Winter poses special challenges to the utilitarian cyclist. Those who ride purely for fun and fitness tend not to ride when it’s dark and cold and snowy. If you consider the bike your primary form of transportation, you don’t necessarily have this option. You still need groceries in February, after all. There are three main differences between fair weather and winter cycling: more darkness, the cold, and snow and ice on the roads.
Of the places I’ve lived in the US, Boulder makes car-free living the easiest and most enjoyable. For me, that means riding my bike. Yes, there’s a little snow, and a few times each winter bitter cold will slide down from Canada, and yes there’s a bit of topography coming out of the Boulder Creek floodplain. However, on balance the weather is very manageable with 300+ sunny days a year, and the terrain is varied enough to be interesting without daunting a healthy though unathletic cyclist. The city’s scale is also very accessible, with the longest possible trip taking about 45 minutes, between the northern and southern extrema. Most trips are 15 minutes or less. However, what really sets the city apart is the infrastructure and the burgeoning bicycle culture. Just watch Boulder Goes Bike Platinum from Streetfilms, and A Day in the Life of Community Cycles from Ryan Van Duzer.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but whereas being a dedicated cyclist in Southern California felt like a heroic or sometimes Sisyphean labor, and often felt lonely, using my bike to get around here mostly just feels wonderful. It’s convenient, fast, cheap, and feels relatively safe. They plow the bike paths when it snows. Something like 10% of commute trips are done by bike. We have climbing lanes paired with downhill sharrows. The separated 13th St. contra-flow bike lane is blissful. There are sometimes (gasp!) signs specifically for bikes, telling you where the path you’re on will take you. This fall we got a couple of bike corrals on Pearl. Our cycling infrastructure can and should continue to be improved, but I think it might actually be more important right now to get more people familiar with using it.
I’ve also talked to people who don’t currently bike for transportation, but would like to. These folks are often outside the usual American cycling subculture demographic, which tends to be skewed toward young to middle-aged athletic and/or rebellious spandex-clad and/or tattooed males without families. In Los Angeles, I never felt I could recommend living car-free without reservations. It was clearly possible — I did it for 11 years — but it wasn’t always enjoyable, at least not in the way I knew it could be from living in Japan and bike touring in Europe. In SoCal, we were happy if we could just get the Powers That Be to recognize bikes ought to be considered transportation instead of (or in addition to) recreation, never mind getting them to make investments of money and space. Here, the City has been making those investments slowly over the past few decades. There, I was only really comfortable advocating the car-free life and its many benefits to people I knew, and who had a temperament to deal with the associated trials and tribulations. Here, I feel like I can unabashedly recommend utilitarian cycling to just about anyone. Here the personal costs are much lower, and the benefits — economic, bodily, environmental, etc. — are as great as ever.
I am wearing a sweater. It was made in Italy, from some of the fuzziest sheepies on the planet. New it cost more than $100; I know because it had the original tags on it when I bought it, never worn. I got it for $3 at a thrift store, because it was irresistibly tasty to the ubiquitous keratin loving Tineidae moths — like some of my other woolens, it has a few holes. That doesn’t mean it isn’t soft and warm. Last night my friend Elana got a cute little Smartwool top for $6 that would have cost $60 across the parking lot at Neptune’s: another 90% discount courtesy of the insect world. This is a repeatable exercise. How do these things lose virtually all of their monetary value, while retaining so much of their sweatery goodness? The answer I think, is that we have imbued many material things with powers beyond their physical existence. A merino sweater is not just a way to stay warm and dry while riding your bike uphill. It is also a way to signal to the other hairless apes that you are of a certain class, or even ideological bent. Our things have become a means of communication, a way of transmitting information. These are some very expensive bits and bytes.
I realize that this isn’t news. We’ve been doing this kind of thing with shells and feathers for almost as long as we’ve been human. I only bring it up because recently, I’ve found that the information these artifacts transmit to me has been turned on its head. Having a thing only implies wealth if you have to pay for the thing ahead of time. In a debt based economy, having a thing means you have promised your future labors to the Rumpelstiltskin thing-brokers far away in their tall sky scrapers. Today, to have a thing more often implies a kind of indentured servitude. A poverty of time and flexibility. And what other kind of poverty is there, really? What other kind of wealth besides the freedom to choose how you spend your few remaining days on Earth?
Continue reading For Richer or for Poorer: How Much is “Enough”?
Boulder has about 100,000 citizens, and about 100,000 jobs. Of course, a lot of us aren’t working. Some of us are climbing bums; some of us are four years old; and some of us are climbing bums staying home to take care of four year olds. 50,000 people commute into Boulder every day to work, and about 10,000 leave the city to go work somewhere else, for a net influx of roughly 40,000 workers, making up for those of us too old, young, lazy, or busy to have a so-called “real job.” (The kind you tell the IRS about). That’s a lot of people moving around, and a lot of lonely driving, since around 2/3 of those commuters are in single occupancy vehicles. If only there were more places to live in Boulder, especially more places that service employees could afford, maybe so many people wouldn’t need to move around. This is how the story goes anyway, and while it’s not quite that simple, I think it’s close to true given the 5:1 ratio of in vs. out commuters.
One of the few remaining large tracts of low-density land within Boulder’s borders is the light industrial area between 30th St. and Parkway, straddling the Pearl Parkway, between Valmont and Arapahoe. The northern portion of that area is now slated for redevelopment, following the 2007 Transit Village Area Plan (TVAP). The general idea of the plan seems to be to create an eastern downtown locus, and to eventually have an urban spine running through central Boulder along Pearl St. and Pearl Parkway, from 9th St. all the way out to Foothills Parkway, and to ensure that transportation within this urban core is functional by de-emphasizing the use of private cars and providing excellent connectivity to the rest of the city via transit, foot, and bike. Additional regional mass transit connections are also planned to this eastern core, including both BRT and rail. As a human powered urbanist, this idea sounds great to me, and much better than the ocean of asphalt and big boxes that 29th St. unfortunately turned into. I’d love for Boulder to accept the role of being a small city rather than a big town, while aggressively enforcing the existing well-defined geographical boundaries, and avoiding high-rise buildings. If we can pull that off, then we will have an interesting, beautiful city of intrinsically human scale, and I can’t think of a nicer kind of place to live. I haven’t been around for the years of debate leading up to the present situation, instead being preoccupied with graduate school, and unsure whether I would be staying long enough to actually see anything actually get built. But now I plan to be here, have the time to pay attention, and am interested to see what happens.
Continue reading Thoughts on the TVAP and Junction Place Village
I’m an emphatically utilitarian cyclist. My bike is my only ride. It is my way of going. It is point A to point B with a pile of stuff. But that’s not all it is, and sometimes I forget.
I started biking 20 years ago when I was 14 and living in Japan as an exchange student. It was how everyone got to school. Every morning was a flood of blue wool uniforms on classic bikes going clickety-click and ding-ding. Baskets, fenders, and not much in the way of gears. So it was utilitarian there too, but I also used my bike as an anti-depressant. I didn’t speak Japanese when I got there. My family didn’t speak English. All the other students were always busy with homework. I was lonely to the point of tears. Sometimes I’d ride around after school until dark. Sometimes beyond dark, in the rain and the wind. I discovered fireflies in a peace park one night. I let a typhoon blow me across the plain. I climbed hills and had crashes. It was a kind of love affair, it was something I could feel unabashedly good about, even if my host family thought I was crazy for staying out and getting drenched. It was deep rhythmic breathing and endorphins. It was still lonely, but at least I was focused. I felt free. When I came back to the US, I traded the circuitous hour and a half long school bus ride for an additional seventy nine minutes of sleep and an eleven minute bike ride each morning.
We watched a Long Now talk last night by Nils Gilman, entitled Deviant Globalization. I first ran across Gilman in a shorter talk from a couple of years ago about the global illicit economy — black markets. He describes deviant globalization somewhat differently. Trade can be perfectly legal, and still deviant. He used the example of US men arranging trysts with 14 year old girls in Canada… which amazingly could still be considered legal until 2008, since 14 was the nationwide age of consent. Sure, it was legal, but who really thought it was okay? So deviant globalization represents a kind of moral arbitrage. Demand exists for goods and services which are proscribed in different ways, to different degrees, in different places. Sometimes they’re socially taboo, and sometimes they’re outlawed, but in all cases there exists a kind of moral disequilibrium gradient that can be exploited.
What united all these extralegal commodity flows […] was the unsanctioned circulation of goods and services that either because of the way they are produced or because of the way they are consumed violate someone’s ethical sensibilities.
One of his main points is that the steepness of that moral or regulatory gradient translates pretty directly into profit margins. Cocaine increases in value by 1400% when you bring it across the US border. This creates incredible incentives to get around the rules, even at great risk. This is why Prohibition rarely works as a policy. Any attempt at eradication financially empowers those who are willing to continue taking the risks you’re able to impose.
Continue reading Nils Gilman and Deviant Globalization: The Graying of the Markets
David Montgomery‘s Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations reminded me a lot of When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce, except that instead of looking at how we have allocated our water resources globally, it focuses on the way humanity has husbanded (or not) its soil resources throughout history, through a vast array of case studies in what we got wrong. It also reminded me a little bit of Energy at the Crossroads, insofar as the last chapter or two, instead of being a concrete, level-headed outline of what we need to do if we actually want to solve the problem which has been presented, it devolves a little bit into a lament. You’ve convinced me there’s a problem. Clearly you have some idea of what the solution looks like. Please don’t be afraid to put that idea into words, even if you think the plausible solutions are so far removed from our current way of doing things that someone is going to think you’re crazy. I think a lot of the most credible solutions to our sustainability problems sound “crazy” to “normal” people these days… but that’s just the way it is. We still need to know what the available solutions look like, or at the very least, what characteristics one can sketch out which any available solution has to have.
Continue reading Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David Montgomery
I spent three-ish weeks riding around Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental on roads worse than the fire roads in the San Gabriel Mountains with Bryan. Las Barrancas del Cobre. Para conocer el otro lado. It was incredible. It was also I think, somewhat beyond the original design specifications of our rigid frame bikes (a Surly LHT for me, and a Traveler’s Check for him). The bikes performed heroically though, and we got through the whole trip with nothing more serious than a flat tire, a lost bolt (for which a replacement was had), a broken chain, and some worn out brake pads. With some bone rattling descents taking half a day, and spanning 1400m vertically (not unlike the Mt. Wilson Toll Road, except steeper, and in much worse condition) I got very familiar with the different sizes of rocks and ruts and hills and other topographic obstacles, and what they would mean as far as the ride. I also had a lot of time to think about why the hell Bryan was already up on top of the hill ventilating his nether regions by prancing around in flip-flops and a turquoise sarong, while I was still hurling obscenities at the inch thick layer of obstacle obscuring volcanic ash dust covering the road and often obligating me to push the bike up a 10% or steeper grade.
Ultimately, I figure it comes down to the absorption spectrum of the bicycle and rider in question.
In my previous post I described the stock and bond markets by analogy with a casino, but you might reasonably question the validity of that analogy. Are market returns really as unpredictable as coin flips? The real payoff probability distributions obviously aren’t binary; what do they actually look like?
After spending a number of afternoons and evenings with friends and family over the last few months reviewing their retirement planning and investments, I’ve gone and done something a little bit crazy: I suggested to the GSC at Caltech that maybe I could give a talk on retirement investing to the grad student/postdoc population. Incredibly, they thought this sounded like a good idea, and so now I’m scheduled to give a talk in a couple of weeks. I’m going to try and write it up here in prose form first, to get it organized. It’s gotten to be a bit long… so I’m going to break it up.
Continue reading An Introduction to Retirement Investing for Scientists