Steve Magas is an attorney in Ohio, a co-author of "Bicycling and the Law", and has represented cyclists on the trial and appellate level.
This case, described fully in the link below, is an example of why careful wording of the law, and carefully groomed relationships and proper separation of responsibilities and authorities between Boards and Commissions and professional staff is critical to avoiding trouble. Also a good reason to watch your back.
http://www.ohiobikelawyer.com/uncategorized/2012/03/the-latest-attack-on-cycling-advocacy/
THE LATEST ATTACK ON CYCLING ADVOCACY
By: Steve Magas, March 12, 2012
"Jerry Walling and Roger Brislawn do what many, many cyclists around the country do – they sit on the Bicycle Advisory Committee of their community. They never dreamed that accepting this role, and reviewing bike crashes, would lead them to the brink of “large fines and imprisonment...
...From 2000-2011 the Bikeway Advisory Committee seemed to work well in Beavercreek – or so Jerry & Roger thought. That changed in August 2011 when Jerry & Roger received a little present in the mail – a certified mail letter from The Ohio State Board of Registration for Professional Engineers and Surveyors....
...The letter cited the men to Ohio Revised Code Section 4733.01 – the code section which defines the “practice of engineering.” The Board stated that it had received a “complaint” alleging that work the men had done for the Bikeway Advisory Committee “may fall into the realm of traffic engineering and could effect public welfare, safeguarding of life, health or property…"
Monday, March 12, 2012
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Has anyone had a close call with the right turn only/sharrows (bike) thru lane on Diamond at Canyon?
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| Sharrowed Right Turn Lane, looking North |
Has anyone had a close call with our example?
From John Allen:
"I wouldn't be so rigid about this. Riding *near the left side* of a right-turn lane does not violate the destination positioning rule, inviting right hook collisions. When the shoulder of a road becomes a right turn lane, and resumes after the intersection, this lane positioning is in my opinion often entirely reasonable, though strictly speaking it is illegal. Laws and markings are being devised to change this in a number of places."
At 11:15 PM 3/5/2012, Bert wrote:
Rather than list my concerns, I would like to hear your comments on the use of Sharrows within a right-hand turn lane but for straight moving bikes. I have serious reservations about this proposal, possibly for NYS. Cyclists should stay in the right-most lane in the direction they are travelling.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Heather Wilson to hold Town Hall Meeting to Hear Concerns About LANL Job Cuts--but not about $2.50 gas
Heather Wilson Holding Los Alamos Town Hall Meeting to Hear Public’s Concerns About LANL Job Cuts
Since you need to have a job in order to ride yer bike to work...not to mention, no job, no food, go read more at Carol Clark's Los Alamos Daily Post. And no, this is not a political endorsement for Ms. Wilson, the former 1st District House member and current candidate for U.S. Senate. I'll ridicule various candidates here regardless of party, but only endorse them on North Mesa Mutts. unless the other contributors to this blog concur with an endorsement.
Welcome to BombTown, Ms. Wilson.To her credit, she now seems to regret creating yet another government bureaucracy for taxpayers to feed . Question is, can she do something about it?
On another subject, and speaking of awarding the Order of the Bronx Cheer, I do get a kick out of Newt's continued bombast about returning two fifty a gallon gas to the pump. Reminds me of those old "a chicken in every pot" speeches made by other highly honorable, ahem, politicians.
That's a Bronx Cheer
A couple comments. One, back in the early eighties when gas got expensive, a lot of my fellow grad students who knew something about sedimentary geology bailed out of grad school and took lucrative jobs in the oil patch. My good friend Joe Smoot, formerly a geology professor at Stony Brook and now a senior geologist with the USGS, grumbled that his master's student was instantly making more dinero than he was.
But when gas and oil prices fell a decade later, many of those budding petroleum geologists got laid off. Oil companies are not charities: they don't explore for cheap oil. The cheap stuff has already been pumped out and burned. Companies now explore for more exotic formations (deeper water, more complex geological formations, secondary recovery and other advanced techniques) when the market will pay them handsomely to do so. We used up most of the easy stuff. Estimating ultimate world reserves, including those recoverable using advanced techniques, is an elusive target. According to a 2007 American Association of Petroleum Geologists conference "World oil production will reach a peak plateau by 2020-40...depending on the ultimate level of world oil resources -- which is substantially uncertain -- this plateau of maximum production is likely to last for 20-30 years before world production begins its ultimate decline,” (Hedberg Research Conference , 2007 AAPG Annual Convention in Long Beach.). Of course, that forecast is five years old.
Two, we live in 2012, not 1970. The rest of the world is racing to catch up to us in auto use and competing with the US market for gasoline, which is why we are now exporting gasoline as a finished product. Dem ferriners, you guessed, pay for it with all those dollars we export overseas for products you buy at the local Big Box Store. If you want to save at the pump, you simply have to use less of the dino juice. Get a smaller or more efficient car, something I don't see enough of on the road. Leave the horse hauler home and ride your bike. Get your kids on bikes to school so you can do the same. Ride the bus. Carpool. Etc. Just don't buy a big SUV you don't need and then bitch about the price of gas.
Its not that I like paying more at the pump, but its simply supply and demand. To be sure, and with all due respect to professional, election-year liars, the US is now supplying more of is own fossil fuel resources, not less, as a function of the total we consume. You can thank Big Oil more than politicians for that (as well as a lot of very smart little guys). But that is because technology has advanced and prices support the costs of recovery while providing tidy profit for the industry.
If, by contrast, you want government meddling with gasoline and oil, go back to the 1970's. Government controls are basically what Newt would have to do in order to convince people to explore, drill, recover, and sell cheap. As far as the 1970's attempts by government to regulate gasoline prices, consumption (remember the national 55 mph speed limit?) and distribution (remember "odd-even")? It wasn't pretty.
It took Ma Nature tens to hundreds of millions of years to make that oil and we burned a heck of a lot of it in about a hundred years; our consumption rate is accelerating. The big science now, aside from developing more conventional and unconventional resource, is to find a cost-effective way to circumvent the slow process (i.e., biofuels, etc) while not loading up the atmosphere with enough CO2 to worry even the skeptics. Until we do those things, I suggest we conserve what we got.
Since you need to have a job in order to ride yer bike to work...not to mention, no job, no food, go read more at Carol Clark's Los Alamos Daily Post. And no, this is not a political endorsement for Ms. Wilson, the former 1st District House member and current candidate for U.S. Senate. I'll ridicule various candidates here regardless of party, but only endorse them on North Mesa Mutts. unless the other contributors to this blog concur with an endorsement.
From The Daily Post: "Wilson encourages the public to attend her town hall meeting beginning at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 14 at the Best Western Hilltop House Hotel."
Welcome to BombTown, Ms. Wilson.To her credit, she now seems to regret creating yet another government bureaucracy for taxpayers to feed . Question is, can she do something about it?
On another subject, and speaking of awarding the Order of the Bronx Cheer, I do get a kick out of Newt's continued bombast about returning two fifty a gallon gas to the pump. Reminds me of those old "a chicken in every pot" speeches made by other highly honorable, ahem, politicians.
That's a Bronx Cheer
A couple comments. One, back in the early eighties when gas got expensive, a lot of my fellow grad students who knew something about sedimentary geology bailed out of grad school and took lucrative jobs in the oil patch. My good friend Joe Smoot, formerly a geology professor at Stony Brook and now a senior geologist with the USGS, grumbled that his master's student was instantly making more dinero than he was.
But when gas and oil prices fell a decade later, many of those budding petroleum geologists got laid off. Oil companies are not charities: they don't explore for cheap oil. The cheap stuff has already been pumped out and burned. Companies now explore for more exotic formations (deeper water, more complex geological formations, secondary recovery and other advanced techniques) when the market will pay them handsomely to do so. We used up most of the easy stuff. Estimating ultimate world reserves, including those recoverable using advanced techniques, is an elusive target. According to a 2007 American Association of Petroleum Geologists conference "World oil production will reach a peak plateau by 2020-40...depending on the ultimate level of world oil resources -- which is substantially uncertain -- this plateau of maximum production is likely to last for 20-30 years before world production begins its ultimate decline,” (Hedberg Research Conference , 2007 AAPG Annual Convention in Long Beach.). Of course, that forecast is five years old.
 |
| From the Hedberg Conference (2007) report |
Two, we live in 2012, not 1970. The rest of the world is racing to catch up to us in auto use and competing with the US market for gasoline, which is why we are now exporting gasoline as a finished product. Dem ferriners, you guessed, pay for it with all those dollars we export overseas for products you buy at the local Big Box Store. If you want to save at the pump, you simply have to use less of the dino juice. Get a smaller or more efficient car, something I don't see enough of on the road. Leave the horse hauler home and ride your bike. Get your kids on bikes to school so you can do the same. Ride the bus. Carpool. Etc. Just don't buy a big SUV you don't need and then bitch about the price of gas.
Its not that I like paying more at the pump, but its simply supply and demand. To be sure, and with all due respect to professional, election-year liars, the US is now supplying more of is own fossil fuel resources, not less, as a function of the total we consume. You can thank Big Oil more than politicians for that (as well as a lot of very smart little guys). But that is because technology has advanced and prices support the costs of recovery while providing tidy profit for the industry.
If, by contrast, you want government meddling with gasoline and oil, go back to the 1970's. Government controls are basically what Newt would have to do in order to convince people to explore, drill, recover, and sell cheap. As far as the 1970's attempts by government to regulate gasoline prices, consumption (remember the national 55 mph speed limit?) and distribution (remember "odd-even")? It wasn't pretty.
It took Ma Nature tens to hundreds of millions of years to make that oil and we burned a heck of a lot of it in about a hundred years; our consumption rate is accelerating. The big science now, aside from developing more conventional and unconventional resource, is to find a cost-effective way to circumvent the slow process (i.e., biofuels, etc) while not loading up the atmosphere with enough CO2 to worry even the skeptics. Until we do those things, I suggest we conserve what we got.
If elected, I promise to bring back the past.
Especially more Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs
Monday, March 5, 2012
Lucky You Live in BombTown?
If you listened to This American Life yesterday (podcast here), you can get an idea of how bad things can get in a community when the economy goes south and takes the municipal budget down with it. I doubt many of us would want to trade our economic situation in Los Alamos for that of Trenton, NY or Colorado Springs, CO. But with the budget cuts coming down from Uncle Sam and the reduction in force at LANL, I think we better start thinking about teaming more than one horse in our economy rather than figuring out how to spend all that money from Uncle Sam at the local Big Box store. Said it before, say it again here. There is no free lunch.
By all means shop locally, but one has to have paychecks to do that. Plus, I'm not sure the buying binge of toys and crap of the last thirty years is sustainable.
By all means shop locally, but one has to have paychecks to do that. Plus, I'm not sure the buying binge of toys and crap of the last thirty years is sustainable.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
To run or not to run, that is the question
County Council seats are up for grabs this fall. Last time around, I declined an organizational request that I run for office. Same question this time. Any thoughts out there?
Thursday, March 1, 2012
We are the other guy
Given the last post's discussion, I had to find this old video. I would say we are all "the other guy" from time to time. Eschew arrogance and overconfidence.
Sixties vintage TV Public Service spot. Watch out for the Other Guy
Sixties vintage TV Public Service spot. Watch out for the Other Guy
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