Jodie's death ricochets around my head and leaves me at a loss for words

Friday’s death of Jodie Ridges has ricocheted around my head since hearing of it on Monday.
Sitting to write, I am at a loss for words and talking with others seemed little help as most just shook their heads in sadness and dismay muttering things about “what a tragedy”.
That gut response from people epitomizes how they feel when someone is seemingly pointlessly wrenched from our community and a hollow sense of all that arises when confronted with the fragility of life.
Jodie, 38, was injured in March last year when cycling on the Midland Highway, just west of Mooroopna, when hit by a car at the Turnbull Rd intersection.
The driver of the car, who was technically unlicenced, was sentenced to a month’s jail, suspended for a year and ordered to pay $10 000 to the Scott Peoples Foundation, a body set up following the death of promising Shepparton cyclist, Scott Peoples, who died in 2006 when also struck by a car.
The foundation was nominated by the Ridges family.
Jodie and I never meet, but the mother of four and I do have, or had, some similarities.
A road accident in December ’97 left me with a brain injury, and other difficulties and I too ride a bicycle.
Those two similarities seem unimportant compared to the overarching likeness – we both lived with hopes, dreams and ambitions; we, before Jodie’s death, were both compatriots in this great experiment called life.
My life was punctuated only by a semi-colon; Jodie’s, sadly, by a full stop.
It is about here that the words begin to evaporate and people, particularly men, turn to why and use reasoning in an attempt to fill the void in their understanding of such a wasteful death.
Women appear more willing to engage with the whole experience and within that work to psychologically understand the dynamics of death or injury, while men in a much rougher male approach simply want to eradicate the difficulty and return things to the way they were.
That said, many men can, however, be equally empathetic, but by tradition they tend to steer away from anything that might be somewhat emotional or, in colloquial terms, a little “touchy, feely”.
Life is loaded with heroics and while trained soldiers, firemen, police officers or even the likes of solo sailor, Jessica Watson, are not heroes, rather well-prepared people who take risks,  I do consider that of those who unknowingly and unwillingly confront the difficulties that life thrusts at them.
Jodie’s husband, Scott, and their four children have had heroism hurled at them and unlike the solitary heroes in the movies, don’t let them stand alone, be their friend and in any practical way you can, help them piece their lives back together.

Rich benefits awaits communities that adopt cycling

The rich benefits awaiting any centre that embraces cycling were explained recently in Melbourne.

Shepparton was not specifically mentioned, but implicit in the comments of the bicycle manager from Portland, Oregon, Roger Geller (right, centre), was the observation that people here need only adopt cycling to access those benefits.
Mr Geller spoke to more than 100 people at the University of Melbourne and then repeated his story about the transformative value of cycling again two days later as the keynote speaker at Melbourne’s Bike Futures conference.
Portland is in every way different from Shepparton, but the essence of Mr Geller’s message migrates without any lessening of its worth.
Shepparton, along with all other communities, has evolved around the mobility allowed by the motor car and easy access to cheap fossil fuels and in a time when there was no knowledge of, and therefore interest in, such things as climate change.
All that has changed – oil is becoming scarcer so will, in the foreseeable future, become impossibly expensive and it is now clearly understood that human actives are impacting on our climate.
Cycling can play a significant role in easing those difficulties.
Portland did not have any sort of real cycling culture 20 years ago, but now 10 per cent of “Portlanders” consider cycling as the prime means of transport.
In a city of nearly 600 000 that is a significant number and retailers, about 130 of them, reacting to the social change have asked for on-street car parking in front of their shops to be replaced by bicycle parking, “corrals” as they are described .
Portland has 500 km of developed bikeways, both on-road lanes and specific bake paths, and every day they are busy with commuters on bicycles traveling about the city.
Those developed bikeways cost about $60 million, which is equivalent in cost of two kilometers of traditional inner-city freeway.
The savings in road costs are obvious and with research illustrating most car trips are just six kilometres and as bicycles travel nearly as fast as a car, they save money and help the environment, and beyond that cycling boosts our broader wellbeing.