Recent Bike Activity

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Winter Gardening Underway

Nearly November, but still picking some tomatoes.  May be a couple more, but this pretty much finishes the garden.

Will even have a couple more zucchini, and should be able to at lease make one more soup.


(Apparently I didn't take much of a picture)...bought some new plants at Nordic Nursery (broccoli, winter tomatoes, green onions, and spinach).  This picture poorly portrays the broccoli and green onions.)


This is my failure of a pumpkin growing effort his year.  The three pumpkin harvest is my worst ever, and worse, the vine continues to tease me with new fruit.  I should just pull the whole thing, but I remain hopeful for a miracle, I guess.


Spinach.


Have some beets started from seed that are barely poking through the soil.


And, yes, I really like broccoli, and planted a few more in the west bed.


Saturday, October 22, 2011

Fighting the Good Fight

One would think that not much in this world could be more benign than my hobbies of bike commuting and gardening.  Particularly regarding bike commuting, I obviously keep one car off the road and that car's associated pollution and congestion.

But, taking a depressing read through our local weekly newspaper makes me realize that biking is far from benign, at least when it comes to discussing addition of bike lanes.


"Every day, I observe bicyclists violating both rules for vehicles and pedestrians as they seem to want the rights of both simultaneously and the responsibilities of neither."


"If Thousand Oaks insists on continuing to add bicycle lanes, then they must also enforce traditional rules of the road for bicyclists and ticket them for: riding on sidewalks, riding in pedestrian walkways, riding against the light, failing to stop, riding the wrong direction in bike lanes, etc., etc.

All actions I see bicyclists do on a daily basis throughout Thousand Oaks.

No one wants an accident, and I have had enough heartstopping near misses that I drive in terror of bicyclists in this town."
"Daily basis"? "Drive in terror"?  Really? 
"Look at the other bike lanes that already exist within the city, where many times these bike riders are four to five abreast riding on the auto section of the road (outside the path) and causing cars to swerve to miss them.


Also, many are not stopping at stop signs or red lights. Many think they do not have to abide by the traffic laws.

I have had several near collisions with some of these riders because they were not paying any attention to the other traffic around them."

Although I'm glad Rick isn't terrified of cyclists like Connie, I am wondering how he is having so many near collisions in a town where only .9% of commute trips are being made by cyclists (I discuss the dearth of bike commuters in a previous blog post.)
"It’s my guess that this push for a bike lane on Lynn Road is being spurred on by elitists in the cycling community who are putting their own selfish interests ahead of public safety and/or have politicians and commissioners in their pockets."

Whew...that's me, the selfish elitist with politicians in my pocket.

All of this is being generated by the City's recent initiatives to take state and federal money to build additional bike lanes.  Something that is not only objectionable to readers, but is actually objectionable to the newspaper itself:

"But some critics see the indiscriminate creation of bike lanes as increasing the likelihood of an accident by encouraging cyclists to ride next to traffic on fast-moving streets rather than off-road or in more residential areas.


There are studies that support this opinion as well.

We think the key here is for the city to create bike lanes in moderation—where they’re really needed—not on every stretch of road that becomes available or every time funding is offered.

Similar to solar panels, bike lanes look great on paper and are popular among politicians looking to add “environmentally conscious” to their resume, but in practice they aren’t always the best option. For solar, the problem is often cost; for bike lanes, it’s the stress they cause drivers."
If anything is indiscriminate, it's this newspapers' inclusion of unnamed studies and a solar panel comparison in an article about transportation planning.
I did respond to the editorial, incidentally:


(One final note, the paper actually shortened and, I believe, dumbed down my response...I hate how the first paragraph, in particular, reads.)

Sunday, October 16, 2011

I guess it wasn't all...more harvest!

I posted last week that harvests were over, yet I was very pleasantly surprised that I was still able to get quite a few veggies out of the garden yesterday, and make three helpings of soup (one for Saturday, two for upcoming work week).

The onions have been a real source of delight for me.  I picked up dried cuttings (I guess that is what they would be called) from Home Depot, planted them back in April, and they produced bountifully.  I believe that this is the last of them.


I'm Especially Proud of the Onions

Last of the Zucchini, I Think

Supplemental Harvest 

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Farewell, 2011 summer, I'll miss you

Well...that's all folks...summer 2011 is pretty much a wrap.  


Harvests actually started in early August, but I posted some of the pics already, and even, I think, posted the first picture below.  I started with that picture to show the recent progression of picked vegetables, however.


I don't know what I was doing on September 03, so that picture is missing, but the pics I did take tell a nice story of how the zucchini production peaked in late August, tomatoes and onions in mid September, peppers in October, and my pathetic pumpkins in October.


Since I started really tracking production in August, I ate 15 meals from the garden.  Figuring three meals per day for 60 days = 180 meals, I ate 8.3% of meals from the garden. Add that to the plum smoothies that I have every morning (from July's huge plum harvest), I can say that I had my own personal produce in 1/3 of my meals over the last two months.


At the bottom I demonstrate my most common meal, just a simple blended soup featuring pretty much whatever is picked that week.  I also demonstrate what was my favorite way of consuming 64 ounces of processed garden tomatoes.


August 20 

August 27 

September 10

September 17

September 24


October 01


October 08

Soup Making

Sometimes I Peel the Tomatoes, but Not this Time

This was Last Week's Soup...had Saturday Lunch + Two Meals at Work
Greet Stuff for 1st Week of NFL Play!






Saturday, October 1, 2011

Bike Commuting, Portland vs. My City

As posted two weeks ago, I was in Portland on university business.  While there, I dabbled in research towards my hobby of bicycle-commuting advocacy by taking a few pictures and observations, and by using a bike to commute to a couple of destinations (as described in that last blog posting).

My experience was consistent with Portland's reputation...Portland is clearly succeeding in getting people out of cars and onto bikes.  Biking to work is clearly part of the transportation fabric of the city.

I contrast that to my on-going experience in my hometown of Thousand Oaks, CA, where during my bike commute I will typically see maybe four or five bike commuters on my five mile commute.  Moreover, of that handful, I'd split them into two categories:
  1. The service worker -- Latino male, lunch in a plastic grocery bag dangling from handlebars, tires probably poorly inflated, riding a cheap mountain bike.
  2. The BIKER! commuter -- White male, spandex clad, riding a bike made for commuting.
I rarely see a sort of casual biker biking to work.

A few pictures from my Portland trip:

Downtown


More Downtown

Constant Traffic on Hawthorne Bridge

Women are a Common Sight
 I compare this with some (bad) shots from my own commute:

Picture Perfect Day for Riding Home from Work on  a Bike
Beautiful Day, Shady Bike Path

But Where are the Bikers



OK, There's One
The Rare Female
 As evidenced by the pictures, there's good (but not great) biking infrastructure, there's great weather, the traffic is not intimidating, yet it's a biking ghost town.

(As a side note, on the day I was taking the Thousand Oaks pictures I was riding from my place of work to my daughter's high school for college night.  The high school was a mess of parking, with cars overflowing the HS lot into the surrounding neighborhoods...in other words, it was a perfect day to bike to the high school, avoid the congestion, and bike past all the drivers that were hiking from their distant parking spaces.  However, as far as I could see, I was the sole biker.)

So...what's the deal?

To answer that question, I turn to every lazy blogger's aid Wikipedia, and also download Thousand Oaks' and Portland's Biking Master Plan documents.  From those sources, I put together the following table:

Portland
Thousand Oaks
Population
        583,776
               128,584
Area (Sq M)
               145
                          54
Density (Pop./Sq M)
            4,026
                    2,381
Median Income
$40,146
$96,120
% with 4 yr Degree
32.6%
42.2%
Miles of Bikeways
               630
                          74
Miles Bikeways/Sq. Mile
              4.34
                      1.37
% of Commuting by Bike
6.0%
0.9%
% of School Trips by Bike
40%
15%

Precipitation Days
               152
                          35
Snow Days
                    4
                           -  
Sunshine Hours
           2,348
 3,000+
Portland Advantages
Density
Bike Infrastructure
Thousand Oaks Advantages
Income
Higher Education*
Weather

*I considered higher education an advantage because of the preponderance of biotech workers in Thousand Oaks, and my knowledge that those employers have very bike-friendly stances towards commuting.

Looking at the table, it seems to me that with roughly one-half of the density, one-quarter of the bike trails per sq. mile, Thousand Oaks' weather, workplace, and income advantages should easily result in at least those proportions as applied to Portland's bike commuting percentage.  However, my anecdotal observations (made over 11 years) and the actual statistics are that Thousand Oaks' has just one-eighth the percentage of bike commuters that Portland has.  Quite simply, in my home town of great weather and high incomes, even though a fair amount of bike infrastructure has been installed, bike commuting is pretty insignificant.

When I went to Portland, I went with the assumption that the answer was going to be about the infrastructure.  Green bike identification areas (one of which I photographed) are common.  I also went through a couple of intersections that had stop light configurations designed specifically for the biker, one of which (if I recall correctly) stopped traffic in both directions for the bikers merging from a bike trail onto the streets.

However, I also observed many bikers biking in areas where there were no bike lanes, and certainly no fancy signals.  At those locations, I came to the conclusion that Portlanders were biking because they've achieved a kind of critical mass in biking so that biking is an accepted part of transportation.

Meanwhile back here in Thousand Oaks, I recall all the conversations with individuals that I know that I happen to encounter either at work or at a nearby Trader Joe's that I quite often frequent on the way home from work.  In those conversations, I hear genuine concern for my safety, with nearly every conversation concluding with, "be careful".  It seems that my well-meaning coworkers and friends are genuinely concerned with the inherent safety of biking, which, to me, explains why few people are biking.

So, where to go from here?  I think we do need more bike lanes and some fancy bike traffic signals in Thousand Oaks, and I think that biking planning cannot be an afterthought in transportation planning.  However, I think (as kind of a cop out) that there are no easy answers, and that I just need to keep riding and speaking up when I can.