True/False True Fact: Your father is always right....(sometimes)

I love my father.  And since he has retired, I've noticed that he emails me a lot more.  Rarely are the emails very informative - but rather contain a lot of spam or chain messages others have sent to him.  This is one I received last week regarding tips on how to pump gas.  Maybe you've received it as well.  (I apologize in advance for its length.....)

TIPS ON PUMPING GAS
Here are some tricks to get more of your money's worth.

Only buy or fill up your car or truck in the early morning when the ground temperature is still cold. Remember that all service stations have their storage tanks buried below ground. The colder the ground the more dense the gasoline, when it gets warmer gasoline expands, so buying in the afternoon or in the evening....your gallon is not exactly a gallon.

When you're filling up do not squeeze the trigger of the nozzle to a fast mode If you look you will see that the trigger has three (3) stages: low, middle, and high. You should be pumping on low mode, thereby minimizing the vapors that are created while you are pumping. All hoses at the pump have a vapor return. If you are pumping on the fast rate, some of the liquid that goes to your tank becomes vapor. Those vapors are being sucked up and back into the underground storage tank so you're getting less worth for your money.

One of the most important tips is to fill up when your gas tank is HALF FULL. The reason for this is the more gas you have in your tank the less air occupying its empty space. Gasoline evaporates faster than you can imagine. Gasoline storage tanks have an internal floating roof. This roof serves as zero clearance between the gas and the atmosphere, so it minimizes the evaporation.

To have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of gas buyers. It's really simple to do.

I'm sending this note to about thirty people. If each of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300)...and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers !!!!!!! If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted!

If it goes one level further, you guessed it..... THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!

Again, all you have to do is send this to 10 people. How long would it take?


After I read this, I smirked like a gambler who's holding a royal flush.  My commuter bike was sitting in the corner of my office, a little muddy from the morning ride in to work.  "Oh, silly father - does it really need to be so complicated?" I thought.

I replied to his email:

Dad,
Thanks so much for this note.  I'm forwarding it onto a few of my friends as instructed.  Plus I've added an illustrated tip of my own that I've noticed helps reduce the number of trips to the gas station.  I hope that was OK.

Ride a bike.

Love,
PooBy

I got no response.  Fast forward to the weekend.  The GEEC and I decided to ride our bicycles to and from the True/False film festival all weekend.   Despite the foul weather, the streets were teaming with like-minded cycling movie-goers and every bike rack we saw was piggy-piled with bicycles.  We waved at others on their bikes, riding quickly to and fro with laminated movie passes flapping at the end of lanyards around their necks.  We smiled, and nearly broke into song...just like this:

It was in the midst of this little cycling smug-bubble, between movies 3 and 4 on Satuday, that I began to get a little sleepy and decided I needed some coffee. The GEEC and I dashed over to Starbuck's to grab a quick cup of coffee before our next movie. We emerged with warm cups in our hands, unlocked the bikes and I attempted to throw my leg over the top tube.  Now, were I more astute, perhaps I would have been able to sense the cosmic tumblers that were begining to fall into position in delayed response to the snarky reply I had sent to my father's email days beforehand. Regardless, as I mounted my bicycle, I felt a sudden resistance in the movement of my leg and then heard a loud POP.  The resistance had vanished and a sudden rush of very cold air entered my groinal region.  I looked down to see that I had blown the entire crotch out of my jeans.  Luckily, the weather was cold enough that day that I decided to wear long johns underneath.  The GEEC, of course, snapped a picture.

Two attractive college-aged girls passed by on the sidewalk at that very moment and looked at my tattered pants.  They didn't snigger, they didn't giggle.  The look on their faces was as if they were watching a crow disembowel a road-killed skunk in the middle of the street.  The ride home was drafty and long and I wished I was in my car, which incidentally was on empty and required filling before we drove it to our final movie of the night.

Thanks for the tips, Dad.

The Fugitive

"In the midst of life, we are in death."  Thankfully, I'm not dead - so let me revise this and say "In the midst of serenity, we are in chaos."  So began my day this morning.  Long story short: I was hit by a car while commuting to work on my bike this morning.  Long story long: I had just exited the MKT trail onto Elm Street, heading east into campus when the altercation took place at the intersection of 6th and Elm.

Upon approaching the intersection I slowed, noticing a woman walking across the crosswalk on the opposite side, and a white car stopped and waiting for her.  This prompted me to unclip my right shoe, and put it on the ground as I came to a complete stop.  I checked to the right and left and noticed a red minivan approaching the intersection to my right, probably 50 yards away from even reaching the stop sign.  There was nothing to my left.  Looking across the intersection again, the woman had reached the opposite side and the white car began advancing toward me in its lane. I picked up my foot, clipped in and rode into the intersection myself.  Now, what follows happened so fast that there was simply no way for me to retrieve my camera and photograph the entire thing.  Thus, using Google Earth, I've recreated the incident step by step for you in a visually representative fashion.

(This is a representative figure of me entering the intersection of 6th and Elm from the West.  Please note that I have chosen Jens Voigt to play the part of me in this reenactment.  As many stand-ins are prone to do, he has elected to take some artistic license with respect to the portrayed speed and aggressiveness with which I was crossing 6th Street. I should note that in actuality, I was not "dropping the hammer" but rather barely crawling as it was still quite early in the morning for hammer dropping, and I'm not even sure I own a hammer to drop.)

Upon reaching the middle of the intersection, I noticed out of the corner of my right eye, that the red minivan approaching the intersection was not stopping at the stop sign, and was instead rolling through it at a pretty good clip directly toward me.  Thankfully, it was also turning right, to the East, the same direction I was heading.  Thus, I swerved away from the turning van, toward the middle of the road to avoid an impact, but the van's speed and trajectory still sent it into me, like this.

At this point, I'm pretty sure I yelled an explative of the four-letter variety that begins with the letter 'F' and simultaneously reached out with my right hand, slapping it on the front corner panel of the van as it hit my thigh and began to push me.....hard.  This kind of deflected me and the van and I traveled as one across the intersection, with me still upright on the bike, feet clipped in.  The sound of my hand slapping the hood must have finally alerted the driver that he was about to kill someone and screw up a really nice bike, because the van finally came to an abrupt halt.  I too was able to brake and come to a stop without going down.  Right about then, I'm pretty sure both of my adrenal glands squeezed down to the size of rabbit turds because my heart rate shot up about 100 ticks. 

I slapped his hood again for good measure, and am fairly certain I yelled some more profanity as I looked through the windshield to get a glimpse of the offending party.  I could see immediately that he was an older gentleman and that he was shouting back at me.  In the midst of the shouting, I noticed a very distinctive feature about his physical appearance......

Now, I'm aware that I have a fairly good imagination, and like to bend reality from time to time.  For example, I like to pretend the following: 1) that I'm a good cyclist, 2) that this blog doesn't suck that bad and 3) the fact that I owned every Duran Duran album in the 80's doesn't bring into question my heterosexuality.  Such self-delusion has gotten me through many of life's little trials, and I doubt I can stop now.  However, what I'm about to tell you is the absolute truth.  The driver of the van only had one arm, just like the guy in the movie "The Fugitive."

Only my guy was not wearing a prosthesis and I could clearly see him waving his stump at me.  At this point, I noticed that I was beginning to shake a bit and rode in front of the resting van over to the sidewalk and once again, stopped my bike to try to gather myself.  And by that I mean I needed to check my chamois for the Hershey squirts.  During mid-gathering, he sped off down the rode and I never even thought to look to get his license plate number.  A number of kind pedestrians asked if I was OK, and in fact, yes I am fine.  Just a little flipped out.

On monday, "Spokes Man" Robert Johnson wrote an article in the Columbia Tribune on how "Obeying traffic laws is a two-way street".  As you can imagine, the resulting commentary was quite colorful, but one reader's response in particular stuck in my head after this morning's run-in.

"dreamer0717" stated....."Every time I see bicyclists on weekends they are.....running through stop signs and red lights as though it was OK and pretty much ignoring every bike safety guideline....Perhaps PedNet could get out of Ward 1 long enough to educate the rest of the residents on safe biking and courtesy when riding the streets.  Focusing on select areas of the city and then writing a column about their work is pretty much "in my face" as I see it."

I bet PedNet cannot get in his face as much as the grill of a red minivan blowing a stop sign got in mine this morning.  I just looked down at my hand and noticed the dirt from the minivan's hood still caked on my sleeve.  I got lucky.  Be safe, kids......and watch out for the one-armed man driving a red minivan with my hand print on the hood.

CCPB

Walking the Fine Line of Bike Smugness

Yesterday I mentioned some of the more popular cycling blogs on the internet, one of which being Bike Snob NYC.  In the most recent edition of Outside Magazine, there is an article on bike commuting in the Culture section in which he provides a short commentary. 

Within the small amount of text they allowed him, the illustrious Snob throws in his two cents in the form of some helpful bike commuting tips under the title heading "Don't be an idiot."  While I agree with the general concept of not being an idiot, and also with many of his tips to avoid idiocy, his first major point left me rather non-plussed, to coin a favorite word of the Maestro himself:

First, let's be clear.  I respect the work of BSNYC as much, if not more, than the next Sidi-wearing, leg-shaving poseur.  So much so that this blog started out being called Bike Snob COMO, as douche-worthy as that now sounds.  Secondly, I'm even OK with elevating his status to the level of 'Blog Maestro' as labeled by the Outside editorial staff.  He is, afterall #2 on the all time cycling blog list.  And while I do agree that in principle, being "smug" can be fairly toxic, and result in "smug clouds" of such ferocity that they are only penetrable by Eric Cartman in deep-sea diving gear,

I still took issue with his statement that "If you think you are doing something special by riding a bike, you're just as toxic [as a V8-driving, earth-fouling fascist]".  Hang on,  I actually do agree with that.  There isn't anything inherently special about riding a bike-is there? But this is exactly what I'm talking about.  Herein lies a conundrum that we as cyclists face...walking the fine line of taking enjoyment in the fact that riding our bikes to work is beneficial for the environment in many ways, and at the same time not being a total ass-hat about it.

Consider this.  Each mile driven solo in a car emits approximately 1 pound of CO2. If your round trip commute to work each day is 10 miles, and you do that 5 times a week for 52 weeks a year, that's in excess of two tons of carbon dioxide you are keeping out of the atmosphere by riding your bike instead of driving a car.  Is this reason enough to think we are better than anyone else?  Certainly not.  But there's also no reason not to recognize the impact that something as simple as cycling to work can have on the environment if more people were doing it.  Unless of course you are riding your bike up to the drive-through window of McDonalds each morning, in which case you are supporting a plethora of other industries not healthy for the environment.  Interestingly, recent articles have outlined that bicyclists are being banned at the drive-through window of fast food chains even in progressive Portland (aka 'Bike-Mecca').  Let's examine one such story more completely and use this as an opportunity to make a smug-ruling on the bike commuter that was supposedly wronged in this scenario.

Sarah Gilbert reports that she was rejected and not served when she took her long-tailed bike which is "festooned with "Love your farmer" and "one less minivan" stickers..." through the drive-through window of a Burgerville in Portland recently. 

I am not a farmer.  But I have it under pretty good authority that farmers could care less if cyclists loved them or not, as long as we were buying beef, or milk, or bread or anything else that will continue to let them make a living the way they want to.  After Ms. Gilbert was rejected at the drive through, she parked her bike at the bike rack, went inside and ordered her food there.  She continues:

She says "I bought hamburgers inside....and then I tweeted...I'd already Googled..."  If I had read this statement 10 years ago, I would been confused, but would have assumed she had eatern her burgers, gotten wicked gas and perhaps shit herself.  But so goes technology, and certainly Twitter is no stranger to cyclists.  The managers of Burgerville apparently offered a full and profuse apology to Ms. Gilbert once they realized the individual working the drive-through window wouldn't serve her, but she still decided to rant on about how she had been discriminated against in her nationally published article.

A couple of questions: 

First - how was she going to eat her take-out while on a bike, anyway?  Holding a coke between your legs is a lot easier in the car than on a bike. And secondly, didn't she get ketchup and mustard all over her iPhone when she was busily tweeting and googling her outrage while macking on her Burgerville burgers?

Ok - so how are we going to call this one?

Yeah - I'm going to throw her a red flag.  This smacks of smugness to me.

What is scarier yet, is when a battle of smugness occurs, such as when one immovable smug force encounters an unstoppable smug object.  Such was the case documented in a recent post on Craigslist.

Titled, "You hit me with your Prius", it says:

"Me - Bicyclist, heading to jury duty on 10th street, Friday at 8:50am.

You - Prius driver, crossing over two lanes, hitting me with your car and speeding away.

I was hoping we could catch up for a cup of coffee, so I could get your views on the environment, and strangle you."

This cyclist may have an air of smugness about herself as she makes a special effort to highlight the fact that she was travelling by bicycle to fulfill a non-work related civic duty.  And the Prius driver is so smug that his hybrid green-mobile doesn't need to stop for hit-and-runs, because that would only compromise the fuel efficiency.  But in a miles-per-gallon throw-down, a 200 pound hypocrite inside a 2 ton, 50 mpg Prius still trumps a 120 pound civic do-gooder on a bike every day of the week.  Physics always wins.  And smugness evaporates pretty quickly when you're about to be run over.

My guess is that most cycling commuters, like me, are also motorists, but yet have a hard time fighting back their sense of righteousness, again like me, if only subconsciously, when passing by a long line of cars emitting their blue exhaust.  But when the first freezing rain comes, it's likely also going to be me sitting in that car fouling the air you breathe when you go riding by me on your way to work - so go easy with the smug look.

Pedal on!

What women want

As I steered my bike off the road and onto the MKT trail this morning, on my daily commute to work, I was struck with a fairly depressing thought that this would be the best part of my day.  It was all going to be downhill from the moment I arrived at my job and had to climb out of the saddle and park her for the day.  It's unfair really - to compare my day job to the actual process of riding to it.  Whereas one is permeated with the feelings of freedom and speed, the other is mired in minutiae and tedium.

As I pass and ride alongside other commuters each morning, I can't help but wonder how many of them are sharing my pain.  According to one 2008 study, 8.7% of people in Columbia report to at least occasionally ride to work or school in Columbia by bicycle. (Incidentally, this figure was up from the 2007 figure of 3.4%).   In 2008, the estimated population of Columbia was roughly 100,000.  Thus 8,700 individuals are estimated to get where they're going (at least part of the time) on a bike in COMO.  Now, in a recent survey, 4 out of 5 individuals (80%) in today's society do not have their dream job.  By my estimation, that means that just shy of 7,000 cycling commuters may be disgruntled just like me on their morning commute to work.  For whatever sick and twisted reason, I take pleasure in this fact.  I like knowing I'm not grumpy and alone on my morning commute.  It is perplexing to me, therefore, that so many people I pass in the morning look so damned happy and want to say 'hi'.  Yes - I love my morning ride as well, as I have indicated above.  But people, the research shows that 80% of you feel just like me: we are lemmings, only able to revel in the feeling of the wind in our fur for mere fleeting moments as we haul ass to the edge of the cliff where we inevitably and blindly fling ourselves into the gaping maw of our soul-crushing jobs every single morning.  Why, then, are you smiling at me?  Maybe I'm just not a morning lemming...

The North American disgruntled Brown Lemming (aka PooBah)

I'm also perplexed by why there aren't more cycling commuters in Missouri.  Some evidence suggests that as a state, Missouri is 7th from the bottom of the list of all states with respect to percentage of individuals commuting to work by bicycle.  Perhaps it's due to the average bike commuter's concern for the environment.  What I'm referring to is an op-ed piece appearing in the Toronto National Post yesterday penned by Mr. Terence Corcoran which describes how biking commuters are polluting the  environment and should therefore be taxed.

States Mr, Corcoran, "...drivers'...metabolisms are more or less flat-line.  They just sit there, burning up little energy personally but paying for the cost of their automobile's carbon footprint via taxes and fees.  Bike riders grinding up the same route burn up a lot more carbohydrates, which their bodies convert into carbon dioxide and exhale, adding to their carbon footprint.  The volumes are small, but it all adds up, and bicyclists don't pay."  Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a bona fide genius.

For the average cyclist to be able to exhale a comparable amount of carbon to what exits the exhaust system of a car in the form of carbon monoxide (not to mention the particulate matter, the sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde) would require that individual to have a lung capacity equal in volume to that of the Hindenburg.

Terence Corcoran

douche (can you see the resemblance?)

No, to answer the question of why there are not more bike commuters, we need not look any further than trying to understand what the average woman wants.  So says an article released in the October Scientific American, in which author Linda Baker contends that to get more bicyclists on the road, we must learn what women want.

 

"If you want to know if an urban environment supports cycling, you can forget about all the deailed 'bikeability indexes' - just measure the proportion of cyclists who are female."

Ms. Baker makes the argument that women have a natural aversion to risk paired with perpetuating gender roles in child care and homemaking.

 Thus, female cyclists that commute, typically do so for more reasons than just getting to work.  They are taking children to school and making trips to the store more so than men.  These tasks, paired with their disenchantment with dangerous riding situations means that they don't want to ride their bikes on errands in or around traffic.  This article attempts to prove this fact by quoting the results of a study which tracked cyclists in Portland to compare the routes woman take to get to their points of destination versus men.  Here's what they found:

"The project, which used GPS positioning to record individual cycling trips in Portland, compared the shortest route with the path cyclists actually took to their destination....Women diverted from the shortest routes more often."

In addition to risk aversion, the other explanation of why women cyclists divert from the shortest possible routes to their destinations when compared to male cyclists is because they don't have penises and thus have no sense of direction.  At least that is what my father would say.  But I disagree.  I have a penis and yet I have absolutely no sense of direction.  I've been known to get lost in parking lots before.  So clearly this article is on to something.

The paper continues, "Women are considered an "indicator species" for bike friendly cities....bike routes need to be organized around practical urban destinations to make a difference."  In other words, bike paths along rivers, and lakes and converted railway lines (like our beloved MKT and KT trails) are beautiful and fine - but to truly enhance bike commuting, safe routes must have destinations of real utility and practicality like schools and stores - not just be aesthetically pleasing.

I will try to suppress the faint aroma of irony tomorrow morning when I ride my metaphorical trail to nowhere as I bike to work.  If you should see a lemming pedaling frantically down the MKT, do me a favor and look disgruntled.

Pedal on!