The first CicLAvia is this Sunday! Don’t forget! The sudden Winter weather we’ve been having will have vanished by then, and it will be a lovely day. There’s a seven-mile route of city streets for you to walk, bike, run, etc. Should be fun!
See my description of one I saw in Morelia, Mexico, here. More information on this first LA one here. […] Click to continue reading this post
Perhaps ironically, since I tune into BBC Radio 4 every day when in Los Angeles, I’ve not been listening to it or any other UK radio or news source while here in London at all. So imagine my pleasant surprise on Thursday when I came across what clearly looked like a docking station for bikes (as opposed to super-fancy bike racks, which I thought it was at first)! Sure enough, once I got closer I confirmed it – a bike sharing scheme was starting in London. By the next day I saw some more stations on my walks, and a truck driving along full of the bikes, presumably going to load up the stations. As it turned out, I learned later that the scheme started that very next day, and today I saw several people out riding on them!
I am a little disappointed about one thing. I wanted to try them out and be out there seeing the streets of the city from one of these bikes instead of on foot (as I have been doing a lot in the last several days), but guess what? […] Click to continue reading this post
On Sunday in Morelia, Mexico, I was walking along the main street near my hotel and it seemed that something unusual was going on. The street was empty of cars, and some sort of event was going on. I saw a few cyclists here and there in the distance, but not the sort that look all hardcore and determined to go fast and determinedly on their way, but instead the more leisurely stop-and-smell-the-flowers sort. I wondered almost immediately if I had run into a local ciclovía, and a few minutes later, a sign confirmed this. Wonderful!
I’ve been waiting for such a thing to come to LA for a while now, since I heard of it last year when I part (and presented) in a public discussion downtown at the Artwalk about bike issues in the city, and had heard that it was becoming more widespread (it started in South America – Colombia) but it was an unexpected treat to find one right outside my hotel room! Here are three more picture. Click for larger view.
It was great to see lots of people out and about just using the streets with no cars […] Click to continue reading this post
It has been a pleasure to see the large number of bikes in use in London, and particularly pleasing that it is a wide range of types of people using them as well. 
There are many things about London that make it feel even more comfortable to me than ever (high prices of everything not being one of them) and the heavy bike use has to be one of them. Things in that department continue to improve over in my home city of Los Angeles, although I think it’ll still be a bit of time before you get bunches of cyclists routinely clustered at the lights waiting for the green, as in the photo on the right.
Also great to see, sending a shiver of pleasure down my spine each time I’ll admit, has been the huge number of Bromptons in use in London. (See photo left.) I know it is true statistically that they are among the most popular single type of bike here (of any type, folding or non-folding) but it is still great that there are so very many sightings of them as you walk along the street especially at peak times. That’s something that really still has not taken off in LA. I’ve seen fewer than a handful of Bromptons in almost seven years on the streets here, relatively few folding bikes in total, and maybe only twice have I seen someone else using them in combination with the subway (and I remain the only person I’ve ever seen bringing them on to the bus). It […] Click to continue reading this post
Hey! B all you can B and look at the Bcycle site and then go to the bit that says “I want it more” and add your city and zip and click that box that says tell your mayor.
This is *exactly* what I was wishing for a couple of years ago in an earlier post or two*. (See here and here.) Also fits nicely with a more limited plan a friend is working on that I’m hoping to help push forward… Will tell you more when I get permission to do so.
This is Excellent!!!! Let’s join in to […] Click to continue reading this post
As you know (maybe), for environmental (both local and global) and other reasons I’m not a fan of routine unnecessary car trips, and so I walk, bike, and use public transport a lot. My car is mostly only used on the weekend. This sort of declaration usually results in blank stares, subsequent treatment as a leper (or worse, in many LA circles, – poor!!), serious inquiries as to whether I was convicted of DUI, comments that this is impossible in LA, admissions from locals who’ve lived here for umpteen years that they’d no idea that there was a subway (that has changed slightly in the last
few years… now at least they know, but typically they’ve no idea where the stops are), and so on and so forth. I will admit to getting annoyed when I see announcements for events and locations that go to lots of trouble to give driving and parking instructions and never mention the subway stop or bus lines that might work for some as well. (Right: Artist Melba Thorn, photo by Diane Meyer for an exhibition on the issue, to be discussed below. Ironically, (at the time of writing) the exhibiting gallery also only gives driving and parking directions on their site. Isn’t that rich?)
Anyway…. you know all this from reading the blog. Check the archives for posts and discussions on a variety of aspects. Here’s part of the executive summary of my main point, and then information about a new exhibit follows after: […] Click to continue reading this post
One of the things I seem to do each year is replace my tyres (tires? always confused about the spelling there…) on the Brompton for another year of cycling around the city (often in combination with public transport).
The beginning of the academic year seems to be about when I do it, which feels right somehow. It reminds me of my youth, when the night before the school academic year started there’d be frantic sewing of new school uniforms, or adjustment of old ones, to be worn the next day. I remember that always being a last minute thing, […] Click to continue reading this post
There’s something quite marvellous about trains. You can sit and think, work, or play while it slowly extracts you from your city and gently inserts you into another.
There’s no mess and fuss to do with cars and so forth, and the scenery is almost always interesting, whether it be the backs of people’s houses, where you can see washing lines, pools, gardens, gym equipment, horses and llamas (no I am not joking), 
or those businesses and infrastructure that we don’t often keep on the high street – any number of strip clubs, storage for trains and school buses, lumber yards, power stations, public storage units, yards with endless amounts of rusted metal – or farmland growing crops (sometimes in interesting geometrical arrangements), ocean, boats, piers, oil refineries, and of course surf and beaches. (I’ve some video clips of some of this. Perhaps I’ll edit it all together into a video for you later.)
You can look up from your thoughts, work, or leisure from time to time and gaze out over any of this for a while, drinking in the scenery at will. I find that people on the train are very friendly -almost ridiculously so- almost as though either the train attracts a certain type of person who is conducive to this type of mood, or there is something […] Click to continue reading this post
You’ll notice that I often talk about alternatives to driving everywhere in Los Angeles. Sometimes I talk about bikes (see for example the last post) as part of a range of options. Well, in December last year a student at USC doing a project in journalism (Lauren Lee – she’s at the Annenberg School) did a short report on bikes and the city for her project. (See also some of my posts about this issue, such as here, here, here, and several posts in the list at the bottom of this one). In her research, Lauren found this blog, gave me a call, and I agreed to make a few comments to camera for her as part of her larger report on some of the changes that are happening here in Los Angeles. (She also interviews Adam and Josef Bray-Ali, owners of the Flying Pigeon LA bike shop (hey, they have a blog)- a bike that might interest you.)
I should preface it with some remarks of my own. It is a nice report, but she edited out all the things I said that I think get at a central and key point. (To be fair, she was trying to make a two minute report, and I was babbling on enough for a Spike Lee four-part documentary…) I’m not advocating that everyone cycle everywhere they need to get to. Instead, I’m trying to get across the idea that cycling works really well in combination with the public transport system that already exists. One of the reasons people give most often for not using public transport is that the bus or subway stop is not quite close enough to where they want to get to, and/or close enough to their home. Leaving aside the cases where that sometimes this means “more than one block” or “not right next to my garage”, I’m trying to get across the […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, hey! I’m not the only one:
Spotted while on my way to see Coraline in 3D at the Arclight, which by the way is quite a treat!
(Uh… in case you’re wondering, I’m talking about folding bikes on public transport in […] Click to continue reading this post
Here we go again! Tonight sees another new episode of the new series of The Universe on the History Channel (you can watch it as a warm up to The Atom Smashers, on PBS), and the episode is all about the speed of light! I’ve no idea how this one will turn out, but for my segments we did some rather fun things to illustrate some of the key concepts. The main idea is that the laws of physics are rather different from ordinary Newtonian/Galilean ones when you are moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed the light. This is what we learned from Einstein’s Special Relativity. How do you illustrate this for a TV viewing audience? Well, one way is to imagine what would happen if the speed of light was a lot closer to everyday speeds. Then you could illustrate some of the effects in a fun way.
Well, one thing led to another and somehow (after a lot of email discussions of the physics with Darryl Rehr, the writer/director) it ended up that I was supposed to do […] Click to continue reading this post
Aha… now text messaging while driving is going to be illegal in California. (See e.g., here.) Very good. (Wait, not even at traffic light stops…? How are you supposed to constantly update people on how late you are?) I have not seen much in the way of enforcement for the mobile phone law from earlier in the year, have you? I wonder how much change has come about… other than more and more people wandering around on foot with shiny blinking earpieces looking like extras from a bad SF TV show… Concerned cyclists would like to know…
Well, here’s a little fun video to remind you of many of the fun things for you to do (that are not banned explicitly) now that you’ve got all that free time for your hands (sorry about annoying commercial at beginning):
Yesterday saw a mass desertion for a while here at the Aspen Center for Physics. Howie Haber (UCSC) organized a large group (twenty-two) of participants (and some of their guests) of the program entitled “LHC: Beyond the Standard Model Signals in a QCD Environment” (info here), to go for a group lunch at the excellent Pine Creek Cookhouse, 12 miles away up Castle Creek Road. And, I should mention, 1700 or so feet up. The latter is significant since about two thirds of us, led by Howie, cycled up there! It takes a while (times ranged from 1 hr 20 minutes to about 30 – 40 minutes more than that), and there are about two or three major long, punishing hills to deal with, but it was worth it!
Here are some (not all) of the cyclists at the destination (restaurant is a low-slung cabin-style affair out of shot to the right). Howie, our organizer, is in the middle at the front. (Click for larger view):
(Er, for the record, I’m slightly embarrassed by wearing socks with my sport sandals – a personal no-no – but I wanted to protect my feet from 12 miles of pedalling friction, so made an exception.)
Here are some random shots of happy arrivals (click each for larger): […] Click to continue reading this post
With the rise in gas prices, I’ve been seeing more and more people on the streets, walking and cycling, and more people using the subways and the buses. While I know that it has been producing real hardship for some people, I have to admit that it has been fantastic to see this change. So many streets and street corners have come to life. It has always been clear that higher gas prices would have this positive change, and I’ve hoped for it in some ways, but I wish that it had not come about in this way. I’d rather that it was because we’d managed to break out of a political climate so selfish and naive that nobody could propose raising taxes to an extent that would simultaneously give an incentive for people to use their cars less while at the same time providing much needed revenue with which to improve public transport infrastructure. Sadly, instead we’re just having high prices with nothing to show for it but a bunch of expressions of anger, while the oil companies and producers get fatter and fatter.
When I say I’d been hoping for higher prices, I need to clarify. I’m completely aware of […] Click to continue reading this post
So here’s a little irony. On Wednesday which was, I note:
(1) The day before Bike To Work Day in California…
(2) The day after I replied to a commenter that the extra investment in getting a folding bike like mine was well worth it (over getting a cheaper model) since -among other reasons- cheaper models would be more likely to fall apart while mine will last a lifetime…
I set off at 1:10pm on my bike to head (via the bus) to my office at USC, photocopy the final I’d spent the morning refining, and arrive at class at 2:00pm to set the final. Everything went fine, as usual, and as I did one last turn after waiting at the lights to head into the home stretch to catch the bus…
…my bike suddenly lost power. The chain had not slipped or broken though… An examination revealed that the crank arm/lever had completely broken away from the wheel holding the teeth and the chain. To be fair, I put an awful lot of regular stress on it (see below), but isn’t that ironic?
I got off the bike and wheeled it briskly to the bus stop I was headed for, managed to [..] Click to continue reading this post
