Moron Number One

I think most cyclists who spend much time out in the world have the experience of getting yelled at by passing cars from time to time. A lot of the time it's unintelligible and these days I always just smile and wave. Saturday I was riding down to Regina's Candies to get some Easter loot, a common springtime ride for me, and went down Lexington through Como Park. I was using the bicycle/pedestrian sidepath and clattered across the intersection where a couple of cars were waiting. The guy in the orange car came around the corner and yelled "Nice Stop!" as he accelerated past, showing his aggravation.

Late last season I got a Fly6 rear light/camera combination, about which I have mixed feelings, but I've been using it and it was running as I went past Orange Car guy. Here's a still from the video:

You can pretty clearly see that I've got the green light. Not quite discernible in here is that I also have the pedestrian Walk signal. I had to swerve around Orange Car guy because his extensive driver training apparently omitted the part about where you're supposed to stop for a traffic control device. It's not uncommon to get yelled at for doing perfectly legal things, like, you know, riding in the street, but I particularly liked getting chastised by someone because I didn't stop when I have the green light!

I expect there'll be more morons this season, but the first sighting is always a welcome sign of spring.

Happy Riding everyone! And remember to stop at all those green lights!

Saint Paul Bicycle Plan adopted

On Wednesday March 18 the Saint Paul City Council voted to adopt the Draft Saint Paul Bicycle Plan. This has been a long time coming. Many of the local bicycle and pedestrian advocacy groups put out a call to get cyclists to show up. It worked. For the first time, they had to put additional bicycle parking outside city hall for a City Council meeting, not that the Council got it arranged.

Bicycle Parking filling up fast outside City Hall on March 18.

Having been to any number of neighborhood or district council meetings where the objections to bicycles range from "this will draw cyclists who will urinate in our front lawns" to "this bicycle trail will be too close to the RV parking I built over my property line onto city land" it was gratifying to be in the majority for a change. Each side had 15 minutes to speak. Ten people signed up to speak against, 28 to speak for, and people like me didn't even bother signing up when I saw how long the list was already. The Antis were mostly concerned with parking, particularly on Wabasha. There are rumors about of 150 parking spots being lost in the plan, though the actual number hasn't been determined, and longstanding businesses like CandyLand note that people going into their store aren't going to pay $10 to park in a ramp to buy $2 worth of candy. Putting aside the fact that you can park cheaper than $10 and it's hard to get out of CandyLand for $2.00, they probably have a point. The City wasn't concerned about the slow strangulation of several businesses along University triggered by the building of the Light Rail line and the subsequent loss of on-street parking. Various promises about trying on-street parking on University once Light Rail was in have so far not been realized. Those worried about parking also may not realize that they have allies in the pedestrian world; on-street parking means endless door zones for cyclists, but is a welcome buffer from fast-moving traffic for pedestrians on the sidewalk.

When everyone was done saying their piece, the City Council voted to adopt the Bicycle Plan. Since not all the Antis had time to speak, they'd had everyone who had come to speak against adoption of the Bicycle Plan stand to get a sense of the numbers. It looked like they were about to wrap up without doing the same for the Pros. A prompt from the audience rectified this, and the Council had us stand.

Supporters of the Saint Paul Bicycle Plan stand in the kind of cool Art Deco City Council Chambers.

The Chambers emptied after the vote and heaps of us went down to the Amsterdam Bar & Hall to celebrate. A worry of many businesses is that cyclists don't spend any money. We did our bit this night despite the hurdle of the Amsterdam's credit card system being down. I had a couple of beers and a bowl of mussels and fries, then took my leave from the merry bunch, walked back to work, changed, and rode home.

Some of the happy crowd at the Amsterdam Bar after the City Council meeting.

It has taken a long time to get to just this point, and it was a happy evening to be in the majority for once. However, there is lots of work still to be done. Some non-controversial aspects of the Plan will undoubtedly go in without any problem, but other proposals will cause a ruckus. There will be more public meetings, outraged groups, worries about cyclists urinating in front yards, demands to preserve free parking, worries about how it will affect the children. We won't always have that happy majority at these meetings, but it sure felt great for this one evening.

Well, I guess that's equality of a sort

Sometimes I ride to work, sometimes I drive. Today I drove, and coming down Kellogg into downtown Saint Paul the rush hour traffic was all jostling to move into the left lane. I let a school bus move in front of me and could see the reason ahead; a policeman stopped in the right lane with a cyclist standing next to the cop car. I thought at first maybe there'd been a crash, and he was involved, but as I came alongside and then turned, the cyclist looked fine, there were no cars stopped, and the guy was rooting around in his pannier as the cop looked on.



I parked in the adjacent parking ramp and took this photo. The cyclist looks like a pretty standard-issue Twin Cities commuter: Surly Long Haul Trucker, fenders, Brooks saddle, Ortlieb bags. I think he got stopped for some traffic violation. He sure looked annoyed. I don't know what he did. Speeding? It is downhill. Run a light? Perhaps. It's an unmarked car, would be easy not to notice. Whatever it was, the cop thought it serious enough to pull him over and then plug up one lane of traffic on one of the busiest roads into downtown at rush hour. Protecting and Serving, you know.

Something old, something new...

My son Henry, 21 years old and a shade taller than my 6' 5", needs a bicycle every bit as tall as mine. By happy coincidence, in 2009 a guy in Utah, having read this blog and some of my whining about needing tall bikes and the difficulty of finding them these days, e-mailed me to say he had a stripped tall Fuji steel frame and he'd give it to me, all I had to do was pay shipping. Sure! So, about $45 later, I was in possession of a big huge tall Fuji frame scraped down to bare metal.


Henry holding the Fuji frame as we got it, April 2009

The condition of the frame as received. It looks a bit like rusting shipwrecks on Guadalcanal from 1943. I had the paint people sand blast the frame before painting.

It would be exaggerating to say we swung immediately into action on this. I did have the bottom bracket shell and headtube faced so that the opposing surfaces were parallel. I didn't, but should have, dragged the frame to some local framebuilder to get a couple of water bottle mounting bosses brazed on. This would have been trivial when it was still bare metal. I did take it to a powder coating place over in Golden Valley and had it painted a nice, fairly nondescript blue-gray color. In went a sealed-bearing bottom bracket and some cheap headset, and then the bike sat in the garage.

Henry in the meantime got taller than he was in 2009. He has a utilitarian Novarra Transit 7-speed internal hub bike that's a bit too small. He rode a mid-1980s Trek 620 until he got right-hooked and bent the fork. He got a Brompton H-model (the tall Brompton) from his grandmother. And finally, this summer, we decided to finish the built-out on the Fuji.

It's a funny mix of parts. The Fuji frame is probably from the late-1970s, which I infer from a) it's enormous size (68cm) b) it's complete lack of braze-ons and c) it's recessed front dropouts, a precursor to the 1980's "lawyer lips". Appropriately, some of the parts date back to the 1970s as well. The front wheel, for instance, is built on a 1977 Phil Wood hub, the very hub that appears in my Bike Touring Circa 1980 photos. The saddle is the Brooks Professional that came on my 1975 Motobecane Grand Record. The rear rack is a 1984 Blackburn, before racks had adjustable seatpost attachments. The rear wheel is from the Trek 620, the sidepull brakes were new because the Trek had cantilevers and this bike didn't have cantilever studs. The seatpost is new (different sizing than the Trek), the front derailleur is new, the Moustache bars were from an experiment I tried with my Atlantis, and the Honjo hammered fenders I just had lying around. The Honjos were, as usual, fiddly to install, and I had to fabricate a couple of brackets for the front fork mount and the brake bridge attachment point. In the end, though, we got this: The Coolest Bike in Winona

It's hard to classify, with classic and modern elements, but in the end, it comes together nicely. It still looks 1970s, especially with the clamp-on water bottle cage holder (and I didn't have a silver cage that worked with these clamps on hand, hence the black cage), the three brake cable housing clamps along the tob tube and the seatstay clamps for the rear rack. The black fixture low on the seatpost is an attachment point for a Burley Travois trailer.

Here's Henry riding it. Note the good leg extension on the down-pedal:

In the end, we're probably into it for $500 plus of course whatever sunk costs there were in parts lying around in the garage. That's a good value considering it's a pretty decent bike in a size that's very difficult to source these days.

Hot damn, I'm famous!

For at least a while in mid-August 2013, if you went to Google and did a search for 'bicycle touring', you'd get this page:

See that handsome devil in the black and white photo upper-leftmost in the results? (No? Click on the image, you'll get a big version) That's me!

Which is kind of strange. I haven't toured that much, and the rest of the images are from all sorts of global destinations. Maybe it's longevity; the Bike Touring Circa 1980 page went up in 1998 or so and must have been extremely thoroughly indexed at this point.

Here's a better view of the photo:

I don't know how long this has been the case, or how long it will persist, but for the moment I'm basking in my Googley fame.

Watching the Tour de France

To be clear, I don't really give a rat's ass about bicycle racing. I don't read Velonews, I don't follow local clubs, I've never raced (I'm too slow, for one thing) and I don't care that much. I have met Lance Armstrong, 7-time winner of the Tour de France, and that was kind of cool because he's so famous, but he also personifies the problems with the sport and this event, that the podium results are just sort of tenative until all the drug results come in, sometimes years later.

Having said all that, I really like the Tour de France. Oh sure, the competitors are all drugged up, they just haven't been caught yet, and they are super-specialized physiques just like champion athletes in any big-money endeavour, but I like the team interplay and I really like the television coverage.

Really liking the television coverage used to be a problem because we don't have cable and the Tour used to show on Outdoor Life Network and then Versus, lesser cable channels, relegated with other minor sports like bass fishing and the National Hockey League. The Riverview Theater in Minneapolis would do free shows of the coverage on weekends, but that meant riding over to Minneapolis and getting all the stinking Subaru ads at full size, too.

Now the Tour is on NBC Sports. We still don't have cable, but for the last couple of years and again this year they've offered an excellent iPhone/iPad app. I highly recommend this. It's $15 for the whole Tour and has live video with commentary and, best of all, no commercials!

This is close to the end of Stage 3. Blue Shoes Guy won't win the stage.
 Yeah, the race is fun, and provides a reason to fly all over France and take photos from helicopters ("hell-ee-coptas", according to Phil Sherwen). It's this castle- and chateau porn that is brilliant.  And the lovely scenery, like Nice:
  
 Looks pretty Nice, eh? Ho ho.

 The first three days of this year were on Corsica, a place to which I'd given just about zero thought up to this point in my life, but which I'd now like to visit. The French get into this coverage, too, and in this case I was wondering what those guys were up to in the water. Fortunately, the heleecopta zoomed in for a closer look.

 Water rocket boots? That actually looks more interesting than the team time trial!

Now, this app (also available in Android) does a couple of things. First, if you're at work, you can have your iPhone next to your computer and keep an eye on the Tour while looking like you're working. You might want to watch your data consumption on this. The other thing that's pretty cool is that, if you have Apple TV, you can Air Play the broadcast to your regular television and watch it full size. It's brilliant!

Meanwhile, the estimable BikeSnobNYC blog had a comment by wishiwasmerckx which captured the essence of TdF coveage, so you can familiarize yourself with the commentary. Study this list and you should be able to pick up the action in an instant no matter what time you tune in to the coverage of Phil and Paul.

A brief training exercise for watching the TdF:

Tapping out a rhythm... Turned himself inside out... Open up the suitcase of courage... He's in a spot of bother... Oh, my, he's ridden into the carpark... The colored fellow... He'll be paying for this effort tomorrow... That chateau was built in 1547... One by one, he's peeling away his competitors, and now he's all alone on the slopes of... The riders will have to look out for that traffic furniture... There's a dangerous left-hand corner less than a kilometer from the line which may cause fits for the leadout trains... I'm hearing on race radio that there has been a crash at the 135 kilometer mark. We don't know if any of the favorites have been swept up in it or delayed... And the team car has sent several of his teammates back to help him chase to catch back on. He should have no problem reaching the back of the peloton... What an unfortunate time in the race to have a puncture... The race comissars have ordered the team cars out of the gap, and our computers are telling us that the breakaway should be caught with about 12 kilometers to go... He's racing like a man possessed...

And just yesterday, there was Phil (an Englishman) saying about Stage 3 winner Simon Gerrans, who won in the final sprint against Peter Sagan by about 5 inches: "I'm told Gerrans speaks English. He's Australian, so we'll see."

Enjoy the Tour, and have a great summer!

Ridin' the Rails

I went on a bike ride with my daughter Geneva, a junior at the University of Minnesota in the Honors Program in English and Political Science. She's liked bicycling for a long time, notably since the second day of our 2005 ride to Duluth when she was 11 years old and said, "Dad, I think to do this you have to love cycling. I think I only like it."  Well, she's been riding to her job at the U nearly every day (using my buddy Paul's Rule of Commuting: "If it isn't actually raining at the time you leave, ride. It'll be ok") and wanted to do a fun ride. We meant to do the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota's train to Big Lake and ride back last Saturday, but the big Friday night storms dropped a huge tree branch onto, and in bits, into, our garage and two vehicles, so rather than ride with BAM we spent the day chainsawing the tree and uncovering the cars.

We decided to do the ride this Saturday, June 29, instead. So, Saturday morning, after the insurance adjuster was here taking photos, measuring things and making estimates, we rode from home down to Target Field, where the Light Rail terminates and, two floors down, the Northstar Commuter Rail ends as well. We got our tickets, took the elevator down, and waited a few minutes until the train showed up.

(Just as a reminder, the photos in this blog all are links to larger versions of the pictures. If you're deeply interested, just click on the photo)

The Northstar train cars have a couple of bike parking spots on the lower level of each car. You basically nose it up to this yellow strap and secure the bike so it doesn't roll around. I'm not sure how this works without kickstands; we both have them, and it worked fine, though the yellow nylon strap ends were frayed and a bit of a challenge to get through the metal buckle.


The train was really large and largely empty. Here is Geneva in her seat with the bikes visible in the background. We didn't notice upstairs until the end of the trip, but they have tables between facing seats up there.


The train was so big (eight cars, two engines) because there was an afternoon Twins game on. I guess they haul a lot of people down to the games, which must be extremely convenient since the Minneapolis terminus is at the ballfield. This warning sign was up, though; don't stick around for rain delays or extra innings, 'cause the train is out of here on schedule! The Northstar line uses regular Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks and must have scheduled time slots for their runs, hence their need to stick to schedule no matter what's happening in the game.
 

Geneva and/or I have taken trains to fun places like London, Paris, Geneva (the city, not the daughter), Chicago, Portland and now, Big Lake! Another cyclist guy on the train took this photo for us. He was going to ride around for a few hours and take the train back; we were going to ride home.
The Northstar uses the MPXpress MP36PH-3C locomotive, two of them for these longer trains. (If you want to pinch one and take if for a ride, the manual is here). When it left Big Lake headed back south, it would presumably fill up with Twins fans on what was to prove a spectacular day to be at the ballpark and a Twins win 6-2 over the Kansas City Royals.


We used the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota's route to get home, which first took us to Elk River down County Highway 14. We basically followed the Mississippi River, on the east side until Elk River, then changing to the west bank the rest of the way into Minneapolis. This photo is of Geneva on County 14.


All our rivers are high after this very wet spring and early summer. This is the outflow from the dam just above the confluence of the Elk and Mississippi Rivers. Those black bits are birds, swifts or swallows, excitedly flying under the bridge and back out.


After lunch of a too-large 1/3-pound burger at Daddy-Os in Elk River (memo to file: next time, split one between us), we crossed the Mississippi and headed south. As we came up on Dayton, I thought it looked vaguely French with the chruch steeple sticking up and took this photo. Turns out it was settled by French people and the Church of Saint John the Baptist took confessions in French into the 1950s.


The current church building was built in 1904. It's quite a looker, as churches go.


Just south of town there was what looked a bit like an abandoned plantation with these out on the gateposts. It's ok, though, they're white! Norwegians, probably. I'm not sure what the scoop is on Elsie Stephens, but I read that Dayton is buying the 23-acre estate on the Mississippi to add to its existing park.


Of course, I live in a house that ought to have "Gone With The Wind" doorbells, but I'm not sure lantern jockeys would go down well here in the Cities. Still, this looks like a nice property.


The park adjacent to Elsie's farm is touted as the Cloquet Island overlook. I'm a sucker for these sorts of things, so we stopped for a look.  I don't know, I'm no outdoor recreation professional or anything, but I think a bit of judicious undergrowth trimming might enhance the view:


Maybe it looks better in this state of mind:


We pressed on, me watching Geneva disappear in the distance, then waiting for me. I gotta work on her bike, adjust the brakes so they rub or something, the girl's getting too fast for me. We stopped at the Coon Rapids Dam. Normally you can walk or ride across the dam to cross the river, but this summer it's closed for some work.


Geneva enjoying a Gatorade and hoping she doesn't start sweating green like in their ads.


The ride down through north Minneapolis isn't the most charming, though I now know where to take any copper pipes and wire I steal out of foreclosed houses to finance my meth habit. It quickly turned from grimy industrial to hipster, then we crossed the Mississippi back to the east bank on the Stone Arch Bridge, an old railway bridge now used for bikes and pedestrians...

...and wedding pictures:

Don't worry, girls, you can always use those dresses for, you know, cocktail parties and, well, stuff.

Ironically, the next bridal party waiting to get shot is beautifully lit by the evening sun. It's only when they line up to get the skyline in the background that they get that awful backlighting. They should do this in the morning.


And then home. My bike showed 59.55 miles on the day, a good outing, and more than I usually ride in a day. It was great fun to get out and ride the Northstar for the first time, then ride back along roads I haven't ever driven even after 19 years living here. It was cool to see small towns and rural areas yield to exurbia, suburbia, inner city industrial, hipsterville, and old urban core in one long continuous stream. I think it would be a terrific ride in the fall though you'd want to watch your sunset times. The BAM ride was advertised as 41 miles, that being Big Lake to a Park Department parking lot at Broadway and the River; the rest of our miles were riding to and from downtown Minneapolis. I'd recommend you give it a try some lovely day.

Mad Traffic Skillz

Today was the second Saturday of Traffic Skills class, taught through the auspices of the League of American Bicyclists. I was one of the instructors, and we had the rare opportunity to have our class do their qualifying ride in sleet, steady rain and 40F temperatures. Yeah, I tell you, those who last week laughed at my RainLegs assless bike chaps were singing a different tune by the time we got back in today! Anyway, congratulations to Erik, Daria, Roy, Courtney, Andy, Nate, Ruby, Jeff, Sheldon, Scott & Jay for completing the course and doing the skills riding and road evaluation in conditions approaching those I consider the worst for riding or camping (33 and rain). For some of these folks, last week and this were the first time they'd really ridden in traffic. Doing it in cold, windy, wet conditions showed that it is possible, though not exactly a picnic, to operate in adverse weather. After class was done, and after downing a major burrito and beer at The Muddy Pig, I met Vickie, a woman from work, to take her on a 20 mile loop around Saint Paul. She's relatively new to cycling and has started commuting once a week. This doesn't sound much, but she's just part time and it's 15 miles one way, a pretty serious commute. Vickie's discovered she likes cycling and has signed up to do a 60 mile ride in early June, and asked if I'd ride with her through the the Saint Paul loop. I barely made it on time due to the Muddy Pig's indifferent service. Sadly, I hadn't brought along any dry socks, and my wet shoes and socks kept my feet chilly, but we did the circuit. No rain now, and it had warmed up to 46. It's encouraging, in a quiet way, to have these folks interested in enhancing their riding skills, to have someone discover the joy of riding, to see a group learn directly that it is possible and not even that bad to ride in shitty conditions. It's also a quiet satisfaction to stop by the Trung Nam bakery for a chocolate croissant on the pre-ride, checking out the circuit before the class, and to hang out afterwards with the other instructors and several students at the Muddy Pig while the rain slowed and stopped outside. I didn't get much else done this rainy Saturday, but am pleased with what I did achieve.

Thar She Blows!

I went off to see BikeSnobNYC at the Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota. I don't ride over to Minneapolis as much as I used to. It wasn't the ideal day to ride:

...Wind Advisory Remains In Effect Until 7PM CDT This Evening...
*Winds...Sustained Winds Increasing To 25 To 35 Mph This Afternoon...Gusting To 45Mph.

*Impacts...Hazardous Driving Conditions...Especially For This In High Profile Vehicles. Unsecured Lightweight Objects...Such As Trash Cans And Lawn Furniture...May Be Blown Around.

And so on.  Long experience cycling in the Midwest teaches you to do your rides outbound into the wind and homebound with a tailwind. It's a painful lesson the first time you think you've got new strength and vigor and head 30 miles out in the country going, Man, I'm like freakin' Eddie Merckx (it's been a while since I've done this), look at me, then you turn around and struggle back into the teeth of your former tailwind as it drains all hope and spirit from your sorry corpse. Anyway, as it happened, I set off into the teeth of 25 to 35mph sustained winds.

I went down Hoyt and my usual crossing of Snelling into the open gate of the State Fairgrounds after a long delay from a slow light.


That gate is left open most of the time, except most of August as the Fair sets up. Waiting to cross Snelling I could appreciate the bucolic aromas blowing my way from the University of Minnesota's livestock barns. They would only get more intense until I passed by.

Once at the University's Minneapolis campus, I found Washington Avenue all torn up as they add in Light Rail. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but it caught me off guard. I rode to Coffman Memorial Union and locked up the bike in the crowded racks out front, then went down to the bookstore.

The BikeSnobNYC had met some cyclists at the Freewheel Midtown Greenway store and ridden to Coffman Union with them.  I thought about it, but didn't leave work early enough to labor another 7 or 8 miles into the wind.  Thus, I missed out on bonus Snob time but did get a seat at the presentation.

Here's Snob:



We were kind of wedged in there, and those who had ridden had to stand for the presentation or sit on the floor.  I think it was more people than they had expected.  Snob followed along with the theme of his book, pointing out that we were relatively powerless in economic terms, the $6 billion spent in the bicycle industry being dwarfed by auto companies, pharmaceutical companies and oil companies, but we could become a religion.  He promoted his Lobster God, pointed out how religions are an excuse for all kinds of odd behaviours and funny clothes (he didn't mention the Mormons' special underwear, perhaps a corollary of cyclists' shorts) and then cyclist abuse could become a hate crime.  Some of the time he talked about being a good cycling citizen, which forms a large theme in his latest book, The Enlightened Cyclist: Commuter Angst, Dangerous Drivers, and Other Obstacles on the Path to Two-Wheeled Trancendence.  One of the great things about Snob is that he is cynical and funny as hell in the blog yet there is an underlying good nature.  It comes out in the books (his first book was Bike Snob: Systematically & Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling).  I'd recommend reading these books. 

There were questions afterwards, including a couple of mine, particularly wondering if Snob was working full time when he started the blog.  When I first started reading him he was only a couple of weeks in and I was pretty amazed at the volume and quality of the writing (the photography traditionally blows).  Could this guy be working full time?  Yes, at least to start with.  He quit about the time his first book came out.

People lined up to get books signed (defaced, as he calls it).  He signed mine.  Then I wandered on out in search of Objective 2 of the evening: trying a Chick-fil-A.  I went upstairs and asked where it was.  Back downstairs, but closed.  It's only open 10:30 to 2:00 on weekdays, not on Saturdays or Sundays at all.  What?  I went back down and found the place.

Yep, closed.  Those are some stringent hours.  So, if I want to try a Chick-fil-A, I've either got to get myself to the Union on a weekday at lunchtime or, alternatively, fly somewhere, get fondled by the TSA, and try the one at the airport.  Fil-A & a Fondle.  Sounds like a decent night out.

Well, time to head on home.  Now comes the reward for the slog over to the Union into the teeth of the gale: the return trip.  The wind was still pretty snappy:

Those flags are at the University of Minnesota golf course.  As bad as it is being tall on a large bike frame going into the wind, it is superb with a ferocious tailwind. I got into my highest gear (a relatively modest 91 inches, something I rarely use) and spun along Larpenteur towards home. It sure is fun to clip along at 22 mph without even trying very hard! I've heard of people doing Tailwind Centuries where, on days like this, they are taken 100 miles out into the wind by motor vehicle, then ride back for an easy 100 miles. It hardly seems fair, but I can see the allure.

Having failed to get Chick-fil-A, I stopped at Stout's, a relatively new place plagued with utterly inadequate bike parking. They have some outdoor seating with a cage around it, so I locked up to that while I ate.

Maybe restaurants don't want cyclists, maybe they just don't think about us, at least they're better than Caribou Coffee who have almost universally absent bike parking yet often have banners of cyclists hanging inside.  I'm going to have to write page on retail establishments and bike parking. Plenty of places that you think would welcome cyclists (including, for instance, most bike shops) have nowhere to lock up despite acres of parking for motor vehicles.

Sated, I cruised on home with the tailwind. I liked actually meeting BikeSnob, it was fun to hear him give a talk, good to put a face with the online persona so many of us know. I think his presentation needs a bit of work yet, but he's off to a good start and is anyway preaching to the converted. And, for all the joking about religion and barking at poor cyclist behaviour, the message is pretty classic; be nice to others, treat them as you would be treated, and try and love your fellow man despite his foibles.

I've Been Working on the Railroad

We've been uncommonly warm here the last few days, after an unusually warm and snowless winter. One of the big markers of springtime in Minnesota is "ice-out", when the ice on the frozen lakes melts out and the lake returns to open water. On March 15, Como Lake was on the verge.

The ice has gone black and there's some open water at this end of the lake. The next day it would be in the upper 70s and the ice would go out of Como. I don't pretend to know what average is, but I expect it is 2 or 3 weeks later. Heck, the last date for getting fish houses off the lakes was February 29, just two weeks ago.

Ice out has nothing to do with cycling, of course, other than the warm and lovely weather has got lots of people out riding. I was among them, riding down to see how this season's construction on the Central Corridor Light Rail was going to affect my usual southbound routes.

Chatsworth crosses University and makes a dandy north/south route if you don't mind one informal railroad crossing. Once the light rail is in, this will be a signalled crossing. Going north from here you run into the informal railway crossing issue, then into navigational confusion around Como Lake. Southbound, Chatsworth goes all the way to St. Clair, then, with a one-block detour, down the hill to Jefferson and West 7th.

One irony of the light rail is that the Twin Cities used to have a wonderful streetcar system. Many of these streets are excellent cycling streets nowadays since they are pretty wide. University Avenue had streetcars (one of the reasons it is so wide and has always been a useful if not scenic cycling route, something that is likely to change if Saint Paul Public Works has their way) and so as they tore up the street they unearthed the old streetcar tracks. At one point, they are said to have tested the tracks to see if they were usable. Had they gone with a more modest streetcar installation (like Toronto has always had, or Portland has installed), one can't help but wonder it they wouldn't have worked, but instead it's going to be a much heavier "light rail" train and have a major railbed.


If you're driving, you can't cross University at Chatsworth, but there is still a pedestrian crossing. They'll work the south side of the street first, with all traffic funnelled along the north two lanes, then switch and do the reverse. I think pedestrian access will be maintained all along, and happily, it's good enough for cyclists.


Hamline is the same sort of arrangement; no traffic access across University, but a pedestrian accomodation big enough for bicycles.


How this all ends up laid out when done is still open for discussion. The plan is to do four traffic lanes with no on-street parking. This is going to suck in many different ways, mostly because it will put high-speed traffic (yeah, yeah, 35mph limit, but these will be 12 foot lanes, the same width as Interstate Highway lanes) right next to the sidewalk, not pleasant for pedestrians and offputting for, say, sidewalk cafes. I'd like to see one through lane and one parking lane with a bicycle lane between them. It's not perfect; it's a bike lane running right in the door zone, but it allows on-street parking for the small businesses which populate University, those which survive construction anyway.

In the meantime, we can still get across University by bicycle and keep an eye on how construction progresses. They've sure got an early start on it with this weather.

Bike Snob in Minneapolis March 27

I've followed BikeSnobNYC since he started his blog and have had a link to it in the sidebar pretty much since the beginning. Snobby wrote a book Bike Snob: Systematically & Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling which, for all the snark and hilarity in the daily blog, was a thoughtful and even earnest book (though still with plenty of snark!). Well, Snob's written another book, The Enlightened Cyclist: Commuter Angst, Dangerous Drivers, and Other Obstacles on the Path to Two-Wheeled Trancendence, and he's off on a BRA (Book Related Adventure) including a stop here in the Great Balmy North. I haven't read this book yet but it promises to be good.

Here are the details:

First, a 4:00PM ride:
Tuesday, March 27
Midtown Bike Center by Freewheel Bike
2834 10th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55407
(612) 238-4447

apparently heading to the 4:30 booksigning at the U. I guess we're going to show off our defective infrastructure as Snob'll be able to admire the underside of our out-of-service Sabo Bike Bridge over Highway 55. Snapped cables, you know.

4:30pm talk and booksigning
University of Minnesota Bookstore at Coffman Memorial Union
300 Washington Ave. S.E.
Minneapolis, MN 55455
(612) 625-6000

Once the adulation of Snob is over and he's defaced our books, the next big feature of the evening can be a visit to the Coffman Union's Chick-fil-A restaurant, the only one in the Twin Cities not protected by the TSA! They sponsor one of the crappy college football bowls, now I can find out what all the fuss is about. It promises to be a great Tuesday.

Note to Saint Paul Bicyclists: Your Lights Suck

The last few months on the second Tuesday I have been bicycle counting as part of the Transit for Livable Communities' monthly bike counts. Several of us from the Saint Paul Bicycle Coalition have been doing counts along University Avenue. I took University just west of Raymond Avenue where I can conveniently sit in the front window of The Edge Coffeesop and do my counting. In the summer, this was nicely air-conditioned. They play fun music, Edith Piaf yesterday for a while, I settle in with my coffee, and for two hours am on high alert, counting bicyclists and bikes on bus racks (my own addition). It's kind of nice to quietly observe the neighborhood traffic for two hours once a month, you notice things.

Anyway, with the end of Daylight Savings Time, sunset now happens in the middle of the 4:00 to 6:00PM counting period. The sun disappeared behind the horizon at 4:50 and at 5:00 I went outside to be able to see better, since we classify cyclists by helmet/no helmet, gender, road or sidewalk and 15-minute period.

I had to be extra vigilant. There were 28 cyclists in the 5:00 to 6:00 hour, lower volume now than in the lighter/warmer months even though it was unseasonably warm, and I think maybe 6 or 8 had adequate lights. I didn't formally count light quality, but maybe half the people showed no lights at all and most of the remainder had dim tailights.

People, this is a busy four-lane street with lots of truck traffic. There is a left turn lane for people wanting to get on Highway 280/I-94, with brake lights and turn signals. There is a utility truck parked along the side of the roads with blinking strobe lights and a big yellow arrow telling traffic to move over. There's traffic lights and a big flamboyant neon sign on the liquor store. Throw into this mix an old, dim, mis-aimed blinkie and you are just about invisible.

Look, I know you can see fine. That's because you're 25 and your eyes are young. The people driving these motor vehicles are 40 and 60 and 80 years old and I can tell you that night vision doesn't improve with age. Don't rely just on reflectors or your own mad cycling skillz, get a damn light! If your blinky is more than about 2 years old, get a new one, the LEDs have been improving tremendously in brightness.

About 750 cyclists are killed by motor vehicles each year in the U.S. Stats aren't kept on the fault in these accidents, but reading daily accounts for a while leads me to believe that in about half the cases, the cyclist is heavily complicit through some sort of bad behaviour. It's easy to fix; don't run Stop signs and red lights, don't ride drunk, ride with traffic and not against it and put on some damn lights.

Trying to count the stealth cyclists riding by lightless makes this obvious. I was absolutely alert and looking to see you and it was a challenge. Think about the motorists driving home from work, going to the grocery store, fiddling with the radio, looking to see if they can change lanes left. They're worried about all sorts of things besides trying to acquire visual contact with unlit cyclists.

I don't know all the lights the lit people were showing but the Planet Bike SuperFlash has a pretty distinctive flash pattern (we have 4 or 5 of these lying around the house for use in the fleet) and the most visible cyclist was a young lady showing two SuperFlashes, one low on the bike (rack or seatpost?), and one high (on a backpack or helmet). I could see her for several blocks after she went by even amongst the cavalcade of lights on University. She is a model to us all.

I personally like to run two taillights, one blinking (a SuperFlash) and one steady (Busch & Müller 4D Toplight). A lot of people don't seem to care and run nothing at all. If you're one of them and get hit, I will feel the same lack of sympathy for you as I do for drivers who text while driving and run off the road and get killed. Remember, stupidity has a way of catching up with people.

Don't be stupid.

My Indirect Commute

So I went to the dentist yesterday. My dentist is in downtown Minneapolis, a holdover from when I worked down there 15 years ago, but twice a year I go down and get my choppers looked at. Unbeknownst to me, yesterday whilst sitting at the desk after the appointment, I dropped my cell phone. It's not really mine; my iPhone 3G took an untimely plunge into the Des Moines River last week while I was leaning over a bridge railing taking a photo of the floodwaters (they've had a lot of rain down there). I have an iPhone 4 on order but it hasn't come yet so I have a temporary SIM in my daughter's old Pantech.

Anyway, I didn't notice this until yesterday afternoon, when I called the dentist and sure enough, they had my phone. I said I'd pop in and get it. So this morning I rolled out a little after 7:00 and, rather than the usual 4.9-mile run directly north to work, headed downtown, about an 8-mile ride.

This is kind of fun. I see a limited number of other cyclists on my simple commute and it hardly feels like an urban commute at all. Nobody is ever going to film riding through Roseville to Arden Hills and then set it to "Welcome to the Jungle". Going to downtown Minneapolis is different, lots more cyclists of all ages and bike types, much more traffic, buses, light rail, the Missisippi River. I rode through the Fairgrounds and the Saint Paul University of Minnesota campus, down Como, across the Stone Arch Bridge and to the dentist's at Fifth and Marquette, then rode back across the Stone Arch Bridge, a little ways up Como Avenue, then cut off to catch the Minneapolis Diagonal Trail. I hardly ever ride this (usually going to work from the dentist's or to Home Depot from work). It's pretty pastoral and there wasn't much traffic on in this morning. I went along County C, up Cleveland, over to and around Lake Johanna and then to work.

My Atlantis doesn't have a computer on it at the moment (I'm about to do a bunch of work on it, including reinstalling the computer) but Google Maps tells me I rode about 19 or 20 miles. I rolled in at 8:45 or so, showered and went to work.

When I ride to work, which is not all the time by any means, I usually ride directly there and directly home. Sometimes I pop into a store or go to a meeting afterwards, but I have never incorporated a longer recreational ride into the commute. I might think about it. It requires an earlier departure but it's kind of fun to get out and about in the cycling ecosystem in areas I hardly ever travel during the work week.

I'll be riding home, and then to a meeting this evening for the Saint Paul Bicycle Coalition. On the off-chance somebody reads this before then, we're meeting at the Jimmy Lee/Oxford Rec Center at Lexington and Marshall in Saint Paul at 7:00 to 8:30. We are an outgrowth of the Saint Paul Bicycle Advisory Board, which is now on hiatus, but independent of the City and looking to become an advocacy organization. Come and join us if you have an interest, we're there every second Tuesday. You can check out our website which is pretty lame at the moment (I did it) but which we expect to improve quite a lot in the near future.

The Perfect Computer for the Cyclist?

I got an iPad 3G the day they came out and have been using it a lot in the subsequent few weeks. I think it could be the ideal computer for the cyclist (though not a cycling computer!). I have a MacBook Pro which I occasionally have taken with me to meetings and work and stuff and I worry about it because it's got a 500 Gig hard drive in it which is getting bumped and jostled. Sure, you can buy big solid state hard drives, but they cost a fortune. Sure, the odd ride here and there isn't going to hurt it, but a day-in, day-out commute can't be healthy for the hard drive. Also, it weights like 5 pounds.

You could do a MacBook Air (with SSD if you're worried about the hard drive) but those are even more expensive and still weigh three pounds.

Or you can do an iPad. It weighs 1.6 pounds and the separate BlueTooth keyboard I have must take it over 2, although you can at least leave the keyboard behind if you don't need it on a given day. The battery life is nice and long, the screen is lovely and big, the Maps feature is superb when mated with the 3G's GPS, and there's no moving parts. Worried about dampness? Get an Orltieb document case for it, basically a heavy-duty roll top ZipLoc baggie. I know, I know, it's not a real computer, you can't run the heavy-duty spreadsheets on it that I routinely work with, the Pages word processor has it's limitations and it's not possible to print at the moment (there are third-party software packages for this, but I haven't tried them), but for note taking and email and web reading and writing this blog entry, the device works great.

I still use the MacBook for the serious work in life, long documents and big Excel spreadsheets (run in Windows on the Mac) at home, photo editing and all that sort of thing, but the iPad makes a smaller, lighter and surprisingly useful device for the cycling geek.

Snow Clearing on Marshall Avenue: A Meeting

No, our snow is all gone. Rather, this entry is about the snow clearing project on Marshall Avenue this past winter. There is a meeting this evening regarding the project, at:

Concordia University
Buenger Education Center
275 Syndicate St N
Saint Paul, MN 55104

Monday April 26, 7:00PM

The topic is the pilot to keep Marshall Avenue clear of snow from the Lake/Marshall bridge up to Cretin or Cleveland (I forget how far exactly). The bridge is one of the few Mississippi River crossings in the Cities, and Marshall Avenue is the street on the Saint Paul side. Heading into Saint Paul, the street climbs a hundred feet or so, meaning eastbound bicycles are slogging uphill.

The problem is that in the winter, snow is scraped off to the side of the road. As happens, the angle of repose is such that it tumbles back in. Cars park out so they can open their passenger-side doors and bicycles get shifted farther and farther out into traffic, annoying to motor vehicles and less safe for cyclists. The plan was to have No Parking on the street during snow emergencies so that the street could be plowed full width, allowing room for the parked cars and for bicycle traffic as well.

This didn't work out.

Part of the reason was that on Christmas, when we had a decent snowfall followed by drizzly rain, the City decided not to be Scrooge-like on Christmas and declare a snow emergency. This holiday gift meant that the piles of snow, then soaked with rain, subsequently froze into immovable ice castles. It certainly happened at our house, where the width that I blew the driveway out Christmas Day was the width it would remain until well into March when it all finally melted away.

It may have been aggravated by Public Works employees slacking off when they should have been working, caught on tape by a local tv station and precipitating the resignation of Public Works Director Bruce Brees from that position (although he fell comfortably back into his old $111,000 a year job as "Administrative Manager for Public Works", man, no wonder my property taxes keep going up!). To be fair, the actual video was people who were supposed to be filling potholes, but one wonders if the same level of effort went into the snow clearing. And commications between departments wasn't very good, so that Traffic Enforcement wasn't aware of the parking ban until quite late in the winter.

Tonight's hearing, on short notice for those of us who don't live in the immediate area, is asking for input on the project. The main effect on the neighbors was the parking ban on selected days, and the way these things are likely to go, those will be the people who show up to complain about it. Not represented unless you and I go there will be people who use the street but don't live right there. We're taxpayers too, remember, it's our street as well, and if you are a Lake/Marshall user, you would be smart to show up and have your say.

If you can't be there in person, you can submit a comment to the Union Park District Council here. You can read about the meeting on the Union Park District Council website.

In summary, Marshall is an important bicycling route year-round because it is one of the few Mississippi Crossings. The road width is such that, if left not fully plowed, parking and then bicycle traffic gets shifted out further and further into the road as the winter goes on. The pilot project and the proposal is not to ban parking entirely; rather, it is to ban parking on specific days so our hard-working Public Works employees can clear the road full width, keeping it safe for all users. For a variety of reasons, it didn't work very well this year. It deserves to be tried again with a better effort next snow season.

Happy Earth Day from the NYPD

President Obama was in New York yesterday giving a talk on the need to pass some inadequate financial reform with insufficient consumer protection. Before he came, the New York Police Department went along the route his motorcade would take and removed all the bicycles, citing fears that they could contain pipe bombs because, you know, there have been so many bicycle-based terrorist attacks in this country. And those mouth-foaming Obama haters are all such big cyclists. There are a couple of photos posted here. I wonder if they told the workers these might be pipe bombs, since they seem to be protected only by nylon windbreakers.

Would it be unworthy to wonder if this has something to do with the current trial on one of New York's finest who assaulted a Critical Mass rider a couple of years ago in what looks to be an episode of douche-on-douche assault, then lied about what he did (what? cops lie?) but was caught on video and has since, umm, retired. Or the other recent NYPD-to-cyclist payouts, like the one at the end of March where the city paid $40,002 to two people who filmed police cutting locks and removing bikes in 2007. Police and the security state hate the first amendment, and these two were arrested for disorderly conduct for refusing a lawful order to disperse and blocking the sidewalk. These charges were later adjourned and dismissed, and the city spent an estimated $72,000 defending the case and for the payout. And just last week another $98,000 was paid to five cyclists for being harassed during a Critical Mass including another case of a cop knocking a cyclist off his bike.

Fortunately, the NYPD Bomb Squad seems to have managed to defuse all the pipe bombs without any injury.

Gee! Maps!

I heard on the radio this morning that Google Maps now has an option to map routes for bicycles. This sounded cool; I've been generally impressed with their auto mapping and even their transit mapping works well here in the Twin Cities, telling you which bus you need and when the next one should arrive at your location. It would be an exaggeration to say I leapt immediately out of bed to give the bicycle routing a try, but once I did slither sluglike from my repose and completed my elaborate morning ablutions I did give it a common destination pair for me, between church and home. This is about 14 miles one way, crosses the Mississippi and can involve several bicycle-specific shortcuts or route options. How would Google do?

Google did pretty well. From north of Como Lake in Saint Paul to just east of Lake Harriet in Minneapolis it selected a route that used both the Intercampus Transitway and the Midtown Greenway. The Intercampus Transitway runs between the Saint Paul and Minneapolis East Bank campuses of the University of Minnesota and is limited to buses, emergency vehicles and bicycles. As a cyclist, it took me a while to notice it because it was so off my radar as a motorist, but it is a useful shortcut and google selected it.

The Midtown Greenway is a bicycle and pedestrian path from the Mississippi to Lake Calhoun that runs parallel to the very busy Lake Street in an old railway trench. It's like a bicycle Interstate, with limited on and off ramps and it goes under dozens of bridges carrying the surface streets. It even has a big swoopy bridge over Hiawatha/Highway 55/the Light Rail line just for bikes and pedestrians. It's not open to motorized traffic at all.

Google didn't select my usual route, down Hoyt and through the State Fairgrounds to either the Transitway or Raymond, but, to be fair, the fairgrounds aren't open all the time. They shut down for most of August for the State Fair and for selected weekends when they have boat shows or classic auto rendezvoux. The rest of the time, bicycles and pedestrians can slip through the NE gate (always open about 3 feet wide) and cruise through the grounds in splendid solitude.

I have to say Google does a much better job than my GPS unit. I have a Garmin Nuvi 275. I got this last year in anticipation of a trip to the UK and France because it has both the North American and European maps built in. I got it a bit early to see how well it did locally on roads and destinations I know, and I have to say, it did really well. It knows all the little back roads and residential streets in the Twin Cities (not sure about the bleeding edge of suburban sprawl, but certainly in our area it was good). It has lots of businesses in it. Once in Europe, I was delighted to find that it knew its way around medieval York, Winchester and Bayeaux as well as it did around 1950s Roseville. It knew speed limits, traffic camera locations and the number of exits out of roundabouts. It was particularly delightful that I could load in the Campaign for Real Ale's (CAMRA's) Good Pub Guide point of interest file, which cost six pounds, and the GPS would ding whenever we got within a mile or two of one of the pubs. You could select the pub and it would set it as a waypoint and guide you there, off the main roads and down the lanes to The Swan or whatever back in the countryside. All this of course is built into the GPS, it isn't picking up data downloads like the iPhone maps application, data downloads that can cost the unwary a fortune whilst overseas. I think the GPS unit is the single most impressive piece of computer gear I've ever used and is extremely useful in a country where the only straight roads are the ones the Romans built.

Anyway, back from our sojourns, I decided to try selecting "bicycle" as the vehicle type and see how it worked. It was hopeless. Basically, the route selection algorithm is the same but the average speed used to calculate time of arrival is much lower and it doesn't use Interstate highways. Put in home and church and tell it you're a bicycle and it sends you down every major arterial street clogged with traffic, transit, doorzones, intersection conflicts and highway on and off ramps. It even sends you down Snelling, perhaps the most gruesome bit of bicycling roadway in Saint Paul. It doesn't use the Intercampus Transitway or the Midtown Greenway at all. As brilliant as the GPS is for motor vehicle navigation, it really is pretty useless for bicycle navigation where, in my opinion, thoughtful route selection that is almost always different from what you do in a car is key to happy and safe cycling.

The only bad news about the bicycle option on google maps? It's not in the iPhone Maps application yet, where the choices are still motor vehicle, transit or walking (and yes, I checked the App Store for updates). I suppose it's still a beta product (I think gmail is too) so maybe they're going to get some feedback first, but it would be very useful for cyclists on the iPhone.

Hummer? Bummer.

The Hummer in many ways represented the worst of the excesses of the last decade, consumerist, credit-driven, confusing militaristic with patriotic, fuel-guzzling, road-hogging, wannabe SUV. I remember seeing them in one of their original breeding grounds, an actual H1 (the military-sized and highly capable off-road vehicle) being driven by a cute blond in Sun Valley in 1996. Later, GM grafted a lookalike body on a Tahoe frame and charged the earth for them as H2s, then later yet, added a more compact H3 for those with the Hummer personality defect who couldn't cough up the $50K+ for the H2. They had a bunch of dealers build special Hummer areas including big rocky things to park them on out front.

Well, it didn't work. Gas got expensive, leading to the ironic situation where the biggest complaints about both the Hummer H2 and the Toyota Prius was the mileage, the H2 because it guzzled gas so voraciously, the Prius because it would turn in 43 mpg and not 52 as its buyers had so fervently hoped.

Gas got cheaper, but then credit got expensive, unemployment went up, houses went underwater, repo men got busy and Hummer sales tanked. The rugged image of the highly-capable military vehicle was diluted as it became an under-armoured deathtrap susceptible to Iraqi IEDs mid-decade. GM would have gone belly up if the government hadn't stepped in to rescue it, and the company has ruthlessly cut brands, closed plants and terminated dealers. A deal was reached to sell the Hummer division to some Chinese company, but even they don't want it. From today's New York Times:

DETROIT — General Motors said Wednesday that it would shut down Hummer, the brand of big sport-utility vehicles that became synonymous with the term “gas guzzler,” after a deal to sell it to a Chinese manufacturer fell apart.

The buyer, Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machines, said in a statement that it withdrew its bid because it was unable to get approval from the Chinese government, which is trying to put a new emphasis on limiting China’s dependence on imported oil and protecting the environment.

In addition, people close to the negotiations had said that the biggest obstacle to emerge in the last few days was not regulatory approval, but rather bank financing. While Tengzhong has the cash to pay for the Hummer brand, it needed bank financing to operate the division, redesign vehicles and set up new production plants in China.

A spokesman for Hummer, Nick Richards, said G.M. had no specific timetable for completing the wind down, but left open the possibility that G.M. would be open to new bids...

About 3,000 jobs in the United States could be affected by the shutdown, including positions at G.M. and the brand’s dealerships. A factory in Shreveport, La., that builds the Hummer H3 and H3T and other G.M. trucks already was scheduled to close by 2012. The larger H2 was built for G.M. by A. M. General in Mishawaka, Ind., until December, when production was temporarily halted to allow for the sale process to conclude.

The deal would have made Tengzhong the first Chinese company to sell vehicles in North America, though it planned to keep Hummer’s operations in the United States.
“Tengzhong worked earnestly to achieve an acquisition that it believed to be a tremendous opportunity to acquire a global brand at an attractive price,” Tengzhong said in its statement. “The renewed investment to be made by Tengzhong and other investors would have provided Hummer’s existing management team the ability to build greener utility vehicles that would have been attractive and useful in new markets such as China as well as the existing core markets.”

Mr. Richards said Hummer dealers in the United States have about 2,500 vehicles in their inventories. In January, the brand made just 265 sales in the United States. Hummer sales plunged 67 percent in 2009, to a total of 9,046.

I won't miss them, but I was never the market anyway. I have to say that for all the hatred Hummers inspired (and it merited it's own site, FUH2.com, consisting of photos of people flipping off Hummers), I've never been yelled at or otherwise abused by a Hummer driver. It may be because there aren't that many of them compared to, say, pickup trucks, who as a class are the most frequent communicators with me while cycling. And once, while looking at some actual facts, I noted that the footprint of a Hummer was actually slightly less than that of a Honda Odyssey minivan, though the H2 was wider and therefore blocked the views from behind more than the minivan. Maybe it was the whole fake-military attitude at a time when a bunch of chickenhawks had taken us to war that was so aggravating. Anyway, may those Hummers rest in peace.

On the Manliness of Cycling

I liked this comment on the inestimable BikeSnobNYC blog, by a guy watching the Olympics:

I'm really enjoying these winter Olympics in Vancouver, between men's figure skating and short track speed skating relay, these sports make road cycling in lycra and shaved legs look like Aussie Rules football.

Those Darn Red Lights

There is the usual flap going on in the letters to the editor and blogs right now about cyclists on the streets, with the predictable arc including the most common gripe amongst drivers, that cyclists never stop at stop signs or red lights. There is some truth to this, just as there is to my counter-assertion that motorists don't stop at stop signs or red lights either. Today I got a dramatic demonstration of this.

I was going to Siwek's Hardware over by the Lowry Street Bridge to get some 10" wide cedar siding for my house. It's an odd size, but Siwek's carries things like this. I was driving my pickup truck, since I'd be hauling lumber. I drive north on University and wanted to turn left, west, on Lowry. I signalled. There was someone wanting to turn left on the other side of the intersection who'd blocked up a line of traffic. They were impatiently pulling out of line to get around her, so I waited. The light turned yellow, she turned. I hesitated while a last couple of cars came through on yellow, irritated that they might miss the light, then completed my turn onto westbound Lowry.

A van went by eastbound, pretty fast, I thought, and I looked in my rear view mirror just in time to see a Jeep Liberty come into the intersection on the red (the van had the green, the Liberty was northbound on University like I was). The van caught the ledt rear of the Liberty which carried on through the intersection.

I went on to Siwek's, got my lumber, then came back. The Liberty had got spun around and the rear wheel had come completely off, so that it was sitting on three wheels and a shock absorber. It was some young lady driver, and she was now talking on a cell phone.

The Lesson? Well, the point is that motorists are pretty bad about stopping at stop signs and red lights, bad enough that I am impatient with the constant accusations that cyclists never stop at these traffic control devices.

Also, the van had the green light and the right of way and was probably pretty surprised when the Jeep suddenly materialized in front of them. On a bicycle, this could have been a real shock! I always check intersections because there are sometimes late or oblivious red light runners coming along.

Finally, this chick just blithely sailed through the light and got clipped. She was probably embarrassed, undoubtedly late, her insurance is about to go up and her nice shiny silver Jeep is kind of messed up. But, she is basically ok, well enough to be jabbering away on her mobile fifteen minutes later. A cyclist running that light like that and getting clipped by a van would be badly injured or dead. Drivers are dense and oblivious enough as it is, if cyclists really just ran red lights all the time they'd be dead.

There are plenty of lousy cyclists out there but they're armed only with 30 pound bicycles. There are plenty of airhead drivers out there and they're armed with 4,000 pound steel motor vehicles. Be careful out there.