Avoiding Accountability via the Wartime Dialectic of Civilian Death

I was never fond of diagramming sentences, but it has it's place. There's a wave of statements being made in Pittsburgh in the aftermath of a driver causing a chain-collision and killing a cyclist. The statement goes like this:

•It's tragic (Susan Hicks) was killed ,but I know a lot of cyclists run red lights.
•It's sad (the cyclist) is dead ,but I see a lot of (them) behaving badly. I ride bikes too!

Here's the pattern:
•{regret}  (individual)  [outcome]  ,but  {credibility}  (many) of  [other- tribe]  misbehave.

{regret}	(individual)	[outcome]	,but	{credibility}	(many)	[other- tribe]	misbehave	assertion of balance
{It's a shame}	(Fireman Jones)	[died]	,but	{we all know}	(many)	[firefighters]	drink too much	Some of my friends are firemen.
{How sad that}	(Johnny Gammage)	[died]	,but	{my cousin the cop says}	(the majority of)	[black drivers]	have drugs & guns in the car.	I do support the 2nd Amendment though.
{How sad that}	(Andre Gray)	[was murdered]	,but	{I know that}	(so many)	[homosexuals]	live a risky lifestyle	Some of my friends are gay.
{What a loss,}	(13 year-old Abdel Rahman Abdullah)	[was killed by soldiers]	,but	{we all know}	(a lot of)	[Palestinian kids]	throw stones at soldiers.	What do they expect?
			,but

And we could go on with other examples. It's pertinent to note that the [other- tribe] is always a group that the speaker does not belong to.

What these statements really say in code is:

The

death killing beating [outcome]

of

Susan Hicks Johnny Gammage AR Abdullah (Individual)

is

acceptable justified understandable OK

because

(many) of [other- tribe]

drink a lot drugs-guns live risky throw stones {behavior}

This is a pernicious bit of rhetoric. It says: What happened to the individual is understandable and not-outrageous because of the way their tribe acts. It says: taking innocent, uninvolved individual lives can be justified by the behavior of other members of their tribe.

The only time Occidental Culture is supposed to justify individual deaths because of tribe-group identity is during warfare. How did we come to this?

Why do we tend to devalue the loss of life based on membership in another tribe? Why do we invoke the rhetoric pattern of warfare in civilian deaths? Because then we don't have to hold a member of our own tribe accountable for it, which would reflect on: ourselves.

Cher The Road, Samuel Jackson PSA: "Slow the F*** Down"

I usually do my bike-blogging here, but I thought this would be better at WWVB. Here's a series of actual tweets from just the other day by Cheryl Sarkisian, d/b/a Cher, who encountered bicyclists on the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH):

Cher is OOC (out of control):

OMG, urr, Yuck indeed. I'd be inclined to dismiss this as the e-ranting of an out-of-touch elitist, but last night in Pittsburgh another driver ran over another bicyclist, which is happening a lot around here.

Although the event is tragic, it does provide an opportunity to read citizen comments on the accident, and that's a chilling experience. One portion of the good people of Pittsburgh say things like:

• You can't expect people to slow down to stay behind a bike. That's not going to happen. (Mr. Wayne Pace)
• bikers, instead of riding on narrow roads not wide enough for car traffic, like butler street and penn avenue, bike a block over on a street that runs parallel (Ms. Georgia Rush, who studied Systematic Theology at St. Vincent College)
• stay on the sidewalk where you belong (Mr. Shawn Cravener, who attended North Catholic High School)
• Bikers want a share of the road? Pay registration and carry insurance. They are riding the streets annonomously. (Mr. Bob Gentile)
• It's impossible for cars and bikes to coexist without the proper bike lane paths. (Mr. John B. Demko

Perhaps Cher IS representative of the population

If Cher is, in fact, representative of the mainstream population, we (bicyclists) are in serious trouble. We need an effective, startling, interesting communications piece about bikes on the road that wakes people up.

Hmmm. Bikes on the road? Wake people up? Snakes on a plane? WTFU?
That's it! We need a Samuel Jackson Public Service Announcement!

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Public Service Announcement: Slow the F*** Down

Hello, this is Samuel Jackson. I'd like to ask you to work though a few situations with me that you might encounter when you're driving. It won't take long, and it might save you from a terrible accident which could expose you to delays, litigation, expenses - and most of all, the terrible feelings of having to explain to your family that you killed somebody with your car. Stick with me here. It'll be OK. I promise.

Vehicular Bullies and a Failure of Decency: Pittsburgh's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week

Pittsburgh is a nice place to live and a good place to be a bicyclist; in fact, Pittsburgh has received a Bronze Award as a Bike Friendly Community (BFC). This last week was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week of death and crime (but no punishment). For those unfamiliar:

• Monday 7/30, Pittsburgh held a memorial ride and a ghost bike ceremony for James Price, a diabetic bicyclist run over by a driver and left to die alone on the 7500 block of Penn Avenue (fatal hit-and-run).
  
• Tuesday 7/31 the driver of an SUV ran over bicyclist Anthony Green, on the 7700 block of Penn Avenue, and stopped after hitting a phone pole. Mr. Green died of his injuries. (fatal collision)
  
• Wednesday 8/01 the mayor's office urged people to be careful and said an alternate bike route would be developed to get bikes off Penn Avenue.
  
• Wednesday at Church Street and South Braddock in Swissvale, the driver of a truck hit a bicyclist and drove away from the scene. (non-fatal hit-and-run) Update: Intoxicated bicyclist ran a red light and ran into back of a truck. Driver didn't know, continued driving, returned when another motorist alerted him.
  
• Thursday 8/02, a motorcycle police officer was riding Penn Ave. in response to the accidents. He was hit by the driver of an SUV. Uniformed policemen, official vehicle, blinking lights.
  
• Friday 8/03, Driver flees scene after striking 6-year-old child on a bicycle in the 200 block of Alter Street, East Carnegie. (non-fatal hit-and-run)
  
• Saturday 8/04, another cyclist hit by a driver in a hit-and-run, in the 2200 block of Perrysville Avenue in Perry North. (non-fatal hit-and-run)

Bicycle Apartheid and Vehicular Bullies

In the immediate response to the first two deaths on the same road, there was discussion of moving bikes off that street and of establishing alternate bike routes. Two widely different perspectives were communicated:

• Here's the key quote from coverage of the Mayor's statement:

  After two bicyclists died after being struck by cars in recent days, Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's office urged bicyclists to consider avoiding a section of Penn Avenue that runs through Point Breeze and Wilkinsburg.
  The mayor's office said bicyclists should consider exiting Penn at at Braddock Avenue and continuing to Meade Street. Pittsburgh has no legal authority to restrict bicycle traffic on Penn, a state-owned roadway.

• An alternate view was expressed by PennDOT:

  "Motorists need to remember that bicyclists are extremely vulnerable," Steve Cowan, safety press officer for PennDOT District 11, said. "They have as much right to the road as you do in your car or in your truck or on your motorcycle."

Bicycle apartheid or removing bicycles "for their own good", is illegal, repressive, and rewards bullying behavior. Smells like "separate but equal".

Policy FAIL: Appeasing Bullies with Segregation for the Victim's Own Good

At a meta-level, this is an issue of responding to bullying. Will appeasing bad actors by segregating their victims help?

In Atlantic Cities, Sarah Goodyear writes about the objectification and diminishment of women, and attempts to protect women for their own good by establishing women-only train cars in India, Mexico, and Japan.

A woman writes that when she boarded a mixed-gender car, a man started crowding her suggestively. When she asked him to step back, he replied, "Why are you here? You should be in the women’s coach." She asserted her right to travel on the mixed coach, and things escalated.

Another man stepped in and got into a fistfight with the first one. The other passengers started yelling at the woman, blaming her for the problem. It was her fault for being there. Simply by being female in a public place, she had caused violence. She needed to go away.

The shaken woman ended her account this way: I’m AGAINST the separate coach for women. It is the most ridiculous solution the government came up with to ensure women travelers’ safety. Segregating men and women will never help anyone develop tolerance and respect for others’ PERSONAL SPACE.

Neither, I would add, will segregating cars and bikes.

Economic Patterns of Bike Friendliness: It's My Fault

I ride in Pittsburgh a few times a week: on the trails, on the streets, wherever. I am in the target demographic. All the new bike infrastructure and the associated bike friendliness have been deployed in places most likely to attract Me: the riverfront trails, the sharrows to gentrified neighborhoods with hipster cachet, coffee shops and cupcake boutiques — it's all about me. It's my fault.

The distribution of bike friendliness has followed the existing patterns of economic success and power, and that (unintentionally but nevertheless) mirrors patterns of race and class.

So our bike friendliness isn't evenly distributed. None of these accidents happened in the white-bread areas that have benefited from the attention of the last decade; they've occurred in the shabbier places that don't make the brochures.

It's a matter of essential decency

This last week shows that as a region (the incidents fall in several municipalities, but all are in the same County) we've lost the sense that there's a human being on that bike/motorcycle/walker, and being in a rush isn't worth killing somebody. There's a philosophical/moral problem at the root of it.

Certainly, there's a need for education, law enforcement, road calming etc - but there's a failure of decency.

Pittsburgh Bike Belt : A Modest Proposal

This has been a big year for bike trails in Pittsburgh, and there is the promise of more to come. Already we've seen the Point-to-24th Street / Strip District Trail opening and the long-awaited Duquesne-to-Munhall Steel-Valley-Coaster-Pipeline Trail opened on Friday. Both of these are tremendous.

This year we also expect to see the SouthSideWorks Trail complete, the PIT Airport connector trail will open, and we may see the Sandcastle connection open.

Which brings us to the matter of Names and Naming Trails. It's great to recognize people and to preserve memories by giving trails effective names like the "Mon-Whorf Trail". Some names are unwieldy, such as the Ruprecht S. and Penelope K. Rutherford Lower Burrel Multi-Use Health and Wellness Trail. If the official world gives an unwieldy name, the real world will assign a more pragmatic one, hence: Jail Trail, Casino Trail, Strip Trail, Southside Trail.

Although each community is justifiably proud of their efforts to bring forth their trails, for outsiders the distinction between the Southside Trail and the Baldwin-Brentwood-Whitehall Trail isn't intuitive. In the same way that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", the nomenclature of our trails restates the condition of our fractured local government.

With all due respect to the Bard, naming is not a trivial issue; on Friday, I had the occasion to call 911 seeking help for an injured rider, and it took a little while to suss out the specific name of the trail I was on. We may need a better system of trail names.

Fortunately, Pittsburgh has previously dealt with the problem of naming and marking routes that run through a variety of municipalities and domains. Let's look at some maps.

The map of today's Pittsburgh bike trail system looks like this:

(click image to embiggen in a new window)

Imagine What The Future Might Hold

Imagine what it would look like if the region is able to:

• fill in the southern gaps of the Montour Trail
• extend the Panhandle Trail on existing abandoned rail lines into West End Circle
• extend the Casino Trail to Neville Island

It might look like a belt system of trails:

(click image to embiggen in a new window)

Through a dozen local successes, we're on the verge of adding a new "belt" to Pittsburgh's infamous Color Belts: the Bike Belt.



I propose that we rename (and re-sign) the various Pittsburgh regional trails (in at least Allegheny and Washington counties) as the Bike Belt. Using the existing, much-loved and parochially functional color-belt framework would connect "new-green-bike" Pittsburgh with "yinzer-mullet-n'at" Pittsburgh.

Don't Get Mad, Make A Viral YouTube Video

At one time, the civilized response to certain frustrating situations was to send a strongly worded letter to the responsible authority, and to disseminate the news of your dissatisfaction to your friends and colleagues.


Among those without literary inclination, the accepted wisdom was, Don't Get Mad. Get Even.

Then teh Interweb was discovered and people had new ways to communicate their displeasure and to solicit tribal support: Don't Get Mad, Mention it on UseNet.

Next we moved to Interweb 2.0, and the understanding became: Don't Get Mad, Blog It.

In the latest development, the shibboleth is: Don't Get Mad, Take it Viral.

Giving the Finger / Have A Good Day Gloves

Too often, a bicyclist gets mad at a cager (a car driver) when they have an unfortunate interaction on the road. Usually the driver speeds away, all the way up to the next red light; in a few minutes, the bicyclist catches up to the cager, gets their attention (sometimes by tapping the vehicle), and gestures with their middle finger to signal their opinion of the driver.


This is generally a dangerous situation, because (1) drivers object to the middle finger, and (2) the car weighs 3500 pounds and the bike weighs 18 pounds. This rarely ends well.

A new concept in bicycling gloves promises to change all that; the new Good Day Gloves by Pryme carry a positive, life-affirming message on the middle finger, to help improve the cager-cyclist relationship.

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Somewhat related: "Give them the finger", Danny Kaye, in The Inspector General

Bicycling in Pittsburgh: the movie

StreetFilms travelogue about bicycling and walking in Pittsburgh:

Cold, Dark, Wet, and Flat

Today was my first truly cold ride of the season, 45 degrees with an effective temperature of 38F with the wind chill. I reluctantly broke out my cold weather kit which consists of wool socks and shoes instead of my Keen SPD sandals, full-finger gloves, running tights, a neoprene jacket, and new for this year - Under Armour "cold gear".

I bought the Under Armour in hopes that it would replace a bulky wool sweater from the Goodwill store that I used to wear under the jacket. What I learned today is that while UnderArmour is great at 50 degrees, it's insufficient at a wind chill of 38.

Riding in the cold isn't that bad; in some ways, it's better than riding in August. If you get too warm, you can open your jacket and cool off. You drink less water in the cold, and you don't get sweaty. There's no gnats. The trail isn't nearly as crowded when it's cold. Militants who obsess about their appearance (and followers of Rule 82), however, can find it difficult to ride in the cold.

I can ride in the cold, I can ride in the dark, and I can ride when it's wet; I'm just not wild about the combinations - cold and wet, dark and cold, etc.

When I was in my 30's, I used to say: Cold, Dark, Wet; I can do any two out of three. Back in the day my definition of "what sucks" was having all three factors simultaneously.

Now in my 50's, my definition of "what sucks" is any two at the same time. Today I added a new factor to the formula: Flat, as in flat tire.

I had ridden 18 miles of my planned 26 when the bike started handling differently and I realized I had a leak in the rear tire (my third flat this year). It was an eight mile ride to get back to my car, and the sun would set in +40 minutes. I had planned the ride to end at sundown, and now the flat tire presented a misadventure.

I was about to be Cold, Dark, and Flat, and I realized that would suck every bit as much as much as being Cold, Dark, and Wet. I didn't have a light with me, and I was leery of changing the tire for two reasons - I'd get really cold when I stopped riding, and the time spent changing the flat would move the rest of the ride into darkness. My lights, of course, were back in the car.

Fortunately, I had a potential silver bullet. I carry a gas-powered tire inflator, which usually runs on 25-gram CO2 canisters. Buried in my bag I also had a can of "Big Air", a 40-gram CO2 cartridge that I'd bought at REI. I had resisted the thought of spending $8 on a mondo CO2 cartridge but I thought that someday it might come in handy.

Today was that day. Three times the tire went flat as I rode back to my car, and three times the can of Big Air reinflated my tire. The $8 price was a bargain.

I got back to my car at 6pm, about 10 minutes before sunset. It was a good ride, and it showed me I wasn't really prepared for a flat tire in cold weather when it was dark out. It also gave me a new definition of what sucks: any two of {Cold, Dark, Wet, Flat}

Tomorrow I've got a few errands to run while waiting for the temperatures to rise before I ride: I've got a flat to fix, and I think I'm going to REI to get a new can of Big Air and maybe some wool.

Touring Pittsburgh via Bike Trails

The perfect time for a downtown bike ride is during an out-of-town Steelers game. Enough people are watching the game to reduce traffic and any crowds, and there's plenty of open parking spots at the trailhead. Sunday afternoon the Parkway West was gridlocked so instead of riding the Montour Trail, I rode my bike on the city trail system and tried to map the various routes with my GPS.

I started at the south end of the Eliza Furnace Trail (aka the Jail Trail), riding north. There's a well-marked detour where the trail has been excavated at Bates Street. I took the Jail Trail past the Golden Triangle bike shop to the Smithfield Street bridge. Eventually there's going to be bike access down to the Mon Wharf trail and into Point State Park, but that's a next-year project so I ended up riding in a few blocks of street traffic to Point State Park.

From Point State Park you can ride over the Ft. Duquesne Bridge (excellent bike ramps) and join the North Shore Trail eastbound along the Allegheny River. That leads you to the recently opened replacement trail on concrete piers over the river (photo below), and then to the Millvale Trail.



On the way back, you can take a spur onto the Washington's Landing Trail, which is very nice but maybe a bit overgrown - it's a pretty narrow trail with reduced sight lines.

Back along the Allegheny River to the stadiums and then north along the Ohio River via the Chateau Trail. This was my first ride along the Chateau Trail, running from the Casino to the Penitentiary. It's a very nice trail, there's both green sections and industrial sections, and the Penitentiary with its concertina wire is an impressive sight. The trail ends just short of the McKees Rocks Bridge.

South to the stadiums again, and then my favorite bike-mile in downtown Pittsburgh: across the Ft. Duquesne bridge, a brief touch down in Point State Park, and then across the Ft. Pitt bridge to the west bank of the Monongahela. It's an incredible bit of bike infrastructure, you go from the North Side to Downtown to Station Square in a matter of minutes.

Then it's the Station Square Trail, to the South Side Trail. This is as nice a trail segment as you'll find anywhere. It does seem like the trail isn't clearly marked between REI and the Hot Metal Bridge, resulting in people riding their bikes on the sidewalk in front of American Eagle's corporate buildings, to their corporate chagrin. The sidewalk has signs "sidewalk closed to bicycles" and "use the tunnel park", but it's not obvious what the Tunnel Park is. Instead of telling people don't ride here, I think it would be more effective if they told people "you should ride over there", and mark the bike lane so clearly that any Yinzer Yahoo could identify it.

Tunnel Park is the green median strip shown in the photo below. It's called Tunnel Park because there's a railroad tunnel underneath the grass, but I don't know how a transient bicyclist could possibly know that. It's completely unmarked.



Next year (2011) the railroad is going to dig up Tunnel Park in order to raise the roof of the underground tunnel by 18 inches, permitting the track to carry double-height train cars. By 2015 the Panama Canal is going to be widened to accommodate bigger ships, and the double-height trains are intended to carry the anticipated increase in freight.

Continued south on the South Side Trail to the Baldwin Borough Trail, which terminates just short of the Glenwood Bridge. This week's announcement of an agreement with Sandcastle and the railroad means that on 11/11/11 (so they say) the Steel Valley Trail will extend further south to Duquesne, and then all the way to DC.

Back north to the Hot Metal Bridge, cross the Monongahela, right turn on the Jail Trail to the trailhead, and then around the corner on Swinburne Street to the Panther Hollow Trail. (The image on the right shows the transition.) I've never been on the Panther Hollow trail in daylight before, and I was really impressed at how much green space there is so close to a congested urban area. Reverse course at the top, back to the trailhead.

Total distance is 32 miles, takes about two-and-a-half hours.

It's a world-class trail system, right here in Pittsburgh. The trails show a very different view of Pittsburgh than you'd usually see, and you see all sorts of 'Burghers out there - kids and students and seniors, runners and rollerbladers. It's really remarkable that people like Mayor Murphy and Linda Boxx were able to build these trails given the hodgepodge of municipalities, the Yinzer resistance to change, and the nature of long-term projects.

If you'd like a really great map of the downtown trail system, email Friends of the Riverfront at friends@FriendsOfTheRiverfront.org and they'll snail-mail you a very nice dead-tree map.

Here's a GPS record of the ride made with a Garmin 76CSx.

Biking in the Burgh Photo Contest

Through Sunday you can vote for one of five finalists in the Bikin' in the Burgh photo contest.



After you vote for your choice, you can see the results so far. Inevitably, the photo I picked (the crowd of bicyclists in front of the Obey Giant) was the least popular.

Polka Dot Jersey: King of the Mountains (KOM)

Montour Trail Oasis: Enlow Station

Saturday I got to enjoy a bicycle ride with my daughter, and so I got to see something I've wanted to check out: the Enlow Station on the Montour Trail.


To get there, we took the newly-renumbered I376, Exit 56 (McClaren Road), drove away from the airport for about two miles and parked by the softball field.

We made a left turn onto the trail, which is a pretty optimal route for a young rider - there's a great illuminated tunnel on the trail, and the trail is quite flat. We rode east (getting off the bikes to cross two intersections) until it was time to turn around.

When we came back to the car we stopped at the Enlow Station, which is not quite a restored train station as much as an ice cream parlor fashioned out of a service station. Cold drinks, soft serve ice cream, hot dogs: all the needs of a recovering bicyclist.

There's not a lot of places along the Montour Trail to get a cold drink, let alone an excellent ice cream cone (I think of Farmhouse Coffee and the adjacent gyro shop as another oasis) and so I hope people will support the Enlow Station. Open seven days a week in the summer, 11am to 9pm.

Great News for Pittsburgh Bike Trails

The last week has brought remarkably good news for Pittsburgh bike trails.

Two New Trail Bridges at Duquesne and Whitaker

By John Schmitz in the Post-Gazette on July 8th: County bridges all gaps but one in Pittsburgh-to-D.C. trail. Two new bike bridges have been placed across railroad tracks in Whitaker and Duquesne, PA.

The 170-foot bridge near Whitaker, which will have a 350-foot access ramp, will cross the tracks between Kennywood Park and the Rankin Bridge. The 137-foot bridge near Duquesne will have two 350-foot access ramps. The total cost of the bridge project is $3.5 million.

This will permit completion of the trail from the current terminus on Grant Street in Duguesne, beyond Kennywood, and connecting to the Waterfront Trail (which in turn leads to Sandcastle).

All that will remain incomplete on the Great Allegheny Passage after that is a one-mile stretch through Sandcastle Waterpark. Negotiations with the park owners have not produced an agreement that will allow the trail to go through.

"There's no solution just yet," Allegheny County spokesman Kevin Evanto said. "We're kind of at the same place we were a couple months ago."

Agreement Reached on Sandcastle Bike Trail

First seen at Pgh is a City, the Post Gazette's John Schmitz writes on July 13th:

Allegheny County and Sandcastle Waterpark are expected to announce an agreement within days that will allow completion of the last missing piece of a biking and hiking trail linking Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.

"I really expect we'll have a formal announcement in the next couple days," said James Judy, vice president of operations for Palace Entertainment, owner of the park.

"I believe that is probably going to be the case," agreed county spokesman Kevin Evanto.

The combination of the two bridges and the Sandcastle agreement means that riding from downtown Pittsburgh to the main trail in Duquesne will no longer be a questionable, frightening act of courage along Route 837. It's going to be a ride you can take your children on and not be concerned about getting them killed. This is huge.

Amtrak Bike Service, Pittsburgh to DC, June '11

Posted in a message in the GAP Yahoo Group was an email message from Linda McKenna Boxx, President of the Allegheny Trail Alliance:

Yesterday at a meeting in Harrisburg, Amtrak officials announced that they would begin offering roll-on/roll-off bicycle service on the Capitol Limited by the end of June 2011!

This means that cyclists boarding at Pittsburgh, Connellsville, Cumberland, Harpers Ferry, Martinsburg, Rockville, or Washington, DC will be able to roll their bikes onto the train (reservations will be required; spaces will be limited at first), put them in a rack, and get off at any of these stops. Amtrak will be retrofitting several cars and needs to work out operational issues before the service can begin.

This is great news for all the towns along the Great Allegheny Passage and the C&O Canal towpath. This will add a great convenience and extra excitement to tourists who want to bike our great trail system.

This Amtrak announcement solves the logistical problem of making the round-trip without riding 700 miles; how do you get you, your bike, and your gear home after the bike ride? Now, if you're in Pittsburgh you can take the train to DC, disembark with your bike and start riding on the trail. Or, ride the trail from Pittsburgh to DC (my preferred direction), stay in the hostel and get on the next train to Pittsburgh.

My compliments to all involved.

KDKA's Mike Pintek is a Dangerous Idiot

Truly an excellent post by Illyrias titled, Do Bicyclists Deserve to Be Attacked?.
Illyrias refers to several reports of local violence against people on bikes, and then quotes local radio voice Mike Pintek whose was interviewing Bill Nesper of the League of American Bicyclists:

Mike Pintek said: "There are some bicyclists who are just these arrogant little dorks that think that they can do anything they want because they're on a bicycle and we're being green and environmentally friendly."

A Pittsburgh Blog that's new to me and quite excellent is Lolly's Reimagine an Urban Paradise. In Dearest Station Manager: Fire Mike Pintek, Lolly relays this about Mike Pintek:

He further went on to state that cyclists “are arrogant dorks” that are “lucky to be alive” and that he has the desire to “bump them” with his vehicle.

I cannot believe that KDKA would allow a man to advocate violence against cyclists. “Bumping” a cyclist would certainly result in severe physical harm and would likely cause broken bones and possibly death.

KDKA's Mike Pintek: Wait, There's More!

In another post, Mike Pintek Should Lose His Drivers License and His Job, she provides this transcript of Pintek's bike foolishness:

I’ve gotta tell you they’ve been times when I’ve come around a curve on a country road and you’ve got three of em abreast in MY lane and they’re just lucky they’re alive. Because, am I WRONG?

There are some bicyclists who are just these arrogant little dorks that think they can do anything they want because they’re on a bicycle and ‘we’re being green and environmentally friendly”…

I have been thoroughly tempted — I haven’t done it cuz I’m not going to do it — I’m not that kind of person… but I have been so tempted to just bump em.

I have been so tempted to pull up behind them when they’re doing this — you know spread out across the road — put my car in neutral, jam the accelorator down, race the engine, and scare the living crap out of them.

They’ve got to stop being so arrogant about what they’re doing. They’ve got to obey the rules. they have to do the right thing or else they’re going to get killed.

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So, first things first: I hope you'll send an email to KDKA program director Marshall Adams, madams@kdka.com, who is Mike Pintek's boss and responsible for what Mike Pintek says on the station's behalf (over the public's airwaves). Tell Mr. Adams what you think of Mike Pintek promoting violence against bikes.

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The report is that Mike Pintek will address these bicycle issues on his Monday show, 12noon to 3pm Local, on KDKA radio.

This presents me with a pragmatic dilemma. I understand that Mike Pintek is an entertainer, a panderer to our darker tendencies, a pot-stirrer whose value-add for his employers is that he says things outrageous enough to keep the audience enduring the advertisements that are the basis of his paycheck.

My dilemma is that I don't want to be Pintek's chump, proving his effectiveness. I don't want to tune in and listen, because that meets the needs of Pintek and his advertisers. I don't want to reward the dangerous, idiotic behavior.

I called Marshall Adams, Mike Pintek's boss. He wouldn't disavow or disapprove Pintek's comments. His only refrain, repeated a few times, was a suggestion that I call into the show and participate in the discussion. They're shills and provocateurs. I can't feed the trolls.

In the end, I've decided that all I can do is to do my part to see that when somebody types "Mike Pintek", or "Mike Pintek KDKA" into Google, they see my comments. I believe in free speech. I just can't tolerate a paid entertainer and scoundrel (and that's what he is) advocating violence by people in cars against bicyclists. I've also got reservations about post-peak hacks who make their living fomenting controversy without contributing solutions or having skin in the game.

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It's interesting (if somewhat sad) to look through Mike Pintek's website, which has a picture of him with Shimon Peres back in the glory days. I guess he looked young compared to Shimon Peres, fifteen years ago. It reminds me of this song: