what is oil, anyway?
Here’s a question i’ve wondered about myself. It seems unlikely that there were that many dinosaurs or layers of algae piled up over the millenia in just the right conditions to create lakes of oil underground. Here’s a short, interesting discussion of the idea that it’s either abiogenic in origin (according to the Russians), or generated by bacteria. You’d think that after 100+ years of oil research that we’d have a better answer to this. It’s sort of a core question in the whole peak oil debate.
Between this and the recent bacteria-powered batteries, it looks more and more like the next wave of tech advances are going to come from some of our tiniest co-habitators. How dumb will we look for the whole antibacterial soap thing when we’re embracing and farming bacteria as a way of life?
I love the whole idea of science coming full circle, that the more we learn about our planet, plants and animals, the more solutions we find right under our noses (or in them, as the case may be). Our future might indeed not be a computerized, mechanized world, but a world that looks much simpler and more agrarian than we have had in centuries.
common sense traffic law
Doing my local bloggist duty to spread the word. The Strib is doing an informal poll on whether it’s a good idea to allow cyclists to essentially treat stop signs and yields and stop lights as stop signs, proceeding when it’s safe to do so. Surprisingly enough, it’s potential state legislation, proposed by Rep. Phyllis Kahn, DFL-Minneapolis, and Sen. Jim Carlson, DFL-Eagan. A suburbanite even!
As others have noted, many cyclists have long used this common sense approach to riding in traffic. When you’re earning your own momentum with real physics class-style sweat-inducing work, making a complete stop becomes a tedious thing. Boo hoo! you say, you’re riding a bike for exercise, right? What’s the big deal?
Try this scenario: you’re riding a bike home alone, late at night and hit a red light. There isn’t a car within view, but current traffic law says you should wait several minutes there until the light changes to proceed. No matter how tony the neighborhood, a pedestrian wouldn’t stand in the middle of an intersection waiting for a light to change; you would feel too vulnerable, and it’s the same for a cyclist. Substitute being alone for being cold, riding in the middle of winter, and it’s a health issue too.
The counter-argument is the slippery slope; that giving special consideration to cyclists will allow all sorts of law-flouting by 2-wheeled hooligans. That’s exactly what we’re planning, people, full-on cycling mayhem in the streets. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This proposed legislation is quasi-important not because it’s allowing cyclists to stop only optionally, it’s important because it introduces into law the idea that cyclists are a different class of road user. This could backfire, of course, and lead to further laws that would relegate cyclists to permanent 2nd-class status on the roads, requiring use of cycle paths, etc. Or it could lead to cementing our place on the roads and recognizing that (just like oversize trucks, for example), we belong on the roads but with some minor modifications that allow for the reality and nature of the vehicle.
So go vote already (at the end of the article).
minor adjustments for the price of gas
I keep track of my bike miles on a little web app i wrote a few years ago, and one of the things i like to track is the amount of gas saved by biking places rather than driving. I flag commute rides, so only the bike rides that arguably replace what could have been a car trip count; so weekend rides just for fun add miles, but don’t count toward the gas total.
I last updated the file that contains the variable for gas prices back in December, and i don’t remember if i changed the going rate for gas then or not. It has been at $2.80 for a while, so it’s probably been longer than that. Today i bumped it up to (a somewhat conservative) $3.50/gallon to generally keep pace with current prices. My gas savings for the year to date magically went from $37.16 to $46.45. That’s two extra Chipotle burritos!
That’s for a little over 13 gallons of gas, or about what my car would need for a fill up if i were running on vapors. I haven’t been filling up the tank very often at all since spring riding season kicked into full swing, but i have noticed the stickers on pumps instructing drivers on the $50 limit some (at least Visa and Discover) credit cards apply to pay-at-the-pump purchases. They’re told to put in $50 worth, then start again like they’re visiting twice (or even more, i suppose, for some vehicles). I’m going to go back to my high school habit of putting in $10-15 worth of gas in at a time as needed to avoid the $50 hit. I should need another $10 in a month or so.
A lot of people weekly drive the 300+ miles that i’ve commuted by bike for the year so far. For long-distance commuters, it’s an unavoidable expense in the short term because of living and/or working where bike routes and mass transit are non-existant. I wonder how long this added expense will go on being quietly absorbed before we start to see either a cultural move back to cities or a big suburban push for alternative transportation infrastructure. The bus lines will most likely win over bike lanes, but maybe we’ll finally start looking at commuter trains more seriously. Maybe we’ll finally get a really family-friendly bike route from downtown out to the MN Landscape Arboretum or something.
How far could ever-increasing gasoline costs push society? Will we make visits to friends across town overnighters, to avoid having to bike the kids home 20 miles late at night? Will a series of Inns catering to cyclists pop up along the Munger trail, giving lodging to weary travelers heading for the north shore? Will my neighbors begin lobbying to keep horses in their garages next to the chicken coops? Will the Amish finally take over the country, driving their wagons around the abandoned carcasses of rotting Escalades with spinner hubcaps faintly creaking in the breeze? We can only hope, my friend, we can only hope. In the meantime, i’m working on my beard and nail-free carpentry skills.
local geography and politics
I’ve been sitting on this post for a few days, but with the recent transportation bill override (woot!), it’s worth another look.
One by-product of not biking to work every day is that i’ve had a lot more radio time lately in the car. There was an interesting story on MPR this morning about a recent political poll showing the radical differences between the central city and suburbs. The thumbnail version is that the closer you live to downtown, the more liberal you probably are. Within the city proper, 77% of the residents identify as democrats. Get to the inner ring of suburbs, and just over half of the residents call themselves democrats, and once you’re in the exurbs, there are 10% more republicans.
This seems somewhat expected, given typical urban statistics, but it still makes for an interesting map. According to the radio story and the people interviewed, the new republican stronghold in the state is a ring of suburbs that are 95% white, affluent, and somewhat isolationist in nature. They’re people who want their own space, and can afford both larger properties and the additional transportation cost of living away from their fellow man. This from Rockford, MN mayor Mike Beyer: “You’re not part of an apartment complex, which is a communal area. Communal to me is social, and social goes to socialism. But here, it’s your space, your time, your business, and that’s generally conservative people.”
Yes, all of us in the city live in apartments are are socialists. We have to sign papers and carry cards.
Those values that are apparently driving the rich white conservatives out of town are the opposite of what i look for in where to live. I like knowing my neighbors and shopping in places where they recognize me and having the option more often than not to walk or bike for an errand because i only need to go a few blocks. I love realizing that i haven’t started my car in over a week, and that my kids ask to walk to the store for a snack or to bike to their friend’s house. There’s security in knowing that my neighbors and friends are looking out for each other. I have my house and yard and our own playset, but those features are no more important to me than my front porch, or the alley.
The political polarization is interesting in light of the fight over the recent transportation bill here. It was passed over the governor’s veto, and that’s a good thing. The current federal administration, seems to think that they can continue to cut taxes while spending gobs of money on things like an overseas war. Our governor, likewise, seems to believe that we can maintain even our piss-poor standard of roads in the state let alone new bridge construction and other infrastructure maintenance without any new money coming in. This despite a $6 BILLION shortfall claimed by the DOT for projects scheduled in the next few years. Who’s paying for this? Our kids are. Yes, it’s all on borrowed money, so Chinese investors own us now. Our jobs are being shipped overseas, and soon we’ll all be working the counter saying, “Would you like shrimp chips with that?”.
It’s also interesting because more specifically (and speaking generally) the very conservatives who live in the outer suburbs and do the majority of the driving (living further from work and having no public transportation options) are the ones who refuse to pay for anything while still demanding more road capacity. The only thing they’re actually conserving is their own wallet. Residents in the city get grief for wanting to build things like light rail as a way to reduce congestion, but we’re generally willing to help pay for it. This is conservation on a much larger scale, and it takes bigger thinking than the view from the steering wheel.
This is one reason i’d rather ride my bike.
Connecting the Cedar Lake trail to the river
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 case for separated bike lanes
An interesting video via Russ Stark
From the YouTube description:
Advocates from Transporation Alternatives, The Project for Public Spaces, and The Open Planning Project join “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz and Enrique Penalosa to call for New York City to consider experimenting with some physically separated bike lanes in the near future.
It’s a good short video, with some nice examples of different bike lane construction around the world. It’s interesting that London is used as an example while there are some serious cycling advocates over there trying to abolish bike lanes (with the idea that chaos leads to safer roads, in a nutshell).
I don’t think all bike lanes are wonderful or necessary, but having some physical separation on major routes would be a Good Thing. Interaction with traffic is (i think) the main deterrent to increasing the number of bike commuters. I can see the potential counter-argument that pedestrians won’t want to cross bike traffic to & from their cars, but i’d be interested to see how much of a problem it is in practice.
While watching the video, i couldn’t help but think that many of complaints about drivers would be solved by stronger enforcement of existing traffic law. Parking and turning on a bike lane should be disallowed, if it isn’t already, and enforced as such. Loading zones could be marked as allowed, otherwise cars ought to stay out.
Likewise, i can’t help but wonder how many fewer people would use a cell phone while driving if police more strictly enforced proper turn signal use?
Minnesota bicycle traffic laws: 169.222
Here is a link to the Minnesota bicycle traffic laws. You know, just in case…