It’s lunchtime at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and throngs of undergraduates file into the University Memorial student center at the heart of campus. Just beyond the entrance, a student pedals a white stationary bicycle as curious onlookers stop to watch. Suddenly, the opening notes of Bon Jovi’sÌę 1986 hit Livin’ on a Prayer blare from a nearby loudspeaker, and the crowd belts out the chorus: “Ohh, we’re halfway there!”

They are indeed halfway. The cyclist, Thomas Coloian, and many of the onlookers are members of the university’s Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, and they have just hit the midway point of a highly unorthodox charity stunt. The brothers are riding a stationary bicycle for 8,423 consecutive minutes—that’s just shy of six straight days—to raise $100,000 for a local non-profit called The White Line. The organization is named after , a local cyclist who was struck and killed by a motorist in 2023. The number of minutes symbolizes every cyclist or pedestrian killed by a driver in the United States in 2022.

The charity ride is , and a TV screen adjacent to the stationary bicycle provides a minute-by-minute update of the donations coming in via the livestream.

“Someone just gave us fifty bucks!” screams one of the fraternity brothers. The crowd erupts in cheers and high-fives.

The fraternity brothers, alas, aren’t exactly on the same athletic level as White, who was one of the country’s best up-and-coming cyclists at the time of his death. Coloian, 21, sweats and grunts as he pushes down the pedals, and and he gobbles down handfuls of gummy bears every few minutes.Ìę “The last time I rode a bike this long I think I was 14 years old,” he says. “Everything below my waist is numb.”

Working alongside a college fraternity represents a bold next step for the White Line and its founders, White’s parents, Michael and Jill. In the months after their son’s death, they to manage donations that had poured in. But they struggled to determine how, exactly, to save the lives of other cyclists with the money and attention they were receiving. They knew they wanted to bring the message of road safety to a .

“There were so many different directions we could have taken the non-profit,” Michael told °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ.Ìę“We knew we didn’t just want to start a foundation and name it after Magnus.”

Nobody within the non-profit could have guessed that, at some point in the near future, the strategy would involve 174 frat boys, an exercise bike, and Bon Jovi.

How the White Line Found its Focus

The music dies down and Coloin and his buddies high-five. A few yards away from the tent, Michael White snaps a wide-angle photograph of the scene. In front of the tent stand 8,423 electronic candles that flicker at night. The number has become a rallying point for the nonprofit.Ìę

Michael laughs and shakes his head as he watches.

“When I see these kids, I see Magnus in every one of them,” he says. “It’s taken me a long time, but I can now talk about Magnus without breaking down and crying.”

Magnus White had been pedaling north of Boulder along U.S. Highway 119 on the morning of July 29, training for the upcoming mountain biking world championships. Without warning, a car coming from behind veered out of its lane and into the shoulder, striking him.

The impact launched White off of his bicycle and into a fence, and doctors pronounced him dead at a nearby hospital. Authorities later charged the driver, 23-year-old Yeva Smilianska, with vehicular homicide. at the wheel, and eyewitnesses say she was swerving on the roadway before the collision.

The death generated a glut of media attention—White was a junior national champion and had been on a trajectory to the professional ranks. As the White family mourned Magnus, they were contacted by the family members of other cyclists and pedestrians killed by drivers who had been texting or nodding off at the time of the collision. Grieving widows and parents across the country told them about the patchwork of laws against distracted driving, and the inconsistent citations or sentencing handed down to careless motorists. So often, it seemed, distracted drivers who injured or killed someone were let go with a mere slap on the wrist.

“We heard about one driver who got a $1,000 fine and no jail time for killing a child,” Michael said. “Everyone we talked to said they wanted greater accountability. Or at least consistent accountability.”

These conversations helped them narrow their focus for The White Line, Michael said. During a meeting in early 2024, the foundation’s inner circle locked themselves in a room to come up with the guiding tenets for the group. They ruled out investing the money in bike lanes or cycling infrastructure, and instead steered their efforts toward changing driver behavior—specifically, toward convincing drivers to pay attention at the wheel. They decided on a two-pronged approach: educating drivers to focus on the road, and pushing lawmakers to increase the punishments for distracted and reckless driving.

Michael said that if the group can even become a clearing house for statistics on distracted driving, that is a victory. “The data is so bad—we’re still going off of 2022 numbers and it’s almost 2025,” he said.

During its locked-door session, the group made another major decision: the White Line will only operate for ten years before dissolving altogether.

“If we can’t change driver behavior after a decade, then that’s on us,” White said. “We don’t want to become some bloated 501(c)3 with a bunch of people in the C-suite earning big salaries.”

Throughout 2024, the foundation’s coffers grew—it received corporate donations from Trek Bicycles, VF Corporation, and even Williams Sonoma. These donations, plus thousands sent in from private donors, allowed the group to hire a small staff. The White Line produced a series of documentary films about other cyclists killed by careless motorists. In August, it organized the Ride for Magnus, , which raised money for legislative demands and attracted Colorado Governor Jared Polis.

And then, in early October, an altogether different project materialized—one that came from outside of the organization.

“I got a text on my phone from these frat guys with this crazy idea for a week-long bike ride,” MichaelÌęsaid. “I told them ‘this idea sounds awesome.’”

Frat Bros and a Bike

After completing his 120th minute, Coloin dismounts the stationary bicycle—his legs wobble as he stands on the ground. One of the other frat brothers adjusts the seat height, climbs aboard, and begins pedaling.

“You should have been here at 3 A.M. on Tuesday,” one of the fraternity brothers says. “We had some pretty stoned guys walk by and ask us what the heck we were doing.”

Another fraternity brother shows me photos from two nights before, when snow flurries blanketed the area at night. Four brothers huddled around the cyclist in the dark to keep him company.

Another Pi Kappa Alpha member named Sebastian Edwards stops by to snap photos and hand out snacks. Edwards, 19, dreamed up the fundraiser alongside two fraternity members, twins Graydon and Gavin Abel. The three grew up in Boulder and knew Magnus Ìęfrom bike racing and school—Edwards had attended Boulder High with him.

Each year, the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity (called “Pike” by its members) holds a philanthropic event, usually a car wash or pledge drive. In late September Edwards and the Abel brothers thought of the marathon ride while hanging in the frat house’s basement.

“It sounds goofy, but we started with asking ourselves what rhymes with “Pike,” and “bike” was the first word we came up with,” Edwards said. “Then it was like, ‘how long can we ride a bike?'”

Edwards found a phone number for Michael White and sent him a blind text message with the idea. A few minutes later, Michael texted back wanting to know more. The four of them met a few days later at a coffee shop. They ironed out details of the ride: the White Line would supply a tent and a big-screen television, and purchase a new Zwift stationary bicycle. The brothers would obtain the permits and sign-offs from the university to host the event, and provide the bicycling manpower.

And rather than ride an entire week, they would pedal for 8,423 minutes to honor each person killed by a driver.

“Their original idea was to do a one-week ride to honor Magnus,” White said. “We told them we wanted to find a way to honor everyone else killed by drivers as well.”

A few days after the meeting, Michael stood in front of 100 or so members of the fraternity at its weekly charter meeting in a lecture hall on campus. He told them about his son. He showed them the tattered national championship jersey that Magnus had been wearing at the time of his death. He replayed the tragic scene that had played out just miles north of campus.

He begged them to ignore their phones while driving, and to take extra precautions when driving past cyclists or dog walkers. He cried.

In the fraternity guys, Michael found the audience that he his foundation sought: regular drivers and not hardcore cyclists. And after his hour-long presentation, Michael believes he succeeded.

“Magnus’s story still moves the needle with people,” he said. “And on a personal level, telling it helps keep him alive for us.”

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Moses Amira told his story to producer Caro Rolando for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I learned of his death at the airport in Dubai. I had a two-hour layover, and another six hours of flying to come after that. I’m with my son, who I was carrying on my chest. That evening immediately got really tough, because I had this little bundle of joy who was making me smile, and I have these emotions inside me that are making me cry.

My name is Moses Amira, some people have called me Mkubwa, which means “the big one” in Swahili slang. I am currently in Manila, Philippines, with my wife and our one-year-old son. I’m Kenyan, and my wife is German.

One of my biggest passions in life is cycling. It has brought me a lot of joy and friendship and connection. I got into the cycling community in Kenya, thinking that I was giving back to the community and being there for whoever needed help, in just small ways that I could manage. At some point while doing this, my cycling friend, Caleb, was cycling on a road in Nairobi, Kenya, called Thika Road. He rammed into a stationary bus parked in the middle of the road on the highway. Without reflection, without anything. It was the dark of night and he was going fast. He died.

It became a big deal in the cycling community. So we organized to go cycle the same road and let our voices be heard, that we are not happy with the situation of the roads in Kenya and the way things worked there.

One person came up next to me, and told me he had just driven 500 kilometers to come and be with us, and he was going to drive back immediately after. The empathy really touched me. I asked this person who they were. And said he’s called Suleiman Kangangi.

The name rang the bell. I knew he was a cyclist who has been representing the country in many races abroad. The empathy to have traveled just to attend this bike ride and go back got me. I told him, “Hey man, as long as you are in Nairobi, my house is your house from today, henceforth.” So I was thinking, Oh, OK, I’m helping this young man here. He started coming to my house, and he became regular until he joined the household. Every week he would be living with me at some point. We would go out cycling together. Slowly, I started noticing, Oh, this guy is not the same as other people that I have met.

He had a fire in him. You could see it was a very mature fire, like somebody who has really found himself. So I started taking notes of the way he talked, the things he was doing, and his story. His story was extremely touching.

He didn’t know who his father was; he had a single parent upbringing. His mother had a terminal illness. He just fought for everything.

He started training to do a thousand-kilometer bike ride from Nairobi to Mombasa and back to Nairobi. Most people were trying to do Nairobi to Mombasa at the time, and you were like royalty if you were able to do that one in a day. So he decided he wanted to do Nairobi to Mombasa and back to Nairobi in three days.

I somehow started looking up to him. You are really sure you are helping someone, but then you take time to be with this person, and slowly you realize the person is actually the one helping you. It’s not like they’re doing anything that is giving you any financial gain, it’s just an enrichment from within. And you start finding peace. You also become better, because you get motivated to be better at something. He became my best friend.

I don’t understand how he managed to live a life so full. Even in the one year that I was with him and I thought I was empowering him, he empowered and enriched me.

I was on the way to Manila from Brussels, I was traveling with my wife and my son. At the airport, my phone would not stop. I was receiving a ton of messages, and people trying to call or whatever to ask me what was wrong. I have a close friend from the cycling community. When I saw his call, I was like, OK, there’s a problem. He said, “Moses, it’s not good.” Then he told me that unfortunately, Sule has passed on.

He was in a cycling race in the US. It was a gravel race, one of the biggest in the world. All of us will deal with grief at some point, because nobody came into this world alone. But, it’s never something you can be ready for, I feel. As much as we all know it’s going to happen.

As an African man, it’s seen as a weakness to cry. You’re scolded as a boy, and you grow up with the fear of seeing your own tears or tasting any salt from upwards of your mouth. You have to allow yourself to cry, to let it out.

We organized a sendoff in Nairobi, where the cyclists could get to say goodbye to an icon. So many people came through; the cycling community in Kenya was amazing.

We went to Nyayo Stadium in a procession, the team that he was cycling with when he passed on at the front. We ended up with around a hundred of us. The cyclists put their bicycles up on the sides of the road, and they were singing and crying and whistling, and it was so beautiful. I was looking at it and I was thinking, I’m very sure Sule must be happy, at least, where he is.

Moses Amira is a cyclist, computer scientist, and videographer. He continues to honor Sule’s life and legacy by advocating for better biking conditions in Kenya and around the world. You can watch videos about Sule and much more on .

You can followÌęThe Daily RallyÌęŽÇČÔÌę,Ìę,Ìę, or wherever you like to listen. and to be featured on the show.

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Retired mountain bike pro Monique “Pua” Parmalee (nĂ©e Mata) was struck and killed by a motorcyclist while riding her bicycle near her home in Yucaipa, California on Wednesday, January 25. The Yucapia Police Department about a fatal collision involving a cyclist and motorcyclist on Wildwood Canyon Road on the eastern edge of town. Parmalee’s family later confirmed to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that she was killed in the collision.

According to a , Parmalee was traveling eastbound when the collision occurred.

“It is with great sadness to announce the passing of Monique “Pua” Parmalee (nee Mata), professional cyclist, seven-time marathon mountain bike national champion,” read a statement from her family.

Parmalee was 43 years old at the time of her death. She is survived by her husband, Chris, and two sons, ages six and four.

A native of Oahu, Hawaii, Monique Parmalee rose to prominence in the U.S. mountain bike scene in the early 2000s as a top cross-country rider on the National Mountain Bike Series (NMBS) circuit. A tenacious and focused racer, Parmalee was known best as both Monique Sawicki and Pua Mata. She excelled at cross-country races that stretched beyond the typical hour-and-a-half duration, and began winning ultra-endurance and Marathon-length MTB events on the budding U.S. circuit. Parmalee also blossomed into one of the top 24-Hour solo MTB racers on the planet.

In 2006, writer Andrew Vontz wrote about Parmalee’s rapid rise ŽÚŽÇ°ùÌę°żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ.ÌęParmalee told Vontz she spent $30,000 of her own money to pursue her dreams on the pro mountain bike circuit during the 2005 season. The results she earned that year helped her secure pro sponsorship for 2006.

“This situation is a dream come true. Now I’ll be able to see what I can really do,” Parmalee said at the time.

She claimed three U.S. titles in 24-Hour solo racing and seven national Marathon MTB titles. In 2009 Parmalee finished seventh place at the UCI Marathon MTB World Championships. Parmalee also won Costa Rica’s grueling La Ruta de los Conquistadores mountain bike race in 2012 and 2013, and finished second at the U.S. cross-country mountain bike national championships in 2013.

“She was a fierce and ferocious competitor,” longtime friend Joy McCullough told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “People talk about natural athletes—those one-in-a-million athletes who have a huge engine and focus—and that was Monique.”

McCullough said Parmalee had brought her intensity and competitive spirit to her new career, which was running an at-home daycare business.

In 2011 Parmalee joined the Sho-Air—Specialized pro mountain bike team, which was managed at the time by Ty Kady. In a phone call, Kady said Parmalee had two distinct personalities on and off the bike.

“She was tenacious and stubborn when it came to racing—just absolutely dedicated and mentally so tough,” Kady said. “Off the bike she was back and kind of quiet, but really kindhearted and compassionate. She could flip the switch when she got into race mode.”

In 2012 Parmalee transitioned from ultra-distance cycling back to traditional cross-country racing in hopes of qualifying for the U.S. Olympic team. She and Kady traveled the U.S. mountain bike circuit together as she pursued the overall points title for the USA Cycling Pro Mountain Bike Cross-country Tour—the premiere professional circuit for XC racing. Parmalee eventually . Kady remembers the time they spent off the bike just as well as her victories on it.

“She loved to cook for the whole team,” Kady said. “Every day we’d go soak our legs in the creek together after a ride. Those are the moments with her I’ll remember the most.”

Jeremiah Bishop, one of Parmalee’s Sho-Air teammates, toldÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that she helped him maintain a healthy perspective on racing when he would overanalyze the sport.

“She would gladly bust my chops for being too obsessed with details, and remind me it’s really just about not holding anything back on the course,” Bishop said. “Pua left her mark on all of us—the riders, fans, and kids who saw her in her element knew she was a positive force in this world. My thoughts are with her family.”

Parmalee faced plenty of setbacks in her career, including her near miss at qualifying for the U.S. Olympic mountain bike team in 2012—compatriot Georgia Gould beat her out for a spot and earned a bronze medal at the London Games. Around that time Parmalee also crashed and suffered a broken ankle, and spent months rehabilitating the injury. Adam Pulford, her coach at the time, moved to Yucaipa to help her bounce back from the injury. Pulford said Parmalee could barely walk when she decided to attempt her first ride back.

“I had to hold her arm so she could clip into the bike, and we went to climb her favorite hill,” Pulford toldÌę°żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ.ÌęThe two decided to just ride the climb and avoid using her power meter. “When we reached the top I had to put my bike down and go over to Pua so she could grab my arm and gently unclip. We both started crying tears of joy, because it had been months since she climbed a hill outside, and this could have been a season-ending or career-ending injury.”

Pulford said Parmalee actually improved after the injury, because the time off simply boosted her motivation to race again.

“I had never seen her climb as fast as she did after that injury, but that was Pua,” he said. “Don’t stand in the way of something she wants.”

Parmalee stood out in the mountain-bike crowd as a tenacious athlete, and also because of her Polynesian heritage. Pro gravel racer Amanda Nauman, who was coming up in the SoCal racing scene in 2013, said Parmalee’s success gave her inspiration. Nauman, who is Asian American, said she recently saw Parmalee at a bicycle race in Mammoth, California, and told her how important she had been to her as a budding cyclist.

“I went up to her and told her how much of an inspiration she was to me when I started MTB racing—It was 2013 and she was a star,” Nauman said. “Not only that, but she didn’t look like every other bike racer. She looked more like me, and that was a big deal for me coming into the sport then.”

Parmalee retired from cycling in 2015, but she continued to stay involved in the sport as a mentor and coach. Jeana Miller, a longtime friend and cyclist, said she and Parmalee operated a kids cycling camp and coaching group in Orange County for several years. Miller, an endurance coach with Carmichael Training Systems, said Parmalee took great passion in working with novice cyclists.

“I work with athletes of all levels, and the pro athletes don’t always go back to their roots the way she did,” Miller said. “No matter how hard [Parmalee] was crushing us on the bike, you knew she was going to come back and ride with the person at the back and motivate them to get to the top.”

Miller and Parmalee recently organized a beginner cycling camp for the Los Angeles-based group Girlz Gone Riding, and the experience stoked Parmalee’s desire to someday start her own cycling camps for beginners.

“Most of the cyclists we were working with started later in life, and most weren’t super duper skilled, but she didn’t care—she wanted to share that passion and flame that was alive in her,” Miller said.

Kady said he learned of Parmalee’s death early Friday morning and was shocked and “crushed” by the news. He said the two saw each other at cycling events intermittently after he left the team to pursue other professional goals, and that Parmalee remained a treasured friend.

“Call those people up you’ve been thinking about and tell them you love them,” Kady said. “I thought about calling her 100 times over the last few years and didn’t.”

has been set up to help Chris Parmalee and the boys through this extremely difficult period.

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Like cigarettes, shag carpet, and those , the automobile is becoming a product that used to be normal but is now considered irredeemably evil, or at least really tacky. More and more cities are adding , and if the government has its way you by 2035. Meanwhile, a new form of protest seems to be gaining traction: vandalizing people’s vehicles.

is a group that bills itself as a “leaderless autonomous movement.” It started in the UK, hence the “y,” but has since moved to other countries including the United States. Its goal is to “make it impossible to own a huge polluting 4×4 in the world’s urban areas,” and it does this by deflating people’s tires and leaving that starts off: “We have deflated one or more of your tires. You’ll be angry, but don’t take it personally. It’s not you, it’s your car.”

Perhaps it’s because I’m old enough to remember stuff like cigarettes and shag carpet (an incendiary combination, it’s a wonder I never burned to death), but to me the idea of sabotaging a stranger’s car belongs in the same category as smashing their mailbox with a baseball bat or putting a flaming bag of poop on their porch, even if it is ostensibly predicated on making the world a better place for humanity. As such, I was surprised to find this tactic actually resonates with people. BikePortland (okay, Portland, I shouldn’t be surprised) recently published a , which ended thusly:

Oh, and one quick tip: if you wake up to find your SUV out of commission, ask someone who relies on active transportation to help you figure out a new route to work. I assure you that anyone who rides the bus or bikes to get around the city has dealt with their share of annoyances preventing them from getting where they need to be on time.

In an era defined by perpetual panic and unprecedented self-importance, I suppose it’s only natural that there are people who think they’re saving the world by letting the air out of car tires. Even so, this “tip” oozes condescension like a tubeless mountain bike tire with leaky sidewalls.

±ő’v±đ long come out of the haze of car worship under which many Americans still languish, and as a bicyclist and New Yorker, I of course rely on “active transportation.” (Finally, a phrase to let everyone know you’re better than they are because you live someplace you don’t have to drive!) But I also know that people drive for all sorts of reasons, even in cities. Sure, sometimes those reasons seem almost offensively gratuitous (there are people who get in the car and drive around aimlessly just to make their baby fall asleep, which
really?), but just as often they’re driving out of necessity, and occasionally access to to an automobile is even a matter of life and death. (Nurses, doctors, emergency responders, people who deliver pizzas
) So the idea that you can declare yourself an arbiter of personal mobility and furtively deflate an unvetted individual’s tire in a petulant act of passive-agression with the certainty that you’re doing nothing more than making them “figure out a new route to work” that day–as opposed to, say, visiting a dying loved one in the hospital– is astonishing in its arrogance.

Granted, if you’re a cyclist it may be harder to find compassion for the hapless motorist; they’re the lumbering dinosaur, we’re the wily mammals, and until nature downsizes them we’re forced to dodge their heedless footfalls. However, if you’re a cyclist, you also love and depend on your machine, and you should have at least a certain degree of respect for someone else’s, even if you don’t particularly care for it. You should also appreciate that the sorts of idiots who do stuff like are just as convinced of their own righteousness as the Tyre Extinguishers are, and are just as willing to assume anyone who rides a bike is an entitled hobbyist as the »ćĂ©ŽÚ±ôČčłÙ±đłÜ°ùČő are to assume every single person who drives a car with “coarser or larger tires than normal” (whatever that means) is a lazy, selfish cubicle jockey for whom a disabled vehicle is a mere inconvenience.

The current state of motordom is deeply dysfunctional, but even a million Tyre Extinguishers are not going to annoy people out of their cars. It may seem crazy to the “active transportation” enthusiast, but a lot of these people actually like their cars, flat tires and all. If they’re willing to pay all that money for gas in order to keep driving, why would needing a little air stop them? You don’t effect change by messing with things people like; you effect it by offering them something they like better. (That’s offering, not forcing them into it via sabotage.) Or, if you absolutely can’t resist fingering a Schrader valve, at least have the courage of your convictions; instead of leaving a note, why not wait for the vehicle owner and explain exactly why you did it?

Surely something as important as the fate of the planet warrants speaking to someone in person, right?

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I remember 2009 being a good year. Shia LaBeouf was the highest-grossing film star, and his movie “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” was the biggest in the country. And in non-LaBeouf news, the United States saw its , 26 years before Shia LaBeouf was even born.

Since then, that number has been trending upwards, particularly for pedestrians and cyclists. Pedestrian deaths alone have , and cyclist deaths have in the last decade. Meanwhile, cars appear to be safer than they’ve ever been for their occupants, and these days you’re as you were in 1980.

It’s a rueful irony: as our cars get larger and more packed with safety features, they become safer for the people in them, and . Larger cars mean poorer visibility and deadlier impact. As a result, cycling and pedestrian advocates have increasingly called for people from driving large vehicles. “This monomaniacal focus on street design needs to change,” founder and podcast co-host Aaron Naparstek, demanding that cities “regulate and redesign” the cars themselves. Recently, Washington, DC took a step in this direction, proposing a on vehicles over 600 pounds.

As a cyclist and a pedestrian in a city of 8 million people (that’s New York City, in case that wasn’t clear) I don’t particularly relish “sharing” the road with increasingly larger vehicles, and it would be a stretch akin to mounting a tight-fitting tubular tire to argue that big cars make the world a better place for anybody who doesn’t happen to be in one. At the same time, the backlash against SUVs can sometimes seem like it’s fueled as much by as it is by genuine concern for human safety. I mean, sure, big-ass cars certainly ain’t helping but


What about all the weed?

I realize you will immediately resent me for engaging in “whataboutism,” especially when it comes to the green stuff. (Weed, not money.) American attitudes towards marijuana have evolved. In the 1930s it was “Reefer Madness.” In the 1960s it was for countercultural hippies. Now it’s legal most places, corporate types are the stuff to increase focus and creativity, and cannabis and its derivatives are increasingly touted as a panacea, with the potential to do everything from to Today, expressing the idea that marijuana can be in any way pernicious is hopefully retrograde; at best it makes you uptight, and at worst it makes you a .

Yet if you ride a bicycle in traffic, it’s hard not to notice the sheer ubiquity of marijuana consumption while driving, and to come away not only with a contact high, but the impression that it’s only getting worse. Where I live and ride, the smell now emanates from every other car; tinted windows roll down and release cumulonimbus clouds of combusted cannabis or vaporized oils. The gutters are full of blunt guts, empty plastic weed containers, and smashed vape pens. I even smell it through my car vents when I’m driving behind other people on the highway. There was a time when it was mostly just dorm rooms and jam band concerts that reeked of weed; now, it’s absolutely everywhere.

To be sure, all of this is anecdotal–one person’s experience in one specific city–but statistics bear out my impression that more and more drivers are . , the percentage of drivers who tested positive for marijuana went from 8.6 percent to 12.6 percent. Moreover, , the percentage of deadly crashes that involved cannabis increased from 9 percent to 21.5 percent. Sure, plenty of people still drive drunk, but it’s been taboo since the Mothers Against Drunk Driving movement started in 1980, and the . Meanwhile, people are with the idea of driving under the influence of marijuana, and they’re about getting caught doing it. This is not to suggest that driving while stoned is nearly as dangerous as driving while drunk. (You’re about, whereas you’re about ten times more likely to crash while drunk.) However, as cannabis use while driving increases, so does the use of cannabis and alcohol together; since 2000, crash deaths involving both increased from .

Then there’s the weed itself. Not only is it becoming , but the delivery systems are becoming more and more efficient. You no longer need a joint the size of a Subway footlong to get so stoned ; a couple pulls off a vape pen or a potent edible should do it. On the other hand, alcohol and the manner in which it is consumed has remained fundamentally unchanged for hundreds of years, as the label on your favorite whiskey will take great pains to remind you.

Besides getting stoned, there’s something else anyone who rides a bike sees drivers doing with near-ubiquity, and that’s using their phones. Distracted driving , and the problem has gotten its share of and . However, concern over vehicle size has now come to define the advocacy zeitgeist–even though cars were already getting bigger and bigger while pedestrian and cyclist deaths were steadily declining, and even though smartphone sales –which is around the same time pedestrian and cyclist deaths started rising again, go figure. I’m not aware of any studies on the effects of using smartphones and marijuana at the same time while driving, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say they don’t exactly cancel each other out, and certainly the timing of both smartphones and legal weed and vape pens does happen to coincide with the uptick in fatalities.

Now, I am in no way suggesting the pot pendulum should swing back towards criminalization, or that responsible adults shouldn’t be free to indulge as they see fit. However, I do suspect it’s a bigger problem than many are willing to admit. This does not necessarily me a narc or a prude. To be sure, when it comes to our relationship with cars, there’s danger in focussing too much on substances than actual substance; for example, our hyper-focus on drunk driving means that as long as you’re sober, anything goes. At the same time, there’s also a danger in focussing too much on vehicle size when it’s the actions of the driver that are most important. I’m the same driver whether I’m behind the wheel of an F-150 or a Festiva, but I’m a completely different one as soon as I consume a mind-altering substance.

It’s only natural that advocates who are highly critical of car culture (not to mention mistrustful of police) ultimately want to undermine it through policy designed to “regulate and redesign them” rather than play whack-a-mole in the form of ticketing and traffic stops, and it’s hardly surprising that the sorts of urbanites who engage in advocacy tend to default to an attitude of “cars bad, weed good,” especially given how unfairly the law has been applied with regard to the latter. No doubt they’re also right that ultimately the only way to . Impairment aside, certainly people should be able to get around more easily without having to own a car.

But this doesn’t mean that whatever vehicle shape happens to be trendy at the moment is the fundamental problem, or that the streets are more dangerous because consumers now prefer the RAV4 to the Camry, or that focus should shift from changing street design to changing vehicle design. There are all sorts of problems with car culture because there are all sorts of problems with our culture in general, and people who are stoned at all times–including while driving–is one of those problems. Advocates hate it when . In a way, isn’t focusing on cars over their operators when it comes to killing pedestrians and cyclists ultimately the same thing?

No doubt one day we’ll look at the multi-ton internal combustion vehicle the same way we now do at the horse and carriage. Like most major lifestyle shifts, this will probably owe more to innovation and serendipity than to governmental decree. In the meantime, it’s important to keep our eyes on the road and mind our ideological blind spots. Maybe marijuana is one of them.

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The cycling world is mourning a professional cyclist from Kenya named Suleiman “Sule” Kangangi, who died as a result of injuries from a bike crash during the Vermont Overland gravel race on Sunday, August 29.

Kangangi, who hailed from Eldoret, Kenya, was 33 years old.

“Vermont Overland is heartbroken by the tragic death of Suleiman “Sule” Kangangi during The Overland yesterday,” said Ansel Dickey, owner of the race. “He was a kind friend and an inspiring and heroic athlete to his teammates and the gravel cycling community at large. We extend our deepest sympathies to his family, his friends, Team Amani, and the people of Kenya who are mourning his loss today.”

Details of Kangangi’s crash were not available.

Related:

Kangangi was a member of the newly-formed , a squad of off-road riders from Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. He was the captain of the team, bringing with him a wealth of experience from racing on the road. Several members of Team Amani are in the U.S. this month to compete in multiple bicycle races, including the Leadville Trail 100 MTB and SBT GRVL events. Kangangi had recently completed both races.

“Sule is our captain, friend, brother. He is also a father, husband and son. Gaping holes are left when giant’s fall. Sule was a giant,” the team wrote on social media. “Instead of leading us at the front of the pack, he will now lead us as our guiding pole star as we press forward in the realization of his dream.”

Kangangi had previously pursued a professional career in road bike racing before switching to gravel. From 2016 through 2020, he competed on the professional African road team Bike Aid, and in 2017 he finished third place at the Tour du Rwanda, a prestigious pro event. During his professional road career Kangangi competed in pro road races in China, Australia, France, and Italy, among other countries.

In recent years, Kangangi had switched to gravel cycling, and his career change was greatly impacted by Kenya’s gravel event, called the , a four-day stage race that debuted in Kenya in 2021. The race brought American Ian Boswell and Dutchman Laurens ten Dam, among other pro racers, to compete with aspiring cyclists from East Africa on gravel in the Maasai Mara of Kenya.

“±ő’v±đ always had a dream of going to the Tour de France,” . “When I started cycling, that was the dream. But now I’m 32, that dream is fading quickly. But I realized, I’m used to these gravel roads, this is part of me. I don’t have to go find them. If I want to go training I just take my gravel bike and I’m already there. It shows, you can always change your dreams. You start imagining yourself winning. Why not change my dream and go for something which is realistic for me?”

Related:

Kangangi finished second overall in the inaugural Migration Gravel Race. This past June, , the second stage race from the Amani Project to debut in East Africa.

In addition to furthering his own career as a gravel pro, Kangangi was dedicated to growing the sport within Kenya. He spearheaded the Migration Gravel Series, hosting events, clinics, and school events in and around Nairobi.

The Vermont Overland is a 59-mile gravel race with 7,000 feet of vertical gain located in West Windsor, Vermont. Approximately 900 cyclists were participating in the event on Sunday. An outpouring of notes and messages filled social media in the wake of Kangangi’s death.

Rachel Ruto, wife of Kenya’s president-elect William Ruto, tweeted out her condolences.

“My heartfelt condolences to his family, and the entire cycling community, that has lost a talented cyclist, a mentor and a friend,” she . “We will all miss him as an individual. Kenya has lost a champion. Rest in peace Sule.”

Related:

Ìę has been set up to support Kangangi’ family.Ìę

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The welter of Interstate 10 drowns out Yolanda Davis-Overstreet’s voice as we pedal beneath an ivy-laced underpass on the cusp of South L.A. I’m following her mauve city bike north on Redondo—we’ve just left West Adams Boulevard, the main drag through her childhood stomping grounds of the same name—and we’re heading for New Los Angeles Charter Middle School, about half a mile away as the crow flies. After her daughter, Niah, began sixth grade there in 2013, Davis-Overstreet led a grassroots campaign urging the city to install pedestrian infrastructure at the dangerous intersection in front of the school.

Today the 61-year-old is vibrant in cyan beaded earrings, Vans, and brow-line glasses, with a nineties-style choker coiled around her neck and a black ball cap tucked over tight, dyed burgundy curls. She isn’t wearing a helmet; while she normally does opt for one, personal-safety gear offers little in the face of the systemic problems she’s fighting. Besides, the lifelong cyclist knows which streets to avoid pedaling down in the place where she was born and raised.

Davis-Overstreet grew up roaming this largely Black (and later Latino) area, located about eight miles east of Santa Monica, on a gold banana-seat high-riser with ape-hanger handlebars. As an adult, she fell in with L.A.’s Black road-cycling community and eventually found her calling in mobility justice, an endeavor that seeks to make communities of color safer for those moving around within them. For many people who rent or own homes in marginalized areas, walking or biking is the only transportation option, but infrastructure for those on foot or on two wheels, such as crosswalks, bike lanes, and even sidewalks, is often absent. The problem is worse for the unhoused, who have little choice but to spend all of their time on these dangerous streets.

In the U.S. at large, .Ìę in neighborhoods where the median per capita income is less than $21,000. In L.A., , despite comprising only about 8 percent of the city’s population. Seventy percent of serious injuries and fatalities are of the city’s streets, most of which are located in Black or Latino neighborhoods.

A community organizer and strategist, Davis-Overstreet holds a master’s degree in urban sustainability from nearby Antioch University. She has collaborated on a wide range of projects, from pushing for bike lanes and crosswalks on high-risk streets to helping the city develop policies for zero-emission zones to improving access to local parklands in the community of Baldwin Hills. “We’ve been told to get at the back of the line since we came to America,” Davis-Overstreet tells me. “That’s actually what I was told—that to advocate for safe streets for New Los Angeles Charter Middle School, I had to get to the back of the line with everyone else. But my process is not working within the system.”

In 2011 she founded the platform , which educates people about mobility justice and the history of African American cyclists, such as , nicknamed the Black Cyclone, who set multiple world records in the late 19th and early 20th centuries despite death threats, intimidation, and physical attacks that attempted to slow him down. Ride in Living Color also brings people together for social rides, at times 40 to 50 bicyclists strong. “It was like, this is the remedy,” says Davis-Overstreet, recalling when she first started them. “This is the solution—everybody just get out on a bike and let’s ride.”

West Adams Boulevard is one of the most dangerous streets in all of L.A. in terms of traffic fatalities. From 2009 to 2019, at least 45 cyclists were hit here, and , including . On Thanksgiving Day in 2019, the unhoused cancer survivor was struck while walking on the street, then hit again by another vehicle, and finally dragged by a third car 13 blocks to a gas station, where he died. All three drivers fled.

In collaboration with the , which seeks to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025, Davis-Overstreet has worked to educate residents about the safety issues on West Adams Boulevard. “Community support is critical,” says Lauren Ballard, a transportation planner for the LADOT. “Yolanda’s advocacy and leadership have been key to successful community engagement and support for the project.”

Earlier in the day, Davis-Overstreet showed me the fruits of Vision Zero’s efforts on West Adams, which is peppered with small galleries and eateries, from hole-in-the-wall taquerias to a trendy, upscale soul-food restaurant slinging $16 cocktails. The city recently plastered the formerly potholed, four-lane road with newly minted bike lanes. The success of this effort will be measured by the number of fatalities that occur on West Adams Boulevard, but Davis-Overstreet secured additional resources beyond the project’s original scope, which has already improved the streetscape in myriad ways: Regular street sweeping largely clears the gutters of the Chick-fil-A detritus and beer bottles I’d seen strewn in other areas. And , which will ultimately provide shade and absorb noise, have begun to take root in the hell strips between the street’s lanes. Already, Davis-Overstreet told me, it feels different.

Instead of ripping past clusters of unhoused people at 50 miles per hour—a crush of traffic that sounded “almost like a wave,” according to Davis-Overstreet—vehicles now motor down the street at around 35. Still, as we cruised past a skate shop and a bookstore with freshly graffitied windows, a muscle car startled us as it burned rubber down the middle turn-only lane to bypass slow traffic. Near a cafĂ© strewn with copies of El Aviso, a Spanish-language general-interest magazine, a man dashed across the lanes, threading the gap with a baby in his arms. Elsewhere, a Pepto Bismol–pink ice cream truck trawled the eastbound bike lane, emitting a discordant jingle, and passenger vehicles swerved into it, too, employing it as a makeshift passing lane. Drivers weren’t used to the new setup.

Communities of color—even historically affluent ones like West Adams—are often treated as places to be driven through instead of thriving communities in their own right. The , which created the interstate system as we know it today, established freeways that cut through many neighborhoods of color. In 1960, the year Davis-Overstreet was born, her parents received a notice that their West Adams rental was among the hundreds of houses slated to be razed to make way for the new Interstate 10. “There was no fee involved in helping them to relocate,” says Davis-Overstreet. “They were given a certain amount of time that they had to move, and then they moved.”

In addition to the , the interstate system created physical boundaries that reinforced the marginalization of such neighborhoods. Many of these areas had already begun to face disinvestment as a result of , a practice that started after Great Depression that excludes home buyers in Black neighborhoods from federally backed mortgages. (Neighborhoods that were deemed risky investments—generally, that is, communities of color—were coded red on internal maps and subsequently segregated from government-subsidizedÌę.) Of course, new roadways also routed more traffic through these communities. Today, frustrated commuters still speed through many of West Adams’s streets trying to avoid bumper-to-bumper jams on the freeway.

Walking and biking would help ameliorate many of these interconnected problems: too many cars on L.A.’s clogged streets; air pollution that disproportionately harms communities of color; physical ailments that inordinately affect Black people, including hypertension and obesity (especially among Black women). But while pedestrian and cycling infrastructure would help cure some of the symptoms of disinvestment in communities of color, mobility justice also has to address the complex, cascading roots of institutional racism in housing, public health, and policing. Simply being in public while Black is a roll of the dice. Take Dijon Kizzee, a 29-year-old Black man who was in 2020 after they attempted to stop him while biking.

Or take AdĂ© Neff, a dapper, soft-spoken transplant who who rented me a bikeÌęthe day before my ride with Davis-Overstreet. In 2014, he founded a worker-owned bike co-op called in the lively heart of Leimert Park, a near West Adams. A former classmate of Davis-Overstreet at Antioch, Neff told me he had recently been pulled over on his bike while cycling on West Adams Boulevard. Legally, nothing ever came of the stop. But Neff spent the weekend in jail, and when he tried to recover his electric bike, which had been impounded, he found that it had disappeared.

For years, Neff didn’t own a car. The safest route from his residence in Hollywood to Venice Beach, which he commuted daily in street clothes, passed through the residential streets of Beverly Hills. “Like clockwork, I got pulled over damn near every day,” he told me. Neff has friends who wear spandex to try and avoid being singled out. If police “notice that you’re Black, but you have this kit on with a $10,000 bike,” you might get a pass, he says. “But if I look like this”—Neff was wearing red-and-yellow sneakers and an emerald-hued tee stating “Black Power Ride On!”—“and I’m on a $10,000 bike, whether I bought it or not, I fit the description.”

For Davis-Overstreet, addressing police abuse toward people who “fit the description”—men who look like Neff, or like her son, Nile—is part of the snaggled web of mobility justice. To make public spaces safer for Black men and for all people of color is also to build a culture of care toward the environment. “Our communities can be strong stewards for the planet, but people are afraid for their lives,” she says. “​​How can we become mountaineers? How can we become Olympians? How can we get there if we’re too frightened to even come outside our door?”

Community-led initiatives are a step in the right direction. As we coast to a stop across from New Los Angeles Charter Middle School, on the other side of I-10, Davis-Overstreet tells me that she took hundreds of photos and videos to document the dangerous street conditions here.

In 2015, the LADOT responded to her and other activists’ lobbying by approving safety upgrades for the high-speed intersection in front of the school, which didn’t even have a traffic signal. But they took five years to actually be implemented. While the project was awaiting funding, a mother and her three-month-old were seriously injured here. A month later, in August of 2019, there was another grisly accident, close to where we’re taking a breather now.

As we survey the yawning intersection on this sunny October afternoon, Davis-Overstreet’s hard-won additions seem like a drop in the bucket: four broad, yolk-yellow crosswalks; a set of traffic lights in each direction; some school signage. And yet instead of roaring by, cars idle beside us at the light. I can finally hear Davis-Overstreet clearly. She’s circled back to a story she told me earlier, about a century ride she did from Anaheim to San Diego in her forties, during which she was left behind by her friends. The chase truck crawled along beside her, proffering Gatorade and waiting for her to give in as she climbed into Torrey Pines. Not today, she recalls thinking. She cracks up at the recollection.

“You are going to be out there, sometimes, on your own,” she continues, now in a more serious tone. “That’s the thing about bicycling—nobody can help you pedal.”

The post This L.A. Resident Is Working to Stop Pedestrian and Cyclist Deaths in Her Neighborhood appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

On May 28, 2021, I finally felt like I belonged somewhere. Ten months earlier, my husband, Steve, and I had relocated to Flagstaff, Arizona, in the middle of the pandemic so he could attend grad school at Northern Arizona University. We hardly knew anyone there and were growing lonely, so we were thrilled when a new friend invited us to an event one evening called the Flagstaff Bike Party, a monthly group ride in celebration of bikes and community. It was our first opportunity to gather with new people since our move. When we arrived at a park outside the city’s library, nearly 100 people were there, mounting fixies, mountain bikes, and commuters. A little blond girl giggled on the handlebars of her dad’s bike as he did figure eights in the grass. Some riders wore construction vests and strapped fluorescent orange traffic cones to their helmets to signify the night’s theme: safety.

We were unmissable and buzzing with energy as we started riding around neighborhoods, in circles on the tennis courts, and through downtown. Pedestrians waved and cheered enthusiastically for the return of the beloved event after its COVID-19 hiatus. “Bike party!” we all howled into the cool summer air. An hour into the night, I knew that these were people I wanted to surround myself with. Maybe I’d even get to know some of them better over drinks once the ride ended.

A little after 7 P.M., we reached the intersection of Beaver Street and Butler Avenue, a highly trafficked stretch that separates downtown from the NAU campus. When our light switchedÌęfrom red to green, those of us in the middle of the pack inched forward as the front row slowly pushed into the intersection. I glanced down at my pedal to steady my foot and looked back up, ready to ride.

Then in a matter of seconds, moving into view from the left, a tow truck hauling a Budget box truck careened through its red light. Bicycle wheels rotated under the truck’s flatbed, and there was shouting and honking and someone’s bicycle bell dinging and metal dragging against the asphalt. It was hard to tell how many people had been struck, but I knew immediately it was going to be catastrophic.

About 50 feet away, I stood frozen on my bike with my hands clapped over my mouth in horror. Time seemed to slow. Riders around me ditched their bikes to rush to their friends in the road, but all I could do was full-body shake. Someone eventually shouted for us to get out of the way to allow emergency vehicles through. Sirens screamed. Cyclists panicked. That’s when I grabbed my husband and our friends into hugs. In a daze, we formed a huddle on the sidewalk one block away. We didn’t leave the scene for almost two hours, waiting for any news and wanting to be together. A 12-year-old boy with his new mountain bike joined us to wait for his mom to get him. In tears, he told us he didn’t feel safe to ride home and wasn’t sure if he ever would again.

In the months after, I watched and re-watched two videos from that night, trying to make sense of what happened, wishing I could rewind in real life. The first video, which I filmed at 6:23 P.M., is of riders on the tennis courts, people laughing, and hip-hop music playing from speakers mounted on a bike trailer. My friend is talking about Frisbee golf in the background. The second video is much harder to watch. A driver behind us in traffic had started filming us at 7:04 P.M.—he was in awe of the size of the Bike Party group and only happened to capture the moment of crash. He sent me the video to make sure the police collected it as evidence. It’s only two seconds long, but it shows me and Steve in a sea of other cyclists. It shows the green light and the tow truck. And then there’s the excruciating sound of us yelling “No!” in unison.

That night, . Her name was Joanna Wheaton. Joanna was 29 and a triplet. She went by Jo for short. She devoted her whole life to helping others, especially underrepresented and neglected people. She passed out warm coats to people experiencing homelessness when it was snowing. She served on the Flagstaff Housing Commission to advocate for housing fairness. She started , an independent, data-driven project analyzing social issues in Flagstaff. I could go on. “It’s really beautiful and inspiring to see how she chose to use her gifts,” Jenna Wheaton, the youngest of the triplets, told me months later. She said Joanna was bold in a way that was off-putting to some people, but her intentions were always rooted in empathy for humanity. “She created community wherever she went.”

I had never felt so heavy with grief before. At first, I thought it was weird for me to cry so much about someone I had never met. I couldn’t even mention her name without getting a lump in my throat. But the more I learned about Joanna from news articles and Jenna, the more I realized just how amazing she was. And I couldn’t help but think that we would’ve been friends. She grew up in San Diego, where I was born almost exactly two years after her. She loved the mountains and nature and biking too, and ended up in Flagstaff, just like I did. Why did it have to be her?

I used to work the crime beat at newspapers, so ±ő’v±đ covered crashes, shootings, bomb threats, deaths, and gnarly court cases. I deal with anxiety and secondary trauma from some of those stories, and ±ő’v±đ been going to therapy since 2018 to learn how to cope, heal, and regulate my emotions. But I didn’t know what witnessing something so violent would do to my mental health long-term; nor did I know how my body would process the trauma in the days that followed. Nothing I was going through could compare to the wounds suffered by the victims. I requested the investigation reports (which included Steve’s and my testimony and named us as witnesses) and learned the injuries of three of the five cyclists: one person suffered critical injuries to his right leg and pelvis, another person had numerous broken bones, and a third person was scraped and bruised. Yet for the sake of my own healing, I wanted to find out how best to navigate what I witnessed by talking to my therapist and other experts about the healthiest ways to recover and care for myself. I wanted to be OK again.

I didn’t have to look far. In the first few days after the crash, I scrolled through the almost hourly combing for information. I came across a comment from a trauma therapist and licensed counselor in Flagstaff named Dunya Cope. Not only does she have specific training in Somatic Experiencing—a therapy model that focuses on body sensations to relieve trauma—but she was also at the ride that night. “A moment of collective joy turned so quickly into collective horror,” she wrote, before sharing a long list of tips for taking care of ourselves. “Allow your body to find safety when it can, whether around friends and loved ones or just getting to notice your home or an outdoor space,” was one. “Let yourself be in the space with your senses, and check in to see if there is any way that your body notices safety.”

She added that if we’re in shock, there’s no need to try and push ourselves out of it. “Allow yourself to be safe, allow yourself to be held. If you notice any trembling, or any emotional or body impulses, allow yourself the safety to know that your body has wisdom to process and move through what is happening.” If any of us were still seeing horrific images—which I was, whether my eyes were open or closed—she suggested widening our frame to try to remember a tree, a friend, or something else that was neutral at the scene.

“There’s no wrong way to be with this,” Cope told me when we met up in September. We both brought tissues to the downtown coffee shop. “Just let what’s coming out come out. We don’t have to judge it. We don’t have to make it different.”

I tried not to. I cried alone and in front of people without holding back or feeling ashamed. I screamed into pillows until I lost my voice. I spent days curled up in bed in my dark apartment, and I cleared my schedule of plans and chores because it felt impossible to do simple things like eat and shower. While I experienced big emotions, Steve said he felt more numb, like moving through the motions as a zombie. Once we finally had the energy to run errands, we drove through the crash site on the way to the store. Being there again cued more hot, wet tears.

It also prompted outrage—at the tow-truck driver and at other careless drivers. I noticed myself yelling at cars more often and more aggressively. The other weekend on a ride back from the farmers’ market downtown, a 4Runner tried to cut in front of Steve and me as we entered the crosswalk. The driver had a green light, but the pedestrian walk signal was also blinking. Steve gave the driver a sarcastic thumbs up, while I screamed, “Are you fucking kidding me, bro?” Then I flashed him my tallest finger.

I mentioned these outbursts to my therapist when we met for the first time after the crash, and she was curious to know how it felt to yell. I told her it made me feel like I had a voice, like I could change someone’s behavior. If they recognized the close call, maybe they’d be more cautious the next time. My therapist told me that anger and yelling in the presence of threat or harm is an appropriate response. I plan to keep yelling.

When it came to writing this essay, I struggled. It felt uncomfortable to hurt so deeply every time I sat at my desk. I kept feeling like my pain didn’t matter or wasn’t important. I felt like, Who am I to write about suffering? To keep crying uncontrollably? I didn’t lose part of my leg or someone I loved. But Cope reminded me, “There’s no monopoly on stories. One person writing about their experience doesn’t take away from all the multiplicity of the other narratives and feelings.”

I keep thinking of Joanna. When I’m riding my bike. When I drive through the intersection. When I run through the sunflower fields at the park. Jenna, Joanna’s sister, told me that she sees her everywhere as long as her heart is open. A praying mantis landed on her neck during their shared birthday and stayed with her for seven hours throughout the day. She’s sure it was Joanna. “She’s always there,” she said. Jenna is a therapist and is working toward a specialization in grief and loss. Her knowledge was comforting. “±ő’v±đ been intentionally keeping death near, because to me, life and death are the same. So often, we turn our backs on death and don’t let it alchemize us and transform us.” It cracks you open, she says, but “we don’t need to be scared of what is in that crack because it can be unifying.”

Something profound that ±ő’v±đ learned through this process is the power of the word “and.” It has changed how I view my own feelings and emotions. They don’t have to be either-or. You can feel many complex things all at once, like deep loss and immense gratitude. You can feel heartbroken and encouraged. Heartbroken over a world without Jo. Encouraged by the way people have comforted one another. “There is no expectation that we have to go back to some earlier version of ourselves before tragedy happens or before grief affects us,” Cope told me. “Is it ever going to be OK that Jo died? No, that’s never going to be OK. But what an amazing thing to expand our hearts and our capacities to bring in the resilience of community and the ways that we come together.”

I feel a stronger connection with Flagstaff now, partly because of having experienced a collective pain with so many others. And partly because of the way the community came together to grieve and show support. Several GoFundMe campaigns surpassed $100,000 goals to fund the victims’ medical expenses, time off work, bills, and whatever else they needed. Businesses created special menu items and donated proceeds from a day of sales to raise money for the fundraisers. People made “Flagstaff Strong” T-shirts and organized vigils for Jo and the other victims. And community members submitted a petition to the city council for more pedestrian and cyclist protections. I’m not sure whether more bike lanes or the newly painted green stripes would have prevented what happened, but it’s a start.

I’m still scared to bike alone and I worry constantly about Steve, who rides through the intersection every day on his way to school. I make him text me once he gets to campus. “Alive!” he writes every time. There’s still an immense amount of individual and collective healing that needs to happen. Then there’s the healing from the physical injuries. None of us are ever going to be the same. But maybe one day, once everyone feels ready, the Flagstaff Bike Party will meet again. If it does, I’ll be there.

The post I Witnessed a Fatal Bike Crash. It Changed Me Forever.Ìę appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Welcome to What You Missed,Ìęour daily digest of breaking news and topical perspectives from across the outdoor world. You can also get this news delivered to your email inbox six days a week by for the What You Missed newsletter.

The scales of justice may be shifting in Texas.

This week the district attorney in Waller County, Texas of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon against a teenager who struck six cyclists with his pickup truck on a country road outside of Houston. The incident received national attention because the teenager had been allegedly attempting to intentionally spray the riders with exhaust—an action known as “rolling coal.”

Four of the six victims were hospitalized, and two of them required emergency airlifting to a Houston-area hospital. They had been on an organized training ride preparing for an Ironman triathlon.

In the weeks following the crash, the incident became a flashpoint in the national debate over driver culpability in behavior toward cyclists. Intentional attacks on cyclists from drivers . Earlier this year a 58-year-old cyclist in Arizona by a driver who intentionally plowed into a bicycle race and then fled the scene.

Local police in the Texas case initially allowed the driver to leave the scene with his parents without even a minor citation. The lack of charges created an uproar in communities of cyclists and other outdoor athletes across the country.

The very blatant nature of the attack—and eyewitness accounts of it—made it one of the most heinous examples of police inaction in cases involving aggressive driving. One of the cyclists who had been on the ride, Chase Farrell, told multiple media outlets that the driver had already harassed other cyclists on the ride before targeting the six who he later hit.

“The reason he couldn’t stop is because he was accelerating to blow more diesel fuel on these cyclists,” Farrell said.

In the days after the incident, the Waller County DA’s office that the authorities did not handle the crash properly, and launched its own investigation.

“We wish them the speediest of recoveries on their long journey ahead, and remind everyone to share the roads, obey the traffic laws, and to treat each other with the respect that we all deserve,” the DA said in a statement.

The Wild Apple

The urban jungle is teeming with wildlife—hawks, eagles, and even monarch butterflies. Lisa Collins of interviewed naturalists, horticulturalists, and the executive director of the city’s Audubon Society about the recent uptick in wildlife sightings across the city. Recent sightings include bats and butterflies, native bees, salamanders and frogs, and even a coyote in Central Park.

Alas, this is not an example of the pandemic-inspired meme. Naturalists attribute the surge to the city’s recent investments to clean up public parks, rivers, forests, and wetlands, and the decision to spend billions converting former landfills into nature sanctuaries—and not due to us hiding indoors for 15 months.

The city’s soaring population of sewer rats also to welcome the new wild guests.

Warranty Voided

Here’s one hydrofoil board to avoid buying on Ebay.

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To capture the beauty, diversity, and conflict inherent in the African wildlife ecosystem, the BBC built an artificial body of water in Tanzania and fitted it with hidden cameras. The result was “Life at the Waterhole,” a three-part series that PBS describes :

The series reveals dramatic interactions and unlikely rivalries, as well as some unexpected moments of humor. As elephants, warthogs, giraffes, monkeys and big cats jostle for position, scientists gain a greater understanding of the important role of water in Africa as its wildlife faces the growing impact of climate change.

While I haven’t visited an African water hole, I am a resolute city dweller and bicyclist—and inasmuch as bicyclists and city dwellers are prone to facile pronouncements, I feel comfortable saying that our equivalent is the intersection. Nationally, occur at intersections. Here, “dramatic interactions and unlikely rivalries” also abound—only instead of elephants and warthogs and giraffes, it’s cars and pedestrians and bikes. And while the animals may be competing for water, the resource that compels all of these road users is the city itself. Commerce, culture, education, recreation: these are the city’s “water,” and the need to partake in them is what dictates everyone’s movements. These movements in turn lead to interactions that can be anything from delightfully serendipitous to deadly.

Here in New York City, the Intersection Capital of the United States (with , nearly ), there’s no better way to observe this ecosystem than by coming to a complete stop at a red light on your bicycle and taking in your surroundings. Yes, there’s a common conception that bicyclists don’t stop for red lights, and to be fair, this is not totally unfounded—in fact, running red lights is arguably necessary in certain situations. But watch a city intersection for a while and you’ll find that nobody stops for them, at least not really, and certainly not consistently. Pedestrians slip through gaps in traffic. Bicyclists practice the “” (not yet legal in New York), even though most of them probably have no idea there’s a name for it. And drivers afford themselves a five-second grace period after the light turns red, during which there’s a tacit understanding that they’re going to gun it and speed right through if there’s an opening in traffic.

At an intersection, anything can happen at any time, but in the five seconds after the light turns red, it crackles with the possibility of sudden death. Look around you and you’ll see it in the wary eyes of your fellow travelers. Walkers hesitate before putting a foot forward; bicyclists scan the streetscape before pushing off. They’re like zebras on high alert for predators, sniffing for danger in the wind before tentatively lowering their heads to take a sip. Whether it’s the water hole or the intersection, an attack is inevitable. Sometimes it’s the driver of a Dunkin’ Donuts rig, blasting the horn before charging through the red light; other times it’s someone behind the wheel of a car who’s whipping around the corner like a frisky cat from the other room. With each cycle of the traffic signal, it seems like there’s always at least one person who manages to escape death by the width of a goose bump… .

This downward pressure from the automotive apex predator results in curious behavior from the other species, who are in a constant state of fleeing for their lives. More vulnerable and yet more nimble than people in motor vehicles, bicyclists forced to wait for oncoming traffic will generally try to get a jump on the drivers bearing down on them by track standing, riding around in circles to avoid putting a foot down, or reverse queueing in front of each other until they jut out into the intersection (a bizarre process called ). Or else they’ll simply run the light altogether—some in a tentative and cautious fashion, others rolling casually through in a state of Mr. Magoo–like oblivion, and still others simply going for it like squirrels.

These bicyclists can unsettle the pedestrians—who, while watching for drivers, must also contend with the addled cyclists who are variously occupying their crosswalk—or even While considerably less of a threat to pedestrians than drivers, bicyclists are in a way more vexing; they appear suddenly while you’re scanning for more obvious threats, and thus have much more of a capacity to startle. In turn, some bicyclists complain of “oblivious” pedestrians stepping out into their path or sauntering across bike lanes. But who can blame pedestrians for doing so? A bicyclist who surprises you is scary, but one in plain view is so benign as to be easily ignored, especially on a street full of cement trucks.

A more recent addition to this ever-changing ecosystem is the preponderance of electric contraptions—e-bikes, e-skateboards, e-scooters, Onewheels—some of which are capable of rather high speeds. Drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians may quibble over who’s the worst, but for now many seem united in their contempt for the new wave of e-assisted conveyances, in the same way . Based on familiar vehicles like bicycles and skateboards, these e-machines move at an altogether different pace—faster than bikes and yet slower than cars—and to someone who’s been plying the streets of the city for a long time, they can be quite disconcerting, like those creepy .

To its credit, the city has been working to tame the intersection. In 2010, the Department of Transportation that 74 percent of crashes resulting in death or serious injury to pedestrians happened at intersections. Around half of those occurred at intersections with signals, and over half of the walkers had the signal in their favor. Ìęit has identified over 200 priority intersections for safety treatments and redesign, and implemented pilot programs, such as signals giving pedestrians and cyclists a head start on motorists (known as a ). This allows the smaller animals to drink first while the red traffic light holds predators at bay.

Still, the world moves much more quickly than city agencies do. The rapid shift to online retail means the streets are choked with trucks, some of which disgorge packages while parked in the bike lane. Meanwhile, —not just the usual commuters and recreational riders but also commercial cyclists on e-bikes working for food-delivery apps. When the city installed it seemed impossibly exotic, like something imported from the bike utopias of Amsterdam and Copenhagen. Now, in the age of , the very idea of a bike lane is almost quaint, and as people on every conceivable form of wheeled locomotion speed by you, it can feel as though the improvisational and instinct-driven nature of getting around New York will always remain just ahead of the city’s efforts to bring order to it.

Despite all the changes the city has made to the streetscape, the intersection remains a place of peril. In July of 2021, a bicyclist riding in the new protected bike lane alongside Central Park in Manhattan by the driver of a U.S. Postal Service truck, who appears to have struck the rider while making a right turn onto the 86th Street transverse, a motor-vehicle thoroughfare that carries heavy traffic across the most used park in the United States. The city installed the bike lane on Central Park West after an Australian tourist on a rental bike . Four years and a redesign later, this confluence of commerce and recreation and culture and education and residential life is still treacherous. Vehicles of every size and description, piloted by people often at cross purposes, travel along a roadway that serves as a line of demarcation between the bustling city and the respite of the park.

New York City is either a vast desert or a giant oasis, depending on who you ask. There’s a water hole at the end of every block, and at any one of them you might meet your fate.

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