I agree with Mass Bike that the truck driver was responsible. Not sure that he should be criminally charged, that's a really big hammer to use on someone that almost certainly did not intend any harm. But he wasn't even cited, although he left the scene. He called the Boston police many hours later, from New Jersey.

That said, I would advise any cyclists to avoid ever putting themselves in the position that Dr Kurmann found herself in. It is dangerous to ride beside large vehicles with limited visibility, as we see. Also good to note that semi trucks frequently swing left to set up a right turn -- I don't believe she realized the danger she was in until the truck was close to actually passing in front of her.

The symbol in the middle lane is a "sharrow", which really indicates that the middle lane is not a bike lane. The sharrow is supposed to indicate to motorists that bicycles may be expected in the lane, and to remind cyclists that they are allowed to use it. The Boston police report gets this wrong, irresponsibly making the driving public stupider. At the time of the crash the right lane was used as a turn lane, and there was a bus stop just before the crash site, making it likely that cyclists would use the middle lane.

It's fun to say that you never trust anyone, but that can't literally be true. For example, I trust thousands of drivers standing at red lights or stop signs not to charge out and run me over. It would be almost impossible to move in traffic without relying on most drivers to do the right thing most of the time.

First off why the fuck does she video the interaction with her neighbor when discussing these neighbor issues? If you ask me that's provoking all on it's own. That's not what good neighbors do to resolve issues.

Kids on trampoline always peepin what you're doing is kinda annoying but barking dogs piss me off. If your defense is "that's what dogs do" then fuck you. If your dogs are barking outside at 6:30am bring the fucker in. I love animals, but dogs that constantly bark in close neighborhoods are a nuisance. End of barking dog rant.

Also that hillbilly hair is amazing and she fixes her bike with duct tape. These things score huge points with me

(edit) okay after watching more vids from this women's channel which are ALL of her neighbor, i think that Billy is a bit off and difficult to be neighbors with. Also with as many views as this woman gets from her videos shes making a nice chunk of change. Just sayin'. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWtCqWbJOO0VqzDX4AX3eKg/videos?disable_polymer=1

Sad video for sure (the music was a bit much though).

Kind of a tough call - I do think the truck driver deserves the majority of the blame and should at the minimum be charged with a hit and run - and probably more - as he did pass the cyclist and clearly did not proceed with any due caution on that turn.

With that said, as an avid cyclist myself, I trust NO ONE while riding. Looking at the video, there seems to be a bike lane symbol in the middle lane, suggesting that cyclists proceeding through the intersection should be using that lane. Now I don't think that is enforced by law, but if that is what the symbol is there for, this would be a perfect illustration as to why. Also, if you look even closer, it appears the truck had his indicator on before she pulled up beside him; i.e. she should have seen his indicator. I hate to put any blame on that poor woman and - I really hate to say this - this video only goes to show that both parties were at fault.

@noims -- My grandfather had about 10 war stories that he rotated through telling, pretty much exclusively after one of my uncles "broke the dam" by asking him to recall things as they were at the Oshkosh air show standing next to a P-47 airplane like he had worked on.

By the time that happened, my grandfather was in his 80's and in very good physical and mental shape (cattle rancher that did daily work manhandling heavy feed bags around, etc.) but had a quirky personality because he was 90%+ deaf. I don't think that was a result of the war, hearing problems seem to run in the family.

Anyway, he frequently used those hearing problems as an excuse for not having to interact with people. He had hearing aids, but he'd turn them off most of the time and just ignore people. I think some of that was being an introvert, and some was probably lingering "shell shock" / PTSD effects. But overall he really adjusted back to civilian life just fine. Got a degree in education on the GI Bill and taught and coached basketball to High School students, then worked as a small-town Postmaster, and eventually retired to work the ranch. I don't think any of us in his family, including his wife and children, thought of him as being "impaired" by the mental effects of the war. But it was clear that some of what he experienced had a very deep, lifelong effect on his outlook.


I wrote out the 3 stories of his above because they seemed to be the ones that had the most emotional impact on him. To me, it was interesting that a lot of stuff outside of combat hit him the hardest. He also had more traditional "war stories" stuff about victories and bravery, like when his unit captured / accepted the surrender of a young German pilot in a Bf-109 who deserted to avoid near certain death from flying too many missions after the handwriting was on the wall that the allies were going to win. But by far, he got more choked up about the other stuff like having to knock that French girl off her bike and seeing starving civilians and being unable to help them much.

Like you said, more banal stuff side-by-side with or against a backdrop of horror. I think it's pretty much impossible to imagine what those sorts of experiences in war are really like and what being in those situations would do to us mentally. And then WW2 in particular just had a massive impact on the entire generation. Basically everybody back home knew multiple people that went away and never came back. Then when some did come back, they were clearly different and yet reluctant to talk about what happened. Pretty messed up time to live through, I guess.

Possible, but I don't really think so. I think that the Medical minds of the time thought that physical shock, pressure waves from bombing etc. as you described, were a (or perhaps THE) primary cause of the psychological problems of returning soldiers. So the name "shell shock" came from there, but the symptoms that it was describing were psychological and, I think precisely equal to modern PTSD. Basically, "shell shock" became a polite euphemism for "soldier that got mentally messed up in the war and is having difficulty returning to civilian life".

My grandfather was an Army Air Corps armorer during WWII. He went through basic training, but his primary job was loading ammunition, bombs, external gas tanks, etc. onto P-47 airplanes. He was never in a direct combat situation, as I would describe it. He was never shot at, never in the shockwave radius of explosions, etc. But after the war he was described as having mild "shell shock", manifested by being withdrawn, not wanting to talk about the war, and occasionally prone to angry outbursts over seemingly trivial things. Eventually, he started talking about the war in his mid 80's, and here's a few relevant (perhaps) stories of his:

He joined the European theater a couple days after D-Day. Came to shore on a Normandy beach in the same sort of landing craft seen in Saving Private Ryan, etc. Even though it was days later, there were still LOTS of bodies on the beach, and thick smell of death. Welcome to the war!

His fighter group took over a French farm house adjacent to a dirt landing strip / runway. They put up a barbed wire perimeter with a gate on the road. In one of the only times I heard of him having a firearm and being expected to potentially use it, he pulled guard duty at that gate one evening. His commanding officer gave him orders to shoot anyone that couldn't provide identification on sight. While he was standing guard, a woman in her 20's rolled up on a bicycle, somewhat distraught. She spoke no English, only French. She clearly wanted to get in, and even tried to push past my grandfather. By the letter of his orders, he was "supposed" to shoot her. Instead, he knocked her off her bike when she tried to ride past after getting nowhere verbally and physically restrained her. At gunpoint! When someone that spoke French got there, it turned out that she was the daughter of the family that lived in the farm house. They had no food, and she was coming back to get some potatoes they had left in the larder.

Riding trains was a common way to get air corps support staff up to near the front, and also to get everybody back to transport ships at the end of the war. On one of those journeys later in the war, my grandfather was riding in an open train car with a bunch of his buddies. They were all given meals at the start of the trip. A short while later, the track went through a French town. A bunch of civilians were waiting around the tracks begging for food. I'll never forgot my grandfather describing that scene. It was tough for him to get out, and then all he managed was "they was starvin'!" He later explained that he and his buddies all gave up the food that they had to those people in the first town -- only to have none left to give as they rolled past similar scenes in each town on down the line.

When my mother was growing up, she and her brothers learned that they'd better not leave any food on their plates to go to waste. She has said that the angriest she ever saw her dad was when her brothers got into a food fight one time, and my grandfather went ballistic. They couldn't really figure out what the big deal was, until years later when my grandfather started telling his war stories and suddenly things made more sense.


A lot of guys had a much rougher war than my grandfather. Way more direct combat. Saw stuff much worse -- and had to DO things that were hard to live with. I think the psychological fallout of stuff like that explains the vast majority of "shell shock", without the addition of CTE-like physical head trauma. I'd wager that when the docs said Stewart's father's shell shock was a reaction to aerial bombardment, that was really just a face-saving measure to try to explain away the perceived "weakness" of his condition.

I expected a ten-minute video to be documentary style, not someone biking through a tent village....

Trickle-down economics seems to be working as intended.

Have you ever ridden a 10+ speed or mountain bike for hours on end? Recumbent bikes are far more comfortable, and can facilitate greater pedal power because you have something to push against.
I couldn't figure out why there's no cockpit or fairing. That seems like a design flaw to me....or a planned upgrade at extra cost.

if it's such a bulky machine, why not make it regular bike sitting position with an encloded cockpit? Better visibility and warmer in cold Swedish winters.

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That's no bike. It's got 6 wheels!

Neat design, though.

Uhhh... you are aware of the atrocities Japanese soldiers committed less than a century ago during WWII, right? And I think you're confusing psychopaths (who may or may not be violent) with those suffering from a psychosis (a complete mental break with reality).

Either way, mental illness is a huge problem in Japan and in fact treatment of mental illness is one area where their socialized medicine is sorely lacking behind other countries.

I don't know of any credible studies that say that mental illness rates are lower in Japan than in other developed countries, but I do know that the overwhelming majority of crimes in pretty much any country are actually committed by people who are legally sane.

So, despite what you may believe, "genetic" predisposition is an unlikely factor in explaining Japan's crime rate. Besides which, criminologists agree that whatever role genetics plays in people becoming criminals it isn't nearly the most important factor and is dwarfed by environmental factors (see this for a scholarly article on the topic and <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29760212>this for a popular news article).

You're trying to paint this as two equal parts of the recipe for crime when in reality it's more like "add two cups of environmental and a dash of genetics/personality/whatever."

Crime does happen here. The kinds of stuff I hear about on a daily basis in the news: crimes of desperation (homeless guy stealing to survive), thrill-seeking crimes (stealing a bike because you're young and stupid and the chances of getting caught are pretty low), crimes of passion (i.e. domestic violence, drunken bar fights, etc.), organized crime (i.e. yakuza), and the big one--sexual assault.

Sexual assault is so prevalent in Japan that there are actual signs warning women of areas where they are likely to be groped or have men expose themselves. There are train cars for women only so they don't have to get groped on the way to work or school. I mean, how fucked up is that?

So it isn't all rainbows and unicorns over here. Crime happens, and unfortunately is much more likely to happen to you if you're a woman. Still, even accounting for that the crime rates here are ridiculously low, for the reasons I stated above.

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When he was asked a similar question over at reddit he replied...

"Said some inappropriate words. Slowly dragged my bike backwards. And then sprinted in the other direction."