Just in case my dedication to the bikey lifestyle was in doubt...

New ink, as of two Fridays ago:

If I had put bacon in there, it would have all three of my most favorite things in the world.

So what's up in The Greatest City in America, you ask? Well, it's been hot. So hot that I almost considered giving up the bike for a week or so but... no, couldn't do it. Just the thought of having to leave the house a whole ten minutes early, then being interrupted in my reading by the light rail bull every five minutes to make sure I've bought a ticket (and seriously, Baltimore, come up with a better system already. In Pittsburgh you had to buy your ticket on the train and honestly that makes a lot more sense to me), and THEN having to wait for ANOTHER train on the way home. Point is, I think I made the right call. Although I did make the sacrifice of putting a bottle cage on my hybrid. I hate the way they look, but when the temperature's cracking a century, looks ain't worth a hill of beans.

I recently discovered a little tip that makes riding in 90+ temperatures slightly more bearable and even though I didn't know about it when it was really bad, at least I'm discovering it now. Cycle chic fans will hate me for this, but the secret is: men's boxer briefs. (Under your dresses or skirts.) Originally I was wearing nothing, but wound up getting terrible saddle sores and had the saddle pressing on me in all the wrong places. Then I graduated to wearing women's athletic shorts under my skirts*, but they were much too hot. I pinged to using boxers when putting away my husband's drawers and damn, do these things ever work! No saddle sores, no inadvertent flashing (not that I really care about that), and the cotton breathes like the poly blend athletic shorts never could. Yeah, it looks super dumb when you're off the bike, but again, hot weather + ease of use = don't give a crap. I'm using the Hanes brand. Maybe they make a "women's" version of boxer briefs but if they do it probably comes at half the durability and twice the cost. So dude panties it is!


*Taking off the skirt never occurred to me; I hate dressing multiple times throughout the day. If I lived in the desert or Florida or something, maybe I'd feel differently. But in Maryland? And with a half-hour commute? Just make clever use of layers, put on some deodorant, and deal with it.

Expressway for Bikes

In the past couple of weeks, I've made drastic changes to both my morning and evening routes into work, coming up with what I think is both the shortest and the least trafficky way from Hampden to the Inner Harbor and back. I've completed them both in slightly less than a half hour, although that's only if all the traffic lights are working with me. I'm especially pleased with my evening commute, enough so to take a break from not posting on my blog and talk about it for a few hundred words.

View from the end of the lane, I love the color of that bridge.

Before, I was dodging evening traffic on Calvert, which I took mostly because it's either Calvert or Charles and there's slightly fewer cars on the former. Very slightly. Not a day went by where I wasn't yelled at or buzzed at least once, but that's what you should expect when you live in a city that didn't even make the top fifty American biking cities. (Okay, I know that these rankings are just a popularity contest and don't mean anything, but friggin' Orlando is on this list. Baltimore ain't Portland but there's nowhere in goddamn Florida that deserves to be on ANY "best biking cities" list.)


I've known for months that the Fallsway cycletrack was in progress, or had just finished progressing, or had yet to be completed... I'm not really as up on these things as I should be. I assumed that construction was still ongoing so instead of worrying about how I was going to deal with an unfinished road, I stuck with the devil I know. Then one afternoon I just said "screw it, let's try this out." It couldn't be any worse than dealing with northbound suburbanites who are already all pissed off about the JFX lane closure.

View of pedestrian path, bollards... and pothole.

The route isn't pleasant and picturesque in the normal sense of the word. You're sandwiched between the JFX and a succession of industrial buildings (and a jail). But who really cares? For a little over one glorious mile I'm completely separated from cars and that is the MOST pleasant thing I can think of. The road spits you out on Guilford Avenue, the first bicycle boulevard on the East Coast (but it's nothing compared to what Orlando's got). I've been taking Guilford into downtown every morning and I can say with confidence that it's at least ten billion times better than Cathedral. They're similar streets (one-way, multi-lane, 25 mph that really means 35), but the fact that Guilford is marked as a "bike boulevard" makes all the difference. So basically, suck on that, anti-infrastructure types.

It's not done, as the huge, evenly-spaced ditches can attest (it's just not a Baltimore road if there isn't at least one pothole every half-mile). I'm also still a little edgy about taking it in the wintertime but I'll cross that overpass when I get to it. For now, this is the fastest, safest way to get out of downtown on a bike. I'm sure glad I decided to try it.

How's Your Bike Week?

As the many cycling blogs I follow have mentioned once or twice, this week is Bike Week in the USA, a time when we collectively think about how different and better our lives could be if we accepted cycling as a viable form of intra-city transportation... before jumping in our minivans to drive half a mile down the street. As this is my first Bike Week as a transportation cyclist in a city with a large enough cycling population to support Bike Week activities, I wanted to partake in a few of the events, even though I'm not really a very social person by nature or in practice. "Unfortunately," I've also been busy with writing stuff: I've really felt a lot of drive to work on my short stories lately, and haven't done any cycling outside of the minimum amount of nine miles per day. That's more than 99% of Americans, but less than 85% of bike bloggers. Mea culpa, except not really, because my short stories are very important to me.

My bike, after riding to work in the rain. Note the frame sticker.

My "festivities" this week have been pretty much confined to riding my bike like always, although I must admit knowing that there were going to be bike counts this week (and that I pass two of the checkpoints on my daily commute each way... four "counts" in all!) influenced my decision to ride to work Tuesday in a fairly heavy rain, although I've found that even when it's raining, I never really regret riding to work. I think I've maybe missed two commutes because of weather in the six months-plus I've been doing this, and both times I spent a good portion of the morning thinking "man, I really wish I would have rode in, I'm such a chumpette." And anyway, the rain was over by the time I got to work, as happens more often than not when I set out (the other possibility, of course, is that it gets way worse and I have to wring out my pants/skirt in the bathroom, which is annoying but still probably better than taking the train). I thought about going to the Ride of Silence but I didn't know about it until the last minute, and I had a writing group meeting. It's something I think is really important, though, and I'll definitely be doing it next year as it is apparently a yearly, nationwide event.

Tomorrow I attend my first Bike to Work Day, which I assume will be just like a normal non-capitalized bike to work day, except that I'll get free stuff. I'm hopeful that there will be a lot more riders on the road... but it will also make me sad, because I know that for many people, this is only a once-a-year thing. Then a week later is Baltimore's first Tweed Ride. Being a committed citizen of the 21st century, I don't have anything to wear for it, and I'm debating showing up in rags with dirt smeared on my face, as this was the style at the time among my coal-mining ancestors. (Who probably didn't even own bikes, and just walked everywhere until their feet fell off and then couldn't afford to buy new ones, which was also the style at the time.) But I could also just get a nice hat at one of the four thousand resale shops along the Avenue and duct tape it to my head. At least my bike is vintage!

Taking Me Home

A discovery: my evening commute is exactly as long as one of the soundtracks to my late adolescence, Sleater-Kinney's Call the Doctor.

It's a great album to ride to!

Random Thoughts from an Increasingly Infrequent Blogger

1. I listen to music while riding now. Yeah, I know, it's dangerous. Still not as dangerous as driving, of course! My new commute is around forty minutes each way, and truth is, I was getting a little bored, and also very, very tired of listening to nothing but wind and cacophonous engine noises. Right ear only, of course, and not ALL the time, although most of the time. I find my music choices on the bike are slightly different from my music choices at home: more dancey, electronic-y type stuff, no folk rock by bearded hipster dudes. Some current faves: Cut Copy, The Go! Team, Tune-Yards, Aesop Rock, Los Campesinos! (Looking at that list, the unifying factor seems to be "bands with exclamation points in their names." If only I liked !!! more.)

2. It's sorta funny to me that as much of a transportation snob as I am, and how much I truly believe in sustainability and urban living and whatnot... in some ways I will always be a suburbanite. Take my food choices, which would probably horrify most bike bloggers. My diet is that of the typical five year old without parental supervision: we're talking corn dogs, Mountain Dew, giant blocks of processed cheese, and candy. Oh, so much candy. And even though I know this stuff is bad for me (and the planet), it's easy to believe it's not, because I'm at a weight I'm happy with and I don't feel any better when I don't eat crappy. In fact, I feel worse, because I'm denying myself my favorite foods! So at least for now, I'm going to continue eating dirty and traveling clean, the exact opposite of most "health nuts" I know.

There's also the fact that I sort of love big box stores, at least in concept. I like doing all my shopping in one place, especially since I don't have a secure trunk to put my purchases in. Anything I buy has to come with me to the next store, so yeah, cutting down on trips is definitely something I look for when I'm planning any consumerist activities. Of course, in my fantasy world, big box stores would pay a living wage and not be surrounded by miles of shitty parking lot and would sell only fair trade or locally sourced goods. It's more about convenience than price, for me. (And hey, it's not like I could find locally sourced versions of most of the stuff I buy at Target anyway, no matter how much I'd be willing to spend.)

3. Drop bars: what's the deal with them? I'm starting to think my next bike is going to have drop bars. I have no interest in racing, but I DO have interest in doing recreational rides like Tour Dem Parks and although it's certainly possible to do a 30+ mile ride on a comfort hybrid with BMX handlebars, it seems like it might be easier on a more aerodynamic bike. Like, I even found myself struggling to keep up with Critical Mass and I don't know how much of that is because I'm just slow, and how much is the bike's set-up. A little of one, a little of the other, I'd reckon. But then, drop bar bikes look more difficult to ride and someone might mistake me for an athlete, which would be the worst thing ever, am I right? So, mental note: if I get a bike with drop bars, I have to be sure to always wear an evening gown and/or clown costume when I'm riding it.

4. I know it's old, but this Portlandia clip still cracks my shit up:

Cars, man, WHY???

The Week of Fail

Hola, amigos. I know it's been a long time since I last rapped at ya, but I've been living it up, enjoying my great new job (and, relevant to this blog, the most perfect 4.5-mile commute), and attempting to work on my "real" writing. After taking care of the house and the cats, there isn't much energy left for blogging

This has been... not so great a week for cycling. My troubles started on Wednesday morning, when I decided to bike to work despite it being a cool thirteen degrees out. Cold weather doesn't bother me any when I'm on the bike because I heat up like a motor (this is probably also the case for you), but it sure did bother my bike! The back wheel froze up causing me to skid. I tried everything to unfreeze it, including loosening the brake pads and attempting to unlock the quick-release back wheel, but it remained frozen until I reluctantly dragged it onto the train, at which point it heated up enough to spin. I resolved not to ride anymore if it's under twenty degrees.

On Thursday, though, it was a bike-approved thirty-five degrees when I set out, so no problems, right? WRONG! I normally take the Fallsway to work, a gently down-sloping back road with almost no traffic and no stoplights, which runs alongside the Jones Falls. Scenery-wise, it is very pretty and a great way to spend half my commute. The Fallsway's upsides are also its downsides, though, since there was a thin sheen of ice on it that hadn't been melted away from the crush and heat of cars. And when I swerved to avoid that ice, there was an invisible layer of ice just to its left.

So, I fell off my bike, for the first time since I was a kid probably. I ruined my pants, removed the top layer of my knee, and was late to work again. I had no idea what was going on for like two minutes, at which point I figured, oh crap, better get the bike out of the road before someone hits it (hey, I told you that road never gets traffic). At that point a friendly motorist asked if I needed any help, but I didn't want to take a ride from a dude and I was only three minutes from my house, so I painfully pedaled back and took the train to work. Hello again, MTA! Really really wasn't expecting to see you again so soon.

Not that epic.

I wasn't going to bike to work yesterday and actually considered calling off the rest of winter, but it was Rob the non-cycling bikes-are-dumb-and-I-hate-them husband who convinced me to ride, because he knows that I'm miserable without my daily dose of exercise. Just avoid the Fallsway and leave extra early, he said. So I did, and I was completely fine. Bypassing the Fallsway adds an extra ten minutes to my commute, but hey it's not like I don't enjoy riding, right? And I'm sure I'll find ways to shorten that commute once I ride it for a week or so.

So basically, the moral is, if life kicks you once, get back up and do what you want to do. If life kicks you twice in two days, well... still do that. Or maybe the moral is that my impatience will someday be the death of me!


(P.S. The fact that the Fallsway is in such bad condition now makes me a tad leery about the in-progress Jones Falls Bikeway, which I previously wholeheartedly supported. I think I'm going to have to get some reassurance that the lane will be cleaned on a regular basis, or else I'm going to have to ride through the city, traffic or not, at least for the four months out of the year when ice/slush is a possibility.)

Unacceptable Absence

What the hell, I just started this blog and already I abandon it? Well, I have a good reason...

Even "in this economy" I managed to find a new job, which I will not talk about for important life/work separation reasons (yeah, having a bike blog isn't exactly like putting drunk pics on Facebook, but close enough), but suffice to say that employment-wise I'm as happy as I've been since 2007. After such a long time being unemployed, and then experiencing my second worst job of all time, I can scarcely believe my luck in the employment arena.

In bike-commuting terms, this means that my commute is over twice as long as it used to be, and I couldn't be happier about that. Every day I get to see a nice little slice of Baltimore, from where my commute starts out riding the scenic, almost car-free Fallsway right next to the Jones Falls Trail, then onto city streets, which are (for now) completely un-laned but also relatively calm at 8:30 when I hit them. I need to take some pictures, once I get a digital camera that can fit in my pocket and doesn't take forever to warm up. I don't know that my commute is the "best part of my day" because honestly my job is pretty killer but it's a really great excuse for getting in an hour of exercise every day. (And as a bonus, light rail is very convenient to both my job and my home, for when it snows or rains... which hasn't happened yet!)

The downside to my new commute is that the return trip is entirely dark for now, and I have to ride with traffic for most of it (at least for another year until the Jones Falls Bikeway is complete... and check out that link if you want to watch someone who obviously doesn't ride try to talk about bike infrastructure*). In order to not die, I picked up a Nite Rider MiNewt 350 headlight at my local bike store (Twenty20 Cycling in Hampden), and while it worked fine for the first two weeks, three days ago it just didn't come on after work. Apparently, I'm the first person ever to have a problem with this light, and it's currently being repaired and/or exchanged, so I will in fact be able to post a glowing review of it later. While at the LBS, I also purchased a pannier, as my quick-release Wald basket no longer fits on my hybrid due to the headlight. No review needed, as it's just a basic pannier, but I will say that I now find panniers to be a much better stuff-carrying system than front baskets. I still worry that it's going to hit against a car or fall off for no reason, but I can get way more groceries and things in there than I ever could in my basket, and even with twenty pounds of stuff, there's no noticeable fishtailing.

So, yeah, right now life is pretty awesome, despite being winter and the holidays, i.e. my usual least favorite part of the entire year. I have every hope that 2012 will continue to be as awesome. And that I will remember to post to this blog more often.

In closing, my current favorite bike-related Youtube clip:

*Okay, so I have more to say about that post but I don't want to start another post about it so let me just say that it's really sort of insulting to see someone who's willing to throw cyclists under the bus (literally!) because we're "good for the community," in other words scenery. I pass through Mount Vernon twice a day, and look forward to not having to ever pass through it again once the bikeway is complete, because the drivers are insane, and the streets are way too narrow to accommodate a double line of parked cars, plus cars in motion, plus bikes. Yes, people also park on the street in Hampden and the rest of North Baltimore, but we're nowhere near downtown. Also, pretty sure the streets are wider here, because we used to have electric streetcars. Mount Vernon could be a decent neighborhood for bikes if  they got rid of the on-street parking (why people are allowed to park on the street so close to downtown flummoxes me) and put in lanes instead but that will never ever happen ever. So fuck yeah, I want to ride next to a prison if that's the only way I can be almost completely separated from deathmobiles. Man, I just should have made a new post about this.

Dynamic Dynamo

I will keep to a regular posting schedule on this blog that nobody reads if it kills me!

Aside from my commute, I haven't really been riding much lately. Most of that is due to overwork; when I get home, the last thing I want to do is go for a long bike ride for fun. Or, rather, that's one of the first things I want to do, but I also have to do dishes and wash clothes and all that boring adult stuff. So the riding falls by the wayside, a lot of the time. But I have reason to believe things might improve in January, so yay? Even though I don't think I'll be doing much recreational riding in January anyway, because snow (boo!).

But! I have a new bike toy, and while I can't play with it yet, I am super excited about it. It's a bottle dynamo for a human-powered thievery-averse lighting system.

It looks like a tiny gun. Or maybe a hair dryer.

I now need to get a headlight and taillight, and oh yeah, figure out how to hook up the whole thing. It would probably be better to go to a bike shop to get this done, but I enjoy tinkering, and it doesn't look too too hard, at least once I get the voltages right. The dynamo is used and vintage because it was way cheaper than a new one, but I think I'll stick with modern lights. These would be for the vintage Raleigh as the newer hybrid already has battery lights, and while the battery lights are detachable they don't fit on the Sports very well. I'm also constantly leaving them on the hybrid or on the kitchen table instead of taking them with me, which does nothing for my nighttime safety. So I think I'll be much better off with a system I can't possibly leave at home.

It's All in the Commute?

So, as I alluded to in my last post, I have a new day job. Without going too far into details, it isn't the greatest job in the world. To go slightly more into details, it isn't the job I applied for and I'm a little irked at the bait and switch. But enough with the details!

I've noticed that, as non-ideal as my job is, I am a lot less cranky than I feel like I "should" be when I get home. Part of that is that I'm (by choice) not working full-time. But I think that, weird as it sounds, a very big part of the reason why I don't come home cranky and miserable is -- you guessed it -- because I ride my bike to work.

See, for around a year when I lived in Pittsburgh, I used to have a walking commute. It was approximately the same amount of time as my current bike commute (20 minutes each way). And I didn't come home cranky then, either. I really liked that job, which could be part of it... but when I moved and had to start taking the bus to work every day, I started getting cranky. And pretty much didn't stop being cranky about my job for the next few years.

I can't really get much thinking done on a bus. Oh, sure, I got a lot of reading done. But deep thinking, the kind I need to cleanse my introvert brain after a long day of working in an extravert's world... no. Not with all the stop calls, the babble of voices, people pushing and bumping into me, and oh god, the motion sickness. I don't get carsick as easily on a bus as I do in a car, but it's still present. (Well, someone's a delicate butterfly.) And I think all these various bus annoyances had a lot to do with why my attitude went downhill all those years.

Maybe there's no correlation. Or only a very weak correlation. I'm not a scientist.

I kind of wish my commute was longer, although I'm sure I won't feel that way after the first snow.

Daylight Saving Time: A Cyclist's Perspective

If you're reading this American blog written in English, chances are probably pretty good that you've just participated in the twice-yearly changing of the clocks. Amid the jokes about time travel and the elation at getting an "extra hour," there is the harsh reality that we're going to be faced with an ever-decreasing amount of daylight, which moving the clocks back will only hasten. The day we switch to Standard Time is one of my least favorite days of the year, which is why I've spent all day lounging around in my adult onesie and listening to the Smiths.

The view from my window, approximately 5:52 pm.

I am a fan of DST. I like coming out of work and having a good three hours, or even one measly hour, of glorious natural sunlight. Daylight saving time has many non-transportation-related benefits for me and for others: lessened seasonal depression (those sun lamps don't work, that is not the sun), lower energy costs (although those are doubtful), and less time watching TV or playing on the Internet because hey, what else are you going to do? But as this is a bicycle blog, let's just talk about the transportation effects, because those alone are enough to convince anyone that a move to permanent DST is an excellent idea that should be carried out immediately. According to some British news site:

• Car accident rates in November go up 17% as drivers adjust to darker conditions. This wouldn't happen if the change to darkness was more gradual, and if there was less darkness in the evening overall.
• Motorcycle accidents go up 41.8% during standard time. Our two-wheeled brothers and sisters bear the brunt of the decrease in driver attentiveness.
• 80 lives per year in the UK would be saved if permanent DST were the norm. Extrapolate this to the US, where  more people are driving longer distances, and that's a huge amount of people.

Although bike commuters aren't mentioned specifically on that article, it's pretty easy to see that permanent DST would have enormous benefit for us, the main benefit being more people would bike commute. I mean, I'm going to commute by bike all winter long anyway: I don't have a choice. But for people who do have a choice, it's awfully hard to convince them that it's safe and healthy to ride their bike home from work when it's pitch black outside. Most people who work standard shifts, and most students, stop working/going to school around five at the latest, which in standard time is just when it turns from dusk to evening. But with an extra hour? It would still be pretty light, and that extra 20-40 minutes of fading daylight might be enough to assure greener cyclists that the roads are still safe for them. And more riders equals more safety! (But still turn on those lights, kids.)

But also, more daylight means more protection from drivers. Cyclists are just as susceptible to driver inattention and poor night vision (hey, I have both!) as people on motorcycles, and just like them we're much less likely to survive an accident. Lights are an essential tool for cyclists, but no light can match the sun, the ultimate bottle dynamo.

Of course, a trade-off of longer daylight hours is that it will still be dark when many of us leave for the day, but personally I don't mind riding at dawn nearly as much as I mind riding at dusk. Okay, I do hardly any dawn riding because I am lazy and don't like leaving the house before mid-morning if I can help it. But the little I've done, I haven't minded. I'd guess that it's safer than dusk riding, because after all the light is increasing, so every minute that passes gets safer and safer.

I can't think of any good reason why we shouldn't have year-round DST. What do you think?