Parking: it's a skill.

September 13: SDOT SUV parked northbound in a no parking zone on Dexter Ave, blocking both a bike lane and a general traffic lane, right after a bus stop. This is downhill in a 30 MPH zone. (Just south of where Dexter passes under Aurora.) There are more dangerous places to park, but this one is pretty dangerous.

As soon as the driver saw me, she drove off. I didn't see whether she put down her cell phone first or not.

Update: I got this message from SDOT:

Hello,
This is not an SDOT vehicle. It is a standard city vehicle used by all city departments. SDOT vehicles have our logos on them in blue. I would need a license plate to have facilities folks identify the city department using the vehicle. Perhaps there was an emergency situation that the driver had to respond to a phone call; it’s hard to know the circumstances.

Thank you for contacting SDOT

Traffic Hazard

This pole used to have a sign on it. The sign was either removed or stolen. Now there's just a pole. This pole is in the sidewalk approach to the Fremont Bridge southbound, where as many as a thousand bikes and (literally) uncounted pedestrians pass. (Bikes are directed onto the sidewalk here, to avoid the open bridge grating that motor vehicles use.)

At this point, traffic narrows to go over the bridge. Depending on traffic coming the other way, a bike rider or pedestrian may want to move near to where this sign is to give oncoming traffic a wide berth. (Pedestrian with dog, bike with trailer, drunk with attitude, etc.) This could easily cause an accident. Any sidewalk users could be affected, but it's obvious how this could be dangerous for a bike. The pole is hard to make out from the background, particularly on a cloudy day. Hanging up handlebars or a trailer on the poll could easily result in getting thrown from the bike, into bridge traffic.

It's a matter of time before something bad happens, and somebody rushes out to fix this.

[Update: I submitted this as an incident on Bikewise.org]

Return of the road spikes

The city puts these spikes in the street to hold down air hoses for traffic studies. The spikes are supposed to be pounded flush with the pavement after they aren't being used any more. But as I've found (over and over and over) they are often not pounded flat.

This spike is on N. 34th in Fremont. It's on the south side of the street, maybe two meters from the curb, near the Sunday Market marker for stall 47, about where the new steel towers carry the new high-tension line cross the street. The Burke building is on the south side of the street here.

This is a busy bike route, with several bikes a minute passing through this way during rush hour. On Sundays, this is a very busy walking route, with people packed along the street in good weather.

If these spikes are not pounded down, they can cause a bike flat tire or even loss of control. Eventually they work their way loose. The resulting spike is several inches of hardened steel that can cause a serious injury to a person, a flat tire on a car, and other damage. This is why it's Seattle policy that these spikes get pounded down. Yet it doesn't happen. Now somebody has to take time out of their day to come back out and pound the spike down. It would have been better to do it right the first time.

Weight, Wait!

Another lead wheel weight on my commute. This one is a biggie. Feels like at least half a pound of lead. Well weathered. Probably heavier when it fell off. I've been finding a lot of these on Seattle streets, even though putting them on cars is now illegal. Do we have to let them all fall off and get ground into dust?

Debris Field Report

On January 3, I reported spikes in the road at 26th Ave and E. Galer to SDOT. As of this morning, they're still there.

The city puts these spikes into the road to hold down air hoses for traffic studies. They're supposed to pound them down after the traffic study is over. They don't always do that, and based on the number of these I see around town, I think they may not pound them down most of the time. Even when I point them out to SDOT, the crews seem to have trouble finding them. Are they really that hard to see? I don't have any trouble spotting them, and my eyes certainly aren't what they used to be. Maybe SDOT should use nails that are easier to spot, or else keep better track of where they put them. When the crew is pulling up the air hoses, it really should be pretty easy to figure out how many nails they have to pound down.

Look how shiny the heads of these spikes are. Plenty of people have been running over them. This is a designated, signed bike route, and the spikes are about 3' from the curb, where most bikers ride on this street.

More road debris.

Some sort of metal plates in the bike lane on Nickerson. Not super sharp, but probably sharp enough to get through a sidewall if you hit it right.

Become What You Are

"Become What You Are" I learned these words from listening to Juliana Hatfield, not from reading Nietzsche. I think critically about how I ride a bike, because that's the only way to improve. I gather Nietzsche deemed critical thought unhelpful. Well screw him.

Regardless, at 46, I'm a little young to grow out my beard grey and ride a steel horse with a bed roll and a frying pan.

But I've become a randonneur. Somehow this has happened. That's not the only kind of biker I am, but I am this thing now.

I have no idea what Nietzsche meant, but I think I understand what Hatfield was on to.

I rebuild the fast bike

I'm in the middle of my first major surgery on the fast bike.

In the past, I've put on new wheels, replaced the front fork when it got trashed, and put on aero bars. But none of those things really touched the purpose of the bike. Now, I'm taking a Trek Madone, the bike most associated with Lance, and building it up for the least likely thing that it's plausibly suitable for: randonneuring.

That's right: a plastic rando bike. Randonneurs ride steel. (Except the few who spend for titanium.) Randonneurs are required to have fenders, and my Madone doesn't even have the braze-ons to mount conventional fenders. Randonneurs need to carry supplies and spare clothing, sometimes lots of it, and there is basically no way to put a luggage rack on this bike.

So bad idea? Maybe. But I know this bike well. I like the way it fits, and it likes me back. It's been a good ride for 8,000 miles, and I frankly don't think I have time between now and August to build up a new bike from scratch and get it dialed in the way I'd need it. Sure, I rode 100 miles on this bike the morning after I bought it, with a "fit" that was literally by eyeball. But 100 miles isn't very far by rando standards. When you are going to be on a bike all day and all night, you need to be comfortable, and you need to ride and react with the bike as one unit. I'm just not ready to start another relationship like that.

What I've done so far:
- 42cm (2cm narrower) bars (should have done that a long time ago)
- 2cm shorter stem
- aero bars off since the French don't allow them
- Luggage (!) fore and aft
- 26mm tires run at a mere 80psi, replacing 23mm tires at 120psi
- rear fender
- an LED headlight close to what a motorcycle has.
It's a little like an F1 car with a ski rack.

I haven't taped the new bars yet, still tweaking the brake lever position. I need to redo the rear fender and add a front one. I need to redo how the lights are mounted. It's the same bike now, but also very different.

An embarrassment of debris riches

What are these things? They look like springs. They're steel (magnetic), their ends are sharp, and they were strewn in the bike path on Dexter. I picked up all I could find, but I'm sure I missed some.

I'm pretty sure they're the remains of tire chains. People in Seattle get only sporadic practice in snow and ice, but sometimes it's very slippery and Seattle is a hilly town. So people put on tire chains, but because they don't get practice, they buy lousy tire chains and put them on wrong. The result? Shredded tire chains make a wreck of the paint on a quarter panel, before spilling their guts on the roadway. Since the City takes a mild interest at best in street cleaning, late winter Seattle streets are a debris field of tire chain guts. Cars run over them until they end up where? In the bike lane.

So I and every Seattle biker gets to dodge bits of what look like purpose-built malice because why? Two reasons:
- Lousy tire chains that ought not be legal to sell.
- A city that cleans the streets approximately never, despite the fact that it would make the city money to clean.

Grrrr.

More debris, fielded

More debris. In this case, a nasty piece of galvanized flashing or some such. Lots of sharp edges. I rode around it in the bike path for two days, so on the third day, I stopped and picked it up.

Debris Field

In winter, Seattle roads are a debris field. The cause is a combination of winter conditions, stupidity, and the City's antipathy towards street cleaning.

As usual, I try to single-handedly make things better, with mixed results.

So I have a personal rule: the third time I see the same piece of hazardous shite in the roadway, I have to stop and pick it up. (Unless it's a broken bottle, in which case I sweep it out of the path of bikes and pedestrians, and hope for the best. I'm just not willing to pack beer-soaked glass in to work.)

Today's find: some weird metal bracket that seems purpose-built to cause flat tires and pedestrian injury. Nasty

More road spikes

26th Ave E at E. Galer St., Seattle. These two spikes are right where the road bends. Around the corner, south of this intersection on 26th, there is another spike. In the short time I stopped to snap this picture, three bicycles came by. How do these things get left by the city in the road? I think I have an eye for them, but most bicyclists and pedestrians probably don't even see them until they hit one.

Update: They're still there.

My letter to Nicole Brodeur on road diets

Dear Ms. Brodeur:

I read your column regarding the road diet for Northeast 125th Street. Not being familiar with this street, I decided to go out and see it myself. something I hope you get a chance to do.

On my visit, I noted several interesting things. First was how pleasant the neighborhood was, with mature trees lining the street. I can see why folks up there see potential for interesting retail to spread west from Lake City Way.

My impression of the road is that, despite a little rough pavement, it's entirely bikeable as it stands, although to be fair it's probably more challenging during times of heavy traffic. I didn't see any bikes besides me, but on a Sunday afternoon, there weren't all that many cars either. Lots of people waiting for buses though. Not a lot of good places for bus riders to get to or from the required side of the street.

As for the monster 8% grade hill, meh. I assume this is west-bound from roughly 25th to 17th. I rode up it in 2 minutes without breaking a sweat. Literally, 2 minutes. I timed it. I ride my bike quite a bit, but I'm well into my 40s and don't have the strength I did as a kid. Surely, there are some casual bike riders that would have had to work harder or go slower, but a lot of those casual riders ride city bikes or mountain bikes with very low gears (I was on a road bike), so they can comfortably go quite slow. I reckon there are riders that would be intimidated by that hill, but I can't imagine there are very many riders who are not able to comfortably ride up it if they tried.

Why don't more bikers ride 125th? As for me, I ride in this area quite a bit, and I've never ridden 125th because, well, I didn't know it was there. Now that I've ridden it, I'll probably ride there now and again. It's actually better than the other ways I've been getting from Lake City Way to 15th. One thing this controversy might to is get more bikers to try 125th, and when they do, they'll probably like it. Lots of bikers ride Lake City Way, and southbound there are two hills far more formidable than the hill on 125th. Taking 125th replaces the steeper and more dangerous of the two Lake City Way hills with a shorter, easier hill having better sight lines.

So what does SDOT need to do for bikers on 125th? Nothing.

But the road diet isn't for bikers anyway. It's for pedestrians, and those bus riders I saw. 125th today is like Stoneway when I used to cross it walking my son to school. It was scary to cross, especially in the winter. After too many close calls, I ended up carrying three bike flashers with me so that cars would see us in the crosswalk. Sometimes that didn't feel like enough. It's worlds better now.

Businesses were worried about the road diet on Stoneway affecting them too, and it has. For the better. Slower driving speeds make people more likely to notice interesting businesses, and more willing to park. (Ever tried parallel parking on Aurora?) So I hope the road diet is as good for business on 125th as it seems to have been on Stoneway. I can't see anything special about 125th that would keep a road diet from helping business there.

When the road diet goes in, there will be space for bike lanes, and I suppose the city might as well put them in, at least westbound, although eastbound is probably better off with a little bit wider lane and sharrows. A bike lane or sharrows would both signal to bikers that they should give 125th a try. Had I seen such an invitation in the past, I would have taken it, and discovered a pleasant little neighborhood I'm now pleased I know about.

Regards,

- Erik

Nickerson Street Road Diet

Drove the dieted Nickerson today. (Planned on riding it, but had another errand to run....) Maximum speed: 36 mph, probably a 10 mph improvement. Average range of auto speeds: less than 10 mph. So far, looks like the diet is working.

There are bike lanes, but this clearly is not bike-centric infrastructure. Bike lanes disappear when the space is needed for turn lanes or for room for cars to wait at the 5-way snarl at the approach to the Fremont Bridge. I think that's the right call, though. The road diet as implemented should have negligible impact on car capacity (of which there is excess anyway) while increasing bike capacity and giving a clearer signal to all road users that bikes belong on Nickerson.

As for pedestrian safety, the actual reason for the road diet? Traffic speeds are closer to the legal limit, with ample traffic capacity. The street now complies with national standards for crosswalks, and the street feels less like a waste land and more like a neighborhood. Everybody wins, even if they aren't ready to admit it.

Everybody, that is, except a few people who think that driving 50mph through a college campus is somewhere in the Bill of Rights.

Once again, bad driving in front of my son's school

This morning, walking home with Nick after dropping Sven off at school, a Ford Expedition rolls past the stop line for the crosswalk, starts to head for the parking lane, finally sees us, then decelerates without exactly stopping. At this point I am maybe 8 feet from the driver. who finally stops. I point at the red light and shrug. She starts to drive forward again, still in a red light. When I don't move, she stops again.

"What?" she says.
"Red Light!"
"Why do you care?"

Why do I care? Um, I dislike being run over? Not enough? How about this: it's fifteen minutes until first bell. Dozens of kids are going to cross this intersection in the next fifteen minutes, all of them harder to see than the two adult men you almost didn't see. If one of them was the kid I see strapped in behind you, would you be more cautious? Would you consider the chance that he would end up under your bumper less important than being able to get to the red light at the end of the block a few seconds earlier? I care because you're old enough to have your own child, but you don't seem to have any concept of the responsibility that comes with operating a device with constant lethal potential if not operated carefully. I care because it bothers me that you are willing to put the children of my neighborhood at risk to test your theory that the rules are for everyone else but you.

Car driving in a bike/parking lane

Car driving in a bike/parking lane, blowing through a crosswalk at high speed against the light on Fremont Ave.

This driver pulled out of the car lane to speed through a crosswalk while driving in a combined bike lane/ parking lane. There were children the crosswalk at the time going to school. The crosswalk is in a school zone. This driver committed a bunch of infractions and risked the safety of all around them. Why? So they could speed forward a few hundred feet, slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a parked car (It's a parking lane, remember?) then crowd back into the driving lane. Nuts, just nuts. SDOT has planned improvements to that area, and they can't come too soon. It's bad enough when bikes blow through that crosswalk. That kind of driver behavior is going to kill someone.

Just finished David Byrne's book Bicycle Diaries. It's mostly about riding bikes in cities, from New York to Istanbul to London to Manila. It's also about various other musings, thoughts on what cities could be like if we planned for things besides driving, and Byrne's foray into urban planning activism in New York.

It's fun. As a Talking Heads fan, it was interesting to get inside the head of their sardonic frontman. I also found the subject interesting.

Spike spiked

Update: after several conversations with SDOT about spikes in Seattle streets, I marked the location of the spike in the street. SDOT sheared the head off and pounded it down. I think it's going to stay there. Good on ye, SDOT.

SDOT promises to address street spike problem

I received mail from Tracy Burrows at SDOT today. She promissed on SDOT's behalf to address the problem of SDOT crews leaving spikes in Seattle streets. The solution is to leave spikes in Seattle streets.

Well, OK, she did say they'd pound them all the way into the pavement. It sounds scary, but if SDOT actually does it, and the spikes stay there, I'm happy.

Of course, SDOT crews still have to find the spikes. Tracy told me that SDOT went looking for a spike I told them about, and couldn't find it, even when I told them almost exactly where it was. I saw it on the way to work this morning. The spikes can be very hard to see in asphalt, despite their size, because they blend in very well. That's a big part of the problem, in fact.

SDOT Still Leaving Nails on Seattle Streets

I blogged last summer that Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is leaving metal spikes in city streets. They're still doing it. This spring, SDOT conducted a traffic study around Univeristy Bridge. On June 5, 2009, I noticed that SDOT had removed the traffic sensor but once again left the metal spikes behind in the pavement. As the picture above shows, they're still there. The spikes are on the southbound bridge approach from NE 40th. This street is marked with sharrows indicating it as a bike route. The spikes are somewhat over a foot from the curb, roughly in the center of the area you'd expect a bike to travel. The spikes stick up out of the pavement over a centimeter. Hitting the spike with a tire would probably cause a flat, and could cause a bike to lose control, even if the spikes didn't cause a flat. Eventually, the spikes will work themselves loose, presenting a hazard to cars, bikes, and pedestrians.

Taking the spikes out isn't difficult. They pop right out with a crowbar. It happens I don't carry a crowbar with me on my bike, or I would have taken them out myself. But apparently, SDOT crews don't bother to take spikes out, at least some of the time.

I'm trying to fathom a situation where somebody thinks it's a good idea to leave a spike in the pavement rather than take 5 seconds to pull it out and dispose of it. Is SDOT doing this all over town? This just seems idiotic to me.