Pumping Iron

I stopped on the way home tonight to buy these:

I've decided I want to get an upper body workout (other than lugging my 45 pound bike around).
When you strap two 8lb dumbells on said 45 pound bike, it has surprisingly little effect on how hard it is to move around the city- because it's a small fraction of the overall weight.
However, they were attached to my rack with elastic straps, and the period of their vibration was significantly out of phase with the rest of the stuff that's attached to the bike.  Most stuff that I strap back there either has less mass, or it's spread out over a larger volume,  so it's not as noticeable.
But every time I went over a bump, there was a distinctive clunk a half a second after everything else had finished oscillating.  Kind of disconcerting, although not really that big a deal.

Trilobite

A couple of images from the bike lane at Main and Broadway

I reported the debris to the DPW Friday, and they sent me an email yesterday saying that they'd have someone take care of it.  Hopefully they'll sweep up some of the gravel while they're at it.

They fixed some potholes along here in the car lanes, and the gravel from the patches is really bad in the bike lane.

Bikes in the Wedding Industrial Complex

Saw these two images that are being used in advertising campaigns for registry services:
I'm a little skeptical of the messengers, but I like that they're using in both cases the image of a bride and groom actually on bicycles in full regalia:

Sorry for the heavy dose of advertising- don't worry FCC, I wasn't compensated for passing them along.

I'm just happy when bikes are used in a positive way in the media.

Bike Pods

I've seen these futuristic pods a couple of times as I ride by, and have never bothered to stop and get a picture.  They're covered bike parking outside the offices of Livable Streets Alliance.
I had actually forgotten about the Livable Streets talk, but saw a crowd of people, and someone trying the pod, so I decided to stop, and blew off my grocery run to go and hear the lecture about Human Centered design.
The pod in use-  I tried lifting it up and it's lightweight, and I think it has some kind of counterweight system that makes it easy to lift with one hand, while you move your bike into position.

Some of the cool bikes in a packed bike rack (we had filled up all the racks and all the nearby meters and street signs).

I didn't realize until I posted the picture that the Batavus had an olive frame and maroon fenders. Pretty slick

The talk was not bicycle specific, but was full of interesting pictures of people moving on all kinds of wheels through all kinds of urban spaces.  She had a lot of photos of South American public spaces, which is something that doesn't get seen a lot in planning and design magazines- there's much more focus on American and European public spaces.  The talk was thought provoking,  despite, or perhaps because she didn't have a real agenda or point to make- it was more about presenting data on all kinds of different ways for urban interaction to take place.

Practical Pedal

I'm as guilty as the next cycle blogger of slobbering over an every detail considered, aesthetically beautiful bicycle.

But sometimes pretty is as pretty does, and there's something compelling about a completely utilitarian functional machine:

Like this load carrying machine I spotted outside the Market Basket earlier this week.

It's ready to carry a kid, a load of groceries, and a laptop home without any fuss or muss.

It's got an odd stump of a saddle, that doesn't look comfortable to me, but looks like the product of a lot of trial and error and thousands of miles of perfecting the right thing for this specific person.

Decompression

A note about the bridge meeting, before our regularly scheduled post:
When I arrived (after biking over the Western Ave Bridge, which required aggressively taking the lane)
I was a little disappointed that there were only 8 or 10 bikes outside,  but the hall was full, and there were lots of people who spoke in favor of bicycle access improvements.  I think that they will take that seriously as design begins, but I think the the cycling community needs to stay involved to make sure bicycles are taken into consideration not only over the bridge, but at the nasty intersections on both ends.

I was leaving for work the other day, when I ran into an acquaintance of mine on the sidewalk.  During our conversation, she mentioned that her husband had started to walk to work- a trip of about 35 minutes each way.  That's considered a long way to walk, but it's about the same amount of time as my bike to work.

Tom Vanderbilt, in his book Traffic   made an interesting point, that human settlements have historically been limited to the radius of 30 minutes trip by whatever transportation method was available at the time.  For example, Medieval hill towns tend to have a radius of about 1  1/2 miles,  making a trip from the center to a field on the edge took about 30 minutes to walk.  Somehow that 30 minutes seems to be a convenient time for humans to travel-  long enough to get into the rhythm or mindset of the travel,  short enough not to get bored.

For me, the combination of physical exercise with that 30 minute transition is one of my favorite things about bike commuting.   It's a chance to wake up in the morning.  It's a way to decompress and put the cares of the day behind me on the way home.  I find that I can't concentrate too hard on anything when I'm exercising- partly because I'm having to stay alert in traffic, but even when I run,  I just can't focus on specifics.  It's  sort of a zen thing for me- I can think about things in a kind of foggy big picture way,  and my mind can work on a problem without getting too bogged down in the details-  it's actually a pretty good way to process things.  Even though the ride itself can be stressful in an immediate fight or flight sort of way when someone passes too close,  I find I react differently to those traffic interactions than I would conflict off the bike.

How long is your commute?   Does it calm you,  or stress you out?

Be heard about the bridges

Just a reminder- meeting tonight with Mass DOT at the Allston Library at 300 North Harvard street- 6pm to 8pm to advocated for bicycle lanes on the River Street and Western Ave Bridges.