Signal Figured Out

The first week Maddie learned to ride her bike she tried signaling and nearly went down hard. Since then, she's been strict 2-hander on the bars at all times. Today she tried signaling again and found it pretty easy. She signaled for most of the ride today.

She also did some off-roading along Manito Blvd. The curb hopping exit:

Speaking of signaling, rules of the road, and other bicycling niceties, the guy who I buy my knickers from wrote a good piece about modeling good behavior and "fixie punks" the other day on his site. It's a provocative piece that twists perception around a bit and worth a read in my opinion.

Finally, the WSDOT is sponsoring some bike traffic counts in Spokane over the next few days. They need volunteers to count bike traffic at these locations:

• W 4th Ave and S Washington St - 4-6 PM


• W 2nd Ave and S Howard St - 4-6 PM


• E Mission Ave and N Perry St (Centennial Trail) -4-6 PM


• W Buckeye Ave and N Post St - 7-9 AM & 4-6 PM

From an email by BAB'er Bradley Bleck this morning:

If you want to see state money flow to Spokane to improve the bike/ped infrastructure, this is a great way to contribute.
Please, please, please, bicyclists in Spokane need your help and they need it now! If bicyclists don't step up to contribute to our own success, we can't expect others to do it for us. If you have any questions, please email me. (bleckb3 AT comcast.net)

Friday Pics

Quick post.

Going to school.
Mr Blaine flatted by this nail.
Ben and Jake look on as David changes the flat.

David explaining his next organized race to Jake. It's going to be a great ride.

More tooling around the Palisades area.
I went here a year ago. Almost to the day. The graffiti has been updated.

More apple picken. I picked too many. My back is killing me.

Lunch at Natural Start. I love this place. I went to One World this week too. I'll follow up on both of these place. Add this to the tiny list of small local yummy cheap places that make real food with local stuff.

I met Liza as she got off work. She had to eat before the climb home.

Standard Liza reaction to my phone camera. Name that intersection.

Lofty Goals

This is Cedar St at about 12th ave. These pictures are very good at illustrating why we need a culture shift in the engineering/public works department.

You can see in these pictures that the street is being repaved. For the majority of this repaving project, the bike lane is not being repaved. It is distinctly left out of most of the work here.

Anyone who bombs down Cedar/Maple on a regular basis knows how bad this stretch is. Going north from about 14th to 8th you are at speed (it's down hill). As you can see from the picture above, the bike lane is made up of many layers of asphalt, some finished/feathered better than other layers. In the rain or in the dark/dusk hitting these these variances at 30 mph or so can take you down if you are hitting them incorrectly.

The good news is that they covered that huge dip created by the man hole cover in this stretch. But the bad news is that they didn't extend the nice new pavement to cover all of the variable levels in the bike lanes throughout this section.


These are the kind of decisions that are made "on the ground" or by the engineering department without oversight. This is hard stuff to codify and is a good example of why we really need to have a different way of thinking in these departments.

Engineers that actually cycled for utility would see this kind of stuff immediately. An enlightened public works department would encourage such engineers to bring this kind of issue up and evaluate the cost/benefit to resurfacing the lanes.

We (BAB) are making progress in getting in on more of the decision making at the project level for street work, but stuff like this, where it's really up to the discretion of the project manager and engineers on the ground to make a call, requires a shift in institutional thinking: away from the "move as many cars as fast as possible" approach to "engineering." It requires real leadership at the highest levels of the engineering and public works to value all modes of transportation.

P1

Four-and-a-half years ago Liza and I decided to move back to our hometown of Spokane to be closer to our parents. Another huge reason was to slow down and really be mindful about how we lived.

Our goal was to own as much of our own time as possible. We wanted to have time to enjoy raising Maddie. We vowed never to live in a house that required driving for basic necessities. This need for a slow, human-powered pace was a requirement that fell out of our awful car-centered, huge-commute-time lifestyle that we'd devolved into on the west side of the state.

Largely, we've succeeded in the overall goal of slowing down by riding bikes and walking more. But the more we rode, the more we thought how crazy the rest of the world was for not riding more. This thinking led to getting involved in the Bicycle Advisory Board. It also led to spinning up Pedals2People. It also led to Liza going to UBI and then getting a job as a wrench at REI.

Fast-forward a few years, and we're still mostly getting around by bike and by foot, but we're busier than ever with a bunch of bikey stuff. Any modern family knows how easy it is to get totally carried away in the day-to-day machinations of living your life. So much so that you forget the point of it all. As a result, our little family sort of hit the wall a few weeks ago.

We were all grumpy and generally just not the happy campers we should be. Chatting on the issue over dinner one night, it became clear that the issue was our schedules. Kids have a way of cutting to the core issue.

So Liza and I decided to clear the calendar as much as we could for one month.

Basically: any event that interrupts our morning breakfast and walk/ride to school with Maddie or that interrupts our dinner and evenings and weekends together is being canceled.

We've got a ton of commitments, so we can't can everything, but we've done pretty good. I bailed out of the BAB meeting for Sept. Liza changed her availability at work to go in a bit later. Her super righteous shop-mates also backed her up so she could take some Sundays off for a month. We've been minimizing our time at the P2P garage as much as we can without over-loading our friends that also volunteer there. I'm not taking on morning commuters for the Commute Project for a month.

It's been really hard to clear all of this stuff. But after just about 10 days the difference in our quality of life is huge.

I don't think the long-term answer is to cut everything out completely. I think this time is showing us how living mindfully -- once again -- is the key to a quality life. What you do; how you spend your time; what you eat; the friends you keep; what you buy. The list goes on. These are all worth thinking about and worth making explicit decisions about every day.

Sorry about the low bike content here.

Our neighbor took some great photos of our canning and gnocchi operation last weekend.

Short Sunday morning ride in the rain

I can always count on Joe to take a ride in crappy weather with me. We went up to Palisades and he showed me a new-to-me road into the Indian Canyon section. I went to this area about a week ago for the first time. There's a few trails in there to explore. When I have a few more hours and the knobbies on the Rawland, I'm going to see if I can get through all the trails.

Check out this cool old sign that's on a closed road in the park:

Powerful sign. It's good to see it still standing. And sort of amazing.


I was surprised at the lack of cyclists riding this morning. I take a quick ride just about every Sunday from 9-10:30 or so. I've been seeing tons of cyclists every Sunday since May or so. I figured rain would keep a few people out, but not all of them. The only cyclists we saw this morning were a pack of grade-school girls who braved the rain to go to The Scoop.

Shipped Out

Volunteers John and Jason load em up.

P2P shipped out the Village Bike Project bikes today. This is a big huge deal for the organization and there'll be more on the P2P blog in the next day or two.

Today we had about 10 volunteers show up at the Mountain Gear HQ in the Valley. We loaded exactly 200 bikes and a bunch of parts into a 26 foot Penske rental truck. The bikes are headed to Ghana along with a pile of bikes from Moscow, ID.

2 Events this Week

There are a couple potentially interesting events going on this week that are bikey.

#1 Willie Weir
Weds, Sept 24th, 7PM
South Campus Facility, Riverpoint Campus

From the press-release ...

Seattle-based Willie Weir has bicycled off-the-beaten-track to the mountains of India, war-ravaged Bosnia, the deserts of Turkey and the jungles of Southeast Asia. He recently returned from pedaling in Venezuela and Colombia.His human-powered travels allow him to smell the local scents and mix with villagers from Laos to South Africa.

Weir has put together a montage of a number of different performances and named the presentation, Scooters in the Bike Lane. The show is a benefit performance to support the Bicycle Alliance of Washington's mission to open an office in Spokane.

Tickets are $10 in advance (or $12 at the door) from North Division Bicycle Shop, 10503 N. Division St., Spokane, 467-2453

#2 Downtown Alternative Transportation Trade Show
Thursday, Sept 25th, noon-6pm
River Park Square Atrium

From the website...
If you get to work in a single occupant vehicle and and have been considering alternatives, check out your options at the Downtown Alternative Transportation Trade Show! The show will not only exhibit how to get around Spokane at lower cost and impact right now, it will also showcase future alternative transportation technology being developed right here in the Inland Northwest. From scooters and Segways, and bicycles, to bus and vanpool information, even microcars like the Tango will all be at this event.

Next Wheel

Rim: Velocity Blunt

Spokes: straight-gauge 14 gauge DTs

Hub: Sachs Torpedo Duomatic -- 2 speed kickback

I'm going to give this a try on my 720 this winter. The last couple years I've run my 720 with studded tires. It's a fixed gear, so this combo makes a great bike on ice. But I've wanted to try a coaster-brake set up for a while, and the 720 is my most hacked bike, so it will be the one to be converted yet again.

I've been hording this hub for a couple years. It was on a Raliegh 20 that I bought a couple years ago.

The only bummer about this set up will be the rear triangle on the 720. It's set at about 132mm right now. I'll need to set it at 117 or so to make this hub work. I recently attempted to do some rear-triangle work on my RB-T and ended up kinking the chainstay. Ouch. I know cold setting the frame doesn't do it any harm, but it bugs me all the same.

The RB-T is my CX bike and it's now at Hairy Gary's being repaired. I'm actually using the 720 (with a freewheel) for my CX clinics at the moment. Lately, I've been slogging up the side of the bluff carrying the 720 in my lame attempt at "training."

Anyway. That's the plan for this wheel.