Revolution Schmevolution

In a previous post I cited a series of articles written by Jan Heine of Bicycle Quarterly (sheesh, why do I even subscribe to that magazine when Jan puts everything but the ads on his blog..?) about the relative merits of bicycle-specific infrastructure such as separated bike lanes, cycle tracks, etc. The gist was that there is a battle between those who advocate for bikes to have separate-but-equal facilities and those who want bicycles to be treated as vehicles - granted rights on the road equal to cars. I suggested, in my intuitive, non-scientific way, that there was likely some middle ground where bike lanes and cycle tracks would continue to proliferated in densely packed urban cores, bikes would continue to be treated like malformed stepchildren in the suburbs and in the country we would still have to clench our Lycra clad sphincters every time one of those gigantic pickup trucks blows by, but otherwise would still be happiest on such roads with their light traffic.

In his follow-up post on the topic, Jan has done what Jan usually does, which is analyze the options from a rational, statistical perspective aimed at maximizing the safety of cyclists and has recommended almost exactly the opposite of what we seem to actually be doing. He argues that on city streets where automobile traffic is moving slowly, riding in the street is the safest approach. Where the speed picks up a bit (up to 30 MPH), painted bike lanes allow sufficient separation to assure bikes and cars can coexist peaceably. And when cars are flying, he acknowledges that completely separate bike lanes are warranted. He cites the example of Munich, Germany which has engaged in a decade long effort to modernize its infrastructure and has apparently achieved a 70% increase in bicycle mode share in just nine years; 17.4% of all trips in Munich are now made by bicycle.

His key recommendation suggests the creation of Fahrradstraßen, bike boulevards where cyclists have the dominant right-of-way. Personally I have difficulty imagining many American cities will ever consider bicyclists worthy of the top spot on the totem pole. It just seems too European. But the concept is definitely intriguing. Just take a few strategically placed, lightly used side streets and designate them "bike boulevards". Cars can still use them, but bikes have the right-of-way. This would get a lot of bikes off the main arteries and make cyclists feel safer, which would get more people on bikes which would reduce traffic on the main arteries. I just have such a hard time seeing Americans giving priority to bikes over cars.

Maybe if we make it a nationalistic thing. Make it about beating the Germans. You know, Let's get those Krauts before they cover the world in Fahrradbahns! It might work. After all it worked once. I mean we entered WWII to save the English, who we don't much care for (and who, I might add we had to forcibly expel from these beloved shores a mere 158 years prior), and the Jews, who many Americans would probably have liked to exterminate themselves. We could get some awesome propaganda posters made and whip up the anti-Teutonic fervor that's always lurking just below the otherwise quiet exterior of the average American. Nah, it would never work. Or, I guess we'll just keep things just the way they are, which is what I suspect we'll do.

The problem is that the communities with the greatest desire for improved infrastructure, i.e., cities, don't really need much in the way of improvement. And those most in need of improvement, i.e., suburbs, don't want it (meaning don't want to spend money on it). So we'll end up with all kinds of separated lanes in the cities where we don't need it and the suburbs will continue to be soulless, car focused hellscapes populated by Humscalade driving distracto-moms shuttling their obese offspring from one diabetes clinic to the next while shouting at their cell phones over the television in the back seat playing a continuous loop of drool inducing mental pablum. Sorry Jan. We're not in the Old Country anymore...        

Pokey dokie

I'm not sure where you'd go to find a washboard these days, but I sure am glad Ryan Koenig, the percussionist for Pokey LaFarge found one. Dredged up from Mississippi bottom land of southern Illinois, the St. Louis band manages to transport listeners back through a Victrola horn to a warm crackling time when musicians actually had to know how to play their instruments. This is the flavor of American music revived by the Coen Brothers' Oh! Brother Where Art Thou. I don't know if it's the Great Depression-Great Recession connection or the plethora of Tweedy hipsters that have sprung up in our cities over the last few years that makes Pokey's tunes feel so relevant, but there is something about the that just seems appropriate. I'm just glad to have found them. I'm so happy, in fact, I'm singin' la la la.

Pokey and the boys swing the NPR offices

Devolution Revolution

One small step for man

This is the end

Neil Armstrong put the first human footprint on the surface of the moon in 1969, three days after my sixth birthday. The actual memory of seeing it on TV is now lost in the hundreds or thousands of reruns of the event, but I have a distinct recollection of having been told that this was the greatest achievement in all of history, the pinnacle of human ingenuity, and that it was performed by the greatest civilization planet Earth had ever had the good fortune to have hosted. Land of the free. Home of the brave. My country 'tis of thee (whatever that means). In those days America was number one with a bullet! And I believed it. I think most of us in my generation did.

We were born into a world in which even the sky was not the limit. Anything was possible and despite a few minor anomalies like the war in Vietnam, the odd political assassination or the race riots in cities all over the country, America was leading the world into the trans-planetary future of infinite possibility. It's been all downhill from that point on. Looking back from our current vantage point, I've come to see the moon landing as the high point of human evolution. It was the last time a pedestrian was celebrated and what seems like, at least from a transportation perspective, the beginning of the end of human powered locomotion.

Just as soon as NASA could figure out how to do it, they got a car up to the moon so the astronauts wouldn't have to trudge around the way Armstrong and Aldrin had had to do. That was it, Apollo 15 - the last time any American had to walk further than the car port. Should humans ever go back to the moon, my guess is that the first thing they'll do is construct an inter-crater connector (ICC). And that should kick off the next phase of human evolution: the symbiotic fusion of mammal and machine. Call it Homo Automobilis.

In the beginning

What we think of as the modern human more or less began when our primate ancestors came down from the trees and walked out onto the grasslands. To this day we maintain an irrational fondness for lawns. Just fly into any city in the southwest if you don't believe me. They're piping water hundreds of miles so they can grow grass in the desert! So, given how intrinsically defining bipedal-ism is to humans, it is amazing to see how foreign an activity walking has become to modern Americans. This fact was brought into focus for me when a couple of young nieces came to stay with my wife and me for a weekend recently. Without thinking much about it, my wife and I routinely walk to restaurants, theaters and shops in our neighborhood but when our young nieces, aged eight and eleven, were confronted by the prospect of a fifteen minute walk to get to a park, they acted as though they were being tortured.

I initially attributed their resistance to simple preadolescent slothfulness, but the more I thought about it, the more it kind of made sense. They live in one of those new McMansion subdivisions where the sidewalks just mysteriously end, they are driven to school each day and there is a TV set in the family minivan. Their entire lives basically seem to be spent on a virtual sofa. They have hand-held devices with them at all times - the first thing they did upon arrival at my home was demand free WiFi access - and there is video streaming in front of them more or less twenty four hours a day. Walking to the refrigerator is about the longest distance they have to traverse without being in a car. And it turns out that in this respect, they are really just typical Americans.

"...the idea that that we, this species that first hoisted itself into the world of bipedalism nearly 4 million years ago—for reasons that are still debated—should now need “walking tips,” have to make “walking plans” or use a “mobile app” to “discover” walking trails near us or build our “walking histories,” strikes me as a world-historical tragedy."     The Crisis in American Walking

We're Number One! We're Number One! We're Number One!

Only thirteen percent of American children walk or bike to school —  down from 50% in 1969. 23% of American children get zero exercise per day. Zero. You don't have to go farther than the nearest mall — to which, by the way I'll bet you have to drive — to see that Americans are becoming increasingly, astonishingly obese. In fact, obesity is one of the only remaining characteristics in which we can still claim to be a world leader!
    
And the funny thing about this is how resistant we are to do anything about it. Witness the recent uproar over the proposal to ban absurdly large sodas in New York. Or the kind of push back you get for insisting that our neighborhoods should be walkable. Now, I'm really happy to be an American and I'm glad we repelled the British occupiers, but equating NYC's prohibition on trans fat in restaurants and large sodas with tyranny just seems silly to me. And labeling people fascists just because they want to wean our citizens from the corporate gavage that is turning us into a nation of diabetics is just laughable. But then I guess our tricorn-hat-wearing forefathers started a revolution over a beverage, right? So maybe it's not so weird that greet limitations on our consumption of corn syrup as tantamount to the imposition of Stalinist totalitarianism.

I've consequently had no alternative but to recognize Armstrong's first step on the moon as the zenith of human evolution. After that point it's all devolution, as we walk less and sit more and slowly, inexorably become fatter and fatter, less able to even lift the weight of our ever growing bodies, transforming from Fat Bastard, past the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen phase, through the Jabba the Hutt metamorphosis and inevitably back into some kind of legless fish creatures. And we'll complain about the tyranny of anyone who tries to intervene between us and our Kröd-given right to pollute ourselves with fake food and wallow in the soothing glow of our Retina screens.

So off we go, forward into the past...

Integration Segregation

Jan Heine, editor of the much esteemed Bicycle Quarterly has recently engaged in one of his typically analytic discussions on the relative merits of the various types of bicycle-specific infrastructure popping up around US cities. In particular, he seems a bit incensed over a newly unveiled cycle path in his home city of Seattle. In the age old argument between those who advocate for equal rights of bicycles on the street (let's call them Vehicularists) and those who advocate for bicycles to be segregated from car traffic as much as possible (George Wallace took all the fun out of the term best used for these folks), Jan seems to be tending toward the vehicular side. But if you know how Jan's mind works (which you would if you read Bicycle Quarterly or his blog, Off the Beaten Path), you would know that he's really more of a data weenie than an ideological zealot. And more importantly, he is a lover of elegant design; and anyone who loves good, sensible, utilitarian design has got, inevitably, to hate most of what passes for bicycle-specific infrastructure.

My own city, that is the nearest big city, the one around whose edges I have spent the vast majority of my life, has been engaged in the rapid expansion of cycling infrastructure over the last decade or so, and is struggling as are many of our cities to figure out exactly how bicycles fit into the overall flow of traffic. We are in the early days of what sometimes seems like a genuine transformation of our city. And as is always the case with all of nature's transformations, we are experiencing growing pains. And it's not difficult to understand why.

"...evolving designs reflect a learning process, as bikes are squeezed back into a streetscape long dominated by cars."

The division between the two camps is completely understandable. White guys in Lycra want to be allowed treated like equal citizens, afforded the same rights as people in cars. They don't want to dodge baby strollers and speed walkers and all the other obstacles strewn about the average "mixed use" trail. And they want to make left turns without having to wait through two stop lights. The Dutch apparently don't mind waiting, but that's be presumably because they don't have real jobs to get to.

Pass the Dutchy on the left-hand side.

On the other hand, most people, thank Kröd, don't want to dress up in skin tight synthetic clothing, put a Styrofoam ice cooler on their heads and max out their lactic thresholds just to get to work or the store. It's the usual tribal warfare between caffeinated Baristas trying to get to work quickly and moms getting their kids safely to school; between racers and riders, carbon and steel, people who live in Copenhagen and people who live in an exurb with streets named after the features bulldozed to build the development.

I love this particular ideological war because it starts with the premise that it's good to have more people riding bikes. The argument is about how best to accomplish that goal. A worthy conversation. I am personally of the opinion that neither side is absolutely correct. We're not going to dig up all our cities and remake them around the bike. And the suburbs are not going to become friendly places for human powered vehicles until the gas runs out.

Ultimately we will find a range of options, more or less appropriate for each situation. I think cities will do a lot of retrofitting of their existing infrastructure, putting in bike lanes, bike shares and bike parking. Suburbs will continue to worship cars and parking lots but over the past decade more rail trails, sidewalks and mini-villages have popped up, so maybe there is hope yet. And country roads will still be lovely places for a delightful cyclo-tour despite the occasional yahoo in one of those silly big pick-em-up trucks hollering, "get off the road!"

A woman, a bike and a chicken, whole and roasted.

The Acorn Handlebar Bag

You know, if you have been following this blog, that I’m a big fan of the rack-mounted handlebar bag. But they won’t work with carbon frames (or really any bike with a “modern” racing front fork – no eyelet for the rack). As it happens, my stable contains a modern lightweight bike which I bought because I wanted a bike that would minimize the effort it takes to ride it so I could go farther, longer, more comfortably (okay, titanium or steel might be more comfortable, but the carbon certainly is better on my back than my old aluminum when it comes to the long rides).

Okay, you know it as well as I do. I bought a fashionable carbon fiber racing bike because I am a fan of competitive cycling and so in my perverse male ego I harbor delusions of riding like the professionals do. All I need is the exact same bike Sparticus rides and when some scout from an elite ProTeam gets a load of me ambling along Rock Creek Park on a Saturday morning, he will have no alternative but to recruit me on the spot into their senior division. Of course all having such a bike has accomplished is to drive a stake into the heart of any fantasy I ever had that I could be a racer. But still, I like the bike and I like to ride pretty long distances in places far from home.

And when I'm on such an "epic" ride, out in the glorious country, miles from the clutter and chaos of extraneous things like stores that are open on Sundays, I often find the need to eat and drink more than I can carry in my pockets. I occasionally want to swap out clothing as the day heats up, or to have warmer, drier clothes available when unexpected weather hits. When in unfamiliar locales I might even find it convenient to carry a map (I can see the Garmin owners' eyes rolling). So there you go - I like long rides, but I'm not exactly a touring rider. I like a light, racing style bike, because I've been brainwashed by the ads and reviews in cycling magazines to lust after the latest and greatest technology. But such bikes aren't conducive to portaging the several belongings I sometimes prefer to carry when venturing into the hinterland. Much as I look longingly over my shoulder, that damn team car just never seems to pull up alongside to take my unwanted rain jacket, to provide directions or to pass a prosciutto and Asiago panini out the window. Sowhattayagonnado?

Well, as of last week I am the proud owner of a new bar-mounted bag from the master craftspersons at Acorn Bags. This one is in black and was bought for the Madone, while the rack-mounted Rando in saddle tan has, since last autumn, perched on the front rack of my '86 Fuji Allegro. And I have to say that I love this thing. It's big enough to carry my phone, rain jacket, all the food I'm likely to need for a long day on the bike. And I can even remove a jersey or some tights when it warms up and don't have to cram my jersey pockets with all this stuff. And unlike the Rando, this one is rock solid. The wooden stabilizer bar keeps its shape and the stiffer-than-ripstop fabric keeps it from wobbling around. I just love the rider-facing rear pockets with their shiny turn-buckles, though the cables from my Ultegra make them less convenient than those on the Fuji with its center-pull brakes. I just can't say enough about how great these Acorn products are - and they're made in the United States. Bonus!

Of course this bag is an abomination to contemporary weight weenies, who spend fortunes to shave every gram from their UCI certified trophy bikes. But in my heart of hearts I know I’m an old fart who thinks cycling should be fun and practical, so screw ‘em. I have a big ol’ canvas bag with leather “appointments” on the front of my carbon fibré superbike. So what? Am I a walking talking (not to mention rolling!) ball of hypocritical contradiction? You bet. But I can carry a whole roasted chicken with me when I ride my bike. And chicken grease doesn’t drip down my butt while I ride. Can you say that? 

Related reading:

http://lovelybike.blogspot.com/2010/09/allure-of-handlebar-bag.html 

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/fell/PBP1975.html

Profane haberdashery

Bartlebones' muthahfuckin' hat

I attended Friday night's performance of The Motherfucker with the Hat at the Studio Theater. At turns hilarious, shocking and poignant, the play continues the season's string of really outstanding productions. The ensemble cast is tremendous and Drew Cortese manages to walk the delicate line of making a potentially unattractive character sympathetic in his portrayal of Jackie, the lead role, a low-life drug dealer recently released from jail.

This play could easily have resolved to little more than a self-indulgent exercise in Nuyorican shtreet cred, relying solely on hackneyed representations of urban life. All the elements are there; the stock drug dealer, the unhappy upscale hedonist couple, the strong-willed Puertorriqueña girlfriend from the neighborhood. But despite being made up largely of elements you might find in the average music video, with a plot line to match, Motherfucker works. Somehow Serge Seiden's production manages to create compelling, if somewhat unattractive characters, and tell a story that resonates beyond the stereotypical caricatures of poor druggies from the neighborhood or yuppie materialists to which it could have all too easily devolved. The characters are complex, the story is compelling, the acting is capable of bringing tears to your eyes. You should go see that shit, Motherfucker. Through March 24th.

Mix-a-tune

In yesterday's post, I basically just shoved a couple of YouTube videos of an obscure German punk band from the '80s at you. No context, no explanation, just the videos and some ramblings about feeling old. I just wanted to play some jams, so that's what you got. But, as is always the case with your 'umble author, there's a back story.

At the end of last year, a buddy of mine from a more or less German speaking country suggested I read Jennifer Egan's magnificent Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. So I did. The book is about an aging punk rock record producer and what happens to the people from that scene as they are getting older. Frankly, on the basis of that description, I would have passed the book right by. Not another aging rock star book. But, a dear friend suggested it, and I have certainly done much harder things for friends. And as it happens, that book is tremendous. Not just because it is about people roughly my age, or because it's about music I appreciate, but because it's a really well crafted book. You should read it.

Now as it also happens, the Aryan who recommended the book to me is the guy who in my youth was always turning me onto the latest sounds, and I still happen to have a couple of artifacts from that glorious time, in the form of something that will swell the hearts of my contemporaries and will likely mystify the youngsters among you. That is, I have some MixTapes my friend made for me.

Exhibit from the Museum of Obsolete Media - a "Mixed Tape" 1990

See, before there were playlists, before there was digital music, before normal people had access to anything as exotic as a computer network, before there were even Compact Disks, there were vinyl "records" and record-able cassette tapes. Average people could buy blank tapes at the record store (or the grocery store, for that matter), take them home and record stuff. We recorded commercial broadcasts from the FM radio and "tracks" from 12 inch albums. We would spend hours recording mixtapes, queuing up the tape using only the << Back, Pause and Forward >> buttons, dropping the needle onto the proper cut and hitting the Record button at just the right moment to avoid odd snippets of the previous song or missing the beginning of the one you want. Such tapes were a labor of love, impossible to comprehend in today's Copy and Paste world.

On my favorite of these mixtapes from my Helvetic pal (pictured above) is exactly the kind of eclectic time capsule that made these so special. Now get yourself to YouTube and start listening!

Punk-in Chunk-in

How do you know you're old? Probably the best way is to have children, those metronomic little ticking time bombs; a constant reminder of your mortality. But surely the next best reminder of your increasing obsolescence is the music that got you off when you were a kid. Likely it still gets you off, and if it really got you off you're probably still willing to defend it against any challenge to its obvious superiority over anything "out there today." Well, you know, each to their own. Most music sucks when it's new - thank goodness young people have such bad taste. All I know is that Jingo de Lunch rocked. It sounded great when I was young and it still sounds good to me.

Good enough to listen to 44 minutes live!

But it also makes me feel old. Because I'm no longer pissed off. I am no longer willing to stand for hours in a broken down hovel with toilet paper stuck in my ears and beer all over myself. It was fun at the time. And the music still sounds really good to me - even when a lot of other music I listened to at the time has gone flat. Thanks Yvonne @ Company!

Carry me back to ol' Virginny

Carry me back to old Virginny,
There's where the cotton and the corn and tatoes grow,
There's where the birds warble sweet in the springtime,
There's where this old darkey's heart am long'd to go.

Oh, Northern Virginia (NoVa), despite your gleaming towers of Rosslyn and the metropolitan hipster vibe of Clarendon; regardless of your increasing population density and the steady purpleization of your electorate, you are still the offspring of the inbred, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, pre-Enlightenment cretins that still dominate RoVa (the Rest of Virginia).

Struggle up through the slime though you try, you will just keep being dragged back down into the primordial muck by the bigots, the racists and the gun nuts. The state is starting to look like a laughingstock with its whacked out retrograde politicians that are just downright embarrassing to anyone with an eighth grade education or better.

The latest affront to common sense and progress springing from the Ancient Dominion is the failure to pass an anti-dooring measure that would have made motorists who unthinkingly fling their car doors open in the path of oncoming cyclists at least partly responsible for the damage and injury they do.

Now it's bad enough that the Virginia Senate didn't pass the bill through the transportation committee, but what is particularly galling is the stated reason: they couldn't get their shit together enough to have all members of the committee actually attend the hearing. Half of the douchebags who allegedly sit on this committee couldn't even be bothered to show up to vote one way or another. So there you go, Virginia. You are one of only ten states in the Union (I realize many of you don't even recognize that you ARE in the Union) to extend exactly zero protection to people who get injured by thoughtless assholes who can't be bothered to look in the rearview mirror before throwing their car doors open into the path of fellow travelers. Well done.

Atruistic punishment

How could you hate her?

A fascinating, if somewhat perfunctory article on the BBC's website yesterday posits that the reason motorists hate cyclists derives from the game theory notion that society functions only because we are programmed to self police by punishing one another for behaving outside the bounds of accepted "morality." That is to say that humans have actually evolved to punish people perceived to have broken the rules. And for drivers, practically everything cyclists do is technically in violation of the rules, since the set of rules by which they operate is specific to cars. Cyclists can't, by definition, obey some of those rules. We can't go the speed limit most of the time, for instance.

And the rules we can obey, we often don't. Largely because the laws of physics play a much greater role in our mode of transportation. Since the calories we burn are derived from the energy our bodies have converted from food instead of from the refined essence of prehistoric organic matter (i.e., gasoline), we cyclists typically observe much stricter adherence to the laws of conservation of energy. That is, since it takes us a lot of personal energy to build momentum, we often go to extraordinary pains to maintain it. Drivers just push one pedal a couple of inches and hundreds of horsepower are produced, whereas a pedaler has to grind a crank round and round just to get up to a speed most motorists disdain and curse. Don't believe me? Do the math. So we often blow through stop signs. We're following rules - just not the same rules motorists have to follow.

We come by our own little set of rules by the exact same method as drivers have come by theirs - through trial and error, underpinned by a grave sense of self preservation and public safety. We do what we do because we have weighed the costs against the benefits, considered the possible risks and come up with a pretty workable set of operating principles. Just like cars. Even in a society where bicycles represent a meaningful proportion of the mode share (transportation geek speak for percent of trips made by bike), the transportation induced death rate is negligible. Can we say the same thing about our own society in which the car is clearly the dominant mode of transportation? No we cannot.

So when a person sitting in a type of vehicle responsible for over 30,000 fatalities a year can get all pissed when I scoot around them on a vehicle responsible for so few fatalities a year as to be not worth mentioning, I don't really feel that bad about it. When was the last time you heard about a motorist getting killed by a bicyclist? Just doesn't happen. Sure occasionally a cyclist runs down a pedestrian and kills them. Occasionally. How frequently do cars run down pedestrians? But I also understand when motorists, being the good egalitarians they are, and apparently in thrall to their limbic brain, go berserk and start shouting out their car windows and shout, "get off the feckin' road!"