Current Conditions:  Piercing headache. 

Long-term Forecast: Warmer with a  70% chance of bike commuting next week.

…compared to the ice on a watched bike lane.

I’ve been patrolling the bike lanes on my main routes to get to work – Summit and/or Minnehaha Avenues – to see if the ice is anywhere close to receding far enough to make biking to work tenable.

Not yet.  And I’ll cop to it; whatever motivation a zero-degree morning doesn’t sap, my cold-weather-averse kids do.

But next week?  A couple of days above thirty-five should do to the ice what a couple of “get on the bus on time, see-ya!”‘s should do for the kids.

It’s a strange time of year in Minnesota, weather-wise.  There’s enough sun high enough in the sky  to warm things up pretty well during the mid-day.  But there’s enough snow cover to reflect all that sunlight back into space, so nights still get pretty chilly – and it’s still a bit brisk when we get ready for work in the morning.

So for the next ten days or so we’ll be having highs pushing 30 during the day, but lows in the single-digits to barely over ten.

Which means that in the afternoon, I’m overwhelmed with the desire to start biking – and get bludgeoned in the morning by the idea that it’s probably be a really dumb idea for the time being.

That, and the roads in Saint Paul are atrocious this year.  The city got behind the eight ball from the beginning; the Christmas ice/snow storm left most of the side streets as rutted and filling-jarring as andean goat paths.

Anyway.  Soon.  The goal for the year is to be back on the road by mid-March, to make up for the lousy biking last year, when a family commitment left me driving around the metro every morning all summer.  While I did manage to bike a bit from September through November, and even squoze in a ride in early December, I never really got a rhythm going.  The other goal?  Get somewhere close to my 100-mile-a-week pace from 2008.

As soon as these freakin’ mornings warm up.

(NOTE:  While this blog’s policy is to generally leave comments alone, all anti-biking comments will be mutilated for my own febrile amusement.  There will be no further warnings).

With yesterday’s “blizzard”, and today’s relative chill, I think it’s time to declare 2009 biking season closed.  (*)

As I mentioned earlier, it was a rough year for biking; much of my summer got eaten up with family business that kept me off the road for most of July and August.  Biking in the fall, at least for me, takes a certain amount of momentum – and I had none.

Still, I managed to bike through much of September, a good chunk of October, a bit of November, and I even squeezed in one rare, chilly December ride.

And it was a good year in political metabiking, too; the case the biking is more conservative than not biking was proven pretty conclusively.

But I think I’m gonna call it for the year. But I’ll be shooting for a March start date in 2010.

See you then!

(*) And yes, I know people are still on the road.  That’s hardcore.  More power to ’em, but it’s not for me.

For the past couple of years, from whenever the snow’s been off the roads until I just can’t manage it anymore, I’ve been biking to work.

Or trying to.

2007 was a good year.  After about 15 years of virtually no biking at all, I commuted pretty much daily from June through August.  And I did it without dying of a heart attack.

2008 was even better.  I managed to bike pretty much daily, from late April ’til late September.  It was a hard fall, and getting the kids to school ate up a lot of time and effort, but it was a great season, all in all.

This year?  Enh.  I spent most of the summer dealing with a family situation every morning, which precluded most biking from mid-June until September.  And between the cold, hard fall and the usual school schedule, it’s precluded a lot of biking; I’ve managed a couple of days on good weeks, less on others.

But this week, with temps up in the high fifties and brisk but temperate mornings?   Yesterday felt good out on the road.

Yeah, I’m fixing to send the season off with a bang.  Might even bike to the station on Saturday, with any luck.

Next biking season, though?  It’s gonna rock.

Last year, I managed to commute via bike pretty much every day from late April to early October.  I managed to get into the best shape I’ve been in in decades.  It was great.

This year?  Ugh.  Not so much.

A family commitment left me driving to appointments early every morning for the past 11 weeks or so.  That squeezed out most daily biking, of course; I got in the occasional weekend ride, but riding once a week doesn’t have the same effect as being out there every single day.

But school’s back in session, and things are clipping along generally fairly well – so yesterday, it was back in the saddle.

And…ugh.  I feel like it’s mid-April all over again.  Although to my credit, I managed the end-of-day climb up Cathedral Hill without any huffing and puffing, so maybe I held up better than I thought.

Anyway – the plan is to ride every possible day until the weather makes it utterly impossible – and by utterly, I mean “drifts over my 27″ wheels”. 

Or at least that’s what I mean at the moment.

Somebody with a French-y sounding name – Bartleby Camembert or some other limp-noodle fake name – writing at Anti-Strib took yet another dork-fingered whack at bikers a few weeks ago.

Unusually for a “conservative”, writing on a “conservative” blog, Mr. Chablis’ piece borrows from that great conservative thinker, Vice President Joe Biden, and is entitled “Efficiency is Patriotic”

There is another problem I have with biking as a primary means of transportation, is that it is inefficient which I feel is un-American

Yeah, that’s right.  “Life, liberty, and on-time trains”.  It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence.

No, Mr. Brioche; “Efficiency’ is a market imperative.  Since you are (or ape) French, we’ll have to explain that to you.  That’ll come later.

I know that a few people are confused as what could be more patriotic than an individual pedaling alone to work?

Really, Mr. Cote-du-Rhone?  “A few people” are “confused” about this?

Name them. Provide some cites.

Because…no.  Nobody is confused about the “patriotism” of riding bikes.  Nobody.  Not one person in the entire world.

Seriously – when did Anti-Strib hire Grace Kelly?

One of the greatest assets of our economy has been its flexibility. Americans, much more then Europeans, have always been ready and willing to change. Liberals want us to become less flexible and more rigid. They want us all to live near LRT and bike paths.

Right.  So what?

Some liberals would also like us to be vegetarians; that doesn’t mean enjoying a veggie burrito at Chipotle for lunch is “Unamerican”.

But since the subject is flexibility, let’s talk about how very, very hidebound and inflexible – which apparently means “Unpatriotic” – Mr. Pepe-le-pew is:

Biking is a big part of the liberal dream to restrict the freedoms of Americans. If you can only afford to bike or take mass transit to work, your job options are severely limited. This not only reduces the pay of the individual, it also reduces the productivity of our society.

Let’s stop right here.

Who says it’s a matter of affording to ride a bike?

I bike to work because I enjoy it.  I drive it sometimes, I bus it others, and when weather permits, I bike it.  In other words, I exercise flexibility.  Something that apparently is beyond Mr. Blancmange’s comprehension.  I have spent most of my career driving to work, because the drive was too far and the kids’ demands too great.

And now – after years of looking – I finally have a job in the city proper, an easy six miles or so from my house.  And I can do anything I want to get to work…

…by Mr. MarieAntoinette’s leave, naturally.

My schedule this fall was this: up at 6:30 AM so I could be at the U of MN campus by 8:00 AM. Drive to client A north of St. Paul after class. Drive to client B in White Bear Township at 12:30. Leave WBT at 5:15 to go back to the U of MN campus, drive home at 9:00PM. Now try this scenario with LRT, buses or bicycles. It just doesn’t work.

Oh, waaaah.

I remember when I could be the kind of layabout slacker with a schedule like Mr. Passepartout’s.  I’m up at 5:15 most every day, getting in an hour or so of blogging.  Then I’m waking kids up, getting them up and on their way, and getting off to work -which, over the past fifteen years, has been anywhere from Chanhassen to Maple Grove to Eagan to Farmington to Eden Prairie to Minnetonka (and sometimes more than one; when I was a consultant, I’d sometimes work two or three gigs at a time) to, after 13 years in IT, Saint Paul.  Then home, for making dinner, housework, kid stuff, finish work that I brought home, doctor appointments, grocery shopping – I rarely stop moving before 10PM.

And somewhere in that schedule I gotta find some time to try to stay in some kind of shape, so I hopefully don’t die of a heart attack before I’m 50.  Some guys might go to the gym – but that’s pretty much wasted time.  Inefficient, if you will.

So I bike.  It’s fun.  It’s just about the best cardio there is.  I get between 40-60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous cardio a day, including the brisk, humility-induciing climb up Cathedral Hill at the end of the day. It fits into time I’m already spending; it’s faster than the bus, and when you factor in parking and walking to work, not a whole lot slower than driving.  It costs almost nothing (more financially efficient).  It makes my work day more efficient, since the morning workout pumps up my energy to a level that – I guarantee this – you can not match, Froggy LeFroggue. And it is fun, which is more than you can say for plodding away on a treadmill or sitting in traffic in your Renault LeCar or puttering along on your “motorcycle”.

As you can see this level of productivity is only possible with roads and cars.

The level of productivity Mr. Baguette is yapping about is only possible if you have a stroke and a broken leg.  Give me a break.

Look – seriously, for a moment?  DUH.  I mean, big D, small uh.  As I’ve noted in this space for years, most of the transit snobs you read and run into may or may not have jobs, but the incomprehensibly vast majority seem to live alone, or with another able-bodied adult.  And it might be possible to live a car-free life with kids, but who the hell wants to try?  The transit snobs are screechingly myopic; anyone who thinks they can live and work and raise kids, even near a bus or train stop, and have a life that involves much of anything but planning how one is going to get places and earn the fare for it, obviously hasn’t tried.

Which doesn’t excuse the kind of “us against them” conceit that Mr. Gruyere wallows in.

So if you believe in freedom and want to leave your kids with a growing economy and a shot at a life at least as good as yours, you’ll stop supporting job killing ideas like LRT, mass transit and bike paths.

Whoah, Monseuir Andouilette!  You changed the subject!

“Biking” is not the same as “bike paths”.  One is a personal choice one makes with one’s own money, time, and effort, exercising the adult free will to decide how to live one’s own life, using streets he or she has paid for with taxes already.  The other is a government program. 

Do try to keep things straight, here?

Our country and economy are built in individual freedom, flexibility and efficiency. Anything that reduces that is a threat to our future and ultimately our country.

Whatever, Mr. Phroux-Phroux Authoritarian Scold Who Learned Everything He Knows About Blogging, Logic and apparently Politics From MNob and Grace Kelly (Who Have Never Been Seen In The Same Room).  The future of this country depends not one limp froggy piddle on how we get to work.  It depends on the job we do once we get there.

Jeez, Tracy Eberly; who’s checking the green cards at Anti-Strib these days?

Columbia, Missouri – known as “The Berkeley of the Ozarks” – has passed a law against road-raging against bikers. 

My jury is still out on the law itself – stupid road rage is stupid road rage, no matter who it’s aimed at.

But this op-ed in the Wichita paper touches on some preconceptions that need to get looked at:

Imagine if you will, cruising down the street in your car when you come upon several bicyclists heading the same direction that you are going. It’s a busy street and they are riding two and maybe even three wide, and you’re not able to get around them for quite some time. What do you do?

That does depend on local laws.  Bikes are entitled to half a lane and three feet of clearance in Minnesota (assuming I have it correct).  They’re also well-advised to clear out of the way of traffic, into the parking lane, if people are piling up behind them; tense drivers are dangerous drivers. 

You might decide to hit your horn to encourage them to move over a bit. You may shout at them, telling them to get off of the road, or, as you finally do pass them, you may extend a hand and a certain finger while yelling obscenities at them. Now I would never endorse nor do the two latter ones, there have been plenty of times when my horn was put into effect.
As of this past Monday, all of those reactions could cost a heavy fine or even land you in jail for up to a year over in Columbia, Mo. The Columbia City Council passed an ordinance prohibiting such road rage geared towards bicyclists. Don’t be surprised if that trend starts to take hold here in Kansas, especially over in Lawrence.

Enh.  Road rage should be illegal, no matter who the target is.  Bikers are more vulnerable, since we’re not wrapped in a ton of metal, but rage is rage. 

But here’s where we get into preconceptions:

I understand that road rage is high, especially against bike riders. The general knowledge, or I should say, what everyone thinks concerning bicyclists may be wrong. They do have a right to the road just as much as cars do. I don’t have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is the fact that bicyclists are supposed to follow the same rules as cars do.

Stopping at stop signs and red lights. Signaling when turning.

Well, no kidding.  I mean, bikes are vehicles, and they should act like vehicles – right?

I mean, just like the semis on Summit Avenue have to follow “turn on red” rules, and dirt bikes on University Avenue have to mind the speed limit, and mopeds are allowed to use the shoulders on the freeway just like MTC buses, and bicycles have to maintain proper clearance on the freeways!

Well, no – semis aren’t allowed on Summit, dirt bikes aren’t allowed on the street until you slap a lights and signals on ’em, and mopeds aren’t allowed on the road at all (much less freeway shoulders), and bicycles aren’t allowed on the Interstate. 

Vehicles are not one size fits all, even in the eyes of the law.  They have different rules. 

I’m an advocate of the Boise Stop rule, in which bikes are allowed to treat stop signs as “Yield” signs, and stoplights as stop signs.  It doesn’t change the rules of the road – just makes them safer.  Intersections where cars and bikes aren’t mingling about as fake equals are just plain safer.  Having bikes and cars trying to accelerate out of corners together is bad news – getting through or out of intersections is always good if you’re a biker – and that doesn’t even address the stress injuries caused by sitting too long at pointless lights, letting ones’ muscles get all cold, then heated up, then cold again.

So yeah, bikers should follow the rules.  But the rules should make sense, too. 

“Conventional Wisdom” among anti-bicycling conservatives is that as the number of bikers rises (as it has been steadily for some time, which accelerates as gas prices rise), the carnage on the road rises with it.

Not, apparently, so, according to Quimby:

…as bicycle ridership has increased in New York City, the absolute number of bike injuries and fatalities has dropped.

That means the rate of accidents has dropped from roughly 4,000 annual casualties per 80,000 daily riders to well under 3,000 per 160,000 riders — about a three-fold improvement.

Which I’d suspected would happen, but this is the first empirical evidence I’ve seen.  It’d be even more interesting to break that into accidents per rider mile – since I’d suspect as the number of bikers doubles due to gas prices, the lengths of their trips do as well.

The most interesting thing to look at of all, though?  I started looking at this a few weeks ago, but haven’t had time to follow through:  Compare the number of person/years lost to bike fatalities to the number of person-years gained by previous non-riders getting into better shape from the exercise they get from biking.

Example:  Say in a typical year (1992, in this case) 459 cyclists above the age of 20 died in bike/vehicle accidents (we’ll discount children, since they’re not likely to be commuting or biking for fitness).

Let’s break ’em down by age group:

Now, let’s figure how much life expectancy was lost (taking the US average life expectancy of 78 years  and the average age in each bracket (let’s assume that the years spread evenly in each age bracket; there’ll be as many below the midrange of each bracket as above it) to figure the total person/years lost.

The result?  Bike accidents claim 15174.4 person/years (using the figures above).  A ghastly toll?  Certainly.

But what do we gain from having thousands more people being in better – much better – physical condition?  Say, having a bunch of formerly-sedentary mid-forty-something suddenly getting into the best shape of their lives?  Or a bunch of twentysomethings go through their lives never falling out of shape in the first place, since biking is, along with swimming, the the most sustainable form of exercise (and a lot less likely to bore you to death than swimming)

How many person-years do we gain?

Let’s extrapolate from New Yorks’ numbers: growing from 80,000 to 160,000 bikers out of a population of 12,000,000 extrapolates a rise from 2 million to 4 million bikers nationwide; let’s arbitrarily lop those numbers in half, just to be very (what else) conservative and allow for those who live where biking just isn’t tenable (say, people who commute 60 miles to work, or farmers, the handicapped, everyone), and say that the American recreational, fitness and/or commuting biking population has risen from 1 to 2 million in recent years.

Thirty minutes of (aerobic) exercise a day adds four years to life expectancy compared to sedentary people.

So let’s say that one percent of those two million bikers rides half an hour a day (which, by the way, I do): it’s a hopelessly-low 20,000 – which translates to 80,000 person/years of life expectancy added.  Ten percent (200,000 daily riders, 800,000 person/years) seems on the high side of plausible; let’s split the difference, say 100,000 Americans, like myself, ride at least five days a week for at least half an hour a day.  That’s 400,000 person/years added to life expectancy (using a formula that fudges sharply toward the conservative),

But even if you take the lowest feasible figures it’s a 6-1 skunking: Biking saves 80,000 person/years to 15,000 lost to accidents, even if we take comically-low numbers, 30-or-more to one otherwise.

Some biking critics say (chant, really, more as an autonomic response than a considered position) that biking is a “dangerous hobby”.  But when you look at actual numbers, it seems that not biking is the risky frippery.

So yesterday was the first “round trip” commute – riding both ways – of the season.  Which means the first climb up Cathedral Hill of the season.

Make no mistake about it; by June, I’ll be zipping up Grand Hill like it’s hardly there (although Ramsey Hill is kinda the great white whale for me; maybe this year, maybe not.  Even when I was in my twenties, I didn’t ride up Ramsey Hill).

But the day-by-day hill that I face in my workadaddy, hugamommy routine is Cathedral Hill – the big hill from which the, doy, Cathedral of Saint Paul looks over downtown.

The BikeRadar map says it’s about a 100 foot climb from my office to the corner of Summit and Selby.  And in about three weeks, that’s all it’ll be.

But that first climb-out of the year is always a bear, even if you take the long way up the hill – up Wabasha to the 94/Capitol frontage road, and then up John ireland Boulevard.
But a smaller bear every year.  Two years ago, when I started bike-commuting, I ran out of wind aroud Marshall and had to walk it the rest of the way on my first attempt.  Last year, I made it to the top (in first gear, nice and slow and easy).

I did about the same yesterday, but feeling much better about the whole thing.

And by golly, it’s time to get on the road again!

Shucks!