Who wants to get political? Sign a petition and write the cops!

First off, I want to ask all of y'all who think that updating the Austin Bike Plan is a good idea to cruise on over to the Austin Bike Plan Petition website and sign that mofo. The City of Austin Bicycle Pedestrian Program are updating the old Bike Plan, which was last worked on in 1996. As in Bill Clinton vs. Bob Dole 1996. As you can imagine it's rather out-dated, and of all the infrastructure improvements the '96 plan included, only 1/3 of them were actually even implemented.

LETS ALL GIVE A BIG HAND TO THE CITY OF AUSTIN'S DEDICATION TO THEIR TWO-WHEELED CITIZENS!!!

Sorry, maybe that was a little bit over the line. Anyway, this petition was put together by the guys at Austin Bike Blog, both of whom have a background in politicking and have a good pair of heads on their shoulders (collectively, not each). They're also bicycle commuters themselves so they drink from the communal koolaid and know how much it can suck to bike around this city of ours sometimes.

Their petition covers a lot of good points, but the main things it calls for are a timeline of achievable goals in infrastructure development that the city will stick to, establishing an east-west and a north-south bike-boulevard or bike-only path, appointing an advisory committee to the city council to provide updates and recommendations to the plan as needed, and several other decent-sounding ideas. If you want to know all about it just check their page out and fill yourself in. It looks good to me, and my name's already on the roster.

Now on to a little bit of other politics, and by politics I mean police state, and by police state I mean the Austin Police Department and their crackdown on cyclists...

Our good friend (and one of the first to arms when the revolution comes) Willo4 decided to not just sit on a website and talk about the crackdown but to engage the police directly. This is what he emailed Police Chief Art Acevedo yesterday:

I just sent him this-
are we doing anything about the increase in gay-bashing and the increase in smash and grabs and the increase in sexual asaults or are we just waisting our resources on some kids on bikes? and if so how soon can you go back to where was it again?

Here's their response to his email, which he posted as a comment to my rant from the other day:

Mr. Kern,

The Austin Police Department takes all violations of the Texas Penal Code and the Texas Transportation Code serious, whether we are talking about Hate Crimes, Burglaries, Sexual Assaults or Transportation Code violations by bicyclists.

I can assure you that we investigate every case as thorough as possible and file charges based on the information from the investigation.

If you are inquiring about a specific case, please let me know which case and I can talk to you about that.

Sergeant Richard Stresing
Austin Police Department
Public Information Office
(512) 974-5017

Am I reading that right or did they just put cyclists lacking the proper lights or riding on the wrong sidewalks in the same league (and importance) as rapists, robbers, racists and gay-bashers?!? Really guys? I've been there and watched them when they ignored the facts in front of their faces and declined to give a ticket even though a driver directly (and willfully) endangered my life by performing an illegal maneuver in their automobile. I know for a fact that they don't "investigate every case as thorough as possible and file charges based on the information from the investigation"; oftentimes they CHOOSE to ignore the information given to them.

Yet here they are promising to look into our crimes with the same thoroughness and seriousness as is pointed towards a rapist suspect. Knowing that bit of info, on top of the fact that the cops can rarely even keep the law straight when it comes to their enforcement I'll be keeping an eye out for an upsurge in your friendly neighborhood rapists. And I'll be making sure I've got a light and a spare set of batteries on me at all times. Hope they don't spend so much time looking out for us that they miss any of those other guys.