Archive for the ‘biking’ Category

Suburban blight

March 12th, 2010 at 10:48 pm

As I mentioned last week, I’ve started biking to work again after the winter layoff. This is the first year it’s been consistently warm enough1 to start bicycle commuting in March, and because the frost is still working its way out of the ground, I’ve been leery of taking my normal route on the crushed limestone paths through the Springbrook Prairie Preserve and along the Southern DuPage County Regional Trail. So my way to work has been mostly on sidewalks adjacent to busy roads in Naperville and Aurora. And it’s unrelentingly ugly.

Much of the ugliness is a winter’s worth of garbage that’s floated down gutters and blown up against fences and shrubs and hasn’t been cleaned up by street sweepers and property owners yet. The sidewalks are filled with broken glass flung out of passing cars. In one spot, I pass a dead woodchuck, recently uncovered by the melting snow.

South of the Fox Valley Shopping Mall is a particularly ugly stretch, where a trenching operation dumped mud over half the sidewalk and left the site without cleaning it up.

Some parts of my route aren’t actually ugly, but are signs of decline, nonetheless. West of the muddy sidewalk, still adjacent to Fox Valley, is a blocklong stripmall that was built two years ago and is absolutely pristine because it hasn’t had a single tenant.

Local kids come to skateboard in the parking lot and do tricks on the concrete planter walls. Police park at the end of the strip, filling out paperwork and pointing their radar guns out into the streets that border the mall. I ride through the parking lot to get a break from the bump-bump-bump of riding on sidewalks. The big glass storefronts make good mirrors.

On my way home this evening, I decided to get off the busy streets and try the path in Springbrook. The trail was mushy in only a few spots; mostly it was bumpy from the solidified footprints of joggers who had run along the trail when it was all soft. It was slow going and hard pedaling, but it was fun to be away from the streets, if only for a couple of miles.

I stopped to take a picture of this tree.

Last year, I took weekly photos of a few places in Springbrook, hoping to create some interesting sequences. The only subject I was happy with was this tree, and unfortunately I didn’t start photographing it until late June, so the sequence doesn’t cover as much of the tree’s seasonal changes as I’d like. This year I’m getting an earlier start.

  1. If the global warming deniers were intellectually honest, they’d be making as big a deal out of the recent warm weather in the upper Midwest as they did about the East Coast snow in February. But if they were intellectually honest, they wouldn’t be global warming deniers, would they? ↩

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Post #1196 in biking, local | No Comments

Google bike directions

March 10th, 2010 at 11:59 pm

I’ve been using Google Maps to choose bike routes for years. The route I took today from my office to downtown Naperville, for example, uses a set of residential streets and sidewalks along busy roads that I first found by studying its aerial photos. Now Google has a specific option for getting bicycling directions.

I tried it out by entering my home and work addresses. Most of the route it came up with matches my regular path, but one spot was horribly wrong.

First, Google wants me to ride along Ogden Avenue, which is suicidal, although this instruction may not be as bad as it seems, since no one would be stupid enough to ride in a busy street when a there’s an asphalt path (that’s the bright green line) that’s not only close by, but actually cuts a corner.

No, the real problem is crossing Ogden at Meadow Lakes Boulevard. During rush hour, cars can barely cross that intersection. There’s no traffic light, and Ogden—the main east-west street in the area—has two through lanes and one turn lane in each direction. And there’s no median, so there’s no way for you to cross halfway when one direction is clear and wait in the middle until the other direction clears. Google’s Street View for the intersection shows cars in every lane, and I can guarantee you the Street View photos weren’t taken at rush hour. Just riding on the bike path parallel to Odgen is a pain at this intersection, because drivers on Meadow Lakes are always pulling forward to block the path.

Weirdly, there are traffic lights a block east and a block west of this intersection. Either would be better than trying to cross here.

Google recognizes that its biking directions may be wrong. Here’s the warning/disclaimer that comes with them:

I filled out the little web form that pops up when you click that link, and I have little doubt that Google’s bicycling directions will improve quickly. Still, I think it’s odd to use the term beta for this product. Losing your data is a risk beta testers are used to. Here, you stand to lose a bit more.

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Post #1191 in biking, internet | 4 Comments

Biking begins

March 5th, 2010 at 7:58 pm

The first full week of March has me moving out of winter mode and getting more active. I had my last two session of physical therapy for the slipped disk I suffered right after Christmas1 and started riding my bike to work again.

March typically isn’t a great month for riding, and I don’t expect this one to break the mold. Although temperatures this week got up into the 40s, we still have snow on the ground, especially near intersections where the plows piled it up. My usual route to work through the Springbrook Prairie Preserve probably won’t be ready to ride on for a few weeks. Even after the snow melts, its crushed limestone bike path will be impossibly mushy on warm days until we get further into spring. Last year I tried to ride it too early and the glop oozed up over my rims and stopped me cold.

So I’m taking an alternate route to work, one that has me mostly on sidewalks along busy streets. The way is mostly clear, and getting better every day, but there is one low spot of snow that forces me off the bike

and another place under a bridge where, in the morning, the refrozen meltwater is so smooth and slick that I can barely walk across it.

If you’re an urban cyclist and thinking about chastising my for riding on sidewalks, don’t. Suburban riding is not what you’re used to; I can go weeks without passing a pedestrian. Also “sharing the road” is not a concept familiar to drivers out here.

I didn’t plan to start riding quite this soon, so my bike isn’t in the best shape. The frame is still dirty from the wet, messy rides of late November (it was too cold to give it a good washing then), the tires are nearly bald, and the brake pads need replacing. I’ll start fixing it up this weekend.

My replacement tires, by the way, will be the same as what I have on the bike now: Continental Contacts. I’ve ridden about 4000 miles on the current set, over twice what I got out of the tires I had before that.

The commute to work is pretty chilly—this morning’s windchill was in the teens—but the sunny ride home in the late afternoon makes it worthwhile.

  1. I don’t want to complain, but the past 12 months have been a musculoskeletal nightmare. In April, I was knocked off my bike by a pickup truck, which messed up my left hip an wrist for over a month. Then in July, my tires slid out from under me on a patch of wet grass and my right shoulder slammed into the ground for another six weeks or so of pain and discomfort. Finally, the slipped disk after ice skating on the day after Christmas. I didn’t fall, but I think jerking my upper body around to keep from falling put my spine out of whack, my worst back injury in almost ten years. Much worse than my celebrated Guitar Hero injury. ↩

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Post #1189 in biking | No Comments

Bike mileage Google spreadsheet

October 19th, 2009 at 9:51 pm

This year I decided to keep better track of my bicycling miles. I put a new battery in the bike computer and zeroed its odometer at the start of the season, and I set up a Google Spreadsheet to save the mileage and do a few calculations.

I used Google instead of Numbers because:

  1. I wanted to be able to enter data from either of my computers. This was before I had Dropbox.
  2. I wanted to give the Google Docs thing a try.
  3. I just don’t like Numbers. I haven’t thought enough about it to write a coherent critique, but it just rubs me the wrong way.

One fun thing about Google Docs is that you can embed them in a web page, like this:

The most important part of the spreadsheet is the column where I enter the cumulative mileage from the odometer, and the column to its left where the miles for each month are calculated. The monthly and daily averages are fun but not essential; with such a small amount of data, the numbers themselves are easy to get one’s head around.

The two rightmost columns are aids for the calculations. Today, for example, determines whether today’s date is before, in, or after the row’s month. It’s used to control the average calculations, preventing calculations in months with no miles, and displaying “N/A” in months that haven’t come yet.

A copy of the spreadsheet with no mileage data will be my template for next year’s spreadsheet. Here’s a link that should let you copy the template file to your own Google Docs space: Bike miles template. Once you have your own copy, you can use it as is or trick it out with your own additions.

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Post #1066 in biking, programming | No Comments

Up against the wall!

September 14th, 2009 at 10:05 pm

It’s common to hear drivers complain about bicyclists darting in and out of traffic, never obeying traffic signals, and so on. I suppose that’s true in the downtown business sections of big cities, where bike messengers are, in effect, paid to break the law. But out here in the suburbs, apart from a few weekend warriors who refuse to ride single-file (and whose greatest offense is their tendency to wear garish jerseys advertising Italian beer), it’s drivers who are the idiots on the road.

How can I make such a sweeping statement? I commute by bike 8 months out of the year, riding 15-20 miles a day, mostly on dedicated bike paths that run parallel to the local roads. I see a lot of traffic; more than a driver taking my route would see because I’m out there longer. And the comparison isn’t close—drivers are far and away more likely to disobey the rules of the road.

The jerk who inspired the tweet above was unusual only in that he deliberately cut me off, speeding up so he could beat me to an intersection and turn right in front of me. I knew he was going to do it, so I slowed down—if I hadn’t, he would have creamed me because he, like most drivers, had not mastered the elementary physics of time, distance, and speed.

(It would be unseemly for me to mention the undoubtedly microscopic penis of a man who feels the need to race his truck against a bicycle, so I won’t.)

The thing is, I get cut off by a car or truck every day. I am not exaggerating. Every fucking day at least one idiot drives across my path at an intersection where I have the right of way. How do they miss a 6-foot, 190-pound object with a bicycle, standing there waiting to cross?

  1. They are talking on the phone.
  2. They are looking in another direction—yes, that’s right, not looking in the direction their 2-ton vehicle is traveling.
  3. They are talking on the phone.
  4. They are applying makeup (usually applies to women only).
  5. They are eating (usually applies to men only).
  6. They are talking on the phone.
  7. They are drinking an elaborate Starbucks creation and talking about it on the phone.

I’d gotten so used to being cut off by inattentive drivers, it barely registered with me; just part of the day.1 But I’m starting to get more militant about it. When drivers roll past me without looking, I yell at them like some Wobblie in Bughouse Square yelling about the evils of capitalism.

And when the revolution comes, the drivers will be the first up against the wall.

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  1. One of my favorite scenes in The Maltese Falcon is when Sam Spade is first digging through the layers of Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s deceit: “Of course you lied to us about your sister and all, but that doesn’t count; we didn’t believe you.” Similarly, I wasn’t bothered by drivers ignoring me and my right of way; I didn’t expect them to pay attention. ↩

Post #997 in biking | No Comments

Long ride home

July 24th, 2009 at 10:57 pm

Let’s start with the good news: On my ride home from work tonight, I passed 1200 bike miles for the year. Given that I’m still a week away from the halfway point of my biking season—eight months, April through November—this puts me well ahead of last year’s pace.

That’s pretty much it for the good news. The reason I passed the 1200-mile mark tonight is that it took me over 25 miles of riding to get home. That’s three times the distance between my office and my house, and I know I rode that far because I came home…then had to ride back to the office…and then rode home again.

Why? Because when I pulled into my driveway the first time, I realized that one of my panniers was missing off the back of my bike. I hopped back on the bike and started retracing my route, figuring that I’d find it within the last mile or two. When I didn’t find it, I kept going, thinking that it came off during a bouncy stretch about halfway along the route. When that didn’t pan out, I kept going, eventually riding all the way back to my office and never finding the missing pannier.

And since I’m not going to sleep at my office, I then had to turn around and ride home again. This gave me another chance to search for the pannier, but I have to say as I got closer to home, my feelings about finding it became increasingly ambivalent. Sure, it would be great to have it back, but if I found it on my return trip within a mile or two of house, that would mean I’d just ridden 10–15 miles for nothing.

In any event, I didn’t find it; someone must have picked it up before I could get back to wherever it fell off. I’m not sure how it fell off. It’s several years old, and I had had to tighten its straps a couple of times in the past week. Maybe they finally loosened enough for it to bounce off. Maybe one of the plastic buckle pieces broke.

You might be wondering how a pannier could fall off my bike without my noticing. I’ve been wondering the same thing. I’ve decided to blame it on The Bugle. That’s what I was listening to on the (first) ride home, and it must have distracted me. I’ve noticed that the Bugle website contains no warnings of possible pannier loss if you listen to the show while riding, showing a willful and wanton disregard for the pannier-carrying public. Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver shall be hearing from my lawyer, my solicitor, my barrister, and possibly my licensed conveyancer shortly.

I’m calm enough to write this post only because of which pannier fell off. Here’s what I lost:

I hope whoever picked it up enjoys the underwear.

It’s not that I’m happy to have lost these things, but compared to what was in the other pannier,

I could be a lot worse off.

This is not my first loss of property on a bike ride. A couple of years ago, my phone popped out of its pouch. The pouch was actually made for a cell phone, but its closure was apparently designed under the assumption that you would always be riding in a velodrome. I retraced my route that time, too, and came up empty. Luckily I had insurance on that phone and got a new one with no hassle in a day or two.

The 25-mile distance of tonight’s odyssey reminds me that I never wrote a post about the McDonald’s LATE ride that my wife and I did a couple of weeks ago. That was also 25 miles, but was much more pleasant and varied. Frankly, it seems stupid to write about it now that so much time has passed, so I’ll just say that it was fun and very crowded. I did several tweets that night, and I have a set of photos up at Flickr. My favorite is this view of the city from North Avenue Beach, taken with my iPhone about half an hour before sunrise.

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Post #876 in biking | No Comments

Goodbye, old saddle

July 3rd, 2009 at 3:03 pm

We had a lot of good times together, but I knew you were near the end when that rip started.

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Post #842 in biking | No Comments

Bike light failure

June 21st, 2009 at 7:00 pm

Last year I bought a Blackburn Voyager 4.0 light for my bicycle. While I’ve always liked the amount of light it put out, the way it mounts to my handlebar has been a source of concern and frustration. Today the body of the light broke off the mounting hardware, due in large part to the design of the light. I won’t be replacing it with another Blackburn.

Here’s the Voyager 4.0 as depicted on Blackburn’s web site.

The light comes in two large pieces. The body of the light is a tapered cylinder that weighs 8-9 ounces. On the bottom of the body is a slot that connects it to the mounting piece.

(Don’t worry about the fracture just yet; we’ll talk about it later on.)

The mounting piece has a clamp that grips the handlebar and a pair of flexible arms that squeeze inward as they slide into the slot of the body. The arms spring out and a barb on each arm engages with a detent inside the slot when the two pieces are slid together fully.

There are two problems with this design. One problem became evident on the very first ride I took after installing the light. There’s no popping sound as the arms spring outward, nor is there any significant clicking feel when you hit the detent. There is, however, a decent amount of friction between the slot and the arms; the resistance to further sliding can lead you to believe you’ve got full engagement when you haven’t. That’s what happened to me when I installed the light and went on my first ride with it. After a few decent bumps, the body slid off the mounting hardware and fell to the pavement.

Fortunately, the light still worked, and from that point on I tried to ensure that the arms had sprung back out every time I reinstalled the light. Despite my care, it did pop off one other time, earlier this year.

The second problem with the design is what caused today’s failure. The plastic along the edges of the slot is simply too thin and weak to support the mass of the body. I had my bike parked on grass next to a sidewalk as I relubed the chain. The ground around here is soft from all the rain we’ve had this spring, so the kickstand sunk and the bike fell over to the left onto the sidewalk. The plastic along one edge of the slot broke and the body of the light popped off.

Here’s a more detailed view of the broken area.

The whitened area is common in plastic fractures. It’s known as “stress whitening”1 and is due to subsurface micro-cracking at high strains.

You might be wondering if the fracture occurred when the light body hit the sidewalk. If that were the case, my complaints about the design would be unfair to Blackburn, as that would be a pretty significant impact. I can assure you that’s not how it happened. Here’s a front view of the two parts of the light, oriented as they would have been as the body broke away from the mounting hardware.

For the fracture to be where it is, on the upper edge of the slot, the light body must have been rotating as shown in the picture—clockwise as viewed from the front. Had the body of the light hit the sidewalk, the rotation would have been in the opposite direction and the edge of the other side of the slot would have fractured. (The geometry of the handlebar and the light’s position on it also make it very unlikely that the light would strike the sidewalk while still mounted.)

So the force that cracked the edge of the slot was the inertial force of the light body itself. The bike and the mounting piece suddenly stopped when the bike hit the sidewalk, but the light body wanted to keep going. The plastic at the edge of the slot wasn’t strong enough to support the mass above it during this fairly common occurrence.

Time to start looking for another bike light. This time I’ll pay as much attention to the structural design as I do to the light output.

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  1. Engineers are not known for clever nomenclature or imaginative flights of fancy. ↩

Post #823 in biking, mechanics | No Comments

Snappy

June 9th, 2009 at 11:30 am

On my way into work yesterday, I pedaled past this guy resting alongside the Waubonsie Creek Trail.

The path runs between a creek and a pond, and I’m not sure if he was going from one to the other or was just out to stretch his legs. I stopped and pulled out my camera for a few pictures, which I put up on Flickr.

The nice thing about shooting a turtle instead of a bird is that you don’t have be stealthy or quick about it. I did make sure to take one photo from a distance so I could capture him before he pulled his head in, but otherwise it was like shooting an interesting rock.

He was pretty big: his shell was about 10 inches across from side to side, and 12 inches long from front to back. I don’t carry a tape measure with me on my bike, but I can use my hand to give a sense of scale.

I wanted a clear view of his eyes for this portrait, and briefly considered clearing away some of the grass in front of him. But I decided my fingers were more important than an unobstructed photo.

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Post #803 in biking, photos | No Comments

Presta change-o

June 8th, 2009 at 10:30 pm

My new bike—which is to say, the bike I’ve had for about three years but which still seems new to me—came with Presta valves on the inner tubes and rims with narrow holes meant for those valves. I’d never had a bike with Presta valves before and didn’t think they’d be much of an improvement, but I decided to stay with them and give them a fair trial. Now I’m done with them. I’ll keep using Prestas until my small supply of spare tubes runs out, but after that I’m back to Schraders.

If you don’t know the difference between the two types of valve—if you don’t even know that there are two types of valve—your bike has Schraders. Presta valves are longer, skinnier, and have a locking stem. The stem—that’s the part in the center of the valve that lets the air out when you push it in—is threaded and a little knurled nut that fits on it can be tightened against the valve body, preventing the stem from moving in and leaking air. Here are two photos1 of a Presta valve, one with the nut turned in to lock the stem,

and one with the nut turned out to unlock the stem,

As you might expect from the different geometry, to inflate a tube with a Presta valve, you need a pump with a connector made for it. Most decent bike pumps have two connectors, one for Schrader and one for Presta, so I didn’t have to go out and buy a new pump when I got my “new” bike.

But I did have to go out and buy a new inner tube pretty quickly. The longer stem on the Presta is easy to bend, and I bent one during one of my first refilling attempts. Because a bent stem won’t fit in the pump’s connector, I had to bend it back straight. This weakened the stem, and it broke off the next time I tried to pump up that tire.

OK, I figured, I have to be more careful with this type of valve. And so I was, and for three years I’ve been gentle when turing the stem locking nut, and I’ve made sure the pump connector was perfectly aligned with the valve before sliding and locking it in place. There have been no more stem failures, although you can tell from the photos above that I haven’t been able to keep the stems from bending a little.

Yesterday morning I had a new type of Presta failure. I was inflating my tires before a ride and was having trouble locking the pump connector onto the rear tire’s valve. My left hand is still a little weak from an accident I had at the end of April—pickup truck vs. bicycle—and I was probably turning and rocking the valve body as I tried to connect and disconnect the pump with my right hand only. As I pulled the connector off the valve, there was a pop and a short hiss of air. The tube wall had torn through at the base of the valve body.

So I’m through with Prestas. They’re just too dainty for me. In their favor, I will say that they seemed to maintain pressure better than Schraders. I refill my tires less often than I refill my wife’s, even though I keep my tires at a higher pressure than hers. Still, I’m tired of the extra care I need to take just to refill my tires.

I will, no doubt, need to ream out the valve holes in the rims2, but I’m not worried about weakening them. This isn’t a highly optimized road bike; a slightly larger diameter hole shouldn’t make the rims crumple.

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  1. All the photos in this post can be seen larger on Flickr ↩

  2. Get your mind out of the gutter. Really. ↩

Post #801 in biking | No Comments

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