the Practical Pedal Blog

IMG_1739.JPG

Originally uploaded by practicalpedal

We were just a bit inland, my friends and I. Just far enough from the ocean that on weekends, if we’d managed to scrounge enough cash to buy gasoline, we’d load up our trucks and head east, toward the desert. Our trucks were ratty on the inside, dented on the outside, and each of them required a unique collection of trivia to keep running. My old Ford Ranger had a short in the wires that gave the fuel pump electricity. It would cut out, sometimes on the freeway, and demand that I wiggle it vigorously before it would pump its volatile cargo to the spark plugs. Growing up in San Diego we were not surf bums, we were desert rats (the surfing would come years later.)

San Diego sits in the lower left corner of the United States. It’s a unique position because not only is it graced with vast ocean to the west, and beautiful desert to the east, but just south is the best thing a landscape can offer a pack of exceptionally-mobile teenaged boys… a foreign country with large swaths of undeveloped desert.

Baja California was, for us, a fabulous adventure. The place scared us, broke us, got us lost, and fed us tacos. We’d throw our old sleeping bags and camp stoves into our trucks and jeeps and drive south on a Friday night, past the throngs of drunken partying on Ave. Revolucion, and into the winding trail carved into the desert by the seasonal fishing crews that plied the coast in small aluminum Pangas.

We got lost. We spent ours in one spot, trying to figure out ways to extract our stuck machines. We grew up, so to speak, in Baja and in the deserts and woods of the U.S.. We grew up with our gasoline-fueled rigs. These machines were so much a part of our lives that some of us even went on to document these activities professionally. You can see a small snippet of that work in the video below.

But how does this connect with bicycles? How do we go from fuel sold from a pump to fuel sold in the grocery store? That’s an easy question to answer. Our machines were, for us at least, not ends in themselves, but rather a tool for finding adventure. They allowed us to throw our gear into the back and set off for places that had things in store for us we could barely imagine.

Bicycles offer a similar romance. For me, it’s been a number of years since I’ve ventured off-road with some ratty camping gear and a vehicle that I’d have to learn to trust. So with the Big Dummy, Surly’s new gear-hauling mountain-bike frame, that call to adventure will once again be answered. And this time, i’ll be able to work on it in my apartment, no garage required.

IMG_1731.JPG

Originally uploaded by practicalpedal

A preview shot of the builtup Big Dummy. Friggin awesome. More to come…

Back from India and hard at work on the next issue as well as our new project bikes, two Surly Big Dummies. One will be a city-oriented electric, and the other, Project Redneck, will be the bicycle equivalent of a Willies Jeep… something you throw your camping gear into and head out into the woods for some camping and muddin’. Anyway, here’s a time-lapse video of the initial build-up.

An interesting article in Wired magazine about clean tech and oil tariffs. Here’s a quote:

One way to do it is to put a floating tariff on the price of oil and gradually raise the price up to $200 or $300 a barrel. As long as you do it gradually, the economy can respond to it. That’s the beauty of our system. It has responded very calmly to an increase from $20 to $100.

Just a note to you lovely readers. I’ll be in India for work (my other job) from Friday March 21 to April 18.

I’ll have laptop and internets, so work on the next issue and the occasional blog post will occur. Expect some photos and a tale or two about riding the supposedly anarchic streets of Pune.

If you’re living in Bozeman (or near it) you’re lucky. Because some fine locals are bringing the Collective’s new film, “Seasons” to town.

And I’m pretty sure well have the RockySprints roller racing setup there as well. So stay tuned. Meanwhile, here’s the trailer:

I got this, from ZPG, who got it from space aliens (I think.)

What is it? It’s an awareness test from British people. And it’s surprisingly relevant to Americans, too.

Comments are no longer limited to the blogs.

I’ve added commenting and rating to the Practical Pedal site. Now you can comment on and rate (is this a good idea?) the stories in the magazine.

Go wild.

And that’s all I want. I don’t care where the bike lanes are or even where the paths are (unless it bypasses a freeway I can’t ride on.)

I don’t care because I’m of the opinion that almost every street is suitable for practical bicycle riding (recreational riding is a whole different matter.) So any service that lets me select “bicycle” as my preferred method of transportation, shouldn’t lead me down the path of bike lanes and trails. It should give me information that will allow me to get to my destination in the shortest distance while avoiding bicycling trouble spots. And for all but a few exceptions, that means any old street will do.

So here’s what I think the ideal bicycle-friendly mapping service would do:

* Route around trouble spots
* Provide shortest-distance routing

That’s it. These two things are all we’d need to have an effective and useful bicycle-friendly mapping service.

Granted, there are many more features that one could wish for. But the thing I most want to know when using such services is: How do I get there without finding myself on a shoulder-less 50mph road?

This question answers the other question of: what’s a trouble spot?

For me, a trouble spot (of the kind I feel compelled to avoid) is simply a road that lacks lanes wide enough for both car and bike to travel side by side. Most roads have plenty of room, even the ones without bike lanes.

But when you have narrow lanes, traffic that moves faster than 30mph, and traffic that is frequent enough to disallow for easy other-lane passing, then you have a trouble spot. I want to see these in big fat red lines on my bicycle-friendly mapping service.

These trouble spots, then, could be mapped with only three bits of information: lane width, speed limit, and traffic frequency. I’ not a traffic engineer or an urban planer, so I can’t say how available such data is. But I’d guess that this information, being important in non-bicycling contexts, is more readily available than cycling-specific data.

Don’t get me wrong. I love bike paths, but I think of them as recreational infrastructure. If I want to get to the store, I’m riding practically, and I won’t go out of my way to get there on a bike path. I will, however, go out of my way to avoid roads that will cause me to create long lines of backed-up automobile traffic behind me.

So I suggest that in our desire to have practical cycling tools, we keep the specification for such a tool simple and useful (like a bike), so that it has a chance of being implemented.

Just my $.02.

I Just got this in the mail:

Hello Everyone,

Please sign this:

We are asking Google Maps to incorporate a bike travel as an equal option  to automotive and bus transportation.
This would be very cool and useful, especially with the new tracing algorithms they have recently implemented.
Pass it around to all the cyclists you know.  Google responds quite well to these things.
http://www.petitiononline.com/bikether/petition.html

–
Sincerely,
Aaron Goss  Owner & Master Mechanic

Aaron’s Bicycle Repair
6521 California Avenue SW
Seattle, WA       98136

It’s an idea I’m sure many of us have thought of. So we might as well let the Goog know.