The story of a bike and a stubborn cyclist

Orillia cycling & the MEC contest

2010-09-09T06:46:00.002-04:00

As noted before, I've posted a few cycling videos onto Youtube. This was the first one, and then I did a second one riding west out of the city.

Later, I was browsing the MEC site looking at paniers and winter cycling pants, and came across their Sweet Spots video contest.

I entered my videos into the cycling portion of the contest, and if anyone wants to grace me with a few votes, go to this page and look for the two videos which have "orillia" in the title.

I initially assumed that you had to be a MEC member to vote in the contest, but you don't - all you need is an email address.

Thanks!

West out of town

2010-08-09T17:20:00.002-04:00

Maybe I'll do a video in each direction out of Orillia. The last one started north of town and worked it's way back in. This one loops out of town to the west, then comes back in from the south. I could do a purely "south" one and then one out to the east!

Anyway - here's the youtube link to the newest video.

P.S. - as a long time Toronto cyclist (where you bike for about 1.5 hours just to get to something resembling the farmland seen in this video), let me say how nice it is to have these kind of views just 15 minutes away from your house. In just about any direction.

A cyclist with a mac

2010-07-31T16:54:00.006-04:00

I now have access to a Mac and the IMOVIE software. I'm starting to dream about creating awesome cycling videos. Unfortunately I don't have regular access to a good video camera. These two videos were just shot with my Canon Powershot camera's video-recording capabilities, and they're still turning out pretty well.

The link to go over to YouTube to watch this video is here. I don't know why embedding videos on blogger continues not to work properly.

That's the one I tried a bit harder with. This one is shorter and was my first crack at the IMOVIE software.

floyd - the truth is out there

2010-05-22T10:43:00.003-04:00

In 2006, after Floyd Landis won a crazy mountain stage in the Tour de France (the Tour that he would win and then have taken away due to doping), I wrote a very sentimental and melodramatic post about Floyd's mountain climbing ability, and about mountain climbing in general.

Despite positive doping tests from that Tour, Floyd would deny drug use for four years. He even set up the Floyd Fairness Fund (or the longer title Fund to Fight for Fair Treatment for Floyd Landis and Advocate Advances in Best Practice in Anti-Doping in Sport. Basically - you were meant to donate to the fund to help Floyd clear his name and also help protect other athletes from every being tarnished in this way.

Well the truth is now out of the bag - Floyd has confessed, and he's saying that Lance was involved in the doping.

I don't really care about Lance. What gets me is the indignant, holier than thou, "how dare you accuse me of doping" attitude that Floyd (and McGwire and Bonds etc) put on for as long as they possibly can, until something makes them realize that it's pointless and they might as well confess. And to go so far as to set up a Floyd Fairness Fund?!? That's ridiculous. In his confession, Floyd should have also added "I would like to announce that anyone who contributed to my fund is welcome to come and punch me in the face."

It's such a shame. Those mountain stages in the Tour and other cycling races are so inspiring and dramatic. To hear - a few weeks or months or years later - that the dudes providing the drama were flat out cheating.... well... it just ruins it, doesn't it?

Last day of mini-vacation

2010-05-19T16:55:00.002-04:00

The Trek road bike mentioned below has sold. Thanks to my buddy for selling it for me and to everyone who inquired about it. I hope the buyer enjoys many long summer rides on it.

It's mid-May and my thoughts are more about gardening right now than biking. The photo above comes at the end of a nice day here in central-Ontario - the plants and vegetables in the foreground will soon be in our garden this weekend hopefully, and the bike out in the lawn was deposited there by my wife after a "gotta ride my bike in this sunshine" outing along the lakeshore trails.

The cats spent most of the day under a bench.

babies and baby blue bikes

2010-03-21T16:11:00.006-04:00

So I obviously haven't been blogging much these last few months. One of my reasons is this little cutie - who is now six weeks old.

The new baby and an early spring here in central Ontario has got me in a "spring cleaning" frame of mind, and one outcome of this is that I'm going to sell my road bike, and not having much time for this, I'm going to sell it through a bike-saavy friend in Toronto. Contact him at duncanvolk [at] yahoo.com.

A dozen pictures are viewable in a set over at Flicker. I'll provide a couple here though as well:

The specs are still viewable in the Trek Bike Archives. Look for the 2006 Road bikes, and then the Trek 5000. This link should get you there.

Before I forget - this is a 54cm frame.

The differences, as the pictures at Flickr will demonstrate, are these:
Wheelset - Easton Circuit
Tires - Front: Specialized Pro / Rear: Michelin Orion
Brakes - Ultegra
Front Derailleur - Dura Ace
Bar Tape - Specialized Gel tape (called S Wrap I think)

Although there is an old Selle Italia saddle on the bike in the pictures, I'm going to put the stock Bontrager saddle back on for the buyer. The Italia is my beaten up old favourite saddle.
Also - the current pedals are Time Impacts. I'd rather keep them, but if the buyer doesn't have his/her own pedal system and wants the Times, I can sell them and my cleats for an extra $30.00 bucks or so.

Here's the brief story:

I bought the bike in April 2008. It was originally owned by another central Ontario cyclist who told me he'd taken the Shimano gears off the bike and ridden it with SRAM parts. After I bought it, I had my local bike shop do various things - replaced the wheelset with Easton Circuits, which are high up in the "value" range of road wheels. They were often sold anywhere from $400 to $600.00 a set by themselves. I had the bikeshop redo the bartape for me, and at one of my visits they offered me a good price on the Dura-Ace front derailleur which is now on the bike, and I took them up on it.

That's how the bike came to be fairly differently spec'd from what you'll see on the Trek site. To my mind all these changes are upgrades - especially the wheels (and I guess the front derailleur).

The mileage is hard to guesstimate. I've had it for two summers and really only rode it maybe 10 to 12 times a summer at the most, and not being in shape anymore those would have been 30 to 60km rides at the maximum. I can't vouch for how much mileage was put onto the bike by the guy before me.... but since he rode SRAM gears, and since I changed the wheelset... any mileage put on by that guy really only refers to the frame and fork etc... not the parts which usually suffer from the most wear and tear.

There are a few reasons I'm selling, primarily:
a) at 5'7 I've always been at the low end of people who could ride 54cm frames. My previous two road bikes were both 54s, but this Trek is a bit different and a bit too big for me. As I see myself getting older and less fit, the size problem will just get worse and worse.

b) With the new baby mentioned above I don't think I'll really need a road bike for a few summers. I mainly find myself reaching for my 'cross bike these days anyway, and so I figured I'd sell while the bike is still fairly new and I could get a respectable price for it.

One more note: see post below for a review from Bicycling Magazine for the 2004 model of the Trek 5000.

Review of Trek 5000

2010-03-21T16:00:00.000-04:00

In the post to follow, I describe my 2006 Trek 5000 road bike which is for sale. I thought I would post a review from Bicycling Magazine of the 2004 version of this bike. The 2004 I believe was the first year the Trek 5000 was produced.

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Tour trickledown.(bicycles)(Product/Service Evaluation).

Bicycling 45.7 (August 2004): p85. (1733 words)

Trek 5000

PRICE: $2,200 WEIGHT: 18.0 lb. (56cm w/o pedals) YAY: Smooth, feathery frame NAY: Paying more than two grand and settling for a few ho-hum Shimano 105 parts FRAME AND FORK: Trek OCLV 120 carbon fiber; fork has alloy steerer tube SIZES: 50, 52, 54, 56 (tested), 58, 60, 62cm COMPONENT HIGHLIGHTS: Shimano Ultegra shifters, cranks, rear derailleur, 105 brakes and front derailleur; Bontrager wheels, bar, stem, saddle, seatpost CONTACT: 920/478-4678; www.trekbikes.com

To appreciate the 5000, let's look at what Lance rides...and has ridden since signing with Trek in 1997. For his first two Tour wins (1999 and 2000), Armstrong used a 58cm frame identical to that of the 5000. The next year, Lance piloted what's now the 5900 SL, which uses a slightly lighter weave of carbon fiber (110 grams per square meter instead of 120 grams). The savings in weight was a mighty slim 60 grams. Last year, Lance used the new Madone which, at a weight similar to a 5900 SL, is a whisker more aerodynamic.

A frame that won two Tours and is a few gulps of water heavier than the latest and greatest? Fine by us. Frame aside, Lance wasn't riding a $2,200 rig in the Tour-his bike was decked with top-of-the-line Dura-Ace parts. To bring the price down, the 5000 gets dressed with a mix of Shimano Ultegra and 105, backed by a spread of Trek's house-brand Bontrager components, including wheels. All work without complaint, even if outclassed by the yellow-jersey winning frame.

Hop on the 5000 and enjoy the quiet, no-buzz ride that carbon-fiber frames-and Trek's decade-old OCLV models in particular-are famous for. With the requisite carbon-fiber fork up front, all-day comfort abounds, but there's still stoutness for torquing in town-line sprints. Thankfully, steering leans toward precise and stable rather than quick and twitchy-perfect for those secret, two-handed victory salutes when, alone on some back road, you're playing Armstrong.

We have a peak oil date...

2009-12-15T20:02:00.003-05:00

When I first started this blog, I had recently seen The End of Suburbia, and I was commuting daily on a bike through Canada's auto-manufacturing heartland, and when you add these plus some other things together, you end up with a guy who couldn't help but blog endlessly about peak oil. Some of these old posts can be found here and here and here and here.

Oh yeah, and if you haven't heard the phrase "peak oil" before, try this site for some background.

So I was blogging and blogging about peak oil and except for that blip when oil prices rose for stock market reasons (as opposed to resource depletion reasons), nothing really happened. In fact... for a while now I've been wondering if advances in technology (hybrid engines for example), the recession lowering demand for oil, and general environmental awareness, would succeed in pushing back the peak oil date for many decades.

But now, in the Dec. 12-18 issue of http://www.economist.com/The Economist, Fatih Birol (chief economist of the International Energy Agency), says the date is 2020.
The reasons are not hard to find. After analysing the historical production trends of 800 individual oilfields in 2008, the IEA came to the conclusion that the decline in annual output from fields that are past their prime could average 8.6% in 2030. “Even if oil demand were to remain flat, the world would need to find more than 40m barrels per day of gross new capacity—equal to four new Saudi Arabias—just to offset this decline,” says Mr Birol.

So even if China and India DON'T acquire the North American appetite for cars (which they will), the world will need to find 4 new Saudi Arabias by 2030 just to offset the decline in production from existing oil fields.

What does this tie into? Canada's absolutely atrocious reputation at the Copenhagen Climate Talks of course! Because conventional oil is fast running out, the economic worth of Alberta's tar sands is about to skyrocket. Unfortunately getting oil from the tar sands is one of the most polluting and carbon intensive industries on earth. So, to protect the economic value of the tar sands in an era of green activism, here's what you do (if you're the federal conservative government):

a) Create a smokescreen: say that you're committed to reducing Canadian carbon emissions 20% below their 2006 levels by 2020. Sounds great until you realize that the rest of the world is talking about reducing carbon emissions by at least 20% below their 1990 levels by 2020.

b) Just say screw it and throw away most carbon reduction targets for the oil sands.

So - the age of skyrocketing oil prices is only ten years away, and Canada is moving to cash in on this phenomenon, at the cost of its international reputation and (with only a little bit of hyperbole here), the planet.

Norco Monterey SL

2009-09-26T09:10:00.006-04:00

My wife hosted a charity garage sale at our house last weekend. That sounds innocent enough, but I discovered that hosting a garage sale means that everybody and their uncle comes by your house with crap they no longer want and you end up with your backyard and garage full of knickknacks and trinkets to try and assign prices to.

The good news is that three bikes were donated, and at the end of the day - for $20.00 - one remained with me. I now own a Norco Monterey SL. I can't really find a date for it, but it seems like it was probably made in the 1980s. If anyone can give a good date estimate for this bike, I'd be curious to hear it.

When I first spotted the bike in our garage, my first thought was "should be a singlespeed". Now that I own it and have ridden it to work twice, I've realized that the gears actually work perfectly, so I think I'll leave them alone. The wheels are also pretty good, and the bottom bracket seems pretty smooth, so all in all it is a pretty solid bike. I am going to make a few changes though.

I've ordered a new seat for the bike, and I'm going to put on some knobby cross tires. I'm going to cut and flip the handlebars as well, creating that bullhorn look. I've also ordered two new sets of pedals, and after swapping some pedals around on different bikes in the household, this Norco will eventually have the basic pedals from my Kona Dew Deluxe.

The pedals that came on this Norco were Japanese made KKT Pro Vic II. This is the second time I've had a pair of these pedals in my life - the first time when they came on an old Fleetwing bike that a Toronto cyclist named Geoffrey gave to me.

Who the hell designed these pedals? And why did companies like Norco think it was a good idea to equip their bikes with them? Wow do they ever suck. On neither side do you get a flat surface under your foot. They bulge in the middle on one side, so the ball of your foot feels like it is kind of balancing on an egg shaped marble, and on the other the edges are higher than the middle so your foot makes contact on the edges but no contact in the middle.

Anyway - I'm mostly going to leave this bike alone, but some other guys have done really cool things with Norco Montereys that they've picked up.

At some point in the future maybe I'll do something like this, or this.

Looping around Tudhope Park

2009-09-13T18:48:00.003-04:00

It starts snowing in Orillia in early November. Heavy wet snow that is designed to break your back when you are shovelling every single morning.

I'll probably look back on this ride pretty fondly in a few months.

P.S. - the cuss word near the end wasn't uttered by me - it was the annoyed cyclist coming towards me.

The places your Jamis will go

2009-08-14T14:22:00.003-04:00

I was recently told about a trail that runs from the end of Carlyon Line (which is north of Orillia) up to the Trent Severn waterway. Thinking it'd be fun to explore, I took a ride up it this morning with my Jamis Nova cross bike.

For any Orillia area cyclists who think they might want to try this, the above map shows where you're going. It was fine on a cross bike, but it'd be better on a mountain bike. It's about 20 km one way to the Trent-Severn waterway (from the end of Carlyon Line).

And before I get to the photos, here's a short video taken on the trail:

From the beginning to the end of the ride, here are some photos from the day's ride (if you click on the photos, you'll be taken to enlarged versions over on Flickr):

A river wandering through farmland on my journey north out of town.

Looking south and taking a picture of Carlyon Line.

Marsh about halfway up the trail to the waterway.

Liftlock on the Trent Severn - also the end of my trip. This is looking west... low water.

Looking east(ish) from the Liftlock - high water.

Part of the dusty trail - with a poor man's switchbacks.

Most of the way back down Carlyon Line heading towards Orillia - horses in the shade. Really only stopped to take the photo cause I was fighting a headwind and needed a breather. : 0

This is called the Uhthoff Trail - it always feels like it is within the city limits (this stretch is only 3km from my house) but it is just barely outside of Orillia. Still... when I've reached this point I'm pedalling easy knowing I'm almost home.

Jamis is in the backyard and I'm just about to walk into the shower with all my clothes on.

Orillia Bike Rally 2.0

2009-06-17T06:05:00.002-04:00

Orillia's Trails for Life Committee organized its second Bike to Work Day and Bicycle Rally yesterday.

The turnout was smaller this year. I think there was a lot of excitement last year because it was the first one, and the local cycling community was so surprised that some cycling activism was happening, that they made sure to come out and support the cause. This year it seemed a bit harder to recreate that enthusiasm. Next year we'll have to get Bruce Springsteen to show up or something.

The point of all this is to try and get some momentum building in town which will lead to improved active transportation infrastructure. The cycling community in Orillia has rarely ever been political before. I always remember a story about Glen Murray, the former mayor of Winnipeg, and his advice to cycling activists: Basically he said that cyclists need to make life hell for municipal politicians until they get what they want. In Winnipeg it must have worked - in 2005 they had $300 000 budgeted for Active Transportation initiatives, and then it went all the way up to $3 million in 2008. The City is also planning to 450kms of "active transportation infrastructure" (not sure quite what that means) to the 190kms they already have.

Anyway - onward and upward. And let's do it for the little guys, like this five year old who powered pretty happily through the whole 10km route!

What I drew from the water by the pond-side

2009-04-19T12:45:00.003-04:00

So yesterday was road bikes and Oakley sunglasses, and today was single-speed commuter bikes and a camera dangling around my neck.

You can click on these photos to jump over to Flickr and try to see enlarged versions.

These shots were all taken on Orillia's Millenium Trail, which runs mostly north-south along the western shore of Lake Couchiching. It's a great great trail for easy recreational riding, but if you're a commuter who wants to get to and from work/shopping etc, it is completely useless, and there aren't any other bike trails to help you commute through this city (but we're working on it!)

This is the old workhorse - a Kona Hahanna (circa 2001) which is now a single-speed with Mavic wheels (though two different models of their wheels).

I took several shots of trees drinking from the lake, this is the one I liked most.

I bought a new camera recently because our previous one broke. The old one really was old, and had only 2 megapixels and a 3x optical zoom. The new one is a Canon PowerShot S5 IS which I snapped up when Future Shop here in Canada sold a bunch off at a pretty cheap price. The new camera isn't amazing or anything, but it is all that we need, and it's a massive jump in quality from our old one - this one is 8 megapixels with a 12x optical zoom.

The guy in this photo? He's also in the one above.... way way way off in the distance in the above photo. New cameras with powerful zoom capabilities are great!

First road ride of the year

2009-04-18T14:44:00.003-04:00

A post or two ago I mentioned the big snowfall we got in Orillia about two weeks ago. The weather then turned nice, but I didn't get out for a real ride until this morning when the local bike shop had their first large group ride of the season.

Almost as soon as we took off, I thought "yeah, I've missed this." Group road rides are so much fun - the sound of shoes clipping into pedals, Car Back!, trying not to look like you're trying to beat everyone up a hill, but not being able to resist and going ahead and trying to beat everyone up a hill - so awesome.

I rode the Trek 5000 that I picked up last summer for around $1200.00 Canadian, and maybe everything is going to be okay with this bike. I've never really been a Trek fan, and I don't love this bike, but it's fine and it works for me, plus I doubt I'll ever do the road mileage that I did a few years ago again, so there isn't much pressure to upgrade.

Not being a Trek purist I also don't really care about the big OLCV vs TCT debate that this bike stirs up in people. For the uninitiated, Trek was famous for making high-end carbon bikes IN AMERICA, when so many other companies were having their manufacturing done in Asia. The Trek TCT 5000, which is what I have, was Trek's attempt to sell bikes to people who wanted carbon but weren't willing to pay full price for it. However - and this is the problem - it meant having the bikes made more cheaply in Asia.

Yeah, that's a shame. But from my perspective, I got a carbon frame and an Ultegra / 105 mix (now an Ultegra, Dura-Ace, 105 mix) for the price that heavier aluminum bikes with a Tiagra / Sora mix sell at. I'm happy enough - plus, I have a mortgage to pay.

party like it's 1969

2009-04-16T13:20:00.011-04:00

Something I just read in Bill McKibben's Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future got me thinking about a post I did nearly three years ago (wow! have I really been doing this blog that long?).

The old post was called Working Less = Living More. In that post I was basically agreeing with the British Columbia Work Less Party that the human species works too hard to produce goods that last a year and then end up in landfills. In the process... in the hurly-burly day to day grind which allows us to keep our jobs, we sacrifice things like family time, exercise, and healthy eating. At the same time, we force the planet to cough up its natural resources to make these products (and then, when they've become garbage, make the planet hide the mess for us).

What's the answer? A four day work week! Think about it... we work less and have more quality time for ourselves... meanwhile we have less money to buy non-essential extras, therefore fewer of these things get made, we conserve energy and natural resources, contribute less to climate change, spend less of our time idling in traffic jams on yucky highways, and on it goes...

Here's a (lengthy) excerpt from Bill McKibben's book - and what's the moral of the story? The human species should spend more time at the beach - and we should let the economy chill out. Maybe the financial crisis is actually realigning things in this direction anyway.

Bonus points if you can connect the dots between 1969 and the Joplin photo and the picture of the earth taken from the moon.

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The results of all this work, given what we now know about the deeper economy, are predictable. The more hours you work, the less satisfied you become with your life, even though you make more money. The amount of time that parents spend with their children has steadily decreased, a trend “reliably linked to lower levels of average happiness and life satisfaction” for kids, says Layard. Indeed, children in affluent suburbs are more likely to be depressed even than those living in inner-city poverty.

The more hours you work, the bigger your ecological footprint, too. That's because you're spending more money and spending it carelessly: with no time to go to the farmer's market, let alone cook what you buy there, you drive through the drive-through instead. The numbers are substantial: an American working twenty to forty hours a week requires about twenty-three acres of the earth to support him, someone working more than forty hours requires nearly twenty-eight acres.

Now try the following thought experiment, which Schor suggests. Between 1969 and 2000, she reports, overall labor productivity increased about 80 percent, so that the average worker in 2000 could produce nearly twice as much per hour as the average worker in 1969. “Had we used that productivity dividend to reduce hours of work,” Schor points out, “the average American could be working only a little more than twenty hours a week.” The math isn't that linear of course, but it gives some sense of scale.

And there are those of us yet alive who can actually remember the year 1969 and so can testify that it was not a dark era of unrelieved poverty. True, we drove smaller cars and lived in smaller houses and ate out less. On the other hand, we ate together more. And we were working forty-hour weeks then. If those hours had been substantially reduced, there would now be more time for almost everything, from talking to your spouse, to sleeping in, to volunteering at the local hospital. You could grow more of your own food and have time to cook it. You would have less money, but also less need for child care, for work clothes, for the expense of commuting.

snowstorm - before & after

2009-04-07T10:36:00.003-04:00

Spring seemed to be coming. Saturday up here in central Ontario was a bit rough, but Sunday was gorgeous and my wife was cleaning up the yard and starting to develop gardening plans.

We had the cats out in the backyard and I took some photographs... unfortunately none that show the backyard in full. This one will at least give you an idea of how all the snow was starting to leave.

(P.S. if you click on the pictures you'll be taken over to Flickr, where you can see larger versions).

And - yes - my cat is on a leash. We're kind of geeky about our cats, and we're hesitant to let them wander all over town... but at the same time feel bad keeping them inside all the time. So, since we have quite a long backyard with a clothesline that runs the whole way down the yard, we tie the boys to the clothesline with a leash, and let them play back there.

Anyway - on Monday the snow came, and this is what the backyard looked like this morning.

The forecast was for 15 to 25cm of snow yesterday. We got the 15 easily, though I don't think we got more than 20cm. My wife and I had to shovel the driveway last night, and I had to do it again this morning. Man - I hope we're getting close to the end of this craziness - I'm starting to get cycling fever.

Who needs a bait shop?

2009-03-29T17:00:00.002-04:00

I grew up in a small town in central Ontario, but we never had live bait vending machines in my hometown. I guess this kind of thing is what makes Orillia special.

I remember being surprised when I was an ESL teacher in Japan that they had these beer vending machines all over the place. As far as I could tell, there was nothing that would prevent a five year old with some coins from getting a beer out of one of these things.

The other good vending machine in Japan were these ones that sold coffee in cans. In summer the unit was set to "cool" so the coffee came out cold, and in the winter the unit was set to "warm" so they came out warm. They were great.

Orillia millennium trail

2009-03-28T07:49:00.004-04:00

In Orillia we have the Millenium Trail which runs for about 10km along the shore of Lake Couchiching.

One annoying quirk of the trail is that right about where the 3 is in the above map, the trail is dissected by a boat launch. In the photo below, which is looking west to east towards the lake, the launch is just out of sight behind the clump of trees on the right, and behind the little monkeybars / playarea that you can kind of see behind the trees.

The photo below shows.. on the right side... Centennial Drive, which is the road that runs north/south along part of the lake... currently the Millennium Trail is further to the right of Centennial Drive, along the lake. There is now a proposal to move the bike trail in this area away from the lake and put it (i.e with a marked bike lane) right on Centennial Drive... getting cyclists away from the boat launch.

What you're also seeing in the picture above - the wide dirt strip in the center/left - is the railbed for the trainlines that used to go through the area. Now it is used for nothing except parking for all the fishermen who leave their pickup trucks and boat trailers here when they're out on the lake with their boats. There is also a proposal to take over this railbed for the use of a "fast track" bike trail, to get cyclists through this problem area quickly.

And this last photo is the Millennium Trail as it leaves the lake and starts cutting north through town. Still too much snow for your road bike.

declare the pennies on your eyes

2009-03-27T06:43:00.004-04:00

The provincial Ontario government just released the provincial budget for the coming fiscal year. The main change is the inroduction of a harmonized gas tax. Previously we'd been paying two separate taxes - an 8% provincial tax, and a 5% federal tax. Now, they're lumping them together and we'll be paying a 13% harmonized tax.

Image above is from Marc Engblom's Comic Coverage blog. The post covers an issue of Superman where the Taxman tries to get Supes to pay billions of dollars in backtaxes.

So the harmonized tax sounds simple - but there is a catch (which I like). The provincial tax was primarily on goods not services, and so many things were exempt from the 8% PST. Now they won't be. Apparently this includes gasoline, which I don't really understand, because my understanding was that the provincial government collected tax on gas, and then gave a cut of it to municipalities in order to supplement public transit funding.

In the Globe and Mail, New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath states that the new harmonized tax that would boost daily costs for consumers.

"Make no mistake, behind the veil of so-called rebates and credits, families will be paying more. They're going to be paying more for home essentials, like home heating and gas for the car, not to mention that morning coffee and doughnut," she said.

Buyers don't pay PST on gasoline now. Ms. Horwath estimated the new harmonized tax on gas would cost families $150 per year per vehicle.

I've written before that I find gasoline taxes & prices in N. America to be ridiculously low.

With gas so cheap here, no one has any incentive to change their driving habits, and the car companies have had little reason to produce really fuel-efficient cars (which is obviously changing these days). Anyway - thank God gas is going to be costing more. I think that is long overdue, and I just hope that the province gives a hefty chunk of the gas tax revenue to munipalities to allow them to actually run a public transit service which is so good that your neighbour with three vehicles actually decides to ride transit once in a while.

the republic of active transportation

2009-03-25T14:10:00.003-04:00

Me Likey!!!

So many bikes, so little time. I have no business owning another bicycle, but these Republic Bikes out of Florida look awesome - especially after a long snowy winter in central Ontario.

Although a small-town newspaper story about a city council meeting isn't usually the most interesting news in the world, it is this time.

City Staff are urging Council to officially hire a consultant to devise and write an Active Transportation Plan for the City of Orillia.

From the article:

Recognizing a provincial shift toward encouraging and creating active transportation in municipalities and following up on a deputation from Orillia's Trails for Life Committee, city staff are recommending council look at creating an Active Transportation Plan.

The recommendation that council committee will discuss tonight is for staff to prepare a capital budget request for the 2010 budget process to hire a consultant to develop a standalone active transportation plan for the city.

Active transportation includes initiatives like creating pedestrian linkages and establishing bike lanes, making it easy for residents who choose to use other modes of transportation than vehicles to move across the city.

The three departments involved in preparing the report -- planning and development, parks and recreation and public works -- identified a number of logistical questions for councillors to consider before moving ahead with one of two options. Those options were continuing to address active transportation on an ad-hoc basis, as the city does now or preparing and implementing an active transportation plan that would guide all future decisions on developments and projects.

"An Active Transportation Plan would provide the city with a unified vision with respect to the creation of a multi-modal and safe transportation system," states the report. "Preparation of a plan would also likely involve a concerted review of the city's design standards."

Battlestar is over

2009-03-22T10:25:00.002-04:00

Battlestar Galactica is all done.

In an article called The Way We Were - Newsweek magazine called it the best TV show to represent arts and culture over the last 8 years.

TELEVISION
Battlestar Galactica
By Joshua Alston

An orchestrated terrorist attack. An inexorable march to war. An enemy capable of disappearing among its targets, armed with an indifference to its own mortality. It sounds like a PBS special on Al Qaeda. In fact, it's a synopsis of the Sci Fi Channel series "Battlestar Galactica," which—for anyone who manages to get past the goofy name—captures better than any other TV drama of the past eight years the fear, uncertainty and moral ambiguity of the post-9/11 world. Yes, even better than "24," with its neocon fantasies of terrorists who get chatty if Jack Bauer pokes the right pressure point. Of the two shows, "Battlestar" has been more honest about the psychological toll of the war on terror. It confronts the thorny issues that crop up in a society's battle to preserve its way of life: the efficacy of torture, the curtailing of personal rights, the meaning of patriotism in a nation under siege. It also doesn't flinch from one question that "24" wouldn't dare raise: is our way of life even worth saving?

"Battlestar Galactica" always finds ways to challenge the audience's beliefs—it is no more an ode to pacifism than "24" is to "bring 'em on" warmongering. In the pilot, humanity is nearly eradicated by the Cylons, a race of robots that revolt against their human creators. The only survivors are stationed on a spacecraft called Battlestar Galactica; they're spared because the ship's commander, William Adama (Edward James Olmos), had refused to relax any wartime restrictions. Adama is a hard-liner, willing to sacrifice personal freedoms in order to provide safety from an abstract threat. And he was right: the moment the human race let its guard down, the Cylons attacked. As the show unfolds, though, the survivors must constantly reflect on the price of keeping their enemies at bay, and whether it's worth paying. The show's futuristic setting—hushed and grimy, not the metallic cool of stereotypical sci-fi—helps ground the writers' ruminations in a nail-biting drama series. "Battlestar Galactica" achieves the ultimate in sci-fi: it presents a world that looks nothing like our own, and yet evokes it with chilling accuracy.

Black sheep of the family

2009-02-18T17:27:00.003-05:00

At the bottom of the post below, I more or less promised to shoot a series of videos about converting your bike to a single speed. I really wasn't happy about the quality of video I was putting up though (shot in hi-definition, I was converting the file a million times to get it uploaded onto youtube). I was also getting impatient and wanted to finish the job, so the series has had to be postponed.

You can click on any of these photos to go over to Flickr and see bigger images. It's amazing how much cleaner bikes look when you take more and more parts off them.

The drivetrain (44 x 16) involved a new bottom bracket, cranks that I got off a friend in a trade, spacers, cog and chain tensioner from a nashbar single speed kit, a chainring from the local bike shop, and single speed chainring bolts. I also put on new brakes, and if you look closely you'll notice a wheelset (mavic rim with deore hubs) that is probably worth more than this whole bike was when it was bought. You really can't beat good wheels though - upgrading wheels makes you suddenly feel like Hushovd.

And strangely, an immensely satisfying part of the conversion process is looking down at the bucket of junk that you took off your bike. If you put it all in a plastic bag and lift it up, you get a sense of how heavy all that crap was, and what a weight it was on your bike.

Hear my motor purr

2009-02-01T09:39:00.004-05:00

Every once in a while my thinking comes back to taxes on gasoline.

North America has the lowest gasoline tax rates in the world - and the historically cheap price of gas here is why we also have sprawlurbia and mostly ignored public transit systems. Everyone knows that North American reliance on the automobile has caused a litany of different problems, including killer air pollution. So why do we not raise the tax on gasoline?

Ironically, the Americans (even Republicans) are talking about this more and more often. Meanwhile, here in Canada, there is no discussion of this at all. In fact, when oil and gas prices were high this past summer, a southern Ontario group was getting tons of TV coverage by lobbying for a reduction in the gas tax ("Mr Prime Minister, please help the poor struggling families" kind of thing).

My thought is that the gasoline tax should be raised - gradually but steadily, with nearly all of the money going straight into public transit.

By doing this, you wean people away from the automobile and all its various problems, and build bigger, better, faster public transit systems - transit systems which are so good that people will actually give up their car and rely on the bus.

Of all the opposing arguments, the two strongest ones are a) increasing the gas tax hurts rural Canadians who have no access to public transit, and b) raising the gas tax primarily hurts low-income Canadians.

Fine - if you're in a rural area with no public transit, you get a break on your income taxes. The same applies for low income earners. Everyone else though, pays perhaps 2cents / litre (at the beginning) to improve the public transit system in their city.

I really don't understand why this is such an accursed idea in Canada. The federal Conservative government took a step in this direction their very first year in office when they decided to encourage the use of public transit by giving transit users the right to claim money back for their monthly bus pass at tax time. Is it really such a jump to go from rewarding public transit use to penalizing automobile use?

P.S. I'm hoping to shoot a series of youtube videos about converting your bike to a freewheel singlespeed. The series will be aimed at complete beginners, and so far I've done one introductory episode. I actually shot it in high definition with a very good camcorder, but I had to keep converting and degrading the file to get it onto youtube, and now the quality is so bad that I'll probably have to reshoot this one. It's a start anyway.

Bush and his legacy

2009-01-13T13:31:00.003-05:00

If you go to google news and type in something like george bush (legacy OR "place in history") you'll find tons of articles that are trying to assess how Bush will go down in history.

The anti-Bush writers point to Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, torture, Guantanamo Bay, wire-tapping and the Patriot Act etc as the best examples of Bush's failures.

The pro-Bush writers don't have much to commend him for - but the key one is that after the 2001 New York attack, Bush the Strongman didn't allow any other terrorist attacks to happen on American soil.

Apparently trying to fix his environmental legacy a little bit, Bush has also done something that actually is tremendously valuable and important - he created several massive marine protection zones which can be thought of as oceanic equivalents of National parks where marine eco-systems will be protected.

If you haven't read about the catastrophic state of the oceans by the way, check a special report by the Economist magazine called Troubled Waters - it isn't too big a stretch to say that there should be an immediate end to all human fishing in the oceans:
The fish that once seemed an inexhaustible source of food are now almost everywhere in decline: 90% of large predatory fish (the big ones such as tuna, swordfish and sharks) have gone, according to some scientists. In estuaries and coastal waters, 85% of the large whales have disappeared, and nearly 60% of the small ones. Many of the smaller fish are also in decline. Indeed, most familiar sea creatures, from albatrosses to walruses, from seals to oysters, have suffered huge losses.

Anyway - yes Iraq and Katrina (and possibly stealing the 2000 election by disenfranchising blacks in Florida) are enough to ruin Bush's legacy, but here are two more reasons that you won't see discussed much, but which have always really angered me:

A) Under George Bush, the U.S. administration censored scientific reports on climate change to lessen the importance of the studies, and minimize climate change as a problem. The Bush years also saw republican climate change deniers Joe Barton and James Inhofe in charge of different energy and environmental committees. Joe Barton was such a blood-thirsty demon that if you were a scientist about to release a "yes we're causing climate change" report, he'd launch an IRS audit on you.

B) With the appointment of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, the Bush administration began a Stalinist culling of democratic attorney generals, replacing them with republican cronies who would help support the wire-tapping of Americans, the erosion of the rights of Guantanamo detainees, and the right to torture.

Good riddance George - even if America says it was faulty intelligence rather than outright lies that started the Iraq War, there are plenty of other reasons for you to go down in history as the worst president ever.

On a completely different note, watch this - especially if you play guitar.

Bringing the well to the thirsty

2008-12-19T15:37:00.002-05:00

Wired Online has a story up called Study Says Cars Make Us Fat.

-----
"Countries with the highest levels of active transportation generally had the lowest obesity rates," Bassett and Pucher conclude in the study published in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health. "Walking and bicycling are far more common in European countries than in the United States, Australia and Canada. Active transportation is inversely related to obesity in these countries."

Nowhere is this more obvious than the United States, where 12 percent of the population walks, rides a bike or takes mass transit, and as many as one in three people are obese.
-----

Ever think that sometime in the 22nd or 23rd century (if we last that long) a primary school history teacher is going to tell their class about the 20th century and sprawlurbia and building cities that necessitated traveling in pollution emitting / natural resource consuming automobiles, and some cute kid is going to put up his or her hand and say "What did they do that for?" and there simply won't be a good answer?

P.S. Get a kick out of wacky philosophy books? Take a look at this series from Open Court Publishing in Chicago.
James Bond and Philosophy, Johnny Cash and Philosophy, the Undead and Philosophy... they're even doing one in 2009 called Jimmy Buffett and Philosophy.

So a quick look tells me that Buffett has songs with titles like:
* The Missionary
* Captain America
* Truckstop Salvation
* God Don't Own a Car
* My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, And I Don't Love Jesus

Perhaps a Buffet / Philosophy book isn't as crazy as I thought!

The Land Ethic (or, are we screwed?)

2008-12-17T16:06:00.006-05:00

I've been reading about Aldo Leopold, a conservationist, amateur philosopher, and one of the earliest of the modern day eco-warriors. In 1949 he wrote the first edition of the Sand County Almanac, and most notably within this book, his piece The Land Ethic, which was very much of a throwing-down of the environmental gauntlet.

What Leopold did was assert that the long held assumption that humans only had moral obligations towards other humans was wrong - that it didn't go far enough. There was no real thought within philosophy that along with humans, maybe plants, animals and ecosystems had rights as well. In the Land Ethic, Leopold says that humans, plants, animals, the entire ecosystem, should be considered one thing - a "biotic community". In considering what a moral action is, he wrote A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

I basically agree with this, but nothing is easy. If we are to state (what I consider a defensible argument) that the earth doesn't really have the carrying capacity to support 6 billion people (much less the 9 billion the U.N. expects by 2050) - does this mean that too many humans = a fractured biotic community, and that getting rid of some of these humans is morally correct? Leopold's position has been attacked in just this way before. Later philosophers, like J. Baird Callicot have tried to refine Leopold's argument so that it doesn't seem to legitimize setting limits on world population.

A lot of the climate change literature makes you scratch your head though and wonder what the hell it will take to get humanity to live sustainably on this pale blue dot of ours.
My library has a number of the climate change books that have been coming out the last couple years. This topic is actually so hot that the literature defending the climate change deniers has even become respectable... for example this one and this one.

Anyway, I was leafing through Humanity's Footprint, which is a very academic book put out by Columbia University Press, and love this chapter title:
Seven - Searching for Answers: Can we achieve sustainability, or are we Screwed?

Plus ca change

2008-12-10T14:41:00.005-05:00

I just read this story about the nearly finished bailout of the Detroit Three automakers.

I love these points:
- A breakthrough came when Democrats agreed to scrap language — which the White House had called a poison pill — that would have forced the carmakers to drop lawsuits challenging tough emissions limits in California and other states, said congressional aides.

- Environmentalists already were livid that the measure draws the emergency loans from an existing loan program to help carmakers retool their factories to make greener cars.

So are North American governments REALLY going to take this opportunity to force the big three to turn green? They haven't pulled enough crap over the last 80 some years, so we're just going to shrug and say "Hey - keep up your lawsuits against cleaner air measures?"

Once we got the tobacco companies in a headlock we kept the pressure on them, are we not going to do that with the car companies?

plus ca change, plus c'est la meme

Turn it into a sexy dance

2008-12-05T13:21:00.003-05:00

More so than hell, I think the road to winter fitness is paved with good intentions. Though it has since fallen apart, I had a good start to my quest to get into shape this winter - allowing me to be a hill-climbing machine right out of the gate this spring.

I set my Trek up on my trainer, down in my basement, and with IPOD in my ears I felt fairly energized, and seemed, for about two weeks, not to be succumbing to that "holy crap, training in the basement is damned boring and depressing" bug that is associated with this type of training.

At the same time, and this is a project I'll be working on all winter, as money is saved to buy new parts, I've been working on my brother's old beater mountain bike.

When I picked it up, the chain and gears were rusted enough that they weren't even moving anymore. A firm believer in the theory that everyone needs a bare-bones, maintenance free, single-speed commuter, I'm turning the bike into a single-speed, as I've done with a few bikes before. I'm going to be a complete idiot actually, and put some very good (entry level race for example) wheels onto the bike. I can't wait to give it back to my brother and let him feel what a difference it makes to strip crap parts off of a frame, and replace them with good parts.

Anyway, the single-speed project will keep going on, but I don't see how I'm going to get the training in. My town of Orillia has already had several snowstorms, and (see picture below) I have the longest driveway in the world, plus a few other walkways to shovel. I have never been able to train in the evening, but every morning these days my training time is over-ruled by having to get out and get shovelling.

It's kind of ironic, because my wife and I rarely drive. I'm a bit too green to give up and buy a snowblower, so it's a shovelling life for me. Come summer, rather than great legs and great cardio ability, I'll have a bad back, good abs, and strong shovelling arms.

I really wanted to, but I don't really "get" HBO's Flight of the Conchords. I do however really like this song and performance. That's why they call it business socks!

who's gonna take the weight?

2008-09-18T18:07:00.002-04:00

As is my usual pattern, in September when the students come back I have very little time for blogging.

But - here's the important thing - Orillia had its first ever bike rally!

Up to the last minute, we weren't sure what kind of turn out to expect. Through word of mouth, all of the serious cyclists in the area knew about the event, but how many "people with a bike in the garage" folks would come out, we weren't sure. In the end we had 100 people do an easy 10km loop through the city. Much to my relief, no one got hit by a car and the first bike rally wasn't marred by an accident.

I think it was a nice bit of bike activism, and we even had two federal political candidates do the ride (conservative and green party). Hopefully the rally, and an upcoming report on active transportation, will spur some movement in this town.

I didn't start work until 11:00a.m. today, so I did that ride I was doing in the summer, out to a town called Hawkestone and back. Beautiful morning to be on a cross bike on some trails.

the active transportation hurricane

2008-08-30T07:58:00.003-04:00

To begin - anyone else think the guy leaving comments on this post is a little bit too angry about something?

During my life in Toronto, I took part in a few cycling events, and organized that petition, but never really got involved with cycling activism the way I thought I should. When I moved to Orillia, I wanted to get involved in city life and look into bike issues, and so I won a spot on a city committee that deals with trails in general (more commonly hiking / nature trails) and a small group of us from this committee have started promoting active transportation issues.

This is fun stuff. Orillia has had a strong recreational cycling culture for a while, but very little of a commuting cycling culture. Cycling infrastructure doesn't really exist here at all - there are next-to-no bike parking posts in this town, and no bike lanes which are useful for journeying to work/school etc (i.e. no bike lanes going through or across town).

So - we're trying to get something started here. On Sept. 10th we're running a bike/walk to work day, and a Bike Rally (think a critical mass ride, but one in a small town where you're forced to get a parade permit from the cops). We've also been handed responsibility for buying bike parking posts, and we're planning an active transportation report which will wake council up to the importance of shifting planning away from cars to public transit/bikes/walking.

It's kind of like being at the beginning of a revolution - active transportation makes so much sense as a solution to so many problems, that you wonder why governments aren't being as vocal as these guys are about replacing car trips with bike and walking trips.

As they mention over at Dandyhorse - Bicycles lie at the intersection of two of today’s fastest growing trends: personal physical health and urban sustainability.

About time - we never should have fallen for the automobile dependence con-job in the first place.

Orillia Team Tri wrap-up

2008-08-20T12:26:00.002-04:00

On Sunday, my brother (in the middle), my partner Anna and I did the team relay at the Orillia triathlon. I biked, my brother ran, and Anna swam, and we came in 9th out of 21 teams.

As I mentioned below, on Saturday my Trek road bike, which I haven't ridden much this summer, was shifting terribly. The front derailleur was throwing the chain over the big ring onto the crank arm every time I tried shifting from the small to the big ring. A choice I considered for a while was shifting my road wheels onto my Jamis cross-bike. This ended however when I picked up the cross-bike right after picking up the Trek, and noticed the 6 pound difference between the two bikes. So, I said "screw it" and decided just to ride the whole race in the big chain ring.

This obviously isn't ideal, but it all turned out fine actually. I did a bunch of training rides on the race route prior to the race, and knew exactly how all the hills worked (and how all the downhills worked, i.e. where I had no business being below 50km/hr). So in the three spots on the route where it would have been nice to have the small ring, I just got out of the saddle and hammered the best I could, and in the end I did the 33km in 1:01:07 - coming in fifth out of the 21 cyclists in the team tri. My brother came in fifth out of the 21 runners, so we put on a pretty good show.

PS - Anna got called in as the swimmer only a week or two prior to the race, when my friend Duncan messed up his leg. Thanks for being brave and doing the swim for us Anna!!

damned derailleurs and farmers

2008-08-16T19:17:00.002-04:00

So - regarding the below mentioned triathlon that I'm participating in tomorrow, I have a spot of bother. I haven't actually ridden the carbon Trek in ages, and ever since I bought it the bike has had front derailleur issues. I tried riding it around today and the derailleur kept throwing the chain over the big chain ring, no matter what I did with the limit screw.

I almost decided to put my road wheels onto my Jamis cross bike today, switching over the cassette, but in the process of lifting the Jamis and the Trek, with the Jamis weighing... I don't know... 6 pounds more than the Trek... I couldn't bring myself to do it. So screw it. I'm riding the Trek tomorrow and I'm not going to use the smaller chainring at all. I'll let you know how this goes.

Another dumb thing I did today - the day before a race - was ride 50 km (on the Jamis). I tried to go Friday afternoon (had the day off) but right when I was set to go, thunder started rumbling in the distance, with grey clouds filling the sky. So, fairly pissed (this has been a wet and crappy summer here in Ontario), I called off the ride, but was really anxious to go this morning.
Anyway - on Burnside Line - a quiet two lane 80 km / hour road that runs south into Orillia, I was cycling along with almost no traffic around me, when a pickup that was headed towards me veered over into my lane and more or less played chicken with me for 15 or 20 seconds, veering back when he was maybe 20 metres away from me.

And it wasn't even some stupid kid! It was about a 55 year old guy with white hair who looked like a normal guy that you'd run into at the farmer's market or something. Jackass. I sat up in the saddle and held my arms out in the "what the f*&K was that" pose, but it totally slipped my mind to get the guys license plate.

I can't wait for peak oil. You old guys and your pickup trucks... enjoy it while it lasts.

Orillia Triathlon & Tuco's bike collection

2008-08-15T18:12:00.005-04:00

Although I can't claim to have ever been a "racer", from 2003 to 2005 I did lots of running races and several duathlons. Since moving to Orillia - where I walk most places and haven't been road riding much - I've completely fallen out of cycling shape. Not letting that deter me, I'm doing the cycling portion of a team tri this weekend - the annual Northern (Orillia) Triathlon.

Now, coincidentally, way before I moved to Orillia, I did the duathlon here twice, in 2003 and 2004, coming about middle of the pack in my age group both times, and doing the 33km bike portion in about 1:05 each time. Ironically, in 2003/04, when I was probably in the best shape I'll ever be in, I was riding the worst road bike I'll probably ever own. I mean, it was my first road bike and it did what entry level bikes are supposed to do (ie addict you to the sport) but it was a heavy chromo frame with low level Shimano Sora and whatever type of wheelset you get with a $500.00 bike.

I'll always wish that I had the Cervelo Soloist that I owned for a while in 2006/2007 when I was racing in 2003/2004, just to see what a difference the (much!) better bike would have made in my placings.
Anyway - here is what I'm hoping: that the new(ish) Trek (pictured above) and my local knowledge of the bike route, and the fact that the bike portion is all I have to do, will balance out my much better 2003/04 fitness level, and let me come close to the 1:05 mark again. Fingers and toes crossed.

So the last time I did a bike roundup, was in April 2007. In that picture we see my girlfriends' Giant and KHS, and my Kona Hahanna, Kona Dew Deluxe, Cervelo Soloist, and almost invisible, my Cannondale road bike.
In August 2008 we now have Anna's KHS, and a Specialized CrossTrail (bought to ride the rail trails here in Simcoe County). She still owns the Giant, but it is a terrible bike, more or less on permanent loan to a friend in Toronto.

My collection is almost completely different. The only two bikes which remain are the Kona Hahanna and the Cannondale, but both were reinvented and now live very happily as freewheel singlespeeds. I sold the Cervelo and I gave the Hahanna to my brother.

Added since April 2007 is my Jamis Nova cross bike, my Trek (which is actually a bit too big for me and I need to get a smaller stem when I have money again), and the Raleigh that my dad bought for $50.00 at a garage sale, and which I've had fun riding around town on a few times. The bike dangling badly from the wall is my brother's Norco mountain bike, which is falling apart, and which I'm planning to turn into a single-speed, but as mentioned I have no money so it'll have to wait for a while.
Additionally, I have the Fleetwing that Geoffrey gave me. I keep it in Bancroft though, to ride when I visit my parents.

We need a freeway, not a bikepath...

2008-07-31T13:32:00.004-04:00

Newsweek has two stories up now that people might be interested in:

Why the government wants you to drive more discusses the subsidization of automobile culture by the federal government in the States. The writer calculates the the feds spend approximately $100 billion a year on driving related subsidies. What's the best news?
The Transportation Department reported that Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer miles in May 2008 than in May 2007, a 3.7 percent drop. The result: rising demand for mass transit and declining revenues for the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which is funded by gas taxes. The Bush administration's counterintuitive policy response, as the New York Times reported, has been for the Highway Trust Fund to borrow funds from the department's mass-transit account.

Yes - President Bush pulled money OUT of mass transit to put into the highway system.

And Pedal vs. Metal is about the growing popularity of cycling causing friction between motorists and cyclists, now that motorists are feeling their superiority on the roads being threatened.

Ah well, tough for them.

open letter to the guy who stole my bike wheel

2008-07-29T08:58:00.004-04:00

Police in Toronto have recently recovered over 3000 stolen bicycles. An investigation into one notoriously shady bike shop owner has led them to all these bikes, and the "reuniting" process - owners coming in with proof of ownership - has gone very slowly.
I personally think that they're going to end up with at least 2500 bikes that they have to get rid of somehow. Traditionally, this would be done via a police auction, but even if they do this, I can't see them selling 2500 bikes.
Instead, I think that, in this age of active transportation, the cops should search for a good way to use these bikes, and my solution, despite the problem of annual costs, is for the province of Ontario to take these bikes and then hand them out to cities across the province to start up bike share programs. If municipalities balk at the ongoing costs, up the gasoline tax and give the revenue to the cities to cover the bike share program.

As the price of oil is sliding away from the $145.00 / barrel mark, Business Week has an article about whether or not oil should be cheap.
Expensive energy, in many ways, is good. Why? When the price of oil goes up, people will use less, find substitutes, and develop new supplies. Those effects are just basic economics. Things are so painful now, many economists say, because of the past two decades of cheap oil. Prices stayed low in part because they didn't reflect the full cost of extras such as pollution, so there was little incentive to use energy more wisely. If those extras had been counted, the country would be better prepared for both today's soaring prices and the day that global oil production begins to decline.

I wasn't really in love with this year's tour, probably because I was simply too busy to pay much attention, but I loved Sastre's attack on Alpe-d'Huez. Stay quiet for two and a bit weeks, make sure no one is even talking about you, and then, on a 210km day which has three climbs so tough they can't even be categorized using pro cycling's classification system, simply explode on the last climb and gain enough time on everyone else to win the tour. Mountains rock.

From Orillia to Coldwater on the Uhthoff Trail

2008-07-19T20:30:00.002-04:00

Leading out from Orillia there are a few old rail trails that are fun to ride, especially if you have a cyclocross bike and can put the hammer down to ride at speed for a while.
You can click on all these photos to go to my Flickr page, and look at the large version of these photos if you like

This morning I went north out of Orillia and rode the Uhthoff Trail to a town called Coldwater, which is a 25km trip one way.

The ride is dead flat the entire way. It's also pretty much dead straight - so it isn't exactly the most interesting ride in the world. However, it is really nice to be cycling all alone through forests and past farmland for two hours.

In places the trail is a bit overgrown. It's a shame, but I don't think this trail gets used very much, not like the Oro-Medonte trail which goes between Barrie and Orillia. After turning around in Coldwater, and starting the ride back to Orillia, I passed two ladies on bikes who were going to give up with their ride - worried that there was actually a lot of poison ivy in the overgrown sections.

If there is poison ivy in there (and it's very possible), I might be immune because I got through without lots of scratching occurring later in the day. Actually, I also scared up a skunk this morning, which I was lucky to encounter when I was riding fast, and he didn't have time to spray me.

So, this trail isn't perfect, but it is worth doing. It's listed on the Huronia Trails and Greenways website, and I also found another gentleman talking about the trail on his website.

Batman

2008-07-18T09:05:00.005-04:00

To go along with this old classic Campy Batman panel, Macleans magazine here in Canada has given us another example of a Batman comic, which, in 2008, just makes you giggle (if, like me, you have a weakness for juvenile humour).

P.S. - You can click on this image to get a slightly bigger, more readable version (once on the Flickr page, click on the All Sizes link and view the Large version).

P.P.S. - if you look at the big version, at look at the newspaper in the Joker's hands, even the headline is funny... Chortle at the Joker's Boner!

And, from this page, here's why the Dutch are awesome - they even have trailside garbage bins designed for cyclists!

Naked, you are blue as a night in Cuba

2008-07-15T14:54:00.004-04:00

Yeah, you have to love Pablo Neruda (supplier of my subject line up there).

Peak Oil is even becoming a popular topic in academic and college magazines! This article from the Chronicle mentions that within 10 years of the peak, if we are to come anywhere close to the type of living that we have right now, alternative fuels will have to be able to produce as much energy as Saudia Arabia currently produces, by far the world's largest oil producer. The article is mainly about how colleges and universities need to start reassessing their entire business model in preparation for the end of cheap oil.

I'm really loving my Jamis. You know when a bike stops being some bike that you bought, and becomes your best friend, or your brother or something? My Jamis has pretty much reached that point. I'm currently riding it in training for the Orillia triathlon. I'm only doing the cycling portion, in a relay with my brother and a friend. My friend who is swimming has the hardest job - over the last few weeks thousands of carp have been dying in the same body of water that the swim portion of the triathlon is being held in. Hopefully all the triathletes will come out of the water with the proper number of limbs.

Nashbar could really do me a favour by NOT having these amazing sales all the time, just to drive me crazy. As I'm about to blow all my money on a house and wedding, I'd rather they had a few months of "Sorry! We're jacking up all our prices!!" promotions.

This is my cat Owen. Our orange one, Clarence, is cuter, but Owen has more personality. This cereal box was lying on the floor, inspiring him to take a running leap/dive into it, break through the other side, and then propel himself around the floor in the box for a while.

Annalise's cousin Mary came to Orillia a little while back, and using her nifty digital recorder, we made a couple music videos. They're all here on YouTube if you're curious. Being the suckiest, I just did two, but Mary and Annalise have four up there I think.

P.S., we tried, but our videos are quite as good as those from Feist:

mariposa folk festival

2008-07-07T07:59:00.003-04:00

Holy Cow, I have not been blogging very much. I do have some very valid reasons however... getting married in September, bought a house and moving in on July 31..

pretty busy at work, and busy with the trails for life committee that I'm on in Orillia, specifically helping write a report on Active Transportation that we're going to send to city council. I'll be drawing on some material from my active transportation articles for the report (mainly the calamitous health effects of automobile exhaust from article 2).

Enjoying the first "summery" thing I've done this year, we spent the weekend at the Mariposa Folk Festival. The festival is in Orillia, and we spent the weekend cycling from our house in the north part of the city, along the lake, to Tudhope Park where the festival is situated, mainly on that northward point of land which means that when you're walking around the festival there is water all around you.

My God, it was a gorgeous weekend, with crystal clear blue skies from Friday to Sunday, and amazing music no matter what stage you plunked yourself down at.

I even ran into a guy I worked with around 2000 at Indigo Books in Toronto. I remember him being a full-on cyclist back when I knew him (when he closed the store at midnight he used to just fly around the city on his bike on the nighttime streets, enjoying having the streets to himself). Turns out he'd cycled up from Toronto to Orillia (not sure how far that is... but at least 120kim). Now this is obviously very doable, and every guy doing Sunday rides with his buddies probably does this... but my co-worker was carrying gear to camp for three nights... that ups the difficulty a bit.

Anyway, it was a great weekend, and for me the highlights include the following:

Seeing Joel Plaskett about three times, and finally understanding why he's taking the Canadian music world by storm (he performed Natural Disaster so powerfully at one point, that it left your heart in your throat)....

Seeing Jory Nash, J.P. Cormier, Pavlo, and Dala do a Gordon Lightfoot tribute set. Jory Nash is a great storyteller, and despite not having a powerful voice, he gets a lot of soul into his singing. Dala was great as well, but what was really wicked was hearing Cormier and Pavlo play together. Pavlo is a spanish guitarist, and Cormier is an eastcoast maritime player. Pavlo took some Lightfoot songs and played them acoustically with no vocal, and he'd nod at Cormier and the two of them would improvise long, amazing guitar riffs with each other.

And for a final note, it was really a revelation to discover Dala - two girls from Scarborough who have amazingly ethereal vocals, and a great sense of humour. I must have seen them perform with J.P. Cormier twice, because it wouldn't have been the Lightfoot set when they did a Neil Young cover, and when they finished, and their voices were still drifting over the crowd, Cormier said "I think I just saw God...... Jesus..... I hate crying during a set" (he was kind of joking, but still...).

Anyway - after a lot of lame weather, I think I finally feel like summer is here. Hope everyone is doing well out there in blogland!

P.S. did a lot of night cycling this weekend, and for anyone who rides at night the Firefly Supernovas from Road I.D. are awesome. I had one velcroed around my ankle, and we stuck one onto Anna's backpack, and just with these two you are so lit up that you look like a city maintenance truck with all its warning and hazard lights going.

What you guys rebelling against?

2008-06-13T15:18:00.003-04:00

A little while back I posted a question with a couple of groups in Facebook asking if anyone knew of any books about bicycle culture - especially the history of the recent explosion of bicycle activism. Nobody answered my posts, and I tucked the idea of writing my own book on this topic into my back pocket (I've also written to Bicycling Magazine asking if they'd consider publishing an article on bike bloggers. So far I've had no reply).
Well - it looks like a book on this has arrived. Chris Carlsson has written Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today.

This curious, multifaceted phenomenon constitutes an important arena of autonomous politics. The bicycle has become a cultural signifier that begins to unite people across economic and racial strata. It signals a sensibility that stands against oil wars and the environmental devastation wrought by the oil and chemical industries, the urban decay imposed by cars and highways, the endless monocultural sprawl spreading outward across exurban zones. This new bicycling subculture stands for localism, a more human pace, more face-to-face interaction, hands-on technological self-sufficiency, reuse and recycling, and a healthy urban environment that is friendly to self-propulsion, pleasant smells and sights, and human conviviality.
Fixed photo from this page.

P.S. - my left I.T. band basically aches all the time these days. me no likey.

Cycling with e.e. cummings

2008-06-06T11:25:00.002-04:00

Up and on the bike early - rained hard all night but sun broke out nicely on a day meant to hit 30Celsius.

up into the silence the green
silence with a white earth in it

you will(kiss me)go

out into the morning the young
morning with a warm world in it

(kiss me)you will go

on into the sunlight the fine
sunlight with a firm day in it

you will go(kiss me

down into your memory and
a memory and memory

i)kiss me,(will go)

Say goodbye to suburban living

2008-06-04T16:44:00.004-04:00

The June 9th issue of Macleans magazine has a good cover story titled After Cheap Oil.
I guess I'm mainly impressed because - finally - peak oil is in the mainstream media, and blurbs like You won't be able to eat, travel or live as you do now. Say goodbye to the age of plenty are appearing on the covers of national popular magazines.

Here are a few good passages:

Last week, the International Energy Agency said it will re-examine the oil supply in 400 major oil fields around the world - a sobering acknowledgement that there may be even less oil than once thought. Even industry insiders are waking to the idea that the world is nearing the supply wall. Last year, former U.S. energy secretary james Schlesinger declared the battle is over, the peakists have won.

Peak Oil theory...describes the point at which the supply of oil can no longer keep up with the world's growing demand... When supplies run short oil prices don't just go up, they skyrocket. A 2005 U.S. government report concluded that a four percent shortfall would result in a 177 per cent increase in oil prices.

P.S. - none of this should be new to anybody. Heck, Hubbert Theory goes back to the 1950's.

And this really terrible picture comes from this story.

Keep adding stones

2008-05-30T12:24:00.002-04:00

I did much the same route as mentioned in the post below, but stopped at a couple different places to take some photos.

When I've been on these morning rides south of Orillia, I'm simply reveling in the joy of cycling through forests, past lakes, along country roads, with almost no traffic anywhere near me. It makes it very easy for me to believe that nature deficit disorder (wait for ad to clear and Enter Salon link to show in upper right corner) is a very real problem.

After a bit of a break, I'm doing the Becel Ride for the Heart this weekend. I'll be doing it on the new Trek, and it'll probably be the fifth different bike I've used for this ride.

I don't know if there's anything sweeter than being up early in the morning and riding a well tuned bike along a well paved country road. I love it when you're all alone, see a small hill coming up, attack it like you're breaking away from the peloton in the Tour, and after you crest the hill you see a second one and you go "oh crap" and sit back in the saddle and start clicking your chain up to your biggest cog. Yeah, we all suck, but its still fun.

You know what I love most about the Scott McClellan / George Bush story? The response from hard-core Republicans like Karl Rove that (their formerly loyal buddy) McClellan has either a) gone insane, in which case we should pity him, or b) let a left wing blogger/ghost writer use his name to generate more publicity for a book attacking Bush.

The implication? There's no way the former Bush Press Secretary actually thinks that Bush bullied the country into an immoral war. Come On!! he's obviously insane!!! Oh there's no talking to you pinkos... where's my limo... I gotta go blow up more of the third world somewhere...

As sweet as tupelo honey

2008-05-28T13:07:00.002-04:00

At my last job, I was biking about 66km one way to get to work in the morning, passing through the strip malls and strip housing of Scarburbia.

This year, I can either walk straight to work in 20 minutes, or I can suit up and go for a long optional bike ride in the morning. It's pretty sweet. If you live in Orillia, and if you get up early, pack your bag and clip into the pedals on your Jamis, and follow this route out of town into the countryside, you see lots of farmland, four deer, and lots of waterfront.

Brakeman on a hurtlin' fever train

2008-05-27T08:52:00.004-04:00

It was pretty cold and windy this morning, doing the 30km round trip out to Hawkestone and back in time for work. Here are a couple photos from the morning ride:

On Sunday I rode my Trek on the country roads to the west of Orillia... the Bass Lake Side Road and various Lines (Line 8, 14, 15/16 etc). I love the fact that every direction I go when I leave Orillia, I'm cycling through rolling farmland. It's really pretty gorgeous. The only annoying thing is that, since I don't know the area very well yet, I keep going along nice country roads and all of a sudden hitting gravel where the road is no longer paved. I dinged up the underside of my downtube on Sunday having gravel pinging off the tube. So, I'm off to the drugstore today to pick up some nailpolish to seal the chipped paint.

And here are some stories that can maybe make you believe that we're getting serious about the problems we've created:
The LCBO (chain of wine / liquor stores run by the provincial government) is going to stop offering plastic bags.

London, Ontario, is considering serious restrictions, and possibly an outright ban, on new drive-throughs. Of course, Tim Hortons, McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King and A&W were on hand to fight this effort, which basically puts them pro-asthma and air pollution, and anti-clean air (although McDonald's has done some good things, fast food in general has enough of a moral problem due to factory farming. Do they really want to be on the wrong side of the idling issue the way the big three were on the wrong side of the air pollution issue for decades?)
This is happening at the same time as highschool students in London set up a protest at a Tim Horton's asking people to stop the unnecessary idling that happens in drive-throughs.

And this one isn't really about climate change, but as a cyclist who's worried about the motorists around me not really paying attention to what they're doing, I'm pretty happy with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty considering a ban on cellphone use while driving.

made it on over to that million dollar bash

2008-05-23T13:01:00.003-04:00

I have to admit, I really get a kick out of the Diamond Shreddies ad campaign. Do you guys have this in the States, or is it just up here in Canada (Shreddies are a cereal brand, and a "diamond" shreddie is a normal shreddie turned over a few degrees)?
Apparently the campaign was created by an intern named Hunter Somerville, who nearly didn't hand the proposed idea on to his boss because he thought it was too stupid.

I used to talk about current events (mostly George Bush) a lot, but I guess I haven't had as much time for blogging OR current events recently. However, here are a couple thoughts I've had:

Lowering the gas tax, in the States OR Canada, is stupid. It'll only save consumers peanuts, and it doesn't get to the root of the problem which Kuntsler and Heinberg have been talking about for quite a while now - from here on out, gasoline prices are going to do nothing but go up. If we really wanted to help people, we'd be increasing taxes on gas and throwing all of the money at public transit and active transportation, which are going to be increasingly important as automobile travel becomes more expensive.

And what is active transportation? It's using your bicycle and Google earth to fly around the world.

Stephen Harper, our conservative PM, keeps surprising me (P.S. - don't read into this the idea that I actually like him). A year or so back he introduced an income tax credit given to people who use public transit. Now he's starting to fix the Made in Canada problem.

Up until now, food products which happened to have their finishing touches done in Canada (i.e. the labels put on the cans or something), could be classed Made in Canada, even though the apples/fish fries/mustard actually came from Australia or Singapore or someplace.
Under the new rules, a "product of Canada" label will mean all or virtually all the contents are Canadian in origin.
If the ingredients come from another country, the label would reflect that as well. For example, a label might say "made in Canada with imported ingredients," Mr. Harper said.
"This qualified 'made in Canada' label will let shoppers know they are supporting Canadian jobs and the Canadian economy, but also inform them that not all of the contents necessarily come from Canada," he said.

So, we'll still have to read the packaging carefully for the fine print, but at least the fine print will have the information needed to make a decision.

P.S. - Deathstar picture has nothing to do with this post's subject matter, I just thought it was funny.

I'm drunk & you're probably taking pills

2008-05-15T15:24:00.007-04:00

It is mid-May, and I'm STILL not biking very much. I'm so embarrassed. Having a leisurely 20 minute walk to work is a blessing in many ways, but it does tend to make you keep your bikes in the basement.

I have a new plan to get back on my wheels again - instead of trying to get up in the morning, go for a ride, come home & shower etc, then walk to work, I'm just going to go for rides which end at work. Basically I'm going to be recreating my routine from my Toronto to Oshawa commute (though not with the pissed off aggression I mention in that post). Luckily I have much nicer streets and trails to ride than I did in Durham county, like the Oro-Medonte rail trail pictured above.

This morning I got on the Jamis and rode the trail south out of Orillia to a little town called Hawkstone, right on Lake Simcoe. It was a pretty gorgeous way to spend a morning.

Wow - I opened up the (print) Globe and Mail and saw a $10000.00 Cannondale in the business section - that was a surprise. So Cannondale has been bought by a stroller manufacturer, and Specialized is pissed because they think it means that Cannondales will start showing up at Canadian Tire - allowing people to pay much less for a Cannondale bike than they would for a similar Specialized bike? Is that the gist of it?
Despite the fact that I want as many people on bikes as possible, this does scare me a bit... Cannondales should be sold in bike shops, not department stores. Hmmm.... I'm an elitist... who'd a thunk it? At least I know that Canadian Tire won't be selling old Cannondales from the 80's/90's with broken derailleur hangers which have been set up as singlespeeds. Canadian Tire will never be that cool.

Searching for something else, I found a CBC Radio interview between Kevin Sylvester, James H. Kunstler, and the mayor of Mississauga (one of the sprawling suburbs of Toronto). If you go to this page, and then do the Control + "F" search on peak oil you'll find it.
It was pretty good, but will be more interesting if you're only now starting to think about the peak oil issue. If you're read the literature already this is old stuff.

If anyone cares, this is the property that my university was trying to acquire for its campus here in Orillia. There were legal problems though, so we never got it. Such a shame - don't those grounds look PERFECT for a university? Plus, this is also right beside Lake Simcoe, and we would have had a long stretch of lakefront. AND - this property is right on the rail trail.

May you live in interesting times

2008-04-25T13:32:00.003-04:00

Well, Gary Duke just can't get a break. After his (classic!) bike store was utterly destroyed in the big fire in downtown Toronto this winter, he is now being charged $48 000 to finish the demolition.
It ain't easy being a cyclist.

Careful readers know that I moved from Toronto to Orillia this past autumn. When I lived in Toronto, and was riding a lot with theToronto Bike Network, I used to bike about 15 km north on Yonge (i.e. yucky city cycling) just to get to Finch station, where I met the other TBN guys, and then we would ride another 15km or so just to get out of the damned city and hit a country road.

Now, in Orillia, I have a little 1.5km pedal down a street and across a bridge, and it's country roads as far as the eye can see. The only drawback is that a good chunk of them aren't paved, so until I know my way around I might do my exploring on my cross bike and leave the new Trek for when I ride with the bike shop guys.

When I was younger, and writing a lot of fiction, I used to lament the fact that I lived in a boring era, and that I didn't have a chasing wolves into mexico or a Eastern Europe under Communism type of experience to write about.

But every day that passes right now, I am increasingly thinking that our civilization is about to experience an upheaval of societal and planetary consequences. It's like we're living in a tree house, and a number of factors are working together to cut down the tree.

In our lifetime… we will have to deal with a peak in the supply of cheap oil.
National Geographic Cover Story, 2004.

National Geographic. The End of Cheap Oil.
Globe and Mail. CIBC's Jeff Rubin - gasoline at $2.25 a litre by 2012.

The era of cheap food is over.
Economist Magazine Cover Story, 2007.

Economist. The Silent Tsunami.
Globe and Mail. Why grocery bills are set to soar.

P.S. - May you live in interesting times is an ancient Chinese blessing, and curse.

despite not being a "lance" guy...

2008-04-19T11:43:00.005-04:00

I finished the series of active transportation articles that I've been mentioning off and on, and they're posted at Orillia Gets Active if anyone wants to check them out.

Article 1 covers how North America came to be an automobile dependent society

Article 2 explores the problems that auto-dependence has caused

Article 3 talks about why active transportation is a sustainable way forward for city planners in a (soon to be) $1.50 / litre of gas world.

In other news...

I bought a new bike.
Maybe a year and a half ago I sold my 2004 Cervelo Soloist (aluminum with Ultegra) thinking that my duathlon days were over, and that I could just use my cross bike for the long Sunday rides I anticipated doing.
However, several things ganged up on me & convinced me that I still needed a real road bike:
a) as mentioned before, I'm a cycling shopaholic.
b) This spring, both my brother and a co-worker have been bike shopping, and I've been looking at bikes left, right and center in efforts to advise them on things like wheelsets and what level of Shimano components not to drop below.
c) In Orillia I've gone for two Sunday rides with the local bike shop guys, on our cross bikes, and I'm enjoying it, but as the snow and ice leaves and the roads clear, I would have been very pissed to watch them switch to road bikes and leave me chugging along far behind on my steel Jamis.

SOOO - I've been surfing EBAY and the Canadian Cyclist classifieds, and found a guy living fairly close by selling a 2007 Trek 5000 - the 53/39 double version. It wasn't stock, he'd put on a different wheelset and fork, but they were still good parts, the bike was my size, and he was asking what I considered a really good price. Even before I went to look at it, it was pretty much a certainty that I was going to buy it.

Haven't ridden it yet, just picked it up this morning, but I already have adjustments to make. I want to get some good (used) mid-level Mavics for the bike, a new saddle, and some pedals.

Thank God for spring and bike part fiddling.

Tying a few pieces together

2008-04-13T08:21:00.005-04:00

I just stumbled across a New York Times science & environment blog called Dot Earth, and read this passage in their "About Us" section:
By 2050 or so, the world population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where, scientists say, humans are already shaping climate and the web of life.

Coincidentally, I recently reread Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress, which I wrote about a while back in my tough lessons from Easter Island post.
In "A Short History", Wright has two passages which came back to me as soon as I read the above Dot Earth passage:

a) On page 124 he quotes British scientist Martin Rees as saying "The odds are no better than 50 / 50 that our present civilization... will survive to the end of the present century... unless all nations adopt low-risk and sustainable policies based on present technology."

b) On page 129 If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature. Ecological markers suggest that in the early 1960s, humans were using about 70% of nature's yearly output; by the early 1980s, we'd reached 100%, and in 1999, we were at 125%. Such numbers may be imprecise, but their trend is clear - they mark the road to bankruptcy.

So - here are the two pieces that I immediately drew together: if 6 billion of us are using 125 percent of the earth's output, which is already unsustainable, what the hell are 9 billion of us going to do to this place?

Sometimes I wish I didn't read so much. Nearly all of it turns out to be negative. I do find some good stuff sometimes, like the Earth Charter, endorsed by UNESCO, but still, the good news is invariably overshadowed by the sheer weight of the bad.

I hope the Amish and the Mennonites feel like saving our sorry butts when civilization crumbles.

Incidentally, it was Can People Have Meat and a Planet Too? that led me to that Dot Earth blog. Does anybody else find the idea of breeding meat protein in petrie dishes, in order to avoid factory farming's massive problems, an unbelievably scary, sci-fi solution to a problem that could be fixed by just reducing how much meat we eat?

Where are we?

2008-04-03T15:50:00.002-04:00

Below is the 2nd article of the three which should soon(ish) be in my local newspaper. Any criticism, fact-correcting would be totally welcome. After looking at why North America became automobile dependent, this article looks at the consequences of automobile dependence.

P.S. - frequent readers of this blog may notice that I've borrowed from myself a few times here. Oh well, as long as you aren't John Fogerty, that's okay isn't it? : )
--------------------------

In a previous article, I argued that North American cities became dependent on the automobile not because it was a good idea, but because the automobile lobby did two very effective things: a) they convinced governments to redesign public space to be pro-automobile and anti-public transit, making people NEED cars whether they liked it or not, and they used advertising to convince people who didn't need a car, WANT a car: To be without an automobile was increasingly a form of public nakedness in which a man, as one commentator put it, “ran the risk of being singled out among his fellows, especially on Sundays and holidays, as either hopelessly poor or perversely out of the swim (McCarthy, 2007, p. 53).

In this article I want to look at what one hundred years of automobile dependence has given us – what environmental, social, and health issues the automobile century has left in its wake. I'm barely going to mention climate change, believing that everyone already knows that our cars' C02 emissions are causing problems like the 200 million climate change refugees that the IPCC expects to be looking for new homes by 2050 (Leake, 2007). Before climate change became such a major issue, the biggest problem associated with the automobile was the PM 2.5 and carbon monoxide emissions from our cars contributing to air pollution. It's a shame that this issue doesn't get much press anymore, because the findings from air pollution research are horrendous - children living in smoggy areas lose 1% of their lung capacity every year (Gauderman, 2004), living in Madrid is the equivalent of smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day (Ham, 2006), a pregnant woman who lives for as little as a month in a high smog area is three times as likely to have a baby with a physical deformity as women living in healthier areas (Ritz, 2002), children living within a quarter mile of a freeway had an 89 percent higher risk of developing asthma than those who lived a mile away (Gauderman, 2005), “people who live near congested freeways are at least twice as likely to develop cancer from breathing vehicle pollution than those who live next to factories” (Tamminen, 2006, p. 47). And are you thinking about driving for a living? You're opening yourself up to increased instances of cancer and respiratory disease (Toronto Public Health, 2007). Finally, the Ontario Medical Assocation's Illness costs of air pollution report has put the number of premature deaths in southern Ontario, due to smog, at 5800 for 2005.

Climate change and air pollution are the most infamous legacies of the automobile, but there are many other problems to consider. The first, and the one with the most far reaching consequences, is that rampant automobile use has brought us to the end of the cheap-oil era. As recently as 2002, a barrel of oil traded at about $20.00 (U.S.). Six years later a barrel costs over $100.00, and the CIBC recently released a report saying that their research shows oil hitting $150.00 by 2012 (Hamilton, 2008). Oil prices are not the only measurement to consider however. Thomas Homer-Dixon would have us pay more attention to a factor known as Energy Return on Investment (EROI). EROI refers to how much energy you put into a project compared to how much energy you get out of the project. The nightmare scenario is when EROI is 1/1 - you get no more energy out of something than you put into it. In the Texas Wildcatter days, all you had to do was dig a hole in Texas and you had a geyser of oil shoot out of the ground. Today, after using up all the easily recoverable oil, we're drilling through unbelievable depths of water and scrounging through all the tar in northern Alberta to meet our petroleum needs. From the 1970's to today, EROI has fallen from about 25/1 to 15/1. The EROI of the Alberta Oil Sands is about 4/1 (Homer-Dixon, 2006). What does this mean? It means that we're now scratching the planet in desperation to get oil. As gasoline heads towards $1.50/litre it is going to become more and more uneconomical to have any sort of long drive to and from your workplace, especially as oil scarcity also causes your heating and grocery bills to rise.

The automobile has also had a profound influence on the health of North Americans. In conjunction with the fact that we eat far too much (one fast food meal can contain 2200 calories, which would require a full marathon to burn off [Maziak, 2008]), automobile use has reduced our daily level of exercise and caused obesity and diabetes rates to soar, and one study in the New England Journal of Medicine states that these problems will lead to the current generation of children, for the first time in history, to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents (Olshansky, 2005). 23.1% of Canadian adults are now obese, up from 13.8% in 1979 (Tjepkema, 2004). Between 1995 and 2005 the number of people in Ontario with diabetes grew by 70% (Hall, 2007). Aside from the fact that automobile dependence has helped to make people sick by reducing their activity levels, these problems entail massive monetary costs – the cost of physical inactivity in Canada has been estimated at $5.3 billion, and the cost of obesity estimated at $4.3 billion (Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute, 2004). Physical inactivity's burden on the health care system was such a concern to the Federal and Provincial/Territorial Ministers Responsible for Sport, Recreation and Fitness in 2003, that they set a national target to increase levels of physical activity by ten percentage points in each province and territory by the year 2010. A primary reason that they set this target was that “Physical inactivity levels in Canada remain a serious public health burden. Fifty-five percent of Canadians do not meet minimum guidelines for regular physical activity necessary to attain health benefits. Physical inactivity increases the risk of chronic disease, premature death and disability.” (Government of New Brunswick, 2003).

Finally, I'd like to mention the social costs we're paying due to automobile dependence. In 1961, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacob argued for closely packed communities where you met and mingled with your neighbour every time you took out the garbage. She argued for a concentration of people and shops in one place, the idea being that the two would support each other, and that a vibrancy would arise from the constant interplay of people meeting on the streets as they went about their daily lives.

The automobile quite emphatically does NOT create a vibrant interplay of people. It creates suburbs and isolation. “Cars are increasingly inhabited by lone individuals, often insulated cocoon-fashion from the world around, rather like mobile gated communities” (Freund, 2007, p. 41). Not only do we travel by ourselves in our steel cans, building cities for our cars, rather than for ourselves, means that we live farther away from each other, and farther away from the places that we want to visit. Remember when you used to be able to walk to main street (or yes, drive to it), and do every single one of your errands – groceries, banking, post office, pharmacy – on foot? Meeting your neighbours in the shops? Probably not, and if you do, you're probably over 30 years old. Today's reality is making about 5 car stops to complete your errands, with a distance between each one of around two to five kilometres (and incidentally, these short trips, because they finish before a car's pollution control mechanisms kick in, cause more pollution than longer sustained trips).

Nobody profits from this style of urban design, except the automobile and the oil companies. In fact, most of us suffer from it. Although the automobile is here to stay, there are a few things that we can do to alleviate the problems that automobile dependence has caused, and the simplest solution, and perhaps the best solution, is active transportation.

Article Two – Reference List

Bittman, M. (2008 January 27). Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler. New York Times.

Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute. (2004). Physical Activity Monitor and Sport.

Freund, P. & Martin, G. (2007). Hyperautomobility, the social organization of space, and health. Mobilities, 2(1), 37-49.

Gauderman, W.J., Avol, E., Gilliland, F., Vora, H., Thomas, D., Berhane, K., et al. (2004). The effect of air pollution on lung development from 10 to 18 years of age. New England Journal of Medicine, 351(11), 1057-1067.

Gauderman, W.J., Avol, E., Lurmann, F., Kuenzli, N., Gilliland, F., Peter, J., et al. (2005). Childhood asthma and exposure to traffic and nitrogen dioxide. Epidemiology, 16(6), 737-743.

Government of New Brunswick. (2003) News Release: Federal and Provincial/Territorial Ministers Responsible for Sport, Recreation and Fitness Target Increase in Physical Activity.

Hall, J. (2007 March 02). Diabetes soars in Ontario. Toronto Star.

Ham, A. (2006 February 11). Spain chokes under ‘Grey Beret’. The Age.

Hamilton, T. (2008, January 11). Economist predicts $1.50 a litre for gasoline. The Toronto Star.

Homer-Dixon, T. (2006, November 29). The end of ingenuity. International Herald Tribune.

Leake, J. (2007, April 1). Climate change ‘could create 200m refugees’. The Sunday Times.

Maziak, W., Ward, K.D., & Stockton, M.B. (2008). Childhood obesity: Are we missing the big picture? Obesity Reviews, 9, 35-42.

McCarthy, T. (2007). Auto mania: Cars, consumers, and the environment. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Olshansky, S.J., Passaro, D.J., Hershow, R.C., Layden, J., Carnes, B.A., Brody, J., et al. (2005). A Potential decline in life expectancy in the United States in the 21st Century. New England Journal of Medicine, 352(11), 1138-1145.

Ontario Medical Assocation. (2005). The illness costs of air pollution: 2005-2026 health and economic damage estimates. (OMA Publication ISBN 0919047548).

Ritz, B., Yu, F., Fruin, S., Chapa, G., Shaw, G.M. & Harris, J. (2002). Ambient Air Pollution and Risk of Birth Defects in Southern California. American Journal of Epidemiology, 155(1), 17-25.

Simpson, J, Jaccard, M. & Rivers, N. (2007). Hot air: Meeting Canada’s climate change challenge. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

Tamminen, T. (2006). Lives per gallon: The True cost of our oil addiction. Washington: Island Press.

Tjepkema, M. (2004). Adult obesity in Canada: Measured height and weight. Statistics Canada.

Toronto Public Health. (2007). Air pollution burden of illness from traffic in Toronto: Problems and solutions. Retrieved April 1, 2008 from

How we got here

2008-03-29T10:20:00.003-04:00

The Toronto Cyclists Union is holding an Advocacy Workshop on Sunday April 13 - 11:00am to 4:00pm in the Toronto City Hall Council Chambers at Queen & Bay.
The Facebook group is here, and the workshop is for anyone who wants to learn how, with the support of the Toronto Cyclists Union, to improve cycling conditions and get more cycling programs that are specifically targeted to your ward."

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So it looks like I will be writing three articles on Active Transportation for my local newspaper, and the first one will be a "How we got here" piece - i.e. how did we end up with an automobile dependent society?

Since I'm a fairly biased left wing vegetarian cyclist, I'd be especially interested to hear what the pro-automobile people would say in reply to any claims that I make. Anyway, give it a read and tell me what you think. Take care!

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In his 2006 book Lives Per Gallon, Terry Tamminen asks the following hypothetical question – if you had the chance to wipe the slate clean, and redesign all the cities in the world, would you put the homes and the workplaces about 50km away from each other, connect them with concrete highways, and force people to travel in 3 ton steel containers which are fuelled by one of the most precious resources on earth, and which burn it in the most environmentally damaging manner possible? (p. 165). Hopefully, we would answer his question by replying “No.” This leads to another question however, why did we design cities this way?

Before discussing the benefits of active transportation, and recommending it as a useful form of transportation for Orillia, I think it is useful to talk about how we ended up in the situation that Tamminen describes above – in cities without adequate public transportation, where people cannot travel safely on foot or bicycle, and where we are completely dependant upon automobiles. The answer, although multi-layered, eventually boils down to the fact that companies like GM and Standard Oil could make more money if you drove than if you took public transit.

Up until 1908, when Henry Ford put the Model T on the market, automobiles were exclusively toys for the fabulously rich. Playboys like William K. Vanderbilt raced at high speeds past bicycles and horse drawn carriages and stirred up a powerful mixture of emotions – outright hatred (noisy, polluting, and reckless automobile driving frequently led to motorists being stoned, shot at by farmers, and mercilessly beaten if they stopped after running over a pedestrian, leading to the “hit and run” [McCarthy, p. 9]), but more importantly, jealousy. If owning an automobile meant that you were rich, not owning one meant that you were poor. “The emotions that the speeding sportsmen aroused... sparked the automobile revolution of the 1910's and 1920's.” (McCarthy, p. 30).

Between 1908, when the reliable and affordably priced Model T was introduced, and 1927, the number of cars on American roads jumped from 200 000 to 20 million; and 15 million of these cars, snapped up by people who wanted to prove themselves a “have” rather than a “have not”, were Model T's (McCarthy, p. 30). Jealousy provoked such a desire for car ownership that many families living barely above the poverty line gave up real necessities in order to own an automobile (Davis, p. 2).

Now, without a doubt, the automobile was a positive innovation in many ways: it allowed farmers and people in rural areas to travel to and from towns much faster, and it offered relief from situations like New York in 1900, where horses were dropping 2.5 million pounds of manure every day, along with 60 000 gallons of urine (Flink, p. 136). But the usefulness of the automobile doesn’t explain why North American cities didn’t support a healthy mixture of different transit styles – the automobile in conjunction with electric streetcars and bike lanes for example.

The pro-automobile lobby got started destroying the competition at least as early as 1910, when automobile advertisements slurred public transit with ads that asked “Why be part of the ten-cent common herd?” (McCarthy, page 152). City business leaders, who very emphatically were NOT part of the ten cent public transit herd, bought automobiles and then became powerful voices on city councils:
“City planners and politicians largely ignored the needs of the autoless for better public transportation, while undertaking a massive restructuring of cities at public expense to accomodate middle-class motorists.... the main reason why planners almost totally neglected the needs of the urban working class and the poor for better public transit is that planning commissions were dominated by commercial civic elites” (Flink, pgs. 151-152).

Public transportation suffered heavily with the rise of the automobile. Cars gave people the ability to live far from where they worked, buying houses in temporarily idyllic suburbs and escaping sometimes industrial conditions in city centers. As cities spread out, population density became thinner and thinner, and it was no longer profitable for a transit operator to run a streetcar line on routes with only a handful of regular passengers. Just as public transit was dying, cities were sprawling, giving us situations like the eastern part of the GTA, where Scarborough oozes into Pickering then Ajax then Whitby then Oshawa, all of which was once gorgeous farmland, but is now a collection of housing developments and box stores linked together with four to six lane mini highways.

So public transit was dying, active transportation was almost unknown, and the auto lobby kept consolidating power. In the late 1930s, GM formed an alliance with companies like Standard Oil, Firestone Tires, and Mack Trucks, to destroy public transit systems (i.e. their competition), by buying up public transit companies and replacing light rail / electric streetcar systems with GM buses. Eventually convicted (though only lightly punished) for monopolization of bus sales, Government Attorney Bradford Snell eventually summed up GM's actions this way: “[GM's motor buses] ultimately contributed to the collapse of several hundred public transit systems and to the diversion of hundreds of thousands of patrons to automobiles. In sum, the effect of General Motors' diversification program was threefold: substitution of buses for passenger trains, streetcars and trolley buses; monopolization of bus production; and diversion of riders to automobiles” (St. Clair, p. 16).

Throughout the 20th century, the automobile lobby and the big three sold more cars by creating demand for more cars. After the rich playboy market became saturated, they sold cars to middle class people for weekend rides to the country. When they wanted to force urban dwellers to use their car to get back and forth to work, they tore away public transit and lobbied for a pro-automobile redesign of urban environments. When they wanted to make the automobile the best choice for cross country travel, they lobbied federal governments to conduct massively expensive freeway building programs. When, in the 1950's, they had sold a car to every single family, they targeted housewives - When the male population empties out of Suburbia each workday morning – millions of housewives are left virtually prisoners in their own homes (Ford advertising copy quoted in McCarthy, p. 151) - and began selling two cars to every family.

So, back to our original question – why is North America dependant upon the automobile? Unfortunately, it is not because an interdisciplinary group of experts spent 10 years studying the issue in the 1920's, and decided that automobiles were the answer. More accurately, it is because a good technology came under the manipulation of very greedy powers, and if something like a bike lane or a bus route wasn't going to be good for them, they were going to fight it, even if it would have been good for us.

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Davis, C. (2005). On these very streets: The automobile and the urban environment in St. Louis, 1920—1930 (Doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri - Columbia).

Flink, J.J. (1988). The Automobile Age. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Fotsch, P.M. (1988). Stabilizing mobility: Transportation and isolation in urban America. (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, San Diego).

Gutfreund, O.D. (2004). Twentieth-century sprawl : highways and the reshaping of the American landscape. New York: Oxford University Press.

McCarthy, T. (2007). Auto mania : cars, consumers, and the environment. New Haven : Yale University Press.

Miller, G.R. (1983). Transportation and urban growth in Cincinnati, Ohio, and vicinity: 1788 – 1980. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati).

Schlosser, E. (2001). Fast food nation: the dark side of the all-American meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

St. Clair, D.J. (1986). The Motorization of American Cities. New York: Praeger.

Tamminen, T. (2006). Lives per gallon: The true cost of our oil addiction. Washington: Island Press.

For the good of American civilization

2008-03-11T12:30:00.004-04:00

Geoffrey left me a comment below the last post about Tommasini bikes. Tommasinis are hand-crafted Italian bikes, that have now set up distribution in the U.S. I guess the love of cycling runs in the Tommasini blood (this is also my surname). I would L.O.V.E. one of those bikes, maybe I should do some research and see if there's a family connection in the not so distant past, maybe they'll give me a free frame!

I'm still doing some background reading to prepare me for three articles on active transportation, and my plan is that the first article will be a "how did we get into this mess?" story about why North America adopted the automobile to the extent that it did.

Part of the answer, apparently, is that people in the 1920's were just freaking insane. Listen to this, from The Automobile Age by James Flink:

Family togetherness was a major benefit anticipated by early proponents of automobility. Next to the church there is no factor in American life that does so much for the morals of the public as does the automobile, E.C. Stokes, a former governor of New Jersey and the president of a Trenton bank, claimed in 1921. Any device that brings the family together as a unit in their pursuit of pleasure is a promoter of good morals and yields a beneficent influence that makes for the good of American civilization. If every family in the land possessed an automobile, family ties would be closer and many of the problems of social unrest would be happily resolved… The automobile is one of the country’s best ministers and best preachers.

Errrr.... so, if Jesus (or Buddha etc, take your pick), were alive in the 1920's, he'd have been an automobile?

The Automobile Age also mentions another book, which seems a bit more in line with my thinking. In the late 1950's, someone named John Keats wrote a text titled The Insolent Chariot. A critique of the American automobile industry, the book was summarized in the New York Times as portraying contemporary American cars as “overblown, overpriced monstrosities built by oafs for thieves to sell to mental defectives."

Check out Ethicle.

I don't know why there isn't more hype about this, but this version of the Google search engine allows you to do searches which contribute a penny per search to organizations like Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, Amnesty International, and a few others as well.

Another form of active transportation

2008-03-05T09:59:00.004-05:00

I don't really remember how it came up, but I was talking to a co-worker and I started saying "You know, I've owned...." and then I had to pause, trying to remember how many bikes I've owned since I became a full on bike commuter back in about 2001.
The answer, including two bikes which were given to me, is nine (a bunch of them are pictured in this post). I've given a couple away, and sold a couple, and I currently own four bikes (only one of which has gears, the others are singlespeeds).

Now I remember how it came up, I've been helping another co-worker research bikes because she is going to buy this spring, and I was telling the first co-worker that I was living vicariously through Jennelle (who is bike shopping) because spring for me means coming down with bike lust, and I currently have no business whatsoever spending any money on bikes.
Now, if I DID have a spare $1000 bucks for a bike, I think I'd have to find a shop that could sell me a Felt F85. I came across this bike in the current Bicycling buyer's guide, and I cannot believe how much bike this is for about $1100 bucks. It's a sub 20 pound bike, with carbon fork and seatpost, and a mix of Ultegra and 105!!! components! I mean, holy crap - that is such a bargain it's almost worth giving up food for to be able to afford.

At my last job, in Oshawa, I did what many of us do, and I brought my bike into my office for safety. come to think of it, I commuted to that job on 5 different bikes over the course of just over a year. Life in Orillia is a little bit different however. The snow just doesn't stop falling in Orillia, and here, you park your snowshoes in your office after your morning commute.

Being eaten by the wolf

2008-02-21T09:09:00.005-05:00

I have an idea to write a series of articles on Active Transportation for the local newspaper here in Orillia. If they think it's a good idea, I'm proposing to do the following:
a) How we got here - a quick history of why North American cities ended up becoming dependent upon the automobile.
b) What's the problem? - a survey of the various problems associated with cities and automobiles, i.e. the diabetes and obesity problems stemming from inactivity, the loss of farmland due to suburban sprawl, air pollution and climate change, and rising gas prices making automobile dependence risky anyway.
c) What's the solution? - A statement about active transportation providing a sustainable way forward for urban planning.

To this end, I'm going through a bunch of material on these issues, and I'm currently taking a look at a book called Auto Mania. And guess what I found!

I more or less consider automobile dependence to be a con job pulled by Henry Ford and GM and Standard Oil etc on North Americans, and isn't it awesome that after successfully selling everyone in North America a car, they started a campaign like the one above to convince people that one car isn't enough - you need TWO CARS to be a real North American family?

What you see above is an ad by the J. Walter Thompson advertising company, patting themselves on the back for the way THEY CREATED the idea that a family needs two cars. If you can't read the text in the poster, it uses phrases like "housewives are left virtually prisoners in their own homes" to describe women at home after their husbands have driven off in the car.

[Housewives] stand and watch Dad go, taking with him their link with the outside world - the family car. In millions of other households, however, Mother is not cut off from civilization when Dad departs. For the family has a second car in the garage.

Wow. Would I ever like to punch the guy who wrote that gibberish in the nose.

If any high level advertising dudes stumble upon my blog, my wish is that you'd turn your efforts to groups like this and try to rectify the damage you've done to the world with the automobile hoax.

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.

- Marshall McLuhan, Canadian communications theorist.
quote found on this page.

Duke's Cycle

2008-02-20T11:54:00.003-05:00

Picture and story from the Torontoist.

There has long been a bicycle shop in Toronto called Duke's Cycles. I don't know if I ever bought anything from them, but whenever I was walking along Queen West I'd stop in and drool over their cross bikes.

A massive fire struck Queen Street West in Toronto this morning, and might still be blazing while I type. It would appear that Duke's, along with many other shops, is now gone.

Be well, Duke's - may the road rise up to meet you.

Too much silence can be misleading

2008-02-18T10:15:00.004-05:00

It's February in Orillia, which means snow up to your waist, and I've finally done a bit of work on my Cannondale. As you may or may not remember, my Cannondale has had an interesting life since I bought it off my friend Duncan. When I bought it, it was a fairly zippy bike, set up with Shimano 105 components, and it used downtube shifters.
I used it the summer I was biking from downtown Toronto to my job in Oshawa, and promptly put over 4000 kilometers on it. Then I had a crash, ended up snapping off the derailleur hanger, and it became a single-speed. Finally sick of the grimy looking hoods, and the black bar tape, I decided to beautify a little bit.

I bought some Shimano brake levers from Nashbar, and some Specialized Gel Tape from my new hometown bike shop, and set to work redoing the levers and the tape. By the way, if you want to learn how to wrap handlebar tape, you can do yourself a favour and watch this video.
Anyway, above you can see the old look of the hoods (although I'd already replaced the right lever by the time I took that photo). And then to the left here, you can see the new tape job.
I think it looks great, but I guess I won't really know how good a job I did until the summer when I put some wear and tear on the bike, and see how the tape job lasts. To get even more cushion on the bar, I taped a strip of the old tape along the top of the bar, and then taped the new stuff over top.

I'm finding myself absolutely burnt out with cycling these days. I don't bike for transportation in Orillia, because the city is small enough that I just walk everywhere, and I simply cannot bear to be on my bike on my trainer in the basement these days. So I've more or less given myself the winter off.
Hoping to keep in some sort of shape, I bought some snowshoes yesterday.
Velocity sells snowshoes as well as bikes, and they had a "test some snowshoes" hiking day yesterday. Annalise and I romped around on some Tubbs Odysseys for a while, and decided to buy them, especially because they were last year's model and were going for about $60.00 off.

After we'd tried them, I asked the guy what sort of level snowshoes the Odysseys were, and he said "Well, they're about two down from the top model, and two or three levels up from the bottom."
"So these are the Shimano 105s of Tubbs snowshoes?"
"Yeah! They're like buying 105, for $60.00 off."
"Okeydoke," I said. "Sold."

such beautiful sunsets

2008-02-05T17:05:00.000-05:00

I've been skimming through a book called Lives Per Gallon by Terry Tamminen. Tamminen is a long time environmental activist in California, and was Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, working with Governor Arnold.

The book is handy because he's collected every piece of "smog will kill you" research ever done, and you can use the book as a bibliography on this topic area.

Here are some other neat notes from the book:

On Military Spending to Protect the Oil Supply

He's studied how much the U.S. devotes to military spending to place troops and technology in oil producing areas, to protect the oil supply. His number, EXCLUDING IRAQ, is between $55 to $100 billion each year. According to one report, the American military is spending $98 million to protect one single pipeline down in Colombia and Venezuela (page 59).

On How to design a planet

He ponders how you would design cities etc if you had the chance to wipe the slate clean and start all over again. Would you....
"build residences in the middle of the most fragile natural resources and then build the workplaces 50 km away? Would you connect the two with costly ribbons of steel and concrete? To get from one point to another, would you put people in 3-ton steel and plastic containers, propelled by a highly flammable substance that could only be found in sufficient quantity on the opposite side of the globe? A substance that could only be made useful by drilling thousands of meters into the planet and then filtering the stuff in factories built on vast, industrial wastelands?" (page 165).

On another way to react to 9/11

"What if the United States had responded to the September 11, 2001, attacks by directing the $100 billion that was spent during the FIRST YEAR of war in Iraq on a crash program to build alternative fuel vehicles and fueling stations, launching a new economy, phasing out our use of oil, and underwriting well-paying U.S. jobs and exports in alternative energy production for decades to come?" (page 159).

Anyway - there are some interesting points in the book, but it's definitely not something you can read straight through. And even for a dude like me, Tamminen is a bit too over the top sometimes with his agenda.

little bit scared of what comes after

2008-01-21T09:50:00.001-05:00

I've never really been into the daily carnage stuff out of New York and Toronto - sure it proves the point that driving is dangerous as hell, but it does so in a fairly morbid way.
Having said that, I'm about to do exactly the same thing! : 0

Some friends from Toronto drove up to Orillia this weekend for our book club meeting. This was incredibly kind of them, and Annalise and I really appreciated that they'd drive up and stay with us overnight in our new city, but then they got caught in the middle of the massive pileup on the 400 on Sunday afternoon.

They were all okay, no major injuries, but Mark's car was totalled, and they basically spent all of Sunday sitting on a Greyhound bus on the 400, and after leaving our place at 11:00 a.m., they didn't get home until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m.

If you've checked this blog often enough, you'll know that I don't like driving and the automobile whatsoever, but I do have to admit that since we've designed our cities the way we have, and because Canada doesn't have the train links that you use in Europe and Japan and elsewhere, the car is often a necessary evil.

But the 400 series highways here in Ontario, those highways where there are four or five or six lanes of traffic with vehicles exiting and merging and all going 100 to 150 km an hour, really freak me out. In fact, I think they are just plain wrong.
These highways, as I've said to Annalise, depend on every single driver having perfect concentration throughout the entire course of his or her drive. If you drive from downtown Toronto, up the DVP, and then east to Oshawa on the 401, and if your attention wavers for a second, then you could kill yourself and possibly dozens of other people.
I just don't think humans possess the ability to concentrate that perfectly, especially not in the age of the fast food meal, the Tim Horton's coffee, the IPOD and the cell phone.
And I think the often overlooked traffic accident statistics bear this out, according to one source, automobile accidents account for over 3000 fatalities a year in Canada, and over 220 000 other injuries.
In the States it is obviously worse, with over 40,000 fatalites, and over 4 millions injuries per year.

So, as I said, I think we're really over-estimating ourselves when we think that the big highways are really a safe way for humans to get themselves from point A to point B.

Maybe this will help: a report has come out of Trent University saying that road tolls in the Greater Toronto Area, and a steeper tax on fuel are necessary to help fund public transit while simultaneously moving people away from using their automobiles. Indeed, let's get as many of those cars off the road as we can.

Why can't i draw right up to what I want to say...

2008-01-12T09:20:00.000-05:00

After helping organize that petition last year which asked the Canadian federal government to promote cycling as a preferred means of transportation, I'm feeling a bit political again and have a couple things I'm working on:

a) I'm thinking about writing a new petition, this one aimed at the provincial Ontario government, asking the province to pressure all towns/cities over a certain population (maybe 20 000?) to have arterial north/south and east/west bike lanes.
Any thoughts on that? "It's a terrible idea because..." or "It'll never work due to..."

b) If you're on Facebook, feel free to join a new group on there titled the Orillia Coalition for Active Transportation (even if you're not an Orillian). Aside from pressuring local politicians to be aware of active transportation benefits and issues, I hope the group will generally foster some discussion on this topic.

After riding my trainer this morning, I did a quick cleaning of the drive-train, and thought I'd share a few tips. First of all, it is SOOO much easier doing anything with your bike if you have either a bike stand (which I don't have, they're expensive), or a trainer. Whenever you just lean your bike against a wall and try to clean it or work on it, you end up sticking your foot under the back tire trying to keep it from rolling back and forth as you work. It's so much easier to have the bike locked in place, especially so that you can change the gears without having to lift the bike up in the air to allow the chain to move up and down the cogs.
Anyway, my first quick tip? Put your bio-cleaner into an old windex bottle so that you can spray it onto the parts.

Second tip? Rags rock! Old underwear, socks, and some pants, especially jeans, are great for rags. I use every scrap of jeans that I can - even tearing the pockets off. The only trick with rags from old clothing is that when you tear them into pieces, you get stringy threads hanging around, which you need to be careful about not letting get entwined into your cassette or your derailleur.

Here's some quick news:

~ In Canada, where our conservative government continues to embarrass us at things like the Bali talks on Climate Change, and continually tells us that some sort of carbon tax would throw us into recession, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy has said that a carbon tax is exactly what the country needs. The NRTEE is made up of leaders from business, labour, universities, environmental organizations, Aboriginal communities and municipalities.
"Market-based policies that put a price on carbon to send an economy-wide signal on emissions are the most effective way to achieve deep, long-term greenhouse gas emissions reductions of the scale being considered," round table Chairman Glen Murray told a news conference.

"An early and clear price signal is needed to influence the investment decisions by industry in the technology and innovation required to achieve deep reductions."

A carbon tax would penalize the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and gas and could target industry or consumers.

~ One of the largest Canadian banks, CIBC, has come out with a report saying that they expect to see oil at $150 / barrel in about five years, meaning gasoline in Canada soon being $1.50 / litre, and in the states at $4.50 / gallon.

Nowhere is the phrase "peak oil" used, but that is exactly the underlying rationale:

Oil depletion from existing fields is outpacing new supply, argues the chief economist of CIBC World Markets, and what supply the International Energy Agency and other tracking bodies are optimistically counting on involves complex and costly "mega-projects" that are likely to see major delays.

And this, according to a CIBC report released yesterday, doesn't even account for the unpredictable: escalating geopolitical tensions and extreme weather events.

"What we don't appreciate is that the oil-sands delays (we've seen) are not a unique story. It's happening in the very fields where the world is expecting to get its future supply," Rubin told the Toronto Star.

"Don't think of today's prices as a spike. Don't think of them as a temporary aberration. Think of them as the beginning of a new era."

Talkin about the old style

2008-01-04T15:59:00.000-05:00

The cool thing about being a librarian is that you basically wade through information all day. Here's something cool I found out leafing through a magazine today.
There is a group called the Sentinelese who - because they have completely resisted contact with modern civilization - are known as the last remaining paleolithic hunter-gatherer group on earth.

They've been in the news most recently when they killed two Indian fishermen who landed on their island, and Indian authorities have so far resisted launching an investigation because they couldn't figure out how to do it.

As well, after the Tsunami in 2004, a few helicopters flew over to see if anyone on the island had survived, and they realized that there were survivors when arrows and spears began being shot at the coptors.

Here is some weird news about the modern world that serves as the introduction to Earth in Mind by David W. Orr.

Male sperm counts worldwide have fallen by 50% since 1938, and no one knows exactly why

Human breast milk often contains more toxins than are permissible in milk sold by dairies

At death, human bodies often contain enough toxins and heavy metals to be classified as hazardous waste

Similarly toxic are the bodies of whales and dolphins washed up on the banks of the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic shore

There has been a marked decline in fungi worldwide, and no one knows why

There has been a similar decline in populations of amphibians worldwide, even where the pH of rainfall is normal

Roughly 80% of European forests have been damaged by acid rain

U.S. industry releases some 11.4 billion tons of hazardous wastes to the environment each year

Ultraviolet radiation reaching the ground in Toronto is now increasing at 5% per year

For some happier stuff - I am getting such a kick out of this song, and I don't even know who Dawn Landes is!! This song, as with everything I know these days about modern music, I owe to Melissa in Nashville.

Raleigh and how oil kicks off 2008

2008-01-02T18:02:00.000-05:00

This summer I wrote about my Dad and his old Raleigh, which he gets quite the kick out of owning just for the novelty value of it. Just before Christmas he was at a garage sale and picked up another old Raleigh, this one for $50.00.

It's a Raleigh Sprite, with a five speed Suntour rear derailleur. I checked the gears and they were working okay, until Dad and I shifted a bit too far and the chain flew off the biggest ring down into the spokes.

As you can see from this photo, it even has a generator and lamp and an old-school horn!

I find it pretty funny that ever since I got into cycling, bikes have woven themselves into my Dad's brain. I like his original blue and white Raleigh a lot more than this one, but I might poke around and see if I can find how much this bike would go for.

Or maybe not! Since oil hit $100.00 / barrel today, and since OPEC is saying that they will not be able to meet their share of oil supply by 2037, maybe I should horde all the bikes i can get my hands on!

I've written about peak oil before, and gloated about how bikes will take over the empty freeways, but maybe I'm about due for my rude awakening to peak oil reality. This morning Michael Hlinka was predicting on CBC that by the end of 2008 we will consider $100.00 to be the normal price for oil. Except for the fact that I'm a cyclist, I'm as reliant on oil as everyone else. My plastic sandwich bags are made out of oil, and the apples I bought at the supermarket tonight made their way to me here in Orillia via oil. In reality, I'll be as screwed as all the SUV drivers if peak oil hits as hard as it could.

Jan. 2, 2008. This could be a big day. OPEC's announcement that they may not be able to maintain their share of oil supply is the equivalent of saying that the 20th century, the oil century, is over.

So this is Christmas (in Orillia!)

2007-12-22T14:33:00.000-05:00

Let me think, what did I tell the world last Christmas? Oh yeah, I moralized about climate change, that cycling petition (which I think helped inspire the Ontario government to cut the provincial sales tax on bikes last election), and polar bears. Hmmm... and actually, looking through my other December posts last year, I like the Napoleon one more than the Christmas one!

Anyway, no "be the change you want to see in the world" language from me this Christmas. I hope you're able to build some snowmen, do some skating, and get some winter riding in if you're able. (Jill, I don't visit your site enough, but you continue to be an inspiration).

Merry Christmas everybody!! : )

Invite Enrique into your oikos

2007-12-19T10:57:00.000-05:00

Guess what! There is good news coming out of the White House! The House of Representatives has passed a bill, which Bush has said he'll sign, to set tougher fuel economy standards on U.S. automobiles:
The bill, which passed on a bipartisan vote of 314 to 100, sets higher fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks for the first time in 22 years and requires the annual production of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022, a fivefold increase from current ethanol production levels.

And there's more good news today!
The Japanese have long had a sneaky way of getting around international whaling agreements, by saying that they were allowed to kill X number of whales for scientific research. This year, the Australians got so pissed about this that they vowed to send ships and helicopters in pursuit of Japanese whalers, to video-tape every thing they caught.

Just this morning the Japanese have announced that they've changed their minds and won't kill any humpbacks, which have been under international protection since 1966. On the flip side, they're still planning to kill 1000 whales of other types.

Pretty cool of the Australians eh? I wish they'd come over and videotape the oilsands in Canada, and the automobile use in our big cities, and shame us into taking a tougher stand on climate change.

If you're a cycling advocate, and you want to hear someone who will bring tears to your eyes, listen to Kevin Sylvester's recent interview with Enrique Penalosa on CBC Radio.

Penalosa was the mayor of Bogota (Colombia) who believed in the priority of public transit and active transportation over automobile transit, and was able to achieve massive changes in Bogota's transportation methods. If you listen to the interview (you MUST listen to the interview), Penalosa ties democracy and human dignity into a city's choice of transportation methods, and it is totally inspiring.

And to my surprise, while looking up Enrique Penalosa, I found a story about how Bush is actually pro-bicycle!

And finally, want to test your vocabulary and donate rice?

Happier Christmas thoughts coming soon!

2007-12-09T12:55:00.000-05:00

I just finished a book about Robert Oppenheimer called The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer: And the birth of the modern arms race. It was okay, but I'm not mentioning it here because I'm recommending it to anybody as a great read.

I am mentioning it though because it ties in with a long ago post about Easter Island and how smart we humans really are.

Now Oppenheimer, as we all know, is the scientist who, in World War II, gave the world the atom bomb. The U.S. was expecting that if they had to land troops on Japanese soil to finish the war, they'd lose thousands and thousands of men in an effort to bring the war to an end. The scientists working on the A Bomb knew this as well, and wanting to avoid the loss of these troops, finished work on the A bomb in time to destroy two Japanese Cities and force the Japanese to surrender.
Oppenheimer, a very philosophical man, worked on the A Bomb with great moral misgivings. While watching the first successful test of the A Bomb, he famously (mis)quoted Krishna in the Bhagwad Gita - "Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds." (Apparently the real translation is I am time, the destroyer of all.)

So World War II ends, and suddenly the Americans are racing against the Russians to develop a Nuclear Bomb. Where the A Bomb was a weapon whose destructiveness was dozens of magnitudes higher than the worst regular bomb used in World War II, the Nuclear Bomb would be even worse still. While not quite sure that they could even develop a nuclear weapon, the scientists at Los Alamos in the late 1940s were torn about whether they should even TRY to make a nuclear weapon.

In late 1949, the head committee, which included Oppenheimer, of the Atomic Energy Commission wrote a report on H Bomb (Nuclear, or "Super" Bomb) development, with the following passages:

We have been asked by the Commission whether or not they should immediately initiate an "all out" effort to develop a weapon whose energy release is 100 to 1000 times greater and whose destructive power in terms of area of damage is 20 to 100 times greater than those of the present atomic bomb. We recommend strongly against such action.
We base our recommendation on our belief that the extreme dangers to mankind inherent in the proposal wholly outweigh any military advantage... Let it be clearly realized that this is a super weapon: it is in a wholly different category from an atomic bomb. The reason for developing such super bombs would be to have the capacity to devastate a vast area with a single bomb. Its use would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians. We are alarmed as to the possible global effects of the radioactivity generated by the explosion of a few super bombs of conceivable magnitude. If super bombs will work at all, there is no inherent limit in the destructive power that may be attained with them. Therefore, a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide.

We believe a super bomb should never be produced.

The fact that no limit exists to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.

So, I just find this fascinating. Just the way people on Easter Island knew that tearing down the island's trees was jeopardizing their future, and just the way we know today that most of the things we do jeopardize the planet, scientists in the 1940's knew that building nuclear bombs could destroy the world. Yet they were forced to do it anyway.

You kind of wonder "how did we actually avoid nuclear war?" And then you remember the Cuban Missle Crisis and realize that we barely did.

And if all this interests you, you should probably try to see Why We Fight sometime.

I wanna debate this particle cube thing...

2007-12-05T09:22:00.000-05:00

You know, a year ago I would have had lots to say about this we were wrong, Iran doesn't really have a Nuke program story. I'm so exhausted by the Bush White House though that I really don't care anymore. I wonder if that was their plan - "hey, let's do so many things wrong, and sink so low, that they can't even criticize us anymore! And then right before we leave office, let's do something REALLY bad!"

Oh well, at least the Bush presidency gave us stuff like this.

I also find I don't have that much to say about the new Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's report. Basically he's saying that the growth in the Greater Toronto Area is unsustainable (the GTA apparently adds the population of a medium sized city every single year).

Well, we all know that. But we're still spreading cement over every spec of green space in places like Scarborough

Wake me up when the Canadian government has increased gasoline taxes and Mayor David Miller in Toronto has imposed fees for driving your car into Toronto's downtown core.

Oh well - for those of us "in the know", let's keep riding our bikes and using Bullfrog and wrap ourselves warmly in the blankets of existentialism.

Courage of the early morning basement cyclist

2007-12-02T15:46:00.000-05:00

As soon as Annalise and I started telling people that we were moving to Orillia, we began hearing horror stories about how much snow Orillia gets in the winter. As I'm originally from Bancroft, Ontario, which is probably a little farther north than Orillia, I thought "How bad can it be?" Well, it's only December 2nd and we've already had enough snow fall that I could barely open my front door in the morning.
All of Ontario has gotten a lot of snow the last few days, and I was listening to the guy on CBC talk about doing 30km/hour on the 401 this morning, and still ending up sliding into a 360 degree turn, but up here all the snow is fun. It reminds me of being a kid and going over to the baseball diamond, climbing up to the top of the bleachers, and jumping off into snowbanks. Bancroft hasn't had snow like that in years.

I'm not biking at all these days - walking to work only takes me 20 minutes, so that's what I do. I'm riding my Jamis on my trainer most mornings, thinking I should look into building/buying a bike generator, so that all this energy I'm expending would go into something useful, like charging a cell phone or a laptop battery. If you google "bicycle generator" you will find tons of help pages for building one of these things, but it's all a bit over my head.

P.S. I don't have one of those sweat guards that you can buy for your bike, so i just drape an old dress shirt over the handlebars and the headset to soak up my perspiration.

P.P.S. - If you haven't seen HBO's The Girl in the Cafe, get your hands on it - it's one of the best movies I've seen in a while.

renewable dinosaur energy

2007-11-20T18:24:00.001-05:00

Picture from How stuff works.

Although we aren't really noticing in Canada, because our soaring dollar is protecting us from high gasoline prices, the price of oil is rebounding towards $100.00/barrel - closing today at $98.03. It hasn't affected gas prices here much, but in the states (from what I can tell using google news), gas has gone up around .25cents in the last month.

And still none of the major news outlets, or political figures, are really talking about peak oil. Maybe this will change with a report released in October from the Energy Watch Group - the executive summary is here.

As coverage in the Guardian Newspaper explains, the report states the following:

World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030, according to a report which also warns that extreme shortages of fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown.

"The world soon will not be able to produce all the oil it needs as demand is rising while supply is falling. This is a huge problem for the world economy," said Hans-Josef Fell, EWG's founder and the German MP behind the country's successful support system for renewable energy.

I've written too often about this - but in short, let's learn some survival skills and move to Cuba.

Some people even seen the bear in me

2007-11-16T08:59:00.000-05:00

I'm going to impose a strict "no more polar bears for several months" policy for my blog after this, because this could get silly, but here are some pictures from another email that was forwarded to me.

These are things we can learn from our great white friends up north:

A) Always get your beauty sleep.

B) No half-hearted hugs - bear hugs all the time.

C) Get exercise, and don't neglect your core.

D) Always look your best.

E) Beware of penguins.

F) Because they're annoying little bastards (click on picture to animate).

Sustainable Communities

2007-11-12T15:35:00.001-05:00

I've mentioned before how much I hate sprawlurbia and how I secretly (or not so secretly) am waiting for peak oil to hit and get all the cars off the road, and force urban planners to prioritize active transportation in their planning.

As many of us already knew, sprawlurbia is killing us in various ways. The obesity and diabetes rates are way up partly due to our culture of sitting in the car for an hour to get to work. As well, as the previously mentioned (see below) Toronto Public Health report states, the pollution caused by automobiles is doing quite a number on us.

To the rescue is the Ontario Provincial Planners Institute. They've just released a report titled Healthy Communities, Sustainable Communities.
The report calls for many things near and dear to a cyclists' heart: they call for an expansion of transportation legislation to include walking and cycling, and not just automobile use, in establishing transportation master plans.

They advocate for arterial roads to contain no more than "two or four private vehicle lanes: if additional travel demand exists, the additional corridor space should be devoted to transit or bicycle lanes."

They ask urban planners to pay "specific attention to reducing use of petroleum-fuelled vehicles in favour of other transportation technologies and modes, and placing greater attention on greening our urban environments with green roofs and trees, especially along heavily travelled thoroughfares."

And finally, as part of their summary, they write "Communities that adopt these planning principles are walkable, cyclable, and transit-supportive, include transit-oriented development, and promote alternatives to the single occupancy vehicle."

Right on - death to single occupancy vehicles, suburban utility vehicles, and urban sprawl.

Public Health in the City of Toronto

2007-11-06T18:10:00.000-05:00

Toronto Public Health has just released a report titled Air Pollution Burden of Illness from Traffic in Toronto. My friend Kate from my university donning days worked on this and sent me the link - thanks Kate!

It's a follow up to the 2006 report that I mentioned in this post, and when you add in what the City of Toronto Transportation department knows about The Bicycle and Urban Sustainability, you wonder why things aren't fixed already. Think about it - city research shows that motorized traffic is killing us and that active transportation is the answer. What's the hold up in getting the bike lanes in and taxing car use downtown? Oh yeah, guys like this and this.

This chart comes from the public health report - it shows how the City of York in England prioritizes modes of transportation

Figure 8 illustrates the hierarchy of transportation users implemented by the City of York. In this hierarchy, cities are designed around people, not cars. A sustainable transportation network focuses on active transportation modes first, followed by modes that are vehicle dependent. It is also important to note the emphasis placed on the needs of individuals with mobility problems. These individuals require special attention to enable them to enjoy active modes of transport. Toronto is considering adopting this transportation hierarchy as part of its Walking Strategy, which is currently being developed. In order to be most effective, this priority setting approach needs to be applied to all land use and transport decisions.

The following is from the new report's executive summary:
This study estimates that mortality-related costs associated with traffic
pollution in Toronto are about $2.2 billion. A 30% reduction in vehicle
emissions in Toronto is projected to save 189 lives and result in 900 million
dollars in health benefits. This means that the predicted improvements in
health status would warrant major investments in emission reduction
programs. The emission reduction scenarios modelled in this study are
realistic and achievable, based on a review by the Victoria Transport Policy
Institute of policy options and programs in place in other jurisdictions. Taken
together, implementation of comprehensive, integrated policies and programs
are expected to reduce total vehicle travel by 30 to 50% in a given
community, compared with current planning and pricing practices.
Given there is a finite amount of public space in the city for all modes of
transportation, there is a need to reassess how road space can be used more
effectively to enable the shift to more sustainable transportation modes. More
road space needs to be allocated towards development of expanded
infrastructure for walking, cycling and on-road public transit (such as
dedicated bus and streetcar lanes) so as to accelerate the modal shift from
motor vehicles to sustainable transportation modes that give more priority to
pedestrians, cyclists and transit users.

toronto cops mean business

2007-10-31T15:13:00.000-04:00

Although this happened very close to my (soon-to-be former) apartment in Toronto, this isn't my story, but my friend Oliver's story.

In the Dundas, Parliament, Queen, River area, you have a nice collection of bike lanes. On the east side of the Don River, Dundas Street has a great bike lane, and on the west side of the river, Gerrard has a bike lane, and so do Shuter and River Streets. Oli was commuting to work along Shuter on the first day of school this past September, when he approached and passed a cop car parked in the Shuter bike lane.

As he moved into the car lane to pass the cop, Oliver muttered "WHY?" through the cop's open window, and then just kept cycling along. Behind him, Oliver hears an engine roar to life, and almost immediately the cop has caught up to Oli, and swerved to a stop in front of him - the car diagonally blocking all of the bike lane and most of the car lane (both on the westbound side of the street).

The cop gets out and starts off with "how you doing?" and then he and Oliver have a brief conversation about why the cop was parked in the bike lane. His story is that he was on-duty keeping an eye on the school crossing just up the road to catch anybody running the crossing.

The discussion quickly turns into "What's your name? / Let's see some I.D.?" What do you need to see I.D. for? "You don't have any I.D.?" Will my old (orange and white with no photo) health card be okay? "You don't have any photo I.D.?" UNTIL Oli finally hands over his driver's license.

The cop disappears into his car to check to see if Oli's record is clean (which it is), but also seems to grab a binder to check for cycling regulations to see if he can nail Oliver for anything. When the cop struts back out of the car again, his first words are "So where's your bell buddy?" and he ends up writing Oliver a ticket for $120.00 for not having a bell on his bike.

While all this happening incidentally, a SECOND squad car has pulled to a stop ahead of the first car, and the second car is parked on an angle taking up part of the eastbound lane and the rest of the westbound lane that the first car hadn't stopped. So you have two cops causing a traffic jam all in the interest of harassing a cyclist.

Moral of the story? Don't question the authority of the toronto cops. They'll find a way to make you pay.

And yes, Reno 911: Miami was completely juvenile, but I still have a soft spot for that kind of thing.

And don't eat red meat.

An Orillia roundup

2007-10-26T15:35:00.000-04:00

Before I forget, here's my new theory - your sense of outrage with the world has a direct correlation to how much time you have to read and follow current events. I haven't been following the news as much as I used to, and therefore I don't know what Bush and Cheney etc are doing, so I don't have much opportunity to be outraged. I guess this is a variation on "ignorance is bliss."

Here's a glimpse at the life of a cyclist in Orillia, Ontario - my new hometown. There's a nice biking trail down along Lake Couchiching, which runs parallel to a gravel hiking trail. Otherwise I haven't seen any bike lanes on the city streets at all.

Velocity is my new bike shop. My girlfriend and I went in there our very first day in town when we were apartment hunting and they gave us the scoop about which neighborhoods to avoid etc. I've bought an armadillo from them, and a Pedro's mini-cleaning kit. I'm hoping to do their Tuesday morning rides with them in the summer (on my Cannondale single-speed!)

The day I was walking around town (a plus 20 degree celsius day at the end of October in central Ontario!) I caught these two going by, the rear cyclist hauling a trailer.

These are the only bike parking posts I've seen in town. They're beside the big A&P down near the lake (an A&P is a supermarket). There aren't any on main street, nor are there any near the Lakehead University campus (where I work). I doubt I'll be lucky enough that Orillia works like Toronto - i.e. you call up the city, say "I need a post at X and Y streets, and it gets done." I have so many things to check up on - city bylaws about how much of the lane I'm allowed to take up, bike posts etc. So many things to do in my new town.
The last photo is just a sneaky shot of the lake through some autumn trees. I gotta say, I dig autumn. The hot weather is worrisome, but in general me and the leaves are grooving together pretty well.

And finally, No Impact Man found my blog and linked to me recently, and the day he did, my hits went up to 599, from a usual average of about 110 per day.

It just don't get no better than a bear

2007-10-23T15:49:00.000-04:00

My girlfriend was forwarded this story, and when she sent it to me I thought it'd be a good blog post.

I guess a photographer visiting Churchill, Manitoba, took some sled dogs out to take some pictures.

Out of the snow a polar bear creeps towards the pack, and the photographer starts thinking "Oh crap, all the dogs are goners."

Turns out though, that the polar bear just wanted to play around.

And he came back several times on succeeding days to play with the dogs some more.

So cute - and such a shame we're going to have killed 30 to 50% of the bears by 2050.

Badges, we don't need no stinkin badges!

2007-10-16T17:36:00.000-04:00

Wow - oil closed at a record $88.00 a barrel today. If you adjust for inflation etc, oil was still more expensive back in the 70's, but it definitely makes you think about peak oil and how screwed we're going to be when the oil runs out (unless you live in Cuba, which is apparently a post peak-oil economy already).

Ahh peak oil - fewer cars and more bicycles. I realize there will also be potentially catastrophic consequences of peak oil hitting as hard as it could, but being a cyclist I tend to just concentrate on the ribbons of empty highways and how much fun it'll be cycling along them.

On a somewhat similar topic, I took the Eco Footprint quiz today. You can see my results here below. I guess that's what being a near vegan and a cyclist/pedestrian will do for you.

I'm getting used to life in Orillia, and since I only have a 20 minute walk to work I'm actually not biking much here, just walking everywhere. I hope to do a bigger update on life up here in Simcoe County, but it'll have to wait until I get my hands on my girlfriends' digital camera again.

Hope everyone is doing well!

When tomorrow gets here (where will yesterday be?)

2007-10-07T14:41:00.000-04:00

In saying goodbye to Toronto, one thing I thought I could do was a photographic "thanks" to some of the bike shops I've depended on since becoming a commuting cyclist back in about 2001. So I went for a ride on a grey Sunday morning here in Toronto today, and took photos of the main shops that I've used over the years.

The store I've depended on the most over the years is Sweet Pete's at Dufferin and Bloor. In 2000/2001, when I was new to cycling and was riding some sort of Home Hardware mountain bike thing, I kept going to them for repairs until one day the front hub kind of shredded and the guy at the shop, who'd done repair after repair for me, looked at me and said "Man, it's over for this thing." I subsequently bought the Kona Hahanna from them which I rode around town today taking these photos, and it is by far the most useful bike I've ever had, though it looks very different now than it did when I bought it (i.e. it's now a singlespeed with slick city tires). I wish I knew how many kilometres I had on the Hahanna - I think 20 000km is a safe guess, but it's probably more.
I also bought a KHS Flite 200 road bike off these guys, which a year or two later I sold through Craig's List, and a Kona Dew Deluxe, which I eventually gave to my brother.

After moving into the Regent Park area I started using the Danforth Cyclepath a bit. They stock Specialized Armadillos, which I love, but the main reason I need to thank them is for a wheel rebuild they did for me. In the summer of 2006 when I put 4000+ km on my Cannondale, riding back and forth to Oshawa, I went to them after a broken spoke to look at my rear wheel, which had been straight laced. They took it apart and relaced the spokes to cross three times, and I haven't had a broken spoke since, nor has the wheel gone out of true. I wish I knew his name, but to the mechanic at this shop, thanks dude, nice job.

I've only been in the Roncesvalles Set Me Free a couple times in my life, but I owe them a thanks for a flat tire fix they did for me once. I was going up Roncesvalles once in an autumn rain and got a flat a few blocks south of the bike shop. For some reason I wasn't carrying a tube and a pump, which is unlike me, so I walked the bike up to Set Me Free and within moments the guys in the shop had my wheel off the bike, the tire off, a new tube installed, and me on my way. It was really pretty cool - kind of like a Nascar pit stop.

The Parliament Street Cycle Solutions has been my local bike shop for about two years now. They're good guys willing to talk you through some fixes (I got advice and parts for the kona single-speed project from them) and they also carry armadillos.

And I never had much contact with Bikes on Wheels, but I wanted to get a picture of my Kona since I'm taking it up to Orillia tomorrow and it'll never roll through Toronto again, and so I thought I'd stop in Cabbagetown and take this photo. My bike is the one in the centre of the shop, leaning against the store.

And to Gino and the staff up at the North York Cyclepath, who went out of their way to find a 2006 Jamis Nova to sell me at a discount, I'm sorry, but your store was just too far north to be included on my jaunt around town today. Sorry guys, but thanks so much for the Jamis.

Toronto the good

2007-09-27T07:44:00.000-04:00

In preparing to say goodbye to Toronto, I've been trying to squeeze in some bike rides that I've always enjoyed in this city. Frequently thinking things like "this might be the last time I ever cross over the Humber bridge."

These two pictures are from the Humber River biking trail. Toronto has two river valley biking trails - the Humber in the west, and the Don in the east, and I've ridden the Don Valley river trail far more often than the Humber. I've always lived a bit closer to the Don than the Humber, and the Don trail has the advantage of three half decent hills up at the north end that you can use for hill-training. But, the Humber is definitely more picturesque. I remember going through the Humber once on my Kona mountain bike on a thin layer of crusty snow - nice quiet winter morning, the trail mostly deserted, the snow breaking under my tires. One of those random rides that you take which turn into a lasting memory.

And this is the beaches in Toronto's east end. From my place (this was Monday? Tuesday?) I rode east on Queen Street to the beaches area, turned south and was quickly on the Martin Goodman trail, which is a long biking trail along Toronto's lakeshore which takes you completely across Toronto from east to west (with only maybe 3 or 4 km of street riding involved). When I did my undergrad at U of T, a small-town boy in the big city, I grew to hate Toronto. And for the first few years I was back (after going abroad and teaching ESL for a few years) I hated it even more. And then I bought a bicycle and started exploring areas like the Humber trail and the Don trail and the Martin Goodman trail, and my bike opened up Toronto's green areas to me, and I relaxed here for the first time.

So here's to biking in Toronto. Here's to your bike opening up the green areas of your city. Here's to Toronto the good - the places where you can ride your bike.

Bells on Bloor

2007-09-23T20:24:00.000-04:00

Bells on Bloor happened today. Picture about 200 cyclists (my rough guess) meeting at High Park in the west end of the city, then cycling along Bloor Street (with bike cop escorts monitoring all the intersections) to Avenue Road in the center of Toronto, and then weaving a bit and ending up at Queen's Park - the home of our provincial government.
All this to rally people around the cause of getting more bike lanes built in Toronto, more people out of their cars, and more hope for solving the climate change crisis.

In the picture below we get a glimpse of Darren from Bike Refugee (white T Shirt). Darren is one of the few cycling activists I've met before. At the end of the ride today I also got the chance to say hi to Tanya from Crazy Biker Chick (probably the most famous cycling blogger in Toronto) and Vic from Vic Gedris (and from Cycle Ontario Alliance). P.S. - as per usual, Tino at Bike Lane Diary has coverage of today's event, and some other cool photos if you scroll down a bit.

This is the group going past the new (funky!) addition to the Royal Ontario Museum, just before we make the turn off Bloor Street south onto University Avenue.

And this isn't a great photo, but the best one I took of the group assembling at the end of the ride in front of Queen's Park. I doubt any of the politicians were there, but the Liberal Party's campaign bus was parked in front of the building. I wonder if there's been a pledge for all the parties to go carbon neutral in this election campaign. Didn't all the federal parties do that in the last federal election?

And this is just typical, and ironic. If I had a camera with me all the time (and the patience to stop and snap a photo), I could take dozens and dozens of "cars parked in the bike lane" photos every month. Today, on my way home from Bells on Bloor, I found this dude parked in the bike lane on Shuter Street just east of Parliament.

Thank you, sir. By taking up the entire lane, just on the other side of a set of streetlights, you guaranteed that I was going to have to check over my shoulder a few times, gauge my speed right, and fight for some room as i went through this intersection, rather than having what should have been a peaceful stress-free ride through a bike lane.

In a way though, I find it hard to blame the motorists, when cops will go right by them most of the time without saying "boo" about this traffic violation. Since the cops don't enforce it, why would motorists think twice about doing it?

Where's Waldo?

2007-09-21T07:25:00.000-04:00

Although I am planning to attend Bells on Bloor on Sunday, my mind has not been on cycling, the environment, George Bush, or blogging very much recently. In fact, as far as cycling goes, my butt hasn't been on my bike for maybe two weeks now.

My contract at the university in Oshawa finished at the end of the first week of September, and I am no longer the lonely cyclist pedalling his way through Whitby/Oshawa each day. Thank god, actually. I got so tired fighting that battle. Durham Region (for american readers, durham is the sprawl of suburbia to the east of Toronto, including the cities of Pickering, Ajax, whitby, oshawa) is a lost cause as far as I'm concerned. durham is exactly the type of region that HAS to switch to public transit and cycling RIGHT NOW to help save the planet, but the political will doesn't exist out there, and I'm pretty sure that in 2025 when peak oil has hit and all the polar bears are dead someone on the oshawa city council will say "hey, let's hold a referendum about building a bike lane downtown, and maybe start work in 2030 on it."

Anyway - my job in Oshawa finished, I spent about a week in Bancroft with my parents, hiking through the forest every day, seeing lots of deer, doing some writing (I'm a hack novelist), canoeing with my dad and that kind of thing. And then, just as I was starting to enjoy being unemployed, I was offered a new job.

And I'm MOVING - at long last (I'm a smalltown boy at heart) I'm LEAVING TORONTO.

I'm going to see if you guys can figure out where I'm moving to. All these pictures were taken yesterday in my soon-to-be new home. I'll give you a few hints - the city is in Ontario, within three hours drive of Toronto, and an established university is setting up a satellite campus in the town I'm moving to, ergo a job opening up there for me.

So, I don't know when I'll get back to blogging regularly again. I'm fairly stressed right now about finding a place to live etc. Once I do relocate though I'm excited about being the annoying guy at town council meetings standing up and saying "what about bike infrastructure?" every five seconds. Luckily my new town does have a fairly good cycling culture, at least on a recreational, if not a commuting, level.

Anyway dudes - leave a comment with your guess about where I'm moving to, and I hope you're all getting lots of miles under your wheels in the nice late summer weather we're having. ciao.

P.S - Floyd has been officially declared guilty.

of bells, bears and taxes

2007-09-10T07:40:00.000-04:00

Bells on Bloor is happening on Sunday Sept. 23 to celebrate car free day. That one should be a hoot - riding from the west end of Toronto into the center on Toronto's main east-west artery. Can't wait.

I'd like to think that our petition helped spur this on - the provincial Liberal party is promising to cut provincial sales tax on bikes and bike helmets if they get re-elected. Our petition, which asked for this and other things, went to the Federal Government (I never got around to directing one at the province), but hopefully the Ontario Liberals were paying attention when Olivia Chow read our petition in Federal Parliament, and stole some of our ideas.

This story about global warming's impact upon the polar bear population is exactly why I have rather extreme thoughts regarding what our society is NOT doing about climate change.

How can we not raise gas taxes, not enforce better auto-emission standards, not hammer industries which are extreme polluters, not raise taxes on the meat industry (if you're not a vegetarian this might seem an "out of left field" statement - but read this, or this study which came out of Guelph University), when our society is leading us right to a world where polar bears will be massively killed off - along with all the other plants and animals which are disappearing due to the unbelievably high extinction rate that we are causing.

From the Guardian:
"At present, animals are believed to be going extinct at 100 to 1,000 times the usual rate, leading many researchers to claim that we are in the midst of a mass extinction event faster than that which wiped out the dinosaurs."

The gentleman who graciously gave me this bike was attacked, while on bike, by a car a few months ago. The description of the crash, and a string of comments, are here on Spacing - be well Geoffrey. Hope you're out there fighting for your lane again soon.

My buddy Oliver, who is pretty pissed about cars parking in bike lanes, got a ticket from the cops recently when he went up to a squad car parked in the lane and asked what they thought they were doing. I haven't heard the full story yet, but hopefully Oli will be giving me the description in a guest post soon.

Take care everyone!

a sunny summer september day

2007-09-08T20:37:00.001-04:00

Life has been fairly busy and I've been out of my normal routine and therefore not posting on here that often. Today was a nice end of summer day though. Anna and I biked around the city - first to the Veggie Food Fair (see Veggie Blog) and then out to the west end of the Martin Goodman trail where one of Anna's friends got married.
These aren't our bikes by the way. The couple who got married picked the wedding spot partly because it was a nice spot for people to bike to - and they asked that people do just that! : ) I'm assuming that these bikes belong to someone else who was at the ceremony.

It's funny how you can live in Toronto and go through a lot of the year totally forgetting that your city has a great Harbour area, with a lake the size of a sea. I used to bike along the lakeshore a few times a week, but not the past two summers.

These three photos are all of Toronto's downtown, taken from the west end of the Martin Goodman trail. The sky looks a lot bluer than Toronto has felt recently. It has been so smoggy that I've been contemplating using one of those carbon filter smog masks that some cyclists have. One thing that holds me back though is that I've heard that no studies have been done to show that those masks actually work. Plus, I wear glasses and having one more thing on my face would drive me a little nutty.

Could I buy you a scotch and soda

2007-08-30T09:10:00.000-04:00

Steve in Winnipeg has just posted some definitive advice about buying department store bikes. That really is a cool project he's got going on over there, well done sir, I wish I had the mechanical ability (and patience!) to do something similar.

Along with the flat I mentioned yesterday on the Jamis, I noticed a few days ago that the fairly cheap front tire I have on my Kona had bulged, and a lot of seam was showing through the panels of rubber on the tire. So much so that I gave the bike up as unrideable until I replaced the tire. I already had a Specialized 26 x 1.5 slick Armadillo tire on the back, and I shelled out the $56.00 (Canadian) for another one yesterday, and put it on the front wheel of the Kona.
It's kind of weird - with my Kona set up as a singlespeed, my tires on this bike are now worth more than my drivetrain, more than the fork, and since the Kona is six years old, maybe even worth more than the entire frame.

Oh yeah, and the deal with Specialized Armadillo's is that they're meant to be the most puncture proof tire you can get. I agree - when I was riding all the way to Oshawa last summer, I put 4000+ kms on 700 x 25 armadillos without any punctures, and I've only had one puncture on the 26 x 1.5 armadillo on the Kona. A stupid staple pierced perfectly into one of the grooves in the tread and flatted me.

MUSIC

I don't plan to make a habit of this, but here's another music mix for you all. It's at this address. Click, type in the little code, wait 45 seconds, unzip the file and play the songs in RealPlayer or something.

Here's the playlist.

Weakerthans – A New Name for Everything

Martin Sexton – Black Sheep

Groove Armada with Richie Havens – Hands of Time

James Brown – Too Funky in Here

Great Outdoors – Land of my Deceased

Waifs – Lies

Malvina Reynolds – Little Boxes

Daniel Lanois – Lotta Love to Give

Ricardo Lemvo – Mujer Divina

Solomon Burke – None of Us Are Free

Bruce Cockburn – Pacing the Cage

Steve Forbert – Romeo’s Tune

Sly and the Family Stone – Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)

Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris – This is Us

K.T. Tunstall – Universe and U

Lyle Lovett – What do you do (live)

Staple Singers – Will the Circle Be Unbroken

David Bowie – Young Americans

First flat on the Jamis

2007-08-29T11:37:00.000-04:00

It took 1200 km for the Jamis to get it's first flat, and it was such a convenient flat that it might as well have called me up beforehand and said "what's a good time for you?"

I was on my way back to the Whitby Go Station in the afternoon, and the flat happened about 800 metres from the station, so I had lots of time to just walk the bike to the station and still catch my train into Toronto, without having to pull a fast and furious tube change on the side of the road.
On the train platform I turned the bike upside down while I was waiting for the train to check the tire (it was the rear wheel by the way, I can't remember the last time I had a front wheel go flat) for glass etc, but I couldn't find anything.
When my train came in I set the bike upside down in the car, did the tube change, and then went to the little bathroom on the train to wipe the grease/dirt off my hands. (Some people, like my buddy Oliver, have the knack of the quick and dirt free tube change, but not me. I get d.i.r.t.y. everytime). So when the train pulled into the Danforth Go Station I pedalled away like normal without having lost anytime at all. I'd love it if all flats worked themselves into my day this nicely.

The only annoying thing was that I couldn't find the cause of the flat. I don't feel satisfied unless I'm able to pull the offending hunk of glass etc out of my tire and can feel satisfied that I've really solved this problem. This tube just had a pinprick hole kind of in the high sidewall area, but I couldn't find anything that would have caused that.

Oh yeah - and the pump I carry (I realized this afterwards at home) actually got my tube up to the maximum inflation. Road tires call for about 120 psi, which you can never attain with a portable pump. But cyclocross tires only call for 75 to 80 psi, and my pump actually managed that.

So there's a wacky blogger, and expatriate Canadian, in Nashville, and she posts music mixes on her blog more or less monthly.
I've been downloading her mixes at work and using them as my music at work, and thought I'd make a mix from her mixes for other people to download and play off their computers.
So - if you Click Here, within the next 20 days, type in the little code and wait about a minute, you'll be able to download a zipped file of 21 songs from the folk/rock goddess of nashville.

Here's the "Nashville Hits" playlist:

Ryan Adams – Cherry Lane
The Boy Least Likely To – Be Gentle With Me
The Lovely Sparrows – Chemicals Change
Bishop Allen – Click Click Click
King of France – Mexico
The Foundry Field Recordings – Warning Raids Over Kiev
Jose Gonzalez – Hand on Your Heart
The Mountain Goats – Dance Music
John Doe – A Little More Time
Black Bear – I Believe in Immediacy
Sarah Blasko – Perfect Now
Amy Winehouse – Wake Up Alone
Walkmen – We’ve Been Had
Deb Talan – Ashes on Your Eyes
Rilo Kiley – With Arms Outstretched
Tom Petty – Square One
M. Ward – Let’s Dance
Feist – One Two Three Four
Aria C Jalali – Postmodernism
qR5 – Revisited Gone
Justin Rutledge – Don’t Be So Mean, Jellybean

Have wrench will pedal

2007-08-26T19:30:00.000-04:00

I just found three blogs dedicated to chronicling life on a Supercycle.
Kind of neat - three guys who have taken on the challenge of performing all the repairs needed to keep their Supercycle bikes running, and seeing how many miles they can get on the bikes.

The blogs are:
Bike of Doom out in Winnipeg.
In this post the writer ponders the question of how long it is worth it to keep repairing his bike, and when you officially declare (after installing replacement parts) that the bike you are riding is no longer the bike you bought.

Urban Xavier in Montreal.

Maple Leaf Test Rides in Toronto.
He doesn't say where he got this stuff, but in this post he pastes a long rant from a Supercycle owner about bike shops, and then a rebuttal from a bike shop employee.

Anyway, just thought these were interesting cycling blogs. And it is an interesting question - when is the bike you ride no longer the bike you bought? After the first drive-train replacement? Bottom bracket? Wheelset?

And a Monday update:

On Pinch Flat today, the Bike of Doom guy discusses the fact that he has unwittingly inspired people to buy Supercycles.
And this is the Bike of Doom Upgrades section - the posts where he discusses the various problems and repairs he's gone through with the Supercycle.

And on a totally other topic - Alberto Gonzales has finally resigned. Rumsfeld, Rove, and now Gonzales. Now please, will the democrats start subpoenaing these people and hammer Bush and Cheney as well!

(the following from Andrew Cohen's Washington Post blog)
When historians look back upon the disastrous tenure of Alberto R. Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States they will ask not only why he merited the job in the first place but why he lasted in it as long as he did. By any reasonable standard, the Gonzales Era at the Justice Department is void of almost all redemptive qualities. He brought shame and disgrace to the Department because of his lack of independent judgment on some of the most vital legal issues of our time. And he brought chaos and confusion to the department because of his lack of respectable leadership over a cabinet-level department among the most important in the nation.

He neither served the longstanding role as "the people's attorney" nor fully met and tamed his duties and responsibilities to the constitution. He was a man who got the job not because he was supremely qualified or notably well-respected among the leading legal lights of our time, but because he had faithfully and with blind obedience served President George W. Bush for years in Texas (where he botched clemency memos in death penalty cases) and then as White House counsel (where he botched the nation's legal policy on torture).

For an administration known for its cronyism, and alas for an alarmingly incompetent group of cronies, Gonzales was the granddaddy of them all. He lacked the integrity, the intellect and the independence to perform his duties in a manner befitting the job for which he was chosen. And when he and his colleagues got caught in the act, his rationales and explanations for the purge of the U.S. Attorneys were so empty and shallow and incoherent that even the staunchest Republicans could not turn them into steeled spin. Devoid of any credibility, Gonzales in the end was a sad joke when he came to Capitol Hill.

Even St. Christopher needs some company sometimes

2007-08-23T11:00:00.001-04:00

Herb from I Bike T.O. and I met up recently at the Urban Herbivore. He took a photo and I handed over my interview answers and I'm now written up in one of I Bike T.O.'s cyclist profiles.

I was careful with my words in the profile. I could have been a lot more disparaging about cycling in Durham, but I held back. There is simply no cycling infrastructure in Durham, and the single occupancy vehicle rate out there is staggering. It is so frustrating to ride your bike knowing that you're doing the right thing, but have to fight tooth and nail for your precious few feet of the road against motorists that you can't help feel aren't trying hard enough to find alternatives to their car.

I have been thinking about getting a sign that read "Honk if you love clean air - get out of your car if you want to do something about it" made to go onto my backpack.

Additionally - I'd be so much happier if I EVER saw another bike commuter on the road in Durham. I see roadies once in a while, headed for the country roads to the north, and I see the odd dude riding a BSO (bicycle shaped object, like a CCM) on the sidewalk, but maybe once every two weeks do I see someone who looks like they're actually doing a commute by bicycle.

Anyway, although I always feel like I'm leaving the Whitby Go Station each morning and battling motorists on my own, I know Darren and Joe and Mike and Snake and many others are out there demanding their share of the lane. Cheers guys - to those of you about to pedal, I salute you.

Here are two quotes, kind of on topic, from a book by Paul Hawken called Blessed Unrest. The book is a history of the grassroots movements which have sprung up to battle things like globalization and climate change.

Speaking of previous battles like this, Hawken provides this quote from Rachel Carson's fight against the pesticide companies in the 1950's.

Miss Rachel Carson's reference to the selfishness of insecticide manufacturers probably reflects her Communist sympathies, like a lot of our writers these days. We can live without birds and animals, but, as the current market slump shows, we cannot live without business. As for insects, isn't it just like a woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs! As long as we have the H-bomb everything will be O.K.
P.S. - She's probably a peace-nut too!"
Letter to the New Yorker protesting the publication of Silent Spring.

And this one about Bhopal:

The Bhopal tragedy is a symbol of the cruelty of corporations against humanity. The day that we succeed in holding Dow liable for the continuing disaster in Bhopal will be good news for people all over the world. From that day on chemical corporations will think twice before peddling poisons and putting profits before the lives and health of people. We are not expendable. We are not flowers offered at the altar of profit and power. We are dancing flames committed to conquering darkness and to challenging those who threaten the planet and the magic and the mystery of life.
Rashida Bee, Bhopal survivor and organizer

P.S. Title of this post comes from the Justin Rutledge song, Special.

P.P.S. I know I've used this Terry Fox photo before, but I was in a "why can't we do what's right - like Terry would" mood, and it's such an evocative photo.

Long lost art of placing foot in mouth

2007-08-16T10:35:00.001-04:00

I'd actually forgotten that I'd corresponded with Momentum Magazine out in B.C., and that they would have an article on the petition coming out soon. Thanks to Herb over at I Bike T.O. for reminding me about it.
The (now finished) cycling petition generated a few news stories, and I've read them all with a lot of trepidation, because I tend to shoot my mouth off more than I would usually like when I talk about cycling. I think I did that again in this interview, but hopefully any harsh comments will be forgiven.

Sounding like a moron in public got me thinking about former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle. There are actually Dan Quayle quote books because he was such a rich source of weird statements, like We don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward.

Ronald Reagan had some good quotes, though to be fair, Reagan was usually a witty guy. Robin Williams has a story though about Reagan making a crack about how nuclear weapons were no more dangerous than trees. A few weeks later Reagan was giving an outdoor speech on some university campus in California, and students strung banners across all the trees reading Stop Me Before I Kill Again.

And Bush, who is working hard to put food on his family - how do you even know where to begin with Bush?

And, although I'm kind of a Jimmy Carter fan (especially after he slammed Bush back in the spring), there's a funny Carter quote at the end of this post.

P.S. I've been trying to figure out why I feel like this is a non-story. I guess it is because the ice caps are melting and the species extinction rate is somewhere around 137 species per day, and therefore we have a problem right now, no matter which years in the last century were actually the hottest ones.

Hiking and the Bicycle Film Fest

2007-08-14T10:27:00.000-04:00

Next week (August 22-26) is the Toronto Bicycle Film Fest, at the Royal Theatre in Little Italy. That sounds like a pretty cool combination - I hope I can make a couple of the shows. Lucas Brunelle - the genius filmmaker behind this crazy video has a special screening on Saturday the 25th.

Anna and I had a mini vacation this weekend and did a couple of the Bruce Trail hikes. This one was near the (tiny) town of Mono Centre. It was quite nice and we had some veggie samosas that we ate while enjoying this view. We did another hike though just north of here, and in my opinion this book got us lost with faulty directions. It definitely wasn't my fault - had to be the map. Dumb thing. Getting lost did have its advantages though - we saw a deer, a turtle and some turkey vultures (which ran out of the bush in front of us quite suddenly) that we wouldn't have otherwise seen.

And near Shelburne Ontario, where we saw the Canadian Olde Time Fiddle Championship, we saw a pretty cool looking wind farm, which was way too big for a photograph to accurately represent.

Global Warming Deniers

2007-08-10T10:38:00.000-04:00

The most recent issue of Newsweek has a good article titled Global Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine. If you hate big corporations and kleptocracy and really want to brew up some angry resentment, give this article a go. Basically we're talking about the coal and oil industry sponsoring groups with misleading titles like the Information Council on the Environment (ICE) to counter all the scientific evidence that was coming out regarding human driven climate change.

All these pictures below are also from the Newsweek site incidentally.

The Newsweek article also mentions Republicans like Joe Barton and James Inhofe who very suspiciously were the heads of Senate Energy and Environmental committees, and would both froth at the mouth with rage and rabies whenever human-driven climate change reports came out. Hell, Barton would even launch an IRS audit on you if you were a researcher who'd written a "Yes, humans are causing it" report on climate change.

Man I hate these people. They're just like the tobacco companies and the fuel companies that tried to keep us buying leaded gasoline back in the 1920's. When their own workers were going insane due to the leaded gasoline fumes, one company told reporters "These men probably went insane because they worked too hard."

Regarding the photos, the polar bears are standing on what was once an iceberg, the duck is looking for food on a dry riverbed in China, and the elephants are standing before what is left of the Snows of Kilimanjaro.

Raleigh and Sturmey-Archer

2007-08-08T10:46:00.000-04:00

The second to last long weekend has come and gone. I rode Geoffrey's bike several times, and though it often wasn't pretty, I made it up every one of the hills that my route takes me along. I was riding with no hands at one point adjusting my sunglasses and promptly sailed into the ditch and the bush, but both the bike and I survived.

I pulled my Dad's old Raleigh out from behind the furnace in the basement to take a picture of it. Dad thinks it is a classic but I'm not so sure he could get more than $150.00 or so for it. That's what most of the bikes from this era seem to go for on Craigslist.

Dad figures it is from about 1970. It's a three-speed with Sturmey-Archer gearing and hub. It still works great, but wow, it is so weird to ride a bike like that. Your posture is SO upright, and with the handlebars coming towards you, I kind of felt like I was steering a kitchen chair around.

My Dad incidentally is not a cyclist, despite what these pictures might imply. He probably has cycled about 5 km in the last 25 years.

P.S. if you are a bike history nut, and want to read about Raleigh, try this article.

oh to be in Cape Breton

2007-08-03T10:55:00.000-04:00

I commuted to work on this bike today. If you add together the Toronto and Durham portions of my commute, my one way trip is about 23 km, and that is the furthest I've ridden this bike so far. The bike needs some upgrades, particularly the wheelset, since they're the wheels I put thousands of kilometres on last summer when I was riding the whole way to Oshawa, and they weren't even new at that time. Anyway, the front wheel in particular is creaking like hell, the brakes are a bit past their prime, and the gearing I ended up choosing (I forget now actually - about 40 up front and 15 at the back?) will probably be a bit tough for the country roads I plan to use the bike on up north, but oh well, it was still a good ride today.

The September issue of Bicycling magazine has a teaser on the front cover titled "The Best Ride in North America". When you open it up, what does the best ride turn out to be? The Cabot Trail on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. On behalf of my fellow Canadians I'll say - Thanks Bicycling!
I'm letting my subscription to Bicycling expire actually. I basically just drool over the bikes and never read the articles, but I'm also dismayed with all the car advertising in the magazine. The Sept. issue has 10 pages devoted to car ads, and I recently counted 17 pages of car ads in another recent issue. Not for me.

I don't know what to say anymore about Bush. A little while back he commuted the guilty verdict passed on Scooter Libby for obstructing a CIA leak investigation. Now, "Citing executive privilege, President George W. Bush on Wednesday rejected a subpoena for his close adviser Karl Rove to appear before to the Senate Judiciary Committee in a probe over fired federal prosecutors.

Sufferin Succotash. Apart from the war and the wire tapping and all the other reasons that the U.S. could impeach Bush, shouldn't it just be done because he is setting an unbelievable precedent for future presidents? That they don't have to be accountable to anyone?
P.S. - here's a good article about why Bush needs Gonzales to remain as the Attorney General, and here's a funny but no longer unbelievable piece about Bush cancelling the 2008 election if it looks like the GOP will lose.

Steve in Halifax is back on his bike after being hit a while back. That's awesome Steve, I hope all your journeys are incident free from here on out.

I read a bit of Steve's newspaper interview and found it interesting about his growing up in Nigeria and Zambia, and therefore being a cyclist partly because he didn't grow up in a "car culture" environment.

I did grow up in a car culture environment. So how did I become a cyclist? I guess it was due to two things a) having spent most of my adult life working and living in downtown Toronto, a bike was simply the most sensible way to get around the city. b) I read voraciously, and when you read about urban sprawl and the environment and peak oil and diabetes and obesity rates and all the other reasons why car culture sucks, I guess you become a cyclist.

Have a great long weekend everyone!

Tuco wants a bike lane

2007-08-01T13:56:00.000-04:00

I was talking to my buddy Oliver recently about relaxed cycling versus wound-up, nervous, bitter cycling, and came to the conclusion that the majority of the miles I pedal through Durham fall into the latter category.

Here's kind of a definition of the terms I'm using - "relaxed" cycling is when you're on a true bike trail, and you're sitting up on the saddle, your shoulders loose and your arms just dropping down to the bar and you're looking around enjoying the scenery.
"Bitter" cycling is when you are hunched down on your bike, gripping the handlebar tightly, a nervous pissed off aggression in your shoulders as you pedal over crappy pavement that is threatening to throw you left or right suddenly, and you have single occupant vehicle after single occupant vehicle squeezing past you with centimeters to spare.

"Bitter" cycling basically epitomizes bike commuting in Durham region, and after a year of doing this, it has really worn me down. I basically ride along fuming and writing apocalyptic letters to the city council in my head.

What really has me wound up is the lack of bike access to the region's Go Stations. I don't know about Ajax and Pickering, so I can't talk about them, but Oshawa is a total write off, and of the two exits out of Whitby, both are crap, and you'd have to be a moron like me to try either one of them on a bike.
If you go to the east and come out onto Brock Street, you're dealing with traffic merging on/off the 401, which is loads of fun.

Henry Street to the west SHOULD be the answer, but it is so damn narrow, and the road is so torn up, that you just rattle along with cars squeezing past you hoping that you don't get a shattered elbow, or worse.

So Whitby city councilors, if you have a shred of decency, or any ability to show leadership on this issue, I want you to pulverize and melt Henry Street, repave it, widen it, and paint me some bike lanes on both sides.

P.S. - I agree, impeach the hell out of Bush and Cheney.

Barefoot gypsy

2007-07-26T13:26:00.000-04:00

I don't really want to talk about the Tour de France. I just hope they test everyone and whittle the field down to the five or six (out of 180) riders who are actually clean, and then let them race for the title.

And though I find myself more or less bitter and angry all the time now when I'm cycling through Durham (or Mordor) I don't really want to talk about that either.

Instead I thought I'd just give you this Van Morrison classic from the Band's farewell movie, filmed by Scorsese, called The Last Waltz.

Apparently Morrison agreed to be one of the performers, but he hadn't been live on stage for years, and had been suffering from stage fright. Almost up to the second before he stepped on stage, no one knew whether or not he was going to perform (he'd been having panic attacks and kept disappearing from the building). And then when he does show up, he's wearing this purple jumpsuit.

Van Morrison in a purple jumpsuit playing live with the Band in 1978?
Priceless.

Google Image Search Confusion

2007-07-25T12:27:00.000-04:00

This is driving me crazy, and I'm just wondering if any tech-saavy readers out there can tell me what is going on.
A little while back on my veggie blog, in this post to be exact, I used a picture from the Indianapolis Zoo website. I immediately started getting weird hits on my Statcounter, and they annoyed me so much that I eventually removed the picture and the link which I had put up to the Indy Zoo showing where I got the picture from.
BUT - I'm still getting these weird hits (see below).

It looks like people all over the world are going to the google image search, typing in a specific URL for the photograph I'd used, and seeing what websites had used it.

What I don't understand are these things a) Why would I be getting these kind of hits from all over the world? In the last 24 hours people in South Africa, the U.K., Australia, Canada and the U.S. have done this search.

b) Why is my blog still showing up on their results when I've removed the picture and the link?

Although the Vinokourov doping thing is tragic, at least he's still got a sense of humour:

He told L'Equipe:

"I heard that I made a transfusion with my father's blood. That's absurd, I can tell you that with his blood, I would have tested positive for vodka.

Say it ain't so, Vino

2007-07-24T15:05:00.001-04:00

Oh. My. God.

And Rasmussen is dodging doping accusations.

And the Astana withdrawl means Kloden is gone.

Stupid tour.

This comic is from Married to the Sea - which I just discovered recently. Pretty funny stuff.

Build your own religion

2007-07-20T10:25:00.000-04:00

Newsweek has a section this week titled Back from the Dead about new emergency room treatments which are greatly improving the ability of doctors to revive patients from sudden cardiac arrest. I'll let you read the article for the medical/science aspects, but here is what I found interesting:

We experience consciousness embedded in time, a succession of mental states continually re-created in our brains, even during sleep. But when the brain shuts down, where does the mind go?

For example - you've been declared dead, your cells and synapses are no longer active, your brain doesn't work. But then science brings you back, and brings back your mind and memory as well. While you were dead - while your brain was not working - where was your mind?

In other news:
My sister sent me this link to the Ministry of Natural Resources Go Green website. It's okay - you can generate a map of your hometown showing climate predictions for 20 to 50 years in the future.

P.S. - Regarding climate change and things I've written about the automobile and suburban sprawl and water scarcity etc, I'm fully aware that it all comes back to the size of the human population. And while I've wondered what can be done about this, I wouldn't go this far. But, the World Without Us does look like a neat book.

Yeah, I'm a book nerd. And I'm buying the last Harry Potter as soon as I can this weekend. I have to admit I'm kind of surprised by the scale of the festivities being planned for the book release. The Indigo Books at Bay and Bloor in downtown Toronto is actually closing down part of Bay Street for the release!

TORONTO, July 20 /CNW/ - On Friday, July 20th at 8:00 p.m., hop aboard the Hogwarts Express, take a stroll down Diagon Alley and enter the magical world of Harry Potter. Indigo Books & Music is closing down Bay Street (between Charles St. and Bloor St.) and celebrating Midnight Magic, the largest Harry Potter street party in Canada.
Indigo Manulife will be open for extended hours to give Potter fans the unique experience of rejoicing in the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows while getting the first available copies in Canada. Pottermaniacs can enjoy live music, fire juggling, a magic show, entertaining animals and a variety of Potter-themed activities.
Where: Indigo Manulife (Bay/Bloor)
When: Friday, July 20, 2007 8:00 p.m.

Puppies at the Tour

2007-07-18T11:04:00.000-04:00

I cannot wait to see No End in Sight. I think they skip over the reasons for going to war, and focus instead on the (mis)management of the war. Looks great.

Somebody let their dog wander across the road at the Tour de France yesterday. The video is on Versus if you want to take a look.

After a couple other riders managed to swerve around him, Marcus Burghardt ended up hitting the poor guy.

Luckily the dog (as far as we can see in the video) was totally unhurt, but Burghardt's carbon wheel totally crumpled with the collision. My guess is that Burghardt hit him at about 25 to 30 km/hour - and the dog won.

Despite Vinokourov basically being finished, I'm loving the Tour. It's totally wide open - any one of about 5 guys could win it, and I think it'd be a hoot for there to be five guys within 20 or 30 seconds of each other for that last ride into Paris to the Champs-Elysees - watch them go ballistic through the streets of Paris to try and win on the last day.

Falling off mountains

2007-07-16T11:33:00.000-04:00

So I think this was Stage 8 yesterday when the riders were blazing their way down a mountain. If you just look at the pictures this is kind of funny, but if you really get into the heads of the two riders it's heartbreaking.

Anyway, Michael Rogers and David Arroyo are hurtling down a mountain. Arroyo goes into the barrier and and flies off his bike into the bush. Rogers hits him and falls to the pavement as Arroyo climbs through the bush to get back up to the road.

Now that I think of it - seems strange that Arroyo's feet came unclipped and off the pedals so easily. I doubt he had time to unclip his feet, and he obviously flew WAY over the barrier which he probably wouldn't have done if he'd still been hooked into the bike.

From the Daily Telegraph - Then came a sickening crash yesterday as [Rogers] followed the Caisse d'Epargne rider, David Arroyo, down the beautiful but horrifying descent of Cormet de Roseland at speeds of up to 65mph. Arroyo lost control and went hurtling over the barriers - mercifully the lush undergrowth cushioned the fall - and in trying to avoid Arroyo, Rogers smacked into those same barriers.

You can watch the tour highlight videos at Versus. Just click on TDF for Tour de france.

Here's the ride I do when I want to do hills in downtown Toronto. I did the ride yesterday on my Jamis with my friend Duncan. Basically go to Scarborough and do the Scarborough Bluffs hill, then come back to the Don Valley and climb the three hills near Sunnybrook, then come back south on the trail and climb out via Pottery Road. It's almost 50km and is a good workout.

Vinokourov

2007-07-13T13:29:00.000-04:00

I can't believe what happened to the Astana team at the Tour yesterday. They have two of the favourites to win the whole thing - Vinokourov and Kloeden - and they BOTH took spills yesterday and banged themselves up badly.

Kloeden - who isn't necessarily a "star" rider, but who is totally solid and who I like - fractured his tailbone and I seriously doubt he'll finish the tour. And Vino has stitches on his knees and will have scabs all over his butt after his chain snapped on him sending him off the bike.

Christ. Vino must be p.i.s.s.e.d.. He's like 33 now (which is the upper limit for cyclists who think they can win the Tour). Last year he couldn't race the Tour because the rest of his team got kicked out for doping, and this year - with Ullrich retiring and Basso out for drugs - he must have totally thought this was finally his big chance. I hope he pulls it together and gets angry on a mountain somewhere. That would rock.

Today is Friday the 13th. I don't really care, but just as I was pedalling away from the apartment this morning a black cat crossed the street in front of me. Didn't strike me as a very good way to start the day.

I loved Undercover Brother. I don't know what brought it to mind again recently, but here you go. Have a great weekend.

Don't forget the White Guy Brainwash scene.

And the Catfight scene.

Last mention of singlespeeds

2007-07-11T08:18:00.000-04:00

I know you're all bored of hearing me talk about singlespeeds. I'm bored of it as well, and I promise this will be the last time I do it. I've spent way too much money this summer on bikes (mainly the new Jamis, but also three new wheels and a bunch of parts and tools), and I'm also tired of playing around with bikes.

However ~ a while back I mentioned that I was addicted to surfing the bikes section of Craigslist looking for a cheap steel roadbike that I could turn into a cyclocross singlespeed to leave at my parents' place in Bancroft. A Toronto cyclist named Geoffrey, who's a far more avid cyclist than I am, emailed me and kindly offered me a steel frame that wasn't quite the right size for him.

And this is it. Geoffrey gave me a frame, fork, handlebars, brakes, cranks and chainrings. I put on the wheels, seat, chain, rear cog etc. It's set up with a 40 tooth ring on the front, and a 15 tooth cog on the back. This is a lower gear than my other two singlespeeds, but with the steel frame, and with the fact that the roads in Bancroft I plan to use it on are slightly hilly, I kind of wish I'd put maybe a 17 tooth cog on the back.

Once again I had a hell of a time getting the damned chain tension right. If you click on these photos - go over to the Flickr site - and choose to view the LARGE size photo, you can see that although this bike kind of has horizontal dropouts (which in theory makes getting chain tension easy), when I played with moving the wheel's position in the dropout, it just messed up the contact with the brakes, so I treated it like a vertical dropout and used a halflink to get the tension right.
You can see the halflink in the picture above, and also the SRAM powerlink (it's the one furthest to the right - you can open it with your hands, eliminating the need for a chainbreaker).

Anybody know what company would have made this frame? Geoffrey didn't know and I can't figure it out either. I think it starts with an "F" because of more lettering elsewhere on the bike -- something like F____wing?

And here's a random photo of the Toronto Outdoor Art Show at Nathan Phillips Square, which my friend Mark was showing paintings at this past weekend.