After yesterdays regret of rejecting a visit to a really nice cafe, I cycled to that cafe today on my own. They mostly do sandwiches, and damn that absolutely was an excellent sandwich. I'm still growing out of my picky child palate, but that was the first salad I finished, too.
roasted turkey, French brie, cranberry chutney, arugula, herb aioli
It was about a twenty three mile round trip. The weather started perfect, the kind where the ambient temperature feels warm but the occasional breeze is cool. Unfortunately, the weather was different on the side of town that the cafe was on than where I started. It was a little hazy and cold. It was suggested that the weather was cloudy because of 4/20.
My first time ever on a road bike was on the 25th of December 2020. After todays cafe stop, I had completed my first one thousand miles ridden. Technically my first thousand was completed a couple of days ago, but that includes rides which I never recorded statistics for. Limiting the stats to just the rides I have recorded gives me some awesome concrete numbers.
According to my Strava statistics, as of today I have
As for four week averages, I ride
I heard of this study in the comments of a Reddit thread today, about how cyclists are viewed through the windshield, aiming to understand what it is that drives people to run unprotected cyclists off the road from the safety of their multi-ton steel coffins, hypothesizing that this attitude is in part driven by dehumanization.
Public and humorous references to violence against cyclists are not uncommon and a significant minority of cyclists report harassment and aggression. We hypothesize that these hostile attitudes and behaviours are caused, in part, by the dehumanization of cyclists among some individuals.
I'll call attention to the "Literature review" section, which brings to light to the fact there are people who really do advocate violence towards cyclists with conviction. And violence towards cyclists does happen, and rarely when the cyclist is actually doing anything wrong. Part of the video "I am not a 'Cyclist'" by Not Just Bikes talks about how some drivers actively try to "punish" cyclists for "taking up space" on the road, by passing dangerously close (sometimes even coming into contact with the bikes handlebars) and deliberately getting in their way.
Less often, but absolutely happens, is drivers of diesel truck owners modifying their trucks to burn fuel extremely inefficiently so that they can dump out massive amounts of soot at the flick of a switch (a modification called "rolling coal"), and doing this while passing cyclists. Some people with weaker respiratory systems have been killed due to this. The section of this video which I am referring to includes multiple recordings of both punishment passes and rolling coal.
(8:21) I am not a "Cyclist" (and most Dutch people aren't either)
Table 3 of the study includes concrete statistics about punishment passes and other forms of harassment and aggression towards cyclists, such as using cars to block cyclists and throwing objects at them.
[This study] found that a significant proportion of the survey sample dehumanized cyclists, contrary to the view that dehumanization is only relevant in more extreme circumstances. This supports the argument that cyclists are often viewed in hostile and demeaning ways, at least among this non-representative pilot sample. The sample (which over-represents young, high-income males) may be more inclined to dehumanize cyclists than the average population.