Lent

I've often been a little interested in the idea of Lent. Give up something (traditionally meat) for 40 days in sympathy for Christ's suffering, celebrate its return at the festival of rebirth that follows. The mingling of Christian theology and European paganism into an enduring ritual that draws people into contemplation in February. But one of the reasons I've often been interested is that I can't get into it at all myself. Maybe it's a symptom of my modern anomie that I neither feel that I have something compelling to release in Lent, nor something to contemplate on. I don't feel particularly indulgent or grateful materially (this is probably something I should work on), and a lot of the things I might give away would only push me away from my friends and community. And I don't identify with the suffering of Christ. That can be broken down many ways. One is association: because I grew up in a society steeped in Christian ideas without any religious upbringing instinctively associate any Christian doctrine with exclusion and coercion. But even if I contemplate other leaders that have suffered for their beliefs and works, it's hard for me to feel kinship with them when I know I've tended to avoid pain by avoiding conflict in almost every area of my life.

So Jess has suggested that I give up anomie and focus on focus. Now I have, as we say in the business, two problems. Maybe three.

Maybe one day I'll be ready for something like Lent, but today probably isn't that day. I can think of one modern practice that is something of a mirror image of Lent: repeatedly trying new and unusual things, a month at a time. If the tradition of Lent keeps people's minds attuned to the past, this practice keeps people's minds attuned to the constant reinventions of modernity. People try the Dvorak keyboard layout or biking to work. They'll try wacky organization systems or keeping journals. Some might write a novel or record an album, although the motivation may be a little different. Ironically, one common choice is vegetarianism, and the RPM Challenge is in Februrary. Anyway, people take on these challenges publicly and socially, encouraging each other and sharing results.

I'm not sure that's quite what I need either, though. If anything, I need to find comfort and consolidate my strength, not take on another unfamiliar thing.

Ye Olde Compromise Bike

A while ago one of my friends said he planned to ask his peeps on the Internet a question: how many bikes should one own, and what sorts? I'm writing this down now so I don't have to do it later. The answer: you should own one bike.

Why one bike? Well, aside from my general tendency to avoid accumulating stuff, I believe it's not about the bike — it's about riding the bike. If you have zero bikes, you probably won't find yourself riding very often. If you have more than one, you'll have to spend more time fussing with your bikes than if you had just one. So, optimally, if you want to spend your time riding you'll have one bike.

If you're going to have one bike you'll have to think carefully about what sort of bike it should be. I think there are a few things that hold true for any cyclist that doesn't race for money (especially those living in Seattle):

• You almost certainly want a road bike of some kind. Most practical riding is done on the road. So you want a bike that rides well on roads. Despite the efforts of the American bike industry to equate road bikes with cheap imitations of racing bikes, these are not one and the same — road bikes take many forms. A few things are constants. One is tires. They should be smooth. Tread hurts your traction on pavement, especially in wet conditions. There is a special place in hell reserved for salesmen that try to sell bikes with knobby tires to urban commuters. Most people that will regularly ride more than a few miles at a time will want handlebars that allow a variety of riding positions. In Seattle we have climbs, descents, and flats; some trips are long and others are short. Flat handlebars are popular with outright beginners, but they don't give you enough choices to tackle long rides or varied terrain.
• Fenders and a rack. This is Seattle; you need fenders on your bike at least nine months out of the year. Take them off in the summer if you really want to, but remember, you're not racing for money, so don't get too bent out of shape about weight or aerodynamics. Fenders make it hard to fit a bike into a car, but why would you want to drive your bike somewhere when you could ride it? Racks are pretty nice. They allow you to carry all kinds of useful things for commutes and utility rides (clothes, computers, tools, locks, etc.) without awkward backpacks. And they let you do all-day and multi-day rides without vehicle support — why make someone support your ride in a vehicle when that person could have more fun riding along with you? Even if fenders or a rack don't have a permanent place on your bike, your bike should be able to support them. This has consequences for your fork and brakes.
• Carbon fiber is a stupid material choice for any part of the bike that supports your weight. Quality carbon fiber isn't, to the best of my understanding, more likely to fail than other frame materials, if treated with due care. However, due care is hard to exercise; it's really hard to tell when carbon is damaged. Supposedly a few experts can determine this, but the cost of enlisting their help is significant. Many cyclists recount carbon components failing without warning; others will say they probably should have known their parts were damaged, but let's be honest: you are probably not expert enough to know this. Finally, the failure mode of carbon fiber is shattering. This typically leaves the part unsalvageable and the rider in serious trouble. Aluminum seems a little better, but has its own disadvantages. Rather than shattering, it shears, which is less than ideal. As it's employed in typical bike frames, it's considered uncomfortably stiff, leading to aluminum frames paired with carbon forks (or seat posts, which ended badly for me). And, so I've heard, it gets stiffer and more brittle as it ages. Titanium is ludicrously expensive (though supposedly great in every way). Which leaves us mere mortals with steel. In 2012 steel is still the best material for a practical bike. Yeah, steel is heavy. If you ride carbon your bike is maybe a little less than 10% of your total weight, and if you ride a typical cheap steel frame it's maybe a little more than 10%. You're not racing for money. It just doesn't matter.

There are other things that can vary considerably.

• Frame geometry. There are many right answers for frame geometry. In Seattle's hills and traffic, recumbent is probably not one (unless it's dramatically more comfortable for you). Mountain and cyclocross frames have road handling characteristics compromised by off-road capabilities (for one thing, high bottom brackets raise your center of gravity relative to your wheels); how much you care is up to you (my current bike is a cross bike; I care a little bit about this, but... more on this later...). Cargo and “Dutch” bikes are great for mostly short-haul riding, or for carrying cargo! They tend to have sweeping handlebars that have a better default position than flat bars for most road riding, and even allow a more forward position when you want it (I rode an old Schwinn cruiser in college, loved it).
• Freewheel or fixie. If you can ride fixie in Seattle, more power to ya. I'm not sure I could handle steep Seattle descents on a fixie. If you ride fixie, at least have a front brake there just in case (this PSA brought to you by your mom, unless your mom is a crazy trackie/messenger).
• Brakes. Whatever stops ya, as long as it doesn't get in the way of your fenders. Compared to rim brakes, trendy disc brakes are still mounted such that super-hard braking can pull the wheel out of the front fork, but I'm not sure that overwhelms their advantages: easy power and great rain performance. They require less maintenance but the maintenance is more difficult. They can still work if your rims are damaged, and don't put so much stress on the rims. This, in turn, frees you to get all kinds of crazy, lightweight, structurally dubious rims, but you're not racing for money, so you don't care. Weight and aerodynamics of brakes are negligible for all but the most serious of racers — even more so than frames. All brakes yet known can have overheating problems on mountain descents; the only solution is to use them less. Coaster brakes are pretty lousy in every way, but if you're not going fast or down mountains you might be able to get away with them.
• Gearing and drivetrain. There's almost no wrong answer if you're comfortable with what you have. After initial skepticism I have come to like my cross-style gearing on Seattle's hills, though I'd certainly prefer a bigger little ring. More traditional road-style gearing works fine, too, though I'm pretty sure I wear my cogs and rings more evenly with the cross-style setup. If you hate maintenance and care even less about performance than I do try a full chain case and hub gearing — word is that there are some great hub gearing systems out there. Some riders with hub gears or single-speed bikes are going to belt drive. I have no opinion on this.
• Pedals. Whatever. You. Like.
• Age and price. Spending money does not make you cool.

So... you have to make some compromises to find a bike that's adequate for all your needs. I have a long commute, have to carry a lot of stuff, and like to go on long rides for the fun and challenge of it (challenge, to me, involves pushing my body pretty hard), so my ideal single bike is probably something like a touring bike. Unfortunately mainstream American bike manufacturers don't promote the stodgy, long-lasting touring bike the way they promote racing bikes (whether on-road or off-) and beach cruisers, so they're not always easy to find. And this led me to my biggest problem with my one-bike strategy. When my one bike went down in 2011 I had no spare to fall back on. To get back riding I needed a new bike quickly, and ended up (somewhat unwittingly) with something closer to a cross bike than the touring machine I really wanted.

There are good reasons to have more than one bike. Having a hot spare might be a good one, especially if you want to avoid having to buy a bike in a hurry in the event of a catastrophic failure. If you do two different sorts of riding that can't reasonably be served by one bike, that's another. If you really like to go off-road and get dirty, for example, but also have a commute too long to use an MTB, you probably want two bikes; or if you do lots of long rides where you want pretty aggressive geometry and clip-in pedals, but also quick errands where you want slab pedals (I have clip-in pedals and just push 'em with my tennis shoes for this sort of ride, but I mostly walk over those distances; if making trips like this on bike was important to me I might want a Dutch bike for them). Maybe if you regularly have to park in a high-theft area like UW it's a good idea to have a bike you don't care about. On the other hand, saving your best bike for dry weather, in Seattle, is utter nonsense.

It is time to HTFU, whiner.

So I walked into the bike shop with my busted dérailleur, and the mechanic said, “Son, did you use those,” and he looked down at my quads, “with this bike?” And I said, “Um, yes?” And he said, “I'm afraid that applying such a massive, apocalyptic level of force to the bicycle voids the warranty completely. You're lucky you didn't rip the frame right in half!”

Actually the bike shop was closed and its open hours correspond almost exactly to my work schedule. Also I need to get a haircut and a bolo tie (because apparently I'm a fucking hipster) and pick up Jess' new computer, all this week, all while I should be working. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!11!1

Jane Jacobs on the *oof*

I'm reading Jane Jacobs again, this time The Economy of Cities, which Jess gave me as a Christmas gift. And, oof! When I read The Death and Life of Great American Cities I did it on the L (as documented on this blog in the past), and now I'm doing it on the 5, with its lovely payment scheme where, as long as downtown Seattle's Ride-Free Area is in effect, you pay as you exit on buses leaving downtown. Some Seattle Transit Blog commenters call this scheme PAYPTTF, or “Pay As You Push To The Front”, and on a full bus that's about how it works out.

So in between giving and receiving body blows trying to deal with the flow of people through this bus I'm reading her account of how cities and urban work are the real sources of development and prosperity; not rural work, and not the earth, as many people have thought. And how the “impracticality” of big cities is one of the driving forces of progress. If only Seattle, not that big a city, could get over itself and make it practical to get people on and off of buses quickly. Nürnberg and Erlangen do it with no fancy smart cards or anything (my guess is at least some other cities in the German-speaking world are similar)! And their bus drivers give change!

Jacobs is largely thought of as a hero on the left, but her ideas often have something in common with Libertarianism; see this article from the Mises Institute. In The Economy of Cities she shows these stripes very strongly. She celebrates how the public good is served when people have the freedom to go off and develop their own work for their own profit. Certainly Jacobs' thought is wide-ranging. Her comments on development economics make perfect sense to someone that's read Amartya Sen; her comments here and on environmental regulations often point to the futility of common types of government action, as in Death and Life her most common targets for criticism were centrally-planned government redevelopment projects.

From where we stand today, her thoughts on environmental topics are interesting. She stressed the importance of recycling, and mining waste for usable products. Among other authors I've read, some of Paul Hawken's ideas come to mind. And, indeed, cities facing expensive waste disposal problems have made some strides in this way. She stressed the importance of chemical scrubbing of smokestack emissions, producing useful, profitable by-products. Unfortunately some of the worst chemicals we emit don't have a profitable economic use. So we're now stuck in the undesirable position where the combined actions of people working for their own good don't serve our overall good — the position where we really do need some kind of regulation.

In this sense, I might say Jacobs ended up being too optimistic on the ability of cities to solve their own environmental problems. But maybe she was actually right-on with her frequent pessimism that our cities, and our economy, is stagnating and failing to come up with practical solutions to its problems.

IT'S NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION TIME MOTHERFUCKERS

In 2012 I resolve to halve my weight and double my salary. To reduce my slavery bootprint and obliterate my carbon assprint. I'm gonna bike to Tacoma, then I'm gonna bike to Olympia, then I'm gonna bike to Portland, then I'm gonna get drunk as hell, wake up on the bus mall, fight a wino, hug it out, bike back home, and run a marathon. No, fuck it, an ultramarathon. I resolve to hack the world, patch all the world's vulnerabilities, then hack the world again, just because I said it was impossible.

Other things I resolve to double:

• My followers on Google Plus
• Number of computers to which I have root access
• Length of blog posts
• Old stuff in my house (working variety)
• Bench press
• Lines of code hacked
• Lines of code deleted
• Lines of code crushed, driven before me, lamentation of the women, &c.

Other things I resolve to halve:

• PRs in the mile, 5k, and 10k (this implies WRs, too, but I'm gonna rock the humility this year, so I might not even tell anyone)
• Number of people I follow on Google Plus
• Lane-miles of freeway in King County
• All haters

Nobody can possibly stop me.

Stories I don't know (yet): the history of Phinney Way and the future of Green Lake Way

A few months ago there was a fire at the corner of 46th and Phinney Way. Jess told me she saw the fire on the way home from work, and this confused me. We live near Fremont Avenue, Jess works east of where we live, and Phinney (the street) is west of where we live. Unless she stayed on the bus too long, she shouldn't have passed the fire on her way home. It turns out that Phinney Avenue is west of us, and Phinney Way is basically an onramp to Aurora, just east of where we live. Seattle is full of wacky street naming quirks, but why would we have ever named this onramp Phinney Way when there's a street with nearly the same name a few blocks away, the onramp isn't in Phinney, and in fact takes you directly away from Phinney?

More recently I was thinking about intersections near where I live that hinder pedestrian mobility. Two that came to mind were confusing multi-way intersections. First, the 5-way intersection of N 50th Street, Green Lake Way, and Stone Way; second, the 7-way (!) mess involving two separate N 46th Streets, Green Lake Way, and Whitman Avenue. In fact, these intersections aren't much fun to cross by bike, bus, or car either. What do they have in common? Green Lake Way, which is itself a nearly-uncrossable pedestrian barrier all the way from 46th to 50th. How could one street cause this many problems?

And what do these two odd streets have in common? For one thing, geographical proximity. Here's a nice Google Earth cap:

Here's another thing these streets have in common: they didn't exist 100 years ago. Here's a clipping from the 1912 Baist map of Seattle:

In Chicago, I'm told, the diagonal streets that muck up the otherwise orderly street grid were there first, at least on the north side (I could be wrong about this, but I don't feel like researching it right now). The 1912 Baist map shows that in Seattle the grid streets came first. Roads taking curvy, relatively level paths around the hills like Fauntleroy Way and Sand Point Way didn't exist yet (though railroads took these sorts of paths did); neither did most of the current crossings of the Ship Canal; neither did roads like Bridge Way, Fremont Way, nor our culprits: Green Lake Way and Phinney Way. This last set of roads had not been built because their main purpose is to quickly funnel automobile traffic to and from Highway 99, which wouldn't exist in its current form for another 20 years (per Wikipedia: Ford started mass-producing cars in 1914; the Aurora Bridge was opened in 1932, and the highway through Woodland Park was built somewhere around that time; the Alaskan Way Viaduct and Battery Street Tunnel were built in the 50s).

So the mess created by Green Lake Way comes into focus. At some point during the upswing of the automotive era the through-travel needs of motorists ran roughshod over the local-travel needs of pedestrians. Wide, fast roads were built along reasonably level paths cut through the existing urban fabric to connect drivers to what was then the major highway of the west coast. Bridge Way from Wallingford; Fremont Way from Fremont Avenue in Fremont (grumble); Green Lake Way from Green Lake (in this case the name worked out, as Green Lake Boulevard at the time didn't exist south of Woodland Park). And Phinney Way. Start at Aurora and continue its path. There must have been a plan at some point to build another diagonal road continuing along its path to Phinney Avenue, like a mirror image of Green Lake Way. But for some reason it was never completed, and Phinney Way is left as a weird stub with a weird name.

I'm sort of interested in when exactly these roads were all built, and why Phinney Way was never completed. It seems likely to me that these events predated the “freeway revolt” movement, so did some kind of proto-freeway revolt take hold (a proto-revolt for a proto-freeway), stopping the road? Or was it a more mundane reason? One reason I'm interested is that I believe we need to start reversing some of the legacies of the automotive era in our cities. One that I'd love to see go is Green Lake Way. I'm not a natural activist or leader, but I can envision a more cohesive and walkable neighborhood with more pedestrian-friendly intersections. There are plenty of other ways to get to Highway 99, and Highway 99 is no longer as important for north-south travel in the region now that I-5 exists. I don't know if anyone else is interested in this, but I'm sure interested in the history, and what we might be able to do in the future to re-shape our city.

Random transportation comments in Seattle

1. I was recently discussing the 520 bridge rebuilding project with some of my co-workers. One of them commented, in the context of a discussion about workers commuting from Seattle to the eastside, that many eastside workers would never ride the bus because Seattle has such a lousy mass transit system. It's possible that they would never ride the bus, but I think the reason is false — for suburban workers, Seattle has a great mass transit system. The best city I have to compare with is Chicago. Chicago does certain things much better than Seattle does. Its suburban commuter service to downtown is much better than Seattle's. The combination of the L and the very consistent local bus grid provides generally better service around the city than Seattle does. But we were talking about people that work in the suburbs. Seattle's transit system works a lot better than Chicago's for this. Workers in Seattle's eastside suburbs of Kirkland, Redmond, and especially Bellevue have pretty good transit options from many places around Puget Sound. There's regular 15-minute bi-directional service during the day as far south as Federal Way and as far north as Everett. Similar places in Chicago, for the most part, have only commuter service downtown and skeletal local service to nearby suburbs. Compare Bellevue to Naperville; Kirkland to Oak Brook; Issaquah to Schaumburg.

Chicago, of course, has a few handicaps. One is distance. Chicago (like many eastern and midwestern cities) has suffered from a sprawl-and-abandon development pattern, and while Chicago has managed to revitalize its urban core (like New York, unlike Cleveland or Detroit), it still has a band of severe economic depression in the outskirts of the city and the inner suburbs. Seattle is hemmed in by water and mountains that limit the pure extent of sprawl, and its history and geography has been shaped less by violence and racism. To be sure, Seattle's geography as it is has been shaped by these factors, not to mention corruption and gentrification, but not to the extreme degree Chicago's has. So Seattle's "boom-burbs" are closer than Chicago's are — closer to eachother and closer to the urban core. I think Chicago's other big handicap is the success and popularity of its commuter rail system. Commuter rail is cheap to expand because it runs on existing freight tracks, and popular because it allows people to avoid stressful downtown driving and expensive downtown parking. It's also inflexible, incapable of serving "boom-burbs" that mostly are nowhere near train stations. Seattle's advantages here are twofold. First, almost all of its transit service uses buses, which are very flexible. Second, the same agencies are responsible for suburban commuter services and local services, so they have a greater incentive to cooperate than compete for funds. Agency splits and politics also probably hurt transit service in the urban core of Seattle.

2. While talking bike commuting, a friend said that cyclists with serious-looking racing gear seemed to make up a really high proportion of Seattle cyclists. That sort of serves to reason, I guess. Seattle has a lot of weather that would scare off casual riders, but very little that will deter a committed cyclist. Combine that with the US cycling industry's general disregard for serious adult cyclists that aren't racers, and you have a lot of people riding around town in racing gear, even though many of them will never race on a bike in their lives. Some sport clothing is even pretty practical for longer commutes (I wear bike shorts and a bright yellow pullover, which work great our misty rain), though I'll never understand why people buy gear with "sponsor" logos all over it.