Category Archives: Advocacy & Local Issues

Bicycle advocacy both local and national, as well as discussion of local bicycle incidents with the community and/or police

10 minutes of your time, today, could save cycling in the US

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Congress, in the next two days, may kill off virtually any expenditure having to do with making cycling a routine & safe activity, including-

Safe Routes to Schools is a program that works! More kids riding & walking to schools, less congestion.

  • Safe Routes to Schools, an amazing program that is getting kids to walk and ride to schools again, is going to be gone. And with it all hope of relief from traffic gridlock anywhere near a school in the mornings or afternoons. And this is a program that has had widespread bipartisan support.

  • Efforts to make sure new road projects accomodate motorists, pedestrians and cyclists will be set back years. This affects everyone, even motorists, as all users will continue to fight it out on poorly-designed roads and intersections. Congestion, gridlock and road rage will only get worse.

What can you do? In 10 minutes, you can make a difference.

Call your representative’s office and ask them to support Representative Petri’s amendment to restore funding to Safe Routes to Schools and Transportation Enhancements. Tell them it’s important, to you, that we invest in the future. Tell them that you’ve used a bicycle to commute, to shop, or just for fun. Let them know that, when gas gets above $4/gallon again, you’d like an alternative that’s safe and easy to do.

How do I do that?

Follow this link to find out who your Representative is and their phone number. For example, when I go to that link, it asks for my zip code (94062) and tells me my Rep is Jackie Speier. I click on her link and at the bottom of her page it gives me her phone number (both local and DC; I called the local). I call the number, speak to a staff person in her office, explain that I’m concerned about the future and that cutting all support for cycling is not something I want to see. Please support Representative Petri’s amendment. They take notes, and report to the Representative that “x” number of people called today asking that she support Representative Petri’s amendment to save funding for pedestrian & cycling projects.

That’s it. Seriously, just 10 minutes of your time. You don’t have to know any details about Representative Petri’s amendment. They don’t expect that you do. They just know that the amendment supports cycling infrastructure and that you believe in that.

My personal pitch for investing in the future-

I get that people think the country’s deficit is too big and we’re spending beyond our means. I get that we have to prioritize and make painful choices sometimes. But what I don’t get is an insistence that we only spend what we have, and cannot afford to invest in our future.

Anyone who has kids knows that’s not how the world works. If you’ve made a decision to have kids, you’ve mortgaged your future, plain & simple. Anyone who owns a house knows this isn’t how the world works. You borrow against the future, believing that the investment will pay off. These are generally intelligent decisions supported by society. Not subject to naysayers telling you that’s crazy, you don’t have the money today to support what it’s going to cost you tomorrow.

Investing in a future that helps us fight health issues, congestion & reducing our dependence on resources other countries can hold us hostage for is, I feel, worth spending 1.5% of the federal transportation budget on pedestrian & cycling needs.

Thanks-          Mike (& Steve) Jacoubowsky, Partners, Chain Reaction Bicycles

9400 Facebook employees are coming our way, but maybe (hopefully?) not their cars!

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My wife just walked in a few moments ago, after seeing a story on Channel 2 news about Facebook strong-arming Menlo Park over their new headquarters (in the former Sun Microsystem campus). She thought hey, what a great opportunity for a cycling solution! And of course, she’s right. Just like always. So I dug into the issue a bit, trying to figure out how we can play our part in making this a world where people are a resource and not a burden on the infrastructure (a fancy way of saying we can pack more people into a given area if we have fewer cars attached to them), and found that, of course, the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition is all over this. Follow this link for an excellent piece on their website, including important dates and locations for meetings that you might want to attend.

Directly across from the new Facebook Campus is this convoluted bike crossing, including a channel designed to keep shrapnel in place to assault bike tires.

There’s a lot of work and opportunity with this one; presently, the Bayfront bike path is a disaster; poorly maintained, improperly signed and dangerously-routed. My son and I reported on this on Oct 24th when we rode through the area on our way back from Mt. Diablo. It’s really bad news. Unfit for cycling at any speed.

Facebook could easily become a model citizen and dramatically improve the lot of cyclists in the area without much effort by embracing the bicycle. Let’s hope this works out!  –Mike–

Why we need a 3-foot passing law

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Why we need a 3-foot passing law
I do what I can to avoid issues with cars, and for the most part, have very few. But today, heading back up west-side 84 from Old LaHonda, my son and I had someone fly by much too close for comfort. Currently, there is nothing on the books saying how much clearance a car should be giving a cyclist, but pretty sure most reasonable people would think it should be more than what’s shown in the photo, particularly when the car is going well over the speed limit.

Aside from that a pretty nice ride; first chance to get out the rain bikes (as if it’s something I’d look forward to?) and get things checked out before a “serious” ride (such as next Thursday morning’s Thanksgiving Day ride, otherwise known as the annual Turkey Trot, which presently shows rain in the forecast). It was supposed to be a longer ride than it was, the plan being to head down to the Los Altos store via the foothills before turning back. I really didn’t want to do a Skyline ride in the wet until I knew the bikes were up to it. That was until Kevin lets m know, about 15 minutes into the ride, that he’s got to be back for a 4:30 gig with his friends (Lazer Tag). And it’s 2pm. Yikes. So we ended up doing Old LaHonda instead (maximum effort minimum time), down the back side and back over 84 into Woodside.

Amazingly, despite the face that we had waited until it had stopped raining, we saw just 6 other cyclists on the road. Where was everybody? Perhaps watching the cyclocross racing in the City?

Caltrain+BART+Bike = Mt Diablo, 80 miles, 6400ft of climbing= great ride, but oh my has the Dumbarton bike path deteriorated!

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An odd ride, eh? Starts and ends in different places. Ah, the things you can pull off if you’re not tied down to a car!

We’ve got some decent transit in the bay area, so why not use it? Not really fast transit; you have to go to France for that. But you can put together a good East Bay ride by riding to your nearest CalTrain, connect to BART at the Millbrae Station, and arrive in Walnut Creek ready to go! We left the house at 8:17am, just enough time to pick up coffee and breakfast at Starbucks before catching the 8:41am train, which connects to the 9:21am BART, which arrives in Walnut Creek at 10:30am. Could you drive there faster? Sure. About 1 hour 10 minutes; 1 hour 30 including the stop for Starbucks, so maybe 45 minutes faster by car. But then you’ve got a car that you have to get back to, limiting your riding choices. If you do an out (by transit) and back (by bike), you can effectively increase your radius from 50 miles to 75 or more! Which is obviously what we did.

It was pretty nice out there; close to hot, but not quite. The climb up Mt. Diablo was between 73 & 80 degrees and was surprisingly easy. We stopped once on the way up to help a guy with a flat (new bike and he wasn’t too familiar with it, plus he was using the tubeless road clinchers, something I don’t think is quite ready for prime time). Tried to save a snake but unfortunately got to watch a car drive right over it. Lots of road stain from previously run-over snakes & tarantulas, much more than I’ve seen elsewhere. The road surface is fantastic, far better than Mt. Hamilton.

Interesting thing about the top of Mt. Diablo today. It was just exactly the right temperature to make you a bit too comfortable. You felt like you could sit down and read a book for a couple hours, chat with people, whatever. Seemed like a nice place to hang out. That’s not usually what goes on on a bike ride!

The ride back down was uneventful but slow (slow mostly because the park has radar-enforced speed limits of 15 to 25 miles per hour), after which came an unexciting cruise through Blackhawk and the backside of Dublin. I’d been concerned there might not be many places to eat on this ride, and maybe 15 years ago that would have been true, but things are pretty built up now and it was no problem finding a Subway near Camino Tassajara & Blackhawk Road.

Palomares Canyon was as challenging as ever, and also the finale as far as anything really fun on the ride. After that it was city roads with traffic through Fremont, which was actually a whole lot better than what followed- the Dumbarton Bridge lead in, the bridge itself, and the Bayfront bike path on the other side. Talk about crumbling infrastructure! The road leading up to the bridge is both grainy and choppy, and the bridge? Yikes, unbelievable amount of glass and other tire-biting debris, so much that I had to boot my tire midspan after I noticed an irregularity when I ran my (gloved) hand over it, making sure I hadn’t picked up glass.

And the other side? If this is what I go to DC to lobby for, I’ve got to change my thinking. They’d recently cut down the grasses and weeds along the path, and not bothered to sweep it. Crud everywhere. And the part where you have to cross the street at the former Sun Microsystems location (now Facebook)? Glass so bad in the bike section that you have to lift your bike over it. And when you get to Marsh Road and have to use the push button to get across, just try and find where they hid it in the shrubs! In my opinion, the Dumbarton Bridge bike path is a disaster, something not suitable for road bikes unless you’re willing to risk destruction of expensive high-quality tires.

It’s that time of year again (Trade Show in Las Vegas)

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Wednesday will be my first day at “the show” but the real work was today (Tuesday) when, instead of getting to do the usual Tuesday/Thursday-morning ride, I was in NBDA (National Bicycle Dealer Association) meetings dealing with nothing at all important, just things having to do with whether small businesses in this country have a shot at survival and what role internet sales should play vs our “brick & mortar” investment (selling to real live people out of a real live building).

But first, I was treated to a pretty wild lightning storm, with a great view from the 33rd floor of Circus Circus (yeah, real high-rent digs) at 2:30am! Pictures soon.

If I call out “Car Back” could you please move over?

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It would be easier to skip this entry and not risk offending anyone, but there are cyclists out there making my time on the road more dangerous and more difficult because… they’re rude? Indifferent? Feel priviledged?

On Monday’s ride (the 94 mile figure-8 to Boulder Creek) Kevin and I were heading up 9 on the return to Skyline, about halfway between Waterman Gap and the top, when we came across a couple of guys out for their own ride in the same direction. Riding two across, they were taking up at least half of the lane on a road with very fast-moving cars. I understand the idea of being social and riding next to someone else; I do it often with Kevin, because it’s easier to carry on a conversation. But when I hear a car coming up, I immediately drop back and get in line behind him. Why? Because it’s safer, and because there’s no reason a cyclist should cause others to go out of their way or get delayed when there’s no good reason to. It’s called sharing the road. Continue reading →

Why do we ignore simple solutions to intersection design?

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Yikes, read through this article on intersections and see if you can make sense of everything- http://www.slate.com/id/2300425/pagenum/2 (someone reading this provided a link to a youtube video that does a much better job of presenting the solution this article provides)

In a nutshell, many believe that left turns are the big no-no for proper traffic flow. But why go to so much trouble, all manner of examples of complex traffic re-engineering to solve this problem, and *no* mention of traffic circles? I have both cycled and driven in areas that make extensive use of traffic circles, and they require very little retraining. They’re not entirely intuitive; it takes a little getting used to the idea that, at least in some cultures, making eye-contact means you’re yielding to the other person, but that’s likely more cultural than an aspect of the traffic circle itself.

Yes, they require real estate, but the center of the circle presents significant opportunity for visual enhancement (park accessible via underground or overground passageway, gateway signage, etc). They also offer opportunities for traffic calming without the complication of signals and other electro-mechanical devices that don’t work when there’s a power outage. In other words, very low maintenance.

Perhaps part of the issue is that, in the US, there’s a belief that a blank space must be filled. It should have parking, or office space, or something. You can’t just have a piece of land (the center of the circle) that people can’t park or walk or trash. Darn, once again, life imitates life. It’s just like a retail bike shop. You get too large an open space and you want to put something there, instead of recognizing the value of reducing clutter and making things more open and spacious to set people at ease.

–Mike–

“Clean Air Vehicle” that runs on gas? I don’t think so!

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This is a "Clean Air Vehicle?" It runs on gas, it requires large amounts of asphalt for parking, and it encourages driving for errands. Maybe "cleaner" than some alternatives, but cannot compare to a bicycle. Your bike is a true "Clean Air Vehicle."

Hybrid cars. Some people love to hate them, mostly for how they’re driven (if only they’d get rid of that meter telling them how, if they roll through the stop signs and drive like Grandma they’ll get 53 miles per gallon instead of 48). OK, so they have one thing in common with bikes, but getting stuck behind two of them today and having that orange sticker staring me in the face that says “Clean Air Vehicle” while they’re burning gas running errands to the shopping center… I’m sorry but that’s just too much.

A “Clean Air Vehicle” shouldn’t burn gas! It probably shouldn’t even run on electricity. The only true “Clean Air Vehicles” are those self-propelled. Your bicycle is a true “Clean Air Vehicle.”

Besides the recreational/fitness aspects of cycling, you truly can use a bike to avoid driving. Today, I did a run to the bank before heading to the shop, and how much gas did I use? Exactly zero. How many square feet of asphalt were required for me to park my bike? Exactly zero. The air would be a whole lot cleaner if there were more bicycles used for shorter trips and fewer “Clean Air Vehicles.” It’s time for some truth in advertising. Or maybe a new advertising campaign for Chain Reaction!

Tell us about your commute. It may inspire others to Go By Bike!

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I’m putting together a page that will inspire people to consider commuting by bike, or just getting around in general on a bike instead of driving. So many of the trips taken by car are short (under 3 miles) and don’t require hauling 50 pound bags of dog food, and yet we don’t think twice about grabbing the car keys and driving. Time to “Think Different” as Apple would say! So please, respond to this with your bike commute story, and I’ll see what I can do to organize things and inspire others. Thanks- –Mike–

Go By Bike! Commuting, shopping, banking… (And a goofy video with a soundtrack you might recognize)

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(Originally posted for Bike To Work day) So have you figured out how you can ride your bike to work instead of drive tomorrow? The weather report looks good for the Peninsula, with a high of 71 and low of 48 degrees. So what’s keeping you from trying the bike commute thing?

For me, it was the assumption that hauling around my “missile case”, a laptop case including the keys to everything needed to run the shop (in particular the marketing end of things), and a 400ft hill at one end of the commute that just isn’t much fun with a lot of weight on your back. Nevertheless, when one of the two shop vehicles died a second time (one doesn’t put a third transmission into a 13 year old Dodge Caravan with 133,000 miles on it), I was left without a gas-powered weather-insulated tomb on wheels. And that’s really what a car becomes when commuting… you try to pretend that you can do other things than drive, because you admit to yourself that driving is stupid, so you talk on your phone, you turn on the radio, you roll up the windows and put the air conditioning on, you eat & drink. Anything to avoid thinking about your actual surroundings, which is, of course, incredibly dangerous. And dehumanizing.

I started out with a big Oakley backpack, so big that it could swallow up the laptop case. But, riding with a heavy backpack just isn’t much fun, but seemed like the only option since I don’t own a bike with a rack on it. Except that I do! My Bike Friday, my travel bike for trips to France, has a rack on it. Add a grocery bag pannier like my wife uses on her Trek e-bike, and voila, no more backpack, and I get to make a lot more use of the Bike Friday than for a once-a-year trip to France.

The run to the shop is pretty easy, since it’s downhill for the first mile, although I’ll admit that, on a Tuesday or a Thursday, when I’ve just finished the morning training ride, the legs talk to me once I hit the flat part of Jefferson (especially when there’s even a slight headwind). The detour to the bank seems to take less time on the bike than in the car, and there’s been no issue bringing the bike inside. Without the side trip to the bank, it’s about 9 minutes from home to the shop (2.7 miles). Adding the bank in brings it up to 25 or so. The trip home? Not quite so easy, but not that much slower at between 14-16 minutes, depending upon how I hit the lights. Do I feel “rested” when I get home? Uh… no. I’m 100% totally destroyed, because I can’t help myself, the second I leave the back gate at the shop I turn on the timer and it’s game-on. But perhaps “destroyed” isn’t quite accurate, because there’s this strange combination of near-death & energized that really best describes how you feel. I don’t think a non-cyclist can relate to that, and perhaps it’s a more-exclusive club that requires a degree of competitiveness bordering on the absurd.

Please tell us about your own commute! Submit it as a reply to this post and I’ll try to organize them in a fashion that will hopefully inspire more people to Go By Bike. –Mike–