After You Make Your Pie...

When should you replace your helmet?

Giro, the manufacturer of the helmets I currently ride, recommends getting a new helmet every three years.    MET, an Italian constructor of cranial caskets, says that a helmet should be good for eight years after the date it's manufactured.  The Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute, on the other hand,says that while the rumors about sweat and sunlight degrading helmets aren't true (in the case of sweat) or exaggerated (in the case of sunlight), five years is a "reasonable" lifespan for the helmet of a cyclist who rides thousands of miles a year.

So, according to Giro, both of my helmets should be replaced (coincidence?) and the folks at BHSI would tell me that replacing mine would be a good idea.  According to MET's recommendations, one of my helmets should be retired, while the other has a year and a half or so left.

Giro, MET, BHSI and every other helmet-maker and safety organization of which I'm aware say that you if you crash your helmet, it should be replaced.  Some say that dropping it onto a hard surface is reason enough to consign it to the scrap heap.

I actually had planned to replace my helmets in the spring. About two weeks ago, I bought two new helmets, both Giros, that were on sale.  (This, it seems, is the best time of year to buy a helmet, as retailers are clearing out this year's stock to make room for wares from the new model year.)  Soon, I'm going to toss the older of my current helmets.  I'll replace the fitting pads in the other with thinner ones so I can ride it with winter headgear underneath.

I got a really good deal on the new helmets.  Still, before I bought them, I wish I'd known about this:

From Alienation Bicycle Components

I would love to read the report if Snell or the American Society for Testing and Materials did a crash test on pumpkins.  Do the kinds of patterns you carve in them affect their structural integrity?

Happy Halloween! 

Tell Them Groucho Sent You

When I was a kid, we thought Rambler was a car old people drove.

Such a conclusion was based on the impeccable powers of observation children have:  Everyone we saw driving a car with the "R" was old enough to be one of our grandparents.  Also, everything about it just seemed like it was meant to be driven by someone who would have fit the demographic of Brezhnev's last Politburo.  The word for it--which I didn't know at the time, because it wasn't used in my blue-collar milieu--was stodgy.

Thus, when the brand died, one could, perhaps, have been forgiven for thinking that its demise came because all of its potential customers had gone to the Great Golf Course In The Sky.

I was just short of eleven years old at the time.  Not only had I seen what we would, in more politically correct times, call "senior citizens" driving Ramblers, I also noticed some cars--also, as often as not, driven by members of the same age group--bearing a brand that wasn't advertised on TV.

Several years earlier, that brand--named for the first known European to cross the Mississippi River--crossed the Rubicon, or the River Styx, or whatever body of water separates us from The End.  I am referring, of course, to De Soto.

Now, I don't recall the passing of De Soto--the car or the explorer (in spite of what some of my students might have you believe!).  The brand died around the time I was passing through a "terrible" age.  Aside from seeing  some of their cars--which, by the time of Rambler's end, were about a decade old--the only other reference I saw to the brand was in re-runs of You Bet Your Life.  The popular game show's host would urge viewers to go to their nearest De Soto dealers and tell them "Groucho sent you."   

Hmm...If you did utter that magic phrase, did you get a free duck on your dashboard?

Or, perhaps, if you bought one of their cars, you'd get this as a bonus:

I tried to find information on De Soto bicycles.  I don't know whether they were made by any company connected with the automobiles.   It wouldn't surprise me if they were, or at least if someone in the auto company had a hand in designing them.  After all, you can see some of the same "aerodynamic" features--which, on both the bike and the car, were probably more design flourishes than engineering innovations.  And, at the time of the ad (probably the 1950s), bicycle makers marketed their wares to appeal to the fantasies children--boys, mainly--had about the cars they would drive when they were of age.

From what little information I can find, I think I can safely assume that the De Soto bicycles of that time have no more relation to today's De Soto adult tricycles than the bikes today sold as "Motobecane", "Windsor", "Mercier" and "Dawes" have to the classic marques of the Bike Boom and earlier.  

We Can Use The Jump, And The NY Post Needs To Get A Grip

The other day, I chastised the Mayor of Montreal for his plan to paint lanes that would be shared by bikes and buses on some of his city's main thoroughfares.  An editorial in the Montreal Gazette  lambasted the idea--rightly, in my opinion.

Today the script is flipped, if you will, in my hometown:  a sensible piece of bicycle policy is proposed, but an idiotic newspaper editorial denounces it.

You probably wouldn't be surprised to find out that said editorial is in the New York Post: you know, the rag that became famous for headlines like Headless Body In Topless Bar and has lately become the print media's biggest cheerleader for Donald Trump's candidacy.  They've published a lot of diatribes against cyclists and this city's attempts to be more "bike friendly".  Some of the latter, to be fair, were on the mark, if for the wrong reasons,  such as their early criticisms of bike lanes.

Today their editorial begins thusly:

It seems it's not enough to ease up on anti-social behavior, from urinating on the street to public pot-smoking:  Next, the City Council may let cyclists legally jump red lights.

Here in New York, many intersections have traffic signals with four-way red lights and "walk" signals that precede the green light by 20 seconds.  In principle, I think it's a good idea, because it allows pedestrians to enter the intersection before, and thus be seen by, motorists who might make turns.  If anything, I think the interval should be longer along some of the city's wider streets such as Queens Boulevard, along which many senior citizens and disabled people live.

The City Council proposal would allow cyclists to follow the pedestrian signal in crossing an intersection.  Frankly, I think a 20-second interval for "jumping" red lights makes even more sense for cyclists than it does for pedestrians, especially for cyclists crossing intersections from bike lanes.  Twenty seconds is plenty of time for cyclists to cross just about any intersection, and even the slowest cyclists at the widest boulevards will have enough time to get through the immediate traffic lanes and avoid motorists making right turns.

The Post does have one thing right:  Many cyclists already do that because we know that it's much safer to cross that way than according to motorists' signals.  But I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a paper of their caliber compares legalizing the practice to tolerating public pot-smoking and urination.

If you follow the logic, if it can be called that, of some of the Post's other editorials and articles, allowing public urination unfairly privileges 49 percent of the population (of which I am not a part:  boo hoo).  So, perhaps, it's not surprising that the esteemed editors would follow the passage I italicized above with this:  It's not as bad as it sounds.  Then, they use even more tortured, to put it kindly, logic to dismiss the City Council proposal.

Usually, when folks like Denis Cordierre propose wrongheaded policies about cycling and pundits endorse them (or oppose good ideas), I can attribute it to a lack of knowledge about-- usually because of a lack of experience in-- cycling.  The Post, however, has magnified that lack of knowledge with an apparent inability to construct a cogent argument. Had any of my students submitted anything like it, he or she would see lots of red ink upon getting it back!

I wonder what Alexander Hamilton would think of that editorial--or the Post?

Ou Sont Les Cyclistes Jeunes d'Antan?

Ou sont les neiges d'antan.

If you recognize that line, you've probably seen (or at least read) The Glass Menagerie.  As great an artist as he was, Tennessee Williams didn't write that line:  He took it from Ballade des dames du temps jadis (Ballad of the Ladies of Ancient Times), a poem Francois Villon wrote some four centuries earlier.

The line means "Where have the snows of yesteryear gone?"  Most of us, I believe, have asked some version or another of that question at least once in our lives:  perhaps when looking at an old photo album or yearbook, for instance.

Even if I have no connection to the subjects of an old image, I can't help but to wonder who they are and where they might be now.  

This photo was taken by John E. Scott and is dated 27 October 1954.  Posted on the website of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, it shows boys with bicycles they'd won in a contest which may have been sponsored by the Montgomery Examiner in Alabama.

Hmm...Not only do I wonder where those boys are, I wonder whether any of them are still riding today.  One can hope!

A Wrong Path To Bike Safety

I am generally not a fan of bike lanes.  While data from Antwerp, Belgium indicate that they cut the accident rate in half on high-speed (75KPH/45MPH or more) roads, that same study shows that a cyclist riding in either a separated or painted lane along a medium-speed (50KPH, or 30 MPH) has roughly the same accident risk as one riding on the road itself.  

The same research shows, most tellingly, that along low-speed roads (30KPH/20MPH)--meaning most urban streets--a cyclist in a painted lane is nearly five times as likely to get in an accident.  And, if he or she is riding in a separated lane, the risk increases to more than six times what it would be if the road had no lane.

Studies from other locales corroborate the main lesson of Antwerp's experience:  that bike lanes make cyclists safer only in comparison to riding on a highway.  On most suburban streets, the safety level is about the same as it is for lanes.  And on city streets, using bike lanes actually puts cyclists at greater risk for accidents than if they rode on sidewalks, which have long been considered--by planners and everyday cyclists alike--to be the most dangerous places to ride.

Yet transportation planners and "experts" insist that the best way to make urban cycling safer is to paint or install more lanes.  When confronted with findings like the ones I've mentioned, their response usually goes along the lines of "Well, bike lanes make people feel safer.  And if people feel cycling is safer, more of them will do it."

Some people feel safer if they sleep with a gun under their pillow. I wonder how well that logic works.

Anyway, it seems that in transportation planning--especially as it pertains to bicycles--there isn't an idea that's so bad that nobody can come up with something worse.  And, sadly, those worse ideas are just as likely to come from "bike friendly" burgs as they are to emanate from those places where one is not considered fully human without an internal combustion engine.

For the past decade or so, Montreal has been done as much as any city to encourage cycling.  Like other municipalities with "bike friendly" reputations, it established a bike-share program (Bixi) and turned disused byways like the path along the Lachine Canal into bike lanes.  To be sure, it made some mistakes, but on the whole, Montreal has probably done more than most cities (at least in the Americas) to consider cyclists in its transportation planning.

From CBC News

But now it seems that Denis Corderre, the Mayor the City of a Hundred Steeples, plans to take one of the most unsafe practices of contemporary urban planning and make it even more hazardous for cyclists--and just about everyone else.

La Rue St. Denis and Le Boulevard St. Laurent are the two main north-south thoroughfares on the island of Montreal, while Sherbrooke Street is one of its major east-west conduits.  Monsieur Corderrre wants to paint lanes on them that will be shared by bikes and buses.

Let that one sink in.  Bikes and buses in the same lane.  I don't see how anyone can feel, let alone be, safer.  Buses have a lot of blind spots, so it's easier for a bus driver to simply not see a cyclist in the lane.  Also, buses pulling over to pick up and discharge passengers, and pulling away from those bus stops are at least as much of a hazard as motorists making turns into intersections into which bike lanes feed.  

Oh, but it gets worse.  You see, Corderre's plan also calls for turning Avenues Papineau and de Lorimier--two other important north-south routes--into one-way streets simply to accomodate the bus/bike lanes.  

When I visited the City of Saints last year, I spent a fair amount of time riding all of those streets.  They are heavily trafficked, but one can ride them by exercising the same sort of caution one would employ on a major street in almost any western city.  Even a separate bike-only lanes would probably do nothing to make cycling safer.  In fact, they would most likely make riding more dangerous for the same reasons they put pedalers in greater peril in other cities.  On those streets, as well as on streets in other cities in which I've cycled, it's easier and safer to negotiate with buses when they, and cyclists, are part of the regular traffic flow.  I know:  I do it nearly every day!

Denis Corderre, reconsiderez s'il vous plait!