Bikes Will Be The Ruin of Civilization. Obviously.

So much happy news today!

I mean really, where to even begin?  Aw, what the hell, let's start with this one:

Fitts, who admitted that he struck and killed 80-year-old Theodore Schwalb in an Allston crosswalk Wednesday afternoon, was on television a few hours later, blithely confessing to what sounds a lot like vehicular manslaughter.

“As I’m driving, I’m driving too quick . . . to the point where it’s like, I couldn’t really stop,” Fitts told Boston 25 News reporter Drew Karedes, who should get a medal for not punching this guy in the face on the spot. Fitts also said the light was green and that he beeped at the man repeatedly but struck him with his SUV because swerving would have led him into a pole.

Why could he honk repeatedly but not brake? That was left unstated. And as for why he didn’t bother to stop?

“People hit and run people all the time,” Fitts said. This is sadly true, but it’s also not much of a legal defense: Fitts was arrested later that evening.

Infuriating?  Yes.  Surprising?  No.  Rhetorical questions?  Absolutely.  See, motorist entitlement long ago reached the point where people act like they're driving locomotives on dedicated rights-of-way instead of private vehicles on shared public thoroughfares, and that whatever or whoever wanders into their path simply gets what's coming to them.  I seem to remember learning all sorts of stuff in drivers' ed about driving slowly around children and yielding at crosswalks and watching for balls rolling into the street and reducing speed in wet conditions and poor visibility and all the rest of it, but in practice that's emphatically not how it works.  (Except in the Hamptons.  Drivers will totally yield to you when you're in the crosswalk in the Hamptons.  But that's only because they realize it's possible you may be a fellow rich person and they don't want to take the chance.)

No, the way it works is that green means go and red means stop--well unless it turned red and the driver in front of you held you up, in which case you're allowed to run the light because you should have made it if only the person in front of you hadn't decided to turn.  Also, the speed limit is a speed minimum, and you should never take your surroundings into account.  School zone?  Park?  Shopping area?  Doesn't matter.  Simply go as fast as you can get away with confident in the knowledge that anybody stupid enough to venture into the street deserves to die.  Blizzard coming?  Don't modify your behavior in any way, just go forth into the breach just as you would on a summer's day:

Whether it's blizzards, or floods, or their fellow human beings, drivers just can't stop driving right into stuff.

But let's not lose sight of the real problem, which of course is bikes.  In particular, dockless bikes are ending up in vast graveyards that will soon engulf the entire planet:

Oh, wait, sorry.  Those are cars.

Here's one of those bike graveyards:

Chilling--if you've never seen a landfill, that is:

All the shit we use just ends up in giant piles, most of which are right in our backyards, but sure, let's freak out about those bikes in China.

Anyway, given what I knew about the "litter bike" phenomenon (that being limited to what's been written in news articles that use phrases like "litter bike), I watched with interest as a dockless bike program launched in Yonkers recently:

I live just a few miles from the New York City/Yonkers border, and my rides take me through there regularly, which meant finally I'd have a chance to see the devastation wrought by dockless bike-sharing systems firsthand:

Indeed, as it happened, I didn't even have to go to Yonkers, because shortly after launch the bikes started migrating here to the Bronx:

This was only natural, since (as I wrote in the Bike Forecast) it's a straight shot down from Yonkers and it's now super easy for Yonkersians to hop on a Lime and access our deeply dysfunctional subway system.

Of course, technically you're not supposed to use these bikes to go to the Bronx.  In fact, just the other day I walked out of my home only to find a Lime Detector Van (not to be confused with the Cat Detector Van from the Ministry of Housinge, yes I am a huge dork) on my street.  In it were two people from Lime (or a contractor representing Lime, I don't know how they work) looking around my building looking for an errant velocipede that was apparently popping up on their tracking system.  Naturally at this moment a neighbor saw me emerge and instructed them to talk to me about the lost bike, since as the resident cyclist obviously I should know where it is.

Anyway, even though Lime is actively rounding up their wayward bikes and the system isn't supposed to be operating in New York City, they're still a regular sight around these parts:

And as of this morning had encroached upon the Isle of Manhattan:

Now I should not that as an anal retentive sort I prefer the idea of an orderly, docking system.  However, I can assure you I have no problem with the Lime bikes invading my territory, and in fact it makes me happy whenever I see one because it's tangible evidence that people want and need to ride bicycles across different municipalities.  I can also see myself using them, though so far apart from a test run I haven't had occasion to do so.  Plus, they just seem to sit there on the sidewalk not hurting anybody, so what's the big deal?

Surely however it must be a different situation in Yonkers, where there are thousands (I'm assuming) of the things, and where one even got tossed in the river:

Ironically the only reason you can still see it is it's probably sitting on a pile of car parts.

Well, it's been a few weeks now, and on my regular rides through that city I can say that the Lime bikes are indeed begriming the city by sitting primly in front of libraries, train stations, and other such places:

Furthermore, incredibly, none of these bikes are sticking out of smashed car windshields or up in trees or lying across railroad tracks.  So far the worst thing I've seen is one that was upside down, which will only rattle you if you're the sort of person who thinks "Wacky Wednesday" was a horror story:

("The giraffe is in the sewer!  There is no God...")

Otherwise it's pretty tame stuff.

It's almost like people find bikes useful and that they integrate themselves into everyday life fairly seamlessly.

Who'da thunk it?

Finally, Lauf are Lauf-ing all the way to the bank with their front-suspended gravel bikes:

Yep, looks like the cross-country mountain bike is officially going the way of multiple chain rings and rim brakes and drop-bar all-terrain whatevers are the future:

If the fork doesn’t convince you that the True Grit is part of the mountain bike family tree, the geometry will.

The 1,120-gram carbon frame is designed with a longer cockpit to pair with a shorter stem — 394 millimeters of reach with a 90-millimeter stem on the Medium Long model we rode. Plus, the head tube angle is very laid back at 70.5 degrees. Sounds a bit like a cross-country hardtail, doesn’t it?

Maybe so, but I'm holding out until Rivendell makes a gravel fork:

Wonder if there will be a disc version.