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 […]
Category Archives: Transportational Cycling
Toronto: transit
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 […]
Two species of ride report
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 […]
Certified LAB cooking
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 […]
Slow Life International
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 […]
Thinking into the box
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 […]
Sensible advice on visibility
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 […]
A matter of course
Today was an interesting bike day. In the morning, I had a bike-car contact moment when a guy stopped suddenly in front of me (someone had stopped suddenly in front of him). I had a moment to think “Huh. My brakes aren’t going to stop me in time. Whoops, I just hit him.” Fortunately it […]
101 in 1001 #49: Bike advocacy volunteering: BTWD 2008
So Thursday was Bike to Work Day, for which I was determined to do something more than just biking to work. After all, every day is already bike to work day in that sense. So I decided to volunteer to help out as an Outreach Host for SVBC at an Energizer Station, to provide information […]
I’m a self-propelled person!
I picked up a copy of Momentum magazine (“The magazine for self-propelled people”) out of a box they brought us at Maker Faire to take to SFBC. It turns out it’s an awesome magazine, and it’s incredibly cool that the ads are all for things I might actually want, or want to know about — […]