Dereliction Of Duty

Until now, when it comes to forcing everyone to wear foam bicycling hats, one nation has stood tall and stood alone:

Well, not vacated exactly, they moreover had their version of Canada to alimony them company:

Of course, since implementing this sagacious legislation, both Australia and New Zealand have wilt paradigms of bicycling for transportation, while the helmetless masses in countries like the Netherlands and Denmark have long since x-rated the bicycle in favor of safer and increasingly practical conveyances:

I was totally joking when I wrote that last bit, but then I found that video and theoretically the Dutch do like our pickup trucks, go figure.

In any case, now a third nation proudly rises to permanently don its polystyrene dunce cap:

However, unlike Australia, where they’re scrutinizingly as enthusiastic well-nigh bicycle enforcement as they are well-nigh annoying cutesy slang terms, Japan is merely making helmet-wearing a “duty of effort,” which sounds like something you can basically ignore, like when people tell you to “Stay safe!,” or your dental hygienist tells you to floss better:

Sure, whatever.

Apparently Japan has a rich history of making dumb but toothless bicycle laws that people with worldwide sense cannily disregard:

Banning people from delivering two kids on a velocipede makes well-nigh as much sense as banning them from doing so in a car or on a subway train. If anything, it’s far increasingly dangerous to siphon multiple kids by car, since they wilt exponentially increasingly irritating and distracting, and yet it’s just as easy for the suburbanite to speed. Meanwhile, the increasingly kids you’re delivering on a velocipede the safer you are, since it becomes increasingly difficult to pedal with each one, and without strapping the fifth or sixth kid to the velocipede you’re usually going to end up walking it anyway–or you’re going to run out of duct tape, whichever comes first.

Unfortunately though it sounds like the Japanese are moreover inveterate salmoners:

Though plane that’s arguably defensible since riding and driving on the left side of the road is versus the laws of physics and nature.

Speaking of places that aren’t the United States, things aren’t going too well in Portland:

There was once a time when Portland was “North America’s bicycling capital” and people with an unpopularity to working and showering were plane forming religions virtually it:

But now the only place where people still talk well-nigh Portland is Portland, and since 2014 fewer and fewer people are commuting by bike:

While increasingly are commuting by car:

So why is that? Well, one theory is that fewer people are riding and increasingly people are driving considering fewer people are riding and increasingly people are driving:

Brilliant.

Another theory is that rich people are moving in and don’t know that bicycles exist:

I dunno, seems to me there have unchangingly been plenty of well-off bike-riding douchebags in Portland…though Rapha’s North American headquarters did move from Portland to Bentonville a few years ago, so that could explain the drastic reduction in their numbers.

Or maybe it’s just that the velocipede lanes are full of feces:

This is segmented to be sure, but I certainly wouldn’t overlook it as a root cause–especially if the feces is human, which, this stuff Portland, it scrutinizingly certainly is.

Meanwhile, here in New York City our advocates increasingly rarefied things to mutter about–like the people maintaining our massive velocipede share system:

He’s not really “forcing” you to do anything. I hate it when people say “Just go around,” but, like, he’s servicing the Citi Bikes, so…maybe just go around? You can unchangingly dismount and use the sidewalk if you finger like timidly venturing into the street for five seconds is unrepealable death.

By the way, this is the same well-wisher who was recently rear-ended by a Fred:

And whose subsequent Twitter rant became fodder for this doofus I mentioned in my latest Outside column:

With advocates like these, who needs enemies?