Manic Monday!

After my first three experiences with seaming, I may quit working straight needle projects.

What a day. Is it too late to sign up for the MLB package?

I have now owned a total of five devices for conveying children via bike. (Don't even ask about strollers; Linda had to help me with those.)

Yay Woodside! -- wait, Woodside?!?

After years of being mostly hostile to cyclists, Woodside has suddenly made a dizzying number of improvements to its roads. Perhaps if I were some kind of citizen journalist, and/or had some free time, I'd find out who was responsible for this. Thanks to the Redwood City Bicycle Pedestrian Committee (which I helped found, back when I had time) for passing this on.


April has been a month of bike safety progress in Woodside! Since the Peninsula Committee's Woodside Ride on April 4th:

1) Caltrans reduced the speed limit from 40 to 35 mph on westbound Woodside Rd (Hwy 84) approaching the I-280 intersection This is the area where Michelle Mazzei was run down and killed by a motorist in October 2005.

NOW

2) With TDA funding, Woodside reconfigured the westbound bike lane on Woodside Rd approaching the Canada Rd intersection so that straight-through cyclists are not channeled to the right of the right-turn-only lane.

BEFORE

NOW

3) With the same TDA funding, Woodside extended the NO PARKING red curb along the eastbound Woodside Rd bike lane (east of the Canada Rd intersection). The bike lane is now 12 feet wide where parking is permitted east of the landscaped triangle.

BEFORE

NOW

4) In another TDA-funded project, Woodside replaced a depressed drain grate in the westbound Woodside Rd bike lane west of Buck's Restaurant with a flush, at-grade solid plate. Cyclists now have one fewer obstacles to navigate. (They can now concentrate on getting around the cars that park in the bike lane, legally. Unthinking cyclists frequently choose to park in the bike lane when they go for a ride.)

BEFORE

NOW

5) Woodside has diagonally striped the northbound shoulder of Portola Rd between Sand Hill and Mountain Home Roads to inform cyclists and motorists alike that the shoulder is not a bike lane. There is a steep-walled drainage ditch adjacent to the shoulder. This stretch of Portola Road is a shared roadway.

BEFORE

NOW

kiefer-rocks.com

How much does Kiefer rock? He was on the Tonight Show earlier this week talking about how he rides his bike around LOS ANGELES to pick up stuff like his scripts and puts them in the basket on his bike! *swoon!*

Top 5 Fridays, late because I'm a slacker

Top 5 Rules for the bike ride Adam and I did on Saturday:

5) It's OK if we don't finish. (we did)

4) No rushing -- especially on hills.

3) It's OK if we don't finish.

2) Lots of sunscreen.

1) Most importantly, no making fun of my crazy cataract sunglasses. These, along with other measures, will hopefully prevent me from getting my typical mile-40 raging headache,

Two-wheeled Wonder

From the Sierra Club:

Bicycles are not for everyone, and they're not for every trip. Cars do many things that bicycles cannot easily do: carry heavy loads uphill, protect riders from the elements, and cover long distances quickly. But a surprising number of car trips could easily be made by bike. Nearly half of all trips in the United States are three miles or less; more than a quarter are less than a mile.

...

Short car trips are, naturally, the easiest to replace with a bike trip (or even walking). Mile for mile, they are also the most polluting. Engines running cold produce four times the carbon monoxide and twice the volatile organic compounds of engines running hot. And smog-forming (and carcinogenic) VOCs continue to evaporate from an engine until it cools off, whether the engine's been running for five minutes or five hours.

My first-ever missed connections post

To the woman driving a Mercedes on Campus Drive this morning ...

around 11:30 who told me “I really think you should be on the sidewalk":

a) That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
b) According to the Vehicle Code, cyclists are allowed on the street, no matter how slow they are going, no matter how narrow the lane, no matter how many pounds of kid they are towing in a trailer behind them.
c) I didn’t know the construction was going to end the damn bike lane and trap me between a concrete wall and big old median.
d) It’s Sunday, for Pete’s sake. Will you just, ah, take it easy, man??

What I want for Christmas

A combination GPS, heart rate monitor, cyclecomputer, cell phone and MP3 player. Might as well throw in a 2-mp camera. Of course it would upload all my ride data to some web software to track my routes, speed, calories burned, etc.

This lady needs a kick in the head

I know this is old news, but she still does, nonetheless.

The head of transportation in this country said this live, on an actual news show, while talking about transportation funding:

MARY PETERS: Well, there's about probably some 10 percent to 20 percent of the current spending that is going to projects that really are not transportation, directly transportation-related. Some of that money is being spent on things, as I said earlier, like bike paths or trails. Some is being spent on museums, on restoring lighthouses, as I indicated.

Guns vs. cars: No contest

There is much hand-wringing, and rightfully so, this week about guns and how 30,000 people a year are killed by guns and how we need to revisit gun control (though not enough angst, me thinks, about how the Virginia Tech shooter wouldn't have had access to the weapons he used if Dubya had signed the renewal of the assault weapons ban, but that's another post).

And yet 41,000 Americans are killed each year in automobile crashes. That's about three-and-a-half Virginia Techs a day. And millions, of course, die each year of diseases caused by obesity and inactivity, which can be largely attributed to the sedentary lifestyle our car culture has enabled. Yet no hand-wringing there. No calls for more public transit or fewer roads. No outcry for expanded bike lanes or walkable cities. I guess it's easier to call for stricter gun laws when only 38 percent of American households own firearms, while 60 percent of American households have at least two cars. For most Americans, you'll have to pry the steering wheel out of their cold, dead hands.