NIMBY'S

[MountainBiker]

Is anyone else running into trouble with the Nimby crowd...you know the "not in my back yard" group that keep getting events cancelled or changed because it might inconvenience them for a couple of hours

We have had some big events cancelled and even the National Road Championship moved to a different area because of these guys.

You plan on doing some event, or going out to support the amature racers, and next thing you know, it's cancelled...very frustrating

[Shadow Catcher]

My wife and I operated/orchestrated The Pairs and Spares Mostly Tandem Tour in NW Ohio. I started and ended each 25 mile loop at Harrison Lake State Park this was isolated very rural Ohio and we provided a map and the streets had direction arrows. This was one of five major rides under the Toledo Area Council of Hosteling International. It was not a race and no roads were closed and no one was inconvenienced.
There is a race (starting in Sylvania Oh) operated by another group that shuts down major roads on Sunday morning making it difficult to even get to church, the riders are discourteous and demand such things as pieces of carpeting over railroad tracks.
TACHI in 20+ years has never had complaints, the other group(s)...

[Fenlason]

I was going to say.. we don't have that problem here at all.. but one of our group road rides.. ran into a little problem last summer. It was a ride, that started with someone from one of the local hospitals.. kind of a move and improve type of thing. We went through a couple of leaders.. and ended up sort of self lead. [we had a small core of people that stepped up.. my wife and I as part of that] The original leader is a mountain biker.. but hates road riding and road riders. The mountain bike trails had a trail head paved.. while we had to ride through "crap" around a locked gate... and through the smoking hospital workers.

We got a complaint from the neighborhood we ride through. Some of the riders are semi clueless.. taking too much of the road.. and being obivious to others [even other cyclist] While there were issues, the complaint while civil.. was a little over the top. We could see that it would probably be a long term issue..so we just moved out to another location.

[MegC]

Yeah, the elk get REALLY annoyed when I accidentally toodle through their autumn hormone fest. Bastages.

[MountainBiker]

We have two problems here. Unfortunately to run a local event nearby, at one point or another, you are going to end up going through the wealthy land owners area, and heaven forbid we inconvenience them.

Also, right now the police are very reluctant to help at events, unless of course the organizers come up with a lot of money for police and insurance, and that just makes it unaffordable

I don't get it. They tell us we have to get out and exercise more, then when we try to have events to promote fitness, they stop us

[Fenlason]

We have two problems here. Unfortunately to run a local event nearby, at one point or another, you are going to end up going through the wealthy land owners area, and heaven forbid we inconvenience them.

Also, right now the police are very reluctant to help at events, unless of course the organizers come up with a lot of money for police and insurance, and that just makes it unaffordable

I don't get it. They tell us we have to get out and exercise more, then when we try to have events to promote fitness, they stop us

On many of our rides.. they are just group rides and we just do them. Our club does host 3 time trials as part of a series. We have run them without the Police being a part of it, it has not been required... but we have gone back to having them and find their fee well worth the price.

[rossjools]

, I can understand why some communities don't want cyclist events in their backyards. I am a member of an organization called St. John Ambulance Australia, a volunteer first aid organization and each Saturday afternoon when I'm not on afternoon shift I do a first aid duty with a local road racing cycle club. I know that not all cyclists have the bad attitudes of some but there are members of this club who definitely do. There is a section of the course they ride that is on the off ramp of the Stockton Bridge here in Newcastle and the cycle lane is marked by cones each Saturday afternoon. As each grade lines up on the starting line the commissair reads them the riot act, what they can and can't do. One of the can't dos is if you come up behind a slower grade you must not overtake outside the cones and thus stray in to the traffic lanes, vehicles doing 80 km/h, sometimes more. You must apply your brakes and stay behind the slower grade for the few hundred metres of the cone area. Invariably every week there is at least one rider suspended for a month for doing exactly this. When some people get on a bike they leave their brains at home.

I have also experienced cycle clubs out training in Sydney when I worked there that thought they could do just as they pleased and that the road rules didn't apply to them. They would ride at night on black bikes with all black clothing and no lights at all in the middle of winter. They also think nothing of going through red traffic lights without even slowing down or looking to see if there is any traffic coming through the green light. When one of their number was hit and killed by a poor truck driver (never had a chance, either of them) he was attacked by these morons as he got out of his truck to render aid as is required by law. He ended up in hospital and a cone of silence descended over the whole thing until a couple of car drivers who had initially seen the incident and stopped until they saw what was happeneing to the poor truckie and drove off, fearing for their own physical safety, came forward and assisted the police with their inquiries. Turns out the president of this particaular club was the ring leader in attacking the truckie while their member lay dying on the roadway. And they wonder why some car drivers justifiably think they are morons As I said, some people leave their brains at home when they get on a bike, and most of those that do will never ever make international standard, they will never ride for Australia or any other nation in the Tour de France.

Last weekend I travelled to Sydney to do a St John Ambulance B.E.R.T. (Bicycle Emergency Response Team) course. Unfortunately I have to go back to complete the distance ride (40 km) as I was too unfit to finish it because I had in the previous 24 hours caught a slight chest infection so my energy and stamina were right down. During the theory section on the Saturday morning we were read the safety riot act, what we could and could not do. St. John is a uniformed, disciplined organization with military ranks (goes back to the days of the crusades and was then the military ambulance and medical corps of the Christian armies). We were told we would be given a caution for our first safety breech and for a second we would be told to place our St. John bike to one side, gather up our personal stuff and leave the course. Believe me, the instructors weren't whistling dixie, they meant it so we all complied and no one was asked to leave the course. It doesn't take much to do it right and it is more of an attitude thing than being overly intelligent.

I must admit the majority of cyclists are very courteous and will do anything to avoid a collision or confrontation with car drivers but the few that have the attiude that they are God's gift to the travelling public spoil it for the law abiding ones. Admittedly, there are also some car drivers who need a lot of "attitude realignment" when it comes to cyclists. Cyclists sin NSW have the right to the first 1.4m of the road if in single file or 2.6m if travelling 2 abreast and they are entitled to do so and there is nothing the vehicle driver can do about it. Finally, when we're out on our bikes (I got on mine yesterday afternoon for the first time in about 10 years) we have to be responsible for our own safety and riding attitudes (as far as we can be). I've attended the results of cyclist versus car or truck prangs and it isn't a pretty sight. Even cyclist versus cyclist prangs can also be a traumatic result if it happens at 80 km/h. My apologies for the long post,but this is a subject close to my heart too, especially now I'm back on my own bike training to complete the next BERT course in probably 3 months time.

,
Ross.

[SteveF]

Yeah, yeah, them awful cyclists. I could start listing things I see drivers do (both when I'm riding and when I'm driving) that is wrong and/or dangerous and not stop typing 'til my fingers fall off. Everyone's human--a little courtesy in either direction goes a long way.

[rossjools]

Yeah, yeah, yeah SteveF, so could I but the context was about cyclists and why some communities have nimby attitudes towards them. Some car drivers don't bother to look in their outside mirrors before they open their drivers' doors and knock cyclists off their bikes. That hasn't happned to me but I've had to stop my car and render first aid to a cyclist that has happened to in front of me and then call the ambulance and then her boss to tell him what had happened. 2 weekends ago we had an annual event around Lake Macquarie called Loop the Lake. It's more or less a fun ride to raise money for various charities and the police are heavily involved each year with some bicycle police riding in uniform. The whole loop is 87 km with 2 shorter sections of 42 and 21 km. There were a number of incidents reported where car drivers acted in a discourteous and even dangerous manner towards cyclists, particularly at a notoriously narrow bridge. At last years event I watched horrified as a car driver got out of his car right near my first aid point and punched a cyclist in the face for something that was the car drivers fault. I took a photo of the car, rendered first aid and handed the pic on to police and made a statement. He was charged and knew he didn't have a leg to stand on with so many witnesses willing to testify against him so he pleaded guilty and got a couple of hundred hours community service for his trouble.

Ross.

[Fenlason]

In my locale, or at least what I witness here, things are not as bad as what Ross is talking, but I do understand it can be that bad in places. I do see that many road racers can be rather arrogant. I do see a lot of cyclist here, that are horrible, but at least most of it is just being mindless.. vs intentional malice. Of course these same cyclist are kind of horrible to other cyclists.. We do of course have troubles with cars.. some intentional some just carelessness. I think one of the reason's it is not so bad here is the lack of population density.

[Tom Kurth]

I used to ride and I do sympathize. My son is now an avid cyclist. But a 10K (foot)race in our little town of 400 people last summer opened me up to an other way of thinking. Some of the comments here seem to indicate that 'no one was inconvenienced.' That seems to me to be a little short-sighted. Put the word 'apparently' in there and it might be more accurate. The race here was publicized and I did know about it, but without knowing exactly what time the runners would be passing by my house it was most certainly an inconvenience because I had to be somewhere at a particular time. I'm on your side but it's almost impossible to put on a race or a fun-ride or anything else that uses public roads that isn't an inconvenience to someone. Whether such inconvenience rises to the level that the event should be jeopardized, well . . . Point being, it's hard for a participant to judge what is inconvenient to someone on the outside.

Best,
Tom