Magic Spot Flowing

I’ve had a post draft sitting in my WordPress box for a while about the ups and downs of bike commuting, because I wasn’t convinced I had anything substantive and new to say about that subject. Today I had an experience that integrates what I was trying to say into a larger context.

When I moved here three years ago, I went up to San Francisco one weekend in December to submit some applications to work at bookstores up there. One was in Union Square (Borders), and one was in Fisherman’s Wharf (Barnes & Noble). That B&N is quite near where my dad lives now, but at the time I had never been to that area.

I took Caltrain to Millbrae and transferred to BART, then got off at Powell and walked up to the Borders. When I came out, I tried to get on the cable car, because the cable car goes pretty much directly down to the B&N. However, I did not know that however directly it may go, it is (1) expensive, (2) slow, and (3) during the holiday season, impossible to board except at its origin point outside the BART station, because there are so many tourists in San Francisco trying to ride it. (1) turned out to be irrelevant since I couldn’t get on. I tried to figure out another way to get there, but this was before 311 and before I had a web-enabled phone, so it was really a bit hopeless. Finally, after a lot of waiting, walking, and confusion, I managed to get on the F Market somewhere around Embarcadero, got to the place, figured out how to get the F Market back, got on BART, and got home. I forget if I missed my connection in Millbrae too (which would have meant waiting an extra hour), but I wouldn’t be surprised. It was that kind of day.

In short, it was a transit hassle from beginning to end; it took eight hours and I accomplished two things which took about 1 hour, total.

Today wasn’t nearly as bad. I went to San Carlos for lunch on the 12:34 train, ate lunch with my friends, chatted at their house for a while, and headed out to REI about 4:45 to do some Christmas shopping. I know REI is a decent walk from their house (it’s about a mile). And I knew it was going to be raining on and off. So that part was okay, although I’d forgotten what a car-oriented nightmare the El Camino/Old County/Brittan/Industrial corridor is, lacking sidewalks on one side of Brittan and having eternally long light cycles with very limited pedestrian crossing times. But, whatever. I walked there in the rain and the gathering dark, got what I needed, and then realized, oh, bother, I don’t have a bag to carry this stuff. REI was not able to provide me with a plastic bag, even though it was raining. I guess it doesn’t occur to them that maybe some of their customers would like to, you know, walk home with their goods. In the rain. He offered to staple the bag shut; I accepted.

Then I realized on my way back that the train had just come, so if I walked back to the train station, it would be forty minutes (after the walk) until one came again. I had thought about taking the bus anyway, since the stop is closer. I crossed the street, reached the bus stop, and wend under the awning to check bus times (which are of course not posted on the stop — what do you think this is, San Francisco?!). Just as I got my phone out, I saw the bus coming and ran back to the stop, waving. The bus went right by, not even bothering to slow down and look to see if someone might be waiting.

Some colorful remarks about the bus driver, the transit agency, and the Silicon Valley transit system in general followed. I ended up back at the train station, entertaining myself with mobile internet until the train came.

REI makes good paper bags and everything stayed dry inside (the bag is however quite destroyed). I got home still dry, if chilly and hungry. And all is well.

In the process of experiencing the frustration of missing the bus, it occurred to me that it’s been a while since I had an experience like that. I really do pretty well most of the time, and I could have done better here — checked bus times in advance, kept an eye on the train schedule vs. my walking time, brought a bag.

A lot of the downsides of transit (and cycling too) come from not knowing the system fully. You really have to know what the buses are and where to get them, and which streets are good for riding. It’s not the default option, and so it requires a bit of extra effort. And in some cases, I think people who are encouraging others to become car-free forget to mention this. They play up the positive aspects of it: it’s relaxing, it’s good for the earth, it’s good for your health, it’s fun.

In truth, all the options have ups and downs; all of them have different tradeoffs. You just need to pick your favorite.

If you cycle, you may get tired, sweaty, and dirty. You might get a flat or have a mechanical issue. You have to pay attention to traffic. If you take transit, you might miss your train or bus, or it might be late or break down; you might have to walk a long way (again getting tired, sweaty, and dirty). Someone else on your train or bus might be smelly or loud. It might take a long time. If you drive, you might get stuck in traffic, and you have to pay attention to traffic. Your car might break down.

If you cycle, you stay in good shape and relieve stress through exercise; you can avoid the worst of the traffic. If you take transit, you don’t have to worry about paying attention (it might take a while longer but you can work or read); you usually stay clean; you get some exercise by walking. If you drive, you get to stay warm and dry, choose your own schedule, and get where you’re going pretty quickly. You can bring stuff with you easily, and quickly run errands (as long as you can find parking).

What you decide to do depends on which downsides you don’t mind, and which upsides you like most, as well as whether the area you live in is more friendly to cars (big streets, lots of parking lots) or transit (narrow streets, density, limited parking). And how good you are at mitigating the downsides. With transit and cycling, if you devote some time to learning and planning your routes, and figure out systems for staying or getting clean and dry carrying cargo, you’re pretty set. You can combine the two for a better commute, if that works. It takes time to work out the kinks, and sometimes you have days where it just doesn’t work, whether it’s your own fault or the system’s. And it’s very frustrating.

In the end, it’s kind of like those bulk bins of candy at the supermarket: pick your favorite mix.

Whenever I do Portola loop on my bike, I always pass the entrance to Windy Hill OSP, and I have thought many times about riding up there and hiking, but today I finally did it. I wasn’t sure if it would work well. I thought I might be too tired, but that turned out not to be the case. Again, my W2W-acquired endurance triumphs. I’m tired now though, and planning a nap soon.

Going up on the bike takes about 50 minutes, about 8.5 miles. Mostly it’s up Alpine, and then a little ways on Portola. There are no bike racks (that I could find), but there are plenty of nice-sized trees to lock up to. Bike parking was a lot easier than car parking; the preserve was quite busy.

I wasn’t sure if I would want to do this, but ultimately we did climb up to the summit, elevation approx. 1900 feet (the entrance is around 550 ft). The hiking took about three hours, so we were going pretty slowly to cover the 5 or so miles up and down Spring Ridge Trail and the Anniversary Trail. We saw several coyotes and a small brown lizard. The views were terrific, but the thick haze did make them a bit less exciting, so it would be better on a really clear day. But you can see all the way to the ocean and all the way to Mt. Diablo. Really amazing.

Coming down on the bike is faster — 35 minutes — and of course, a lot easier.

Overall, a challenging and enjoyable thing to do. I think I’m going to try biking+hiking for more of the nearby preserves, like Arastradero and the Dish area!

One of my favorite things about not having a car is that it reminds me to think of my journeys as part of the fun of my trips. Journeys take more of my time than they do of most people’s, so if I don’t enjoy them and look for ways to spice them up, I’d be much more annoyed by their duration, and I might as well just give up and buy a car.

This weekend I had several long-journey adventures.

First, I decided that instead of taking the Capital Corridor train all the way from San Jose to Davis, I would shorten (and save money on) the journey by taking BART to Richmond. (It’s not really shorter, but the weekend afternoon CC and Caltrain schedules don’t mesh very well.) There are two options: Caltrain to Millbrae to Richmond, and bike to Fremont to Richmond.

Fremont beckoned. In the three years that I’ve lived in the Bay Area (I moved here on the second weekend of November in 2005, so this was my anniversary weekend), I’ve never been to Fremont, only through it on CA-84 and I-880. And I’ve never biked over the Dumbarton Bridge (CA-84) which is one of the four bridges in the Bay Area you can bike over, and the only one that’s within my normal bike area that I have never biked over (since I crossed the Golden Gate for the first time during Waves to Wine).

I mapped out a route using Fremont’s bike map, aiming for roads with bike lanes because I’m not familiar enough with Fremont’s roads to know which non-laned roads would be comfortable for riding. The route I chose was scenic, but not short:

Willow > CA-84 Bike/Ped sidepath/sidewalk > Marshlands Rd > Thornton Road > Paseo Padre Parkway > Mowry Ave > Civic Center Pl > BART Way

The total distance was 17.8 miles, so my roundabouting added about six extra miles (Fremont is about 12 miles as the crow flies). Luckily, I planned for the extra time, leaving around 1pm for a 2:30 BART train. I got to the train just in time to board without being in a desperate hurry, but not without being worried. Thank goodness for having a tailwind most of the way, and for my leftover W2W fitness.

The route, despite involving bike lanes for nearly the entire way, was not entirely what I would call pleasant riding. To go about it backwards, Paseo Padre is a bit like Central Expressway (something I suspected from its Parkway appellation) only the bike lanes are even more poorly lined at intersections even though they are official bike lanes and not shoulders. The intersections were poorly designed overall, with bad pavement and short lights, and the intersection of Thornton with CA-84 and surrounds (yes, you get off 84 and then have to cross it again) was seriously the most terribly-designed intersection of a bike-laned road with a major highway I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen lots. Fremont? Not a terribly bike-friendly town, based on what I saw.

Before you get on Thornton, Marshlands Road is a two-lane road with “bike lanes”. The lack of real bike lanes rather than gravelly, terribly-paved, nearly unpainted imitations isn’t a serious problem because there’s almost no traffic, but the paving in general is very poor, although the scenery is quite nice: marshy areas, with hills arising out of them.

The bridge bike-ped path, and the path leading up to it (it starts at Bayfront Expwy, where the road gets wide and the speed limit high) was for most of its length fine except for having a lot of debris, which is basically par for the course for sidepaths. However, it also had two inset plates which were so inset that had I hit them unawares, I could easily have lost control of my bike. Note to self: find out who is responsible for that crap, and get it fixed. And then there was the flooded road. Yes, really. The road up to the bridge, itself, of course, was not flooded. Can’t have that. Cars must get through. But the sidepath/road to the recreation area (which you’re supposed to use until you reach the sidepath for the bridge itself) was under several inches of water.

No thanks. So I rode a short distance on the shoulder of the bridge approach, then carefully took my bike down a small embankment and over to the bridge path proper.

Riding over the bridge was pretty awesome though. The temperature was in the upper 70s and it was as clear as a bell. I watched the blueish water of the bay, and seagulls flying along below me, as I took in a view of the contrasting pinkish-tan East Bay hills ahead. It’s a longish climb but shallow, and an equally nice descent.

I enjoyed my BART ride too: conversation with a fellow bike enthusiast, reading and people-watching, and an unexpected view of the city and the bay when the train came up out of the Oakland subway portions. Transfer at Richmond was fairly painless (this was also the first time I’ve ever been north of Berkeley or south of Bay Fair on BART — now I’ve been to all the line termini in the inner Bay Area!), and the views began again. The Capitol Corridor runs along the edge of the North Bay there and I’ve never seen it in full daylight before, so it was a treat.

As we approached Davis, the sky pinked and the sun slanted prettily over the green fields. I rode around downtown Davis for a while as it got dark (sporting my new MiNewt light so I could actually see — amazing). It’s a pretty town, lots of trees and big houses, perfect for just tooling around going nowhere and enjoying it.

Today Mike and I went on another long-journey adventure: a ride over to Winters for lunch. It’s a 28-mile roundtrip, so neither long nor short by ride standards (mine anyway), but certainly longer than you would usually take just to have lunch. But the ride was part of the point, which is my point: when you ride, the journey is fun too.

It’s an interesting area to ride in, very different from the Bay Area. Out in the farmlands, you wouldn’t know you’re in California except that when you look west, you see mountains — that, and the fact that it’s in the 70s in November! But the farmland is amazingly like every other farm landscape I’ve ever seen, except flatter than some. Green, brown, and tan fields, distant lines of trees and small buildings.

It’s very, very flat, and so windy that it’s almost like having hills, though today was not as windy as the last time we went riding. Also, no tomatoes to avoid, but plenty of cracks in the asphalt. Does anyone know why asphalt cracks horizontally in that weirdly regular way? Or why fruit trees are painted white in the middle of their trunks, but not at the thicker lower part? Such are the mysteries that arise while enjoying the journey.

The radio was on this morning in the shuttle, playing various things, including a traffic report. It was almost like it was calculated: 101-S is a complete mess in two different places, as is 237. Aren’t you glad you’ve been on the train?

But of course, on any given day, you might rather be on the road if there’s a Caltrain snafu. Still, just thinking of all the nightmarish traffic I regularly miss was a reminder of why I prefer a cycling/transit commute.

On the other hand, I find Caltrain just mind-boggling sometimes. Recently, they decided to change the shuttle schedule for the shuttle I take. I discovered the shuttle back some months ago and was thrilled to find that I could not bike and still take the fast trains. It used to connect to the limited train in the mornings and I would arrive at work around either 8:30 or 9:30, which was great because the bullet trains + bike got me to work at either 8:00 or 9:00, and the local train + walking around 9:15, so I could pretty much arrive at any time I chose, with intervals of 15-30 minutes. That’s about all I expect or need as far as tolerances. There was even a late shuttle run that would get me to work around 10 on the unusual occasion I can’t get in any earlier. In the evenings, it picked up at 5:15 or 6:15 and connected to the bullet and limited trains that got me home around 6 or 7 (usually the latter). Perfect.

Well, nothing is perfect for everyone (the bullet people used to wait quite a while for the shuttle to leave, for example), but the change was just stunningly bad. Suddenly the shuttle only connected to the morning (crowded, slow) local train, despite the fact that the bullet comes in only a few minutes later. (Which, additionally, would push more people onto the bullets’ crowded bike cars, since they no longer had the shuttle option.) In the evenings, the convenient pickup times had changed to inconvenient 5:45 and 6:45, the latter completely killing the time advantage for the last shuttle in the evening, and only connected to local trains also.

They’ve now retooled the schedule again — to their credit, they have fixed the morning and it makes complete sense now. It meets the local and bullet trains, albeit not the limited, and most people who take it get to work around 9. Cool. This is awesome. (Why not do this in the first place?!)

But the afternoon schedule is still bizarre and, to my view, stupid. The pickup times have moved ten minutes earlier so that allegedly the shuttle meets the limited trains, at least. However, the leeway is one minute. You need at least five minutes of leeway in case the shuttle is late, and/or to cross the platform, buy or validate a ticket, etc. Plus, they are now claiming to meet the bullet trains, even though they really are not doing so, because you would have to wait almost an hour for a northbound bullet. (Most people who take these shuttles are going northbound in the evenings, in my experience. It looks like the schedule does serve the southbound trains a bit better, but considering a southbound bullet saves you a ten minutes, compared to a northbound one which saves you about twice that, and serves fewer people, I can’t see that this is a huge benefit.)

One of the biggest things that bothers me about how this has occurred, which is completely typical for Caltrain, is that they don’t seem to have actually thought the changes through from the perspective of the users, or communicated to the users aside from announcing the new schedule, or asked for feedback, or anything. (I think a lot of people have called or written them to complain, though. I certainly did.) The complete illogic isn’t necessarily typical, but the fact that they’ve now gone through three schedules (one proposed, which I guess was so bad they just abandoned it and delayed the change by a week, and two actual) and the schedule still seems somewhat stupid, doesn’t really give me a lot of confidence that they thought about it, not just from a user perspective, but honestly, at all. It’s been so bad that even the drivers noticed it and started surveying people and collecting comments. I mean, really. Good for them, but what went wrong here that this was, and is, so messed up?

Alaska Airlines helpfully sent me an email notification today reminding me to check in on the web before my flight. I elected to click their helpful link to do so (note to Southwest: you could learn something from this) and was conveniently reminded that my flight leaves from SJC, not from SFO. Oh yeah, right — part of the reason we use Alaska for work travel is that work is much closer to SJC. But somehow I’d gotten it in my head I was going to SFO. Planned the transit trip there and everything.

I am extremely glad that email notification saved me from screwing that up.

Salon’s even picked up the Xtracycle story.

I’ve gotta get one of these soon.

There’s a story that I want to tell, too, which has nothing to do with cycling, but does have to do with a lesser-known vehicular interest of mine: identifying and comparing car models. For someone who doesn’t drive, I pay an inordinate amount of attention to car models. One day I said to someone, while we were in his car driving down Willow Road, “Why do you think Scion has four car models, three of which are xA, xB, and xD, and the fourth of which is tC? Why not xC?”

The person who was driving said to me something like “I think you ask a lot of questions to which there are no really good answers.” We had a discussion for a while about my tendency to ask why about things for which there may be no satisfying answer to the why. He didn’t say as much, but basically he seemed to think it was silly, a waste of mental energy.

Time passed, and I didn’t find out the answer. But eventually one day I thought, I could actually look this up and find out if there are any theories. It turns out that the answer is pretty simple. Wikipedia says:

The name tC does not fit in with its stablemates the xA, xB, and xD, because the name xC has already been taken by Volvo for its XC60, XC70 and XC90 models. According to Scion, tC stands for “Touring Coupe.”

I think they made up the Touring Coupe backronym after they found out about the Volvo XC’s, but that’s pure speculation.

The moral of the story isn’t that all my why questions have (satisfying) answers, but it is that by failing to ask, and disengaging your brain from all these (sometimes exhausting) questions, you may miss interesting little tidbits like this, and the brain-reward that they bring: that feeling of something dropping into place, the world making just a tad more sense than it did before.

Besides, someday I’m going to win a Trivial Pursuit game with this little factoid.

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…

I have quite a bit to say about Canada, but just as a quick followup to my last post, gas was indeed very expensive. I was lucky enough to be able to borrow a car from my relatives, but my side trip of 194 km (120 mi) one way (so 240 miles total) cost CDN$73.30 in gas (51.077 L @ CDN$1.435/L), plus the CDN$60.06 (40.445 L at $1.485/L) of gas that I put into the tank to leave it more or less full for my relatives (the tank didn’t start out full, so I had to fill up twice).
[My bank indicates I was charged US$72.71 for the CDN$73.30. The other I paid in cash.]

Interestingly, Google Maps is completely convinced that the way I went — Hwy 401 to CR-73 (Elgin Road) — isn’t the best way, but my relatives all insisted that it was the best way. The distance and time given are identical for the route Google suggests and the route that was recommended to me (though the one I actually took, which was given as a slightly simpler alternative, is 2 miles and 3 minutes longer), and doesn’t involve going through downtown Toronto just after the rush hour (something that is indeed the nightmare you might imagine, as I discovered the next day on bike, but on bike it’s not a big deal because you can’t be going that fast anyway). It seems like a no-brainer to me.

That was the only time I was in a car for the entire trip, except for a brief drive with my aunt and uncle to dinner (I took buses to and from the airport). I’m pretty sure we could have gotten to the place we wanted to go faster on the TTC subway than driving at that time, too. I was very impressed by the TTC, but I’ll leave that discourse for another entry, along with my joy at visiting Urbane Cyclist.

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.

One of the things I’ve done the past two weekends (in addition to a 50K ride, a 14-mile ride, and a birthday party) was take a local League of American Bicyclists-certified Road I class.

The goal of a Road I class is to take any cyclist who can ride a bike and teach them basic-to-intermediate traffic cycling competency (level label depends on your definition of basic or intermediate), both on the legal and practical side, including road skills and emergency maneuvers.

One might ask why I took the class, given that I am already a fairly competent traffic cyclist. Two reasons: 1) I wanted to learn the emergency maneuvers, and make sure I had no gaps in my knowledge; 2) I wanted to find out if I’d like to learn to teach the course.

The class was interesting. I feel like it’s a lot of material to cover, and you have to be extremely organized to teach it in the minimum 9 hours allotted to the class per the manual. The presentation that we had was a little bit disorganized, and somewhat marred by technical difficulties. I don’t want to criticize the instructor too much because as I said, I think it’s a demanding class to teach in such a short span of time.

To some extent, I wonder if it’s realistic to put the entire class into one unit at all. The people in our class really had a big range of abilities and a big range of interests. I think there are some things that everyone should know to traffic cycle even if all they’re planning to do is ride short distances, but other things aren’t so relevant to everyone, like discussing narrow country roads, nutrition and hydration, and cycling clothes — highly relevant for people planning to ride in those conditions or for longer rides, but not so relevant for people who plan to do mostly short-distance city cycling.

I felt that some of the variation in usefulness could have been addressed just by the order in which everything was presented, addressing the essentials first and extras later, and some could have been addressed by keeping certain topics really on the simple side unless there was interest in spending more time on it. Our instructior did some of this — for example, we didn’t spend much time on nutrition and hydration — but we did spend a lot of time discussing parts of the bike and cycling clothes. Certain parts of the bike are really relevant, but spending time talking about the more obscure bits can detract from basics like wheels, brakes, saddle, chain, etc. Likewise, it’s highly relevant for everyone that it’s recommended to wear a helmet, gloves, and glasses, and a rain cape or light, breathable coat if it’s wet (and have fenders if possible), but not so relevant for everyone to discuss wicking clothes and bike shorts — it really varied in our class on how interested people were (and I was probably the most interested and I already knew that stuff).

There was also some material in the slides which I felt wasn’t extremely important, like “Bike only turn lanes” and “Bike only thru lanes” (same slide). Both pictures were of the intersections near Sand Hill and El Camino in Palo Alto (it was fun to see places that I recognize on slides; several of the pictures were areas that I ride regularly) and they’re quite rare situations and it’s normally pretty clear what to do, so I thought that was a bit of extra information which could honestly be skipped since it’s a generalization of principles you learn separately (directional positioning at intersections — stay to the left of right-turn only lanes). Another slide showed a similar but more extreme situation, on Page Mill at I-280, where both right lanes are right-turn only so the bike lane switches from right to left and you have to merge across. This is not a fun merge, but it has the same basic characteristics as any other merge across right-turn only lanes, just more so.

Everyone in our class could ride a bike just fine; there were no ‘true beginners’. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to teach in the alloted time if there were, since as it was we barely covered scanning, signaling, emergency maneuvers, road position practice, and road test in the time we had, and I think the people with less practice still need more practice, though I was very, very impressed to see them all ride on El Camino Real without completely freaking out!

Incidentally, our instructor was trying very hard to deter people from believing that El Camino is a dangerous and unpleasant road to cycle, and I can understand that, because it’s important for being an effective traffic cyclist to not be intimidated by roads unnecessarily. El Camino is not, as multilane arterials go, all that awful in many places, especially if you know how to position yourself correctly and ride assertively. However, I think she should have been more realistic and acknowledged that many, many competent traffic cyclists (like me) don’t ride much on El Camino because it just isn’t enjoyable. I mean really — if I have my choice of El Camino, Alma, Bryant, or Middlefield through Palo Alto, guess which one I’ll choose? Bryant, of course, because it’s the most fun and it’s pretty efficient (and also convenient to my house). The others are all pretty unpleasant, although because El Camino is so wide in most places I probably would prefer it to Middlefield or Alma. Sure, people can choose the others, should have the right to do so, and sometimes do, but realistically most cyclists will avoid heavily-trafficked arterials most of the time.

The most important part for me, aside from emergency stopping and turning, was a reminder about recommended road positioning. I generally ride as recommended by Effective Cycling, the book by the guy who developed the Road I class curriculum, but sometimes I get lazy and I ride further right than I should because I don’t want to annoy motorists, and that’s not safe behavior. My safety is more important than their brief annoyance, and I should position myself and ride assertively because I’m protecting my safety when I do.

On the whole I really feel like the class is likely very beneficial for the people who take it in terms of understanding the theory and practice of traffic cycling, and really gives a strong foundation of skills for riding, thus giving people greater confidence in maneuvering and making them less likely to make common mistakes. I think I’d eventually like to learn to teach it, although I think I’d have to practice a lot so I could be very organized and do it well. I’m also interested in taking a LAB Road II class if any are offered around here, since the instructor mentioned there is such a thing (but doesn’t know if it’s offered here) and it seems to cover the things I really want to learn and definitely don’t know, stuff relating to group cycling and advanced road cycling techniques.