Current mood: 2001

It is 2001 again (or maybe 2003):

• Mass protests have returned to mainstream consciousness
• I am extremely “single”
• I've messed up my body by running too fast
• Irony's dead now, for real this time

Because it is 2001 again, I am learning to play every song on (Radiohead's classic electronic album) Kid A as an acoustic-guitar strum-along. Back then I worked out several of them on piano, and some of them really are a lot easier on piano, but I'm being stubborn and sticking to guitar. Also I didn't really know how to play piano back then and I really don't know how to play piano now.

Why am I writing about Juicero?

There are just so many angles to this perfect exemplar of human silliness ca. 2017 (this is where I'd find a way to insert the phrase “late capitalism” if I was¹ a Marxist but I'm not a Marxist; adjust per your politics).

• Juicero is an Internet-connected “juicer” that squeezes bags of pre-chopped ingredients (sold separately) until juice comes out. You might ask what you need the Internet connectivity for, and the answer is, “Nothing.” Yet Juicero needs Internet connectivity. Not the juicer itself but the concept of such a juicer. Juicing is a dumb, overblown fad. The health benefits are dubious, and juice you buy in bottles or frozen cans is perfectly adequate — good enough to tide you over between monthly trips to that swanky juice bar in your town, if you're into that sort of thing. Only by the power of rapid, global, peer-to-peer human connection, only by the Internet, can a bunch of sparsely-distributed juice fanatics congeal into a “community”, with fresh-pressed juice becoming such a large part of their identity that they can be convinced they need this.

  Juicero the venture-capital pitch also needs Internet connectivity for a couple reasons, which only matter to a user in that they allow Juicero to exist:

  • DRM²: ensuring that only authorized Juicero juice may be juiced by a Juicero juicer³. In order to get/stay rich Juicero's founders need to be able to profit on initial sales of the machine and on continued sales of bags of chopped fruit.
    • The DRM angle includes a thin pretense of user benefit: that the machine could warn users of expired or recalled packets. I don't know, maybe you could have an online profile where you collected badges for your impressive juicing accomplishments. Whether or not you'd actually use any of that, none of it is a feature for the user — it's all there to make the company's life better, not yours.
  • Internet connectivity makes it a “tech” product, suitable to be pitched to “tech” investors. “Tech”, economically, means that you're using technological novelty to stay ahead of competition, thereby keeping profit margins high⁴. So there's more silly money in “tech” than in the food and beverage sector, and it's silly-arrogant money that believes it can understand all the other sectors better than the established money already in them.
  
  
• As much as Juicero is riffing on a dumb, overblown fad to try to become a dumb, overblown fad in its own right, hating on Juicero is also a dumb, overblown fad. There's actually a product here. It's similar to the whole Keurig coffee maker thing, which has certainly taken off. Coffee from a Keurig tastes better than instant coffee from powder or crystals; the prep and clean-up is much easier than other home-brewing methods where you have to deal with grounds. On a per-serving basis it's more expensive than other home-brewing methods but cheaper than going to a cafe. On the Juicero side there's something about some frazzled dad, you get the point.
  • So about Keurig, I guess they're having trouble dealing with competitors making “cups” compatible with their machines, undercutting them on price, and killing their profit margins. Hence Juicero's need for DRM from the outset, hence their Internet-connected concept.
  • The “easy” clean-up associated with Keurig machines has an associated environmental cost. A discarded, used Keurig cup contains plastic, aluminum, and organic matter all in a tight package, making it hard to recycle or compost, even though the materials in isolation are pretty well suited to recycling or compost. A Juicero bag must be quite similar. There's the outer material of the bag, strong enough to hold under the pressure of the machine. There's some kind of filter at the bottom of the bag, where the juice comes out — if that was built into the machine it would require regular cleaning, so it must be built into the bag. And there's the organic matter, the fibrous remains of the squeezed-out fruit.
    • When I make coffee at home I use a French press, and I can attest that coffee grounds are annoying, like any other damp organic kitchen waste. When I was renting the first floor of a house with a yard I could just walk out in my PJs and sandals and dump the grounds under some plants that the Internet said would appreciate having coffee grounds dumped on them. Now I toss them in a moldy compost bin for a couple days until the stink becomes unbearable, then take that bin down three flights of stairs to the bigger, moldier compost bin on the parking level of my building. Then I have to take a shower to wash the fruit flies out of my hair.
      • Point is, the inability to compost the coffee grounds and juice waste is, perversely, a feature.
      • “Why don't you just shave your head, Al?” I did that, once, because all my cross-country teammates did it for the state meet my senior year. My head is not shaped right. It looked ridiculous, even more ridiculous than shaved heads usually look.
  • So you can squeeze a Juicero bag with your hands. So, what? I'm sure you can strategically poke holes in a K-cup and pour hot water over it just the right way and end up with coffee. Who would actually do that? Not the “frazzled dad” on his way out to dad it up at some dad thing. Not the customers in the waiting room at the vet's office⁵. Not the waiter, hurrying-up-and-waiting like 10 tables, and this guy is going to regret that 3:00 PM coffee order at 3:00 AM, but the customer is always right...
    • The workout you get from squeezing the Juicero bag with your hands probably has more health benefits than the juice. The problem is that as you develop strength you can only do more reps by drinking more and more juice, confusing the question of what's really responsible for your newly buff forearms...

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¹ This is where I'd use the subjunctive voice if I was the sort of person that used the subjunctive voice in English... ↵

² DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Like many software dorks of my age, when I was younger I ranted a lot about DRM in software because it represented extra complexity toward the end of making products less useful for users. Like many software dorks of my age I've mellowed on this subject. Anyway, computing models have shifted and more important work is done server-side (“in the cloud”), where big companies naturally have control of the data and the rights. Instead of seeing further erosion in users' rights to use data they possess, we've seen the erosion of users' possession of that data, often even what they'd call “their own” data. However the legal arrangements have or haven't changed, “Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” and it's also nine-tenths of practical power, power that the big companies in charge of the cloud wield mostly for their own benefit. Oh, right, the point that I should be getting to. Now there's DRM in a juicer that I'd never own, and I'm distinctly un-mellowed about it. I guess the mellowing wasn't about age, but just about what I was accustomed to. Humans are pretty good at adjusting themselves to their conditions. ↵

³ It's really hard for me to keep typing, “Juice,” instead of, “Guice.” Just thought you should know. ↵

⁴ Remember when I said I wasn't a Marxist? Well I have a very thin understanding of competition and profit margins that mostly comes from my observations of the tech industry and what I remember from the chapters of Das Kapital I managed to get through. ↵

⁵ My vet's office does have a Keurig machine in the waiting area. ↵

Humility / Audacity

I thought about making a poster for the Seattle March for Science today, then didn't, because I figured there would be lots of posters, and I'm not that good at slogans or visual art, better at long-winded explanations of stuff, so probably other posters would be more worthy of people's attention. Indeed, there were lots of clever posters there and I didn't take any pictures of them because I'm not good at remembering to take pictures. So instead I'm writing a blog post about the poster I maybe should have made. It would have had just two words: “HUMILITY” across the top and “AUDACITY” across the bottom.

I'm probably missing a lot of the words for this, having not studied history nor philosophy of science in any depth, being just some guy that does software and reads stuff... so this is going to be a pretty square and incomplete account of things... so maybe you think about science as an institution, or as a practice. It's an institution made of people, a practice performed by people. We often fail to live up to our best ideals, but they're still our ideals (cf. the USA). Humility in particular would be good to highlight at this sort of event, both to and from the crowd.

I didn't see either of my words anywhere. That's fine. I did see a “Make America Care Again” sign, which was the first MAGA riff I've ever liked.

Cold Take: Serial

I finally listened to Serial, a few years late now. One of the big things I got out of it is that I don't want to talk about “reasonable doubt” in a case where I'm not on the jury.

To talk about reasonable doubt is to implicitly question the jury's decision. It seems unfair to do that after listening to a podcast about a trial. I didn't see the whole trial! And I saw a lot of things that weren't in the trial, which were presented because they might indicate the wrong verdict was reached.

But even if I had watched a video of the whole trial and nothing else... both sides in any jury trial prepare arguments to convince the particular jury in the courtroom. In this case that meant a majority-black jury from Baltimore; the podcast audience is a global audience of NPR listeners. There's a whole episode of the podcast called The Deal with Jay, Jay being the prosecution's star witness, where host Sarah Koenig asks, “What's the deal with Jay?” She was never quite sure what to make of him, the inconsistencies in his story, or the lies and evasions he gave before admitting his role in the crime and testifying for the prosecution. So in this episode she talked with a juror, Stella Armstrong, about how she understood Jay. Stella explained, “We all have somebody in our life like that, you know, that you may know, a cousin or a relative, who, if something goes wrong, you think you can call to help you.“ The implication was that “something” was something outside the law. In this case Jay testified that Adnan, the defendant, asked him to help him cover up a murder he committed. Sarah replied that she didn't know anyone like that.

OK, I don't think I know someone like that either. Forget covering up a murder — if I commit a murder (I will try very hard not to commit a murder!) and ask you to help cover it up, don't mess around with that, slap me in the face and drag me out to face justice! But for stuff that isn't so grave... I don't really know who I'd call off the top of my head. Most of the people I'd call for advice would probably say stuff like, “Don't do anything stupid.” Some of that is a mark of privilege, that the law generally works for people like me (I've jaywalked as much as anyone...). But this trial wasn't put on for myself, Sarah Koenig, and a jury of NPR listeners. If it had been, both the prosecution and defense would have had to present somewhat different cases!

So for me, in no way am I in the position of someone asked to do what the jury is doing. I'm listening to a podcast. I just speculate about stuff.

Just because I'm tired of arguing with people about dumb things...

... I guess I have to state a moral philosophy of bad form and annoyance.

1. There are individual actions and there are collective actions. They are different.

2. Some individual actions have terrible results when performed often by many people. Often, here, these actions are the result of many individual decisions made in self-interest, and the result does not resemble what we'd choose collectively. Often the harm can be significantly reduced if those individual actions are simply done less often, by fewer people. Sometimes, here, we luck out of disaster because of physical or economic constraints. Other times we need to act collectively to avert disaster. Acting individually in self-interest is human. Acting collectively toward our collective best interest is a really good idea. Acting individually toward a collective best interest is usually futile. Acting individually in self-interest while hoping that others' individual actions toward a collective best interest will solve our collective problems is stupid and annoying.

3. Sometimes the demands of our world are such that we have to do things that wouldn't be good for everyone to do all the time (cf. Kant). Sometimes when we do we run up against constraints imposed on us by necessary collective actions taken to limit the harms caused by such behaviors. It is bad form, in this scenario, to complain about it.

4. We are all responsible for the consequences of our actions to some degree, in proportion to how much of a choice we really have (cf, I dunno, Camus?). Sometimes people with lots of reasonable choices choose to do things that cause a lot of harm relative to the alternatives, simply because these things benefit them. It is bad form, in this scenario, to disclaim responsibility. It is particularly annoying to disclaim responsibility on the basis that these actions or choices are popular.

OK. That's not comprehensive or absolute, but I think it's reasonable. Good enough to stand around as proof of my logical and moral consistency, in order to annoy the bejesus out of people. BE IT PROCLAIMED.

Apparently the OJ documentary won an Oscar?

I haven't seen the whole thing, only bits and pieces of it, and it was a while ago, and I didn't write about it then. Maybe there's some part of it that examines this and ties it in to the thesis that its title (OJ: Made in America) implies. Anyway, there's a part of it that really stuck with me. They were talking about OJ's mixture of success and struggle fitting in with the rich and mostly white world he inhabited after retirement. There was this idea that there was something off with his constant desire to charm people and present a successful image of himself. So they interviewed a bunch of his rich and mostly white friends, and one of them talked about how he was bad at golf, and how he laughingly cheated at it, and how his golf buddies just couldn't get through to him the importance of honor and sportsmanship on the golf course.

Honestly, if I had to play golf to get through my social interactions I would cheat my ass off (while laughing about it). Because, like OJ, I'm terrible at golf, and I'd just be trying to get on to the next hole and not hold up the group. Sportsmanship? This dude is here because he was a professional sportsman! A typical round of golf is just something to do to pass the time with friends. When these things involve sports or games, and one person isn't very good, you give that person a leg up or take it easy on them, if you're decent. Apparently OJ's rich friends cared more about some mythical honor code of golf than being a good friend, which probably reflects more on them than on him. If he was displaying some kind of character flaw by trying to charm his way through stuff he wasn't great at, this would be a common character flaw that doesn't hold the secret key to his becoming abusive, and then a murderer.

The “secret” key to OJ becoming abusive, and then a murderer, is that he always regarded Nicole more as property (as a symbol of his success and status) than as an actual person. This attitude was obvious from direct quotes that the documentary showed, but did not (in the parts I saw) connect to an assessment of his attitudes or character. He abused her for years, covering it up through connections to police and media, before murdering her. The documentary did cover this, but didn't (as far as I saw) connect it to familiar patterns of domestic abuse or the tacit agreements that keep abuse covered up. If there's one thing that's directly tied to his crimes, and also reflects back on American culture, it's these things.

This isn't the most important thing you'll read about sexism in tech today.

If it has been so far, try this and this maybe? Anyway, it's important for guys to speak up about this stuff, and I am (as you all know) just some guy, so...

This story, in particular

Those articles linked above were the ones that prompted me to write this, covering Susan Fowler's account of working at Uber for a year, detailing specific incidents of sexual harassment, wider failures of culture and inclusiveness, and poor HR responses to them. I work for Google. Google shares, at least, a lot of jargon with Uber, so when I read Fowler's account I had a couple double-takes, before remembering I wasn't reading something written by one of my colleagues. While accounts of both specific harassment from superiors and general sexism in the culture aren't unheard of at Google, I think our HR and leadership response has generally been better. But then there's a lot that I see from the inside here that I don't see there. When Uber's CEO responds that this sort of thing is against what Uber “stands for”, it's hard to see what Uber does stand for if it only reacts to public allegations — if it has not taken proactive steps to make sure HR and other leadership are prepared when they come up internally. Every organization needs to be ready for these sorts of things to come up internally, because they will. They always do.

Everyone, every man working in tech needs to be ready for these sorts of things to come up, with themselves personally. We will make mistakes. Even if we don't do anything that's specifically worthy of getting called out, we'll do things that contribute to a culture that's really hard on women. So we all need to be ready to respond first with humility, not defensiveness.

Our whole selves, and nothing but our selves

Again, my perspective is not the critical one here, but ya gotta write what ya know, 'eh?

Google tries to take more responsibility for its employees' well-being and happiness than other companies I've worked for. When I started there, five years ago, there was a lot of discussion about work-life balance and employee surveys asked about our ability to detach from work in off-time. With answers looking alarming, people looked into the question and found that there appeared to be a spectrum of work-life styles. Some people are “balancers”, who separate their work and personal lives, while other people are “integrators”, who choose to blur the lines, sometimes socializing and taking down-time during the work day, sometimes getting good work done at home. We have a lot of “integrators” at Google, with a lot of official support, and it didn't just start five years ago. This was, perhaps, adaptive to Silicon Valley, where tech campuses are sprawling and isolated. It made sense to eat at work because there weren't restaurants around; it made sense to go running from work, because it would be dark by the time you got home. And it made sense for companies to provide employees, especially younger ones, some built-in, almost college-like social opportunities. I moved to the South Bay just after college to work for Nvidia, hardly knowing anyone on the west coast at the time, and the difficulty I had building a social life there is the main reason why I left after a year. In any case, now the surveys explicitly emphasize “bringing your whole self to work”, more than work-life balance.

When the idea of balancers and integrators came up at Google, I was sure I was a balancer. I truly value my independence, having an identity and a life that's set apart a bit from my career — these opinions are not the opinions of my employer, that goes without saying. But I've found over the last few years that, at least at Google (where there are some really strong “integrator” draws) I'm more of an integrator that I thought. This isn't always to my great credit, but I won't get into that here; doing stuff with colleagues has rekindled my interest in competitive running and cycling, allowed me to share knowledge and learn stuff about tea, and helped me develop a personal sense of style. If that's not the most world-changing stuff, well, working with people that care about my life a bit has made work a place I look forward to going when things are tough in my personal life.

This is much, much easier for me than it is for most people. I'm a skinny white dude with middle-of-the-road interests, tastes, and politics (by tech-industry standards). I almost never have to worry about not being accepted. I don't have kids, so I have the schedule flexibility to hang out after work. I don't drive to work, so I can drink if that's going on (surprisingly often at Google, and I'm not sure it's for the best, but that's another story). Introversion makes the volume of loud social events and conversations draining sometimes, but introverts in tech are common and fairly well understood. Would it be more equal if we brought less of ourselves to work, just the “professional” parts? My current thinking: what we call “professional” is full of exclusion, conflict, and discomfort, we just don't talk about it (it wouldn't be professional). The freedom to bring one's full self seems more critical to people that aren't so privileged in the status quo. Being able to openly discuss effectiveness of various bike tires at work is cool; being able to openly discuss the challenges you have being taken seriously at work, at work, seems a little bigger.

That means when we bring our whole selves we can't be selfish about it. If we're bringing our whole selves we have a responsibility to make sure that's meaningful, and not just a new veneer over the old exclusive professionalism (bikes are the new golf, IPAs are the new scotch, etc.). It means that we have to look out for our colleagues and make a point of being welcoming.

Riffs

The leather jacket thing. Considering how much discussion there has been over how thoughtful you ought to be when giving clothes as swag, and how often women are left out or made uncomfortable when that thought is lacking, this should have been avoidable! When the status quo is so male-dominated, not every avoidable thing will be avoided. That's when the response matters, a lot. The ham-handed, defensive response suggests a culture problem — it's one of the things that suggests Uber hasn't actually stood for anything.

The performance review and transfer games. Again, these seem to show an organization that is desperate to retain women and is willing to try anything except admitting it has problems and working on them.

“The HR rep began the meeting by asking me if I had noticed that *I* was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making”. Keeping in mind that what's judged reasonable is usually a matter of the status quo, all progress depends on those unreasonable people that don't accept it.

I was trying to find a few more things to link in here, and couldn't find them. There was an article that went around maybe a year ago about some true excesses in culture-fit hiring among tech startups, which ties in with the idea of a new veneer over old exclusive professionalism, but I couldn't find it.

In One

After I said I'd heard Port Townsend was “a charming town or some shit” Wes said a blog would be a good format for my ranting and that I should write a sarcastic travelogue, or rant while traveling into a blog(ue), but o, ho, Wes, I was several steps ahead of you there.

In a café in the off-hours in a tourist town in the off-season one man said that another man had called him a fascist and he wasn't the one wearing the fashy.

There's probably some tough-guy nonsense expression that you don't find out what you're about until you get punched — this whole trip happened before Richard Spencer got punched, and I'd been thinking back then that he didn't know what he was about, but then I've also been reading a couple biographies of Emil Zátopek, who repeatedly found out what he was about, and I really love self-knowledge, but even Zátopek found a lot that drove him to drink, and most of us are neither as great nor as good as he was, so maybe I should learn to smile at lack of self-knowledge.

My brother and his wife keep a non-sarcastic travelogue, which I think requires pictures, as sometimes things aren't quite what they seem in these places; particularly in the off-season you have to plan a little but not too much, you have to be open to experience, sometimes experience is learning nothing.

Trail-Oriented Development on the ERC?

Seattle Met gives Trail-Oriented Development the big headline for their guest article by King County Council member Claudia Balducci. That might lead us to ask: what does “Trail-Oriented Development” really mean? The term is coined in reference to “Transit-Oriented Development” (TOD), which indicates new development built around mass-transit access. That sounds nice; trail-oriented development would then be new development built around trail access, here specifically the planned Eastside Rail Corridor (ERC) trail. But sometimes the “transit-oriented” label is applied questionably; when we see “trail-oriented” used we should look at exactly what's being proposed and what it means.

First, why is TOD (here, the T is for transit, as usual) sometimes not TOD? Today many mass-transit lines follow major highways, which are the primary mode of access to the area. They do that because following these highways is the easiest way to get a bus within range of a large number of homes and destinations that have been built along and near the highway. A lot of these routes were established and grew into popular, important “trunk“ routes in response to travel demand generated by development that formed around the highways. Metro's E Line is sort of like this and the A Line even more, but even bigger and more expensive projects do this: Sound Transit's current network looks a lot like the freeway network, and with a few notable exceptions will continue to through ST2 and ST3. If a freeway interchange is built, and then an office park next to it, then the interchange is expanded to handle the additional traffic, then express bus service is started, then eventually a train station is built there, and then part of the office park is expanded, is that really TOD? Or is that just a nice-sounding buzzword, while the expansion will mostly continue to lean on the freeway interchange for access? This comes up a lot around here, with recent and future redevelopment in places like Northgate, Lynnwood, and Bellevue's Spring District (along with many others).

What about the ERC? It's a defunct freight railway; within Kirkland the rails have already been removed and a temporary gravel trail constructed. Within Renton and southern Bellevue the trail is sort of hemmed in by Lake Washington, I-405, and steep slopes; there really isn't much room for development of any kind near it south of downtown Bellevue. Around and north of downtown Bellevue it used to provide rail access to some fairly large industrial lots; some of these are still industrial while others have newer big-box stores and car dealerships on them. Continuing north it backs up to some office buildings and apartment or condo complexes before entering Kirkland, where it runs along a hillside surrounded by expensive view homes (whose residents reliably agitate and file lawsuits over any proposed change to the corridor). North of that is old industrial Kirkland, some of which has been recently been replaced with low-slung commercial buildings. North of there, the Totem Lake area, named for a small lake but dominated by a massive freeway interchange, home to a chronically struggling mall and the hopes of generations of Kirkland leaders that they could focus growth out there (growing their tax base without pissing off people in older parts of town) by redeveloping it. After escaping Totem Lake the industrial character resumes, broken up by hillsides and the wineries of Woodinville.

So since the corridor's industrial peak it has already seen some changes, with mostly retail and commercial buildings replacing rail-dependent industries. Building out the trail and focusing planning resources along it might accelerate this change, and probably add some homes to the mix. It's hard to see much happening south of downtown Bellevue (because of terrain and physical obstacles), or in Woodinville (I think everything that isn't a hillside there is a floodplain; maybe some of the beer-and-wine businesses will open up trail-facing entrances and try to compete with Red Hook). Some parts in Bellevue could be really exciting. Through much of Bellevue the rail corridor is a big physical barrier that's near other parallel barriers (especially 405 and 520), so the areas near it aren't very cohesive. A good trail conversion would add lots of ways across it, connecting homes and destinations on either side in ways that haven't been possible before. On the other hand, taming the connections to downtown Bellevue would take a lot more work. In Kirkland I'm less excited. I've heard people from the city of Kirkland talk about these ideas, and they seem pretty excited. They mostly seem interested in accelerating the ongoing land-use changes along the corridor, which is OK; good, even, if it results in daily needs like basic shopping and childcare available within walking distance of more people. But it's mostly on pretty small slivers of land... until you get up to Totem Lake, which is what I think it's really about. Kirkland wants yet another hook to get some developer to make Totem Lake happen, for real this time.

Now here's the problem with any “transit-” or “trail-oriented” development project in Totem-Lake. ST3's 405 BRT plan includes a station in Totem Lake. That's one little bus station, about the size of the freeway bus station that's already there today. The ERC trail is one 12-foot-wide strip passing through the southeast quadrant of the neighborhood. So there's some transit, and there's a trail. But they're not all that big, they're not all that close, and they're not really connected to eachother. I-405 is really big, and it's the Prime Meridian of Totem Lake. NE 124th Street is really big, and it's the Equator. And they sure are connected, with a very large interchange right in the dead center of the neighborhood. Whatever good there is in 405 BRT (which I'm skeptical of in general) and the ERC Trail (plenty of good things, especially in Bellevue), we shouldn't pretend that they'll really change the game in Totem Lake, which will continue to be dominated by roads and parking lots. So we shouldn't let Totem Lake redevelopment be greenwashed by them. There are parts of Kirkland where low-carbon redevelopment is possible today and Totem Lake just isn't one of them without major infrastructure work.

2016: Seattle's Cycling Progress

The BMP

In 2014 Seattle adopted a major revision to its Bike Master Plan (BMP), defining routes of city-wide importance for bike transportation and promising to create good bike infrastructure along them, or at least serving the general travel need they represent. Though this represented more of a general aspiration for the shape of the network than a commitment to specific projects, and it never promised to do anything by any particular time, it was more specific than previous plans and explicitly called for higher standards in facilities. No route of city-wide importance would be implemented by slapping down “sharrows” on an arterial road, for example. It wasn't just bike advocates that took notice: opponents of including a bike lane on NE 65th Street through the Ravenna-Bryant business district packed a community center in protest and got the city to move the line, indicating a nearby side-street route (which probably would have happened several years later, when it became truly relevant, anyway). This was an exciting moment: this “master plan”, which explicitly didn't commit to anything specific or to any time frame, felt that real to people.

Just as exciting for the more wonky among us, though not as visible, was Seattle's subsequent release of a five-year “Implementation Plan”, setting out what sort of progress the city expected to make between 2015 and 2019. I believe the first version of the Implementation Plan was released in late 2014 and it had some really ambitious stuff in it! In March 2015 the city published an update, cutting a few things back due to changing conditions. It was reasonable to update the plan every year or so, to reflect differences between planned and real progress and changing conditions, but I also thought it was important to compare real progress against a fixed version of the plan. So I took the March 2015 version, broke down projects by year, analyzed it against the Master Plan, and have been tracking progress against it since then. That work is in in this spreadsheet. The March 2015 Implementation Plan covered 73.8 of the 176.2 miles in the BMP's city-wide network (41.9%), and only a few items in the Implementation Plan didn't correspond to Master Plan items. As for year-by-year progress, the Implementation Plan set out about 20 projects per-year, and I was curious whether SDOT would keep up that pace.

In 2015 the city completed half of the 22 projects they promised. That sounds bad, but I was tracking completion, while the plan only promised that these projects would start in 2015 (I track completion because it can't be fudged and is evident to the public), and most of them had been started (at least outreach or conceptual design was done). They also completed some things that had been planned in previous years that weren't counted toward the total; if they finished all the outstanding items in 2016 and got about half of the 2016 items done they'd still be in good shape! Toward the end of 2015 we got the disappointing news that the city wasn't going to release a final downtown bike network plan by 2015, and in fact would be kicking the can way down the road because of complications with bus routing due to the Convention Center expansion. This tore a big hole in the 2016 update to the Implementation Plan, removing the many downtown projects.

Even so, if the city has the capacity to implement about 20 bike projects per year, it certainly had a backlog that would allow it to get about 20 projects done in 2016. On the ground they finished 10 of the 11 outstanding 2015 projects, plus three-and-a-half of the 21 originally slated for 2016, plus a couple 2017 items that got moved up: by my count, 15.5 projects. Many of the 2016 projects have started, but some haven't, and that's not limited to downtown projects. Seattle is making progress, but it's both behind and off-pace.

Bike counts

The Fremont Bridge will not make a million this year, and will probably finish a little behind last year. The windstorm in October and some snow in December, both coming with threats of worse weather than what actually happened, kept cycling numbers down in those months. The Westlake Cycletrack opened in September, and we did pretty well in September and November, but not overwhelmingly so. The West Seattle Bridge got a boost from the 99 closure in May, but its usage has also been hit hard by weather late in the year, probably a little more than in Fremont. Monthly patterns are pretty similar between the two bridges, as you'd expect with weather as a major driver. Fremont is doing a little better year-over-year than West Seattle since September, which might indicate a small boost from Westlake. If that boost is real Fremont has a good chance to get back over a million in 2017.

Suburban things

As far as I know most of Seattle's suburbs don't have public multi-year bike infrastructure plans to track (and I wouldn't have time to do that anyway), but there have been some notable things going on throughout the region.

• The part of the Lake to Sound Trail that follows Des Moines Memorial Drive between 156th and Normandy Road is almost complete. It will one day continue to the south and connect to the Des Moines Creek Trail (and the Sound), with the exact route yet to be determined; the Lake to Sound Trail heads east along 156th toward Renton. This segment is also part a path continuing along Des Moines Memorial Drive to North SeaTac Park, with bike lanes continuing from there almost to the Seattle city limit and the Duwamish Route.
• Also near the Des Moines Creek Trail, a climbing lane was built from the trail up to the new Angle Lake light-rail station. The new lane is a steep climb for people that have just finished a long, easy climb.
• Bellevue striped a bike lane that falls along a key route, on 116th Ave NE from about 12th to 24th, by doing a road diet! It's also in the process of a massive road expansion on 120th and NE 4th that also includes bike lanes, for what it's worth. The Northup Way rebuild that will eventually connect the two sections of the 520 trail with bike lanes is underway.
• More sections of the East Lake Sammamish Trail are being paved, pushing it toward what the county will dubiously call “completion” in the next couple years.
• Eastside Rail Corridor trail planning is underway. The county wants to get an interim trail open quickly, at least in some sections. Others (especially near Bellevue) may be held up by Sound Transit construction.

Occam's Razor's Edge City Lights

A paunchy, greying man wearing a dark sweater walked up and down the security lines, asking each in turn to please not put our shoes in the bins, because people put their food in those bins! I thought, “What kind of dingus would put their food in those bins — they've had shoes in them!” Bombarded by the noise of his voice and mine I forgot to empty my pockets before entering the X-Ray machine...

“I've about had it with understanding," the man said. He sat on the edge of the bed, facing the wall, pulling on a sweatshirt. He cracked, "I tell every line the same damn thing but the next one never listens!" His voice was still raised from the din of the terminal. The joke did not land.

“You don't have to do this,” his wife sighed. “We could move to the coast. You could do something else.”

“Ah, it's not like that.” A long pause followed. He was a couple generations removed from northern farm people that stared at the flat horizon and left lots of space in their conversations. “I'm adjusted.” As if remembering himself, his voice adjusted to the house and they spoke softly as usual. “How about Saint Paul?” He turned to show his grin. “Chicago? Always has great Christmas decorations, not like here.”

“No! Bad! No more shoveling snow!” Now she smiled slyly. “Barcelona.”

“It's bad enough to fly back home from here, with both cities being Delta hubs.”

“How does a guy work so many years in an airport and hate flying? You're not half as well adjusted as you think, mister!”

“Oh, I love flying, watching the ground recede and return, it's still awe-inspiring. I just hate the security lines. Those pompous tyrant-for-a-days telling you to take off your belt, hassling you about your arch supports!”

“Just get pre-check already!”

“Anti-democratic nonsense. And everyone trying to sleep on the plane making me feel like a real jerk for having the reading light on.”

“... and a neck pillow...”

“I don't need comfort, I need purpose!”

“... and an iPad...”

“I don't need to be entertained,” by this point he couldn't keep a straight face and he laughed and stammered while he searched for a line, and she let him search, and he finished, “I need to be enlightened!”

“You don't need to be right —”

“— in fact, I prefer to be wrong —”

“— you just need to be contrary!”

“Anyway, I really have just had it with understanding. Everyone's on Facebook, they just want you to understand this one thing, whatever it is now. This fucking year. The idiots crowing about Trump. The idiots ranting about how we have to understand the idiots crowing about Trump, making carefully sure not to share with any of the idiots crowing about Trump. Half my old friends from Madison that are just mortified, apparently about what Trump says about them. The Bernie people, still. The anti-Bernie people, still! At least the Bernie people are for something. But when I go see them we don't talk about all that, we treat eachother like people. When I live in the midwest I never use Facebook, I never get on airplanes, and I treat my friends like people. That's a life.”

“When you lived in the midwest you didn't have a cell phone.”

“And I was a bike-riding vegan. Now I live in Seattle and run 'em down in my Suburban on my way out to go hunt pandas.”

“You live in Federal Way, you take the bus to work, and you keep a patch kit in your Civic.”

“In case I come across someone in need. And I have.”

“Wasn't he a Bernie person?”

“Yeah, but it was still 2015, and he didn't even spout any nonsense about superdelegates. And I proved I can still fix a flat better than some kid even if I never could ride fixed in this town. I'm happy with the exchange.”

“You could fix people's flats on the coast. No more hopeless-ceaseless-line-of-fresh-clueless-assholes-from-shift-start-to-shift-end. You could stop being a... a pompous tyrant-for-a-day or whatever.”

“I'm adjusted. What about your job? It's all the same once we're adjusted. Your quarterly planning meetings, where you set goals for advancing —”

“— the new woman on my team, not the new new one but the one from six months ago —”

“— Amy? —”

“— Yeah, she said like half the stuff I said was dystopic in the 2017 goals was dystopic, and I couldn't... I had to —”

“— You're, like, her mentor —”

“— I'm her manager, her mentor is... you don't know him, different sub-team.”

“You're like her mentor. You're her role-model.”

“She took over a bunch of stuff in the women-in-tech group at our branch that I was supposed to be doing, and she's killing it. I run around and get coffee and shirts for her events. She connects with the youth. The youth are scaaaaary. They outnumber us, and they're just learning how bad our knees are!”

“You did ride fixed in this town for... longer than she's been coding? Anyway, she said, like... half the stuff you said was dystopic... she also said the advancing dystopia was dystopic. She has an eye for dystopia.”

“Yes.”

“And you couldn't agree out-loud, even in a one-on-one meeting.”

“Sure, and every quarter they're going to keep making new plans and we'll keep making new goals and maybe if I'm lucky the best I can hope is that they won't be dystopic?”

“Yes.”

“I don't think that's fair. We make people's lives better. I'm someone's like-mentor. And I have a real voice.”

“To shout against the dystopia?”

She rolled her eyes. “Shouting against the dystopia is just not how I roll!”

“So you'd walk in next week, mysteriously give your two weeks, and fuck off to the coast without shouting against even a little dystopia?” He made a silly face and waved to indicate somehow that the phrase “fuck off” was not meant as pejorative, which basically worked.

“Maybe not the coast, anywhere but Minnesota.”

These are lyrics.

They are probably the best lyrics I've written in a long time. Unfortunately the music I've written for them is simultaneously boring and too hard for me to play. So I'll probably record this song at some point but it will be really bad. Also, if you were wondering, yes, it is an homage to The Sun Also Rises with all the Pamplona/bullfighting stuff replaced by Chicago and dentistry. Because my dental visits have a sense of ceremony analogous to... um, anyway... in the spirit of the novel, if you think you're in this song you probably are (not really, it's all made up).

---

Steven you know my generation's lot's the mess that yours left after
Steven I've been back to Chicago two times since the laughing gas disaster
To feel the newfound menace in those brick walls that now seethe
The Madhouse dentist would not see me, she just ran upstairs and screamed through my teeth!

Midwest punctuality starts at fourteen and ends at the Edens
So I was on my third beer as the trumpets tuned their bell impedance
She burst in with her painted troupe but not her jealous lover
To say nothing of her husband whom she fought just like a brother, I say

Every time I've seen you since the summer of oh-five
You just reminded me how you don't exist and left me on the stairs for alive

We rode up to the west side, bidons full of makeshift absinthe
She, her husband, and her lover, so I fucked off to play Go Fish
On return my friend the organist had the chant at breakdown tempo
My companions drunk as I was, front teeth busted from the endo

The hygienist did the cleaning with her stiff grey scrubs and picks
Then the floor cleared for the dentist, long coat gleaming white with a smudge of red lipstick!
On the lapel!

(instrumental bit to break up the wordiness)

A jar of tonsils left along the Wood Street underpass
We should all stay on the west coast where we all admit we're never gonna last

(more instrumental)

The calls came in collect for me, I never could refuse them
She saw my good nature and my lack and only once confused them
Oh that's just my self-delusion, she was always gonna make it
That's why she can tease my injury while I just beg to fake it, she said

Every time I see you, since the summer of oh-five
You just remind me how you don't exist and leave me for alive!
On the stairs!

without proof or editing, everything al dimond 2016

1. The thing that always left me cold about Bernie Sanders was all the “big banks” stuff. It's the political version of Walter Sobchak ranting about Vietnam: it has nothing to do with anything! Did the banks have something do do with the housing bubble and its 2008 collapse? Sure. But the banks aren't behind what underlies so much pessimism about the economy. The recovery since then has been very unequal, jobs haven't returned in many cities and many sectors. They point to larger concerns about our future: trends toward wealth and resource consolidation, how automation and ubiquitous information affects the future of work and the value of knowledge and understanding and the project of humanity and living a meaningful life. We need a conversation about that stuff that's smart, humble, and inclusive.

2. In my professional circles (in the field of software) people often say that the top n% of devs are m times as productive as the average dev, where both n and m are somewhere around 10. Over time this statement seems to be spoken with dread, not joy, as we all realize, “There's a (100 − n)% chance I'll be one of the people out of a job when the n% write an AI that's m − 1 times as productive as me.” The AI will make some embarrassing mistakes and its work will lack taste and craft, but will have speed to make up for it. Its biggest problems will be fixed quickly by the smartest people. My biggest problems are harder to fix and I only have myself. For the project of humanity and living a meaningful life, I really hope we can all have eachother.

3. I'll repeat that link from #1 about economic pessimism. I had a bit of a similar thought when I saw a flowchart about how to vote in mid-primary season, including both Ds and Rs (I think Matthew James drew it), where the top-line question was, “Is shit fucked?” A “Yes” answer led to more questions, and ultimately, Bernie, Trump, or Cruz; a “No“ answer ultimately to Clinton or Kasich. Shit is more fucked for, broadly, people that aren't white in America, but for white people shit is fucked in relatively novel ways. This is part of the story behind the demography of the 2016 Dem primary, but probably not all of it.

4. I can't find it right now (so much for ubiquitous information), but I remember reading some quotation of a famous existentialist author upset that his novel was called a “psychological” novel by a critic, because of course the novel was not about some particular psychology (the author's own?) but about some fundamental fact of the human condition viewed soberly, or something. This is how I made sense of it before filing it away but I don't really know about this stuff; anyway, I wondered if maybe the lowly critic had it right, and if maybe the author knew it. That's what I think when I listen to any album Kanye West has made after his... err... 2008 collapse. It doesn't put him in bad company. I think the same thing when I listen to any album Bob Dylan has made starting with Blonde on Blonde.

5. Some U.S. Senator just quoted Psalm 109 (of the Bible), to pray for U.S. President Barack Obama, “May his days be few.” You wouldn't have to be in an age of ubiquitous information, any U.S. hotel room in the last hundred years would do, to be able to quickly check the context. The “days”, unambiguously, were the days of a ruler's life, not his days left in office. Anyway, you wouldn't have to be in an age of ubiquitous information, any room with a calendar in it would do, to know the number of days a lame-duck President has left in office, except in the case of death or impeachment, and a Senator need not pray for an impeachment, merely call some like-minded Representative! Seems pretty clear-cut: the Senator openly prayed for the President's death! On the other hand, people use scripture in weird ways sometimes. A few years ago I was at a Christian service that featured a reading from a psalm that was excerpted in a strange way (with no explanation given), starting near but not at the beginning, and with several verses snipped out in odd places; that might be a reasonable way to quote exposition or dialog, cutting irrelevant or repetitive parts, but not poetry! Later that day I was in a hotel room, and I'm a curious fellow, so I got out the old Gideon Bible and looked up the psalm in question, and it turned out that all the cuts were basically done to hide the context, involving military triumph. Anyway, I'm sure this sort of thing happens all the time in all sorts of churches when it's more important to quote the words of the Old Testament (because that's what fits in the liturgy, and liturgical authority is all today's church has left, having lost all reasonable claim to authority on matters of truth or morality — I won't go any more into that but I heard it from the pulpit so I'll leave it here without proof) than to quote words in a way that basically preserves their meaning and tells you something about why they were written. So the prevalence of this practice gives the Senator at least some cover. Which is kind of dumb.

now we can make ice

there's a ton o' shit we gotta do before we can start to make ice
gotta buy an ice tray and wash an ice tray before we can make ice
then we'll be
making ice, making ice, making ice, making ice, making ice

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3JaOAynaeE)

An account of the 2016 Golden Gate Relay...

... by yours truly, noted useless asshole Al Dimond, may be read here.

How to remove a cassette without a chain whip (for real, y'all)

I used to own a chain whip! I think I left it in the basement of a place I used to live. I don't think it would be polite to call the landlord and say, “Hey, Ed, can you check if it's OK with your tenants if I sort of rifle through the basement looking for some of my old stuff?” So I've had to invent a way to remove cassettes without the chain whip. I still have the cassette lockring tool; as far as I know that's still a must-have (unless you have a head bolt from a Caterpillar engine lying around or something). There are a few different kinds of lockring tools, and the differences don't matter for these purposes.

The gist of the problem is that you have to turn the lockring counter-clockwise relative to the cassette to remove it. When you turn the lockring counter-clockwise it pulls the cassette by the teeth that were locked in place when you tightened it during installation, and the cassette freewheels in this direction. So you need to immobilize the cassette against the wheel. A chain whip does this with two separate pieces of chain and a handle for leverage. We'll do it with one piece of chain attached to the cassette in opposite directions, looped around so it can be braced against the wheel by a screwdriver. A similar approach involves attaching the chain to the rim/tire with zip ties or string; my zip ties were all too wide, so I tried with string and broke the string. Some people say they can get their lockrings off just by grabbing the cassette by hand with a rag for protection. My lockrings always get on way too tight for anything like that — even with a chain whip it's always a lot of effort to remove them!

Equipment list:

• The cassette lockring tool
• A wrench that fits your cassette lockring tool
• A reasonably sturdy screwdriver
• An old chain, full-length (broken and off the bike)
• The wheel should have an inflated tire on it!

Steps:

1. Do all the prep you'd do if you were using a chain whip: take the wheel off the bike, remove the quick-release skewer, insert the lockring tool according to its instructions (some have a dummy skewer attached, while others have a hole in the middle, and you stick your skewer through it and secure it with the screws).
2. Put the chain around the top half of the second-largest cog, with almost all of the excess hanging off to the right.
3. Extend the excess chain on the right out past the edge of the tire.
4. Loop the chain, to the left, back to and around the cassette, one or two cogs smaller than the first. The loop should extend a bit past the edge of the tire, enough to stick the screwdriver through. At this point, with the chain around cogs in opposite directions, turning the cassette counter-clockwise (in the freewheeling direction) shortens the loop.
5. Stick the screwdriver in the loop, with the chain loop around the handle and the shaft against the tire. This prevents the loop from being shortened, so the cassette cannot turn relative to the wheel.
6. Stand the whole thing up between your legs, with the screwdriver against the ground. Brace the screwdriver in place with your feet on either side of the wheel.
7. Turn the lockring tool counter-clockwise with the wrench. This should pull the screwdriver tight against the wheel, allowing you to put a lot of force into the wrench. Eventually the lockring teeth should break free and the ring should loosen.

And here is the world's worst diagram, since I didn't feel like staging a photo while I was working on my bike earlier:

Oh, while I'm posting crap on my blog

After hearing that Seattle was delaying its downtown bike network plans in order to first create a “center-city mobility plan” of some kind, I decided to write my own plan. If we adopt this plan we can get the bike network started tomorrow.

ahem

1. Cap the number of office parking spaces in greater downtown Seattle (i.e. including Pioneer Square, the International District, First Hill, Capitol Hill, SLU, and lower Queen Anne).
2. Set the cap below the current number of parking spaces, because there are already more cars during rush hour than the streets can remotely handle.
3. This means that some parking spaces have to close. Hold an auction over rights to keep parking spaces open. Where will prices end up? Who knows! Similar to cap-and-trade markets for carbon emissions, the cap is based roughly on science (here, how many cars can enter and leave downtown during rush hour without insane congestion), and prices are lovingly guided by the wise hand of Adam Smith.
4. Enact a permanent ban on the phrase “center-city”. Seriously, who says that? Nobody in Seattle, that's who.
5. Get lunch.

Why we can't just get along

So there's this thing with “Bernie Bros” doing and saying blatantly sexist things, largely online, and Sanders telling them to cut it out. Maybe you've heard of it. But that stuff — rude, derogatory stuff that any decent person can just stop doing — isn't half the story with the sexism someone like Hillary Clinton faces. I just read a politically neutral article on the New Hampshire primary scene where Clinton was introduced (i.e. per the journalistic convention of introducing people by full names with some context at first mention) as the former First Lady. A lot of the sexism someone like Clinton faces is like that.

It's certainly true that she was First Lady, and it's not a fact irrelevant to her political career (she certainly was an active political figure in the '90s). But more recently she served in the U.S. Senate and as Secretary of State, and narrowly lost the Democratic nomination for President. That's the record she's running on, and it's the record that (most of) her opponents are running against. Any one of those facts would make a more appropriate introduction.

Now this random story about New Hampshire is hardly worthy of comment. But some of these things accumulate. They're not things you can simply “cut out” like online trolling, they're widespread habits that no single person can stop. They're as much the result of sexism as the cause. All of the people running for President and covering the race have been shaped by decades of sexist double-standards. While the sexism of any particular act during campaign season can be hard to separate from the constant stream of often-unfair attacks by and towards everyone, looking at the big picture, you can see its mark.

ADDENDUM: As this post was inspired by the journalistic convention of introductions... I feel like pointing out that I added in Clinton's first name at her first mention while editing the post, just because I was thinking about the convention, even though I thought it didn't match the style of the first paragraph, which I might describe as, “awkward informal references to assumed shared context, because I'm too lazy to write a good introduction or even link to a relevant article, because this whole post started out as a Facebook status update before it got too long, and I was WAY to lazy to edit it down.” I just noticed that I didn't add Sanders' first name at his first mention. I'm going to leave it like this, because, damn, this post is a trainwreck of writing whose victims are every form and style of the English language. Like my dad said when my brother was making fun of his receding hairline, "Would you make fun of me more if I went on Rogaine or got a toupée?" And the answer was, of course he would have made fun of him more.

Bike Master Plan Implementation Plan Changes: 2016

Tom of Seattle Bike Blog posts another Seattle Bike Master Plan Implementation Plan update. This is how it is different from what they said they'd do in the Fall 2015 BMP Implementation Plan:

First, a lot of stuff listed in 2015 in the previous plan that didn't get finished is listed in 2016 here:

• Roosevelt Way south of 65th
• University Bridge
• N 34th (Fremont Ave to Phinney Ave)
• Admiral Way
• Dearboorn
• Westlake Cycletrack

A few things are moved up to 2016 from later years:

• The “Dexter Ave N” entry, which appears to stand for an inherently mediocre connection from the Westlake Cycletrack to Dexter an the Mercer underpass, moved up from 2017.
• The “9th Ave N” entry (more on that later), moved up from 2018.

A few things are pushed from 2016 to later years:

• 2nd Ave north of Pike Street is pushed back to 2017 (more later).
• A PBL on Swift Ave S is pushed back to 2017 (more later).
• The Broadway Cycletrack extension north to Aloha is pushed back to 2017.
• The long Rainier Valley N-S Greenway is pushed back to 2017.

Some 2016 entries are a bit different than before:

• The “6th Ave S” entry (from Forest Street to Spokane Street) is now listed as “SODO Trail”, and as a trail project instead of a bike lane. Perhaps this means they've found space to extend the trail next to the busway? In the original BMP project list this was a SODO Trail extension, and it showed up on 6th Ave S in the 2015 Implementation Plan.
• The 2nd Ave Extension entry now shows up as “2nd Ave”. That's probably just a typo. More troubling: the southern extent has been cut back from Jackson to Main. That's a really important block!
• The 9th Ave N route from the Westlake Cycletrack into downtown, moved up from 2018 to 2016, is extended westward from 7th to 2nd! That's awesome!
• I'm not sure which previous entry corresponds to the “Central E-W Greenway” at all. Maybe it's one shown primarily along East Columbia in previous documents, which was on the 2017 list in the 2015 Implementation Plan.
• The northward extension of the 2nd Ave PBL, pushed back to 2017, is now extended farther north, to Denny rather than just Broad.
• The Swift Ave S PBL now extends from Albro to MLK, which I believe is the whole BMP corridor instead of the mere 20% of it originally in the Implementation Plan.

Finally, a few 2016 entries have disappeared.

• Pike Street PBL. This was a stand-in for part of a downtown network that was supposed to be planned in 2015 but wasn't, and is now being held until after some new kind of “center city mobility” plan is completed.
• 7th Ave. It's possible this isn't listed because it's already partially open, but it's only open to Virginia and the plan lists the route continuing all the way to Union.
• Royal Brougham, west of Occidental Ave. It may have dropped off because of Deep Bore Tunnel delays. This area is super confusing at the moment.
• NE 130th from the Interurban to 5th Ave NE. Maybe this is replaced by an entry for a greenway on 128th, from NW 8th to NE 1st... all the way out in 2019.
• Some sort of work on the Holgate overpass of I-5 was previously listed as a “Catalyst Project” with a 2016 date, and does not appear on this list. I have no idea what this has ever meant.

I didn't look at 2017-2019 projects aside from these. There are 2020 projects listed for the first time, so I scanned those. Aside from stuff that's just pushed back from earlier years, they include:

• An extension of the Pinehurst/15th Ave NE bike lanes from 125th to the city limits
• A northbound complement to the one-way part of the Roosevelt PBL

Somehow they do not include extending the planned Airport Way route to the city limits, where a route into Tukwila is ready and waiting. Aside from the further delay to downtown network planning that's the thing I'm most disappointed in. The best news is that the 9th Ave N project, one of the connections between the Westlake Cycletrack and downtown, is both expedited and extended farther into downtown. In light of previous comments from SDOT where they seemed afraid to touch the streets at the south end of the cycletrack it's a pleasant surprise.

A Message from the Distant Future: on Bicycle Equipment Regulations and the Founding of the Glorious Nation of Cascadia!

At the time of this post, the end of 2015, some American cyclists are frustrated with bicycle equipment and behavior regulations that differ by locality. Targets of frustration include King County's all-ages helmet law, Oregon's mandatory-sidepath law, bike path “hours of operation” that apply wherever bike paths fall under park-department jurisdiction, and various suburbs' single-file riding laws. I write from the future to tell you all that these are no idle frustrations or concerns. Similar questions have, indeed, shaped nations.

Sometimes the world, after all, turns on the results of low-turnout elections. Back in 2027 King County elected to its council a Dadaist Alternative After-Party majority. This group could not agree on repealing the all-ages helmet law, but managed to pass, in protest of it, a measure requiring all motorists to wear full-face auto racing helmets. As it applied, drivers on I-5 had to take their eyes off Twitter for a few seconds to don their headgear as they approached the Ballinger Way exit! Thousands of RTs and ★s were lost!

Twitter was (at the time) a California company (it would later be purchased by a NoVa military research concern), so a Washington county's interference in its business naturally ran afoul of Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution. The resulting constitutional crisis could only lead to one thing: THE FOUNDING OF THE GLORIOUS NATION OF CASCADIA!

Of course, due to the particulars of its founding, Cascadia had no Article I, Section 8 in its constitution. Indeed, quite the opposite. In Wallingford it was deemed illegal for cyclists to use tires narrower than 40mm, due to the danger of getting tires caught in streetcar tracks. On Capitol Hill, where there actually were streetcar tracks, freewheeling was deemed a "bourgeois freedom" and restricted to the elderly (those over 30); tires wider than 28mm were banned entirely as a crime against aesthetics. A narrow sort of aesthetics, to be sure, but PR Capitol Hill was a narrow jurisdiction, particularly after its territorial losses to the downtown retail core and the various colonies, buffer nations, and puppet states of Broadmoor Country Club.

Cycling equipment rules were soon rendered moot, though. A voting bloc of UW freshmen and out-of-town Seahawks attendees (yes, visitors can vote in Cascadia, we have this thing called hospitality) pushed through strict laws first against unannounced passes, then against interrupting conversations to announce a pass, so we effectively couldn't ride on MUPs. Drivers literally owned the roads in Cascadia but refused to pay for their maintenance, so they banned bikes on all roads out of spite after conditions degraded. By 2040 the only bikes to be seen were on advertisements for $6,000/mo studio apartments. Oh, right, and there was that guy with a routine that biked down the shoulder of I-5 near SLU once a year or so, jumping off just in time to dodge the cops; that kept on until the freeway collapsed.

We finally broke the stalemate on transportation when a bunch of laid-off techies and airplane manufacturers, squatting in an abandoned Boeing plant, invented the first affordable jetpack. One declared herself Queen of the Sky, to be succeeded by anyone that could kill her in her dominion. She then proceeded to fall off her jetpack from a thousand feet up before enacting any laws. Because it was the ground that killed her no succession or lawmaking was possible, leaving Cascadia's skies in permanent anarchy, the perfect legal environment for personal jetpack transport. What's the carbon footprint and death toll of the resulting transportation system? It turns out to be illegal to keep count, according to a ruling reached by the Supreme Court of Jesters in the halftime show of a 2046 Sounders-Timbers game. When you're up in a jetpack you can't put your head in the sand, exactly, put there's plenty of room to put it up your own...