Magic Spot Flowing

It was raining like crazy all day yesterday. I had agreed to go to a party in the evening, so I decided, in the spirit of adventure, to find out whether my bike raingear was up to the task of keeping me relatively dry and comfortable on a 9.6 mile ride in moderate to heavy rain.

Answer: relatively comfortable, yes, relatively dry, no. I was warm enough (mostly; I wish I had worn my long-fingered gloves), but my jacket soaked through eventually, and the rain came in between my tights and shoes my ankles to wet my feet, so that even wearing waterproof shoes was only somewhat helpful. The jacket was marginally breathable enough, and the weather barely cool enough, that I didn’t sweat too much, but I got wet from the rain instead. This is the eternal problem of cycling raingear. Some people swear by Gore-Tex, others say that it leaks or doesn’t breathe. I’m thinking of getting a cycling cape — apparently a place in Oregon makes them.

The waterproof shoes did show their value when I ran into a huge puddle in Mountain View. The entire right lane was covered in water to a depth of about six or eight inches, and I was nervous about riding through it, so I got off, walked up the cross street until I could get on the sidewalk, and walked through a shallower part of the puddle that was on the sidewalk (still 3-4 inches deep). And my feet stayed dry through that.

As I’ve found before, rain pants are not worth it; I just wear my bike tights, which dry quickly and are warm and comfortable even when wet (the microfleece layer stays soft against my skin and doesn’t feel wet). I also don’t bother with a hood or helmet cover; instead I comb out my wet hair when I get someplace. I wear my cycling glasses because I hate getting rain in my eyes, but I do take them off every so often to wipe them off, and occasionally when I get tired of trying to see through them.

My conclusion is that I need to find a better upper (or maybe alternate several, using the current one for light rain, a cape for warm and wet, and a truly waterproof jacket for cold and wet), and get some of those booties/gaiters for my ankles to limit the drippage. I hate wet feet more than I hate almost anything else.

Overall, I did enjoy most of the ride. There wasn’t much traffic on a rainy Saturday between 5 and 6 pm, so the ride wasn’t stressful. The trees are turning colors, making the scenery interesting, and the cool, dull color of the light was soothing. It was nice to try the central route in relative daylight, and see the interesting things I passed by — parks, schools, cool houses. Everyone still had Halloween decorations up, which was also fun. I wasn’t in a huge hurry (though it took longer than I expected — oops) and was riding my old commuter bike, the first long ride she’s been on in a while, so I just toodled along, feeling relaxed. However, I was very glad to get home and change into dry clothes and warm up in my cozy blankets.

I was riding to downtown Sunnyvale today and got passed by a couple cars while sharing a lane. Absolutely nothing notable about it from a traffic standpoint, except that for several of them I was checking my rearview mirror as they came up and I found that I had an instinctive fear as they approached, almost a startle reaction, in spite of the fact that I could see that all was well. This is unusual for me, in part because I know that strike-from-behind accidents are only around 4% of car-bike accidents (largely at night with unlit cyclists), much less than many other kinds, notably left-cross and right-hook accidents, and in part because my experience accords with that — risky passing is not uncommon, but it’s usually clear that the driver knows where I am, but just doesn’t know that they shouldn’t be that close to me in case I move for some reason.

Nevertheless, overtaking accidents are a disproportionately common fear among potential, new, or inexperienced traffic cyclists, to the extent that many people prefer separated paths in spite of the fact that statistics suggest that in urban environments they increase intersection conflict significantly while reducing only the infrequent overtaking collisions. People feel safer when there’s a barrier to overtaking. Why?

I speculate that it may be due to something inbuilt. Babies have an instinctive negative reaction to someone “looming” (a large object moving rapidly into their space, especially overhead). And we all also know that if someone is chasing you who means you ill, and they catch up to you, your goose is cooked. Cars overtaking both loom (they are large objects coming into the field of perception at a rapid rate) and chase.

In spite of knowing about the low frequency of overtaking collisions, I usually¹ feel safer on bike-laned roads than on shared-lane roads where the lane is marginal for sharing (wide, unstriped shoulders feel the same to me as bike lanes — also interesting to note). It feels like I have my own space, into which the other person is not likely to move without a sign of some kind.² So even I’m clearly subject to this fear, despite my experience and statistics telling me that it’s not proportional.

I would suggest that whether or not it’s true that this fear has some deeply-rooted basis, this might be a useful way to approach the people who fear this. Rather than dismissing their concerns blithely with “not backed up by statistics”, say “I understand that this situation feels really threatening to you. I even agree that it can feel that way. However…”

Both actual safety and the perception of safety are important. Without the perception of safety, people will not engage in desired behavior (like walking and cycling). But perceived safety shouldn’t conflict with actual safety (ideally at all, but in practice, excessively). Given city setup and cycling practice in the US, sidepaths are generally a terrible idea even if they ‘feel’ safer.

¹There are exceptions, mainly bike lanes that are partly in the door zone. The stretch of Old County/Pacific in San Mateo County that feels least safe to me is the section with bike lanes, because I feel that the possibility for conflict is greater if I choose to ride out of the bike lane (as I often do). Ditto Lytton Ave in Palo Alto (feels less safe than University) and Middlefield Rd in the block right before Montrose heading toward San Antonio.

²LAB teachers and religious VCs will here say “You’re clearly too far to the right then, because with proper lane positioning you communicate to drivers that this is your lane.” This may be true in some cases, but I would also note that you can only communicate with people who are receptive to your communication. My observed experience is that my lane position can help or hurt, but that overall people behave more inconsistently around narrow shared lanes, especially those with varying or marginally wide width. And inconsistency is scarier than predictability — which is the whole of the VC mindset!

And as far as passing in adjacent lanes feeling safe or not, it’s rare for cars to be passed consistently, repeatedly, with high speed differential in the adjacent lane because car speeds are normally roughly comparable. When the speeds are not comparable, such as on a freeway at rush hour when the HOV lane is running 65 and the regular lanes are running 25-35, sit in the leftmost travel lane trying to merge and try telling me you don’t feel threatened by the looming, chasing cars.

Back when I was planning my mileage for training, I decided that for some of the weekday rides with higher mileage, I would try doing my commute on Foothill rather than Bryant. It increases the hilliness and the mileage substantially. I went for that option this morning and was pleasantly surprised by it. After you pass Stanford, it’s really no more crowded than Bryant, and except for a few tricky intersections, not much more challenging either, except for spending more time on Mary (where the right lane is exactly that annoying width that means you need to take the lane if there are parked cars, and cars are exactly infrequent enough that people are annoyed by you taking the lane).

Stats:
AVS: 15.3 mph (!)
DST: 16.3 mi (a bit more than I thought)
MXS: 27.3 (downslope after Page Mill)
Ride time: 1:03
Total time: 1:20 (real AVS 12.2)

I did get a few typical annoyances: getting buzzed a few times — by both cyclists and motorists, people trying to turn right at stupid times, etc. There was a particular pair of cyclists on JS/Foothill that annoyed me greatly. One of them buzzed me, and then they failed to actually go much faster than I did until nearly Arastradero, because they were stopped by lights. And after the intersection of Page Mill where the bike lane narrows, they were still riding two abreast where there was really no room, resulting in a truck honking loudly and sustainedly right next to me. I don’t think the honking was appropriate, but neither is riding two abreast for no reason except your own pleasure on a road with a 45-mph speed limit in the travel lanes.

I do wish that more drivers knew that passing cyclists isn’t their God-given right though. I feel like the lives of most cyclists in the state or nation would improve greatly if every driver’s ed course and driving test asked two basic questions and required them to be answered correctly: do cyclists have a right to ride on the road (yes), and what should you do when you find a cyclist in your lane (slow down, be patient, and pass when safe, leaving a margin for error).

There’s a stretch of Foothill where I think the road must be uphill, but it looks really flat. But every time I’m on that stretch I’m going 13-14mph thinking “Why does this feel so hard?” And then once I pass it I start going 20mph, so I think it’s an invisible uphill/downhill thing.

The weirdest intersection is the one for Foothill/Fremont/Miramonte/Loyola. I had forgotten how awful it is to navigate (you can see from the map why, because there are all those roads coming together and you have to exit, turn left, turn right, and turn left in order to turn left), and waited there a long time, but people were courteous and I got through without incident.

I always find the South Bay a bit mind-bending because I imagine Mary and Mathilda as E-W but they actually are very much N-S, so I kept thinking, “Wait, I got off on Fremont and I’m going east because Foothill is N-S, so how am I going to turn onto Mary and still end up going east?” forgetting that Mary is only logically E-W (in that it’s perpendicular to the train tracks/Central, which go “south” to San Jose) and is actually N-S.

I’m feeling pretty good this morning, and thinking I might do this commute again in the future, and not just for training — it’s more fun than Bryant and Middlefield.

Much unlike the Tour de Menlo, today’s Tour de San Mateo was a ride thrown around as a concept by another member of SVBC a while back: just a small tour of the interesting bits of San Mateo. I was instantly in, since I used to live in San Mateo and am quite fond of it.

The ride was a relaxed meader through neighborhoods, parks, trails, and bridges. It was a thoughtfully-designed route and very enjoyable. The best parts were the neighborhoods in the southwest where I hadn’t been, which were classic, pretty San Mateo neighborhoods of the kind that I loved walking through when I lived there, and touring what I call “Secret San Mateo” because you can only get there from either Fashion Island or a freeway exit that exists in only one direction (Kehoe Ave on US-101 N). It was nice to see that they’ve been repaving some of the worst streets since I lived there, though there’s plenty left to do.

The lowlight was, sadly, the Monte Diablo bike/ped bridge. There are no pavement cutouts to access it (not just bad for us — what about wheelchairs?!) and it’s incredibly narrow and twisty on the approaches. I don’t know if you’re supposed to walk your bike or what, but it was also full of glass and clearly being used as a camping spot by homeless people, meaning I’d never take it during questionable times of day even if I could get over the totally stupid design. This is really a pity because it’s by far the simplest route over the freeway in the northern area of the city. I don’t know how they managed to screw this up so badly (the bridge was only just completed earlier this year).

I took the North-South Route up and back, since I was supposed to be doing my long mileage day today. Old County has just turned into a washboard since the last time I was on it (for the N-S Route Ride about a year and a half ago). It’s in desperate need of a paving job. San Carlos, Belmont — I will contribute if you need to pass the collection plate to get this darn road fixed up.

Exhaustion caught up to me at the end and I terminated as I reached home, around 37 miles, shaky after hitting a bad bump on Middlefield and just totally worn out despite an average speed of only 11 mph. I just woke up from a nap forced on me by sheer exhaustion, so I’m still a bit wibbly. This is one of those “can’t complete mileage because too exhausted” days, which I haven’t had in a while.

So if I haven’t called/emailed you lately, it’s not because I don’t like you, it’s just because I’m running very low on reserves.

My experiences with transit and cycling in Toronto were almost uniformly overwhelmingly positive. If only it wasn’t so cold there, I’d totally want to live there.

When I first arrived, I got a GO bus and then the TTC subway into downtown Toronto. This had two complications. One, GO and TTC are different systems, so I had to pay for both. But the total was only about CDN$8, so it was still astoundingly cheap for an airport-to-downtown option. Two, the GO bus that I got on went to a station on the other side of the U-shaped line (Yonge/University/Spadina) than the part of the U I wanted to be on, but that was simply fixed by briefly transferring to the Bloor-Danforth line to cut off the bottom of the U. (On the way back I did what I should have done in the first place: take the Bloor-Danforth line to Kipling and the 192 Airport Rocket to Pearson, which costs only CDN$2.75 and is a TTC-only journey. The Airport Rocket has 10-minute frequency during the afternoons — pretty great.)

The TTC is kind of expensive on a per-journey basis, CDN$2.75 per journey, but if you’re taking a long journey it’s quite reasonable, and you can buy at a discount if you get a lot of tokens at once. Transfers between lines are allowed, though you have to remember to pick one up if you get on the subway, and they’re rather finicky about where you can use them — you can’t use them at the station where you got them, and you can’t use them at a station that isn’t a direct transfer between one line and another (though it wasn’t evident to me how closely this was enforced). The one time I forgot to pick one up at my origin, I remembered to get it at my first subway transfer, so that was okay.

It’s relatively quick and pleasant, although crowded (it sometimes required a lot of “excuse me, I need to get out”s). The subway has a minimum frequency of 4-5 minutes between trains, so you’re never waiting long, and I had good experiences with my attempts to find buses and streetcars and get help from their drivers. They could use better signs at stops about routes and timing, but many stops do have the necessary information.

I did quite a lot of walking as well, and found that a nice way to get around, even going into downtown, though it did take longer than the subway. But most of my time not spent on TTC transit was spent cycling around. It was an adventure for me because I was equipped only with a minimal map of the downtown area, and didn’t have a Toronto bike map (allegedly you can pick them up at various places but I didn’t try very hard and didn’t see anything obvious) so I was mostly going on faith and some helpful directions from the owner of my borrowed bike, Crazy Biker Chick. The downtown streets are narrow and often have marginal pavement quality. There are some bike lanes, but not a lot, and some designated routes, but from what I could tell people rode their bikes almost everywhere anyway. Streetcar tracks were frequent and nerve-wracking, and in several cases I put my box-turn practice to good use in order to avoid bad left turns over streetcar tracks.

The most impressive thing was that there were bike racks absolutely everywhere, every 10-30 feet on pretty much every downtown street. Mostly they were just a post with a circle through it that could hold two bikes, about as simple as you can get but very functional. I saw tons of utility/city/hybrid-type bikes, and very few road bikes, while I was there, showing that people are choosing practical options for their environment. I enjoyed riding a very upright bike (a Raleigh Twenty that looks much like the picture at the link — evidently a classic and much-loved folding bike). Most were equipped with a rack or basket of some kind.

I found that the majority of cars were quite polite. A few people passed too close, but by and large I felt that my head was safer unhelmeted in Toronto (I didn’t bring my helmet or any other protective gear) than helmeted here. There were a few cases in which construction and other adverse circumstances made me uncomfortable enough to temporarily decamp to the sidewalk. Shock horror! I think time in Toronto has largely cured me of my default sidewalk anger (one of my 101 goals!), though I still am annoyed by people who ride recklessly on the sidewalk or ride on it where conditions are not very good (too narrow — the sidewalks in downtown Toronto are very wide). I particularly enjoyed my ride on Toronto Island. I took the ferry to Ward’s Island, and rode around and back, enjoying myself in the park and taking pictures, and on my last day there, I was able to see many more things in one day than I could have managed without a bike, so it was not only fun but extremely useful.

One of the things I did on my last day was visit Urbane Cyclist, a wonderful bike shop focused on commuting cycles at 180 John Street, just north of Queen, in downtown. The shop was full of fascinating things. There were urban, folding, and recumbent, and cargo bicycles — including a bakfiets!!! Unlike most shops, rows of shiny new identical high-end road bikes were not the featured item. Instead, the rest of the shop was filled with racks, panniers, mirrors, gloves, jackets, and other useful items. There was a parts section in the back. I picked up a set of road bike bar-end mirrors and a copy of Momentum as well. What a great shop.

Hang on for part 2, about what I actually did between all my subway and bike rides…

Ride report 1, this morning’s ride:
Portola Loop, backwards from usual (Santa Cruz > Alpine > Portola > Sand Hill).
DST: 17.5mi
AVS: 13.9mph
MXS: 39mph according to the computer, but I think really about 32-33mph
Time: 1:15 riding time (about 1:25 total)

I had a really wonderful ride this morning. I decided to go in reverse from the way I’ve done Portola Loop before, to find out what it was like to climb Alpine. Answer: weird. Alpine starts at about 3mi from home for me, but the climb-that-feels-like-a-climb doesn’t start until about 5.5 or 6 miles (and ends at about 7.5 with the turn to Portola). But the whole thing feels like a downhill going the other way, though a very gradual one.

On one of the steeper early sections, I was being passed a fair bit by other cyclists. This happens to me a lot when I’m out in the hills, because 14mph is a fairly slow average speed for a road cyclist (why I’m pleased our W2W team is called Team Slowpoke :) and my hill-climbing skills aren’t the best anyhow. However, I found myself extremely content to be doing exactly what I was doing at that moment. It was sometime between 9 and 9:30, a warmish, calm morning with the fog slowly clearing, gradually creeping up from Menlo Park into Portola Valley, and I was delighted to be alive, to be there, and to be riding, and to be riding at the speed I wanted to ride. I had a similar moment yesterday on the way to the train station. It’s wonderful to be in the moment and be happy to just be riding.

(In my training program, weekend rides are done at “Pace” speed, which means the speed you plan to ride during the event, and I’ve decided I’m not going to try to get faster than 14mph AVS. If I do, that’ll be a bonus. This is about endurance for me rather than speed.)

The rest of the ride was lovely too. I took one brief rest stop before Portola, and then had an incredibly fun screaming descent onto Sand Hill at Whiskey Hill. That’s where I was going the fastest, but I’m pretty sure my computer got confused later on by a sensor, because I wasn’t going 39, more like 32ish. It was exhilarating.

The downside of doing the loop that way is coming back on Sand Hill. The 280 interchange there is not as well designed as on the other side; the bike lane doesn’t carry through, so you have to be very careful about merging motorists. Also, Sand Hill has a number of traffic lights, which Alpine doesn’t, so descending, although incredibly fun, is apt to be interrupted by a few lights and by people turning right who fail to merge correctly. My mirror helped me avoid a few potential trouble spots.

Still, I enjoyed that route tremendously and likely will take it again. One advantage is the slow climb up Alpine; another is that the Alpine/280 interchange area is safer than the equivalent on Sand Hill (the stop signs require people to use lower speeds). There’s also more variation in the up-down profile that way, because Sand Hill goes up again before it goes down, instead of only going down.

One other advantage is that it can more easily hook in with other routes that way. For example, you can go off to Arastradero at one point, or you can take Mountain Home or Whiskey Hill to Woodside, and even go all the way up Cañada to Edgewood or 92 if you are just that crazy. Someday I probably will when I am scheduled for longer rides. Right now I’m just in the last week of base-building before training, so 17.5mi is plenty.

Ride report 2, a coworker’s first ride to work!
I don’t have the statistics for this one, but I wanted to recognize/congratulate a friend of mine at work who rode her bike to work for the first time on Friday. She has been talking about buying a bike and riding to work for a while now, and gas prices lately have provided more motivation to do so. So she is the proud new owner of an Electra Townie and rode it from home to work (and back home, I imagine) on Friday. Go K!

On Friday she very kindly thanked me for the support I’ve provided in suggesting bikes, equipment, and routes, and explaining traffic laws and safe cycling. I’m glad to have helped her do what she wanted, and I’m glad that my help is helpful, because it bodes well for my potential attempt to become an LCI.

As of today, I’m literally and officially certified Road I proficient by the League of American Bicyclists! I have a piece of paper that says so. I passed with flying colors.

I’m glad I took the class, because since then my road positioning has gotten more appropriately assertive, and I’m feeling more comfortable on the road because I know some evasive maneuvers.

On another subject: cooking. I haven’t been cooking a lot lately for various reasons (it’s been hot, I’ve been busy and away from the farmer’s market) but tonight I made something tasty and not very difficult. I’m going to do my best to recall exactly what I did, but as usual it’s not a very exact process. It tastes a lot like a chinese restaurant dish except light and fresh.

Spicy Eggplant in Brown Sauce
Vegetable oil
1 yellow onion
4 small Japanese eggplants
6 small or medium cloves of garlic
1-2 tbsp basil (6-10 leaves), chiffonaded
Soy sauce (~1/4 cup)
Mirin (~3 tbsp)
Water (~3 tbsp)
Corn starch (1/2-1 tbsp)
1/2 tbsp chili-garlic sauce (or to taste, but this is meant to be spicy*)

Chop the onion, and cut the eggplants into half-rounds about 1/4″ thick. Saute the onion in a tablespoon or two of oil over medium heat, stirring frequently, until browning and translucent. Add the eggplant and continue sauteing until the eggplant is mostly soft. Add the garlic and saute a few minutes until eggplant is done. Add a little soy sauce and/or mirin if necessary to deglaze the pan and keep everything from burning.

Add the basil and stir, then add the soy sauce, mirin, water, corn starch, and chili-garlic sauce. Stir, and bring to a simmer. Simmer 30 sec - 1 min or until the sauce thickens, then turn off the heat.

Serve with whatever you like with spicy Chinese-style dishes. I used rice noodles.

Yum.

*Not as in burns your mouth off, but as in, packing the heat. Whatever that means to you. Just don’t get between me and my chili garlic sauce.**

**It occurs to me that this should be spelled chile garlic sauce, because it’s made with chiles, not chili, but I always see it spelled chili garlic sauce (734K GHits to 465K GHits, and most of the ones for the latter are the same as the former), so, whatever.

This week is the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland, and Kent & Christine and Beth both have lovely things to say about life without a car. So many lovely things to say that they’ve said everything I could imagine saying!

My favorite line:

As Peter once told Kent, “I don’t ride my bike because I’m a damn hippie like you, Dad. I ride my bike because I am a FISCAL CONSERVATIVE.”

On my birthday, I drove to the VA in Palo Alto (for the Sequoia ride), to the Farmer’s Market, home, and then to Berkeley, in a friend’s car. While I was on 880-N, driving 65-70mph (and being passed regularly, since this is California), I kept thinking “This is just insane. Why am I going so fast? Where is everyone going?”

Practically speaking, that day was very unusual for me. I had too much to do and too much to carry (a full trunk and back seat) to take my bike or transit. I needed to be able to get to Berkeley in an hour with a whole load of crap, more (I think) than would even fit on an Xtracycle. (You also can’t take Xtracycles on Caltrain.)

What it ended up doing was reinforcing for me how utterly weird it is in my life for me to want or need to be somewhere 50+ miles away in an hour, and how much I no longer enjoy doing that. Slowly, through habit, my life has been reshaped for a more human scale, where ten miles in an hour seems like plenty and trying to locate appropriate places to put a 2000-lb vehicle for 30 minutes to several hours seems bizarre. It also reminded me that I could have made other choices, that it was my own choices that put me in that situation to begin with. Had I made a greater head start on the prep, I could have sent a lot of the stuff back with the other party host, and I would have needed less time for last-minute prep and thus had more time for travel. I’m not unhappy with the choices I made, but I might make different ones next time.

Life without a car is just like any other life: full of evolving choices about how I most want to spend my time.

Re-reading some old posts from my LiveJournal, I came across one about “cyclist’s left”, and remembered that among the things I learned in my LAB Road I class was yet another name for this type of turn (in addition to cyclist’s left and hook turn): box turn. However, the results I get on Google for “box turn” are ambiguous, with none seeming to refer to the maneuver in question, and the only “cyclist’s left” in the Google results with my meaning is my own citation, though there is an interesting Google Books result discussing bikeway hazards which uses a similar term to discuss a similar, but not identical (because it doesn’t presume the stop), maneuver.

The bikeway hazards result is gives a good illustration of why I hate bike paths and why riding on sidewalks is a bad idea. And yes, it’s by John Forester.

Speaking of which, that reminds me about something I read recently on a Portland bike blog where someone was foaming at the mouth about vehicular cycling. They raised one issue that I felt was interesting, which is that the theory behind the fact that Oregon doesn’t use the dashed stripe at intersections that CA uses is that it reduces the number of right-turn conflict points. Which is probably the only even vaguely sensible reason I’ve heard for it, though I don’t know that I buy it.

But the main thing that annoyed me was that the person was saying that you have to be “highly trained” to ride integrated with car traffic. You do need to be trained, but not “highly trained”. Ten-year-olds can do it; attentive adults can learn it in 1-2 days. Learning to drive takes longer. Anyone who can drive already knows about 75% of what they need to know to cycle. The rest of the effort is in a few cycling-specific issues and overcoming prejudices that don’t really need to ever develop (fear of traffic, inculcated by not knowing how to handle it). Saying that vehicular cycling advocates are requiring that people be “highly trained” is rhetorical trickery of the sort that attempts to conceal blatant falsehood.

I’ve complained before (though perhaps not on this blog) about the advice given to cyclists to “ride as if you’re invisible”, because it just doesn’t make any sense. If you assume no one sees you, you can’t ride with traffic at all.

Finally, a piece of cycling instructional material backs me up:

People will often tell you to “ride as if you were invisible.” That advice only makes sense where you’re actually hidden by a blind spot. To ride all the time as if you were invisible, you would have to pull off the road whenever a car approaches from behind. You would also have to stop and wait until traffic clears before crossing any intersection. Instead, ride to make sure you’re visible. Wear bright-colored clothes day and night, and use lights and reflectors at night . Ride in the correct lane postition where you can be seen. Also, test to make sure drivers have seen you. This is the safest way to ride.
–John S. Allen, Bicycling Street Smarts