Posted on 07/14/2013 7:19:58 PM PDT by stillonaroll
The old I-280 and Buckeye Basin Greenbelt Parkway bike path is not safe to travel. It is littered with broken glass and stones.
There are gangs of kids loitering and blocking the path, trying to prevent cyclists from passing through.
Monday, June 24 2013, three boys attempted to attack me and prevent my passage. I recorded the event with a GoPro camera mounted on my bike.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Three youths arranged stones along a secluded section of a paved bike path. Just before 2:00, one of the youths attempts to kick the cyclist and knock him off his bike. This kind of stuff will happen more often as cities expand bike paths, and as more youths seek justice for Trayvon.
Note that I did not post this YouTube video, but one time I took a wrong turn and cycled into a homeless encampment.
Some of the rocks were placed as a swastika. How cute.
Another bad one is the American Tobacco Trail in Durham, NC. Think of it as a shopping site for Amish yutes with trail users providing the goods - http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/07/09/3020161/robbery-renews-american-tobacco.html
How did I know without seeing the video that it would involve yutes?
Yes, I see that, a few seconds after the kid tries to kick the cyclist off his bike.
The public policy implications are significant, as more local governments "encourage cycling," i.e., make driving a car more difficult.
When you are riding a bike alone, you are largely defenseless against a group of strong young men. Assuming, of course, you are unarmed.
Get a pistol and then a CCW permit. Then practice until you are sufficiently skillful.
If you don’t like guns, consider this: it is a lot worse to end up dead than to do something distasteful.
I'll tell this story for the very last time. Then I promise never again. I was on the original survey crew for these trails with ESP Associates out of Cary. At that time it was simply known as the Rails to Trails project. Over the course of several weeks of walking miles through Durham down the old track path we were followed more than once by several "groups", (I won't say "gangs" to be PC) of kids on many areas of the trail. They taunted, brandished knives, yelled threats, mostly followed and taunted us to the point where our crew chief would not leave the van for the day without his revolver.
At the time we joked we would never ride a bike down the trail "with an AK-47 strapped to the handle bars". It was evident at that time these trails went through the wrong back yards and neighborhoods in Durham. We told these tales to the Rails to Trails project manager at the time, who we met a few times on the job. He didn't care. Pet project verses verses demographic and cultural reality.
So saying the location of these trails was a bad idea from the start is not just rhetoric. The words were actually spoken way before the first drop of asphalt was poured. We knew we were creating nothing more than a path for marauding little bandits to travel between housing projects and low income apartment complexes. It goes through the worst parts of Durham. Anyone involved who is now surprised by the level of crime on this trail was never paying attention from the start. At least one just blatantly ignored the hired help. This is not news. It was an inevitable, easy call.
The Amish are up to no good again...
It's much easier to just give up cycling. :(
As is my routine, I rode my bike past a bunch of black kids today. They said hello, smiled and waved, as they often do. There has never been even a hint of a problem. But I know where to find a different class of black kids, and you couldn’t pay me enough to ride through their neighborhood.
Grab that little punk’s foot and flip him on his @ss.
Amazing how so many FR visitors and poster are unaware that FR is an international forum.
As long as I'm on a roll, I should mention another irritation. People who think threads are all about them, with posts like, "I think so too, except when they're going the other way..." with no clue as to the contents of what the post is that they're responding to.
Apparently this takes place in the Toledo, Ohio area.
I can post huge lists of upcoming biker rides where they can try to pull their crap, if they’d like to.
Some cities have groups of semi-legal, semi-organized nighttime bike rides in the summer. I thought it might be fun to try it once, but I’m a slow rider. If I get “dropped” by the group and end up riding alone, it would be most unsafe. I’d have to call a cab to get home.
But it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain (OK, that excludes most liberals) that these paths that pass through wooded areas are crimes waiting to happen. Especially violent crimes.
Depends on what county you live in. Here in Fresno county getting a CCW is not a problem as long as your record is clean.
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