Tensegrity is a portmanteau of tensional integrity. It refers to structures with an integrity based on a synergy between balanced tension and compression components.

We're the ones getting run off the roads and killed.

in the Netherlands, a driver is presumed to be negligent in any collision involving a cyclist, unless the driver can introduce evidence rebutting that presumption.

• It has been brought to your buccaneer-simian's attention that he can sometimes come across as... oh what's the phrase, a finger-waving, preachy asshole on certain subjects.
  
  
  
  Transcript follows for the midget, because it's hella funny:
  ( Make with the clickety-click for to be transcript reading )
  
  Although for the record:
  -I do my best not to ride on the sidewalk
  -I don't wear spandex shorts
  -My mellon bucket looks nowhere NEAR that dorky.
  
  
• What does a society geared towards pedaling bikes as the everyday choice for getting around town look like? Something like this:

  During a 73 minute period on 9/12/06 at one corner of Nieuw Markt (a nice open square in Amsterdam), I took the following 82 pictures of bicycles. Why? Because sitting there I noticed how remarkably different the whole Amsterdam bicycle scene was from my home,... the San Francisco area, California, USA...

  Here's another photo-essay on The Bicycle in Amsterdam:

  Few people consider themselves "cyclists" any more than they see themselves as "washing machiners," "automobilists," or "shoe-ers". It's simply how you get around, with your kids, girlfriend on the rear carrier, groceries, dog, briefcase. Cycling clothes are only for racers. Everybody else rides in the clothes they otherwise wear, be it a short skirt and heels, business suit, construction overalls, or jeans. Helmets are simply not worn, because cycling is not perceived as a dangerous activity. The bikes are simple and outdoor-dog tough and have full-coverage mudguards, lights, chaincases, upright sitting, and all the other basics needed for practical use.

• Lexi pointed out to me earlier [SEE COMMENTS] that there's a reason Yurpeen streetside cafés are cool and 'Murrican ones suck ass.
  
  In 'Murrican streetside cafés, you sit next to row after row after row of parked cars. And beyond that, rows and rows and rows and slowly moving cars, shitting poison into the air and contributing to the ambient level of noise pollution while hunting for the perfect parking spot.
  
  Over in Yurp (where the History's from), most of the cities were built long before automobiles, on a more human scale (and at human sound levels). There's a lot more pedestrian walking and bicycling going on, which is much pleasanter and quieter than having your coffee next to a parking lot 1 lane wide and circling the block, with another one circling the block in slo-motion just beyond it.

Contrary to a faction of wishful thinkers, the earth does not have a creamy nougat center of oil. Oil fields do not replenish themselves. Also contrary to the prevailing wish, no combination of alternative fuels will allow us to keep running the interstate highway system, Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World and the other furnishings of what Dick Cheney called our "non-negotiable way of life."

People who refuse to negotiate with the circumstances that the world throws at them automatically get assigned a new negotiating partner: reality. Reality then requires you to change your behavior, whether you like it or not. With global oil production peaking, we are now subject to rising oil prices, as markets are forced to contend with allocating a resource heading in the direction of scarcity...

We have to live differently. We're going to have to re-inhabit and reconstruct our civic places -- especially our small towns -- and we're going to have to use the remaining rural places for growing food locally, wherever possible. Our big cities will probably contract, while they densify at their centers and along their waterfronts. Our suburbs will enter a shocking state of economic and practical failure.

We cannot imagine this scenario because we have invested so much of our collective wealth the past 50 years in the infrastructure for a way of life that simply has no future.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it...

Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

In Do Motor Vehicle Users in the US Pay Their Way?(PDF), a forthcoming article for the journal Transportation Research A, Delucchi writes:

To pay for [road] infrastructure and services, governments collect revenue from a variety of [motor-vehicle user] taxes and fees. The basic objective of this paper is to compare these government expenditures with the corresponding user tax and fee payments in the U.S.

The analysis indicates that in the U.S. current tax and fee payments to the government by motor-vehicle users fall short of government expenditures related to motor-vehicle use by approximately 20-70 cents per gallon of all motor fuel. (Note that in this accounting we include only government expenditures; we do not include any "external" costs of motor-vehicle use.)

That implied subsidy of 20 to 70 cents a gallon -- which excludes social and environmental costs such as climate damage and uncompensated crash costs, which Delucchi has tallied elsewhere -- equates to 7 to 25 percent of the current price of gasoline. On a dollar basis, U.S. drivers are underpaying local, state and national governments by $40 to $105 billion a year.

• "Parking requirements create great harm: they subsidize cars, distort transportation choices, warp urban form, increase housing costs, burden low income households, debase urban design, damage the economy, and degrade the environment."
  -Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking.
  
  
• Review of The High Cost of Free Parking.
  
  
• We Paved Paradise: So why can't we find any place to park? Because parking is one of the biggest boondoggles -- and environmental disasters -- in our country.
  

The message of the book [Urban Sprawl and Public Health] is simple: our car-dependent suburban environment is killing us. Planners, most notably the New Urbanists, have been saying this for decades, but Jackson’s got the statistics. And the charts. And the tables. In his book and in lectures nationwide, Jackson demonstrates—technically, like a doctor—how sprawl is at least partially responsible for a full range of American diseases, from asthma to diabetes, from hypertension to depression. The reason that we spend one dollar out of six on health care is very preventable, and yet we claim some of the worst health statistics in the developed world. [FULL INTERVIEW]

1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline... The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.
   
   
2. We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto/Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this...
   
   
3. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami ...) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications...
   
   
4. We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient... The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing ships. It's for real...
   
   
5. We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil... The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead...
   
   
6. We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things...
   
   
7. The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).
   
   
8. We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway...
   
   
9. We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called "doctoring."...
   
   
10. Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions...
    

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* I will agree that we have to do something to keep trade happening and people moving. And alternative fuels will probably be a useful part of that. But the age of "happy motoring" is going to be over faster, I think, than our society is prepared for, or is even thinking about.

• I am totally fucking OVER my desire to own a motorcycle. Not only does a motorcycle burn polluting dinosaur-juice that America, inc. is paying a private, unaccountable, corporate mercenary army trainloads of taxpayer dollars to help violently colonize foreign lands that have it, but after taking a spill at 10 mph, that was enough for me. I don't need to dump at freeway speeds.
  
  
• I'm starting to wonder how geeky something like lacrosse armor would look biking around town. I dunno, I first read Neuromancer at an impressionable age. And broken bones suck & keep you off the pedals, which sucks.
  
  I'm already starting to see myself as one of those weird bike-tribe types that the cube drones regard quizzically, like some latter-day two-wheeled Mongol, living in the saddle, carrying all his essentials on his back or his mount. May as well dress the part, especially when it serves a practical purpose.
  
  Besides, I'm not really sure I buy into the "you're safer without a helmet because cagers see you as more vulnerable" argument. And the wind didn't give a toss what I was wearing when it sent me a-bone-snappin'. Shit up and happens, period.
  
  
• I've posted previously on how monkey-powered-mobility has historically been associated with womens' and workers' liberation movements. But as Paul Dorn points out:

  [C]orporate interests have used their considerable political influence to ensure that highways get funded and transit systems don't, creating an extensive system of subsidies to encourage driving and discourage alternatives. The automobile-centered US transportation system has been created to maximize profits, not to enhance personal mobility. [sic]
  
  The prioritization of automobiles by government transportation planners has had numerous detrimental effects, with the most damaging impacts borne by poor and working class people. [clickety-click for the full text]

  The local non-native-English-speakers I see pedaling ancient fixer-uppers around East Oakland have a lot more in common with the dreadlocked activists pedaling fixies to Critical Mass than it might at first seem. The personal is political, for damn sure.
  
  
• Dinosaurs burners are EXPENSIVE! Think of how much you spend in gas, insurance, parking, and just plain, old OPEN SPACE that does nothing but wait around for a dino-burner to pull up and sit on it. Now think of how much the time (the vast majority, I'd guess) your dino-burner sits there in that space, just rusting. All those hours of every day, waiting to be (expensively & dirtily) started up, as oxidation slowly, inexorably eats away at virtually every piece.
  
  What percentage of your household income is tied up in several thousand pounds of fueled-by-corporate-war machinery that will spend the majority of the time you own it substantially depreciating in place? And why do we put up with things being structured that way, if all it does is makes us worse off and the wealthy & powerful more so? Really, scroll up and read that Paul Dorn article. It's brief.
  
  
• I do not like opiate-based painkillers. I can't believe people do this shit for fun. Do you have any idea how much prune juice I'm drinking to deal with what it does to my digestion? And then there's that bluuuuuuuuhhhhaaaaaaeeehhh ffffffffft cloudy lassitude that descends. FUCK! I used to spend my days burning calories on 2-wheels, going places. Now it's a choice between feeling exactly where the splintered bit is and being fuzzy in the head, with my stomach making me remember things William S. Burroughs wrote in Naked Lunch. Ugh.
  
  Don't get me wrong, broken collarbone hurts worse than poppy-belly disturbs. But once I can get through the night without, you're damn right I'm gonna. This is so many kinds of not the Monkey's vibe.
  
  
• We are not blocking traffic, motherlovers. We ARE traffic. Learn it. Live it. Handle it. Because I would never advocate "U-Lock Justice*". But the way some cagers drive... I understand the instinct.
  
  
• Very few people have the tools, space, and know-how to do major repairs on their dinosaur burners these days. But you can live in an apartment, buy MAKE a basic bike stand and with some basic, inexpensive, quality, lo-tek tools, you can get pretty deep into the maintaining of your bike with basic skills and a library book or a website.
  
  And wrenching on your own monkey-powered mobility feels cooler and more empowering than one might imagine.

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  * Personally, I define "ULJ" as smacking the dino-burner's hood with your security device in frustrated response to the cager having just pulled some stupid and life threatening maneuver in your, or another cyclist's, immediate vicinity.
  
  A lot of what gets dubbed "ULJ" I would personally file under Hot-tempered vandal with a deadly weapon and an unreasonable hair up their butt.
  
  Still not advocating either.