Women Who Bike Brunch

Just a reminder- hope to see a bunch of you at Area IV tomorrow at 11!  I'm making a reservation for 16 (14 who responded and a couple of extras just in case) so it should be a decent sized group.

And they're Off!

On my way past Government Center, I saw a bunch of bikers and a couple of team cars, so I took a detour to check out what was going on:

Turns out that this is the start of the Ride on Washington and all these folks were getting ready to start off to DC

Nicole, the Bike czar in orange jacket on left

I like the idea that someone might do the whole ride on a hubway :)
They're raising money for a good cause, but it's not my scene really, and I felt a bit out of place just wandering through.  One of the security guards asked me jokingly  if I were riding with the group.  In my skirt and stockings and upright bike with basket I was obviously not going along.   Although I read that they're going to get a bunch of people on bikeshare bikes to ride along with them for the final miles,  which I personally think is a more effective advocacy message than just a bunch of guys in spandex.

A lecture

I suppose I could have doubled up on more of the categories for the Utilitaire, but I wanted to add a bit more variety, so I looked for a lecture I could go to this week, and ultimately settled on a MIT Architecture public lecture about "L.E.F.T." Architects.   This firm, a pair of Lebanese-American architects based in NYC is kind of a classic "ART-chitecture firm.  They teach at places like Yale and Columbia, and they do very theoretical exercises that win a lot of prizes.   The one real project that they've built so far on their own (they've done some collaborations)  is very lovely,  and they have a real gift for form.
However, as an architect immersed in practice instead of academia, I have to wonder, why the creation of beautiful form is only considered legitimate if it has a dense (obtuse) intellectual narrative about politics and identity and conflict to go along with it.  Is beauty alone not enough?  I guess people think that beauty is too subjective in the modern era.   But intellectual narratives are subjective too.  So round and round we go.

I have a lot of thoughts about this, and the ambivalence I feel about academic architecture is why I don't make the effort to go to many lectures.    But I went.  By bike.   I got to ride on the Vassar street cycletracks, which is a pleasure.

I passed the ghost bike of the MIT grad who was killed at the intersection of Mass Ave and Vassar,  apparently waiting at a light to make a left turn when a wide turning semi ran him down. Very sad.

I took photos of some lovely details of the main MIT "rotunda" building. The kind of details that aren't fashionable anymore.  They've been replaced with dense narratives and intellectual determinations.

They sure are lovely though.

And I mostly enjoyed the lecture.  I think I should make more of an effort to go to lectures that might be more of my "thing" instead of lectures that fit into a prescribed time frame.   That realization alone was worth the trip, and I think will inspire me to go to more lectures.

Perfect timing

I wasn't feeling well last night and decided to take the T home,  which of course meant I had to take the T in this morning.   I was coming up at South Station, ready to walk the half mile to work, when I remembered- Hubway is back!

So it was that I took my first hubway ride of the season!  To my mind riding from the T to work is exactly what Hubway is best at.  Hop on,  ride 1/2 mile,  hop off and in to work!
Now if we can just get it in Cambridge......

Bikes are the new cars

According to this story from Transportation Nation (a public radio collaboration about transportation)  tech workers commute to work by alternative means at a much higher rate than other industries.

Now some of this might be correlation- a lot of high tech companies are in places that might already be attractive for riding (Palo Alto not known for frigid winters).  Or there might be other demographic forces at work.  But it's still interesting that there's a correlation between people who work in info-tech and biking

Thought this video produced by Google about their own commuter programs was interesting.



Some key points-  40% of the staff at the mountain view campus  arrives by means other than private car.  They provide very very very cute "Gbikes"for transportation within the campus

( I want!)

Another part of the transportation puzzle which I think they've got nicely figured out is that sometimes you need to run an errand during the day or at lunch. If you work downtown that's pretty easy because there are lots of services in a dense area. If you work in a suburb, and you take a bus, or ride a bike, you might not be able to do that easily, so you might be tempted to drive to make that possible.  Google has a private car sharing system so that you can use a company car for errands during the day.

I know that locally there's a transportation organization the "Charles River Transportation Management Association"  which not only does a shuttle service from the Kendall T stop to various locations in East Cambridge, but they also provide (free) emergency cab rides if you or a kid get sick during the day, or if you have to work late and miss your bus/train home.  I think that this is a good alternative for companies that aren't big enough to have their own dedicated transportation program like Google does.

Edit,  I'm going to add this article on the criticism Apple is receiving for their anti-urban new compound:

Western and River Street Bridges Meetings

Tuesday the 13th and Thursday the 15th there will be meetings on the proposed reconstruction/ redesign of the Western Ave and River Street Bridges.   These bridges are particularly gnarly right now because of the nasty intersections on each side and the links to the Mass Pike entrance/ exit.

There's a story, which may or may not be apocryphal,  that there was a conference going on at Genzyme, at one side of the Cambridge street/ Storrow/ Mass Pike intersection,  and the attendees were staying at the hotel on the other side of this intersection.   The conference organizers rented buses to shuttle participants all the way across the river on River street, across to Western Ave, back across the river and to the Genzyme campus,  because it was deemed so unsafe to walk across this intersection to go directly the one block from A to B.  Whether this story is true or not, it's definitely true that this is a meatgrinder of an intersection even if you're in a car, and it's particularly daunting if you're trying to cross by foot or on a bike.

There are a lot of tough connections here, and it's an uphill battle to convince Mass DOT that this is still a city street, not just an extension of two highways (Storrow and the Pike).  Boston and Cambridge are in the process of creating much better bike facilities on both ends of the Western Ave bridge, and on Cambridge street from and towards Allston.  The consultants are proposing a pair of cycletracks and a better connection and better signage,  but they're going to need support for providing this off-street cycling facility, and support for the idea that this needs to be an intersection that allows people not in cars to cross it safely.

Please consider coming to voice your support for safer bike facilities at either the Cambridge meeting Tuesday (tomorrow)  March 13th at 7pm,  at Morse Elementary School, 40 Granite St,   or the Allston meeting Thursday March 15th  at the Honan-Allston Library,  300 N. Harvard St, Allston.

Mass DOT's pages on the project can be found here.

Riding in circles

Today felt a bit like I was riding in circles,  on different bikes, to different destinations, but making the same loops over and over.  Fortunately it was a gorgeous day to be out on a bike, so it wasn't much of a hardship to be out riding around and around.

My first trip was ostensibly to meet Utilitaire 12.8,  "to the Bike Shop."  I had hoped to bike out to Harris, but the time change and other things got in the way, so I decided to hit Cambridge Bicycle,  which is just barely far enough away to qualify.  I am almost out of chain lube,  and after reading some glowing reviews wanted to try Chain-L.  I headed out on Minerva,  taking a somewhat roundabout route so that I could drop off compost,  and followed my normal weekday commute up to the point where I hit the edge of MIT,  and instead of hanging my normal left, I turned right and then doubled back on Mass Ave to Cambridge Bicycle.

Unfortunately they were out of Chain-L, but I bought some other lube which I've used before with good results. I'm fairly undemanding on chain lube since I have chaincases on most of my bikes, but it's never bad to have more.

They had replacement helmet liners for Bern helmets, which I haven't seen for sale anywhere else.  If you had a normal Bern helmet these would be a good way to winterize your helmet (next year, as I think the days of needing that kind of extra warmth are over for the year).

This antique relation of Minerva's was in the window.

I thought I was badly out of season taking Minerva's Christmas lights off last week:

I headed back on the shortest route, down Mass Ave, because the Scientist called and wanted me to pick him up at lab.  I normally try to avoid this area because it's like a live-action game of Frogger, but it wasn't bad on a Sunday afternoon.  Lots of people out enjoying the warm weather, on foot and by bike, and even the drivers seemed mellowed out  a bit.

I got in the car, drove to MIT (pretty much following the route I'd just taken)  and giving him his car, got Gilbert out of his office's basement garage.   Gilbert had been hanging out there since  I abandoned my ride home Thursday because I was being blown sideways out of the bike lane!

We had a brief conference about dinner, and I headed home, passing Cambridge bicycle again, and stopping off at the grocery store,  where I saw a Paper Bicycle.

 I'm not sure if that meant Velouria was around somewhere (Star market 4pm Sunday)  or if there's someone else with a Paper Bicycle in the Cambridge area.   I didn't see her in the store, despite doing an extra lap looking for her.

Cool Kickstand!

Looking at the Paper Bike in person, I think they're missing an opportunity to incorporate a light in the headtube/downtube connection.

Home again, I started pressure canning some pinto beans and was getting ready to make dinner, only to realize I was missing a crucial ingredient.  So back to the store (Whole foods where I dropped the compost earlier today) again.

Dinner was a special occasion because I bought the Scientist a Meyer Lemon tree for his birthday in June.  It's been hanging out in his office by a sunny window, and we finally have the first fruits from it- four gorgeously fragrant lemons!

To showcase them we decided to make lemon risotto and trout with lemon sauce.
We made a fairly standard risotto recipe, adding a chopped whole lemon about halfway through.

The trout filets we dredged in milk then flour, browning them in butter 3 minutes a side.  After they were golden, we added thin slices of lemon to the butter and pan juices and cooked them 2 or 3 minutes until they were browned and falling apart, then topped the fish with them.   Very yummy, and we have two more lemons to do something fun with.

So:  Utilitare 12.8 "Bike shop"  approx 2.3 miles RT for that loop.  Plus another 2 or 3 miles  of retracing my steps.