Cycle Lanes Quotes

Suffering has brought clarity into my life. Maybe the things that have happened to me are punishment for what I did in a previous life, maybe they were fate or destiny, and maybe they're all just part of a natural cycle - like the short but spectacular lives of cherry blossoms in spring or leaves falling away in autumn.

I know the names of the books - their old covers bleached to palest greens or pinks by the endless cycle of summers - lined up on the shelf.

on a bike ride through the Surrey Lanes, pedalling in my cotton dress through the hot fields blushing with poppies, freewheeling down a sudden dip into a cool wooded sanctum.

They'd eaten every meal outdoors, hard-boiled eggs and cheese from a picnic basket, and drunk wine under the lilac tree in the walled garden. They'd disappeared inside the woods, and stolen apples from the farm next door, and floated down the stream in her little boat as one silken hour spun itself into the next. On a clear, still night, they'd dug the old bicycles out of the shed and cycled together along the dusty lane, racing, laughing, breathing in salt from the warm air as moonlight made the stones, still hot from the day, shine lustrous white.

THE NO CONTACT RULE: 1. Zero contact; face to face & online. 2. No phone calls. 3. No text messaging. 4. No attending events where they're present. 5. No emails. 6. No letters, cards, or gifts. 7. No checking their social media profile. 8. No contacting their family and friends. 9. No combing through old photographs. 10. No going down memory lane. 11. Zero communication.

We would do well, as Orwell counselled, to see the traces of the dystopian around us, to find the ends of those threads and how far along we are; the most accurate prophecy being that people, and the allure of domination, never really change. We can Copenhagenise our future cities, make them as green and smart as we can, but provided we are still embedded in systems that reward cronyism, exploitation and short-term profiteering, that require poverty and degradation, it will be mere camouflage. Dystopias will have cycle lanes and host World Cups. What may save us is, in Orwell’s words, a dedication to ‘common decency’ and the perpetual knowledge that it need not be like this.

What would you like for your own life, Kate, if you could choose?” “Anything?” “Of course anything.” “That’s really easy, Aunty Ivy.” “Go on then.” “A straw hat...with a bright scarlet ribbon tied around the top and a bow at the back. A tea-dress like girls used to wear, with big red poppies all over the fabric. A pair of flat, white pumps, comfortable but really pretty. A bicycle with a basket on the front. In the basket is a loaf of fresh bread, cheese, fruit oh...and a bottle of sparkly wine, you know, like posh people drink. “I’m cycling down a lane. There are no lorries or cars or bicycles. No people – just me. The sun is shining through the trees, making patterns on the ground. At the end of the lane is a gate, sort of hidden between the bushes and trees. I stop at the gate, get off the bike and wheel it into the garden. “In the garden there are flowers of all kinds, especially roses. They’re my favourite. I walk down the little path to a cottage. It’s not big, just big enough. The front door needs painting and has a little stained glass window at the top. I take the food out of the basket and go through the door. “Inside, everything is clean, pretty and bright. There are vases of flowers on every surface and it smells sweet, like lemon cake. At the end of the room are French windows. They need painting too, but it doesn’t matter. I go through the French windows into a beautiful garden. Even more flowers there...and a veranda. On the veranda is an old rocking chair with patchwork cushions and next to it a little table that has an oriental tablecloth with gold tassels. I put the food on the table and pour the wine into a glass. I’d sit in the rocking chair and close my eyes and think to myself... this is my place.” From A DISH OF STONES

Her bed faced three large uncurtained windows that looked due eat, and she loved the endless variety of sunrises that greeted her from day to day. Growing up in Florida and in the suburbs, she had never realized how the sun paced back and forth through the year, like a restless dog on a tether. During the winter it rose far to the southeast and skulked along the ridgeline, disappearing in mid-afternoon. But now it rising a little past due east, on its way to the northeast where it would achieve the summer solstice, then begin the slow day-by-day journey back to the winter solstice. Watching the sunrise, with its reminder of the endless and inevitable cycles of life, was, she thought, her version of religion.

The days are long and quiet. They accumulate. There is no end to them. Picard walks the lanes around his fields. He broods. He writes—long, long books about great men and great deeds. Wine is made, and drunk. Winter comes, then spring, then harvest, then another deep cold winter. The cycle is endless. The huge clock ticks in the hall, eating time. His mind goes around in circles. What shall I do, now? Where do I go? Who am I?

There is still a cycle lane down the side of the road, but everyone ignores that and cycles down the middle, although we still follow the system of always cycling on the left, so everyone proceeds in quite an orderly fashion.

Mitochondria convert flux through the Krebs cycle into electrical membrane potential. The membrane is a capacitor: a thin insulating layer that separates two electrically charged aqueous phases, generating powerful electrical fields across the membrane. Changes

I never feel entirely safe on a road between some painted lines saying ‘cycle lane’, much as I wouldn’t feel entirely safe swimming between floating markers in Cape Cod that said ‘shark-free lane’.

What was I supposed to do?” Lane returned. “Let him slaughter the old codger on the court room floor? Nhiles are you aware how hard it is to get blood out of carpet?

This reaction can in its turn determine the next stage in the karmic cycle of events — what we decide to do, and the spirit in which we do it. Life, then, is to a large extent in our own hands. One of the Confucian ideals is that “the archer, when he misses the bullseye, turns and seeks the cause of the error in himself.

I’m not goin’ anywhere till I get my fuckin’ shoes!” Amon bellowed as he shoved against the tense, squabbling tangle that had formed in the lane, the functional machines now the locus towards which the weight of the crowd surged.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs described the ballet that takes place on crowded pavements as people make eye contact and find their way around one another. I felt a similar, if supercharged dynamic coming to life in Paris’s traffic lanes. With cars and bikes and buses mixed together, none of us could be sure what we would find on the road ahead of us. We all had to be awake to the rhythm of asymmetrical flow. In the contained fury of the narrow streets we were forced to choreograph our movements, but with so many other bicycles flooding the streets, cycling in Paris was actually becoming safer. As more people took to bicycles in Vélib”s first year, the number of bike accidents rose, but the number of accidents per capita fell. This phenomenon seems to occur wherever cities see a spike in cycling: the more people bike, the safer the streets get for cyclists, partly because drivers adopt more cautious habits when they expect cyclists on the road. There is safety in numbers.fn7, 15, 16

The other distinctive thing about them, and the reason I like to go to Hazlitt's, is that they cannot bear to admit that they don't know the location of something they feel they ought to know, like a hotel, which I think is rather sweet. to become a London cab driver you have to master something called The Knowledge--in effect, learn every street, hospital, hotel, police station, cricket ground, cemetery, and other notable landmarks in this amazingly vast and confusing city. It takes years and the cabbies are justifiably proud of their achievement. It would kill them to admit that there could exist in central London a hotel that they have never heard of. So what the cabbie does is probe. He drives in no particular direction for a block or two, then glances at you in the mirror and in an over casual voice says, “Hazlitt’s–that’s the one on Curzon Street, innit, guv? Opposite the Blue Lion?” But the instant he sees a knowing smile of demure forming on your lips, he hastily says, “No, hang on a minute, I’m thinking of Hazelbury. Yeah, Hazelbury. You want Hazlitt’s, right?” He’ll drive on a bit in a fairly random direction. “That’s this side of Shepherd’s Bush, innit?” he’ll suggest speculatively. When you tell him that it’s on Frith Street, he says, “Yeah, that’s the one. Course it is. I know it–modern place, lots of glass.” “Actually, it’s an eighteenth-century brick building.” “Course it is. I know it.” And he immediately executes a dramatic U-turn, causing a passing cyclist to steer into a lamppost (but that’s all right because he has on cycle clips and one of those geeky slip-stream helmets that all but invite you to knock him over). “Yeah you had me thinking of the Hazelbury,” the driver adds, chuckling as if to say it’s a lucky thing he sorted that one out for you, and then lunges down a little side street off the Strand called Running Sore Lane or Sphincter Passage, which, like so much else in London, you had never noticed was there before. Hazlitt’s is a nice hotel, but the thing I like about it is that it doesn’t act like a hotel. It’s been there for years, and the employees are friendly–always a novelty in a big-city hotel– but they do manage to give the slight impression that they haven’t been doing this for very long. Tell them that you have a reservation and want to check in and they get a kind of panicked look and begin a perplexed search through drawers for registration cards and room keys. It’s really quite charming. And the delightful girls who cleans the rooms–which, let me say, are always spotless and exceedingly comfortable–seldom seem to have what might be called a total command of English, so that when you ask them for a bar of soap or something you see that they are watching your mouth closely and then, pretty generally, they return after a bit with a hopeful look bearing a potted plant or a commode or something that is manifestly not soap. It’s a wonderful place. I wouldn’t go anywhere else.

Putting terms aside, we’ll see that the ancient biosynthetic Krebs cycle was fixing CO2 a billion years before rubisco and the evolution of photosynthesis in the cyanobacterial ancestors of plant chloroplasts. When it first emerged, the reverse Krebs cycle had little to do with energy generation, instead providing the carbon skeletons needed for biosynthesis. This perspective elucidates the deep metabolism of cells, yet it is still largely missing from the more medically oriented textbooks. It’s a serious omission.

Valmac was among the best companies in the industry, but Lane had made a serious miscalculation when he borrowed millions to expand. The poultry down cycle lasted longer than he thought, and Lane was having a hard time paying off the debt. Don Tyson, having followed his father’s strict rules for limiting debt during the upswing, was ready to buy Lane out.

The Danger Zone! Parked cars hide not only entering vehicles, but also people who walk out to get to the driver’s side. And the door of a parked vehicle can open up to 4 feet into the lane. If you ride just beyond the reach of the door, you are still at risk of being startled and swerving if it opens suddenly. The Danger Zone: 1) Strike zone. 2) Startle zone. 3) Unusable road width. Sure, many people—even some bicycling “experts”—will tell you, “Always keep as far to the right as possible,” and, “Look out for opening car doors.” But at speeds above walking, you can’t react in time to avoid a car door. And you can’t see inside many cars to know whether a person is inside. If a door opens in front of you, you will hit the door unless you swerve out into the street—maybe into the path of a passing car. So to avoid being struck or startled, the end of your handlebar should be 5 feet or more from parked cars. Hold your line. Don’t weave in and out between parked cars. Don’t weave in and out between parked cars. If you weave into the parking lane, a parked car will hide you from drivers approaching from behind. Then you have to pop back into the path of overtaking traffic when you reach the next parked car. Put yourself in the place of a driver a couple of hundred feet behind you. Are you constantly visible and predictable? Motorists don’t mind slowing down for a predictable, visible bicyclist nearly as much as they mind a bicyclist who swerves out in front of them.

needs. Riding too far to the right is dangerous because you’re in the danger zone of poor sightlines and opening car doors; it invites motorists to pass too closely, and it takes away your escape route to the right. The correct lane positions described in this booklet are the safest and most efficient. Do not be intimidated. Take responsibility for your own safety, even if other traffic must occasionally slow and follow you. An understanding of road positioning makes the difference between stress-ful, dangerous surprises and smooth, uneventful travels.

And the bikes, why did people think bikes were a good thing? Why were cyclists so smug? Why did cyclists ride on pavements when there were perfectly good cycle lanes? And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If

The year used once to begin in March. That was simple and natural—to let it start on its course with the first warmer breath of returning spring. It begins now in January—which has nothing to recommend it. I am not sure that Nature does not show us it really begins on the first of October. “October!” you cry, “when all is changing and dying! when trees shed their leaves, when creepers crimson, when summer singers desert our woods, when flowers grow scanty in field or hedgerow! What promise then of spring? What glad signs of a beginning?” Even so things look at a superficial glance. Autumn, you would think, is the season of decay, of death, of dissolution, the end of all things, without hope or symbol of rejuvenescence. Yet look a little closer as you walk along the lanes, between the golden bracken, more glorious as it fades, and you will soon see that the cycle of the year’s life begins much more truly in October than at any other date in the shifting twelvemonth you can easily fix for it.

Instead of asking what can we add to our roads to make them safer, they began asking, in the counterintuitive style of IDEO, what would a safer road look like? What they discovered astonished them. It turns out conventional wisdom about traffic is wrong. Often, the less you tell motorists how to behave, the more safely they drive. Think about it. Most accidents occur near school gates and crosswalks or around bus and cycle lanes, which all tend to be regulated by a dense forest of signs, lights, and road markings. That barrage of instruction can distract drivers. It can also lull them into a false sense of security, making them more likely to race through without paying attention. Minimize the lights, the signage, the visual cues, and motorists must think for themselves. They have to make eye contact with pedestrians and cyclists, negotiate their passage through the cityscape, plan their next move. Result: traffic flows more freely and safely. Ripping out the signage along Kensington High Street, one of the busiest shopping strips in London, helped slash the accident rate by 47 percent.