Annual mileage

Some little stuff going on in my life, but seemingly not enough to warrant blog posts.

I got to musing on the annual mileage thing, though, seeing as how I have about a week before my bike riding shuts down for the year due to travel plans. I looked at the YTD totals on mycyclinglog.com, and had a couple of surprises. The first, and largest, was that I've already logged over a thousand miles on my Big Dummy. The last time I thought about its odometer, it was showing something in the seven hundred mile range. That bike accounts for roughly a quarter of my 4400 or so miles YTD. I've been acknowledging some level of surprise at how much I like riding that bike--it's darned useful in so many ways. I rarely have to wonder if I'll have room to haul this or that item I find in my travels.

Yeah that total is just over half last year's total, and aside from acknowledging that fact, I'm not worried about it. There were a couple of changes made early in the year that I knew would have a downward effect on the miles I would be riding this year--one was that I was stepping back from my involvement in the Louisville Bicycle Club, both by stepping down as VP Education and by having lost interest in doing club rides. The other, of course, was that I knew in January that Bluegrass Bicycle was not going to be in operation the entire year, and that daily commute was a big part of my mileage accumulation in 2011 (5500 of the 8000, in round numbers). Riding to the store in 2012 still accounted for 2000 miles or so in 2012.

I suppose that if I wanted to do club rides on some terms other than what I had been, it would be fine, but the reality is that I'm just not interested in that aspect of riding at the moment. Part of that is that I'm a bit different as a rider than I was a few years ago. I have gotten to the point that unless I have a destination in mind, I'm not over-interested in just getting on the bike and riding. I did a pleasure ride in Campbellsville a month or so back, and enjoyed it, but there is some inertia when I'm at home that I haven't been interested in overcoming.

I haven't taken the trouble to log the miles I've driven this year, so I have no idea whether I'm actually riding more than driving. The truck was out of service for a month this past summer, so it's not like I am terribly dependent on it. However, I own three gas powered vehicles, even though I'm the primary driver on only one of those.

Yeah, three cars in the driveway. My truck, bought second-hand at the end of 1999; the Toyota, bought a bit more than a year ago for $1500; and the Volvo wagon, bought from my mother over the summer. Rachel drives the Toyota, mostly just back and forth to work (a mile or so away...). Jenn drives the Volvo most of the time, although I drive it a little bit. I usually ride a bike to get anywhere, unless it's raining out and I need to not look (or feel) like a sewer rat upon arrival at my destination.

Bikes as part of traffic

As all four or five of my regular readers know, and as most of the rest of you have probably surmised, I don't like what many cycling educators refer to as "edge behavior." There are many reasons why taking the lane is safer, more efficient for me, and more efficient for other elements of traffic. Of course, my own safety is my first priority. Yes, my safety trumps the perceived convenience of other road users, just as their safety trumps my own perceived convenience.

Some recent discussions among the online communities of cyclists to which I belong have triggered memories of discussions I've heard or been part of here in Louisville over the last decade or so. A sampling after the break:

Blogs and comments can lead to good things

Via the magic known as the web, I get to interact with a LOT of folks I would probably not otherwise know. Big surprise, right?

Some of those folks are active as cycling instructors, of course. Some of those instructors are versed in the techniques championed by CyclingSavvy.

Some of the bike-related blogs miss points I would have them get, too. Thankfully, there are folks who are better than I when it comes to helping those folks see things from our perspective.

John Brooking, for example.

John made some comments on a Chicago-based blog, Easy as Riding a Bike, a week or two or three ago, challenging some opinions held by that writer. The discussion led to John making three guest posts on the blog, here, here, and here.

I sincerely hope that John's posts in that blog can improve things, in Chicago and elsewhere.

Cargo bike fun

Part of the joy of driving a bicycle instead of driving a car for work is that sometimes I get to hit roads I haven't seen in a while. I've been across the Clark Bridge four times in the last week or so (two trips to Indiana, so two trips across northbound and two southbound). Traffic was different than when I was working in N'Awb'ny, since I was going to Indiana later in the morning (or early afternoon) and coming home earlier than I did when I was crossing the bridge on a daily basis.

Today's trip to KY over the span differed a bit from my prior norm in another way: There was a crew working on the lighting mounted in the bridge superstructure, and they had one southbound lane blocked with traffic cones from the end of the bridge until just after where they were working--a bit more than two-thirds of the bridge was effectively one-lane. Rather than slow that one lane, I opted to take the blocked-off lane, figuring that I could choose a good point to reenter the open lane once I needed to do so. "Easy-peasy" as the expression goes.

I like that Big Dummy more than I expected I would. It's a neat bike--versatile and fairly comfortable. It's no speed demon, but it gets there with minimal fuss.

11,500 views

It was just over a month ago that I expressed amazement that I'd gotten over 11,000 views. In the five weeks since, I've gotten another five hundred views.

Yet there are rarely any comments. I must not be provoking enough thoughts or outrage or excitement.