40+ years of bikes

In honor of bike-to-work day: Friday, May 15, 2009.

c1967: I must've had access to a bike back when I was a five-year-old, because I distinctly recall crashing into a car while riding near my family's apartment in the Bronx. The car was stopped at an intersection and I rode right off the curb into it, but I wasn't going fast enough to cause more than a scratch to myself or either vehicle.
c1970: Groovy custom-built banana-seat coaster-brake with chopper handlebars, a trim little sissy bar, rear shock absorbers, chrome fenders, and a leather carry bag on the back. See snapshot. Rear wheel was a fat-tire slick, front wheel was much smaller and a bit narrower. My uncle built this, just as he custom-built bikes for everyone in my family. This is the bike I learned to ride on -- no training wheels. I think the first of my two relatively serious bike accidents was on this bike, when my stupid kid self put his foot between the front wheel and the fork while moving fast. Wheel abruptly stopped turning and I went flying over the handlebars onto the pavement.
c1971: My uncle built a much more rugged bike for my younger sister. Same-size fat knobby tires front and back. It wasn't really mine but I borrowed it a lot so I could ride off bluffs into gravel pits, jump dirt piles, the usual crazy kid stuff. Don't recall ever wiping out. The bike was very popular among my friends, but I didn't share it much -- it not really being mine to share. Basically a BMX bike before the term existed.
c1974: Montgomery Ward 10-speed with disc brakes -- a birthday present while I was in Jr High. The disc brake worked better than caliper brakes in wet conditions, but was otherwise a gimmick. This was my bike for the next 13 years. In college, with a load of books in both hands and riding no-handed downhill around a curve, I hit a pothole and wiped out. Messed up the bike a bit with some road rash left over for me, the second of my two relatively serious bike accidents. Walked it the rest of the way to my dorm, left it unlocked in the bike rack there -- I was mad at it, knowing that no one would be stupid enough to ride away on a bike in that condition, at least not for long. Bike was stolen by the next morning, of course. After the end of the semester I learned that campus security had recovered it half a block away. Apparently the thief had fallen off and then a car had run over the front wheel, which was bent. Bike stayed in that condition for a couple more years until after graduation, when I had a LBS fix it up, putting caliper brakes on the rear wheel since replacement parts for the Monkey Ward disc brake were no longer available. Bike-commuted in 1985 on side streets between South Pasadena and Pasadena. Also rode alongside the 1984 Olympic marathoners in Los Angeles one memorable time -- I'd hoped too see more of that race, but my roommate and I hadn't reckoned on how fast they were even though we were runners ourselves, so we didn't get to see nearly as much of the race as we'd hoped. Moved to Long Island and then to DC, riding it for recreation both places. Finally gave it to my best friend's landlord (his name was Kelly and he lived in College Park, MD), who needed it a lot more than I did. I did not perceive that suburban Long Island or Northern Virginia were safe places for regular bike-commuting in those days.
1987: My uncle came out of bike-builder retirement to build me a 10-speed for Christmas. It had a big rubber clown horn on the handlebars. After getting it boxed up in San Diego for the flight home, I rode it once in the DC winter. It was an awesome present, a nice bike with an even nicer horn. Left it in my apartment building's locked bike room afterwards, but didn't chain it up there. Never saw it again.
1988: Bought a steel-frame Puch 12-speed at age 26 -- my first self-purchased bike. Rode it for recreation on the W&OD trail in Virginia and, after moving to Sacramento, the American River Trail. Citrus Heights/Roseville wasn't a great place to bike-commute then, either. Moved to North Seattle, bought my first helmet, and bike-commuted downtown and to Bothell. Bought a cushy seat when riding over roots on the BGT started causing electric bolts of pain to shoot from my keel even when I wasn't on the bike. After 10 years in Seattle, mounted an electric motor on it and bike-commuted some more to Bothell, Belltown, and Redmond. A LBS replaced the 6-gear freewheel with a 7-gear equivalent. Once I was in good enough shape for the long ride to/from Redmond, pushing that heavy old steel frame with a second high-resistance chain to the attached 12-pound motor, with or without the 15-pound battery, was more effort than I wanted to expend, so I started borrowing the Trek 720 I bought in Eugene for my wife 10 years earlier, raised the seat way up high, and used that for a couple months. My wife eventually wanted her bike back.
2007: Dropped a K on a Trek 1500. 105 crank, chainrings, and headset, Ultegra rear. The road rocket. Thing can go up hills by itself. Bike-commuted to/from Redmond and later to/from Tukwila. Spilled once while going around a hairpin turn too fast -- I wasn't used to the high center of gravity or the headset integrated shifters/brakes, and didn't brake enough before starting the turn. Started buying accessories for night and wet riding: fender, lights, dayglo vest, tools, small carry bag.
2008: Bought a Novara Buzz V so I could ride Iron Horse State Park over the Cascades between Duvall and Cle Elum with my 11-year-old son. The crossbar-style handlebars necessitated fingerless gel gloves to keep my hands from going numb. Worked nicely enough as a commuter that I switched the cushy seat from the road rocket, which I didn't ride for another 9 months while I used the Buzz commuter exclusively. This year I bought a second cushy seat so I can ride either one of my two new bikes with little prep. I bike/bus commute 1-3 times a week these days. I also pack up the whole family for occasional recreational bike rides around North Seattle: to/from school, baseball practices (my 11-year-old son now sometimes bikes to his practices or games solo), picnics at Gas Works, Costco (!), Pop Mounger pool in Magnolia, SeaFair, even Red Hook in Woodinville and Gene Coulon Park in Renton, really anywhere we want to go. I still have the steel electric Puch, though I don't ride it much anymore.

Family bikes

Kettler tricycle
Winchester bike trailer
16" Novara coaster-brake
16" hand-me-down pink/purple coaster-brake with a little flowered plastic basket on the front
20" Raleigh BMX coaster-brake
20" toy-store 7-speed BMX
24" Giant 21-speed BMX-style
24" Trek 21-speed hardtail
Trek 720

My wife rides the Trek 720. My two oldest sons (11 and 9) use the 24-inchers. My 6-year-old daughter uses the Kent single-speed. My 3-year-old son hasn't quite graduated from the tricycle to training wheels on the 16" Novara -- he mostly rides in the trailer behind me, but he won't stand for that much longer.

We are fortunate in that most of these bikes are hand-me-downs, excepting only the little Novara which we bought for my oldest son when he was 4 years old, my wife's Trek, and the Giant which we bought used from a local meteorologist when her son got too big for it. We had a couple more hand-me-down kids' bikes once, one a Kent that a random kid at the coach-pitch field gave us one day, and which we eventually donated in turn to BikeWorks, the other from a neighbor that we lent to a babysitter who hasn't been heard from since. We're ready to pass on the pink/purple coaster-brake now that my daughter has gotten too big for it. The tricycle has just about fulfilled its purpose, too. Gotta share our good fortune, after all, plus our garage is crammed with bikes! The trailer is still useful for carrying cargo for picnics and shopping trips.

My nine-year-old son is the only one of my kids who's had an accident to date; while riding up 8th Ave NW with his older brother and me last year, he wasn't watching where he was going and rode right into the back of a parked pickup truck, though he wasn't going fast enough to hurt himself or anything else. Really, a little safety education goes a long way -- my sisters and I never had any, and our kid bike accidents (especially my sister's big one) were a lot more serious than anything my kids have experienced. So far. Knock wood.

Thoughts on NY subway transit relevance to smaller cities, Part 1

My brief adventure with Brooklyn and Manhattan transportation brings into sharp focus the key issues in any transit system's success, which the New York subways are largely successful in addressing, but which many other municipal transit systems struggle to meet:

Convenience
Capacity
Speed
Low cost
Flexibility
Safety
Reliability
Congestion-proof
Few transfers

The New York subways feature huge trains and relatively high frequencies, and the system is capable of moving extremely large numbers of people almost anywhere they want to go in the city. Waits at transfer points complicate matters, but frequencies are high enough (and surface traffic is generally bad enough, with parking tight enough and expensive enough) to make subway travel attractive for most New Yorkers. The only real physical constraint to transit travel there is the system knowledge riders need in order to make timely and direct transfers. This is partially solved through use of a single subway map (helpfully named "The Map"), good signage, necessity, and exercised memories, though it doesn't seem to cover buses or the Long Island Railroad, which might've been a good option for me to get from the Brooklyn Bridge to JFK. Note that this solution doesn't necessarily transfer well to other cities, few of which are served so comprehensively by rail transit. In the past I have also used Port Authority buses between New York and its immediate New Jersey suburbs. Here in Seattle, by contrast, for the remainder of my lifetime there will never be more than a single T-shaped light rail line in the city, intended to be fed in the near future only by a (good) bus network. Its trains will be considerably smaller than New York's, also suffering from somewhat less frequent service.

By the way, on the bus I was riding to Tukwila last this week when I started writing this, a passenger was attempting to get the bus driver to help him locate the driver of the bus he'd been on a few weeks ago when he was assaulted by another passenger; punched in the face several times apparently because that passenger disagreed with some comments made ("out of context", according to the assaulted passenger) in a conversation directed to someone else. He wants that bus driver to act as a witness in case the assaulted passenger takes legal action against the man who attacked him. Obviously passenger safety in public transit won't be guaranteed in Seattle or New York or anywhere else, until such time as passengers get to choose who they ride with.

Another safety-related issue I noticed in driving and walking around New York was that it seemed like there was an NYPD patrol car parked on every other block. I wondered how this could be possible until I considered the high residential density there; of course police will seem so much more visible even when the ratio of police to civilians is the same as it is here in Seattle -- the greater density means that the police will also be closer together, and hence more visible.

All in all, the investment required to bring a medium-sized, medium-density city like Seattle the level of rail transit that serves such a large proportion of New Yorkers so well would be basically impossible with public money, and at some point we have to ask ourselves as taxpayers how much rail is enough, especially when a rail transit spine can be complemented effectively with more cost-effective alternatives. Which brings us back to where we started in this post: finding convenient, high-capacity, fast, cost-effective, flexible, safe, reliable, and congestion-proof public transit that minimizes transfers as well as the time spent waiting for them.

Yes, adding more buses can improve this, making the bus transit network more convenient and higher-capacity at a relatively low cost, but this would not really do anything for all of the other considerations: bus transit will still be slow, prone to getting caught in congestion, not particularly safe, and requiring transfers that might have long waits. Even a fully rail-networked Seattle would not feature very quick urban transit, with safety a continuing concern and transfers required, likely with longish wait times at transfer points, and of course the cost to build a grade-separated rail transit network throughout the Seattle metropolitan area would be astronomical.

So, with the economic and environmental unsustainability of private automobiles becoming increasingly obvious, what other choices do we have? More on that next time.

New York

I flew to Manhattan for a long weekend with my two sons for my grandmother's funeral. We saw her off in a fashion befitting her long, fruitful life, in which she made many friends and a lasting impression on the big family she raised and the bigger extended family they raised in turn. She was a talented painter as well as a wonderful mother to her six sons and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A certain Irish pub in Brooklyn saw a lot of extra business that weekend from our assembled family; we still love to see each other from our four compass points even in times of sorrow like this year, or tragedy like earlier this decade.

The day after our farewell to Gram, I took my sons and my sister's family over the Brooklyn Bridge and into Manhattan. We walked over the bridge, which was an adventure in itself, then took the subway to Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, where we waited for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. The enormously long train came a few minutes later, and we dilly-dallied our way to the ferry terminal, then hustled to the ferry entrance roughly 15 seconds after it honked its horn and set sail. The next ferry would depart half an hour later, and unbeknownst to us at the time, the ferry we'd just missed was the last one of the day that would allow us to get to Liberty Island early enough to actually climb up into the statue.

Yes, the boys were disappointed, but it was still a fantastic day for all of us, including eating hot dogs from a street vendor who was wearing a grungy NY Yankees jacket and who looked just like anyone else's working class Italian-American father. My sons agreed that it was the best hot dog they'd ever eaten, and I thought it was mighty fine, too.

On our way back we took a much more direct subway , which dropped us off within a few blocks of our hotel, then we dashed upstairs for our luggage, caught a cab, and headed to JFK for the long, late flight home.

New York City subways are something to behold. The trains are huge and frequent, and they run practically everywhere in the city. Any place in the city is nominally just a transfer or two away, but in practice usually much less, since from my time in New York I remember that many New Yorkers generally don't have to travel far to get what they need, except perhaps in their commute.

With the freeways jammed on Sunday afternoon, our route back to the airport took us along Atlantic Avenue through Brooklyn, which closely paralleled a subway line that emerged to become an elevated train about halfway there. Under more normal circumstances we might have taken a train like this one, but the concierge at our hotel told us when I asked about it earlier that morning that the A-Train to JFK wasn't running at that time. He offered shuttle buses as an alternative to get halfway there, then a shorter version of the A-train which connected to an airport train, but our time was short and it looked like a cab to the terminal was going to be the only alternative that would get us where we needed to be in time to make our flight. We only arrived at the terminal an hour before flight time, which was cutting it a bit fine, but we didn't have any baggage to check, so except for an incident in the security line that could have been avoided with a little forethought, all was well.

Gram

My grandmother died this past weekend. That's one near and dear friend or family member passing away each month this year. My family was driving into the mountains for a three-day Presidents Day weekend when I heard. She was 96 and had been ailing for the last several years, so unlike my friend last month, her passing wasn't unexpected, though it remains a sorrowful occasion.

I remember my grandmother first as the formidable woman who owned a sandy summer cottage at Breezy Point in Queens, and by "sandy" I mean the sand was everywhere inside, most especially the bedsheets, though the fact that I was an active boy who played all day every day on the beach may have had something to do with that. Her husband, my grandfather, died when I was five years old, and while I remember him, I don't remember much. My grandmother, on the other hand, I grew up with. She took me on a road trip from New York to Boston one year, just the two of us, when I was 9 or 10 years old. She handed me a map and asked me to navigate, which I'd never really done before, but I was a quick learner. She might've been taking me to visit my cousins in New Hampshire, to be picked up by the rest of my family a couple weeks later. We took the side roads, not Interstate 95. That trip may have been one of the more formative experiences of my life, with me being given active responsibility for the first time, with potentially unpleasant consequences if I didn't execute well.

When we arrived in Boston, she took me to visit the U.S.S. Constitution, which I've only returned to once since then. It must've made an impression, since I've been actively interested in the Age of Sail since, but I don't recall much about the visit itself except the toy cannon she bought me from the gift shop, and how many different sizes of cannons there were to choose from.

There'll be a memorial service in Brooklyn for her in a week or three, where they'll lay her ashes to rest beside her husband, from whom she's been apart for so long.

God Bless you, Gram.

2008 holiday bus adventures, part 2

On December 30th, the day before New Years Eve, I did another bike/bus commute. Meantime, my wife worked out a date downtown with some college friends and their kids, and she made a day of it there, first with just our kids and then with them as well. She took a #358 bus from our neighborhood to Pine, then walked to an elevator to Alaskan Way and the Seattle Aquarium. After a couple hours she took the elevator back up to the Pike Place Market to meet her friends there. They visited the gingerbread houses at the Sheraton and the Carousel at Westlake Center, they checked out the toy trains in the Macy's window and walked around Pacific Place where they'd heard there would be "indoor snow", which turned out to be bubbles that my wife described as "really kinda weird, it wasn't like snow at all." Ah well, it served its purpose in getting them to visit.

Finally, they took the monorail from Westlake to Seattle Center and stopped in at Zeeks Pizza, where I'd arranged to meet them.

After de-boarding my bus from Tukwila, I biked from the University Street tunnel station to Seattle Center. I had a little trouble finding Zeeks, but a little backtracking with open eyes cleared that up. Zeeks was yummy as usual (we visit their Phinney and Green Lake restaurants on a regular basis) and it was nice to see our friends again. Afterwards, we headed to Seattle Center House to see the model trains there, which, while closed for the night, shared the building that evening with an acrobat troupe and an accompanying band. The kids wanted desserts, caramel apples and the like, which we did our best to accommodate. They ate it up.

Our friends drove home from there while we all crowded onto a northbound 358 bus, my bike on the front. We had to run to catch that bus at its Dexter and Denny stop, but the driver saw us coming and waited half a minute for us to get there.

Have I said lately how much I like bus drivers in Seattle?

Our day downtown, or at least my portion of it, felt a little weird in that we didn't really have a "home" to go back to while we were there. On other trips, such as the one we made a couple weeks earlier, we had a parked car to get back to and to leave purchases in, and even a deadline in getting back to it before the garage was locked up for the night, but this day we had several bus stops to choose from, and while service at that hour was not frequent (one reason we were so thankful to the bus driver for waiting for us), it was at least fairly predictable. Yes, I've done this sort of outing before, and it was as fun as always, but I don't recall feeling this dependent on timely bus service to get home before. Maybe it was that this time I was traveling with young children on a bus route that, late in the evening, often has a higher proportion than usual of drunks, though tonight we found seats towards the front of the bus and everything was fine.

Part 2 will have to wait a bit

I just learned that one of my best friends died unexpectedly, earlier today.

Mike, we love you.

Holiday bus adventures, 2008 edition (part 1)

Last month my wife made an appointment for us to go downtown for a studio family portrait. This was two days after the big snowstorm hit, with most people staying home and off the icy streets. As I've spent many years driving back East in worse conditions than this, I felt competent to drive us all downtown for the portrait, and once we'd taken a few dozen pictures we were asked to chill for half an hour while they were processed. We decided to take a little bus adventure for an early dinner instead, and walked from the studio to the Convention Place bus tunnel station, for a quick ride to the International District.

Unfortunately, it was Saturday, and the bus tunnel is closed on the weekends, which I hadn't known before -- I use it often on my weekday commute and know it closes at 7:00 PM on those days, but aside from a few trips to the airport, which I guess have all been on weekdays, or else before the tunnel reopened from its most recent refit for light rail, all my tunnel trips have been weekday commutes. I'd hoped to show the kids and my wife the bus tunnel, as I don't think any of them had even seen it before, and take a holiday ride to see, walk, eat, and enjoy our beautiful snowbound city.

With the tunnel closed, I figured we could still catch a rerouted surface bus, and in fact there was one waiting right on the corner. As soon as we boarded, the driver started up. The windows were thickly coated in dirt to the point that we couldn't really see out, which gave us an unusual closed-in feeling. The kids headed straight to the back, which on a ride-free-zone bus can lead to certain issues when others who're more accustomed to sitting there board, but this day everything was well with the world. The bus filled up quickly and churned its way through the downtown snow. We got off near the ID Station and walked East past it.

We popped into a pet store that had a lot of fish -- our kids have a fish tank and we needed some snails, which I hoped we could pick up on our way back. It turns out that they didn't have any of the sort we wanted, but they did have a recommendation for a nice family restaurant nearby, the Jade Garden. Our day was going along swimmingly.

It was only about three blocks away and a table was ready within a couple minutes. The food was dim sum, served family-style from carts, which my kids thought was really cool. "Faster than fast food" they called it, and they were right. Better, too. We tanked up on a bunch of stuff, and a few minutes later on a second cart with more. The kids got to eat all kinds of things they'd never seen before, and were mostly game, though my 6-year-old daughter took a little convincing, but once she tried it, she dove in, too. I think their favorite was a shrimp wrapped in a thin, transparent crepe-like rice wrapper, which their Dad called a jellyfish, so "shrimp wrapped in jellyfish" it became.

The place was nearly full, with lots of families enjoying an early holiday dinner together, lots of laughter and happy chatter, it was infectious. Afterwards we walked down to the west side of Union Station to catch a bus back through town, and this one took about 10 minutes to arrive, which was more of a bummer for our thoroughly-chilled kids, but we still made it back to the studio in time to get back in the car before the garage was totally locked down, if not to check out the photos first. My wife was able to do that another day, actually cross-country skiing there to do it after a couple more days of snow, but our family trip to the International District was a great trade for not doing it then.