Summer's Here!

Us bike/CalTrain commuters have made it through that window between "too cold" and "too hot", where fair-weather bikers make it hard to get on the train, and can enjoy plenty of room on the bike car again. At least, we'll enjoy it when the A/C is working (I've found that on the older gallery-style cars, there seems to be separate A/C for each half, so if the bike section is sweltering, try the other side; and either it's my imagination, or else a trick of the internal thermostat, but when one side's A/C is out, the other's seems to go into overdrive to compensate, and it's very nice and cool over there).

I have a few tips for bike commuting in the heat:

• Bring lots of water (yeah, everybody knows that, but it's worth repeating).
• Take off your helmet the moment you stop riding, and you'll radiate a lot of heat out your head.
• Go to work early (not that I'm taking this advice).
• Ride just fast enough to get a breeze, but no faster.

I actually take a perverse enjoyment of biking in non-optimal weather. The world is not designed for our comfort. Suck it up, and thrive in the knowledge that dealing with a somewhat human-hostile environment means you're alive!

Summer is a good time of year for transit adventures. Kids are out of school, and if you take a day off of work, you can go places with them during the week when everything's running. Late sunsets help too.

Last week I took my daughter to Great America via CalTrain and VTA light rail. This works splendidly, but be advised to bring extra clothes--you will want to go to the water park, and a long walk and trolley ride in wet clothes is not so much fun.

Plenty of other outings will suggest themselves. This morning I saw a guy on the train with a fishing pole. Now it turned out he was meeting a buddy at SJ Diridon and they were going to drive to a lake, but there are actually in plenty of transit-accessible places to fish around here, especially on the bay. Just bear in mind that your fellow passengers will appreciate it if you make sure to have a fairly secure container for carrying your catch home.

Why Regular Americans Hate Tree-Huggers

Thanks to the Palo Alto Daily News for publishing this article! It can be viewed on their online edition at this url:

http://www.paloaltodailynews.com/article/2007-6-7-06-07-07-op-ed

Or right here on 295bus!

A few months ago, I dropped by a meeting of Redwood City Cool Families (see article here), a local group citizens with concerns that seemed to mirror my own.

This is the kind social get-together where the issues of the day are discussed, in an informal manner, over wine and fancy cheese. Discussion topics for the evening included:

• Apologies for driving to the meeting
• Printing a T-shirt, and finding a printer willing to use environmentally-friendly ink to do it
• Recycling
• The fate of the Redwood City Industrial Saltworks

The last topic was naturally the one that most piqued my interest, and discussion that evening seemed to be fairly balanced, between the pros and cons of reusing this bayland area as housing (in an area where it's very needed, and could potentially cut down on much car use by allowing a few thousand people to live closer to their work) vs wetlands restoration.

Lately Cool Families has started staking out a position on this issue, and it's one with decidedly less balance--they advocate complete restoration of the Saltworks to wetlands, on the grounds that developing it will:

• Fill in more of the Bay
• Destroy opportunities for habitat, open space and recreation
• Snarl traffic on Hwy 101 and Woodside Road
• Prevent completion of the S.F. Bay National Wildlife Refuge
• Place housing on low ground at risk from sea level rise

Now all of this is true (though it overlooks the small detail of the Saltworks being private property, meaning that turning it into a public space means buying it from the current owners, probably to the tune of a few hundred million dollars). But pointing these facts out, and utterly ignoring the good that could come, goes a long way to reinforce the general public's perception that environmentalists care more about wildlife than people. Very few people can afford an $800,000 house in Redwood City, and an awful lot of people are enduring pretty grueling commutes to get there (40,000 people commute into the city daily).

It also reinforces the slightly more nuanced view that people who call themselves environmentalists are often way more concerned with their personal, local, environment than the health of the Earth as a whole--the people who work in Redwood City are going to live somewhere, and if they're not stealing habitat from ducks by the Bay, they're probably going to end up stealing it from kit foxes and other grasslands critters somewhere out around Stockton, and putting a heck of a lot of CO₂ into the air getting back and forth.

Here's a good rule of thumb: in a world of problems, if you hear about a proposal that does some good, and you have some objection--you don't just get to say "no", you have to come up with a better idea. Our local Bay Area version will be: if you don't want housing to be built in one place, you have to say where to build it instead. So, for example, if you want the Redwood City Saltworks to be restored as wetlands, you could propose densifying the City's core as an alternative--for example, building a few thousand apartments and condos near Sequoia Station.

Or, if you don't care about other people's problems, at least be honest about being a jerk, and tell them to move to Manteca.

Bikes on CalTrain - Not Just for Hard-Core Commuters

I showed my daughter the ropes last Saturday. We went to Burlingame.

Washington Park, a fairly nice park, is right by the station. An antique firetruck was on display.

The High School is right next door, and this makes a good place to practice biking:

The park also has some good trees for climbing, at least if you're 7!

We had a picnic under a tree, and headed back to the station, and home.

Bike Helmets Really Work

Ask this guy!

CalTrain, iPod Hacking, and the Tylwyth Teg

Last Christmas, my employer gave us all iPod Shuffles as a thank-you for a good year. It came pre-installed with the "greatest hits" of 7 years of company morale-boosters. That was fun once, but pretty soon I wanted to put my own stuff on there.

You're supposed to use iTunes for that, but after several years of using iTunes, lately I've found that as this software evolves, it gets less and less useful. Lately I've been using a barebones PC music player program called FooBar on my office PC, and between this and the fact that I really had trouble figuring out how to get the tracks I wanted onto the Shuffle using iTunes (what happened to your intuitive interfaces, Apple?), it ended up sitting on the shelf for a while.

So finally I decided to try bypassing iTunes and using it as a generic portable MP3 player. It turns out you can do it, but it's not quite as convenient as with other brands--you can plug the Shuffle into your PC's USB port, copy MP3 files onto it, but it won't recognize them until you build a special index file.

You're supposed to use iTunes for this, but various hackers have put together alternatives. There are apparently some pretty nice ones if you're running Linux, and although I'm pretty Unix-centered at work, I haven't quite "gone penguin" to the extent of using it as my main desktop OS.

So here's a pretty simple way to do it from a Window's PC.

• Download the Shuffle-DB builder "rebuild_db" from http://shuffle-db.sourceforge.net.
• The instructions tell you to install Python and do lots of other stuff. This will let you use the latest version, which is cross-platform and no doubt has lots of neat features, but you can ignore it all--just open the zip archive you downloaded and look for rebuild_db.exe. This is a standalone Windows program that doesn't do much, and is no longer supported, but hey, it works.
• Plug your Shuffle into your PC find it under "My Computer", where it should look like a disk drive. Copy rebuild_db.exe onto it (you don't have to put the program onto the Shuffle, but if you do that, then when you run it, it the Shuffle will automatically be the "current directory" and it will find your music without any extra help).
• Copy MP3 (and I suppose other formats) audio files onto your Shuffle, delete old ones, whatever. Whenever you're done, double click on rebuild_db.exe. It will run (in a DOS window) and rebuild the track db so that the Shuffle knows what's actually on it.

So what are the Tylwyth Teg? That's the "Fairy Folk" in Welsh, which I'm using my Shuffle to brush up on, by listening to folktales, on the train.

Fightin' Fool, I set you Free

I've found plenty of free reading material on CalTrain, and decided it was time to give something back.

After slogging through Fightin' Fool, by Max Brand--a western writer famous for the sheer quantity of his output--for several weeks, and finally finishing it, I decided to leave this book on the train I was riding at the time.

To be honest, despite enjoying selections from Brand's oeuvre in the past, I found this book somewhat slow-going--despite a few bits at the beginning that hinted it might take a course somewhat different from the western fare I'm used to:

Jingo was pleased. He liked what he had heard, and he liked the set of the stranger's shoulders, and the towering height of him. He hurried to catch up with him.

and later:

Jake Rankin licked his lips and ran his hungry eyes over the lithe body of Jingo. He was a judge of men, was Jake, and he could appreciate the way the parts of Jingo were fitted together. He handled him with his eyes the way a horse dealer handles a horse, judging bone and sinew, and the quality of the long muscles that make for speed, or the bulging muscles that make lifting strength. The muscles of Jingo were all long and cunningly worked together. He looked as capable of speed, say, as a well-braided whiplash of new leather. Jake Rankin missed not a single point.

But the remainder of the tale was fairly conventional for the genre.

Hopefully, at least, it may brighten someone else's commute a bit.

Reading Around the Blogosphere

I came across this blog, which has some interesting things to say about development, transit, and urban history in Sacramento:

http://sacramentohistory.blogspot.com

Worth a read!

Is it Legal not to Drive?

After two years of negotiation between a developer and the city of Mountain View, from which it appeared settled that the former HP site across the street from San Antonio CalTrain would redeveloped into a respectable quantity of much-needed new housing, a new batch of council members has been elected opposed to this "fortress-like" development. Read the complete story in the Mountain View Voice.

These days, it seems that everyone is concerned with global warming, the loss of open space to sprawl, and the myriad other ills of our car-dependent lifestyle.

And so we have annual rituals of "spare the air" days and "bike to work" days, in hopes luring commuters out of their cars, and into trying transit, biking, and walking.

The trouble is, whenever type of housing that could make responsible commuting possible is proposed, namely dense housing, close to where people work, and in quantities large enough to matter, it's always "too big" and "too dense" to suit the neighbors, and city councils soon put a stop to it.

So let's stop pretending that commuters can choose a "transportation alternative". Living in far-flung suburbs and driving long commutes isn't a choice--it's the law.

Something to Try: Restaurant Search and Reviews by Phone

I work for Tellme Networks. We just launched a new restaurant reviews app--so the next time your on a transit-enabled adventure, and are looking for a place to eat. Or after a meal, call up and leave your opinion.

Call: 1-800-555-TELL/8355.

Say "restaurant reviews".

Have fun!

Out and About Without a Car

That was my daughter's and my challenge last Saturday, because Mom needed the car to go to girl scout leader training in Alameda, and while she might have been happy to drop us off somewhere, the training began at 8:30 AM, and we had no intention of going anywhere that early.

So we set out a more reasonable hour, by foot and by scooter. There are no busses in our neighborhood on weekends, so we rolled and strolled a mile or so down to El Camino. But once we got that far, we agreed that a train would really be more fun than a bus, and pushed on to Atherton CalTrain, where trains still stop on weekends, if only hourly. All in all, that was a trek of 2.2 miles.

We timed it well, bought a child ticket (my monthly pass lets me go anywhere I want on weekends), and headed north for San Mateo and lunch at Mr Pizza Man. Seriously, if you are in San Mateo and want pizza, I'd recommend Pizza My Heart across the street, or North Beach Pizza two blocks away, but Mr Pizza Man is sort of a tradition of ours.

Refreshed, we moved on to San Mateo's Central Park, where the little kiddie train was running:

The Park's very nice Japanese tea garden, which we always seem to hit on the wrong day, or when it's rented out for a wedding, or something, apparently was closed for renovation as of last weekend and won't reopen til August. Gah!

We were determined to get a peek:

This is what we saw:

We hung out at the playground, and did a big of geocaching. The rules of one cache required that we find a statue of a dog--and kiss it!

Daughter exercised restraint:

Dad did not:

From the park we returned to San Mateo CalTrain, via the world's greatest toy store, Talbot's Toyland.

I also took a few pictures of street scenes along the way. As you may know, I collect Vintage Postcards featuring Trolleys, and one of my favorites is a scene from San Mateo, on B street, right where I've walked many times between CalTrain, Talbot's, Central Park, and Mr Pizza Man dozens of times:

Here's what the same location looks like today--look for two interesting roof lines on opposite sides of the street, and then flip the image mentally, and since I unfortunately was facing the opposite direction:

Back on CalTrain, we went to San Carlos, and did some pottery painting at Laurel Street Arts. We will return for our new cat water dish and other knick knacks next weekend.

At this point we were pretty tired, and moseyed to the very nice San Carlos Library, where we could find some books and a couch and lounge around a bit til Mom came and picked us up.

We took it easy on Sunday.

Streetcars in the Modern World

I've long been puzzled and dismayed by the cost of new light rail systems. The Muni's new T-Third line cost roughly $100 million a mile to build, which considering that this is by no means rapid transit--it's basically a streetcar line, at best only slightly faster than a bus--is pretty pricey.

LightRailNow.org has posted a new article analyzing the reasons for the high cost of light rail, and reporting on a few cities success in keeping costs in check: Rapid Streetcar: Rescaling Design and Cost for More Affordable Light Rail Transit.

Overall, much of the expense is due to overengineering. Here are some examples:

• Many lines with low traffic could be built as single tracks with passing sidings, but this is almost unheard of in modern transit.
• Sations are often more extravagant than needed.
• Transit projects are often bundled with, or encumbered by, various streetscape improvement projects, utility work, etc.

In a similar vein is the issue of vehicle performance. As speeds increase, there seems to be a point where costs snowball and go up dramatically. Light rail vehicles that travel up to about 45 mph, about what traditional streetcars like PCC's could typically do, can be built lightly and relatively cheaply. Design them to go faster than that, and:

• Overhead becomes much more complex; simple suspension (single wire) gives way to compound catenary (in other words, you get something that looks designed more for bullet trains than trolleys).
• Cars must be built much heavier to survive collisions.
  • So track must be built heavier, with a deeper roadbed.
    • So utilities under the street must be dug up and relocated.

Ironically, many light rail systems, due to stop spacing or street running, give their high-performing LRV's so little opportunity to really book it, that the effect of being able to run at 65-75 mph on actual trip times is next to nothing.

A few cities, notably Portland, and perhaps in the future Sacramento, have taken these observations to heart and had success augmenting heavy light rail lines built for high volume, higher-speed, suburb-to-downtown travel with simpler lighter and cheaper, honest-to-goodness streetcar lines.

Some interesting trackwork in Zürich, Switzerland.

Cake

I'm not normally one of those cranks that complains about stupid beurocrats wasting our tax dollars, etc, etc... But c'mon! (Click images for a bigger view).

There are 29 more pages.

Surprisingly, the bid instructions specify not to provide samples.

Actually the VTA has pulled this from their site--thanks to the good folks at BATN for nabbing it first!

Happy MLK Day!

Martin Luther King Day is a great holiday for transit fans, assuming you get it off; enough people still have to work that tourists are scarce even in the City, and transit systems run their full weekday schedules.

This year we rode the Freedom Train on CalTrain to San Francisco. A few years ago, we did this, and got to march down Market Street as part of a parade. This year, it turns out there was no parade--we were directed to chartered MUNI busses that took us to a rally at the Civic Center, but this really wasn't what we'd come for, so we decided to play tourists for the day.

After lunch at a 50's-themed diner on Powell (which fit into our diet surprisingly well) we walked back to Market and were astounded to find no line for the cable cars. Changing our plans on the spur of the moment, we hopped on the next car leaving, which was on the Powell/Mason.

Mr. Thinks-Very-Seriously-About-Transit 295Bus caught brazenly foaming

The family enjoyed the ride too!

At the end of the line we bought some cheap fleeces from a touristy stand--the pocket zipper promptly broke on mine, trapping my camera and phone, until we eventually discombobulated the pocket with a needle, keys, and other random objects pressed into service as tools.

We rode the F Line back to Market, where our serendipitous adventures continued. After alighting we discovered that a pair of gloves had been left on the trolley, and I ran, caught it, and retrieved them. I can take some credit for this save for the fact that I've been getting in shape, but have to give thanks to a helpful motorman and fellow passengers, plus an odd quirk of the F line routing (at the foot of Market it makes an odd U--look at the orange line at the very right edge of this map if you're curious) which us MUNI fans have long puzzled over, but which in this one case was quite handy since it let me outpace a PCC on foot by taking a more direct route.

As soon as I caught my breath we ducked down into the subway, and hopped on an outbound J. The MUNI Metro may be less scenic than the F, but it's nostalgic for me, and a treat for my budding transit-fan daughter. We rode to Dolores Park, a favorite in the City, where there is a decent playground featuring and old boat, and met up with Grandma (to me, Mom!). We tried a few geocaches--one just led to litter and unmentionable smells, the other we were more successful with, finding the tiniest cache we've ever seen a stone's-throw from the "serpentine right-of-way":

By the "Golden Fireplug"

With a lift from Mom back to 4th & King (much appreciated, because we were zonked by this point) we were back on CalTrain and heading home.

The weather's warming up, and I see more transit adventures coming up in the near future.

Happly MLK Day, everybody!

How About us Riders?

I read that the BART board, under pressure from anti-substance-abuse groups, recently decided to pull all ads for liquor from its trains and stations.

It's a small thing, but let me point out that booze (and ads for it) are legal, and the real objective of any public enterprise is not so different from a private one--it should provide as much service as it can, and if not profit from it, minimize its drain on public coffers.

Unfortunately, as public entities, transit agencies are subject to tinkering from all levels of government with objectives other than, and possibly at odds with, that of providing maximum service at minimum cost.

Consider some of the requirements typically placed on them:

• Infrastructure should be built by minority-owned contractors.
• Equipment must be American-made.
• All contracts must be with unionized providers.
• Vehicles must adhere to the most stringent emissions standards.
• Any most eggregiously: any changes to service are subject to the review and veto power of neighbors (see for example Menlo Park NIMBYs opposition to Dumbarton Rail, and a recent episode in which MUNI attempted to move some bus stops and the resulting fracas escalated all the way to the SF board of supervisors).

Typically, consideration for the time, convenience, and even safety of passengers comes way down below all of the above on the typical transit-planning checklist.

As an interesting case study, which atypically ended happily, let me tell you the story of the Sunnyvale CalTrain station fencing gap.

For years there was no official way to get between the Sunnyvale CalTrain station and the neighborhood to its northeast, except for a long walk to the nearest cross-street. Anonymous passengers remedied this situation by cutting a hole in a chain-link fence that separates the northbound platform from the adjacent street, Frances Avenue. Occasionally CalTrain would fix it, and a hole would be re-cut.

This informal access was workable enough, though not ideal--in particular it was not wheelchair accessible, which precipitated an odd sequences of events. The threat of an ADA equal access suit prompted CalTrain to pay closer attention and make a more definitive closure to the fence (I guess the ADA is another one of those policy tinkerings from above, though one I agree with--but it was not the intent of the law to achieve equality by removing access points only usable by the able-bodied!). Neighbors who used the hole in the fence then turned to the Sunnyvale city council to provide a more sanctioned, fully accessible connection to the station. But this incurred the wrath of other neighbors, who feared an increase in passers-through, crime, litter, and competition for parking.

"Since the hole access has been closed, our street has been quiet, clean and calm," said Frances Avenue resident Melinda Cook.

This is the point in these stories where public servants, in an effort to make everyone happy, are usually struck by paralysis, or else weighing the pros and cons of the options before them, decide that transit riders are the least likely people to remember their decision, or organize around a grievance, and are the safest ones to screw.

This story has a happier ending. Citing man's greatest font of wisdom, Star Trek, the council resolved that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" and decreed that a new, professionally-installed and fully accessible gap should be put in the fence.

A rare triumph of sense in a world gone stupid. (Sidewalk curb cuts to either side out of shot).

Google Maps Working

After trying various things, I've finally found a way to display Google maps in blog entries:

I spent quite a while trying to actually put the javascript code for a map in a blog entry, and actually got it working for Mozilla, but failed for IE, and debugging was just too hard. So I'm taking the approach of hosting a fully tested html page with a map elsewhere, and displaying here via an <iframe> tag.

Breaking out into Traditional Media

The 12/23 Chronicle carried the following letter from yours truly:

Beyond platitudes

Editor -- The Silicon Valley Leadership Group (Open Forum, Dec. 18) is intent on reducing greenhouse gases by cutting down on the use of cars -- so it urges the employees of its member companies to bike to work, and favors extending BART to San Jose. But it seems blind to the role that valley employers play in fostering a dependence on cars, by setting up shop in remote, sprawling office parks that are only realistically accessible by driving. So how about a new pledge for the members of the SLVG: to put their offices within walking distance of Caltrain, light rail, or if it ever gets built, BART?

I wish I had taken a few minutes to edit for style--just because you have a PhD doesn't mean you have to sound like it!

Good News from New Orleans

The St. Charles streetcar line has been partially reopened, from Canal to Lee Circle.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TRAVEL/12/19/neworleans.streetcar.reut/index.html.

A Comment from a Colleague over Lunch

In response to the fact that I write this blog: You're one of those people, aren't you--one of those people who cares!

Been Hassled Fanning?

If you ever get stopped by railroad police and have to convince them that you're snooping around, taking pictures, etc, because you like trains, rather than because you're plotting to blow them up, it might be handy to have a card in your wallet that identifies you as a member of the BNSF's "Citizens for Rail Security". Sign up here, and you can print one out. It also has a phone number on it that you can call if you ever do see anything suspicious.

Wisdom from Unexpected Sources

Mike Nelson, of MST3K fame (and more recently, RiffTrax) was recently interviewed by Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka of SomethingAwful.

Deep in a discussion of bad movies and freaky fans was this interesting little tidbit on technology and manners:

Lowtax	People on the internet, there's something on there, as soon as you log on, that gene inside of you that makes you argue over unimportant really trivial things just kicks in and takes over your brain I think.
Nelson	It's like climbing in a car. I used to commute by bike to work. And I was convinced, if people were driving convertibles, and you could actually look into their eyes, they would not do the things that they did, to nearly kill me every time. It's just you're in your little isolated bubble, and you have all the power, and nobody will know when I cut you off.

You can listen to the whole interview, and learn Mike's nominee for absolutely worst movie of all time, here. (Be warned if you start getting drawn into SomethingAwful that there's a lot of not-work-safe material over there).