“What facilities would improve your commute?”

My answers:

• Replace on-street parking with wider roads or bike lanes.
• Bike path intersections with roads currently require cyclists to press the “walk” button in order to get the lights to cycle so that bikes can cross safely. Reprogram intersections so that the cars don’t try to kill us.
• Bike boxes to prevent right-hooks at intersections.
• Fix grates, potholes, and infrastructure-related dips in pavement. They are hazards.
• Add Bus+Bike lanes to replace traffic lanes. It’ll help buses as well as bikes to speed through traffic.
• Reduce traffic speed through bumps and enforcement.
• Remove pedestrian bump-outs and on-street crosswalk warnings. They narrow the roads and limit passing opportunities, creating bottlenecks in otherwise open roads, and creating contention between bikes and cars.
• Increase bicycle parking, in visible areas with pedestrian traffic.

What are your answers? Go fill one out!

In other news:

• The bike commute continues unabated.
• I’m definitely slimming down since I started biking. I’m down maybe 9 pounds since December 2011.
• I mounted the Xtracycle Stoker Bar on my bike. I had to get a new seat post, but it works, and my daughter is more stable on it. More on that later.

2. The weather has been gorgeous. Biking every day has been no problem at all.

3. I drove in one day, a couple of weeks ago, because I had to go meet up with the family in Sandy Springs right after work. A bike trip up there from Midtown Atlanta would have been a Nasty Traffic Adventure, and I just wasn’t up for it.

4. We’re supposed to get rain this afternoon. I’ve got the rubber ducky poncho in case.

5. I had a run-in with a driver today. I was headed north on Parkway/Charles Allen at Ponce De Leon. I was slowing down for the red traffic light. A woman driving an 90′s Buick Roadmaster station wagon (blue with wood sides) decided that I wasn’t going fast enough, and pulled up beside me as if to pass, then started drifing to the right, squeezing me into the shoulder (where cars are usually parked, but which was clear today), to the right of the sharrows. Then she stopped at the light next to me.

I yelled at her through the window: “That was really dangerous. You need to be more careful.”

She rolled down her window. A 50-year old woman, dressed in blue scrubs, with a coffee mug in her hand: “You were going too slow.”

Me: “I was going as fast as a car. The light is red.”

Her: “You were taking the whole lane.”

Me: “I was taking the same space as a car and going the same speed.”

Blah blah blah. It was obvious that the problem wasn’t that I was slowing her down or actually in her way at all. It was obvious that she just didn’t like having a bicycle in front of her. The problem for her was that I was a bike. She wouldn’t have thought twice about doing that if I was a car.

What she did was illegal in Massachusetts (http://bikesafeboston.com/laws). I’m not sure if it was illegal in Georgia, but it certainly should be. She was trying to put me in danger. If I hadn’t been paying attention, or if I didn’t have a rearview mirror on my glasses, or if there had been cars parked right there, I could have been injured.

Moron. So it goes.

2. According to the computer, I have lost 3.89 pounds, even though I feel like I’ve lost 20.

3. From my office at 5pm pn a Friday, it’s just traffic-jammed cars as far as the eye can see. Biking home will probably save me 20 minutes.

4. I inhaled 2 bugs Thursday, none Friday.

5. Pretty much, as a rule, if a cyclist is wearing bike shorts or skinny jeans, they’re not interested in talking about their bike commute while they ride.

6. I had the opportunity to clean up and tune up an old touring bike I had laying around and give it to a friend. She actually used it to bike to work, which makes me incredibly happy.

7. My front pannier broke. It was an old (18 years) pair of REI’s then-cheapest small panniers, which had an aluminum rod that helped keep its shape. The rod fit into a little metal tube, but it didn’t stay in there securely, and it poked through the fabric and got caught in the spokes and bent. I had to use my knife to cut rhe bar out so that I could get home.

8. I got a pair of Jandd economy panniers. I needed a small pair that would fit on the lowrider rack, and that had an elastic mount point, since I take the bags off the bike when I get to work .My experience with Jandd gear is that it is bulletproof and well-designed, so I jumped. There were only a couple of things that I had to tweak. First, the top hangers on the bags were too far apart, so they didn’t fit on the lowrider. Second, the pannier’s handle had a leather strap (for connecting the handles of the two panniers together) that would have become badly tangled in the spokes. So, I pounded the snaps out of the strap with a hammer, which was easy. They fit great.

9. Shout out to Susan the GSU law student and Jeff.

2. Cheers to the bird that camped out on my handlebars and pooped on them twice while I was at work yesterday.

3. The bike commute is going freaking great. I’m bicycling every day. I only drove to work 3 days in 2012 so far.

4. I’ve used the bike rain cape a few times, and it’s workes great each time. I suspect it will be unbearably warm in the summer.

5. When I get to 4 way stops with cars, I’ve found that they tend to just sit there and wave me through, instead of taking their turn. This can screw up the whole flow of an intersection. I’ve taken to looking away and avoiding eye contact, so that they go when it’s their turn.

6. I made my first bona fide night ride with the new lights, a short trip to the grocery store, and the headlight lit up the street like it was daylight. Very nice.

7. This weather has been unbelievably nice. Why isn’t everyone biking?

On Saturday, we bought my wife a new bike, a Specialized Globe Daily 2 step-through in blue from Outback Bikes. It should be a great bike for her.

On Sunday, I redid the grips on my bike and my daughter’s bike. It’s amazing how just a couple of bucks spent on grips can make a bike feel like a brand new bike.

My bike used to be my dad’s bike, and he had put bar ends on it. I didn’t like the bar ends, so I pulled them off. I couldn’t slip the grips back to the end easily, and I didn’t like the grips in the first place, so I got a new set, very plain Giant grips in black. I really like this setup.

My daughter’s bike used to have white BMX grips, but the ends of the handlebars ate through the grips. A couple of drops of the bike and the grips were wrecked, with the metal handlebars sticking through: a real hazard. I drilled holes in a pair of handlebar end caps, to fit pink tassles, and put the handlebars with the tassles through the holes. So, nice white grips, tassles, and end caps; should be safe and hold together a lot longer than the last setup. She also got a basket, which I attached with hose clamps. It’s a very girly setup.

I also cleaned up a touring bike which I’m giving to a friend. It’s a blue Univega touring frame with 27″ tires and 10 speeds, a real classic setup. I set up this bike for my wife a little while back, but she didn’t like the geometry (she wanted more of an upright fit). So, hopefully it’s a good fit for my friend.

It was very bicyle-oriented weekend, even if it didn’t involve much biking.

The rain cape worked great! I was sort of hoping that I would get some more ran days to test it, but it just hasn’t happened. So, this report is from just the one rain day, BUT:

It is a Grunden’s Nordan Poncho, sold as a rain cape on Rivendell’s web store. It’s a bright yellow, heavy PVC poncho, which has features that make it usable on a bicycle. It is shorter on the butt than it could be, which keeps it out of the rear wheel. The front of the poncho has loops that make it easy to keep it on position while I am riding. It has no hood, allowing for the use of a helmet.

When I left work, it was raining. Not the faking-kinda-raining that we’ve been having periodically. It was a solid rain. On the ride, I was wearing my regular work clothes (business casual), as usual. I rode through one Very Serious puddle, which soaked some of my left shoe, but otherwise, I was completely dry. Rain day, rode dry. I can’t recommend it enough.

I think that I will have to find a lighter nylon or other breathable rain cape, especially for warmer weather.

This winter, I have met a bunch of really nice people on my bicycle commute, including:

• Corny, who takes the bus in the morning and bikes home in the afternoon.
• Mike, who works at Tech
• Roy, with the awesome green bike with internal gear hubs
• Jane, who doesn’t ride when it’s less than 38 degrees
• Jeff, who wears neon green and rides to Medlock every day
• Tony, who is running on the path every morning

I really like that my commute can be a little bit social.

I’ve only made 2 real rain rides this year. There have been a couple of days when it’s been solid rain in the morning and I’ve had to find alternate transportation. I’ve had a couple of sprinkling/drizzly morning rides, which were no problem to ride through. The only time I’ve pushed through the rain have been afternoon rides on towards home.

It was on those rain days that I discovered that my supposed rain gear is lacking. My jacket soaks right through, as do my “rain pants”. I need to investigate a good way to re-waterproof both of those. At this point, I don’t have gear that keeps me dry in the rain.

There are warm clothes and a shower waiting for me at the end of a ride home in the rain, so it doesn’t worry me. It would, though, be nice to stay dry the whole ride, and to be able to ride to work on rainy mornings.

Last Monday, the rain was coming down, and there was just no way that I was going to make the ride to work in the rain. So I spent a few minutes researching rain capes. A rain cape is a big, weird poncho that you can wear while riding a bicycle. It has tie-downs on the hands and waist to keep it from blowing around. It’s supposed to provide protection from rain coming from the sky. Your fenders provide protection from rain coming up from the road.

Together, they should provide enough protection to ride in moderate rain with moderate wind. I wouldn’t trust that they’d keep you dry in extreme conditions. But, what better way to find out than to try it out?

So, another piece of this is that I have made my first purchase from Rivendell Bikes, the mecca of practical cycling. Actually, my first and second purchases. The first: a Grundens rain cape. It’s a big, yellow, industrial strength poncho. The second purchase is old-school use-with-a-brush shaving cream. I’m that kind of geek.

It looks like I’ll have an opportunity to try it out this afternoon. Wish me luck.

The weather headed my way

So, umm. Hi. Come watch me bike to work.