Coal Rolling Is a Menacing Crime—And It's on the Rise
Coal Rolling Is a Menacing Crime—And It's on the Rise
In a rural community outside Houston, a violent incident shattered lives. A teenage boy was charged with assault, but was justice served?
Paywall-free link: https://archive.ph/3tLtL
The crash occurred on September 25, 2021, the first crisp day of fall after a hot Texas summer. Claudius Galo intended to ride a hundred miles or more that morning. “There was a chill in the air. It felt so good. The energy was high,” he recalls of the small group that gathered to ride with him.
Galo had moved to the Houston area from Rio de Janeiro, about 14 years prior. A calm and inquisitive engineer who works in the oil and gas industry, Galo had become unhealthy and overweight in his late thirties. He tried running but got hurt, so his doctor recommended adding swimming and cycling. Now 45, he’d lost 60 pounds and completed six Ironmans and almost a dozen half Ironmans. Tamy Valiente, 45, had come to the United States from Costa Rica nine years before. Inspired by the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, in her twenties, she’d dreamt of becoming a competitive bike rider, but first, “I had to raise my babies,” she says. After going through a divorce, she eventually saved enough money to buy a bike frame and slowly began building her first racing bike part by part. She would often wake at 4 a.m. to train on the narrow roads close to her home back near San José, where buses crept by within inches of her handlebar. To Valiente, the U.S. felt like paradise. “The roads seemed safe. The traffic laws were actually enforced,” she says.
On the day of the crash, David Reynolds, a 45-year-old tattooed photographer with two teenage children, had ridden 11.5 miles to meet the group at Hockley Community Center, about 30 miles west of downtown Houston. Cycling was his “Zen time,” when he could zone out and let all his worries wash through him. Though he wasn’t training for an event, he had ridden for nearly 600 consecutive days. “I just like to ride,” he says. The group that rolled out that morning included three other experienced cyclists: Craig Staples, Brad Stauffer, and Keith Conrad. The six regularly met up to ride through Waller County, an agricultural and ranching community just outside the sprawling metropolis. The group would become known as the Waller 6.
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Rolling coal should be illegal, considered aggressive driving, and the police should be able to impound your vehicle for a few weeks if caught doing it.
On a similar topic, any exhaust loud enough to require hearing protection should be illegal and the vehicle should be removed from the road until its exhaust cannot damage the ears of people outside the vehicle. It is absolutely ridiculous one asshole can wake up an entire neighbourhood at 2:00 am because "fast car go vroom vroom very loud, I am so cool."
If you see someone rolling coal, it is morally OK to find them and remove the stem valves from their tires.
If they're going to pollute the air everyone uses they don't get to put it in their tires
Tamy Valiente doesn’t ride anymore. She doesn’t talk to her bike. She’s given up on her dream of completing an Ironman in Kona. It’s not that she doesn’t want to ride. She can’t.
“And you know,” she says, “I really loved riding my bike.”
This sentence hit hard...
Same here. You can tell it still hurts.
Every state needs to have a rigorous and regular car inspection policy. Coal rolling (and all other exhaust modifications) need to be illegal at the federal level, or mandated to be illegal at the state level. They don't even purport to have an effect on efficiency or performance like some other exhaust modifications. They are objectively worse in every single metric beside looks, which is subjective besides. They are an attack on the environment, other motorists, cyclists, pedestrians, and people who live in the surrounding areas.
I've been behind a shit-stacker in a car and they blinded me when they chugged from a traffic light. I can't imagine how impossible and awful being around one on a bicycle would be.
Two Waller police officers arrived at the scene and, after taking some pictures, moved the broken bikes to the side of the road. When the cops told everyone that they could go home, Ferrell was aghast, “I was like, ‘Go home? These people need to go to jail.’” He told the cops he’d been coal rolled by the teenage driver, and it appeared the boy was attempting to coal roll the group of bike riders when he slammed into them.
Ferrell knew what professional police work looked like. His brother was a cop in Houston for 25 years and his dad worked at the prison unit in Sugarland. “Neither one of these cops were professionals at all,” he says.
Not to change the subject, but yeeeah that's about standard for cops. Asking them to do their jobs is too much.
That was attempted murder, simple.
Attempted Homicide, not murder
Simplified, murder is when you extensively plan to kill someone where homicide is a spur of the moment thing. In this case it might even be argued that it's attempted (?) manslaughter, the accidental killing of people, as homicide would still be on purpose where here it can reasonably be argued that the guy wanted to scare and intimidate them, but not kill them
For those confused like I was.
A civil suit filed later alleges that the driver had attempted to “roll coal” on Ferrell, which the driver denies. An increasingly popular phenomenon at the time of the incident, coal rolling happens when a driver of a diesel truck floods the engine with more fuel than it can efficiently process, emitting a thick black plume of exhaust across the road. The emissions systems of diesel trucks are strictly regulated under federal law. But some truck owners modify their exhaust systems with illegal aftermarket parts, or fail to fix broken exhaust systems. In the 2010s, rolling coal became a kind of defiant act, an aggressive backlash against the increasing regulation of fossil fuels. People using forms of transportation that don’t burn oil—namely, those riding bikes, walking, or driving an electric vehicle—became targets. Social media apps such as TikTok helped drive the #rollingcoal trend. Videos with captions like “POV: You roll coal on every bicycle you see,” showing the engorged tailpipe of a diesel truck expelling a bubbling smoke, accrued thousands, even millions of views.
Of all the stupid things that stupid people can do, coal rolling is probably the most baffling to me.
My feelings can only be found at the intersection of surprise, curiosity, hatred and disgust of a Venn diagram
Archived link if you’d like to read the article.
Cyclists in areas where people regularly roll coal should be permitted to carry arms.
In Texas it is already legal to carry, concealed or not, without a permit.
Colorado makes it legal, if the weapon is concealed, but I would still never.
And we do get rolled here like anywhere else. But still. F these neanderthals. As long as something like in the article doesn't happen, they're not worth the effort.
Everyone everywhere should have the fundamental natural right to carry arms.
"Everyone" I'm sure that would turn out great.
When people in the woo communities talk about low vibrational, does it mean they have less empathy than a rock?