Tag Archives: cycling

What I learned this week, September 21, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

Why James Bond Fans Are Better Than Sci-Fi Geeks

Bond fans are different. They (we) make an effort. When I was younger, I found that watching the Bond films and reading the books made me a more active and motivated person. I began to take an interest not just in playing video games but in learning new things. Online Bond forums are, by and large, not a bunch of nerds arguing over fantasy scenarios but guys talking about actual skills: effective martial arts to learn for self-defense, good clothing decisions, how to fix cars, elegant alcoholic drinks, card-playing tips, travel locations, etc. These are real skills that you can go out and learn and use. You can’t learn how to fly an X-wing, do flips with a lightsaber, or use the Vulcan neck thing to take out a mutant invader.

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http://vimeo.com/16154267
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There has been a lot of talk about Lincoln’s voice in the new Speilberg film – how Daniel Day Lewis interpreted him as having a higher voice than the usual booming baritone. This seems to be historically accurate.

It didn’t seem to be such a big deal, until I listened to this trailer:

Photographer and videographer Peter Sutherland followed six cyclists from different disciplines of cycling and personal backgrounds to produce short but moving documentaries on each one.

“When we spend our lives waiting until we’re perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may not be recoverable, we squander our precious time, and we turn our backs on …our gifts, those unique contributions that only we can make. Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don’t exist in the human experience.”

— From TEDxHouston speaker Brené Brown’s new book, Daring Greatly, released this month.

I keep reading everybody writing and saying that, “Rush is an idiot!”

I don’t know… this might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s pretty good anyway:

Bicycle Lanes

Posted on by Bill Chance

While Dallas rates, again, its well-deserved award as the worst city in the nation for bicycling, my suburb of Richardson was awarded the most bike friendly neighborhood. The best of the worst… so to speak.

One piece of cycling infrastructure that Richardson has embraced is the idea of separate, striped, bicycle lanes on their broad residential avenues. The square mile neighborhood I live in, Duck Creek, is bisected north and south, plus east and west, at the half mile marks by two of these avenues – Apollo, going east and west, and Yale, north and south.

In the last year or so, both have had a bike lane striped off going each way. These are marked off on the right hand side and are shared with bikes and parked cars. The square mile is also sliced on the diagonal with the Duck Creek Linear Park and its trail, plus the Owens Trail branching off to the north under the power lines, Glenville Trail heading west through the trails snaking around Huffines Park – my neighborhood is not lacking for bicycle infrastructure (love the Googlemap green lines for bicycle routes – though they don’t have the one’s on my streets).

The city is expanding this program, and another road near me, Grove, has had the same treatment for at least two miles of its transit through the city.

These improvements have been very popular. Not so much for the bicycle infrastructure they provide – but for their “calming” effect on traffic. These roads were wide enough to allow passing before – which only encouraged excessive speed, and a lot of folks were confused over which lane to drive in. Now the roads are narrowed to a reasonable width and seem to be the better for it.

Recently the city improved the bike lanes in my neighborhood by adding a narrow “buffer zone” that restricts traffic a tad more and gives a bit of confidence to the bike riders.

Bike lane on Yale, near my house.

I’ve been experimenting with these lanes a bit over the last few weeks and have come up with a few opinions and observations.

The lanes themselves are great. Sometimes, sharing the lane with parked cars can be a problem – wide vehicles like lawn-mowing company trailers can force you too far to the left, and there’s always the fear of someone opening a car door in front of you. The drivers do respect the lanes, though. The lanes would be tough for a high speed rider on a hot road bike – but a slow tourist or commuter has no problem in the middle of the blocks.

One problem is the intersections. Left hand turns are harrowing on a bicycle – there isn’t enough sidewalk or shoulder to do the stop, turn, and cross. The cars use the bike lanes for right turns. Look at this picture.

Bike lane merging with right turn lane at Beltline road.

This is a very busy crossing and the cars are going by fast in all directions. There is simply not enough space to navigate a bike through there. If you ride a bike very much in traffic you will learn that bicycles are often invisible to turning cars – I am more afraid of cars making turns than I am of speeding motorists.

Another observation is a more generic one. Planners tend to look at long stretches of road. If they can open up a long stretch, they view that as a victory.

When you are planning a route for your own personal use you tend to think about choke points. These are locations or short stretches of road that cannot be easily or safety crossed on a bicycle. Your route will be developed not to take advantage of long stretches of good road as much as it is chosen to avoid these choke points.

Some of the most notorious sets of these are the railroad crossings. Look at this one on Arapaho – a very busy major thoroughfare.

Rail crossing on Arapaho road.

There are three lanes of traffic both ways going through that little space – going fast, up to fifty miles per hour or more (don’t lecture me on speed limits… this is Texas). There is no sidewalk, no shoulder, no other way to cross. That hump has a set of rough wheel-swallowing steel rails sitting there on top of it. You hit that wrong on a bike and you are going down. There is no other crossing to the south for a mile. It’s two miles south to a safe crossing.

The Grove road bike lane is right behind me… as is the Arapaho DART station. If I want to ride my bike to the library; I have to go through there. If there is any traffic at all I have no alternative than to stop, get off my bike, and carry it over the tracks.

Which isn’t the worst thing in the world… but I wish someone would work on these choke points.

All the Way Around

Posted on by Bill Chance

I have been working hard, riding my bicycle every day. I’m out of shape and too big and too old, but still I try.

One helpful thing is that I have done this before. I was a lot younger then, which makes it a lot harder now, but I know it can be done because it has been.

When I first moved to Dallas I was young and full of pee and vinegar, but I began to give in to my slothful and dissipative nature and started eating out too much and lounging around watching too much television. So I fixed my bike up and started to go our riding on a regular basis… at least four times a week. Now there are bicycle trails everywhere, but back then, in the early eighties, there was only one in Dallas, the White Rock Lake Trail. When I started, I lived on Lower Greenville… then I moved a little north to Lover’s Lane and Northwest Highway – and both gave access to White Rock Lake.

I remember the first few times I rode – I couldn’t make it all the way around. This can be problematic, because once you are on the other side of the lake, you have no choice but to ride back. Again, I was young then and the mileage started to increase quickly and before long, around I would go (it’s about nine miles around the lake).

Two memories stand out from those early circuits. Once, I was plugging up an uphill spot when a young woman passed me, standing on her pedals, and shot up the same hill like it wasn’t there. I thought this was the most beautiful thing I had seen – her power, her technique. It wasn’t long though, before I could do the same thing – without even thinking about it. That was a moment of pride.

One problem with riding back then was that it was a nice little downhill jaunt to get to the lake. That meant the last part of my ride, from the lake to my apartment was uphill. I had to be careful and make sure I had enough energy left to get up the hill. One day I miscalculated and had to use up every last bit of willpower I had to get back home. The problem was, I lived in a second story apartment, and there was no way I could make it up the stairs, especially carrying my bike. I had to lie down in the yard, next to my bicycle, for almost an hour, until I was rested enough to trudge up the stairs. I was surprised that nobody came out to see what was wrong with me (not that the people there were helpful – they were very nosy).

So now I’m at it again. The other day I made a list of the rides I wanted to do over my few days off around the fourth, and one was a circumnavigation of White Rock Lake – something I hadn’t done in decades. It brought back a lot of memories, mostly of when I was starting out. I’m riding an inefficient mountain bike, so it is good exercise. I carry plenty of water and my Kindle, and stop whenever I feel like it to read a few pages.

That’s a good time for me. Riding my bike in a nice spot, with memories flooding back, and stopping in bits of shade now and then… reading a bit, riding a bit. It doesn’t get much better than that.

My old Raleigh is hanging out in the garage. Maybe I’ll work on it, see if I can bring it back to life. It’s old, but it’s light and might still go faster and easier than my mountain bike. We’ll see.

I may be old, but I’ve done it before.

Where I started. I think this is the “runners’ lot” – the “cyclists’ lot” is a bit farther down the road. So sue me.

Near the north end of the lake there is a long pedestrian/bike bridge they built to get across an arm of the lake. Back in the day we had to ride on a narrow sidewalk along Mockingbird Lane – a very busy road. If someone was coming the other way… you could pass, but with no more than an inch to spare. It was frightening.

I stopped and visited with the folks at White Rock Paddle Company. I think I’ll go back there soon and rent a canoe. There’s some swampy backwaters I want to explore. It looks like fun.

The old art-deco bath house is now the Bath House Cultural Center and it has a nice sculpture and butterfly garden out front. It’s one of my favorite spots around the lake so I stopped there and read a couple short stories on my Kindle.

A view of the dam across the lake with the towers of Downtown Dallas poking up in the background.

The trail runs between the lake and the Dallas Arboretum. Here’s a bit of Chihuly visible through the trees. That sculpture is about thirty feet tall and is called “Yellow Icicle Tower.” I took a picture of it at night here.

This bench is one of my favorite spots on the West side of the lake. It’s a quiet shady spot. I remember sitting here years ago, taking it easy, though the area looked different back then. The plaque on the bench said that it was dedicated in 1998, so I must have sat there when it was new. These benches have bicycle racks built in to them, a very useful design.

Meat Pie!

Posted on by Bill Chance

As I was puttering around the house Saturday, trying to shake off the ache of a sleepless night, I thought about getting some cereal or something in my gullet – but I realized there would be food trucks at the Ciclovia de Dallas and that I would want to eat there. That made for some hungry driving around, but I was rewarded as I cycled across the closed-off Houston Street Viaduct by the appearance of a gourmet food truck that I had never tried before.

It was the Three Lions truck and this one boasted English Food. A while back I tried the excellent Three Men and a Taco truck and it was good. The problem is that the folks behind this truck were British ex-pats and driving another Taco truck around North Texas didn’t fit in with their souls. So the gaudy Taco wrap came off and the truck became Three Lions.

Most of the Ciclovia festivities were over before I arrived. When I rode my bike up to the truck they were working on the menu sign, crossing off the Sausage Roll. Looking at what was left, I decided on the Meat Pie (The Carolina BBQ Pork Mini Burger looked good, but didn’t sound very English to me). While I was waiting for my food a guy came up to grab a napkin and told me, “Oh man, those sausage rolls are great… Oh crap! They are out of them!” He looked at me like a poor relative as they handed me my meat pie.

I moved to the condiment section and chose the bottle of Sriracha (anything good is better with Sriracha on it). A Hispanic family was standing there eating the last of the sausage rolls and the man pointed to the Sriracha and in broken English said, “That stuff is good… spicy!” I agreed and gave it another squirt.

I carried my pie back to where my bike leaned up against the concrete bridge rail. I sat there eating, listening to the live music, and watching the bikes of the Ciclovia de Dallas roll by. It was good, though I was so hungry I can’t really give a fair review.

Some day, though, I’m going to try that sausage roll.

Three Lions Food Truck Home Page

Three Lions Facebook

Three Lions Twitter

Three Lions food truck at the Ciclovia de Dallas

Texas in our hearts, England in our blood.

A meat pie, Sriracha sauce, a diet Coke, a bike, and a concrete bridge

Ciclovia Dallas

Posted on by Bill Chance

The crowd at Ciclovia Dallas on the Houston Street Viaduct with the Dallas downtown skyline

Saturday, April 14, was a day I had marked my calendar quite some time ago. It was the day of the first Ciclovia de Dallas, and that looked really cool to me. I had never heard of a Ciclovia before. It means bike path, or in this case, the temporarily closing of a road to automobiles so that it can be taken over by cyclists and pedestrians.

The good folks at Bike Friendly Oak Cliff had organized this event and the City of Dallas had closed off the Houston Street Viaduct to cars. The viaduct is a long bridge that reaches out of the skyscrapers of downtown over to Oak Cliff across the vast Trinity River Bottoms. Over the decades I’ve lived in Dallas I have driven across the Houston Street Viaduct many times and I knew it would be a dramatic place to hang out and ride a bike because of the view of downtown and the long drop down into the river.

My intention was to get up early and get to see the whole thing, but I had a rough Friday the Thirteenth the day before and I was so upset I didn’t get to sleep until about five in the morning. So I slept in and it took quite a bit of willpower to drag my aching and worn out body from the bed and into the day. My mind kept racing and coming up with a million reasons not to drive down there and ride my stupid crappy bicycle over an old bridge.

But I persevered, took my bike apart (reminding me why I want to save enough money for a folder) and shoved it into the trunk. Then I drove downtown and proceeded to get caught in several massive traffic jams and lost and lost. I was hungry, frustrated, and sleep-deprived and couldn’t find a parking spot or make the right turns. I fought my way through downtown at least four times, crossing over the Trinity, then making a mistake and ending up on a crowded Interstate going the wrong way. Twice, I went by so closely I could see the folks on bicycles riding back and forth, but couldn’t find a place to stop (or at least couldn’t spot one before I drove by it). I was getting very close to packing it in and going home, but I thought I’d take one more drive across the river.

Finally, after wasting an hour driving around, I gave up and turned down an obscure side street in Oak Cliff, deciding I’d park there, assemble my bike (reminding myself why I want to save enough money for a bike that folds) and ride around looking for the bridge on my bike. After heading off I realized that the entrance to the bridge on the Oak Cliff side was only fifty feet on down the road.

I was late and a lot of the Ciclovia festivities were past, but there was still a nice crowd there and it was a lot of fun. I rode back and forth over the bridge enjoying the views of downtown and the Trinity river bottoms and looking at all the interesting people.

Music at Ciclovia Dallas

Unicyle riders - I was too slow to get a photo of them riding.

Bicycle Polo on the bridge

Bicycle Polo player

It was so much fun I didn’t pay much attention to getting photographs – I missed the bicycle powered smoothie maker. Didn’t get photos of the unicycle riders on their single wheels. There were food trucks on hand so I was able to get something to eat and I felt a lot better after that.

While I was eating I noticed a guy along the bridge sitting there with a manual typewriter. I’ve wanted a manual letter-hammerer for years and I asked him what he was up to .

His name is Thomas Cantu and he types up little chapbooks on that manual typewriter. I bought one (A Mexican American’s Guide to Your Parent’s Homeland) and chatted with him for a minute. Thomas writes about the Mexican-American experience and how drug violence is destroying Mexico. He says the typewriter is nice because people come up to ask about it and it’s an easy introduction. I told him I’ve always wanted one to put a roll of paper into – he recognized that was how Kerouac wrote.

Thomas Cantu and his typewriter.

So I rode one more lap of the bridge and then went back to my car, took my bike apart, and loaded it into the trunk (getting grease all over and reminding myself about how nice it would be to have a folding bicycle). It was a lot of fun, I hope the event was enough of a success for the city to take the ball and run with it. It would be a great annual thing – to close off the bridge and allow one day of slow riding and walking.

A Ciclovia… what a great idea.

What I learned this week, September, 9, 2011

Posted on by Bill Chance

I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers, and nothing is mine but the cord that binds them.

—-Montaigne

An economic crisis is nature’s revenge on those who make and those who accept false promises; it is a holocaust of lies when the dross is burned away and only what is real and true remains. Think of cotton candy melting and charring in the flame of a blowtorch; that is what is happening to the secure retirements that “caring” blue politicians and “committed” blue union leaders promised gullible state workers.

—- from Rhode Island Pension System Collapsing – by Walter Russell Mead (read the whole thing)

I seem to be linking to Walter Russell Mead a lot.

How Bikes Could Transform Dallas

Constructing a city for the car alone shackles all to the burdens of car ownership and maintenance costs. In a city with a poverty rate of 23 percent and household transportation costs approaching 25 percent of income, fewer and fewer can afford to participate in the local economy, getting from point A to point B, without a miserable two-hour DART bus commute. Without choice in the transportation network, Sun Belt cities will go the way of the Rust Belt. A monoculture of transportation follows a monoculture of the very industry that produced it into collapse. Nobody thought Detroit would collapse when it was dubbed the Paris of the West. Paris, however, is alive and well. And so is bicycling in that world-class city.

—-From D MagazineBicyclist

The Shortlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize is out:

The six books, selected from the longlist of 13, are:

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape – Random House)

Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books)

Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)

Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail)

Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)

A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)

I have not read any of these. Have to take a good look (don’t think I can read all of them in time). Any recomendations?

You don’t have to know what it is that you are eating in order to have a delicious meal.

Writing Tips for the Week

Eight Secrets Which Writers Won’t Tell You

by Ali

  • Secret #1: Writing is Hard
  • Secret #2: We All Struggle With Procrastination
  • Secret #3: We Put Ourselves Into Our Work
  • Secret #4: First Drafts are Always Crap
  • Secret #5: Each Piece Exists in a State of Flux – and it’s Never “Finished”
  • Secret #6: We Do it Because We’re Obsessed
  • Secret #7: Money does matter
  • Secret #8: We All Struggle With Self-Doubt

I had forgotten how much I enjoy a good, steep hill.

Even a titan like Starbucks is struggling in this difficult economy.

Yet, the little Vietnamese Coffee Shops in San Jose are thriving.

What could be the difference?

A Little Farther

Posted on by Bill Chance

After my little trip down the Glenville trail and on to Memorial Park Saturday I was all stoked Sunday for another bicycle ride. I wanted to ride the same route but push on farther. I’m starting to obsess about the possibility of commuting to work on my bicycle so I thought I’d see if I could figure out a route that would bypass the most dangerous stretches of road.

I rode on to the Brick Row Urban Village. This is a new, not-nearly-finished transit oriented development next to the DART station on Spring Valley road just East of Highway 75. A few months ago I spoke at a city council meeting in favor of a new, huge, transit-oriented development proposed for some vacant land (and another DART station) at Highway 75 and the George Bush Tollway. A lot of the speakers that were opposed to that development were complaining about the Brick Row. I don’t know what their problem is – the thing is nowhere near finished. How can they judge at this point?

brick row park

The little park in the center of the Brick Row Village. A nice place to stop, rest, and drink some water.

Maybe the progress is slower than promised – but the economy (especially real-estate development) is in the dumper… some delay is to be expected. Brick Row isn’t near occupied, the retail hasn’t arrived yet, and there is still a lot of vacant land – but otherwise, it looks pretty nice to me.

Brick Row

The front of the Brick Row along Spring Valley Road. You can see the elevated DART train tracks in the background. When I rode up, a train was passing - that would have made for a nice picture, but I didn't have the time to wait for the next train.

One of the nice things about bicycling is that it is the best way to learn a neighborhood. You will see things you never notice from a car, and you cover so much more territory than when you walk. I spotted a little hole-in-the-wall Pakistani Restaurant, The Silver Spoon, that I want to come back to and try. An odd name for a Pakistani place – apparently they bought a Cajun restaurant and never changed the name.

One other thing you notice on a bike that you don’t in a car are hills. Or even slight slopes. To most people the place where I live is absolutely flat. And it is pretty flat – but on the way back I sure noticed a long, slight, unrelenting uphill stretch that I sure never noticed in a car. It’s all good, though – I need the exercise… and it is nice going the other way.

I had a busy day ahead, so I didn’t dawdle more than necessary. I had ridden within a mile of my work. The rest of the route is easy – there are parking lots and sidewalks – I’d barely have to deal with cars. I’m going to keep riding… every day if I can, until I get in shape enough to start biking to work.

Wish me luck.

Today’s Route. 7.4 miles. It was hot again today, but I felt pretty good. Let’s see how this goes. Thanks for your support.