Safe Passing Law SB488

Our dear governor, Rick Perry, recently vetoed a bunch of bills. Some, like the one allowing the state to take kids from homes for interviews away from their parents, I was glad to see. Others, however, we not OK. I'm speaking in particular of SB488, which would have established rules to protect bikes and other non-car users of roadways. Of particular interest in this bill was a clause establishing a safe passing distance of 3ft. Making this into a law would give bikers some (currently lacking) specific legal recourse in the case of side-swipes, mirror hits, right-hook crashes, and eventually increase biker safety in the state of Texas. Governor Perry didn't want to create another class of protected citizens (classic conservative response) and vetoed it, despite overwhelming congressional and public support. I often side with the conservative political point of view, but not this time. Our laws and culture are biased toward cars on the roads and the legal system can be hostile to bicyclists.

So what can you do? You can go sign the petition at Bike Texas like I did, and make sure that the issue doesn't go away. Even if you don't commute or recreationally ride a bike, sign it anyway. It'll take less than 2 minutes, max.

Thanks.

Too Darn Hot!

Time to break the months of blogging silence with my second annual whine-about-the-heat session. It's been busy in the lab.

I was so proud of myself for continuing to bike through the Texas summer. I was that studly biker who never let the weather get him down, cold or hot. That was until this week. Today is our twelfth consecutive day over 100°F, and starting Wednesday it was just too darn hot to ride. I learned that by experience, riding home through the 103.5°F afternoon. I drank liters of water; I rode very slowly; I followed the shade, and when I got home, I lay down on the couch and didn't recover for over an hour. Believe it or not, I wasn't even that sweaty because I didn't exert too hard getting home, but I was just sapped. I thought I was conditioned for the heat, but some days it's just too much.Yesterday and today, I came on the bus. Yesterday, we set a daily record with a high of 107°F, and today at 2:00, it's 103°F and climbing. Yes, I'm enjoying the bus.

Courtesy of the Weather Underground, here's a record from a small weather station near our house, showing high, low, and average temps for the week.

Extreme Ice Survey

I heard about this on NPR the other day, and then I recently discovered the website for the Extreme Ice Survey. I have now spent far too much time watching time lapse video of glaciers. This is really cool stuff. You should watch at least a couple of these videos and find out a little bit about the project.

Maybe it's just my own Arctic adventure on Spitsbergen Island, memories of which were recently rekindled by a National Geographic article on the effects of global warming there,  but I've always had a fascination with the arctic, glaciers, and geology in action. Watch and enjoy, and please let me know what you think.

Commuter Tires

By request (I'd say popular demand, but that's a bit pretentious, and there was only one request) I'd like to say a few words about tires for commuter bikes.

I used to work for the research and development branch of Michelin North America, and now I have a  fondness for tires. I cannot help but notice them on cars (my wife used to laugh about this, now she just rolls her eyes and nods politely), and I am a firm believer in paying for quality.

If you've read this blog before, you probably know that I devote many of my posts to describing my experiences with my Dynamic drive-shaft bicycle. If you've read my reviews of that bike, you may know that I was disappointed with the quality of the tires that they supplied with it. In particular, because I have fenders and because removing the rear tire is less than convenient, the puncture resistance of those tires was unacceptable. I was having to repair a flat on at least a weekly basis.

That led me to one of the best $30 purchases I've made for my bike. I visited my LBS (Clown Dog Bikes) and requested Kevlar commuter tires, and the guy there handed me a pair of CST Selecta Kevlar tires. These tires have a steel bead, a Kevlar carcass (forgive the tire-nerd lingo, that's the weave inside the rubber that provides the strength and shape for the tire), and a reflective strip in the sidewall. There is a very light, directional tread pattern, which for a road bike doesn't serve a whole lot of purpose. The tread pattern is designed in such a way that it does not induce a vibration or noise during rolling (as a mountain bike tread would do, for instance) and may provide some help with water evacuation (although in my experience with tire design, the swoopy directional patterns tend to be more marketing hooplah than functional features).

What's to say about a bike tire? Well, in 6000km, I have had to patch my inner tube precisely two times: once because of bad rim tape, and the other time because of a nasty sharp nail that could have pierced plate armor. Note that when I ride my wife's bike (to which I retired the original tires provided by Dynamic), flats occur on about a weekly basis, more or less, over the same route. The Kevlar works.

What else? The reflective strip, after two winters' worth of riding through dirty sandy black road water, is still visible in my car's headlights (and this camera's flash). There is at present no sign of that strip separating or coming out of the sidewall.

Last of all, the tread. I see only modest signs of chunking. There is still plenty of tread depth left. The photo above is of the front tire, which spent 5000km at the more aggressive rear axle. I'm guessing these are only about halfway through their life on this bike. I ride moderately aggressively and with a heavy backpack.

From the NY Times - Dear AIG, I Quit!

May I direct your attention to this article in the NY Times? It does much to expose the hype and distraction surrounding the AIG payments, which in fact are not bonuses as the media hyperventilatingly call them.

Parking

I was reminded today one of the big reasons why I commute by bike: parking. Today I am picking up my wife from the airport and had to drive to school so I can leave straight from here. I thought that I would just suck it up and pay a few bucks for parking in the garage so that I wouldn't have to hunt for a spot. The sign at the garage stated that times greater than 2-1/2 hours cost $10, so being the cheap grad student that I am, I pulled out and went hunting. After some extended searching, I found a spot about 6 blocks away from my building and squeezed my minivan into a tight parallel parking spot.
Some of you who do this every day may be rolling your eyes at my complaining, but how can you get used to this? Call me spoiled rotten, but I love passing long lines at red lights and stop signs, and I love even more rolling right up to my building without having to hunt for a spot.
And on that note, have you ever stopped to notice how much urban space is devoted to parking? Take a few minutes and imagine yourself as an alien visiting earth for the first time and trying understand why our cities are the way they are. You might be tempted to think that growing cars is a major agricultural activity by the devoted to the Mighty Automobile.

6000 km

Today the odometer on my Crosstown 7 flipped 6000 km. My average speed over the life of the bike (342 hrs) is 17.5 km/hr, or 11 mi/hr. I'm the first to admit that I'm not the next Lance Armstrong, but remember that number includes all the time I walk the bike or go slowly accompanying a daughter on a ride up the street and back. I started riding it in August of 2007, so that's an average of 315 km/month over 19 months. Since my commute is about 20 km/day, that means I've been able to ride almost 4/5 days. (Some days are partial commutes when I pick up Ian at Tae Kwon Do and ride the bus home with him.)

Now that I'm back on the bike after the recent repairs, it's nice to be riding consistently every day. This morning was rainy and wet, but I was still able to pull my daughters to school in their bike trailer without rooster tails or chain cleanup. Fenders are a must on a commuter, and have I mentioned before that the drive shaft is nice for not requiring a lot of messy maintenance? This was the first rain in a long time, so the water on the road was really dirty and oily. Yuck! There's more on tap over the next few days, but I don't really mind. It's nice to be out in the weather, whatever it is.