Coming full circle
Bikes I have ridden: year acquired/number of gears:
1975: 1
1976: 3
1983: 18
1992: 21
2001: 27
2008: 1
So a couple of days ago I succumbed to a long-felt need and bought a singlespeed bike, a Kona Paddy Wagon. Just one gear. Freewheel optional. Fantastic.
When the hill gets steeper, pedal harder.
Overnight hike in the Snowy Mountains
K walking through wildflowers near Guthega. Mt Kosciusko in the far background. A magic night camping by the Snowy River, followed by an arduous trek back around three mountain peaks.
Advice for overnight backpacking:
- Pack sheets of kitchen paper between your Trangia pans. It’ll stop rattling and give you something to clean up with.
- Wear long pants/gaiters when walking through long, scratchy heath, or you’ll end up like me.
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc
When I was twenty, an architect friend-of-a-friend designed a house where kitchen and shower wastewater ran in a stream across an internal atrium, the idea being that an awareness of one’s effluvia was a prerequisite for dealing with it effectively.
At the time, I didn’t grok it: I had an intellectual appreciation for environmental concerns, but I didn’t see what I do now – how intuitively right his solution was. What is it, to feel something deeply, rather than just thinking it? What’s the difference between “knowing” and knowing?
More cars, less bikes. how?
I’ve been thinking bike-positive thoughts of late, and thinking about ways to motivate people to walk/cycle/public transport their way around. It’s a challenge, particularly since my city (Canberra) is highly optimised for car transport. The roads are more direct, wider, better lit and better maintained than the bicycle paths. I can drive 13 kilometres in 17 minutes (average speed: 45.9 km/h) to get to work, whereas the same trip on cycle paths is 18 kilometres in 45 minutes (average speed: 24 km/h). So I need to spend an extra hour each day to commute back and forth by bike.
How can we start to change that equation? Conventionally, only economic incentives have been proposed to help reduce private car use – but people have repeatedly shown that economic incentives are ineffective. We should instead be thinking of using the currency which really matters: time.
Prioritise cycle routes over roads for cars: If the cycle paths were as direct as roads (or I could safely ride on the roads), I’d save almost half an hour (13km @ 24km/hr = 32.5 minutes each way).
Slow cars down: one way to make it safer for cars to coexist with bikes on the road would be to limit their speed, say, 40km/h, saving weight (smaller, less powerful engines), fuel, pollution, and noise. This would reduce the incentive to drive, help the environment, and make the roads safer for everyone. And before you think this is politically impossible, consider that we already have quite arbitrary speed limits already.
Worth thinking about?
I love mountains
When we arrived in Milford Sound a couple of years ago, the summer storms caused dozens of waterfalls to erupt from the walls. Later we kayaked past the waterfalls as they cascaded into the water: so much rainwater drains into Milford sound that the water, though open to the ocean, is hardly salty at all.
In July I’m going to one of my favourite places, the south island of New Zealand, with my father and brothers for a boys-bonding week. This time it’ll be winter, and I’m going to try iceclimbing, which sounds like a lot of fun.
Yay for steepness.
Walkable. Urban. Bucolic.
Today’s 3-minute stroll to work (once you’ve organised your life like this, you’ll never want to commute again) was like a benign parody of walkable urbanism. Autumn leaves swirled around as I walked across the grassy lawns: a little kid kicked a football which landed at my feet: I kicked it back to his embarassed thanks. I grabbed a coffee from my local cafe, where they know my order before I arrive. I read an article on my Palm about poor fuel economy in modern cars. Life is good.