Gravity is Your Friend

The Times of London ran an article on the Parisian rental bike scheme entitled Parisians show their va va voom as city rolls out 'freedom' bike scheme. You know, smashing success, 1.3 million rentals of the 10,000 bikes in three weeks, traffic calming, blah blah blah. I liked the way people are using them:

In Paris there have been few teething troubles with the high-tech system that supplies the bikes for up to €1 per half-hour — but one is a result of residents using them to glide downhill to work and then taking public transport home, resulting in gluts of bikes at some low-level stands and shortages at higher altitude stations, such as Montmartre.

The end of the article outlines some other tries that have gone by, the last one in particular which relates to my prior entry:

• Copenhagen Prototype scheme, with advertising sponsorship – bicycles have tyres that do not puncture


• Lyon 1,500 bicycles available for 15,000 users. Costs 30p for 30 minutes


• Germany Some glitches with GPS system


• St Andrews Bikes were stolen in the Scottish university town in an early pilot scheme


• Cambridge When a pilot scheme started in the 1960s, the fleet slowly vanished. When it was resurrected in 1993, all 300 bicycles were stolen on the first day

This morning I was down getting coffee and talked to Linda, who lives down by Saint Anthony Falls in Minneapolis, not too far from the now-famous ex-bridge. On Thursday, the day after the bridge collapse, her fiance rode over to take a look. Governor Pawlenty was there, some Senators, camera crews. There's a camera crew here, she says, the Governor's here, and right behind him is my fiance. Cops are all over the place, of course. He laid his bike down on a grassy knoll to watch for a minute as statements were made on camera, then turned around, and his bike was gone. He went to the grassy knoll and asked a cop about it. Yep, she said, some guy rode off on it (pointing) but I couldn't leave my position. Sheesh.

Downhills and thievery bring up my Bait Bike idea. Get a bike you don't care about a lot, ride it to a place where it's likely to get pinched, do an indifferent job locking it up, (this is the crucial bit) unhook the brake cables, and leave. Ideally, this location is at the top of a long downhill slope ending in a busy street. Think of the fun. It would make good YouTube footage!

Bike Thievery Around the Nation

Every weekday morning I get a journalism story ideas email from the Poynter Institute. It's a terrific way to keep up on various stories developing around the country. This morning it had a bit on bicycle thefts:

Bike Thieves Keep Active
As people try to go green and ride their bicycles, bike thieves are having a field day. (Texas Hill Country Daily Times). I am seeing reports of rising bicycle thefts in Washington, D.C., (WJLA, Channel 7 ABC from Falls Church, VA) where thieves are hitting metro stations. Some places like this Michigan town, (Northville, Michigan), Denver (Denver Post) and West Des Moines, Iowa, (KCCI Channel 8 CBS) are installing bike racks to prevent thefts.

It's no wonder bikes are so attractive to thieves. They are easy to steal, they can be worth a lot of money these days and they are easy to sell to places like pawnshops. Police often don't spend much time investigating the crime, so the chances of getting caught are small. This would make for a fairly easy story to personalize in your town.

In Denmark, police have announced they won't spend much time on bike thefts, but will instead focus on more serious crime. An estimated 80,000 bikes are stolen (The Copenhagen Post) in Denmark each year. If you figure there are three months a year when bikes are not frequently used in Denmark, this would mean that more than 10,000 bikes a month — a few thousand or so a week — are stolen.

Not included in the Poynter email but another interesting article is Chasing my stolen bicycle by Justin Jouvenal in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. I like this quote from the article:

"Bikes are one of the four commodities of the street — cash, drugs, sex, and bikes," Veysey told me. "You can virtually exchange one for another."

I've had one bicycle stolen, from my garage, and it was maddening. Funnily enough, I'd be angrier if my Atlantis was stolen than if my pickup was stolen. Bicycle thievery is one place where I can see the advantages of sharia law--cut off their hands!

Stone Arch Bridge Open

The Stone Arch Bridge has been reopened to bikes and pedestrians as of about 4PM on Sunday. For those not from here, that's a lovely old railway bridge that is open to pedestrians and cyclists only. The 10th Avenue Bridge remains closed, which isn't surprising. No word on the Number 9 bridge (another old railway bridge converted to bike and pedestrian usage).

In my prior entry I said that bike routes weren't really affected. This was wrong, as my first commenter pointed out. Although I-35W doesn't really affect bicycle routes across the Mississippi, at least once everything reopens, it fell onto the West River bikepath (see this Star-Tribune slideshow about a cyclist who was 20 seconds from the bridge when it fell onto the bike path in front of him, after which he climbed onto the wreckage and helped people) and across 2nd Street SE on the north side. These routes will be closed until the new bridge is in place, which officials are optimistically hoping to do by the end of 2008. There are other usable routes close to 2nd Street SE, and the City of Minneapolis is recommending using the Light Rail bikepath to get into Minneapolis from the south in place of the river bikepath. Some of this is Matt-centric; I use the Stone Arch and Number 9 bridges but hardly ever use the West River bikepath. Those who do use it for commuting will of course be disrupted for some time to come.

Bridges

Well, the outlines of our Governor's Infrastructure Strategy have become apparent:

1. Reject gas tax increases. Twenty cents a gallon was good enough for 1988, it's good enough for 2007! ("An unnecessary and onerous burden" he called the proposed 7.5 cent per gallon tax in May, vetoing a bill which also mandated annual bridge inspections; in 2005, he asked "How dumb can they be?" of Democratic legislators proposing a gas tax increase; in early 2007 he accused them of being "having been simply obsessed with a gas tax"; the GOP Minority Leader in the House this spring called the gas tax proposal "a joke" and a "pocket picking mechanism" but now, with a bridge collapsed and several dead or missing, is open to ideas. Also, our Governor's hopes to be Number Two on the Straight Talk Express appear to have been derailed now that McCain is flying coach and carrying his own bags, staying in the race just long enough to collect matching public funds to pay off campaign debts.)


2. Defer projects and maintenance. I personally like how the bid for the Crosstown Commons rebuild required the contractors to loan the state the money for a year until we could afford to pay for it. Unsurprisingly, nobody bid, and the project was delayed a year.


3. Wait Until Things Get Bad. As you may have heard, a main Interstate Highway bridge collapsed Wednesday during rush hour near downtown Minneapolis. At the moment, the official toll is 5 dead and 8 missing, though I'd be amazed if this doesn't get bigger.


4. Compare this Catastrophe to 9/11 and Katrina. Hmmm, wasn't that about 3,000 and 1,200 dead, as compared to 5? Still, we've got some great visuals!


5. Er, Let's Hold Off on that New Twins Stadium Groundbreaking, shall we? Bud Selig was going to be here Thursday for this celebration, but it seemed a bit tasteless even for him to celebrate a taxpayer-financed ballpark the day after a taxpayer-owned bridge had collapsed.


6. Get Money from the Feds. Helps to have one of our representatives as head of the House Transportation Committee, it looks like $250 million is headed our way. Maybe, with luck, the new bridge will be in place in time for the opening of the new taxpayer-financed Twins stadium and the new taxpayer-financed University of Minnesota Gophers football stadium. Give credit to the Gophers football team, though, they have gotten us used to historic collapses.


7. Get a visit from the President. President Bush was here this morning, looking solemn and wearing a hard hat and, in contrast to a couple of days ago, able to pronounce our Governor's last name. His trainers must have been hard at work. We're promised an expedited effort to rebuild the bridge (I'm guessing it won't be to the original plans). One wonders if this has to do with the Republican National Convention to be held here just about a year from now. Not going to look so good, this big hole in the transportation fabric.

Very savvy. If he'd listened to those obsessive dumb jokers in the legislature we'd have higher gas taxes and be using money picked from the pockets of hard-working Minnesota taxpayers to patch up this structurally deficient bridge. Now, we'll get a nice shiny new bridge paid for by the Feds! Exchange 5 dead for $250 million and the chance to look concerned and solemn in front of a photogenic structural collapse. Perhaps there are those who think this is an ok deal. I don't.

How Close Were We?

Had the bridge hung on another 15 or 20 minutes, it could have been us. We were on our way, all four of us, to a concert at Orchestra Hall in downtown Minneapolis. We had the option of just going down Larpenteur/Hennepin or taking the Interstate. I-35 is usually quicker unless there are construction backups, but it was just past 6:00 when we left and we opted for the Interstate.

I didn't time-stamp things, but I figure we left about 6:10, by which time the bridge had collapsed although we didn't know this. We headed off down I-35 but as it came up to the Highway 280 exit there was a cop there closing off the road and directing everyone onto 280. This was immediately jammed up. I wondered if there's construction going on but Karla, who drives this way multiple times a week, said that was usually on weekends for a full closure, she thought there must be an accident. As I sat in the 280 line, creeping forward, I figured I'd listen to 88.5 Jazz and Traffic. They were just saying that rescue units were on there way to the scene; sounds like a crash. They were asking people to stay away; hmmm, must be a big one--maybe a semi with chemicals crashed. Then they said, to those of you just joining us, the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi has collapsed into the river. This affects both directions and I-35W is closed.

Holy smokes!

We got off 280 on County B (now closed off, as 280 has become a surrogate freeway for 35W traffic) and made our way down to Hennepin. Going towards downtown we crossed I-35W, not surprisingly completely jammed with immobile cars. It was going to take a while to untangle that lot, I thought. Making our way through downtown took a long time, traffic clotted up and a welter of ambulances, firetrucks and police cars making their way through. We got to Orchestra Hall about 7:20, nearly an hour later than we'd planned. I wondered about the concert; if the musicians had a 6:30 call, it would be credible to have some affected by the collapse or the traffic jam behind it. The 7:30 concert got off about 10 minutes late after a graceless tribute and moment of silence in which the Assistant Conductor didn't say what had happened ("And now a moment of silence for the this evening's tragedy") to an audience where a lot of people may not have known what had happened yet (the people right in front of us didn't, having gone to dinner first). We'd planned to eat before the concert in Peavey Plaza but hadn't had time, so went to Brits afterwards for a bite and to let the concert crowd clear. Going home, stuck in traffic on the 3rd Avenue Bridge, the lawyer for the company doing the road surface work on the I-35W bridge was on the air assuring everyone that the road deck work had nothing to do with the collapse. Wow, after four hours he'd already figured out the cause.

To me, ours doesn't seem a close call. There are people who were on the bridge and miraculously survived, others who were last off or about to get on, a friend of ours only five minutes removed, a co-worker of a co-workers's husband who was ten cars back. A 15 to 20 minute miss seems pretty roomy in that context, but in the context of a 40 year old bridge, all it needed to do was hang on for 15 more minutes and it could have been us.

What Happened?

It'll take a while before the NTSB deliberates, but in my extremely informed highly expert considered opinion, I noted the following things:

1) in the publicly-released video of the collapse, I thought it was remarkable how horizontal the main deck was when it went down. This also makes it clear that it started at the south end of the bridge, not in the scene, and the NTSB noted that the south end had displaced 50 feet sideways, so it looks like the truss didn't break along its length but instead the structure folded sideways.

2) I think the south end started to go sideways and pulled the deck off the north end. Then the approach ramps, all unbalanced, went. You can see the north one hang on a couple of second before falling backwards in the video.

3) the bridge deck isn't supposed to be part of the support structure, but I thought this quote from this morning's paper was telling (the article is about the first responders, and Hoeppner is one of these guys):

"At the site, Hoeppner talked to construction workers who survived the fall. They had been doing repair work but expressed concern to him that the bridge had been wobbling several days before it collapsed. Every layer of concrete the workers removed, the bridge would wobble even more, they told Hoeppner." The article's here. I'm guessing that various plaintiff lawyers will be very interested in talking to those construction workers.

Maybe the transverse members that held the bridge trusses parallel were in worse shape than people thought and the deck was doing more to keep them in place than was thought. As the deck lightened, these folded sideways and pulled the whole river span with it. It didn't seem to pull off the north piers--the photos look like the deck ripped off and then the north approach pivoted backwards off the pier, displacing the pier in the midst of all this. That's what you see in the video.

Taking a Look

Well, one wants to look, right? I rode down last night to take a look. For the most part, you couldn't see squat. The perimeter is backed way off, so that the Number 9 bridge, 10th Avenue bridge and Stone Arch Bridge are all closed. Virtually any spot with a view is blocked off with tape and cops. In part this was probably because of the impending (at the time) visit of President Bush--another blogger noted that a cop told him that if they opened the Stone Arch Bridge they'd just have to close it again and sweep it for bombs. Keeping the Number 9 and Stone Arch bridges closed is a bit short-sighted, as those are common bicycle commuter routes and with them closed, cyclists get dumped out onto city streets already contending with additional traffic loads. Maybe once Mr. Bush has come and gone they'll open again. Although I don't normally ride downtown during rush hours, for a set of reasons too boring to relate my dentist is in downtown Minneapolis and I have an 8:30 checkup Monday morning, so maybe I'll see then.

Lots of people down looking, many in cars. Fools! Bicycles are the perfect way to probe an urban perimeter like this, and that's what I did. I didn't know the Number 9 Bridge was closed and went right to it from the end of the Intercampus Transitway. Nope, closed off. Tons of foot traffic and a stream of frustrated motorists. Oddly enough, my son did a report on the Number 9 bridge this past spring and I'd ridden all over and around it taking photos. I tried some of the approaches. You couldn't see much. Lots of yellow tape.

I rode down to University Avenue. Lots more cops. Moving back a couple of blocks there's a pedestrian bridge across I-35W (connecting 5th Street SE either side of the Interstate). The highway is now empty, but the cars under here were just a couple of hundred yards from being directly involved. These people had the close calls.

There was a bit of a view here. (As usual, if you click on the photos you'll get a larger version, and for once, it might be worth it).

You can see where the road pivoted away with the cars of the closest calls of all balanced on the pivot point. Across the river you can see a semi-truck and some construction equipment on the south approaches to the bridge. It's the stuff in between that's missing. In the foreground is University Avenue; we know a person who got off there (frustrated with the traffic) five minutes before the collapse. Like I said, our 15 to 20-minute miss seems plenty big compared to these.

Down by Metalmatic at 2nd Street and 8th Avenue there was a view down between the factory on the left and the condos on the right. The is the north approaches to the bridge, not part of the main truss system, but the southbound lanes were pulled from their piers and there was a pileup, as you can see. This was a popular photo spot and there were some tv stations nearby.

I moved upstream. The power company now has some viewing walkways out into the river which I've never been on. These looked promising, and I rode out. Couldn't see a damn thing. I came back to shore and rode up to Nicolet Island, crossed the river, and headed back down towards the Guthrie. I went by the Mill Ruins Museum.

Boy, they're right on top of things! Actually, this is the Mill Ruins Museum, but it's very close to the bridge just upstream.

Probably the Guthrie's cantilevered bridge offers a nice view (we watched fireworks from it on July 4 after seeing 1776 with an aunt from England) but they're not letting the great unwashed out to gawk. (I like how we mere citizens "gawk" while politicians "inspect", "visit" and "survey"). The bike path which used to go under the I-35W bridge is of course closed off, so I moved over to Washington, crossed the abandoned freeway, and moved in behind some apartments. Bingo!


The semi from the first picture is the one on the left on this photo. This is from a parking lot of an apartment complex between 19th Avenue South and the Interstate. This is an odd bit of Minneapolis--the bridge paralleling the collapsed I35W bridge is called the 10th Avenue bridge, and on the north side of the river the street is 10th Avenue Southeast. On this side of the river, the street is called 19th Avenue South. Why it changes names I don't know.

Anyway, this 10th Avenue Bridge must offer spectacular views. Driving Wednesday to the concert, what residual journalism instincts I have (I started out as a journalism major) cried out to go home, get a camera and bicycle and get down there before everything got closed down. The 10th Avenue bridge is where I would have gone, but of course now it's closed. Officially it's due to concerns about it's integrity vis a vis debris from the collapsed bridge but really this would be one continual spectator stream made worse by the lack of a sidewalk on the upstream side (there is a very nice one on the downstream side). The bright light arrays they had up even as we came home from that Wednesday concert are on this bridge and I expect it will be some time before it reopens.

The light was fading and here, by the north end of the Number 9 bridge, the opposite end of which I'd begun my evening's viewing attempts, I'd made the full circuit. I rode into the U campus looking to take the Washington Avenue bridge home. I was at the lower deck level, not the upper deck, and the ramp up was closed, so I went into the building, took the elevator up one floor, and came out. As I got on the bike, a campus cop guy came over and told me firmly not to do that, that I should go around the building. Look, I said, I tried to use the ramp but it's closed and I don't know my way around. You need to go around next time he says firmly. Yes sir I'll keep that in mind. Sheesh, put these bozos in a blue shirt and badge and they're really feeling their oats, all this hero talk is getting to even the kampus kops.

I rode home using the Intercampus Transitway. It's a bit disrupted right now with road construction and work on the new Gophers Stadium. A big huge grain elevator that used to be there is gone now, and prep work is going on all over.

Bicycles are a great way to do this stuff. I basically never ride on sidewalks or the wrong way down one-way streets but did this night, in a situation like this it works wonderfully. In a car you can't get near anything, you get stuck in traffic, you can't see shit and there's nowhere to park. On foot, you're slow. On a bike, you can make good time, get most anywhere, transition from roadway to sidewalk to parking lot to pedestrian overpass seamlessly. You can even take the elevator up a floor in buildings at the U. You can see what's happening. I've done this before, many years ago during flooding in Des Moines, and just in recent weeks bicycles were of great utility in Japan after some earthquakes and in Britain during some flooding.

One irony of this bridge is how invisible it always was. It was as unremarkable and utilitarian a structure as they come, you only saw it when you drove over it, it had no real redeeming look to it. From the Number 9 bridge it was obscured by the 10th Avenue bridge, from the Stone Arch bridge, it's light truss structure was dominated by the same 10th Avenue bridge in background. Once the wreckage is cleared out, there won't a visual hole in the scenery like the missing World Trade Center towers.

Bicycling Implications

The collapse doesn't directly affect any bicycle routes since there was no bicycle or pedestrian facility on the bridge. As I mentioned earlier, a couple of very useful bike/ped routes are currently closed off but I expect that won't last. The most direct effect is likely to be increased street traffic until a new bridge is built.

However, old, deteriorated bridges have been the topic of conversation elsewhere. Only about 6 weeks ago there was a rally about reopening the Cedar Avenue bridge over the Minnesota river, which would be extremely useful to cyclists down there. Without going back and rereading the articles, I recall comments about how rotten the metal on that bridge is. I'm guessing that will be viewed with more concern now that before even if the loading is just bicycles and pedestrians. A new bridge might be in order rather than a restoration and as usual their are about fourteen agencies who have some say in the effort (for instance, it's close to the airport and any new bridge might have to support emergency vehicles in the event of a plane crash, etc.).

Separately, the wonderful Midtown Greenway across Minneapolis currently terminates at the river. There is this great big lovely railway bridge (the Short Line Bridge) that crosses the river. It used to have 2 tracks, now it has one, and it just serves a spur up and down Hiawatha. The railway has no interest in letting the county use the other bit for a bike path. There are various reasons, but in essence I think the railway has on its hands a big old rusty bridge (nobody seems to know exactly when it was built, but it was around 1880) serving a few grain elevators and scrapyards. I personally think that they look at this customer base, at the rapid improvements along Hiawatha due to the Light Rail which runs the other side, and figure that within a decade all these elevators will close down and they can abandon the spur and bridge. If they allow some stupid bikepath to go over it and all of a sudden it's being used by 3,000 people a day to get to work they now have to maintain their big old rusty bridge forever. Amid all this are discussions of the bridge's integrity and along the line was a comment that it's a design where you remove one element and the whole thing would come down. Again, I expect there will renewed sensitivity to that argument and that we will never see a bikepath on that structure, which is a real pity.

Other Bridgework

Ironically enough, I took some photos of bridge construction last weekend. Henry and I rode to Baker Park, in Western Hennepin County, to camp for a couple of nights with a bunch of church folks. Our late departure (5:35 from home) kept us from dawdling and taking pictures on the way out. We rode down Roselawn and wanted to cross Highway 280 to Broadway but even before the I-35W bridge collapse traffic volumes on 280 were up and no gaps presented themselves, so we went down to Hennepin and moved over. We took Broadway all the way from Industrial Boulevard to Golden Valley Parkway, including an unlovely bit of urban landscape in North Minneapolis, worked our way to Medicine Lake and took the Luce Line trail out to the park to camp by Lake Independence. It was about 33 miles altogether and if our 9:15 arrival sounds late it's because of stopping to navigate, get snacks and buy groceries.

Saturday Henry hung around the campground with the kids. I rode the Luce Line out to Watertown, then up to Delano and Rockford. I'd lost my mirror off my helmet last night and am unused to riding without one, so this felt odd to me. I ate a burger and a beer in Finnegan's in Delano and it wasn't very good. I'd gone in because they had a Boddington's sign in the window, but the didn't actually serve Boddington's. I had a Newcastle Brown Ale and a greasy half-pound hamburger with some bad fries. At least the service was indifferent. From Rockford I rode back to the campground, stopping to snooze for a while under a tree in front of a church. This was about 37 miles in all. Henry was taken home that evening as a bunch of the kids were going to Valleyfair on Sunday after church.

Sunday I got up, packed up and one of the other folks said, hey, we'll take your bags for you. I'm lazy, so I said OK, and they took the tent/pad/bag and both panniers, leaving me light and carefree to ride home. I rode the bikepath through the park to get to the connector back to the Luce Line. This marker was along the way:

I was once in Yellowstone and there was a bunch of cars gathered along the road and it turned out to be a marker of the 45th parallel, halfway to the North Pole!, we took photos, etc., and then I discovered that in fact it runs right down Draper Avenue in Roseville and that I cross it every day going to and from work, usually refraining from stopping to take a photo. Anyway, these markers amuse me.

For those of you following along at home, I went south down Crystal Bay Road to Fox Road, and headed east. I was planning to go through downtown Wayzata. Along the way, Fox Road had a sign about ROAD CLOSED and BRIDGE WORK AHEAD. I ambled along, wondering if it was closed to everyone or just to mere motor vehicles. A cyclist came the other way and I called to him, Can you get through? We circled in the street a couple of times. Yep, he said, they're making a new bridge but you can kind of walk along the side. Last week you couldn't get by. Ok, thanks, I said. Hey, he said, nice Atlantis, I've got one too. Thanks, I sure like mine. And off I went.

The bridge over a little creek was being built but looking pretty impassable. He'd mentioned walking along the side and I looked around. Sure enough, there was a platform on the south side, probably for the workers. I lifted the bike up there and walked gingerly across. One false move and I could be pitched in excess of two feet into the murky waters below!

The walkway I used to get across.

The Atlantis in Exploring Mode--saddlebag, handlebar bag, ice water in seat tube water bottle. It held gin and tonics on the way out. This is on the east side of the bridge after my successful crossing.

I made it without incident, and rode on. On Peavey Road there was another ROAD CLOSED situation. It was half a mile ahead, so I figured it wouldn't cost me more than a mile total, and rode down. Another cyclist caught up to me (not an unusual situation). He's a local, and wasn't sure if it was open yet or not. This road was oozing money, driveways more expensive than my house, big estates, boats. The bridge, however, was impassable this time, and we turned back. I chatted with the other cyclist a bit, he directed me the way to Wayzata, and off I went. I stopped along the waterfront for a bit, munching peanut M&Ms, admiring the expensive cars, the expensive boats, the expensive women, even a remarkably riveting pair of expensive boobs, before riding on. I went past the Cargill headquarters, lost back in some woods, made my way down to Hopkins where I ate at a Chipotle, then rode on the Kenilworth Trail into Minneapolis.

My left crank arm was making noise, so I popped into Calhoun Cycle but there was no mechanic on duty and in fact I helped a customer who wanted to raise his stem and who thought he needed to loosen his headset locknuts to do it. I also bought a replacement mirror for my helmet. I moved on to Sunrise Cyclery where the owner quickly figured out my pedal was just loose, tightened her up, and the bike was once again silent running. Some Twin Cities Bicycling Club guys were there about to go on a ride, but they were heading out to Hopkins and I'd just been there, so I moved on. I took the Greenway to the river, crossed at Lake Street and headed home, about 38 miles total, a beautiful day for a ride.

Bloody 'ot

It's been pretty miserable out the last couple of days. As a Practical Cyclist, it would be nice to ride around in street clothes and not look like a cycling doofus while off the bike, just like those folks in, you know, Amsterdam. You can do that here, in May and October, but days like today cry for separate clothing. Here's the temperature in Saint Paul right now:



And in Amsterdam:


I think their climate and terrain is better-suited to riding the bike everywhere in street clothes. Me, I've been riding to work and showering and changing there. On less-tropical days, I'll ride and just change with a damp mop, but this New Guinea climate isn't going to work for dress trousers, pressed shirt and tie.

I'm guessing that in 6 months I could run the same entry, entitle it "Bloody Nippy" and show our biting cold versus the relatively balmly Amsterdam weather.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Last Saturday was something of a novelty, a day free of obligations. For the last year and a half there have been pressing priorities, resulting from my father's deteriorating health, the decision to move him to a nursing home in northeast Iowa near one of my sisters, the need to move some of his possessions up there from Des Moines, to deal with the rest, to work on the house and sell it, to host his sister, my aunt, visiting from England. Much of this weighed heavily this past spring as my cycling buddy Paul and I worked on the house, starting in February, stripping wallpaper, ripping up carpet, painting, jacking up one settling floor, changing locks, all the details of an older house's need four hours from home. My last trip down was in early June and the house got listed, but then it was the bike races, not an obligation, but another event in a crowded spring.

It came to closure this past few weeks. The last Thursday in June my aunt arrived from the UK for her visit; the next day Dad's house sold, and I no longer had a real estate interest in Des Moines. Margaret's visit was two weeks long; as soon as she left, my mother in law arrived for a couple of days. She left, and a weekend loomed up with no obligations. Happily for me, the latest Harry Potter book was arriving. Henry rode up to the Har Mar Mall bookstore for the party and to buy the two copies we'd reserved; he rode home about 1:30AM and the next morning the household plunged into Pottermania. Nobody was even going to notice if I were gone.

I rode off east to start with, following a ride mapped on Map My Ride. It's 20 miles and passes near the house, so I thought I'd follow the eastern bits, not all of which I've ridden. I did this, riding down Summit to the end and decided I didn't want to go home yet, it was a gorgeous day and at home would be hungry cats and oblivious Potter-obsessed humans. I rode across the Lake Street brigde and up to the Midtown Greenway, and headed west.

At Hiawatha I was pleased to see that work is progressing on the bridge over Hiawatha, which will circumvent the current level crossing. Not only is work progressing, they were working on this lovely Saturday!

Your Tax Dollars At Work I


The cable support and crane for the Hiawatha Bridge.


The cable anchors on the west side.

The grading is looking done on the east side. It looks like this bridge might be open this fall.

I rode on. Is there anything more luxurious than a beautiful day, a lovely bicycle, and absolutely no agenda whatsoever? I rode to the end, then backtracked to the Cars'R'Coffins where I settled in to read a 'zine, drink a latte and consume a delicious ginger and currant scone.


Riding up Bryant Avenue there were new markings on the street. There's not room for bike lanes, but these get put down. I guess they've been trying them in some cities and they serve as useful reminders for motorists that bicycles are there and to cyclists which direction to ride (just tonight, coming home, I had to make room in my lane for a wrong-way cyclist). Plus they're cheap. It's the first time I've seen them in person.

I rode on, back to the Greenway, out to the end of the path, then back up the Kenilworth Trail. It leads to the Cedar Lake Bike Path and I've never ridden on this. I got on it and rode into Minneapolis.

I have to say, it's a pretty greasy way to enter Minneapolis. It goes by highways, past the impound lot, past vast dunes of sand the city keeps to scatter about in winter, growing a crown of weeds now, by piles of smashed concrete. Minneapolis is a lovely city in many parts, but the Cedar Lake Trail is not the way I'd bring in a first-time visitor!

Ominous signs loomed up. TRAIL CLOSED AHEAD. I idled up to the sign and peered on down around the bend. A young couple pulled up. Do you guys know if this goes through? I asked. One of our friends says it's ok said the young lady. I have no schedule, what can happen?, I ride a mile and have to turn back? I head on past the sign and the young couple follows.

The trail carries on for a mile or two, the scenery not improving, and finally does come up to a read end, another sign, but backed up by a fence next to a steep dirt hill leading to a parking lot behind a warehouse. The young lady, the couple having caught up, muscles her bicycle up the path. The young man gets a phone call and takes it and I head up the hill too, having noticed a grisly-looking homeless person watching us with interest. I hung around in the parking lot with the young lady and the homeless guy who kind of grunted at us and sidled off, until the young man showed up, then I clipped in and headed around the corner.

The fencing that ends the trail is blocking off the site of the Minnesota Twin's new ballpark. There is some pissing contest going on about the price of this unpromising-looking bit of real estate, the price having gone up once the Twins got interested, but despite the lack of resolution on price, work has started.

Your Tax Dollars at Work II


A panorama of the ballpark site.


It would be aggravating to work in the building in the background since there was a continuous headache-inducing pounding going on on the pilings in the foreground. Sure are a lot of construction guys working this lovely Saturday!

I was getting kind of hot so rode over to One on One Bicycle Studio, locked up, and got a cold drink and sat reading a book for a few minutes. I took my leave and rode home, stopping for a photo or two, idling along, up the Hendon hill off Como Avenue, cutting through the U of M Saint Paul campus only to find that I was locked out of the State Fairgrounds due to some event, backtracked, took Como Avenue home and arrived back before teatime. I popped my head into Geneva's room and she was crying into the book; the house orca had just died or something. Bummer. I couldn't think of anything appropriately soothing to say so just went back downstairs and put the water on.

It wasn't a fast ride, it wasn't a long distance (about 38 miles in the end and some pathetic average speed, par for the course when I'm exploring, lost or taking photos), there was absolutely no purpose to it at all, but it sure was delightful to just wander along without an agenda and follow my nose. For all their utility as transportation, bicycles are just plain fun as well. I hope I have more days like these, and I hope you do too.

Daily Reading

While I have been preoccupied the past month with various duties, visitors and trips, I have begun reading a couple of fun blogs pretty regularly. I really like the locally-done Pinch Flat News, which comments on bike industry trends and seems unduly hostile to folding bikes (I don't have one, but like the idea).

Separately, the New York-based Bike Snob NYC has a hilarious take on bicycle fashions, especially the Fixie Phenomenon. I can laugh at this with a clear conscience, never having had a fixie and having dispensed with singlespeed bicycles when I got my Columbia Tourist 3-speed for my tenth birthday. However, I can also recognize the passing fads of cycling when I see them and know that I haven't always been immune. When I was that age, it was lugged steel ten-speeds with too-high gearing and sew-ups. It's funny, and a bit rueful now, to look back and think that I couldn't possibly live without the superior handling of the silk tubulars whilst riding my bike to work at Sears.

2007:
Rational Observer: "But your bicycle has no gears or brakes."
Earnest Enthusiast: "Yeah man it's pure cycling and I have mad skillz and don't need gears or brakes."

1977:
Rational Observer: "But your tires are skinny, hard, fragile and expensive."
Earnest Enthusiast: "Yeah man but when you have exquisite cycling sensitivities such as myself you demand only the finest-handling gear to ride to work."

A rational look would have had me riding to work on a three-speed, probably, with the gear ratios knocked down a bit, but the early 20s are not a rational age and are informed by fashion, style and a painful earnestness. The crowning mercy for those of my vintage (nearing 50) is that we pretty much embarrassed ourselves among a limited circle of friends whereas now any clownish hipster can proclaim their painful earnestness and infatuated enthusiasms to The World on the web. This scrap of self-knowledge doesn't keep me from enjoying Bike Snob; take a look, you might like it too.

I've been workin' on the races

I worked on the 2007 Great River Energy Bicycle Festival/Nature Valley Grand Prix races last week. With a bit of effort they might be able to come up with a longer name! Here's how it went.
(Note: I actually am posting this July 16th, having just had a frantic couple of weeks with an aunt from England visiting, but I'm leaving the post date as the date I wrote most of this)(It may seem cheesy post-dating, but on the other hand all the camera crews filming this race do so for a program that won't air until August on the Poetry Channel (Verses)).

Wednesday June 20

It started Wednesday. My cycling buddy Paul rode up from Cedar Rapids, Iowa to work the races on his Stealth Bike (a black Nashbar cyclocross frame outfitted with virtually all black components). I figured he'd call or something when he got to downtown, but he didn't, so I went down in my truck at about 5:00 to do course-marshalling. Paul was already there, having arrived at about 1:00 and spent the afternoon setting up including doing the giant inflatable Wheaties box.

I checked in at the volunteer tent, was issued the standard orange vest, flag and whistle and sent to the northeast corner of Mears Park to be a course marshall. This is the fancy name for crossing guard and the main task is to keep onlookers from going onto the course in front of oncoming cyclists. The main challenge here can be on big open corners with lots of drunks, but this night the corner was just medium-sized (and we narrowed it down for the men's race for better crowd control) and the crowd was well-behaved.

This was my corner in Saint Paul. While standing here I saw a guy walk by with the best t-shirt of the entire five-day affair. On the back it said "The Older I Get, The Faster I Was".


Paul took this photo. The only thing notable about it is that I'm in it, corner marshalling on the left in the yellow shirt, olive shorts and white baseball hat.


I shared the corner with Nora.


Clouds threatened all evening, but it didn't rain until the teardown was nearly complete. It did rain and storm quite a lot elsewhere around East-central Minnesota this evening.


One of the women zooms past.

I figured we might get wet this evening as huge impressive clouds built up and moved around us, but all night long the weather held and the storms went elsewhere (tonight and Thursday the insurance company for which I work would get several hundred hail damage claims from north, south, east and west of Saint Paul) until well after the races were over. Once the men's race was done, I traded in the orange vest for a yellow one and worked on teardown duty which seemed to go pretty well. At about 10:00 we got done just as a thunderstorm finally hit downtown Saint Paul but it mostly just rained on us as we walked to the parking ramp to get the truck and go home.

This criterium was new to the Nature Valley Grand Prix. The last couple of years when I've worked multiple days on the event, the Wednesday Saint Paul race was a time trial along Shepherd Road. While pretty user-friendly for a time-trial (there is a parallel bike path along the whole thing), the race ran mid-day down the hill from downtown Saint Paul and attracted only very modest crowds. Time trials can be a bit dull, too, from an observer's point of view. The criterium format in the evening is much more of a crowd-pleaser, with the racers going round and round a course including Mears Park right in the core of downtown Saint Paul. This seemed to go very well.

Thursday June 21

Thursday Paul and I didn't work any races. We instead went to Cannon Falls to watch the road race. Cannon Falls is about 50 miles south of Saint Paul, so we just drove down. We went downtown and wathced the start of the men's race, then drove out into the country to catch them at a couple of spots. Last year we went to the transition from pavement to a couple of miles of gravel but this year the course was altered somewhat due to some highway construction on Highway 1.

The race leaders are presented at the start line in Cannon Falls.


Paul has actually met this guy. A couple of years ago Paul did a tour of the Tour of Georgia. They'd ride the course, travel in a bus with some racers, meet some afterwards. This guy was one of the racers on the bus. He had perhaps the best hair in the race.

Once again, weather threatened. There were dark clouds and even cumulus mammulus overhead but it never did rain. In fact, compared to last year's heat and brutal wind out of the south, the occasional breath of wind and cool overcast skies made for a delightful evening to ride 60 miles in 2 hours and 21 minutes, which is what the men did.

The lead police car ahead of the racers.


The peloton heads through the corner.


Hey! A guy racing on a steel-framed bike! Of course, he is well-behind the peloton, looking hopefully back.

We caught them at a couple of places and waited for the women to come along as well. There were dark hints of gravel again this year, and word out that a couple of women had crashed in the practice ride and that the women anyway had agreed to take it easy on the gravel, but nobody seemed to know where it was. I had my trusty DeLorme map with the course highlighted (as well as last year's, so I could compare and contrast) and once the women had gone by, Paul and I headed back to town. The men weren't due for a bit, so I idly drove through town and out onto a county road and, Bingo!, the gravel! It was just a short stretch, right before coming into Cannon Falls, and on a road that's normally closed off.

Dramatic clouds, often associated with violent weather, above the course.

There was just one guy there, and when the race came he was going to have to pull fencing across the road, stop traffic and direct racers. This seemed like a lot to do for one guy, so Paul and I donned our vests and helped him.


The men's peloton approaches the gravel.


The men transition to the gravel. This would be pretty short; last year it was a couple of miles.

The men came by and made the transition without incident. We reopened the road and stood around talking with this gentleman, a retired malted barely salesman. Apparently there was a big barley malting operation in Cannon Falls at one time and Goodhue County had been a big producer of barley for malting and thence beermaking. Budweiser one day dropped their business and the operation never really recovered, and eventually shut down. We chatted about a bankrupt development across the street, landscaped, roads, lights and sewers, but lots of problems with the soil which is full of blue clay and causes heaves in the roads and disrupts foundations, I guess.

About 50 minutes after the men came through the lead vehicles came into view and we again dragged out the fencing, stopped traffic and pointed down the road. The women made the gingerly transition to gravel and disappeared over the hill. The support cars and motorcycles all came through, a couple of stragglers, and we reopened the road. The volunteer guy's car wouldn't start, a dead battery, and we didn't have jumper cables, and his OnStar wouldn't work in the car because of the low battery, and his OnStar number was busy from his cellphone, so we promised to stop back after dinner to make sure he was ok, and went into town. The Mill Street Cafe or something like that is where we ate, good beer and mediocre food (at least the bourbon marinade salmon sounded much better than the overcooked fish we got), and then popped back out to see if the volunteer guy was ok. He was gone, as was the fencing. Just out of curiosity, I drove up the gravel road to see where it came out, but the chain that closes it off was already back across the road and I had to go out the way I came in. We headed on home.

Friday June 22

Friday started off with the Time Trial. This was run in Saint Paul, but instead of sending them down main artery Shepherd Road (there was at least one complaining letter to the editor about this last year), it was on the south side of the river starting under the High Bridge and running along Lilydale Road to the Saint Paul Yacht and Pool club. This is a very un-busy road and its main defect as an event venue was that there isn't a continuous bike path alongside so that you can ride down to the end from the start line. At one point the road jogs under what used to be a railway bridge (the short bridge is gone, but the approach trestle is still there), then down a hundred yards and across a small bridge. There is a bike path up to the trestle crossing and then after the small bridge, but that's a hazardous gap in between with the racers coming out every 30 seconds and no clear view through this jog.

The women were already racing when Paul and I showed up on our bicycles about 9:00. When this had been the first event, the order was pre-established. Now that the Saint Paul criterium and Cannon Falls road race were under their belts, there was a General Classification order and the judge was having trouble making herself heard. I asked if she wanted help getting racers up to the start and she said no. A few minutes later number 11 barely made it, rushing past the line, up to the start, and stabilizing for maybe 10 seconds before being launched off on her run.


Kristin Armstrong starts her time trial. She'd be back 10 minutes 24.36 seconds later, well ahead of the others. She would also win the whole Grand Prix by the end of Sunday.

With not much to do, Paul and I watched the women go. We drank some free coffee and laughed at ourselves: You know, without dedicated volunteers like our noble selves, who would make these events possible by standing around drinking free coffee? We wandered down to the trestle. We stayed here quite a while as the men went by. There is a bit of abandoned roadway that bears left and it turned out to be a handy place to pee and also it led past some trash to a path down to near the stone bridge. I took some photos there, then helped a bunch of the women racers in getting across the road and down the course to where the bike path resumes.


Riders going both ways. The abandoned railway trestle ends on the right, a judge guy with a radio checks off riders in the middle, and two inbound riders come through the swerve as an outbound rider heads west. That's an abandoned generating plant across the Mississippi, in the background, and an active grain elevator.


Two riders inbound over the narrow bridge.


Three riders coming through the road bend. I'm not sure who's the hunter and who's the prey here, but someone's having a bad time.

After a while I went back to the trestle. One of the motorcycle guys pulled off and parked. He said one rider had a deer run across the road just in front of him. He couldn't tell from behind quite how close it had been but it looked close, he said. A judge was across the road checking off riders on a list. He had a radio and would let us know how far along we were. The last five men went at one minute intervals. Once the last of them came by we rode back to the start/finish line, parked the bikes, and worked on teardown. This went quickly; there was only a bit of white fencing up. About 12:30 or so Paul and I rode off and headed home.

We packed some lights for the bikes, raingear, a snack or two, and rode off to downtown Minneapolis to help on setup for the Friday evening Criterium there. We couldn't go through the Fairgrounds due to a big Back to the '50s event complete with lots of old cars

I rode Paul past a bunch of the landmarks for my usual cycling rounds; the entrance to the Intercampus Transitway, the Raymond Street turnoff, past Muffaletta where I took girls other than my wife on dates as far back as 1984, down Como, over the Talmadge St. level crossing the railway wants to dump, over the Stone Arch Bridge and through downtown Minneapolis. We got to the Volunteer Tent erected on Nicollet Mall just outside the Dakota, locked our bikes up to one of the tent poles, put on the reflective vests, ate a sandwich and then looked around for the fencing truck.

One of the coordinator guys came up. You guys looking for something to do? Yep, I said, we're looking for the fencing truck. You wanna do sandbags? Sandbags? Nope!

This is the third year I've taken time off from work to work these races, and a couple of years before that I just course-marshalled the Friday night Minneapolis Criteriums (Criteria?), and I have figured out what I like to do and what I don't. I'm happy as a clam with the fencing truck, whether pulling fencing off and setting it up, or taking it back down. It's a lot of work, as with many simple tasks there are a couple of tricks to it, but when you get the experienced volunteer group, it all happens in an unspoken coordinated fashion from which I derive some satisfaction. I don't mind taking down the start/finish structure, I don't mind cutting the zip ties to remove the sponsor banners, I did CAUTION taping for the first time this year and that was OK, and course marshalling is fun. However, there are some things I don't like. Sandbags is one of them, I'm 6'5" tall and have a sometimes-wonky back, the last thing I need is to be bending over and lifting damn sandbags all over the place. The same goes for banners; I'll happily snip them off the fencing and even brought along two pairs of wire cutters to do it with, these things being at a real premium at teardown time, but you need to find someone shorter and younger to roll the damn things up. I'm not fond of collecting the haybales, either. There's nothing wrong with these jobs, mind you, I just don't like 'em. Sandbags? Not just No but Hell No! Where's the fencing truck?

I found it. We don't get to close off the streets until 6:00PM but a lot of the white fencing can be set up alongside the streets and pulled into place when the time comes. During this period it rained. It always rains on the Minneapolis Criterium Friday. I put on my comical Ortlieb Waterproof Hat and my raincoat and we set up fencing in the rain. Last year there was lightning and hail and it rained later and delayed or shortened the races. That storm during teardown was of epic proportions and I have never been so wet without actually going swimming. This year the rain all fell during setup. I went to get the raingear and found the Volunteer Tent was draining about a quarter of its rainfall collection onto our bicycles, including Paul's 1973 and my week-old Brooks saddles. I put a garbage bag over them. Can't possibly let a Brooks get wet, you know, might shrink or dissolve or something, so They say. We got all the fencing out in place and Paul and I mooched a Buy One Get One Free Caribou coupon out of a volunteer swag bag and went to Caribou and had a cup of coffee.

Did it rain? Is the pope Catholic? This is the Minneapolis criterium, of course it rained! Not during the race, though, just during setup. Here are some of the Minneapolis skyscrapers wreathed in clouds as the rain cleared.


Some of the crew working in the rain. We're moving the fence truck to another part of the course.


Andy's the coordinator for a couple of these races. A spot of rain's not going to slow him down!


Andy may be in charge but that doesn't exempt him from helping! Here we're setting up in front of the Hell's Kitchen restaurant on 10th Street. You can see one of the loathsome sandbags on the right.


Setting up fencing is a two-person operation--pick it up, install the feet as you walk into position, hold them in place until the fence is down.

Emerging, one of the leaders asked if we'd do CAUTION taping. I don't know, I've never done it, I can think of no reason not to, it's not like it's stinkin' sandbags. Sure. He gives us 3,000 feet of CAUTION tape, says we need some sort of dispenser (you can buy nice ones for about $9 but we made do with a course marshall flag pole) and said to tape both sides of the street. Paul and I walked off full of swagger and confidence only to discover that we weren't sure exactly where the course went. Hmmm, we could sent them down the I-394 entrance ramp, never to be seen again! We walked back and found another volunteer coordinator and confirmed where the course was supposed to go, then spent a happy 45 minutes running CAUTION tape from light pole to parking meter to flower planter. It's no white fencing, but it was OK. I'd do it again.

By the time we reported back the course marshalls had already been dispatched around the race course. We put on orange vests, collected flags and a whistle (I still had mine from Wednesday, although it turns out they run them all through a dishwasher each night) and walked back up the north side of the course with all the lovely CAUTION taping. At one intersection there were a couple of uncertain-looking marshalls, both newbies, it turned out, so Paul took one side and I the other and spent the races helping out. Crowds were nice again, once again I was on an inside corner, a couple of times we had to move people back a bit, but I also had the pleasure of lining up kids (stand right there and don't move!) so they could see the racers go zooming past.

Races over, we went back, changed into yellow vests and went to work. I cut banners with my handy side-cutters for a while as a guy came along rolling up behind me, an ideal situation, then the fencing truck showed up and Paul and I spent the rest of the night pulling in fencing. Once that was in, and the finish line thing was down and apart, we unlocked the bikes from the Volunteer Tent, helped take it down, looked longingly at the lovely rare beef and large glasses of wine being eaten by the beautiful people in The Dakota (wanna trade for some peanut butter Nature Valley granola bars?) and rode off. We stopped by One on One for a short time, talking to Gene and drinking a beer and a half, the half being half a can each of Surly's Furious which I found annoyingly hoppy. I've made beer before, this stuff made me wonder if the guy tripped and dumped a whole bucket of hops in the brewpot instead of a cup and just said screw it, let's bottle it, maybe someone'll buy it. Paul figured Gene was happy to see us since that made him the third oldest guy there. We chatted with some of the kids back there who all seem really young, just out of college, first jobs, fixies, full of the joys of life, younger by a decade than Paul's saddle or my front hub. We rode on home and turned in.

Saturday June 23

Saturday, no bike races. It's in Mankato and I've never gone down to see those. However, we did some planning. Paul's off to the Boundary Waters with the Boy Scout troop his son is in next week, and the forecast the next couple of days was hot and winds out of the south. On Saturday I suggested he take the train to Winona or La Crosse and ride from there--the eastbound train is a 7:50AM departure (if it's on time). He decided this was a good idea, it pares 100 miles off the ride on a day that promised heat and headwinds.

There was one issue: Amtrak wants you to box the bicycle. This seems silly, it's just Saint Paul to Winona, the next baggage stop down the line. Maybe he could talk them out of it. Paul shaved ("I do it once a week whether I need it or not") so he'd look respectable and we popped by the Amtrak station to see if he could just do a roll-on, roll-off, not disassemble and box the bike. Nope. You know, it's just the next stop, and I'll be riding it away. No, sorry.

Bummer. On some routes, Amtrak has a program (Bikes on Board) where you can do this, and it would be great from here east, where the luggage stops are Winona, La Crosse, Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago. But they don't offer it (yet--I think I'm going to write Amtrak and my Congressman and inquire about this).

We went to find a bike box. My first thought was Erik's in Rosedale. I find Erik's a really boring bike store and I change radio stations when and Erik the Bike Man commercial comes on, but they are large and must sell tons of bikes, so they ought to have boxes. Nope. You have to reserve one. They get bikes in twice a week and immediately recycle the boxes unless you reserve one, so they have a modest collection off to one side but they're all for specific people. We hadn't reserved any of Erik's garbage, so next came County Cycles at Lexington and C2. I like these guys, and sure enough, they had a box Paul could have for free.

Paul was impressed with County Cycles. People are impressed with bike stores for funny reasons. With Paul, it was because they had:

1. Individual tire patches. He needed a couple.


2. Individual allen wrenches. Need only a 3mm? You can get it here.


3. A big spoke display of different sizes out in the open along with...


4. rims. No tubular rims, but still, they did have...


5. a selection of tubular tires.
   

Oh sure, they had bikes too, but it's the details that differentiate a cool bike shop from a boring one.

Anyway, we went home and worked on packing the bike into the box. It was enough of a squeeze that I wonder what I'll do with my enormous Atlantis. Still, we got it in and taped it up.

Sunday June 24

So Sunday we got to the train station about 6:45AM to check the bike in. We'd been warned to do it early because of all the extra handling. The train was running late, so we got a coffee and then I drove Paul around, showing him the Midtown Greenway both east and west of Hiawatha, the Short Line Bridge and the Hiawatha bridge a-building over the road and light rail tracks.

Back to the station, where we poked around a bit. Security's a bit loose, and we looked at the train cars sitting around until some lady came out and yelled at us. Then the train showed up. Paul got in line to board, I took a couple of photos of the luggage car getting loaded, and off I went home.


If you've read my Lake Pepin Three Speed Tour write-up, I mention at the very end seeing a cool custom railcar go by on the end of the Amtrak train. This is the car, I'm certain of it. It must be quite a view out of this car!


Paul's from Cedar Rapids, and that's what the car is named.


The logo would make a great headbadge!


Paul's bike on the luggage cart on the right, waiting to get loaded. The annoying thing about this photo is that he had to box his bike but on either side of the door of the luggage car is a bicycle logo; this car is equipped with hooks for roll-on, roll-off Bikes on Board service! Grrrrrr!


Tell me again why I have to box up the freakin' bike when you have bike logos all over your Baggage Car????


The train sets off to Winona and points east and south.


In the Amtrak parking lot was a bike with this unusual display of what gear you're in. I suppose people in the bicycle business would know what this is and when it's from, but I've never seen it before.

I changed into biking gear, got out the Atlantis and rode to Stillwater. This was 21 miles and I hadn't been out for several years. I liked the new underpass at County 12 and the Gateway Trail, much safer than the old level crossing. I was overtaken by many people along here including one large group that refreshed my memory on how much faster it is to ride in a crowd than it is solo, which I virtually always do. They caught me about half a mile from County 12 and for a brief time I was suddenly faster. I don't ever ride in groups, and I'm not sure of the etiquette; could I just ask to join them? I was uncharacteristically bashful, they moved onto the road at 12 while I took the bike path and I watched them ride away and disappear from view as I lumbered along solo. I might have to try some group rides.

Once I'd plunged down the hill into Stillwater I was starved and ate one of the volunteer ham sandwiches. I pretty much lived on free sandwiches, Nature Valley granola bars, Sport Beans and Cokes during these volunteer stints. The women's race was already in progress and I was due to relieve a course-marshall at 1:30. My position was pointed out to me; it was right by the Expo where the racers would start, in full sunlight. The past couple of years I've been up on the brutal but shady Chilkoot Hill at the top of which lies the finish line. That's OK, I slathered myself in sunscreen, suited up with shirt, vest and whistle, and took over.


Oh No! Look Out! This camera (a Kodak V705) does in-camera panoramas, but there's a bit of delay between each shot. The result is this three-shot, left-to-right image, what looks like a soon-to-be-fatal breakdown of course-marshalling as the unsuspecting pedestrians on the left are in dire peril of getting hit by the zooming racers on the right.


The racers gathered at the start. The guys with the rope set the front row, which was widely ignored, and here are trying to gather up their rope while the men's field bakes at the start line.


This guy's chain came off partway up the hill and he couldn't get it back on. He coasted back down and a mechanic works furiously on it. He got going again, but only after the peloton came by, leaving him a lap back. In a race where the judges began pulling racers two laps in, this probably wasn't good news for him.

It was easy course-marshalling, the crowds mostly having gathered up on the hill. The racers all assembled right there in front of me and I could see them getting pulled, some as early as two laps into the race. It went on for an hour; 45 minutes at speed, then 5 laps declared and counted down. The field was winnowed severely, probably more than half pulled by the judges. With two laps to go there was a crash at the corner near me, one guy running wide into the fence, another crashing trying to miss him, another hitting him and flipping over the bars. There was nothing for me to do; other marshalls, a race judge and a cop ran over, a couple of marshalls waved their flags at oncoming racers who couldn't see the fallen riders, but in a couple of minutes it was all cleared out and the race carried on to its conclusion, cheering and excitement up the hill, some uncertainty about whether the racers would be back, and after a few minutes, everyone began milling about, cleared out briefly for a kids race.

The same routine; switch vests, spend some time snipping down sponsor banners, then look for the fencing truck (of course, it was up the damn hill which is hard to walk up, never mind ride) and set off after it. By the time I got there it had moved on and I helped disassemble the finish line scaffolding, then the truck showed back up with only two people aboard, woefully shorthanded, so I joined them and spent the rest of my time taking in fencing.


Man, this was hot. I eventually went and sucked down a couple of ice waters, then rejoined the teardown efforts.

About 5:00, the fencing in, me wilting in the sunlight and heat, I turned in my vest, drank some water, mounted up and rode off. I thought about a beer and snack along the river, but wasn't really that hungry yet, so set off up the hill out of town.


Since I was last out this way, the Gateway Trail got an underpass under County 12, much safer than a level crossing. It's shared with a horse trail, as you might see.

This hill isn't as steep as the one on the race course, but it was all I could do to slog up the bloody thing. I found myself getting hungry for something other than Sport Beans and granola bars and came across a farm selling strawberries. I bought a pint and sat in the shade at a picnic table and ate the lot. Ahhhh, much better! I rode on home, County 12 to the Gateway Trail, that to Arlington, then surface streets home, not riding very quickly, and arrived right at 7:30, tired, grubby and hot, to take a lovely shower and change.

Another race set over. It's a lot of hard work even as a lowly volunteer, but it's also a pretty satisfying time. I don't regularly do much in the way of physical labour and there's a refreshing simplicity to dealing with fencing and CAUTION tape and sponsor banners and even to course-marshalling with it's opportunities for public interaction. The races are good fun to watch, and they're satistying to work. You might consider doing one or both next year.

Great River Energy Bike Festival

The Great River Energy Bicycle Festival/Nature Valley Grand Prix bike races are coming up. This is a series of five races running Wednesday June 20th through Sunday June 24th. I volunteered as a crossing guard and for setup and teardown in the past, including last year's Minneapolis Criterium, cut short by thunderstorms with teardown in belting cold rain. My buddy Paul rode up last year and is doing so again this year. We're volunteering at the Wednesday Criterium (changed from the Time Trials they've done on Wednesdays in the past) in Saint Paul, Friday afternoon's Time Trial in Saint Paul (along Lilydale Road this time) and Friday evening's Criterium in Minneapolis (will it rain again? good chance!). Paul's heading back Sunday, but I'll be at the Sunday afternoon Criterium in Stillwater with its brutal hill climbs. I think they still need volunteers, so if you have an interest, go to the site's Volunteer Page and sign up. Setup and teardown are pretty easy and being a crossing guard is straightforward. I personally take along foam earplugs (stacking the metal fencing in teardown Friday evening can leave your ears ringing), leather gloves and a pair of diagonal cutters, useful for snipping the sponsor banners' Zip-ties off the fencing. Sunscreen is good, raingear has been essential.

On the off-days, we're just going to hang out. We'll probably go down to Cannon Falls to watch (and not work on) the road race. The race loop is such that you can catch several bits of the race by moving around a little.

Volunteering isn't too hard, you get a good view of the race and, if you see Paul and I around, you can join us for a beer afterwards.

Great Moments in Bicycle Mechanics, or, my Atlantis 3-speed

As a self-taught bicycle mechanic of middling ability I have learned from many mistakes, both mine and others', over the years. Oh those fond memories of carefully repacking the bottom bracket only to find a ball bearing left over, the tremendous stopping ability of a brake block carefully adjusted to grab the tire or, my favorite, the surprise of discovering that the left pedal is left-hand threaded after a wrestling session involving two guys, a big wrench and a pipe. Happily, that last one happened to a couple of friends of mine and not to me, and they eventually gave up and took it to the bike shop where the mechanic got if off, though not before asking what sort of gorilla had installed it. You'd think that eventually every iteration of error would have been made but, no, there's always new frontiers.

Last night I installed a Pletscher/ESGE two-legged kickstand on my Atlantis. I got tired of my best bike having the worst kickstand and really like these two-legged units. I meticulously installed it, measured, cut off some of each leg, reinstalled, re-measured, trimmed off a bit more. No, the obvious error of cutting the legs too short so they dangle helplessly from the bottom bracket 10mm off the ground wasn't my problem. I got them trimmed to the right length, carefully installed the kickstand, rode it around the driveway and packed up for the night.

So today I'm riding to work, taking the Atlantis because the big blue Chatsworth is having some fiddly clearance issues with the fenders, and I go to shift with my excellent Dura-Ace bar-ends and....nothing. The lever will hardly move. I stare down at the crankset as I ride along and realize that, yes, I have carefully and meticulously clamped my rear derailleur cable to the chainstay along with the kickstand! D'Oh!

I rode along. This wasn't a critical service item, no need to return home and drive. This must be what singlespeeds are like. I kept peddling. At least it's in a decent gear--a lot of the time I shift to the largest cog as I wallow through the yard from the back gate. I wonder if I can shift chainrings...yes, I can. Hey! It's a three-speed!

I pulled off at the Lake Josephine changing house to see if I could loosen the clamp and free the cable but the 6mm allen wrench on my cute little Crank Bros. multi-tool won't reach in there. I also have a small allen wrench set, but it stops at 5mm. I really must rethink my field service tools! I rode on to work and parked it, and will ride home tonight on what may be the world's only three-speed Atlantis before making the needed repairs.

You Can't Spell Carnage without Car

One of the aspects of motor vehicles that isn't often remarked upon is the number of deaths we accept each year for our convenience. In 2005, the last year for which figures are fully compiled, 43,443 people died in motor vehicle crashes, an average of 119 a day. On average, then, it takes about 3 1/2 weeks to kill as many people in motor vehicle crashes as died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Those attacks have dramatically altered our country's behaviour, reputation, finances and politics, yet the death toll continues to tick upwards on our roads with hardly any comment. It is so widely accepted as part of life that it seems we all know somebody killed in a car crash (one of our old employees' sons was killed a few days ago in Boston, a passenger in a taxi rammed into by a car being chased by police) or someone who has killed someone in a car crash (Laura Bush, for instance). In among the dead are 750+ bicyclists a year and around 4,800 pedestrians, though I think this undercounts pedestrian deaths.

Since I work for an insurance company, I get the industry rags that come around. Most of it is dull stuff, new insurance commissioners, competitor filings in different states, ongoing industry debates about various lines, but the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety does a number of good publications. They have just released a special Status Report called One Day of Crashes, which looks in detail at several of the crashes that killed people on Tuesday June 7, 2005. June 7 was chosen because 119 people were killed that day, the average daily total in a year with a low of 67 deaths (February 17th) to a high of 197 (June 25th). As it happens, there were no motor vehicle deaths in Minnesota that day, though there were two each in Wisconsin and Iowa.

The first death that day was at 12:05AM in Mooresville, Indiana, when a 16-year-old driving 90mph lost control, hit several trees and ended up upside-down. His father came across the wreck on the way to work and identified his son in the car. He is interviewed for the article and you can feel the unspeakable grief coming through. There are several other crashes detailed, ending with a newly-married couple clobbered by a drunk Marine in a pickup who ran a red light in Arlington, Texas and the final death of the day, when a motor scooter in Fort Worth ran into the side of a tractor-trailer at 11:55PM.

One story is a bicyclist death, one of four that day. A 61-year-old woman in Ocean Springs, Mississippi was riding her bike home from Wal-Mart when she was hit from behind by a Ford pickup driven by a 75-year-old man. He didn't stop until a policeman who'd seen the collision pulled him over. He claimed not to have seen the cyclist. There were 782 bicyclists killed in crashes with motor vehicles in 2005. Most died of head injuries, and 86% of those killed were not wearing helmets.

Another is a pedestrian death. An 83-year-old woman was crossing the street on a Walk signal when she was hit by a 74-year-old man in a Lexus SUV. The driver said he didn't see the pedestrian until his wife pointed her out and, startled, his foot slipped off the brake and onto the accelerator. The SUV lurched into the woman and she died of head trauma, one of 8 pedestrians killed that day, one of 4,881 killed in 2005.

It makes an illuminating litany of the daily carnage with all the usual causes; teenage stupidity (driving fast, no seat belts, inexperience), drunkenness and running red lights (the Marine t-boning the couple), inattention (two sleepy truck drivers, one runs off the road and kills himself, another runs at 53mph into the back of a stopped car and kills the driver), bad luck (the motorcyclist hitting a cow in the dark, a couple killed when a car crossed the centerline and hit them), speeding (a factor in nearly 1 in 3 fatal crashes), older drivers (75-year old hits cyclist, 74-year old hits pedestrian). They are often referred to as accidents, but many are not, they are behaviours people consciously choose. For all the motorist ire about cyclists always running stop signs and red lights, it is the ubiquitous speeding, cell phone talking, red light running, drunkenness and inattention which kills people by the score every single day. Yes, I know, I'm too important to obey those dreary speed limits, this phone call demands my immediate attention, that was close enough to a stop, I didn't drink that much, I am too important to be inconvenienced by legal behaviour and if more than 40,000 people a year have to die because of it, so be it.

You can read the IIHS Status Report here if you're interested.

In the meantime, be careful out there.

Three Speed Tour, Three Music Events

Last weekend was the Lake Pepin Three Speed Tour. It was great fun. It took me a few days to get my account and photos posted, but they are up now and can be read here. I went as the Quicker Vicar this year and even ran a short service in the parking lot before we set off. Here I am Sunday in Old Frontenac:


When I'm not out in public as a Vicar (ordained in the online Universal Life Church!), I actually sing in the church choir directed by my wife. We're in the rotation for the Lake Harriett Bandshell service and our Sunday is this one, at 10AM. If you're in the area, stop by, and hear us sing. It's not as traditional as The Blessing of the Bicycles and in fact we're singing some pretty catchy tunes.

Sunday afternoon there's a benefit for Chris Zito, who was hit and badly injured by a hit-and-run motorist on March 30th. The benefit is Sunday the 27th starting at 3:00 at the Nomad World Pub on the West Bank of Minneapolis. There's a ride to the Nomad World Pub originating at Minnehaha Coffee (4554 Minnehaha Avenue) in Minneapolis at 2:00, there's music, there's food, there's beer.

Finally, next Saturday, June 2nd at 7PM, my son Henry and the Minnesota Boychoir are singing with the Twin Cities Gospel Choir. They'll be at University Lutheran Church of Hope at 601 13th Avenue SE in Minneapolis. It ought to be a cookin' concert.

I Did My Part

There has been an email going around suggesting that we all boycott buying gasoline on May 15 to bring the oil companies to their knees and compel them to reduce the price to $1.30 a gallon, where it apparently belongs. Well, dubious though I may be about these efforts, I dutifully did my bit and didn't buy any gasoline yesterday. Due no doubt to you petrol-buying slackers, these efforts appear to have been for naught. Oh well.

I did go to the Saint Paul Bicycle Advisory Board Bike Summit down by Boca Chica. It was ill-attended, probably due to the lack of publicity. I think my blog entry was about the most obvious announcement of the meeting, so the handful of non-BAB, non-presenters at the meeting was a disappointment compared to last autumn's 100 or so attendees. This session was really looking for comments on the bicycle portion of the transportation plan, not as open-ended a discussion as at last fall's Summit. There was some discussion of the power of the railroads in the context of the Midtown Greenway (which is now looking to build its own Mississippi River bridge rather than share the railroad's existing Short Line bridge), the Saint Paul part of the Greenway and the powerlessness to do anything about the Raymond Street bridge, which has a fairly horrid bend in the road and blind spot.

One interesting discussion during the break was with the City of Saint Paul engineer talking about Stop signs. Apparently, most residential streets used to have no Stop signs, they were uncontrolled intersections. The resulting accidents prompted the city to put in Stop signs on what he called a basketweave pattern, e.g., one every two blocks in opposite directions. Accident figures dropped, everyone was happy. Now, as time has gone on, people have become used to these signs and, as I noted in a recent entry, don't really stop, but slow down, take a quick look, and roll on through. By people, I mean motorists, not just cyclists. Accident rates at these intersections are now back to pre-Stop sign levels plus the city has got the cost of installing and maintaining all these signs. One proposal is to make all these intersections four-way stops which means, as one citizen apparently put it, it takes two idiots instead of one to cause an accident. This of course chops up travel even more--stopping (or pretending to) every block instead of every two, and is twice the number of signs that the city has to install and maintain and undoubtedley people will adapt to this, roll through these as well and, after an initial drop in accidents, no doubt the rate will creep back up.

I noted that there are some uncontrolled intersections in residential Minneapolis and I always creep up to them, afraid of someone barrelling down the opposing road. The engineer guy said that is often the case, that the responsibility is on the drivers and they take extra care. He said often as not, the safest bits of the highway are those known as Dead Man's Curve or Suicide Hill because everyone knows they're dangerous and takes extra care. Uncontrolled intersections are the same; people are cautious because they don't know what to expect.

In the insurance industry, we've seen the same sort of effect with anti-lock brakes. When they first came out, the assumption was this wonderful technology would make driving safer. In fact, the loss experience for ABS-equipped and non-ABS equipped automobiles is virtually identical. Where once, pre-anti-lock brakes, you'd creep gingerly up to icy intersections ready to pump the brakes, now you just zoom right up and stomp on the pedal, knowing the clattery ABS noises will keep you from locking up your wheels. It's been noted that people would drive a lot differently if there was a pointy metal spike sticking out of the steering wheel rather than a pillowy airbag. They'd drive differently if residential intersections were all uncontrolled, too.

It's been done. Here's a brief excerpt from an article about it:

Hans Monderman, the pragmatic Dutch planner who was one of the first to introduce the naked streets concept in Holland, reorganized streets so that cars had to proceed as cautiously as pedestrians. Drachten, a city of 45,000 people, has removed more than 80 percent of its traffic lights and more than half its road signs under Monderman’s guidance: the number of accidents has dropped dramatically. “I am used to it now,” Drachten resident Helena Spaanstra told one newspaper. “You drive more slowly and carefully, but somehow you seem to get around town quicker.”

This also ties into another bike program, the Share the Road signage. Saint Paul has Share the Road signs on a number of streets, which is good I guess, but many have their own poles and, speaking as someone who lives on a busy street, I'd be really annoyed if someone came along and slapped a pole in my front yard with a Share the Road sign on it. I was relieved a couple of years ago when some motorist crashed through our telephone pole, mailbox and street sign into our lilac hedge (then, in true motorist fashion, left the vehicle and ran off into the night). The power company replaced the telephone pole, I fixed the mailbox (which has since been hit again, again by someone who took off) but I just cut off the bent-over street sign and it was never replaced, which made me happy. I hate to say this, but I think Share the Road signs are just more visual clutter, something we can do with less of rather than more.

I rode to the Summit on my Atlantis dressed in regular work clothes--dress slacks, dress shoes, white shirt, tie. It was a good evening for this, as riding there involved a ferocious tailwind and 200 foot drop in altitude, and the wind was mostly gone by the time I rode home. I did pass a couple of Mormon missionaries proselytizing some guy at a bus stop. They, too, were on bicycles, with helmets, in white shirts, ties, dress slacks and shoes. This makes the Dressed Up Cyclist the perfect cycling uniform--if you overtake a slower cyclist, it's extra-humiliating for them to be overtaken by a guy in a tie; if you get overtaken, well, it was just some guy all dressed up, who couldn't overtake someone like that?; and strangers won't bother you for fear of being recruited into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Cyclists. When I told my wife that I looked like a Mormon missionary she pointed out that, no, they're usually young and attractive. Ouch.

Bikey Week

There are a couple of bicycling-related things going on next week that may be of interest. First, for Saint Paul cyclists or those who have an interest, the Saint Paul Bicycle Advisory Board's revised Saint Paul Bicycle Transportation Plan is going to be presented for public comment on Tuesday May 15 from 6:30 to 8:30 at the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Center for Community Building, 179 Robie Street East, Saint Paul. There is a link to the plan and map at the Midway TMO website, look at the upper right. In the way that these things work, this plan has been distributed to District Planning Councils for comments, this meeting is for public comment and it will be forwarded at the end of the month for inclusion in an overall Saint Paul Transportation Plan.

Then, on Friday May 18, it's Bike to Work Day! I've never participated in the events since they seem to be very oriented towards people going to the downtowns whereas I start in Saint Paul and head north, but this year I may help out in downtown Saint Paul. I expect that if you are reading this blog you know about commuting; if you're new to it, May's a great month to start. There are a bunch of rides planned, so maybe one will fit your needs. Hope it doesn't rain!