Urban Adventures & More

I rode down a non-motorized park avenue today. Some thoughts:

• While as popular as last year, I felt that this year people were better behaved. There was still plenty of aggressive biking, but most people seemed to be more relaxed than in the past.
• There need to be more repair stations and more people showing bike basics, such as “how to wear your helmet”, “inflate your tires”, “adjust your seat height”, and, my favorite, “oil your chain”. I saw so many people with underinflated tires (and I told them so), but at least as many with horrible fit who just didn’t seem comfortable, and probably had a lot of knee pain as a result.
• The pool looked both fun and moderately used. I would go in it if I had a buddy. Also, there were a lot of pretty ladies.
• Why does it end at 1 pm? More importantly, why does it begin at 7am? If Germany can close an entire freeway for 30 miles for pedestrians for a day, New York can close an unnecessary avenue for more than 6 hours.

Some other thoughts that came to me.

• New York is kicking butt with its new infrastructure. Downtown, a lot of the route had bike lanes. I rode over to Brooklyn and discovered all the work that has gone into the Brooklyn Bridge park, which extends for miles along the waterfront. You can ride on paths from the Brooklyn Bridge almost unbroken to Red Hook; there are many more on-street lanes (unintimidating ones) that go in other directions.
• The Brooklyn Bridge crams too many people into too little space. While cars fly by in six lanes, thousands of people are stuck bursting out of the path. I say, close a lane on the bridge, make it a bike lane, and dedicate the entire path to pedestrians. (If you want to bike up to the observation points, you’ll have to walk, sorry.)
• Boston has nothing on New York for bike infrastructure. And there’s no reason but politics.

There is an entire site devoted to imagined extensions of the Boston T. Although I don’t (yet!) have a complete grasp of Boston neighborhoods and outlying towns, I could still tell that the highly ambitious routes imagined were really just intellectual fancy. This contributor sums up the issues nicely.

In reply to my previous post, Park Avenue South and then Park Avenue proper is the least unpleasant option. It’s only two lanes below 42nd, which is probably the biggest determinant of comfort. I go left at 42nd and up Vanderbilt Avenue, then right at 46th and back onto Park. This section is wider, but there’s so many cars pulling up to the curve and turning that nobody really has an opportunity to pick up a lot of speed like on a wider, staggered-light street. They should put a bike line along the median and get rid of one lane of traffic. I also rode all the way cross town to the Hudson path on a different trip; this was slow and unpleasant and added 5-10 minutes to my ride, which is a big percentage increase.

I have an excellent downtown route. Yesterday I made it to 25th & Lex from my house on the Upper West Side in 19 minutes, stopping only a handful of times. I go down Columbus Avenue to 77th Street, where I make a left and get into the park. I then take 7th Avenue south through Times Square (shitty, but I want to stay near Broadway. It’s really not so bad: it takes maybe 3 minutes to get through) — it would be awesome to go from 59th to Times Square on Broadway instead, but note that you’ll have to avoid the pedestrian plaza by getting on 7th at 46th or 45th.  At 42nd, I go left and get back on Broadway. Then at Herald’s Square, I go down the extended sidewalk on 6th, cross 34th on the east side of the street and then ride in the gutter against 6th avenue traffic to get back on Broadway.  Then it’s smooth sailing again down to 26th, where I make a left, go to Lex, make a right, and done!

The beautiful part of this route is that at no point are you really being overtaken by cars. The Columbus Avenue section is downhill, so I can keep a pretty good pace. The 7th Avenue section has proven quite empty (since 7th starts below the park!), so most of the time I have the road all to myself. Broadway is shunned like the plague these days and has a separated bike line – you have to be more wary of pedestrians walking wherever they damn well please.

I’m back in New York again, and I’m trying to take my bike everywhere. It’s a little different from Cambridge, to say the least.

I’m at school in Midtown on the east side, and live on the Upper West Side, so my natural route to school is to go through Central Park, down 7th Avenue through Times Square, down Broadway, and then cut east a few blocks at Madison Square. This is a pretty nice route, as the street portion of the ride is through low-volume areas, some even with good bike lanes. (However, the separated path in the 30’s is unusable, since it is basically an extension of the sidewalk.)

The trip back home is not so easy. The 40’s and 50s on almost every single uptown avenue are terrifying. I have ridden on 3rd, 6th, Madison, and 8th, and every ride has near misses. I will give Park a try today, I think, although the lack of staggered lights makes me nervous. Also, 2-way traffic means lots of people zooming across my lane without looking for bikes.

My question is, is there are a way not to risk death on the way home without diverting to the Hudson River Bikeway (an exhausting diversion)?

As I indicated in my previous post, I’ve been learning how to get my chainring straightened out. The internet, as far as I can tell, basically only has Sheldon Brown’s useful (but slightly cryptic) explanation of how to do this. However, now that I have dealt with it, I understand the issue better.

Recall that the role of the chainring is transfer energy from your feet (by way of the pedals and crank) to the chain and eventually to the back tire. Because every ounce of energy your feet put into the pedals is meant to be transferred into the chain, getting very low resistance makes a huge difference in the feel and performance of the bike. When there is too much slack in the chain (low tension) or the chain binds at any point  (high tension), that is energy that should be going from your feet to the wheels, but is instead being dissipated by inefficiency in the system.

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Following up on my previous post about my new bike, everything has been going quite peachy. Who knew that buying everything new helps?

Well, it’s no silver bullet. If there’s anything I have learned about fixed gears so far, it is that you have to get the crank bolts just right, and check them frequently. There should not be any noise, and there should not be any binding of the chain. When I first got the repairs done, there developed an awful rattling in the chainring; it turns out the bolts were too long and weren’t able to be tightened enough. After a couple weeks riding around with a new set of properly sized bolts, the rattling came back. I got a wrench and discovered everything had come loose. I tightened, and the chainring went back to being almost totally quiet.

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Finally, a picture of my bike. Love it! The bag under the seat has my flat fix kit, keys etc. That’s a cable lock I have stuck on the handlebars.

I had everything below the frame replaced. See my last post.

Push on pedals A to rotate chain ring B, driving chain C, rotating rear cog D, and pushing wheel E forward.

This is actually very limited advice on bike repair. But first, the background.

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Jane Jacobs makes an artful case in The Death and Life of Great American Cities against congestion pricing. The crux of the congestion pricing plan is to reduce the supply of vehicles indiscriminately. It vilifies trucks, and makes allowances for cars.

However, this is backward; trucks and other commercial vehicles have no alternative, and are the most needed of vehicles, and cars are the most destructive to pedestrian and transit alternatives. When the private automobile is allowed to thrive, it steals those marginal users from mass transit, lowering bus and train utilization. Streets are widened, made one-way, and streamlined to promote rapid car transit at the expense of pedestrians. Parking becomes an imperative at the expensive civic density. Trucks may be in nearly perfectly inelastic demand, but business will simply pass those costs on to their consumers in the city and lower quality of life and vitality within, something we can agree is totally counter-productive.

The proper alternative is one Jacobs proposes, and it makes inherent sense: make the city inhospitable to car traffic, and alternatives will be promoted. Reduce demand for private transportation. The core observation, and one that bears repeating is that transit is a nonlinear problem. This means that there is no fixed number of cars or even visitors to a city. There is no one story. Some come to shop, some to work, some to visit, some to make deliveries. The magnitude and frequency of these uses is a function of the city’s vitality, and the manner in which these activities are carried out is not predetermined for all.

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To clarify what I wrote in my previous post about safe street riding, consider this passage  (taken from the California DMV code), a bike should stay as close as possible to the right unless,

When reasonably necessary to avoid conditions (including, but not limited to, fixed or moving objects, vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, animals, surface hazards, or substandard width lanes) that make it unsafe to continue along the right-hand curb or edge, subject to the provisions of Section 21656. For purposes of this section, a “substandard width lane” is a lane that is too narrow for a bicycle and a vehicle to travel safely side by side within the lane.

So, when there’s no shoulder, you should take up a lane. It’s that simple.