Bike Share

One of City of Boston's Bike Share Stations

I have been trying to consistently ride 400 miles a month, and had succeeded for the past six months, but will not reach that goal in April. One big reason is a ten day trip to Boston. Although I was able to do almost no cycling on that trip, the one ride I did, though a mere three miles, allowed me to try Bike Share for the first time. Just outside our hotel was a Bike Share station, I had a free morning, so walked over to it with some trepidation, carefully read the directions, inserted my credit card, and the next thing I knew, I was going for a ride. The process looked like this:

The way bike share works pretty much everywhere is that you have to be a member to use the bikes, but once you are a member, you can use the bikes for free as many times as you want. On the other hand, you can only use a bike for a short period of time before you are charged a usage fee. In Boston, that period of time is 30 minutes. To facilitate the use of bicycles by out-of-towners like me, it is possible to purchase a one day membership. So, the first receipt above, for $6, is for a one day membership. Then, being a member, I requested a bike. The system gives me a number, shown on the second "receipt", which I used to unlock a bike. I now had 30 minutes to use it for free before I would be charged a user fee. As can be seen on the third receipt, I returned the bike after 24 minutes, and was charged nothing. During those 24 minutes, I rode a grand total of 3 miles, as shown on the map below:

The above map was generated by Map Pedometer. The blue balloons labelled with "1", "2", and "3" are mile markers. the red balloon marks the Bike Share station where I began and ended my ride. The yellow balloon marks a shopping area I had visited the day before.

What did I think of my ride? The bike was clunky and slow, not any bike I would ever purchase for myself. On the other hand, I had walked a small part of this route the day before, and the difference in convenience between walking and biking was night and day; riding was much faster and much less tiring. The day before, I had needed to visit a bank to get cash and a liquor store to pick up wine I was contributing to a group dinner that night. There was a bike share station right near the bank, so what I should have done in retrospect was to pick up a bike, ride it to the bike share near the bank, turn in the bike (so I was no longer responsible for it being stolen and was not at risk of exceeding my 30 minutes,) do my business, pick up a bike at that same station and ride it back to the station near my hotel. That is how bike share is meant to be used. Had I had time to visit some sites in downtown Boston, I could have similarly used Bike Share to get to and from those sites.

That ride did give me an opportunity to experience a bit of Boston's bike infrastructure. At the end of my epic ride, I accidentally got on some rather busy streets with no bike infrastructure, a survivable but not particularly pleasant experience, but for the bulk of the ride I was on dedicated bike lanes, with short stretches of "shared" lanes. This is what the bike lane looked like:

In Houston, I have opined that so-called "shared" lanes are pretty much useless. Somehow they seemed slightly less useless in Boston, perhaps because they clearly served a bridge function. Drivers were used to the dedicated bike lane, so when they see the shared lane, they saw it as a part of the same infrastructure, a more difficult stretch where more caution is required, but a place where bicycles clearly have a place. Adding to this is the street sign stating that bicycles may use the full lane. This is the more modern, clearer version of "Share the Lane" or "Bicycle Route", one which I feel is a huge improvement and would love to see in Houston. The sign can be seen in the upper right corner of the picture below:

In addition to visiting Boston, we visited Montréal on this trip. Montréal also has a bike share program, but we did not have the opportunity to try it. We did, however, get to see a bit of Montréal's bike infrastructure as well as evidence of the toughness of its cycling community. Although our trip took place in April, we experienced late season snowstorms in Both Boston and Montréal. My last two pictures show a protected bike lane in Montréal and a hardy cyclist using the same mid-snowstorm:

So what do I think about all of this? What relevance does it have to my cycling, to cycling in Houston? Houston just finished its first protected bike lane downtown, but I have yet to try it. Similarly, Houston has a Bike Share program which I have also yet to try. I definitely have plans to try both of these, and will describe my experiences here when I do. However, if I try Houston's Bike Share, I expect it to be just an experiment, I have yet to imagine a scenario in which Houston Bike Share would be useful to me. One obvious reason for that is there is neither a bike share station close to my home nor is there one near any place I go routinely. Our Bike Share system is expanding, will that expansion make it useful to me? I am skeptical that it will. It turns out that the lack of stations is a red herring; the reasons I don't use bike share have little or nothing to do with the location of the stations. Rather, the reasons I am unlikely to use Bike Share are pretty much the same as the reasons I do little utility cycling in general, why all my cycling is recreational. I have attempted utility cycling. I have done some grocery shopping by bike, and when I have needed to go into Texas Medical Center where I volunteer, I have tried biking there as well. In both cases, after having experimented with biking, I have returned to using my car. Interestingly, my wife routinely commutes to work in the very same Texas Medical Center by bicycle. What makes the difference? It all comes down to routine and details. Because my wife commutes every single day, she has been able to develop a routine that works for her. On the flip side, the cost of commuting by car every day is substantial, giving her strong motivation for cycling. Because she is commuting first thing in the morning, the sweltering Houston heat is less of a factor. In terms of details, she has the good fortune of not sweating very much, and where she would have to park is rather inconvenient. For me, I average two trips to the Medical Center a month, so the $10 I pay each time for parking is less of an issue, where I park is very close to where I could leave my bicycle, and I go later in the day which, combined with my tendency to sweat profusely, creates social issues. In terms of groceries, I tend to shop as rarely as possible and then I stock up, purchasing many more groceries than I could carry by bike. Thus, utility cycling just doesn't work for me, and nothing about Bike Share would change that.

Interestingly, I have direct experience as to how things might be different. Thirty eight years ago, my wife and I did not yet have children and had just moved into a new apartment. We had a very old car which we rarely used, so when it stopped running, we never got around to fixing it. A couple of years later when we purchased our first home, got ready to start a family, and began serious commuting, we paid to have that old car towed away and purchased two new VW Rabbits. However, for those few years, we managed completely without a car. My wife walked to work, and I bicycled. When I needed groceries, I walked to a nearby market. We never actively decided to live without a car, it just happened. Under the pressure of two intense careers, the car just didn't make sense. I could imagine if we lived in downtown Houston where a car was more trouble and where running errands and commuting were more convenient, we might decide to live without a car, and Bike Share might become an important part of getting around. Similarly, protected bike lanes might make downtown cycling acceptably safe. Bike Share might not work for me today, but that does not mean it is not useful to people in different circumstances. The steady deployment of Bike Share and its heavy use where it is deployed suggest that this is the case. In any case, I am glad I got to give it a try, and look forward to trying our home town version, even if just to satisfy my curiousity.

Shootout at the Bluebonnet Express

My wife and I have been unable to participate in our favorite group rides lately. (In a recent post, "reasons" for missing these rides were not explained.) However, shortly after this year's Bluebonnet Express, reports began to filter in from the Critical Mass group on Facebook which suggested we may have been lucky to have missed this one. Apparently, the local Sheriff had turned on the cyclists, targeting them in a ticketing campaign. Of course, things rarely are as bad as the worst rumors from the most opinionated observers might suggest, and most events can be viewed from a variety of perspectives, leading to different narratives. We were not there and so I cannot provide any direct observations, but I have been following the story carefully and have come to some conclusions. I think there was a real backlash of the sheriff's department against the ride, I think that despite the complexity of the situation, this backlash was fundamentally unfair to the cyclists affected, but that said, I think the issues that triggered this backlash are worthy of careful consideration by the cycling community.

Background

I have previously posted on the Bluebonnet Express, but I want to describe some relevant details that I had not previously covered. There are about a 2,200 riders on the ride. It has an "at will" start (each rider leaves when they are ready, there is no mass start) which helps distribute the riders along the road, but nonetheless, a lot of riders end up clumping together at various points along the route. Many are there with friends with whom they enjoy riding side by side and chatting. Riders ride at very different speeds which leads to a lot of passing. This can cause cyclists to sometimes "take the lane" in its entirety. Some roads have nice, wide paved shoulders, some have no shoulders at all. Where there are shoulders, some cyclists prefer to stay out of the lane entirely and ride on the shoulder, others prefer to ride in the lane. Rumble strips impact this decision. Speed limits vary, some being over 60 mph. Honestly, we cyclists do not like to stop for stop signs; it is harder to come to a full stop and restart on a bicycle than it is in a car. On the other hand, bicycles are less dangerous than cars and move more slowly such that it is very possible for a cyclist to slow down as they approach a stop sign, look carefully, stop if necessary, and roll on through if it is safe to do so. This is why the State of Idaho developed special rules for cyclists. To accommodate this, the ride organizers had hired off-duty sheriffs to man intersections, controlling traffic and waving cyclists through. Shouldn't cyclists obey the law? Why should participants in the Bluebonnet Express get special treatment at intersections? I will return to these points later in the post. For now, I just wanted to set the stage.

What Happened

A total of 25 to 30 cyclists were ticketed during the 2016 Bluebonnet Express, just over 1% of the riders. Tickets were given for riding more than two abreast, impeding traffic, and running stop signs. To avoid getting bogged down in the intricacies of Texas State Law as it pertains to bicycles, I will concentrate on the stop sign violations, which are pretty black and white. Or are they? Consider that off-duty sheriffs in uniform were at some intersections waving cyclists through stop signs. At other intersections, on-duty sheriffs in the same uniform were waiting at stop signs, but instead of waving cyclists through, they ticketed cyclists for not coming to a complete stop. Some of the riders so ticketed threatened to fight their ticket on the basis that it represented entrapment; that the presence of sheriffs at earlier intersections had sent the message that, for this ride, stop signs were not being enforced. When you combine that with the much murkier law around riding abreast and impeding traffic, you can see that this could be turned into a field day for the legal profession, an outcome nobody wants (except perhaps for the lawyers.)

But really, what's the beef? The sheriff's department saw what they viewed as traffic violations, and issued citations for the same. As often happens, those ticketed begged to differ and are free to make their case in court. The beef is that the sheriff's department appeared to be gloating over the ticketing, posting a running update on citations issued on their Facebook page. At the same time, they announced that, in the future, off-duty sheriffs could not be hired to help with group bike rides. Rather than this being a simple case of enforcement of traffic laws, it seemed more like expression of anger towards cyclists.

What Really Happened

The Waller County Sheriff's Department has been remarkably transparent and frank in their discussion of this event. They could have stonewalled and stuck to their story that they were just enforcing the law. Instead, they chose to describe the chain of events leading up to their actions, implicitly admitting that there was more to it than just traffic enforcement. So here is that chain of events:

• Flooding is a fact of life in Texas; when it rains, it pours and it is not at all unusual for roads to become impassible. During the weeks leading up to the Bluebonnet Express, it had poured, closing many roads in Waller County, trapping people in their homes. 
• The Bluebonnet Express was on Sunday. By chance, there was an unrelated, large group ride on Saturday. Roads had just reopened from the flooding, folks were anxious to take care of errands that had been postponed by the floods, and found their progress impeded by large numbers of cyclists on Saturday. 
• Worse (from the residents' point of view), the Waller County Sheriff's Department seemed to be complicit in this blockade, the organizers of this ride having also hired off-duty sheriffs to control intersections. Folks complained. The Sheriff's Department does not succeed by annoying the citizens who employ them, thus the head of the department decided that these off-duty sheriffs were not doing him any good and to not allow this to happen again.
• Except that it did, the very next day. 
• One final aggravating condition in this perfect storm is that the Bluebonnet Express, like many group rides, is organized as a series of more or less concentric loops so that riders finish at the start where they left their cars and to accommodate rides of varying length. Thus, some residents found themselves (somewhat) trapped within not just one but two or three circles of cyclists, after just having gotten through the floods. In turn, they flooded the Sheriff's Department with phone calls, who felt they needed to do something, so sent out officers to enforce the law. 
• Making matters even worse, the Sheriff's Department felt blindsided. Due to the way state and local governments are organized and the way events played out, they had not been "warned" that these rides were happening and were taken by surprise.

What Does It All Mean, Mr. Zombie?

Obviously I write from the point of view of a cyclist. My first reaction when this story broke was anger at the residents of Waller County and their law enforcement division. But, as my anger faded, I tried to put this into some kind of context. As I see it, it would be easy to take this story in a lot of different directions, which, while valid, are not really relevant. Should there be special rules for cyclists and stop signs like in Idaho? Who breaks the law more often, automobile drivers or cyclists? Are traffic laws being evenly enforced, or are cyclists discriminated against? All excellent points, I have posted on some of these before and will continue to post on these issues in the future, but none of them really speak to the issue. This not the usual motorist v.s. cyclist disagreement, the problems resulted both from unusual circumstances, but more generally, because this was a large group ride. So now allow me to return to the questions from the top of this post: Shouldn't cyclists obey the law? Why should participants in the Bluebonnet Express get special treatment at intersections?

It is simply a fact: very few laws are black and white. Selective enforcement is almost universal, sometimes used as a tool of cronyism and corruption, but sometimes in the service of common sense. Being the person that I am, I wish this were not so. I wish we had fewer and more reasonable laws that were strictly and universally enforced. However, here on Planet Earth, that is not the way things work and I simply have to deal with it. So, if I barrel through an intersection, forcing drivers to screech to a halt, endangering not only myself but others as well, I fully expect a ticket. If, on the other hand, I slow to under 10 miles an hour at a quiet, high visibility intersection, look both ways, see no car in sight, and roll on through, I will feel annoyed by a legally equivalent ticket. (Of course this begs the question of why, if I was being so careful, I did not see the policeman.) If I get that ticket, I am then going to grumble about the unticketed drivers who are traveling 5 mph over the speed limit or whose tires rest on the crosswalk at a red light. I was not at the Bluebonnet Express, I did not see what happened. However, I cannot help but think that a better response to this year's problems would have been to have a realistic discussion between the Sheriff's Department and the ride organizers, followed by clear, realistic instructions to next year's participants, not just in the registration packet, not just at the starting line, but all along the road, as to what behavior must be avoided to minimize inconvenience to residents.

Are cyclists asking for special treatment? Not as I see it. Two blocks from my house is a large Catholic church. It is on one of the busiest intersections in this part of Houston. Every Sunday and every Catholic holiday, they hire off-duty police who stop traffic on these busy streets so that congregants and enter and exit the church parking lot. The same thing is done for all kinds of special events from school carnivals to yard sales and has been common practice throughout my life. I remember my father, a "by the rules" kind of guy, being furious about this. He felt that traffic laws should be followed regardless. I admired Dad greatly, but on this issue, I disagree with him; I think we need to be realistic. Having the off-duty police direct traffic for our neighborhood Catholic church simply makes a difficult situation better, a triumph of common sense. All I am asking is that large group rides be treated the same.

Epilogue

The MS 150, an annual two day group ride from Houston to Austin with 13,000 participants, is the gravitational center of cycling in my city of Houston, Texas. This event is a significant fundraiser for the Multiple Sclerosis Society. Many if not most group rides in the Houston Area are training rides for the MS 150 and many of these raise money for some charity or another. The 2016 MS 150 is scheduled to go through Waller County on April 16th. Thus, the MS 150 organizers were appropriately concerned by the events at the Bluebonnet Express (an official MS 150 training ride.) Shortly after that ride, the MS 150 organizers met with the Waller County Sheriff's department. The meeting lasted over two hours, was described as "highly productive" by the participants, and the Waller County Sheriff's department posted a summary of the meeting. To my eye, not all issues were resolved. For example, I feel that the rules for using off-duty sheriffs to manage traffic should be consistently applied, that group bike rides should not be targeted. If the local church can hire off-duty sheriffs to manage traffic, so should the organizers of the Bluebonnet Express. Nonetheless, I feel like progress is being made. Texas is a libertarian, "git 'er done and fix 'er tomorrow if'n she breaks" kind of state, so I do not expect laws to be rewritten nor major initiatives to be launched, but I do hope that the organizers of the Bluebonnet Express, the Waller County Sheriff's Department, and the people of Waller County will talk and arrive at some ways that those of us in the cycling community can have our big group rides on the beautiful country roads of Waller County without annoying the good folks who live there.

War on Zombies

A new, miniature stop sign (in front of the white car). The Hike/Bike path can be seen passing just behind the car. This new sign instructs cyclists to stop before crossing the roadway.

The original title of this post was "War on Cyclists", a reference to the "War on Christmas" that worries Fox News (among others). The "war" in these cases is a culture war, wherein one part of the culture ("secular humanists" or "automobile drivers") makes a political or social assault on another ("folks who celebrate a Merry Christmas rather than a Happy Holiday" or "Cyclists"). The infrastructure problems I complain about in this post are not, in my judgment, part of a deliberate assault on cyclists, I am using the phrase humorously. In that context, I worried that my title would be taken too literally. Thus, I changed the title to the obviously satirical "War on Zombies."

So who are the Zombies? I am the Zombie Cyclist who "died" as a cyclist in the late 1970s and came back from the dead in 2008. That said, my wife had joined me in cycling by the early 70's, quit at the same time as I did, and restarted the same time as well. Does she not also deserve the title of "Zombie?" I say that she does, so she and I are the Zombies in the title of this post.

So what is the war? It is a temporary setback in the availability of cycling infrastructure which we suffered over the last few weeks. My wife and I differ significantly in our cycling habits. My cycling is purely recreational (with a health motivation.) Although my wife rides recreationally with me on the weekends, the bulk of her cycling is for transportation, commuting to and from work. Given that difference, we are impacted by different battles in the infrastructure war, and so I will discuss them separately.

Just last week, I posted on how I was struggling to keep riding, and how one strategy I use to keep riding is to pick rides that are easy to start, of which there are two; Braes Bayou and the Rice Track. On Monday, I picked Braes Bayou. The first thing I encountered were midget stop signs, newly installed wherever the bike path crossed the road (see the photo at the top of the post). In theory, there is no reason I should be upset by these, most intersections are controlled by some kind of light or sign, why should these be any exception? First off, I would have preferred a yield sign over a stop sign. It is much harder to come to a full stop on a bike than it is in a car, a bike is going much slower and thus is easier to stop than a car, and a cyclists presents much less risk to others than do cars, but these are minor points. The main reason I found these signs irritating is the implication. Why these signs, why now? To me, it smacks of a reprimand to lawless cyclists who go rushing in front of cars with no concern for the havoc they cause. The fact of the matter is that cyclists are no more lawless than motorists. Yes, I know, I am projecting; there was no reason for me to jump to the conclusion that I did. But unfortunately, that is how I felt when I saw them. And then, I got to what used to be the end of the trail, at Gessner Avenue, and found a sign saying that the newly created extension to that trail was closed. My 22 mile ride was now back down to 18 miles. Firstly, I have no idea why the trail was closed, which is a problem in and of itself. I wish there was a website I could go to to find out the status of Houston's trails with some explanation of what was closed, why it is closed, and when it is expected to reopen. Secondly, it sends me the message that cyclists are not taken seriously. I have bad memories of the White Oak Bayou trail, which was closed for two years so that the highway department could store dirt on it. It is as if cycling infrastructure is a gift bestowed upon us by the City of Houston as opposed to a critical piece of infrastructure, part of a commitment to multimodal transportation in which cycling is a mode just as important (if not yet as large) as automobiles, busses, and light rail. Again, I am projecting, but that is how I feel.

Note both the trail closure sign and the attractive waterfall to the right of the trail.

On Tuesday, I decided to ride the Rice Track. Now, I may have a right to complain about the Braes Bayou path as it is a public facility, but I have no right to complain about the Rice Track at all. It is a facility of Rice University, a private institution, and I am not a Rice University student, faculty member or staff member; I am just grateful that Rice allows me to use their track. But still, it hurt when I got there and found that the track was under construction. The construction workers were gone for the day, the track was still usable (if narrower) and it was not clear that the track was closed, so I assumed it wasn't and completed my ride, but I probably won't be back until I think they are done. If I get there when the workers are there I am sure it will be closed, so it is not worth the trouble to go there not knowing. So, I am sitting here writing this blog post rather than riding my bike because neither of my go to bike rides is available. This Zombie certainly feels that he is under attack.

In progress repairs to the Rice Track temporarily reduce its width.

When my wife first started bike commuting a few years ago, she and I spent a Sunday test riding various routes from our house to her work, looking for one that felt safe to her. When we considered traffic levels and lights at busy street crossings, we found exactly one route, and that is the route she has been riding for the past four years. In contrast to their behavior with respect to bike paths, the City of Houston does share its plans for roadways, and some months ago we read that a critical piece of that route was due for repaving. Due it most certainly was, being plagued with potholes, but that nonetheless put us in a dilemma as to what to do when the work began. Although we were warned in general, the work actually began with no warning. My wife went to work one day and by the time she came home, work had commenced. The city did not shut down the street, but left it a mess. The biggest holes in the pavement were covered by the traditional giant steel plates. It had been raining, the plates were wet, and when my wife attempted to ride over one, her bike slid out from underneath her, causing her to injure her hip, an injury that bothers her to this day. We know how fortunate we are that her hip was not broken, or worse, that there was not a car nearby that could have run over her, but the injury is annoying nonetheless. Since this happened, we have been searching for a ride-around so that she can continue bike commuting to work. For now, however, both Zombies feel under attack.

A standard, steel plate used to temporarily cover a hole in the road. This example is on my wife's daily commute. 

Is it fair of us to complain about these steel plates? In general, this is much too big a question to fit in as a part of this blog post. In short, however, if you believe as I do that bicycles either are or should be a real part of the transportation infrastructure, then the answer is yes. Steel plates work fairly well for cars and trucks, but don't work at all well for bicycles, as my wife found out. That does not mean steel plates should never be used, but that when street repairs are planned, bicycle commuters should be considered. This may well lead to steel plates being used less frequently, especially where alternate routes are not available. This leads to the second issue, the paucity of bicycle-safe routes. Under state and local law, almost all city streets usable by automobiles should be usable by bicycles, but unfortunately, theory and practice diverge, as we found out when we scouted a route to work for my wife. In theory, almost all routes available to automobiles are available to bicycles. In practice, however, automobile drivers would be the first to object if my wife acted on that assumption. As a consequence, the only safe route we found from our home to my wife's work is currently interrupted by construction and steel plates. Again, outlining possible solutions is much too long a discussion to squeeze in here, but a solution is needed.

One final point: I began this post by noting that my wife is primarily a utility cyclist and I am primarily a recreational cyclist. Some may have sympathy for my wife, heading off to work, but feel that I am just a MAMIL who should not be indulged. Let me point out that we don't segregate automobile drivers in that way, many automobile drivers are on the road for reasons that are recreational. Consider, for example, a driver heading to the gym to take part in a spin class. Thus, I feel I have as much a right to be considered as a normal part of the transportation infrastructure as my wife does. Simply put, under the law, cyclists and automobile drivers have an equal right to use the roadways. Were this true in practice!

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

This picture is an homage to one of my favorite singers, Johnny Cash, author of the song, "Folsom Prison Blues". I chose that song (and thus this picture) because it is a sad song, appropriate for this post. The picture is of me and from 1968 on a bike ride with one of my fellow Modesto Roadmen from the city of Sacramento to the California State Prison in the town of Folsom, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Then as now, we were Johnny Cash fans and thus when we saw the sign and thought of the song, the picture was a must. I am playing an harmonica in the picture, because that is what prisoners do. Ask not why I have an harmonica on a bike ride. I am wearing a wool Bianchi Pirelli jersey, wool shorts with a shammy lining made out of an actual piece of leather shammy, a cotton cycling cap (helmets, such as they were, were only for racing), and shoes with cleats designed to work with toe clips. I put my feet into the toe clips and tightened the leather straps. At that point, the only way to remove my feet from the pedals was to reach down and manually release the straps; woe be me should I need to stop quickly! This is what all racers wore back then, from the Tour de France to the Tour de Graceada.

A bit over a year ago, I reached my 100th Post and I used that occasion to review what I had done. Among the stats I collected was my success at achieving the one post I week I had promised in my first post. I found that I had succeeded in a weekly posting 86% of the time, and gave myself the grade of "B" for that effort. This is my 135th post, and for these last 35 posts, I have dropped to making my weekly post goal only 50% of the time, for a grade of "F". In fact, last month I made no blog posts whatsoever.

Why has my posting regularity deteriorated so badly? Is it because I am lazy or have fallen into alcoholism, drug addiction, or some other such degeneracy? No, that's not it. Is it because I have stopped cycling and I am ashamed to admit it? No, not that either - I don't ride quite as many miles as I did at my peak, but close to it, and I ride quite regularly. It is the case that my cycling has become somewhat unimaginative such that I sometimes feel like I have nothing to blog about. In the past, I have noted that there is a connection between how my riding is going and how my blogging is going; I think the lack of imagination in my riding and the lack of inspiration for blogging are connected, but perhaps not by a simple cause-effect relationship. While it is true that there is only so often I can blog about riding around the Rice Track, it is also true that the same life events that keep me riding at the Rice Track also interfere with my blog posting. So what are these events? 

At last we get to the title of this post, an homage to one of my favorite science fiction writers¹. This blog is supposed to be about my cycling. If something is impeding my cycling, that should be what I blog about. In this case, however, privacy considerations preclude me from doing so. In the past, I blogged about about how caring for my ailing (now deceased) father interfered with my cycling. Dad didn't mind, in large part because there was no reason why he should mind. Such is not always the case, and is not the case now. So as much as I need to scream about what is keeping me from blogging, I cannot.

That Which Must Not Be Named comes up. I cannot ride, or I cannot ride when I would like or for as long as I might like. I get discouraged and feel like there is no point in riding at all, I might as well quit. But I have not quit, at least not yet. Every day I can ride, I do. By necessity, I pick rides I can do whenever I am free, a constraint that eliminates most group rides. It is sometimes mentally difficult for me to start a ride, so I pick rides that have a low barrier to starting and that have little stress, thus my boring cycling schedule; should it be Braes Bayou or the Rice Track today? But, as difficult as I often find it to start riding, I am almost always glad when I do. And it is not just the virtuous feeling that comes from maintaining a healthful habit. It is true that I take satisfaction from meeting physician-recommended exercise recommendations, but beyond that, as apparently boring as they may seem from the outside, my rides are nonetheless fun. Putting on my cycling clothes is hard. I look at the weather and find plenty of excuses as to why today is really not that good a day for a ride. Maybe I get outside and find my bike has a flat tire that I need to change before I can start. It takes all my willpower to throw my leg over the bike and push off. For the first few minutes, I feel miserable and part of me argues that there is nothing preventing from turning around and returning to the comfort of home. But, with each passing minute, each passing mile, misery fades, to be replaced first by acceptance and calm and then, slowly but inevitably, by happiness. There is joy from being outside, from seeing the world, from the hiss of the tires, and from the pushing of the pedals. Not always, but almost always, by the time I approach home, I think "that was fun! I sure am glad I rode today."

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1) The title of this blog post is the title of one of my favorite short stories by one of my favorite authors, Harlan Ellison. It tells the story of the last human survivor in a distopic future who is being eternally tortured by an omnipotent computer who turns him into a mouthless slug-like creature. Like that creature, I urgently wish to scream (post), but cannot do so, at least about one subject.

Bike Route

The legend for the current bike map put out by the Houston Galveston Area Council, the closest thing to an official Houston bike map that exists as of today.

As I mentioned in my last post, the city of Houston, Texas is in the middle of a bicycle renaissance. This renaissance is not without its controversies, however. For example, the government and associated private organizations pushing this renaissance are focusing on getting bicycles off the streets onto multiple use paths and dedicated bike lanes. Make no mistake about it, my wife and I are enthusiastic users of both of these infrastructures and celebrate every time they are expanded. However, besides being a recreational cyclist, my wife is a utility cyclist whose daily commute is entirely on city streets. Even in our role as recreational cyclists we find it that it is always necessary to do some street cycling to get to the paths we wish to ride. It seems unlikely to me that the necessity for street cycling will never go away, and thus as much as we support the multiple use paths, we are equally interested in improving the street cycling.

Of course, my wife and I are not alone in our interest in street cycling. Many cyclists, the members of Houston's Critical Mass for example, are more interested in making bicycling on the streets safer and better than they are in off-road cycling. That said, it is not as if nothing is being done to benefit street cycling. The City of Houston recently passed a safe passing ordinance requiring that non-commercial vehicles do not pass "vulnerable users" (including cyclists but also horseback riders, pedestrians, and others) any closer than three feet, and that commercial vehicles provide twice that clearance. There has been criticism of the level of enforcement of this ordinance, but it was passed and the city is engaging in a discussion of the enforcement issue. Critical Mass has something of an outlaw vibe so keeps its distance from the city government, and sometimes behaves in ways that annoys voters, but despite this, the city has been fairly tolerant of Critical Mass. Having said all that, what more would we have the city do to improve the on street cycling experience, and how might they encourage it if they wished to do so?

One thing that would definitely improve my street cycling experience would be to provide information as to streets that are particularly comfortable for cyclists, and perhaps even warnings for streets that are more challenging or even dangerous. There are many potential sources of such information, from Map My Ride and Strava to Bike Shop, Club, and Organized Ride routes to Open Street Map and Google Maps to the City of Houston, Bike Houston, and other governmental and non-governmental organizations.  I have used all of these to one extent or another, and my common complaint is that I often disagree with the recommendations; I find recommended roads uncomfortable/unsafe either absolutely or relative to non-recommended alternatives. One thing I have long hoped to do on this blog is to devise a way for me to rate the various roads I have ridden, but have not yet figured out how I want to do that. In any case, this would not be a good solution for the community, few of whom read this blog. This recently came back to my attention when my wife and I were on a neighborhood ride, and I noticed which streets were designated as Bike Routes and which were not.

On the above map, I have outlined the streets I ride to go from the City of West University Place, where I live, to the beginning of the White Oak Bayou multiple use trail, one of my wife's and my favorites. The start is shown in the lower left of the map, the beginning of the trail at the upper center. Where my route does not correspond to official bike routes/bicycle friendly streets, I have marked it in red. Relevant to this post, there is a long vertical line near the beginning of the ride, parallel and two blocks to the west of an Official Bike Route on WOODHEAD ST. I find Woodhead Street very busy and dangerous, especially compared to the misnamed Hazard Street that I ride.

Upon coming home, I checked and the street signs corresponded to the bike map put out by the City of Houston and bicycling recommendations of Google Maps, but were in dramatic contrast to my experience-based preferences. So what should I do to share my opinions with the cycling community? One approach I have successfully taken in the past is to suggest that Google update its maps. Although I am eager to do this in the case of a clear mistake, I feel uncomfortable having my single opinion overwrite whatever consensus had lead to Google Maps current recommendations in matters of judgement. Instead, I wanted to enter into a conversation with that consensus to inform and update the recommendation only after a suitable dialogue has occurred. But what was that consensus, where does Google get its recommendation? As I was considering this, I was being solicited by Bike Houston to renew my membership. In the past, I have not been pleased with the help I have been able to get from Bike Houston so was reconsidering the wisdom of such a renewal, so I thought to kill two birds with one stone, and ask for their help. What an improvement from my previous contact! Although they were unable to answer my question directly, they responded quickly and in a friendly manner, and then forwarded my question to the relevant city official. The city official promptly followed up and told me the following: 1) Google Maps gets its information as to bicycle friendly streets from the City of Houston who updates Google regularly. 2) The City of Houston is well aware that some of their recommendations are less than perfect, and as part of their development of a comprehensive bicycle plan, are redefining the whole concept of the signed bike route.

So there is good news and bad news. The good news is that Bike Houston is developing nicely as an advocacy group for cyclists in Houston and I will be enthusiastically renewing my membership next month. More good news is that the City of Houston is working on better defining bike routes and is responsive to cyclists (e.g. me.) The bad news is that I am not sure that the City of Houston has fully engaged with the issue nor appreciated the power of crowdsourcing as a solution. Specifically, this is what Cathy Halka, who is Planner Leader of Transportation Planning in the Planning & Development Department, City of Houston emailed to me:

In [the Houston bike] plan, there will be a list of facility types, one of which will include “Neighborhood Shared Streets.” This is the new nomenclature for a “Bike Route” which is a facility that has historically been used by the City and features a Bike Route Sign on along the roadway. This tool will be used sparingly, and only where a high level of comfort for the rider may be provided (e.g. low volume, low speed streets that provide critical connections in the bike network and may not need additional features to be comfortable to riders of all abilities)... and will identify major bikeway corridors throughout the City, but not those finer grain networks through neighborhoods. Therefore, there may be local routes (those Google BikeFriendly Routes) that are not reflected on the Houston Bike Plan map, but are key connections for local area residents to get to the citywide network.

I am not certain, but believe that not only will "those finer grain networks through neighborhoods" not be "reflected on the Houston Bike Plan map", but in fact will not be identified by the City of Houston at all. How will they be identified? How will Google know that they are "BikeFriendly Routes"? For those streets that are designated on the map, what feedback mechanisms will be available to correct any errors of judgement or to update this designation should traffic patterns change? I am far from sure that this is a job for the City of Houston, but how about for the leading bicycle advocacy organization in Houston? As pleased as I was with my email exchange overall, I did note with concern the the following from Willard Bruce of Bike Houston:

As Houston's bicycle advocacy group with only 4 staff and limited capacity, we would like ... questions [about bike routes] to be answered by the City in the Houston Bike Plan process.

My concern comes from the apology for limited resources and the passing of the buck to the City. There are many activities (such as the crowdsourcing of bike route information) I think are better suited to a non-governmental organization like Bike Houston than to the City government. However, if Bike Houston feels that they lack the resources to do them, then they will likely fall between the cracks and not be done at all. Rather than cry resource poverty, I would have preferred that Bike Houston would have encouraged me to volunteer, in this case, to work towards building an infrastructure for crowd sourcing bike route information. Bike Houston does actively solicit volunteers, but only within their pre-defined scope. Perhaps this is essential, it is very possible that if Bike Houston allowed their scope to expand too much, they would become ineffective. But what makes me sad about all this is that my intuition says that despite all this hard work and despite all this good will, the potentially useful task of classifying Houston streets as to their cycling suitability will never be done. I don't have a solution to this problem at the moment, but I continue to think about it. Stay tuned.

Pleasantly Surprised

"The advantage of being a pessimist is that when you are right, you get to feel smug, and when you are wrong, you get to feel pleasantly surprised."

Although I live by the above quote, I have no idea where it comes from. Just over a year ago, describing the extension being made to the Braes Bayou path along Keegan's Bayou, I posted the following:

"... as appreciated as every bit of new trail is, this extension is not a game changer by any means. It is not that long, nor does it facilitate the crossing any busy highways or other significant barriers. I suspect its only effect will be to make my standard Braes Bayou ride a couple of miles longer..."

This assessment was based on how far I expected the extension to go. At the time I made this assessment, the existing extent of the extension was represented by the green line on the map above. Based on my examination of aerial maps, I predicted the City of Houston would add the yellow part, and stop there. In fact, the finished part of the trail now extends through the magenta line on the map and the city promises to take it all the way to the end of the grey line. That would be a game changer, providing a safe route past highways 59 and 8, opening up a bike route from where I live to the wonderful trails at George Bush and Terry Hershey parks. My post was not quite as pessimistic as suggested by the above quote, it actually finishes with: "not a bad thing at that" and that has very much turned out to be the case. Previously, my most common Braes Bayou ride was 17 miles long. I could extend it to close to 20 miles with some less than perfect side detours, but with the new extension, my out and back ride with no side trips is 22 miles long, and by riding the eastern side of the path and taking the long way around back home, I managed a 32 mile ride the other day.



The above picture shows where the trail crosses Highway 59. I predicted this crossing would be too difficult for the city to attempt, and delightfully, they proved me wrong.



The above picture shows the current end of the trail. Up ahead looms the impenetrable and heartbreaking barrier of Highway 8. Having cleared Highway 59, cannot the city clear this final hurdle? They promise they can.



The above picture was taken just a few yards from the previous one; the dirt road extending past the end of the paved trail turns left and this is what you see. Just left of center is some promising new construction.

All and all, things are looking up for the Houston¹ cyclist. We just elected a new Mayor, and although his cycling agenda did not by itself decide the election, he was one of the cyclist-friendly candidates. Houston's major cycling advocacy group, Bike Houston, has grown by leaps and bounds, has become much more professional and responsive, and is very active in partnership with the city government to improve the lot of the Houston cyclist. Finally, the Houston Cycling Plan continues to progress, having recently defined its ten year goal; to become a Gold-level Bike-Friendly community, as defined by the League of American Bicyclists. I could (and may) do entire blog posts on any one of these events, but I simply mention them now to put improvements to my local bike path into context. It's a good time to be a pessimist!

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1) Yeah, yeah, I don't technically live in Houston, but I use the Houston cycling infrastructure and am a Houstonian in my heart.

Photographic Archeology, Bicycle Racing, and Rock and Roll

Who are the giants of Rock and Roll? The Beetles and Elvis Presley, of course. The Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, it's hard to know where to stop. However, even a short list of Rock and Roll legends must include The Grateful Dead. Their fans even have their own name: "Deadheads". Thus, it was with growing awe that, as I was trying to make sense of some old photographs I have from my bicycle racing in the 1960s, I came across what was perhaps the most amazing bicycle race of that time and place, The 1966 Tour Del Mar. This is the only stage race I recall from my youth, and what is more, a race with local politicians to bless the race, a Ford Mustang Shelby Cobra as a pace car to start the race, Playboy bunnies to present the prizes, and a Folk-Rock concert featuring The Induction Center (who?), The Quick Silver Messenger Service (I remember them...) and The Grateful Dead (OMG!)

If you have read much of this blog, you know that a large part of my current cycling career is driven by nostalgia for my youth, a time when bicycling was the most important thing in my life. Sadly, not only have I lost the physical abilities of my youth, but many memories from that time have been lost as well. In a desperate attempt to retrieve what I could, I have been poring over the shards and artifacts I have from back then. The good news is that I still retained some photographs. The bad news is that they were a mess, a box full of unsorted slides, prints, and negatives, scratched, faded, confused, and incomplete.

It started with the prints because they were easiest to look at. As I dug through the box, I came across pictures of me, my friends from The Modesto Roadmen, and the bicycle racing legends of my youth. Some of them had landmarks and triggered memories such that I could identify them immediately, the Nevada City bicycle race, for example. Others I stared at in incomprehension. This one, for example:

The guy in the yellow jersey with blue and red stripes riding at the front of the group I recognized immediately: Eldon, a friend from church and an important member of The Modesto Roadmen. I had no memory of this particular race, but the street sign was an important clue. The name San Gregorio seemed familiar, and a search on Google Maps revealed it is a small town along the western coast of the San Francisco Bay peninsula, a region where many of our bicycle races were held. Another important clue is the date printed on the back of many of the prints, NOV66 in this case. Of course, that doesn't mean this bicycle race was held in November of 1966, that is the date the picture was processed, the race could have been any time prior to that, but it was a start. For one thing, it allowed me to do some minimal grouping of the prints. I had a lot of prints dated JUN66, but relatively few dated NOV66, and the NOV66 prints all featured similar scenery and a similar cast of characters, suggesting they were a set, taken at the same time, in the same place, of the same event. Next came the slides. I dug out my old Kodak Carousel slide projector, only to find it had died of old age - a ceramic resistor in its guts had decayed with age, shedding shards of grit into the machinery, rendering it non-functional. Digging through my graveyard of obsolete photographic equipment, I found a hand-held slide viewer which allowed me to look at my slides, albeit inefficiently. At first glance, it appeared that none of the slides went with these prints, to be expected I assumed.

Somewhere along the way I acquired a most useful piece of equipment, a CanoScan 8800F. Not only does it scan the usual documents and photographic prints, but it comes with attachments that allow it to scan slides and negatives as well. So, over several weeks, I went through the box, scanning prints and slides. Negatives were another matter. Back in the day, I sported a Kodak Instamatic Camera which used a cartridge film of size 126. The bad news was that my scanner did not support that size negative. The good news was that 126 film actually uses the same film stock as 35mm film, so my negatives fit into the 35mm film holder. The bad news is that although the film stock was the same, the shape of the image and the way it is placed on this film stock is different for 126 film than it is for 35mm, thoroughly confounding the software that came with my scanner. And finally, the good news is that I was able to find alternative software (VueScan) that allowed me to do a fairly good job of scanning those negatives from the box. At last I could look at them.

The negatives brought lots of new information to the party. Unlike the prints, the negatives have no date on them. However, the prints and the negatives overlap, allowing me to date a negative if it contained the same picture as a print. This resulted in the laborious construction of a spreadsheet linking prints to negatives. The first kind of information the negatives provided is more images. In some cases, I had lost the print of a picture, but the picture remained as a negative. The second kind of information comes from the fact that, unlike the prints, the negatives had numbers, allowing me to order the pictures. The third kind of information was grouping. The negatives come in strips of four, allowing me to group pictures together. In some cases, I had defied instructions and cut the strips up with scissors, but much grouping information remained. Nonetheless, the job of bringing order from chaos was enormous. I would stare at the pictures, trying to figure out where and when they were taken. As I was doing this, I noticed that some of the negatives overlapped with what I was now calling the "San Gregorio" prints, and that there were others that seemed to be of similar scenery, this pair of pictures, for example:

The picture on the left is from a negative for which no print exists. The picture on the right I have both as a negative and a print. Although these pictures are on different film strips, clearly this is the same church, suggesting that the two strips go together and that the pictures are from the same event. Similarities seen in other pictures confirmed this impression; I was on my way to putting together the negative strips into complete rolls of film. However, as I continued to work with these pictures, a problem developed. Compare these two pictures:

The street signs in the upper and lower pictures, blurry as they are, are clearly the same, the San Gregorio street sign from above that was my first clue as to what this event might have been. The person at the front of the group in the upper picture, wearing a yellow jersey, is clearly founding member of the Modesto Roadmen, Tom. The guy in the lower picture is also Tom. In a different jersey. Drat! The Modesto Roadmen might have been very creative bicycle racers, but I cannot remember once when we changed jerseys in the middle of a race. Clearly, despite their common locality, these pictures must come from different races. Based on this sad realization, I created a fantasy of two San Gregorio bicycle races, one held in 1965 and the other in 1966. That was all nonsense, as it turned out, but that's getting ahead of myself.

So we come to my final resource, the Internet. As noted above, my first approach was to use Google Maps. Once I located the town of San Gregorio, I started using Street View to link locations in my pictures to locations in Street View. A major impediment was that these pictures are a few months shy of being 50 years old - a lot changes in 50 years! But remarkably, an amazing amount stays the same. Here is a picture I took back in the 60s:

...and here is what I see when I look for San Gregorio on Google Maps:

It's the same store! In fact, if you look closely at the lower picture, you can see that there are still cyclists in front of it. Using this strategy, I even identified a set of four slides as coming from this same area, as unlikely as it would seem that I would have both slides and prints from the same event.

The final piece of the puzzle came from plain old Google searching, though Feeling Lucky was no part of the experience. The extent to which Google has transformed the world by making so much information available to be searched so quickly and easily cannot be exaggerated. Nonetheless, three big problems confronted me as I undertook my search. The first was that back in 1966 there was no Internet so much of the information from back then is simply not on the Internet, not available for searching. Second is the sheer volume of information and the variability in the different words people use to describe the same thing. I had it in my head that this was the San Gregorio bike race. There was no San Gregorio bike race. I noticed that the town of Pescadero was nearby, and somehow that name rang a bell, so I searched for Pescadero bike race. This brought me to the website of the La Honda Historical Society who had scanned some of their old newsletters and put them up on the Internet. (La Honda is another town on the race route, and in fact was the start site the previous year.) One of these newsletters mentioned a bicycle race and music festival, and this newsletter came up in my search because it described the Tour Del Mar  Bicycle Race and mentioned that the start site was in Pescadero.  It contained a link to the program for the 1966 Tour Del Mar, where I learned that it was a two-day bicycle race, starting in Pescadero, California, and going through the nearby town of San Gregorio. So that explains the two different jerseys. Two stages. Two days. Two Jerseys.

As I read through the material on the Tour Del Mar, it started to come back to me. At the time, I think I neither understood nor appreciated the significance of this event. I am pretty sure that I did not attend the music festival, though other of the Modesto Roadmen, hipper than I, may have. In retrospect, however, I am astonished by it. If you would like to learn more about this amazing race, look at this PDF of the race program, which includes (work-friendly) pictures of the Playboy bunnies, information about the event itself and its organizers, and an unmistakable "60s" vibe. And it is in providing the link to this program that I encountered the third problem with using the Internet as a source of information about this bike race. The site from whence I got the program is no longer available. Between the time I found the race program and I wrote this post, the domain name for the La Honda Historical Society expired, making the program unobtainable from that source. Fortunately I found another path to that program, which is what I am sharing here.

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Coda

A couple of years ago now, I published a series of posts on my youthful cycling career. These were entitled "Cycling in the 60s:" with various subtopics, including: Mountain Loop, The One I Won, Tour de Graceada, and The Great Western Bicycling Rally. The Tour Del Mar was not among these, because at that time, I was still figuring out which of these pictures went together and what event they might have represented. It is only just now that I put together the pieces as described above, and in fact, the project of understanding these pictures is still ongoing.

I previously mentioned a companion project of mine, an homage website for my old bicycle club, the Modesto Roadmen. If you look at that site right now, you will see the above pictures still described as not two, but three different bicycle races. Do hurry, however, as I hope to fix that error in the next few days.

As the picture below documents, I recently had the opportunity to revisit the San Gregorio store with my family. My older son, Michael, on my right, stills cycles past it periodically. I am in the middle and my younger son, Matthew, is on my left.