And this time, in the late afternoon a gap in the schedule presented itself. As has been the case this spring, the winds were again up, and somehow Friday afternoon traffic always makes me a bit wary to be on the roadways. We were already firmly into the commute period of the day, and I was feeling another ride opportunity sliding past.
But then, it occurred to my habitual-choice-oriented brain that there was another option. I do live ridiculously close to that rare trail condition known as “Legal Singletrack” and I do have these funy bikes with small wheels and grippy, knobby tires. A plan was indeed hatched.
Though the tires were floppy from disuse, and the dust on the drivetrain dated to last year, the Bridgestone was readied and prepped.
Bicycles are gloriously patient, but knowingly aware. I swear I could hear it chuckling as the buzzing knobbies sounded over the pavement.
The beauty of the singlespeed is no need for tweaking - air it up, knock the dirt off and make sure the chain isn’t chunky. Before I knew it, the direct and personal pain of climbing paid the penance of disuse. The 26″ wheels made it feel like a toy at times, but the skill set of mtb-on-trail finally made itself known
Tiring. Challenging. Fun.
An hour later, showering the trail dust off my ankles, I found myself marveling at how easy it is to miss the ease of a simple solution. How quickly we develop habits which don’t always serve us well. And realizing that the muscles required of a fast-paced trail ride on a rigid singlespeed are different than those of a regular road ride.
Finally.
Which is to say, specifically, the first ride this year that felt like a “ride”.
Which is vaguely frustrating. The frustration of which dissipated by the act of the ride.
Curious.
It’s been an interesting year so far. As I’ve kinda/sorta mentioned, a long work project ended this January. Which meant (after a bit of a rest period - as the last 8 weeks were pretty much sans days off) my new boss and my staff is pretty much me. Which is equally frightening and invigorating. And exciting.
The first thing I noticed though was that having an off-site job did make it easy to have a simple excuse to get up and get out and ride back and forth to work. Now, in the scheme of bike-to-work options, I had a wonderful commute - an MDR (most direct route) under 10 miles, so if I needed to get there fast, it wasn’t noticeably longer to drive. And the area I’m lucky enough to live in gives enough options that I could easily double that distance for the ride home. Plus the fact that my work position allowed me the ability to show up a bit sweaty, or at least breeze buffeted.
But all of that gets you awful spoiled, and the ability to have regular, cheap miles in the bank gives you a nice base for distant weekend adventures. 80 - 90 miles/week in just commuting is a nice step up, and with a decent loop on the weekend, mileage stays nice and constant. The odd have-to-drive week or day works just fine when you have a setup like that.
Now, my commute is pretty minimal, and the easy miles must be seized when the opportunity provides them. And therein lies the rub. At your own desk/studio, projects have deadlines which must be honored, and time slips away. If you are hustling ’til it hurts, that downtime gets repurposed into action - billing, letters, contacts, etc. - until it’s the end of the day, the winds are up and the dog is angling for a walk.
Thus my walking has expanded significantly. Tuuli loves a good promenade, and honestly, I’d rather have a hiking adventure with her than push on the pedals and roll off into the headwinds which have been the hallmark of this daffy spring weather we’ve had. So, my shoes are worn, but the tires are softening…
Oh that pesky, pesky balance.
This last week things seemed to fall into place a bit better. Morning auditions and project recordings, then desk stuff, then that glorious midday that I managed to turn into an errand loop on the bike. Which kind of reset the ride momentum. By the end of the week, I’d found a few places in the schedule which lent themselves to a head-clearing ride between tasks. Some short rides and focused efforts.
When Gino texted me Friday night, all the excuses roiled up - not enough mileage to go with the big kids, etc… Luckily, he’s a ride buddy who focuses on the ride part of the equation, and we realized we were both looking for a nice ramble to remind ourselves of good company and easy miles.
The Earth Day Weekend Weather assisted our efforts, and by the time we were over White’s Hill, things seemed to be firing the right way. Oh, yeah, we overdid it a little - at 61 miles it was the longest ride of the year for me, and the high 80 degrees of the day were a bit excessive over the last few miles to home.
But, it was a reminder of why The Ride - the act of rolling out with friends - covering the miles with easy conversation and deep topics - is so important.
Here’s to maintaining that momentum.
With a fair degree of trepidation - potentially challenging weather is not a problem, but I’m definitely still a bit under-miled… Ahh well, how can you not get excited about a ride when it has such great artwork?
The artwork is by Alice Stribling, which can be viewed in its original form (but seemingly not linked to or downloaded) here.
Anyway, the San Francisco Populaire rolls north from the Golden Gate Bridge at 7 am this Saturday - check in and/or sign up is required, so don’t show up at 6:59 - the hearty band of randonneurs will be rolling north to Pt. Reyes Station for the first controlle, then heading back down to Crissy Field for a triumphant finish. The SF Randonneurs website has more info.
The Populaire is a great way to feel out the idiosyncrasies of brevets and randonneuring. It introduces the format of non-competitive self-sufficient distance riding, and uses control cards and time limits like the longer rides. For more general information, see the RUSA.org website.
Hope to see you there! Please mock me gently as I suffer up the hills.
Awoke to the tailings of rain today and had to dig out the Grundens for the morning dog walk. But, by midday, sunlight seriously poked its way through and the ground had mostly dried. So, I chanced it and rolled out on the only non-mtb bike that I own which is currently rigged fenderless, the A. Homer Hilsen, to claim the second Utilitaire 12 Controlle Stamp of this week.
Within a mile of home, I was seriously doubting my choice - a couple heavy clouds loomed over the hills and the wind was picking up in a way that foretold more rain. But, the Zeus has some invisible foreign object stuck in the front tire and had come up lame, and it felt good to utilize the invention which allowed me to cease pedaling when I felt like it. The other two options - the Dawes which I’d used for the first Controlle Stamp, and the Quickbeam - are both fixed.
Of course as I turned on the first leg of the route, it became clear that the whole “coastable” thing was going to be largely unused. The winds continued to pick up and any attempt to stop pedaling seemed to result in a seriously sharp decline in speed. The good news being that the darkish clouds were quickly dissipating. By the time I got to the Post Office, it was clear that my only issue would be winds. The winds did sharpen further, but it also scrubbed the sky of clouds. It did seem a wee brisk, but one thing you don’t really get to do in California is complain about the cold.
Now, the sharp-eyed among you probably have noticed that “Post Office” is not on the Utilitaire 12 Control Card. In fact, I was angling for Controlle #6 - “Any Store That Is Not The Grocery Store” (I mean, since “drop in on your cool guitar-making woodworker friend and catch up a bit” is also not on the Control Card…). 14 cheap miles on the route.
Of course, up until now, I have complied with the rules of the Utilitaire 12. In order to maintain the Spirit of the Utilitaire 12, however, there may be some deviation ahead… we shall see.
Today’s lesson is the observation of how much my cycling aesthetic has changed. It was briefly ponder-inducing that I was riding a bicycle with no fenders. Seemed odd and wrong.
About a month ago, MG over at ChasingMailboxes outlined a fun early season challenge - the Utilitaire 12. Unfortunately, that was in the final days of my all-encompassing work project, and the energy/time for reading anything outside of the immediate scope of “need-to’s” was nonexistent.
As I’ve slowly righted myself and trimmed the sails this month, the hash tag #Utilitaire kept popping up, and I finally got around to catching up on the excellent writing which MG shares on her blog. If you work the math and follow the instructions, you’ll realize that I have about two weeks to do 12 rides at the rate of 2 per week. I’ll admit, I was not a math major, but I’m pretty sure that’s a tough trick to pull off using standard numbers.
Which means the gang is well up the road and I’m just rolling away from the start. Nothing to do but smile and wave, smell the flowers, lean into the headwind and see what comes of it.
Anyway, here’s my first official Utilitaire 12 Controlle Stop:
<!–MontyPythonVoice–>
Number Five
“The Market”
According to the rules of the Utilitaire 12, I need to document the ride with a photograph (above) and confirm with an informational/observational insight:
“9. To show evidence of your ride, you must take one photo during your
utilitaire and submit at least one thing you learned or observed during
your trip.”
Mmmmm…. a whole massive midden of thoughts and notes. That’s what sparse writing and little time will do to you. Feel like I’ve flung open the back door and found one heckuva large lump of congealed detritus - everything all interlocked and wedged together so that you don’t know where to begin.
Luckily, there are a couple of threads to tug at. Pulling at that should get the fabric to unravel a bit. Then, I’ll just pull at something that looks promising and see what pops out into the light.
And this intro probably doesn’t make much sense to anyone. ‘Cept those folks who know a little more about my life in the past 18 months or so. Honestly, most of that isn’t all that interesting. Not to mention that there are many more people who have acted more honorably under greater pressure and higher stakes. The interesting thing is that as I’d cut back writing here and actively updating the Galleries, a lot of people sent emails asking if things were OK.
I think I thanked everyone directly. But, if not, please know how much that meant. It’s funny to think how words tapped out onto a keyboard, or a web project that grew from frustration at not being able to track down a photo online can actually migrate into so many places in the world. Thank you all for taking the time to read this, or poking through any of the bike geek photos.
I’ve mentioned it a few times here and there, but my “day job” project for the last bit involved an exponentially-increasing number of hours. That culminated in January of this year. While that was expanding in momentum and deed, the other plate I was spinning involved auditions and recording sessions for my VO work. All work has its idiosyncrasies to be sure, but one of the quirks of VO is that you end up recording and submitting many, many auditions for each job you get. And those auditions must be submitted in a timely manner. And after riding home from the day job and then analyzing scripts and producing auditions for a couple hours, the choice was whether to stay on the computer or remind my wife and dog what I looked like.
Fact is, though I love writing about cycling and the bicycle world in general, when push comes to shove, I’d rather ride. Oh, I suppose it’s possible to punch up Dragon Dictation and ramble forth about stuff while riding. But, there’s something about riding that pushes me away from tech gadgetry. There’s intrinsically something about the ride which makes me realize the moments, see the subtle contrasts around me helps to balance everything.
One pedal goes down, the other comes up. On a flat stretch, the rhythm of breathing becomes a metronome. The horizon remains far distant as the pavement hisses quickly beneath the frame. Expansive moment.
The Quickbeam is bringing me back. It’s a simple, honest system. Patient and direct.
A hill that once sang by under the momentum now is cause for a bit of bar-wrestling and heavy breathing. A steeper climb demands a rest. The bicycle is the same. The gearing is the same. The weaker variable is me. Even without the complete cycling layoff of the final six weeks at work, this past year consisted of regular rides, but markedly shorter distances.
But, it’s all relative of course. I’ve been in worse shape than now, and the toughest part stems from my brain recalling how easy it was and not quite believing the feedback it receives from the various appendages and contact points. I did manage to keep fairly consistent with yoga, so there remains some surprisingly tenacious bits of strength here and there. And I did roll over a 40 mile loop last weekend which did not send me immediately to the couch for a nap.
So, like the writing, it’ll be a diet of small bites and thoroughly chewing.
Little segment from the pre-history days of mountain biking. I’ve never seen this bit of journalism before, but there are a number of recognizable characters in the footage -
Enjoy!
As I’ve mentioned before, any month with a decent ride in it will look good. So, June ended up OK, even with some non-cycling weekends and some schedule-shifting. The best news of the month was that I rode the San Francisco Randonneurs “Populaire” - which is something of a low-mileage (for brevets, anyway…) route designed to introduce new riders to the quirks and procedures of route sheets, controls and brevet cards. I took a few photos, but scratched the writeup, as I crossed paths with JimG a mile or two into the ride and we spent most of the route catching up and each apologizing to the other for a perceived lack of fitness. It was a great, grand, reinvigorating ride for me, but it just didn’t translate too well into the written word.
Yoga was sparse this past month - I had signed up for a high-value voiceover workshop that directly conflicted for four weeks - the workshop was great, challenging and helpful for my career, but you can’t be in two places at once. Well, at this juncture in the space-time continuim anyway.
So - 20 riding days for 369 miles
5 yoga sessions (snuck in a Saturday session instead of a ride).
Bikey Miles So Far This Year - 1755
April was a fun exercise in forced efforts. Though, when I’m jumping on the bike at 11 o’clock at night to spin a 3 mile loop around the neighborhood so I can state that “I rode today”, the forced part resonates a bit more loudly. Which is not an indictment, mind you. A bit more of a description.
In fact, I’m a big fan of repetition and limitation. Glimpsing perfection within the form. Certainly, forms abound. From the idea of chopping wood and carrying water, to the sun salutation, to the grinding out of 200 kilometes in 13.5 hours (or, since this is a Paris-Brest-Paris year, 1200 km in 90 hours), once you agree to the Form, there’s no arguing with it. Within that, there is a certain amount of liberation, which in turn allows supreme focus upon a goal.
Limitation? Wow, that can be a touchy subject. With technology continuing to connect and compound itself, the last thing anyone wants to hear is anything about Limitation. My bias is that when everything is possible and the possibilities are limitless, that causes the most teeth-jarring stop of anything approaching creativity. We become aggregators rather than artists. Choosing the Limits, or agreeing to those Limits, forces creativity to spark.
Kind of big subjects for what was to be a simple and quick post with some numbers. Chalk it up to strong coffee and the burgeoning warmth of June…
20 (organic) bike rides
8 yoga sessions
321 Bike Miles
Bikey Miles So Far in 2011 - 1386
April went well. (But, here we are a week into May before I’m writing about it…)
Spurred on by a mention by the always upbeat and inspiring Harry Hugel, and a mention or two from cycling icon Kent Peterson, I poached the 30DaysOfBiking Challenge and decided to ride every day in April. The distance per ride was immaterial, according to the guidelines of the ride, and I had to slip under the rope because I tried to sign up on April 1st - after doing my first ride - but the site would not let me join.
So, I said “screw it” and decided to do it anyway. Tagged a tweet with #30daysofbiking and voila! it showed up in the stream on the 30 Days of Biking site.
Ended up going 30 for 30, one day at a time, with only a few 11 pm neighborhood loops in the mix. There were a couple of times when my legs just wanted to shut up and go home, but I either tricked them with the fixed gear (they just had to follow the pedals) or the promise of lower gearing and coastability (”No, really. You can rest whenever you want!”)
By month end, it just seemed like the normal thing to do. Made me realize that it was probably the longest string of riding I’ve ever managed. It’s always very easy to opt out for the day - working remotely, or having too many things to do. But, even with all that, throwing the leg over the frame and heading out - whether under the stars and through the nighttime breezes, or greeting the rising sun - put that perfect note into the sometimes overwhelming cacophony of the day. There were some days when I really needed it, too.
The tally was helped, and maybe this year can be propped up into the 5K realm after what I knew was going to be a challenging start. Nevertheless, I’ve learned again that one ride, right now is what matters.
April Bikey Mileage - 467 miles 30 Days for 30 (and reading ahead, went 5 for 5 in May.)
Only manged 6 yoga sessions - instructor was out one week.
2011 Mileage So Far - 1065
Some days, I’m very happy for a coastable drivetrain and a multitude of gears. I knew Monday would be bad, but even yesterday, my legs ached and bitched most of the way to work and back. All because of the phone call I got on Sunday.
“Hey! Where are you?”
It was a trick question really. It was my wife. And there was really only one reason the question was being posed - because I was not where I should have been.
Y’see, cycling is one of those things which tends to dislodge me from linear time. During brevets, there have been hours of purgatory which only took a couple of minutes. Minutes of tricky, technical descents which took merely seconds.
What tricked me is that the usual direction is towards expansion. Like yoga, acting or meditation, you seem to find the time within the seconds to observe, ponder and react. You see the way a hawk tweaks its tail before changing direction, how a bee scrambles to stay attached to the fabric of your jersey before releasing and disappearing aft. There have been distinct moments when my front wheel slid out on loose trails, and somehow I sat back, looked up, picked up the front of my bike, lofted the front wheel and brought everything back upright. A quick flick of the second hand that took minutes.
Occasionally though, it works the other way.
“uhh….heading home?”
“We need to leave in about thirty minutes.”
Now, that couldn’t be right, thought I. Somehow, I’d lost an hour out on the breezy, sunny Sunday right. I’d swooped the trails and hummed over the roadways. I’d enjoyed a double espresso while watching sailboats navigate the Racoon Straits. There had been plenty o’ time to spare the whole day.
But, as Peter Sellers once observed, “Nit Anymere…”
From where I was, still climbing the tail end of Camino Alto, it was a 45 minute ride to get home, via the MDR*.
“I’ll be there in about 30.”
Rolled up the gear on the Quickbeam, used every trick I knew and made every light except one. And just to toot my own horn, I rolled up to the porch 31 minutes later. Showered like there was water rationing and was dressed and ready in record time. I wasn’t particularly popular for a while, but we did arrive on time, at least. Though I think it might have taken another hour before my heart rate dropped back down. Really hadn’t planned on Beryl Burtoning my way home, and things were stiffening up as we sat through the play that evening.
Monday’s commute? Well, as I mentioned, tiny gears and seated, easy pedaling. Goddess, I was sore.
And yesterday? Hit the first climb and my ox-brain let me shift up and come out of the saddle.
Uh. No. That h’ain’t a-gonna work. Big gear, meet burning thighs. Eased up and sat down, finding a gear that worked a bit better. But clunky with a capital “K”… Yoga helped last night, so we’ll see how things are today.
*MDR = “Most Direct Route”
Curious danged thing… I seem to be poaching a ride that didn’t cost any money, doesn’t offer any t-shirts, waterbottles, commemorative tchotchkys, low-rez/ill-lighted photos with an annoying watermark posted to a website or even an official rest stop. Couldn’t be happier.
I think the first place I noticed it was via perennially pleased Harry H, who can reliably be found at RBWHQ&L on Saturdays. He of the alliterative moniker had mentioned something about the “April Challenge” over at 30DaysOfBiking.com. 30 Rides in 30 Days. Hashtag it on your twitter feed. Any distance counted - the idea was just to get up, get out and ride. Sounded like fun, but was attached to the interwebs by the historic computer, so decided to remember to sign up when I was using the newer appliance.
Which of course I promptly forgot until reading Kent P’s post, at which point it was April 1st. And the 30DaysOfBiking site no longer allowed people to sign up. Which kind of sucked. I mean, I could see cutting it off at midnight on April 1st, since if you hadn’t ridden by then, you really couldn’t do the program. But, I had and was just trying to join the gang to celebrate spring, riding, feeling good and life.
Well, mostly, I’m just trying to do small, insignificant things in a methodical and steady manner, trusting in momentum. But, I think that’s a bigger thought than I can address right now.
Anyway, the good news is that the 30DaysOfBiking site seems to be scooping up the #30daysofbiking tag regardless of whether you have signed up. Which means that my sub-parenthetical utterings are dropping into the stream. Which means I’m poaching the ride…
A dismal success?
I don’t know, that’s what it felt like this past month. Dismal in the beginning, successful towards the end. As mentioned last month, I knew that Jan/Feb were going to be impossible for free time and energy. Mentally ready for a slowish start to the year, the nasty flu/infection kind of blindsided me. In the last week of February, it felt like a cold coming on, then just rooted itself into my brain and ate all of my energy. A solid three weeks of no extra energy and certainly no riding.
And the weather helped by remained cold and rainy for most of it. Which I guess is not as bad as looking out the window at gorgeous riding conditions. But, to paraphrase my old rowing coach, “…cycling is an outdoor sport” and since most of my bikes are rigged appropriately for changing conditions, it’s really hard to say that there’s “riding weather”. There’s glorious and easy days out in the sun and there’s hard and challenging days which make for great stories. But I digress…
The first week riding, I was pretty wiped out after four easyish commutes, and opted for naps and recovery on the weekend., and then, with the first day of spring, strung together a consistent run except for one day when I needed to be behind the mic in the middle of the day. The second half of the month I rode 14 days out of 18, managed to get back to my yoga classes and in general came back to life. And just to show how much Nature appreciated that, she even deigned to bring the sun out with Monday’s ride.
By the end of the week, I engaged in two rides whilst wearing shorts. While shocking and unsettling to any onlookers who may have observed the pallor of my gams, it nonetheless felt grand.
March Mileage - 184
2011 Bikey Miles - 598
Rolled out to work yesterday on the Dawes. First time in three weeks, in what has shaped up to be a pretty spotty year so far, mileage-wise. It’s been riding in more or less two week chunks. First couple o’ weeks this year were steady if unspectacular, but then I got immersed in an off-site work project (that I knew was looming) for a solid 2 weeks. That meant that January Mileage got hung at 165 miles
February was a bit more regular - nothing huge (longest ride was 44 miles on the Quickbeam). But illness went ripping through the workplace and I could feel things heading south towards the end of the month. It came on like a slow cold, but ended up being a nastier bug which just wouldn’t leave. Couldn’t even muster up the energy to go to yoga, and the idea of riding seemed like a cruel joke. (And of course, we enjoyed some ridiculously fine weekends in there…) February Mileage was 249 with dwindling returns as the month wound down.
And that has more or less kept me in the cycling doldrums until yesterday, when it seemed right to roll out again. The Dawes seemed the right ride as it was geared a little lower than the Quickbeam, and the Hilsen (for some reason of deferred maintenance or attention) has not had the fenders remounted on it for some time now. To my surprise, the commute went easily, and my legs seemed to actually appreciate being called upon once again. (Nothing like crampy, why-the-hell-don’t-you-take-us-riding? night legs while you are trying to sleep while coughing with a sinus infection…).
Lastly, it’s very hard to even begin to complain about all of this while reading and watching what is unfolding in Japan. I’ll ride in again slowly this morning, thinking about the power and intensity of the tide surging into the San Francisco Bay - an ocean away from the epicenter - how tenuous our grasp always is on this planet, on our very important but infinitesimal existence, how we so often manage to create problems for ourselves with such far-reaching effects, how we allow discussions to devolve into petty squabbles which do nothing other than confuse the issues.
I hope I’ll think about those things and find a core of resilience. The simple act of turning the pedals seems to simplify things, remind me that great distances can be covered with seemingly small but steady efforts. We’ll see how it goes today.
Hard to go wrong with that combo. 
Even better when you can make an afternoon of it. More info yonder on the Soulcraft blog.
Now, the only problem I can see with this event is that “A Ruota Libera” means “Freewheel” in Italian. Hopefully, they won’t be checking drivetrains carefully, and I can sneak in with my Quickbeam in fixed mode…
The iBob List is dead! Long Live the iBob List!
“This is the last email to the internet-bob@bikelist.org mailing list. The list has moved to internet-bob@googlegroups.com.
To continue recieving list emails you will need to join the new group. You can do that by going to one of these two links:
http://yojimg.net/bike/ibob/join.php
OR
http://groups.google.com/group/internet-bob
It’s been a good decade of hosting this list, and I’ve been very happy to be the list admin and host during that time.
For
the next couple of weeks sending email to the old list will get you an
automatic reply with instructions on joining the new list. After that it
will cease to operate.
thanks,
Alex Wetmore“
Big thanks to Alex for wrangling this roadshow for so long, doing it so well and handling a myriad of interesting and often highly opinionated characters so adroitly. And thanks to ride-buddy JimG for stepping up to manage the list now.
Guess I’ll have to update this page-
http://cyclofiend.com/ibob/
Rework is one of three books I read this past year which keep significantly resonating in my brain. (Well, there’s probably more than three now that I think about it, but ideas in Rework, plus Program or Be Programmed and The War Of Art seem to keep interlocking and reinforcing one another, and as such become more of a troika…)
The folks who penned Rework run 37Signals, which as near as I can tell, is a significantly creative, focused and intelligent company in the sense of “appropriate structure.”* The person who tipped me to the book Rework was Grant Petersen, who (as y’all prolly know) formed Rivendell Bicycle Works after Bridgestone Bicycles USA shut down operations.
It’s roundly fitting that the folks at 37Signals would take a moment to sit down with Grant and interview him. It’s a fine interview, and he may be still answering reader questions at the end of the article.
Go read it:
Bootstrapped, Profitable & Proud
*remind me to do a blog post about “appropriate structure” sometime, or dig around the vinyl bins and find a copy of “Let the Power Fall” by Robert Fripp and read the back. Or, here. (Though that person attributes it to Robert Fripp directly, my recollection was that he had transcribed it from elsewhere. Since I sold that vinyl a while ago, it looks like a lunchtime trip to the used record shop is in order…)
Update:
A kindly lurking blog reader passed along this link to the Fripp album mentioned above.
http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=734711
I’d reckon that if you are interested in bicycles and spend much time knocking around the interwebbs (named, of course, after Jack Webb), you’ve run across Kent Peterson. If not, it’s high time you did. Even in the clamor of daily life, someone who decides to do the Great Divide Race on a singlespeed stands out. If that was all he did, he’d be noticeable. But, it isn’t.
Kent manages to write with a deceptive simplicity which elegantly nudges at complex problems and issues. He writes about cycling, but seems to manage to reliably cover much larger topics.
Sunday’s writing is an excellent example:
Enjoy!
Mirroring this post from the good folks over at Box Dog Bikes -
“A friend of
mine that works for the Bay Citizen came by the shop yesterday. He said
they’re putting together a map that shows where all the bike accidents
are happening in San Francisco. It will have a ton of data like what
are the causes, and what kinds of vehicles were involved when it
happened. Unfortunately its based mostly on police reports, which
probably don’t reflect how many crashes there are in the city. They are
launching this application on Monday and are trying to get some people
to submit their unreported accidents before then. Please follow the link below to report yours.”
From the Bay Citizen:
“The Bay Citizen is asking bikers in San Francisco to submit
data about bike collisions they’ve experienced in the past in the Bay
Area. We’re building a new data application that displays collision
data in San Francisco on an in-depth interactive map, to help people
understand what’s happening on the streets and where more safety
measures are needed. We’re using data from SFPD, but we know many
accidents are never reported to the police. If you were in an accident
but never reported it, please take a couple minutes to fill out this short form
and let us know where, when and how it happened. We will add your data
to this project, and we really appreciate your contribution!”
Gorgeous footage of Sean Walling building one up in Petaluma.
FROM STEEL: The Making of a Soulcraft from michael evans on Vimeo.
Viva La Soulcraft!