Things I like

I haven't posted here in nearly a month, possibly because there hasn't been much to write about. There still isn't, really, but I'm not letting it stop me this time.

Some things that I am enjoying these days:


1. The weather

I don't know if it should come as a big surprise that people enjoy summer, but it seemed for a long time that cool and dry was all we would get for May and June. Not so these days. Of course, the combination of recent rain (including a nice weekend hail-shower) and present heat will unleash a wave of killer mosquitoes, but who am I to complain.

2. Reading


In particular, I've been reading Naomi Klein's excellent Shock Doctrine, and while it's rather heavy, the page-turning factor is practically Korman-esque (his early work, up to, but possibly not including The Toilet Paper Tigers). Reading on the porch is a good way to combine #1 and #2, and also to achieve the ever-popular chest tan/white back look.

3. New music

I don't find myself too much interested in bands that I haven't heard of these days, but I am rather enjoying new releases from 2 favourites.


The Notwist's latest, The Devil, You + Me, is as excellent as I had suspected, and features prominently in the current rotation on my iPod. And Wolf Parade's new album, with the unlikely name At Mount Zoomer, also nails most of the items on my musical checklist. You may have noticed that these two records were featured on back to back days by the purveyors of I'm-smarter-than-you---and-better-at-name-dropping-to-boot music reviews. I can assure you that this did not influence my decisions. I also bought the Wolf Parade album at Walmart, of all places (I was there for work, honest!), which would surely make me a target of scorn for the Pitchfork crowd.

4. A well-running bicycle

I was beginning to get pretty frustrated with all the grinding and clicks I was hearing from most of the moving parts on my Norco steed. But like most problems in life, it was all solved with a squirt here, and some lube there (insert joke). And some new bearings for the rear wheel. I no longer feel the need to ride dangerously (illegally?) wearing headphones, for the sole purpose of obscuring the cries of pain from my bike.

5. Garage sales

Actually, I don't like garage sales. But work lately has included a weekly Friday round of south Winnipeg garage sales with a client, and occasionally something good turns up. Case in point:


1970s algebra texts are the best because they include lengthy tables for things like trig ratios which can now be done by any dollar store calculator.

Please don't hit me!

Regular readers of this blog may wonder why I've decided yet again to write about cycling on Winnipeg streets. But most days, these two-wheeling times are among my most enjoyable moments. Also particularly enjoyable is listening to Blue Jays baseball on Morden's country station, but who wants to hear about that? I've put in over 1000 km in '08, and over 900 in the last two months, so I come by this obsession honestly.

The title is a reference to the message sent by the new 'sharrows' that have begun appearing on Winnipeg streets.

From the article:

New bicycle lanes are being painted on more than a half a dozen busy traffic routes throughout Winnipeg.

The new lines create "sharrows," or narrow lanes demarcated on existing streets; it's hoped they'll help ease tension between cyclists and motorists, who often feel like rivals for space on the roads.

"It's going to increase the awareness of drivers to share the road with cyclists, and … it'll increase the awareness for cyclists, you know, to stay where the sharrows are," said Janice Lukes of the city's active transportation advisory committee.

Since the new lanes are on seven busy streets, most of the people who will use them will be experienced cyclists, Lukes said. She hopes the sharrows lead the city to take more steps to become more cycling-friendly.

"It's an absolutely huge first step, from nothing to this — and then it's only a matter of time where you're going to have more families [who] want separated lanes," she said.

"I do believe that the will of the government is there to where eventually we'll see that, maybe in the next two years. It wouldn't surprise me."

The city set aside $100,000 in the 2008 capital budget for the sharrow initiative.

The lanes, accompanied by signs urging motorists and cyclists to "share the road," will appear on:

• Higgins Avenue.
• Roblin Boulevard.
• Grant Avenue.
• Regent Avenue.
• Plessis Road.
• Dakota Street.
• Dunkirk Drive.

That's actually the whole article, so if CBC lawyers descend on this site en masse I may edit to merely excerpt it. Doubtful, though.

I've been up and down Dunkirk Dr in the past few days where the sharrows have been painted. I take exception to them being described as either 'bike lanes' or 'lines' as the author of the article has done, but generally I welcome any reminder to drivers that cyclists on the road aren't thrill-seekers but in fact have every right to be there.

[Read the lower rated comments attached to the CBC article for some particularly misinformed and misanthropic vitriol from drivers]

Directional arrows offer help to confused cyclists.

I do question the broader implications of sharrows on a select number of routes. The signs and painted images of bicycles on the streets don't confer any new rights or responsibilities on either cyclists or drivers. Whether you are driving or riding on a signed street like Dunkirk or Roblin, or an unsigned one, the fact remains the same: cyclists have a right to the road.

The tone is a bit motherly, but the law requires motorists and cyclists to share every road.

Some drivers, though, might get the impression that the marked streets are somehow different, and that their blatant disregard for the life and limb of cyclists on other roads is justified. The Dunkirk sharrows cover only a 1 km stretch [edit: I went by again and realized the sharrows continue down Dakota to Bishop Grandin and likely past St. Vital mall. Still only in 1 direction] and only the southbound portion, as if this was some tiny cycling Valhalla. But it's not: the regular hazards like broken glass, drains and manhole covers occupy the same curbside space.

So far my $5 tires are winning the battle against curbside debris, including the broken glass pictured.

I'm questioning, not complaining. Any attention to cycling issues is welcome, even if it's an article about a ridiculous bike radio backpack (driving with headphones is worse, but still . . .). You'll notice even that story manages to get in some good stuff:

Ravenelle said bike-vehicle accidents will be all too common until cyclist-only lanes are created around the city.

"If downtown Montreal can do it, Winnipeg can do it. We absolutely need bike-only lanes, not bus and bike lanes. It's ridiculous riding with a bus trying to go around you," he said. "There has to be a lot more education and advocacy put into teaching people to coexist on the road. The easiest thing to do is have dedicated bike lanes. Does Main Street really need four lanes?"

I guess what I'm trying to say is that sharrows aren't bike lanes. It's a start, though.

Trouble with math

From reading other blogs, it does seem bloggers have a habit of overreacting to factual or other errors in newspaper writing. I'd like to avoid that stereotype but there was something that I simply couldn't let slide.

Bartley Kives is one of the better writers at the Free Press. He used to be the guy on the music/entertainment side of things and now does a solid job working the city hall beat, including reporting on some of our esteemed mayor's shadier dealings.

But it seems he has a bit of difficulty with numbers. From an otherwise reasonable article about gas prices and walking, he offers the following analysis:

According to city research conducted in 2005, the average Winnipegger commutes 11.5 kilometres every day. And according to 2006 census data collected by Statistics Canada, that one-way trip takes an average of about 30 minutes.

Even though those two statistics were not intended to be taken together, the implication is kind of ugly: We appear to be moving around three kilometres an hour, which suggests a lot of us spend a ridiculous amount of time idling in rush hour.

The first paragraph leaves a bit of confusion as to whether we are taking about a 11.5 kilometre trip taking 30 minutes, or a 30 minute commute covering half that distance, but neither set of numbers should produce the highlighted conclusion Kives comes to.

Try this: 11.5 km / 0.5 hours = 23 kph

Or, at worst: (11.5 km / 2) / 0.5 hours = 11.5 kph.

This would be a rather unimportant error, if he didn't rely entirely upon the result to support the following argument:

Three kph is slower than the average human being saunters, let alone actually walks on the way to work.

I'd like to think I'm a big supporter of active modes of transportation, but even I wouldn't argue that walking is faster than driving.

Dutch love

I tend occasionally to be wistful about times past, and in particular, the year I spent living in the Netherlands. It is a country that often seems more sensible than our own, a land where the Prime Minister vacations in a trailer in a Portugal campground (you'll have to look for it; it's cited as an example of the culture's small 'power distance'). Some of that sense is reflected in that culture's enthusiastic embrace of the bicycle.

I was reminded of this reading an article in the June 2008 issue of The Walrus. I'd link to the article by Bill Reynolds, an excellent yet odd melange of art criticism, biography, autobiography and reporting about cycling safety and advocacy, but as a subscriber I'm so far ahead of the curve that the story isn't even online yet.

Update: Here's a link to the entire article: Geared Up (Walrus, June 2008)

So I've reproduced the relevant sections:

Along one-way cobblestone canal paths, on dedicated bicycle highways, and sharing the roadway with cars, there are tens of thousands of cyclists in Amsterdam. They get their very own traffic lights - with bicycle icns lighting up red or green - in the central core. Dutch city bikes tend to be clunky: hard to lift, uncomfortable to ride over long distances, and forcing riders to sit too far back. (No one in North America would dream of riding such a bike.) But they're solid, the tires are large, and they don't break down - in short, they're perfect for city riding. Couples lazily ride to dinner, formally dressed in suit and gown, he pedalling (usually) and she sitting on the baggage rack. Moms and dads transport kids the same way. No one wears a helmet. Down at Central Station, the confluence of lanes makes the Arc de Triomphe traffic circle in Paris look like the idyll of Manhattan's Central Park. Amsterdam is inner-city kinetic energy at its finest.

My 'just North of Amsterdam' bike. Compared to most city rides (including the one I rode in during my A-dam stint), this is a Cadillac. A used one sells for over €150 (over $225)

H-i-i-i-i-s-s-s-s-s...a middle-aged woman admonishes a walker for dallying on her bike highway. She's one of the ones who have taken up cycling later in life, the government's social engineering having successfully pushed bikes as a way for people, women in particular - Surinames émigrés and Dutch citizens alike - to become more independent and mobile. She's learned the rules of the Amsterdam system to the letter, and her message is, don't get in my way.

Bikes rule Amsterdam. If a car hits you, it's the driver's fault. Period. Down these crowded streets, walkers fight through designated traffic lanes - one for bikes, and one each for taxis, regular cars, and the tram. But nothing is perfect. When I tell Paul, our bed and breakfast host, about the supercilious, hissing woman and numerous speed-automaton men - like our slick cab driver from the airport - he says, "Yes, here in Amsterdam we have our cycle paths, and we have our psycopaths." The system, no matter how ingeniously regulated, is bursting at the seams. Car congestion has given way to a different anxiety: moving through public space that is on the verge of becoming a bike dystopia. I wonder if bikes here have become the new cars; if they are two-wheeled insects, they're sizable ones, like dragonflies. So what does that make walkers - mosquitoes? Maybe there is something in wheeled motion that induces aggressive behaviour.

This light isn't in Amsterdam, but it's close enough.

You'll have to forgive that insect bit at the end - it draws on an analogy from earlier in the article - but otherwise that description is pretty good. I think he goods overboard with the idea of a bike "dystopia". It seems like the kind of judgment one would make as tourists trying to navigate the bustling city core, from the Stadshouderskade inward. And he does go on later to describe the derision he experienced riding a MacBike (MacBikes aren't the latest innovation in uber-cool from Apple, but rather the name of a city-wide bicycle rental firm dealing almost exclusively with tourists).

How much do they love Bikes? Let me count the ways:
At the beach


National park, free-to-ride, bikes

Further out, where most people live and work, the scene is more sensible. My 5km daily commute showed little evidence of bursting at the seams, with my most dangerous encounters being snowball related. (While Amsterdammers have much to teach us about cycling and bicycle infrastructure, they could sure learn a thing or two about winter etiquette, for those 3 or 4 days a year when it matters). For parts of the city that aren't entirely overrun by slow-witted tourists, the cycling machine operates quite smoothly. And the best part is that the infrastructure is in place basically across the whole country.

A rural bikepath somewhere in Gelderland.

Reynolds also complains about a near collision in Vondelpark, and those were pretty commonplace (actual collisions less so). He later adds:

Paul, our B&B owner, says some riders "try to find the absolute shortest way between two points and go as fast as they can. The only thing they respect is the tram because it is heavy and takes time to stop." In 1987, American satirist P.J. O'Rourke theorized that his nation was "afflicted with a plague of bicycles." Right theory, wrong country, perhaps? Then again, after two weeks any new rider will graduate from naiad to dragonfly and thrive in this cycling ecosystem.

That graduation is hard to describe, but you realize it the first time you passive-aggressively ring your bell at a walker in your way, or at a group of girls riding 3 wide across the entire bike path. And it's a far cry from here, where I earned a honk for swerving into inches of the next lane (on Wellington Cr, a winding residential street, I might add) to avoid a construction worker.

Suspended neon shoes add colour to a sometimes frustrating Wellington ride.

A news story today called to mind another example of Dutch common sense. It details a proposal by an analyst to improve Winnipeg's transit system. From the article:

Prentice envisions what he calls a "hub-and-spoke" transit system, which would include the usual city buses on major routes, as well as mini-buses or shuttle services picking up suburbanites at their homes — possibly when summoned by the rider — and ferrying them to transfer stations.

This calls to mind the excellent Treintaxi service, which for a fixed cost (roughly 5 euro) will take you to or from a train station. Knowledge of this might have been useful before a certain 40 euro cab I split with a friend of mine.

Whether or not this hub-spoke model would really work on a smaller scale (though Winnipeg's sprawl isn't that far off from Holland's postage stamp footprint) is a matter for debate, I suppose, but any way to get more people riding public transit, a service like Treintaxi included, is at least worth trying.

If my Dutch-love seems a bit unreasonable, and I'm ignoring significant social problems and ethnic tensions, you might be right. But they also invented tulips, or something like that, so back off.


[We'll see if I outright copied enough text here to earn a cease-and-desist letter from the publisher's lawyers]

Playoffs

Last week my roommates and I hosted the draft for the annual playoff pool. It's nearly a week in and not looking good.

I set up a program to keep track of my standings, so if you're interested in seeing how badly I'm losing (currently I'm tied for last), follow my progress here.

Celebrity lookalike

"Has anybody ever told you that you look like a famous person?"

This, or something close to it, was a question I was asked by a student today who clearly was looking for anything to focus on instead of his assignment on personal income taxes. I answered in the negative (a lie, but I didn't feel like prolonging the conversation). I was nervous, though. There aren't that many celebrities I'd like to be compared with.

The student proceeded to describe the match:

"Have you seen Harold and Kumar?"

(I nodded, another lie).

"You look like the guy who sits in the backseat." (Thanks, real helpful. Maybe not the sharpest knife in the drawer.) "Patrick something."

This must the scene they were thinking of.

I started to walk away. Another student said "the brother from Malcolm in the Middle". (A little better, but there are 4 brothers on the show.)

The lightbulb finally went on and the student had the name: "Neil Patrick Harris"

What? You mean Doogie Howser?

A younger me?

I wasn't quite sure how to feel about that one. Those of you who know my appearance can be the judge of how accurate a comparison it is.

I'll admit, we do share a giant forehead.

Interestingly, this is the second time in the last two weeks I had spoken with someone who had mistaken the elder brother from Malcolm in the Middle (turns out his name is Christopher Masterson) for Neil PH. Get your B-list celebs right, people.