowering of the Confederate flag in the state that was the first to secede and where the first shots were fired, could we now be at the start of a true and more meaningful reconstruction? It would require courage to relinquish the false comfort of embedded racial mythologies and to open our minds to a more complete history of how we got here. It would require a generosity of spirit to see ourselves in the continued suffering of a people stigmatized since their arrival on these shores and to recognize how the unspoken hierarchies we have inherited play out in the current day and hold us back as a country.
“Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s airth [sic] a free woman— I would.” — Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman secured her freedom in a precedent setting court case on 8/22/1781.
Suspected bike thief arrested in wig disguise after ex-bounty hunter, Facebook group run stakeout
“Gray tailed him for a few blocks, when, he said, Wells found an easy target: a red cruiser bike tethered with a cable lock. With a snip, the bike was free and Wells was on the move, Gray said.
Wells pedaled up to the Lowe’s hardware store on Elysian fields where he tried to sell the ride to the day laborers out front, Gray said. Finding no takers, Wells approached Gray, he said.
“Know anyone who wants to buy a bike,'” Wells asked, according to Gray’s account.
Gray said he only had about $15 on him. Wells said that was good enough, and the deal was sealed, Gray said.”
Keep your eyes and ears out about suspicious behavior around bikes and report it to the Stolen Bikes Nola Facebook page. And DON’T use cable locks.
Petition · Cancel plans for development of the “Championship” level golf course in Northern City Park
Especially for downtown residents and visitors, City Park is a necessary amenity and is conveniently located only a few easy miles down Esplanade by bicycle, leg or vehicle. As a FQ teenager, I rode my bike to City Park regularly, learned how to drive there and generally used it to escape from my fabulous but often trying daily life of the Quarter. Because of all of that and more, it remains one of my favorite places in the entire region.
This new golf course will take away what has been a much-loved and well-used space since the 2005 levee breaks. There is no doubt that City Park management has had to find ways to monetize/program much of the park, and has done so by offering many great amenities (i.e. 24 hour beignets, putt-putt, Botanical Garden/music, soccer fields, stables, Grow Dat Youthfarm) but they also need to balance that with open space that encourages a wide variety of beneficial insects, wildlife and plants that add diversity and won’t be attracted to a golf course. People need diversity of spaces too, and the space in question has served as a recuperative spot for thousands who rebuilt the city and were here in the gloomy days after 2005. I believe this need was clearly defined by that use and the management should attend to the felt desire to offer non-programmed or non-monetized space that benefits its residents, visitors and the rest of the natural world.
Please consider signing the petition and sharing it so we can show the support for balanced uses of our beloved City Park.
Petition · Cancel plans for development of the "Championship" level golf course in Northern City Park · Change.org.
New Orleans Can Thrive: Mario Savio
And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
French Quarter block by block 
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