a midway bikelog

I should have posted this as a preview last week or earlier, but we co-hosted a house party for Russ Stark last night with neighbors and fellow bike folks Scott & Carrie. By co-host, i mean that we emailed some people and made cookies, then showed up at their beautiful house and excellent spread complete with little sandwiches.

It was great to be able to spend some time talking about neighborhood issues and developments with someone who knows so much about it. We’ve known Russ mostly through email and various bike-related things he’s done through the Midway TMO, but hadn’t talked that much in person before. Russ has lived in Midway about 7 years (as long as we have), having lived in other cities with both worse and better-laid out than St. Paul, and has made a career of studying city planning and public policy. He’s a policy scholar, a fairly recent arrival, but settled and invested in the neighborhood and its future. He also has kids around the same age as our kids, and in that way represents a lot of new families in the neighborhood with young families.

The other candidates in the race are Randy Schubring, a long-time neighborhood resident and DFL activist, and Bernie Hesse, who is sorely lagging behind with his campaign website, but seems to be getting some endorsements. I don’t know anything about Hesse, but both Stark and Schubring seem to have a good handle on the neighborhood and what needs to be done to steer a course that favors the neighborhoods and residents over the next few years. Schubring has some visible supporters around, with campaign signs (featuring a bike) in a few places. Knowing that he co-founded the St. Paul Bike Classic is enough to raise some interest among us bikies, and he certainly seems to have a good base of political experience too

Between Stark and Schubring, it’s sort of a 3-legged race. They have worked on many of the same neighborhood projects fighting for the same side (SuperTarget, for one), are both major bicycle advocates, and both understand that zoning is one of the key tools to guiding the evolution of Midway as we incorporate light rail and deal with its many ramifications. In short, they’re running in the same direction on a track that i like, and I think they’d both do a good job for the Ward. I’m supporting Russ because I’ve known him longer, we see him often around the neighborhood, and I like his ideas. They’ve both said that they’ll follow the DFL nomination, and i’m sure that whoever wins there will have the support of the other.

It’ll be a very interesting time in the neighborhood over the next few years. There is a lot of good momentum going on; major new construction, older building renovations, the extension of the Greenway along Ayd Mill (unfortunately delayed another year), and of course planning the light rail line. At the same time, there are some gaping vacancies along University and troubling engineering problems in the light rail implementation. It really feels like it’s time to participate in this work to be sure that the human-powered local resident has some space in the new plans, because there aren’t many chances like this for such a major infrastructure change.

The German exchange student staying with us this year is also an avid cyclist, so it’s natural that we talk about bikes and cycling in the US -vs- in Germany. He says that there aren’t a lot of daily cyclists where he’s from (in the North), and most of them do it for sport rather than transportation. The few that do ride for transport or leisure though, ride what they call Holland bikes. They’re the typical roadster/english 3-speed-style bikes a lot of our parents and grandparents had, but haven’t been sold here new in 25 years. Well, they’re coming back. Here are a couple of interesting ones i’ve seen pop up in the last few months.

KHS Green

$270, 3-speed with coaster brake, includes fenders, rack, kickstand, bell and chaincase. It even uses the same tire size as the old Raleigh 3-speeds (ISO 590), but with a Shimano geared hub. This is the one that most recently caught my attention and made me realize that it’s becoming more of a trend.

Electra Amsterdam

(Not a direct link, stupid flash-based website. BTW, damn i hate flash websites that resize my browser. sheesh already)
Announced last year, now available, though i haven’t seen on in person yet. $550, with some nice additional features over the KHS, like alloy wheels and a generator-powered light. It’s a more modern approach in some ways, using 700c wheels, and a little more style-oriented, (I wonder know how long ‘leatherette’ grips will last) but it looks like a pretty solid deal overall.

I couldn’t help but also add this one:
Clever Cycles Bakfiets

From the clever folks who brought you the Stokemonkey. These will apparently be more in the $2500 range, but a whole lot more useful for the small family. Not a bad price when you consider it would replace a decent bike + Burley trailer or Xtracycle. Those are good solutions too, but the unified bakfiets design seems better for a dedicated bike.

There are other good commuter bikes coming out too; the new Specialized Globe, the Bianchi Castro Valley (they should have kept the drop bars), Novara Fusion, and most of the Breezer models. Most of those city bikes try to be more sporty though, and what i find interesting about the couple of bikes pictured above is that they are simple and functional, with really no pretense to be fast or sporty. This is probably what will doom them in the US market, but this is the sort of bike that anyone who is bike shopping at Target or WalMart should be buying instead. People, $270 is CHEAP for a bike – a $90 bike from a department store is simply cheap, and it simply won’t work well or last.

Arboretum: Lask drink at the CAFE, pt. II: This CAFE sucks
(via OIFS)

An interesting discussion about CAFE standards and ideas for increasing efficiency. Scot is right on about automakers playing games with CAFE and why there are more and more SUVs coming to market. Subaru has been my favorite target over this, as almost their entire lineup has slid over the line into the truck category, thereby skating outside the CAFE mileage standards. He’s also right about the low-hanging fruit of the marketplace. It’s a bit silly to be worrying over hydrogen cars and hybrids when people are driving Hummers and Navigators that get mileage in the same neighborhood as a city bus.

The obvious solution is that people need to buy smaller cars. Why don’t they? It’s fairly complicated, i think, having something to do with wealth and status, but also convenience and perceptions of safety. The idea that bigger is safer is ridiculous, just read some of the crash tests. The average SUV isn’t as utilitarian as the average minivan, yet minivan drivers are stigmitized as uncool. The status part is hard too – i’ve seen a family have its house foreclosed on, yet they continued to drive their Escalade. What percentage of a mortgage payment does it take to feed that thing?

Ok, so if the market won’t do it themselves, what about the government? CAFE standards are a joke when manufacturers have no incentive to actually sell more efficient cars. CAFE should be a formula tied to the actual numbers of cars sold. Even if that average number came up a few points, overall efficiency would improve. If the marketplace didn’t do it, manufacturers would have to either create shortages of the least efficient models to push sales elsewhere or create more efficient versions of them.

And no more CAFE exemptions for trucks. Farmers and plumbers will squawk, but there should be tax exemptions for business use. Libertarians will squawk, but they can just keep their current monstrosity if they insist on blowing money out a tailpipe.

There is no perceptible will to actually change this in congress, but there ougta be. This is at least as important a homeland security issue as is terrorist defense, and something that can actually produce results for a change.

This isn’t an entirely academic issue for us, as we contemplate replacing our current car (a Golf) in the next few years. It’s small and reasonably efficient, but nowhere near diesel or hybrid territory. As our family grows we’ll want something larger, so it’ll be a wagon or small van, yet I also want it to be MORE efficient than what we have now (25mpg). I don’t have a problem with the SUV format, just the poor efficiency, yet only hybrid SUVs around (Ford, Toyota) have taken the “more power” approach to the hybrid, so they’re still getting middling mileage. They’re better than other SUVs, but that isn’t saying much. VW and others already have efficient vans, but they are only sold in Europe.

What i want (and probably a lot of other people want) is a small van with a clean diesel or hybrid engine that gets a solid 35-40mpg or better, seating for 5 and some cargo space in back (removeable seats too). Bonus points for having an econo version without all the leather and electronic crap that gets piled on. I’ll even roll my own windows up again, though i’m sure the soccer mom crowd will want to keep all that plus the in-flight entertainment system that minvans & SUVs have nowadays. Whoever can their act together on this will get a guaranteed sale from me, but so far, i’m not holding out hope to see anything like that in the next 5 years.

There has been talk on a few blogs lately about Shimano’s planned obsolescence of 8- and 9-speed drivetrains and how distributors are clearing out even 9-speed parts as Shimano bounces 10-speed cogsets down the product line. It’s a serious disservice to customers.

It’s a fact that 9- and 10-speed parts are more expensive, and anecdotal experience is showing that they aren’t as durable. This only makes sense, since the spacing is closer, the chains are narrower and there’s just less metal to take the pressure, so we begin to see reliable accounts of chains breaking after a few hundred miles and cogsets wearing out more quickly than ever. The cynical cyclist might feel like it’s all part of a plan from Shimano and Campagnolo to start seeing these parts as disposable and get cyclists used to a more aggressive (and expensive) cycle of maintenance than ever before. Perhaps this is the case for professional racers; fine, but it doesn’t have to be that way for the rest of us.

There are plenty of cyclocross racers (more serious & faster than me) and other experienced tourists and commuters who (like me) set up their bike with an 8(or less)-speed drivetrain for improved reliability and durability. It’s clear that as you simplify a bike’s drivetrain toward fewer gears and fewer moving parts, the longer each of those parts tend to last. A racer on a 10-speed setup might go through 2-3 chains and a cogset per year (at least $150), while a singlespeed or internal gear-hubbed bike can easily use the same chain and cog for several years worth of the same mileage (even given that a racer on a 10-speed road bike might ride more miles per year).

Despite what you might think from reading the latest big cycling catalogs, 8- and 9-speed is not obsolete. Even 5- 6- and 7-speed drivetrains are perfectly viable, and make a lot of sense for daily riders. The parts are cheaper and last longer, and even though it’s more often the lower-end parts ranges that are available, those parts are in many cases higher quality than the 5-7 speed parts available 20 years ago. IRD has even begun new production of nice 5-7 speed freewheels.

So worry not, fellow cog minimalist, ride on. And if you don’t have a bike with less than 9 gears, make your next bike 6-speed or less and see if you don’t like it so much you’ll contemplate having even fewer next time.

Twins ballpark planners design a trail to suit cyclists
(via KM)

This is good news; an important cycle path connection and it looks like some good input on the project from local users. The safety aspect is an important point, and nobody will want to ride through an enclosed tunnel if there’s any fear of someone blocking the way or waiting just out of sight. I haven’t seen reports of actual safety problems on the Greenway (despite some well-founded concerns, it being effectively a topless tunnel), but I also expect that most personal attacks (including those to cyclists) aren’t publicly reported unless there’s a death involved. The couple of cyclist attacks i have heard of seemed like just the wrong place at the wrong time, and not being targeted because of cycling.

Another interesting thing is that from the cyclist point of view, it’s a relief that something is getting done to complete some of the frustrating gaps in the Twin City area cycling network, but I wonder how the typical non-cyclist will react. There has been a lot of infrastructure work done around town over the past few years beyond the higher-profile projects like the Midtown Greenway. Miles of on- and off-street bike paths have been quietly installed, and they mostly don’t make the news perhaps because of their limited interest or low cost. However, now that there is more of an established cycling infrastructure, with more cyclists about, closing some of those aforementioned gaps is becoming more of a priority, and it ain’t going to be cheap.

In short, the era of plucking the low-hanging fruit of striping bike lanes is making way for the era of big projects, and of integrating cycling projects into nearly every infrastructure change around town. When the city of St. Paul held it’s Bicycle Summit last year, one very popular proposal was that the city officially adopt the Complete The Streets policy. In a nutshell, this policy requires that all street give equal and equally safe access to anyone using it, for any mode of transport. It’s encouraging to see this sort of thinking in the Twins ballpark planning, and we need to keep on city and highway planners on task to continue this trend.

The Arrowhead Winter Ultra race is on, for about 6 hours now. I’ve got nothing but respect for these crazy bastards, and seeing as how they started off in -28°F this morning, let’s all send warm thoughts their way. It’s all fun until someone loses an eye, or finger, or toes.

Best of luck to our friend Ron, who’s skiing the race this year (his second time), and everyone else on the trails. Keep track of their progress on the official race weblog.

Too damn cold to ride lately, so the mind tends to wander and read things like this:
Unhappy Meals – Michael Pollan – New York Times
(via Kottke)

It’s long – here’s a link to a decent quick summary.

Lots of interesting bits in the article; nothing especially new if you do any sort of reading on organic farming and the food industry, but i especially liked the discussion about food culture and the inherent healthfulness of an established culture’s diet.

It makes total sense from an evolutionary standpoint that humans should evolve with their immediate environment to create foods that are inherently healthy. If a group of people have been surviving anywhere in the world for any length of time (say a dozen generations), they are most likely eating a healthy diet, otherwise they simply wouldn’t exist; they would have since died out or moved away. That these diets can vary widely simply speaks to the variation in available food.

(As a side note, i’m speaking of health in a general sense, and as compared to the typical American diet, which isn’t culturally so much as commercially evolved.)

A typical diet in Greece, or Japan, or France, for example, is a healthy diet because of the aggregate effect of the diet, not because or despite containing any particular food. In short, the French aren’t healthy because they drink more red wine, but because of how the whole range of food and those food combinations (including red wine) nourish and supply the human body.

It would have been interesting to study whether one traditional diet is healthy for someone from a different culture. It’s commonly noted that people moving to America from other cultures tend to get fat and have health problems, but would a Greek moving to Japan and eating the standard Japanese diet also suffer health problems over time? In other words, to what degree have the people of that area evolved/adapted to the diet? Quite probably the world is already too intermingled a place to study if effectively – that, or the study participants are the only ones who it would effect.

Healthiness aside, what i find interesting is the whole idea (less explicitly covered in the article) that our foods, and indeed our taste in foods, may be driven by the need for nutrients or other things in the food that we haven’t even discovered yet. Do we want basil with tomatoes because there’s something about that combination that makes us healthier or more disease-resistant? Is there something about drinking tea that helps our bodies better process the nutrition in typical asian food? (beyond the original benefit of simply drinking boiled, hence cleaner, water).

The idea of beneficial combinations has already been shown with lime and corn and our bodies ability to use the amino acid lysine, and how rice and beans combine to form more complete proteins. Historically, beer wasn’t just a fun drink; but for a long time a major source of nutrition. Was it also a compliment to other parts of a typical German or English diet?

It’s fascinating to think of the hundreds of generations, of the countless meals that have gone into creating the variety of dishes we enjoy today. Certainly some seasoning has come from a medicinal use and found it’s way into food – thyme has been used throughout history, and in many cultures, for example – but we tend to like it with some foods and not others. Are those food combination choices based on some buried knowledge in our dna?

I think that a good part of the reason so many Americans struggle with weight and health issues (aside from the general sluggishness and malaise) is that we’re also struggling to find a food culture. We’ve lost our traditional sense of food, or rather it’s been taken away by the very companies we’ve grown at home. Our only fallback on food-as-medicine is chicken soup, but we need a lot more than that.

When you see some study that starts promoting the benefits of some antioxidant or enzyme or particular food, get out the salt bucket. It seems a lot more likely that it’s not just that particular thing, but that thing in its typical environment or combination that gives the real benefit.