Posts Tagged ‘local’
LATE Ride
July 11th, 2010 at 10:22 pm
Last night, my wife and I did the LATE Ride, a 25-mile post-midnight bike ride through Chicago. It’s our second year of doing it, and it’s been a lot of fun both times.
The LATE (Long After Twilight Ends) Ride is a fundraiser for the Friends of the Parks, a “park advocacy organization, dedicated to preserving, protecting, and improving Chicago’s parks and forest preserves for all citizens.” Nine to ten thousand bikers gather at Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park and ride a circuit through several neighborhoods that eventually leads them south down the lakefront back to the starting point.
Columbus Drive, where the race starts and stops, is blocked off, but the other streets we ride on aren’t, which is certainly a hassle for drivers unlucky enough to be trying to use those streets as we go by. Even though we start in waves of about 2,000 riders and tend to spread out as the ride progresses, it’s still a huge clot of bicycles taking up the roadway. Most people we pass are friendly and encouraging, but there are exceptions. This year, we heard a taxi driver loudly and unintelligibly venting his anger at one of the course marshals. “Cabbies,” said the marshal as the taxi drove off down a side street, “you gotta love ’em.”
The marshals spread out along the course do a great job, directing us where to turn, controlling those bikers who want to run every red light, and helping those with injuries or equipment problems.
We saw two falls this year and came up on ambulances dealing with two other accidents of some sort. The one in Greektown looked particularly nasty; we rode past a small puddle of blood on the median. Frankly, it’s amazing to me that there aren’t more accidents. We ride pretty close to one another, and there always seems to be a pack of young men riding much faster and weaving in and out of the rest of us. Not surprisingly, these jerks typically don’t have the ride’s number bibs pinned to their shirts—they didn’t pay the entrance fee and are sponging off the FotP’s labor to get a fun ride through the city.
There are refreshment and potty break areas set up in a park about halfway through the route and at the fountain where the race ends. I have to say I agree with this tweet
The Metromint water was vile. Neither my wife nor I finished our bottles, and we heard lots of grumbling about it around us. In general, this year’s refreshments were limited in variety and crappy. I refuse to believe that anyone actually likes Myoplex, Lifeway Kefir, Fruit2Day, or Silk beverages; people drink them and pretend they’re good because they think saying so makes them sound like athletes. Even the normally decent Clif Bar snack was one of their subpar products.
Last year’s big food sponsor was McDonald’s. I’ve reached the point where I can barely stand to eat most McDonald’s food and avoid it whenever possible, but I have to say their breakfast was really good—much better than the bag handed out at the end of the ride this year. And, not surprisingly, McDonald’s handled the food distribution much more efficiently.
Of course the point of the LATE Ride is not the food, it’s the beautiful ride through Chicago. I didn’t take photos along the way—that seemed like an invitation to an accident—but I did get a few nice shots at the end, both of the skyline
and of the coming sunrise.
I do have one last food-related note. My wife and I decided to eat breakfast at the Omega restaurant in Downers Grove on our way back home. We noticed an SUV with bikes on a rack in the parking lot and figured they must have come from the LATE Ride, too. In fact, not only was everyone in the dining room a LATE Rider, our waitress told us that she’d been serving LATE Riders since starting her shift at 3:30 am.
The Omega is not famous for heart-healthy food. I ordered the Omega scrambler with eggs over easy and an English muffin.
Under the eggs are hash browns, bacon, sausage, and onions. Even though I ate only half, I’m pretty sure it replaced whatever calories I’d burned during the ride.
The ride to work
July 8th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
The weather for the past few days has been jumping around lot. Every day has been mostly hot and humid—the usual for July—punctuated by brief but heavy thunderstorms. This has played havoc with the kids’ sports schedules, but has been great for the bike path I take to work.
Most of my ride to work is on paths that run along major roads, but for a couple of miles I’m on a crushed limestone path in the Springbrook Prairie Preserve. It’s a pretty heavily traveled path, and during dry spells the traffic pushes the gravel off to the sides, leaving dust in the center. But heavy rains redistribute the gravel evenly across the path, as if a meticulous groundskeeper had come by to groom it.
While I’m sure Springbrook isn’t unique, this doesn’t happen to every limestone path. The Greene Valley path, for example, gets soft in spots after a big rain, and the gravel collects in loose piles that make cornering difficult.
In other commuting news, the big tree limb that hung low over the Waubonsie Creek Trail (another nice part of my commute), and which I figured was going to crack off and kill me one day,
has been cut down and hauled away.
(I wish I’d had a better memory of how I framed the first photo when I took the second. Oh, well.)
So far this year, the wildlife along my route hasn’t been all that interesting. I’ve seen a few bobolinks in Springbrook, but not nearly as many as last year. And although I look every day, I’ve not seen that snapping turtle along Waubonsie Creek again. There have been a few bold toads out on the path, refusing to move as the bikers zip past, but they’re just not as exciting.
Biking season is like deer season
May 4th, 2010 at 9:52 am
If you’re a bicyclist who rides in Naperville, you’ll be interested to know that the cost of attacking you with a car has just been set by a DuPage County judge: 21 days, to be served in three-day increments over seven weeks. And although the attacker has been forced to give up her gun owner’s ID card, she’s apparently still allowed to drive her weapon of choice.
I wrote a post about this story last year. In a nutshell: Two teenagers are riding their bikes in downtown Naperville. A woman driving near them gets pissed and stomps on the gas, aiming her car at one of them. The kid jumps off safely, but she nails his bike, which gets wedged into her bumper and undercarriage. She drives home, dragging the bike along. It’s still stuck to her car when the police arrive and arrest her.
Last week the woman, Mary Rehm, pled guilty to one charge of aggravated battery and was sentenced to 42 days, of which she’s expected to serve 21 in a series of three-day stints starting on May 10. So she’ll have a late spring filled with exotic three-day weekends in the pokey.1
From the article in the Naperville Sun:
Rehm, a gun owner, was also ordered to surrender her firearms owner’s identification card as a condition of the sentence, according to court records.
While it’s nice to see that this unstable idiot is having her gun owner’s ID taken away, I don’t see why she still has her driver’s license. Even during her “sentence,” she’ll still be able to drive the attempted murder weapon around the scene of the crime four days a week.
Liberal, socialist, communist, whitey-hater that I am, I can’t help but think that had her name been Maria Ramirez rather than Mary Rehm, she wouldn’t have gotten off so lightly.
Be that as it may, cyclists should know how much DuPage County values them. Drivers should know it, too. Hate those cyclists who take up space on your roads? Got some vacation days coming? Tune up your engines and come to Naperville!
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“Pokey” was one of my grandfather’s favorite words, and I seldom get a chance to use it. ↩
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.
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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? ↩
The wrong sort
December 7th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Tonight I was killing time in Naperville’s Nichols Library, looking through the computer books. NPL uses the Dewey Decimal System for assigning catalog numbers, so I was in the 005 section when I ran across this book with a call number on the spine of 005.8 BIS.
It’s a pop sociology book, and obviously has no place in the computer section. I someone on staff saw the word “sort” in the title and started thinking bubble, shell, heap, quick,…, big. Despite the mistake, I’m kind of impressed that a librarian would look at that title and make a CS connection.
I got curious and looked it up at the Library of Congress site when I got home. According to the LOC, the Dewey number should be 305.800973 22, which puts it in the social sciences where it belongs. I had always assumed libraries used the numbers assigned by the LOC and didn’t try to do their own classification. In this case, that would have worked out better.
Another mess from Chicago’s freight tunnels
October 15th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Yesterday afternoon, a section of pavement on the Kennedy Expressway, which runs north/south through Chicago, heaved up. leading to a major rerouting of traffic and an hasty—and apparently successful—effort to get the roadway repaired before the morning rush.
Early reports are that the heave was caused by upward pressure from a concrete pumping operation. The concrete was being pumped to fill a section of the old freight tunnels that run under much of the downtown area. These tunnels are notorious for causing the Great Chicago Flood of 1992.
I was one of many engineers involved in the investigation of the Great Flood and was down in the tunnels shortly after it was drained, so the tunnels and I go back a ways. Two things struck me when I heard the news about the heaved pavement:
- The tunnels generally don’t extend more than a few blocks west of the the Chicago River. The Kennedy seemed too far west to have any freight tunnels under it.
- The tunnels are typically about 40 feet below street level; in fact, the definitive book on the tunnels is Forty Feet Below: The Story of Chicago’s Freight Tunnels by Bruce Moffat. Even if a section of tunnel were below the Kennedy, how could pumping concrete so far underground have an immediate effect on the surface?
I went to my copy of Moffat and looked at some old maps of the tunnel system. It turns out there was a spur under Quincy Street that ran almost as far west as Halsted. This puts it under what is now the Kennedy Expressway just south of Adams, which is where the heave occurred. Also, there was a “public station” in that area between Quincy and Jackson, which indicates an area that came up close to the surface and/or a vertical shaft. So my two doubts were erased.
This image is from the Wikipedia article on the tunnels, which seems to have been derived largely from Moffat’s book. There’s also a Wikipedia article on the flood, which, despite the despite the warning about possible unreliability at the top, matches pretty well with my memory of the incident.
The tunnels are pretty interesting in their own right. They were cut, mostly by hand, about 100 years ago through the blue clay that lies under downtown Chicago. The passages were roughly oval with a flat bottom, about 6 feet wide and 7-8 feet high, and were lined with concrete. Much of the excavated clay was hauled up out of the tunnels and dumped into the lake east of Michigan Avenue, making what is now Grant Park.
The tunnels ran under the streets and were used to deliver freight—mostly coal—to downtown buildings. A narrow-gauge railroad ran on tracks installed in the tunnel floors with cars that looked like something from an amusement park kiddie ride.
This image is one of many you’ll find at this freight tunnel history site.