re: #152 albusteve

Bloomberg hates blind people…next he’ll outlaw wheelchairs and crutches for impeding sidewalk traffic

Just declare wheelchairs as vehicles like St.Petersburg has with bicycles, even on the worst, most heavily trafficked, poorly lit streets in town, that also have no shoulders, bicycles are prohibited from using the sidewalks. They enforce it too, even though I have reflectors, a headlamp, a blinking tail light, and wear a helmet I have gotten four tickets in less than three years for riding on the sidewalks.

Truthfully my major objection to riding on street is the way they do repaving now. They scrape off an inch of pavement with a giant grinder machine and then add two inches or more. No one pays the slightest attention or makes any attempt to blend the paving with the concrete curbing. Riding on the street means hugging the very edge of the asphalt alongside a 2” jagged drop to the concrete curb that is only 6-7” wide before the vertical section high enough to catch your peddles on the downstroke.

If your riding on a performance bike with rock hard 110PSI 3/4” wide tires this is a truly serious hazard. If you drop down into the curb/gutter there is no way to climb out again safely without slowing down to a turtle crawl or stopping completely and lifting the bike out. They say I have to ride in the roadway, yet at the same time they make the roadways unsafe to ride on.

I have seriously considered trying to elicit interest into a class action suit on this, not for money personally, just to make them start tapering the shoulders of the roadways again.