I Hope Good Things Grow In This Garden

A thing might be good.  Another thing might also be good.  Putting them together, though, is not always a good thing.

An example is chocolate chips in bagels.  It seemed to be everywhere about twenty years ago.  Thankfully, they seem to have disappeared, at least in this part of the world. Unfortunately, ridiculous pizza toppings like peanut butter, bologna, honey, barbecued chicken, pineapple and--yikes!--chocolate chips have not.  Now, I love fresh pineapple and barbecued chicken as much as anybody does, but they don't belong on pizza.  Roast chicken is OK, but I guess I'm an old-school New York pizza purist:  I prefer to eat my pizza uncluttered.  

(I will admit, though, that in Toulouse, France, I enjoyed a pizza made with locally-produced goat cheese and ham.  It is, to this day, the best pizza I've eaten outside of Italy or New York.)

So, when I heard the term "bicycle garden," I was skeptical.  Bicycles are wonderful. (Why else do I write the blog?)  So are gardens.  The only way, however,  I've ever conncected the two was to ride one to the other.  

Of course, "garden" in this context doesn't mean a park full of flowers and trees where people picnic or a plot for growing corn and tomatoes.  Rather, it refers to any sort of place where someone or something is grown or developed:  Think of the "garten" in "kindergarten."

The "garden" proposed in Antioch, a San Francisco Bay-area community, would look something like this:

or this:

The city council voted in favor of building it in Prewett Family Park.  If that location doesn't work out, they also voted in favor Gerrytown Park as an alternative.  Prewett, however, is favored for its proximity to schools:  the "garden" will be a place where young people will develop bike-riding skills and learn the rules of the road. 

The idea sounds like a good one, as long as kids are being trained for "real world" riding, i.e., on streets and roads, and not just on bike lanes that go from nowhere to nowhere and may not be any safer than the streets.

More Bike Lane Follies

Writing yesterday's post got me to thinking, again, about some of the really bad bike lanes I've ridden. I'm talking about the kind that, if they don't enrage you because they put you in more danger than you would have experienced while riding with cars and trucks, they leave you scratching your head and wondering, "What were they thinking when they built this?"

Of course, some of those lanes aren't exactly built:  They were merely designated by some lines of paint and a few signs.  But there are the ones that make you wonder why anybody bothered to spend the time or money to build barriers or cut through parkland. 

Paths like those lead to nowhere.  I wrote about such a lane in an earlier post:

A year later, I showed another that ran under the elevated tracks of the IRT #1 train in upper Manhattan--and right into the pillars that support said tracks:

I guess I shouldn't complain, though.  No lane I've ridden is quite like this one:

It's in Exeter, England.  Hmm...Maybe the Brits have some sort of cycling we've never dreamed of here in the 'States.  Whatever it is, it's certainly stranger than riding down this bike lane:

It might be the only bike lane in the world designed for BMXers or downhill riders--though I still rather doubt that whoever conceived it has ever been anywhere near a bike!

At The Right Angle

In a few posts, I've complained about poorly-conceived, -designed and -constructed bike lanes and paths.  They lead to nowhere and expose the cyclists to all sorts of hazards.

Sometimes those hazards are embedded in the lane or trail itself.  Among the worst are railroad tracks, especially if they run parallel (or nearly so) in proximity to the cycling route.  Ideally, tracks and lanes (or paths) should cross at right (90 degree) angles or as close to it as possible. 

If the tracks cross at a more oblique angle, the  tires can graze against the rails, or get lodged against them, and send the cyclist tumbling to the ground.  That's happened to at least half a dozen riders on the Centennial Trail where it crosses the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe tracks in Arlington, Washington, 64 km north of Seattle. At that point, the trail crosses the tracks at an angle of less than 45 degrees--or near the one o'clock position.  (A 90 degree angle crosses at the 3 o'clock position.)

Recognizing the problem, the Arlington City Council has just awarded a contract to realign the trail so that the trail, which heads north, would turn east about 15 meters (50 feet) from the tracks so that it can cross at a 90 degree angle.

City engineer Ryan Morrison says the project will take about two to three weeks, and that it will timed to coincide, as best as possible, with improvements Burlington Northern-Santa Fe has planned for that same area.  That means the work will start around late May or early June.

 

Inventing One Kind Of Superhighway, Getting Another

Folks in that part of the world invented one kind of superhighway.  Now they might get another.

San Jose is the largest city and seat of Santa Clara County, California.  Just south of San Francisco, the county is part of "Silicon Valley," where the technology that brought this blog to your screen--often called the "information superhighway" was developed.

Now it might see a "superhighway" that's more closely associated with parts of Europe than any place in the United States.  It would run 10 miles  through San Jose and Santa Clara. What would differentiate it from the county's  800 miles of bikeways and 200 miles of dedicated bike trails is continuity.  Local activists and commuters, like their counterparts in other US locales (including my hometown), complain that too many lanes and trails go from "nowhere to nowhere," beginning and ending in seemingly-arbitrary spots, and are thus not useful as transportation conduits.

From San Jose Spotlight

This "superhighway" was recently proposed as part of the Santa Clara Countywide Bike Plan.  Three different routes have been suggested.  Information about the progress of this project can be found on the Valley Transportation Authority's website--which you will access, of course, by the other kind of superhighway.