On Saturday, Sept 18, I’ll be heading to San Diego to begin riding the Southern Tier. I’ve set up a separate blog for the adventure—tune in there for updates.
This has been in the back of my mind for more than ten years. Now that I’m about to do it, I feel great trepidation. Nevertheless: Onward.
Dear City of Austin—
I think your heart actually is in the right place regarding bikes. You want to do right by bikes. But time and again, you’ve shown that when you apply bike facilities to existing infrastructure, the streetscape is such that the results are worse than no bike facilities at all. Beyond that, the fact that compromise apparently is valued not only as an end in itself, but as a higher goal than a good outcome (which is the nicest way I can say that you lack the courage of your convictions) means that good ideas get turned into bad ones. We saw this with Shoal Creek Boulevard, and now we’re seeing it with the Nueces Bike Boulevard.
The irony is that Nueces already feels like a de facto bike boulevard. It gets very little motor traffic and is a pleasant place to ride. When the project was first announced, I thought it was smart, a way to recognize and build on what already exists.
But the whole Shoal Creek Boulevard debacle taught us that the city prioritizes convenience for parked cars above bikes. I suppose the retreat from the original Nueces Bike Boulevard plan is slightly less appalling, in that it shows the city prioritizes convenience for moving cars above bikes. But it is still galling.
I don’t want to be that guy who complains without offering solutions. Here’s mine: Stop. Stop planning or announcing any bike facilities whatsoever. You just get our hopes up and then let us down.
I’ve written before about the iPhone’s potential and drawbacks as a bike computer. And there are a lot of bike-computer apps available for it right now. Let’s take a look at them.
I’ve gone on a bit of a kick lately and tried out four different ones. There are one or two others that I haven’t gotten around to yet. I hope to eventually, and will report on them in this space when I do.
Executive summary: Rubitrack for iPhone and Cyclemeter are clearly oriented towards performance cyclists; right now I’d give the nod to Cyclemeter. GPSies seems almost like a toy, but might be of use to hikers. Motion-X is for GPS otaku.
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I recently resolved a nagging issue in my life that had been like an albatross around my neck for years.
Back in ’97, I visited the Netherlands, and became interested in recumbent trikes. I’ve always been drawn to the mechanically obscure, and if recumbent bikes are weird, recumbent trikes are way out there. As is my wont, I researched them obsessively when I got back home, and eventually homed in on a model that, even by the rarefied standards of recumbent trikes, was exotic. It was the AS Engineering Zenit. Made in Russia by former Illyushin Aircraft engineers, it had front-wheel drive, a box-section aluminum frame, hydraulic drum brakes, and other unusual features.
I ordered one. It took forever to arrive—the better part of a year. I may have been the last customer to have an order filled. I know that AS Engineering stiffed several customers. It didn’t come as a finished product, but it didn’t come as just a frame (the way many custom bikes do) either: because of its many custom parts, it was somewhere in between. I began putting it together with quality parts, but after a while, I got bogged down. I had routed the hydraulic lines poorly, and didn’t want to redo them. One of the lines also needed to be re-bled, which was a massive pain. The shifting was erratic, and I had trouble getting that dialed in.
So it sat in the shed. For a decade.
Every time I went into the shed, there it was, mocking me. Eventually Gwen gave me the ultimatum “ride it or get rid of it.” and I eventually decided to get with the program. I took it to Austin’s recumbent bike store, and had the proprietor deal with its various shortcomings. At the same time, I found a website for recumbents that included a classified section. Someone saw it listed and told a friend, who had been looking for a Zenit for years. I sold it.
Putting that trike behind me was an illuminating life-lesson. I had let a molehill grow to a mountain in my mind: I had become frustrated by some minor problems and intimidated by the prospect of fixing them. Ironically, in the ten or so years that had passed, those problems became much more difficult to solve (the hydraulic parts needed for the trike had become much harder to obtain, and there was a new leak somewhere).
But revisiting the trike reminded me of an idea I had for it when I first got it: to use it as the vehicle for a transcontinental bike ride. I had completely forgotten about that goal after the tumult of breaking my pelvis, getting divorced, and getting into firedancing in 1999–2000. But reminded of it, I realized that I still wanted to do it. I mentioned it to Gwen and she said “You’re not getting any younger!” So that’s going to be my big project in 2010.
Ironically, I still think that a recumbent trike is the right vehicle, but I have no regrets about having sold the Zenit, and would shy away from using it for this purpose if I hadn’t: a trike with critical parts that simply cannot be replaced if they break is a bad vehicle for a 3,000 mile journey. And at this point it would be bad mojo to ride a trike that symbolized my own inability to complete a project.
I have become slightly obsessed with the idea of using an iPhone as a bike computer. What follows will be of little interest to anyone except gadget-nerd cyclists.
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When I got home from the recent road trip, I discovered that Dean Keaton had been restriped, adding reverse-angle parking, bike lanes, zebra stripes, and a generally dizzying array of new road markings. On the day of David Byrne’s recent talk about bikes, I rode this newly restriped stretch of road and found it to be a disaster for bikes.
The image above shows how the street looked before restriping. To be fair, this is an inherently difficult situation to make bike-friendly, especially westbound: there is a pullout for a city bus, an offramp, an onramp, and two places where traffic is turning across the lane. Not visible here is the fact that this is all happening on a downhill, so both bikes and cars are likely to be moving relatively fast (this stretch is signed as 30 mph, but the limit is rarely observed). Also not visible is another intersecting offramp just to the west.
As shown here, the street has two lanes, with a third lane for merging offramp traffic. After restriping, there is one lane on the left, a no-man’s-land denoted by zebra stripes, and a bike lane on the right; there’s a second lane for merging offramp traffic.
The way the bike lanes have been striped makes them an absolute hazard. The bike lanes zig-zag across onramp and offramp traffic in a way that minimizes the crossing distance. This runs contrary to both my own intuition and effective cycling methods, where the cyclist holds a straight line across the onramp/offramp. Worse perhaps is the quality of the pavement: although the pavement in the main travel lanes is in good shape, pavement in the bike lane is very rough.
As a cyclist, I am skeptical of bike lanes in general. They seem to be designed to cater naïve riders, who don’t know how to conduct themselves in traffic, and more than that, to motorists, who don’t want to be forced to deal with bikes at all. Many motorists will interpret the existence of a bike lane as a requirement that bikes ride in it, even when it is impassable. And naïve riders will follow bike lanes, even when they’re laid out poorly. That said, there can be good bike lanes and bad bike lanes. This is a bad one. A motorist taking the onramp or offramp will come up fast on a cyclist staying inside the lane, who is swerving and cutting perpendicularly across the motorist’s path at the same time. The choppy road surface set aside for the cyclist clearly reflects our second-class status. And the plethora of dashed lines, zebra stripes, chevrons, etc, all serve to confound everybody.
That night, I went to David Byrne’s presentation. One of the speakers was the City of Austin Bicycle Coordinator, Annick Beaudet. She spoke proudly of some of the city’s new bike facilities. Including this one. I can understand a city bureaucrat taking pride in seeing a project to completion, but I have to wonder: has she actually ridden this stretch of road?
See also: How not to design a bike lane.
In the severe hailstorm that hit Austin back in May, our car took a beating—some of the dings were so sharp that the paint cracked at the point of impact. When I took it in to get a repair estimate, they told me they were going to have to replace the hood and roof. In short, major repairs.
We finally got around to taking the car in to get the repairs done, and as of today, have been without a car for three weeks. The experience has been instructive.
I’ve lived in Austin without a car before. That was as a renter, and it definitely involved compromises. It would be much more difficult to live here as a homeowner without a car.
I’ve only had to bum a ride once during these three weeks. And there are certainly a few car-based errands that we’ve deferred. But for the most part, we’ve managed pretty handily, and more importantly, it’s been a reminder that most of the short 1/2/3 mile errands we run can be accomplished just as well by bike.
It’s a little embarrassing that we got out of the habit of using our bikes for errands in the first place. We didn’t quit riding them entirely, but we didn’t ride them nearly as much as we might have. It’s hard to put a finger on why this is. Too lazy to ride? Perhaps in part. Another dumb reason might be our garage door. When we moved into this house, the garage (where we store the bikes) could only be locked or unlocked from inside. So to get the bike out I’d go into the garage, open the door, pull the bike off the wall, put it outside, come back in, lock the garage, go through the house, go out the front door, and lock that. This is not a huge inconvenience in the grand scheme of things, but it adds just enough friction to the process that we’re more often inclined to say “fuck it” and take the car. We had the garage door fixed a few months back, so we don’t have that trivial hurdle to overcome. And now we’ve been booted out of our bad habits by circumstances. I’m optimistic we won’t fall back into them.
Sheldon Brown has died. He created what may be the most extensive trove of cycling knowledge on the Internet. Which I hope will endure.
I encountered him on Usenet under the rec.bicycles.* hierarchy, where he was always a source of good information and good humor. I ordered equipment from the store where he worked a few times and was glad to have his advice. Cycling is poorer for his loss.
2007 hasn’t been a good year for cycling, at least not for me. I recently made a birthday resolution that in 2008 I would ride more.
Along with riding less, I’ve paid less attention to bike technology, which is something that’s always interested me. Lately I’ve been paying a little more atention. I just read about a prototype bike-computer/rear-view camera called Cerevellum. This looks like a great idea—plug-in modules for different functionality. One idea I’ve never seen implemented on a bike is a crash camera. Now, this might be more of a concern for me than most people, but the overhead would be slight and the potential benefits considerable.
I envision the system including rearward-looking and forward-looking cameras, an accelerometer, and some flash-memory storage. It wouldn’t need much—just enough to capture about a minute’s worth of video and audio (about 180 MB for good-quality uncompressed video—chump change by today’s standards). If the accelerometer detected any sudden movement (indicative of a crash), the cameras would save the preceding 30 seconds and the following 30 seconds. That should be enough to capture license plate numbers, the circumstances of the crash, etc. A manual trigger to save would also make sense, as would manual still photography capture. Equipment like this does exist for cars, but nothing miniature enough for a bike. With 1 GB memory cards as common as dirt, one could record several minutes of footage per ride, as well as a lot of still photos, which could be interesting in ways other than crash documentation.
A little while ago, I was riding to a downtown destination by way of San Jacinto Blvd, and noticed that they had striped it for bike lanes. Without wading into the controversy of whether bike lanes really are good for cyclists or not, I have to say, they really blew it here. The diagram above shows the lane striping at the 10th-Street intersection on San Jacinto.
If you’re on a bike and headed straight, what do you think you ought to do here?
If you stay in the bike lane, you’ve potentially got two lanes of traffic turning across your path. In order to avoid that problem, you need to swing across a lane and a half of traffic well before you reach the intersection. Neither is a good option. The latter is less bad, but will be counter-intuitive to a naïve cyclist. While I’ll be the first to admit there are a lot of people on bikes who do dumb stuff that understandably pisses off drivers, I wonder how often drivers are getting pissed off at cyclists who are just responding sensibly to poorly designed situations like this.
Coming home by way of Trinity Street, I discovered bike lanes there as well. Although I didn’t notice any intersections that were striped as egregiously badly as the one on San Jacinto, the oddity on Trinity is that the location of the bike lane relative to the curb changes from block to block. One block there’s a dive-in parking lane between the bike lane and curb. The next it’s immediately next to the curb. After that there’s a parallel parking lane between the bike lane and the curb. Unless you know in advance where you should be aiming, you will find yourself out of the bike lane after crossing almost every intersection. And the street is just hilly enough that in many cases, the bike lane on the far side of the intersection is invisible behind the crest of a hill.
It seems impossible to me that these bike facilities were designed by anyone who rides a bike.
Gwen and I finished the HCRA this past weekend.
We had gone to a mandatory orientation for the ride (apart from packet pickup) that suggested the organizers took a patronizing and paternalistic attitude towards the riders. No drafting, no riding double-file (even if the shoulder permits it), lights-out at 9:00, etc. My enthusiasm had waned long before we showed up at the rollout.
I hadn’t been on my road bike at all in three weeks. Gwen and I have been very busy with the house, buffing up that curb appeal and trying to make it more saleable. We didn’t even start packing for the ride until 9:30 the night before.
Rollout was supposed to be at about 8:00 AM Saturday, and we were encouraged to get there well before that, to allow for setup and general confusion. So we were out of bed at 6:00 AM after a poor night’s sleep. Weather was not agreeable: cold, rain, and lightning. By the time we arrived at the starting point, the lightning had abated, but conditions were no more inviting. The organizers delayed rollout repeatedly, until about 10:30, to give the weather a chance to clear. It still wasn’t clear at 10:30, but it was less bad. My mood was foul.
Once we got moving, however, it wasn’t so bad. As event rides go, this is a small one–something like 350 riders–and the patronizing attitude of the organizers had led me to believe that almost all the riders were beginners. This was not the case: there were plenty of competent riders out there, and some damn zooty bikes. Once we had a chance to warm up, and the field thinned itself out, riding wasn’t too bad. Within an hour or so, things were drying out, and by lunch, the weather was actually quite pleasant.
The route on Day One was shortened by about 15 miles, to 50 miles, because of the delayed rollout. That turned out to be quite sufficient. The course was divided into 4 legs, with lunch at the end of leg 3. I knew that, despite my lack of training, I’d be able to grind through the ride on willpower and my lifetime mileage base. While I was gratified to be proved right, I was definitely riding a lot weaker than I felt I should be, and on the third leg of Day One leading into the lunch stop, the combination of little sleep, little training, and energy drained away waiting in the cold left my vision closing in a tiny bit as I jammed along. At the stop, it took me about 10 minutes before I could contemplate food. At some point late in the course, (leg 3? leg 4? It’s all a blur) we ran into a hill that had at least 4/5th of the riders walking–it’s not so much that the hill was itself terribly steep, but that it came at the end of four miles of gradual climbing. Gwen and I both managed to ride up it (and I managed to hold my 23 in reserve).
Once we rolled into camp in Krause Springs, we pitched camp, got cleaned up, hung out, and ate barbecue. By the time we were done with dinner, it was getting dark and cold (and we hadn’t packed enough warm clothes), so bed turned out the best place to be. Davey, the eponym for our team, had tweaked his knee, so he headed back to Austin after dinner. I realized I had risked the same, by riding in a nearly new pair of cleats (Nikes with carbon-fiber soles. There’s too much hype and fashion with Nike, but if I can get their shoes for 1/3rd retail or less, I’ll hold my nose and buy them. The carbon-fiber soles on these really are nice.) that I hadn’t quite settled into. As it turns out, the shoes didn’t give me any trouble, but that wasn’t the smartest thing to do.
Day Two started off chilly but dry apart from dew. We got up a little late, giving the sun a chance to warm things up for us a little. Breakfast consisted of breakfast tacos and insufficient amounts of insufficiently strong coffee. We struck camp and rolled out. The course this day seemed to mostly trace back Day One’s course. The same hill that had people walking on Day One had them walking Day Two going the other way. Over the course of this ride, I was definitely moving a little slower, my ass was sore, my hands were sore (I had forgotten my gloves), but I managed to avoid the tunnel vision of the day before. Gwen and I both finished pretty strongly and without incident.
The course was challenging and beautiful–I love the hill country. I’ve done some riding out there before, and was prepared for some of the stuff this course had in store for us. There was probably at least one support volunteer for every rider on the course, and they had plastered the sides of the roads with signs to encourage us that made me feel a bit like I was in fifth grade. But they had also looked after, well, just about everything: feeding us, transporting our gear, minding things on the course (I had occasion to borrow a track pump from one of them when I flatted early on Day One). We just had to ride, eat, and camp out.
I’ve posted a few pictures at Flickr.
Their DJs encourage motorists to hit cyclists (registration may be required–log in as plastic/plastic).
There’s been a lot of death in the news lately. Warren Zevon and Johnny Cash. I recently mentioned Walter Richter. And today I read that Ken Kifer bought the farm, run over by a drunk driver while riding his bike.
I used to hang out on the rec.bicycles.* Usenet hierarchy, and Ken was one of the regulars, and one of the most prolific writers on bike subjects I know of. I never met him in person, but felt that in a small way, I knew him.
Warren Zevon’s impending demise had been public knowledge for over a year; Johnny Cash’s mortality is unmistakable on his last album. My neighbor Walter Richter had been in decline for some time, and had a good run. Reading about Ken this morning was like a punch in the gut.
DuShun came by after work and we rode the Manor back-loop, racing the setting sun. 34 miles, average speed 17.0 mph. That average includes a lot of in-town riding–when we were out on country roads, DuShun mostly rode point and set a fast pace of 22-25 mph. It was all I could do to hang onto his wheel.
Now I need to eat. A lot.
Got together for my first ride with both DuShun and Caeasar in over a year. DuShun took us on a loop he’s been riding–halfway to Buda, then east to Nuckol’s Crossing to make a circuit around the Tuesday Nighter course, and then back home on Slaughter Lane. 32 miles. After a long-ish hiatus from the bike, and a 30-miler the day before, I wasn’t feeling too perky, but with them taking it relatively easy, I managed to hang in there.
Afterwards I met Gwen and her gang at the Springs. Gwen convinced me to get into a yoga position to stretch out my bad hip. I tried to be a good sport and went along. I did not achieve enlightenment before my extremities fell asleep.
Today I am toast.
Rode 360 today, my first serious ride in a while. 30 miles, and I’m not saying what my average speed was. I felt really out of shape.
Various observations:
With no work on my desk today, I decided to get out on my bike.
I started rambling in a generally southwest direction without any plan in mind, not following any of my usual routes. I eventually wound up on that path next to Lamar, which took me as far as 12th St. I felt unaccountably nervous on this path–I’d never ridden on it before, but that shouldn’t be enough to make me feel wigged out. At the southern end of the path, I did run into a few obstacles that justified some nervousness–a few dips, swerves, and one really bad bump in the pavement. I took the bump hard, but thought I got over it without incident.
Eventually I decided to ride 360, and made my way over towards the Town Lake pedestrian bridge. After crossing the bridge, I noticed that the city seems to be working on a new path that will connect the south end of the bridge to Rollingwood, which will be a boon to outbound cyclists–but in order to take advantage of it on the inbound side, one would need to ride against traffic for a few yards.
The ride up 360 was fun and uneventful, but with a wind out of the north, was a lot of work. I noticed a couple of deer grazing right out by the highway, which I had never seen before. Gosh, I wonder if they’d been displaced from their usual habitat? [he said, with great sarcasm] When I got to the convenience store at Steck & Mesa, I discovered it had been more work than I knew: my back wheel had been knocked out of true and was intermittently rubbing against the brakes. That would explain why I had been averaging 14.5 mph. I headed over to Nelo’s, my favorite shop (fortunately very close at this point), and once there, we discovered I had actually broken a spoke. I’ve done that only once before, in a really serious accident, so I was very surprised. Nelo had built that wheel, and I joked to him “you built this wheel–it should be bulletproof!” He put a loaner wheel on my bike and sent me home while he worked on my wheel.
I made it the rest of the way home without incident. Coming in on Shoal Creek, I caught up with a guy on a really fancy mountain bike–full suspension, disc brakes, the works. Except he definitely wasn’t dressed like a cyclist (gym shorts and Keds), and the one serious telltale: cheap quill pedals. Normally, someone with a bike like this would be riding clipless pedals–bikes at that level usually don’t even come with pedals, on the assumption that the rider will want to put on the clipless pedal system of his choosing. If they do come with pedals, they’re cheap throw-aways–like this guy had.
A lot of cyclists are snobs about their sport, and I’ll admit I’m one. There are levels of snobbishness: Some won’t condescend to wave at anyone–I assume this is either because they don’t want to break their perfect aerodynamic position, they view everyone else as a competitor, or at that moment you aren’t in their road/mountain/commuter clique. Some will only be friendly towards someone with a fancy bike that shows they’ve made a monetary commitment to the sport.
What turns my snob-knob up to 11, though, is a rider who isn’t as good as his bike. There’s nothing wrong with being a recreational rider of modest abilities and aspirations on a modest bike. There’s nothing wrong with being a great cyclist on a humble ride or a superbike. But when a guy in tube socks, who considers five miles to be a real workout, is riding a fancy bike, he is a fred.
Rode the Manor back loop with DuShun. 34 miles; 17.7 mph average. Not bad–faster than it would have been if I were riding alone. The back section, on a stretch of road where the name changes every three miles, was wonderful–new pavement, few cars, and just enough of a breeze to take the edge off the heat.
I stopped hitting the reload button in Friendster long enough to go on a good bike ride today. The 360 route northbound. 30 miles, average speed 15-point-something. It’s been too long since I went for a ride, but I felt pretty good and had fun. Traffic on 360 was relatively mild. I noticed a new stoplight had been installed (I can remember when there were none on 360).
One of the many good things about cycling is that it exposes one to so many little blog-worthy tidbits.
At Steck & Mesa, I stopped for a giant soda at the kwik-e-mart there. A Coke delivery man was making his drop-off–an entire pallet-load. Some observations: Lots of Dasani, only one crate of Evian. Bottled Coke and Diet Coke were roughly even, but in cans, there was only Diet (or Diet+Caffeine Free), ie, if you want a regular Coke, you get it in a bottle. There must be some sort of weird demographic phenomenon behind this. Harebrained speculation: Bottles are larger than cans (I think the smallest are 20 oz, vs 12 oz for a can). Larger quantities probably appeal more to guys. Diet Coke probably appeals more to women.
I stopped by Nelo’s shop and ogled a Merlin Cielo, an exercise in technoporn costing about $7400. I don’t dispute that there may be $7400 worth of technology, materials, and craftsmanship in that bike. But the law of diminishing returns must apply to this sucker in spades. My own bike was hardly cheap, but I can’t imagine getting a 2x or 3x advantage riding that thing.
Shortly after leaving Nelo’s, I (barely) heard my phone ringing. It was DuShun, calling to say he had just seen me from his car and congratulated me on getting out to ride.
At the end of my ride, I stopped by Chango’s for one of their excellent burritos. As I was eating, three EMTs stopped by to grab a bite. Two lit up cigarettes. I found this extremely bizarre and funny. I wonder if dealing with life and death crises every day gives them a cynical view of their own mortality.
