Hurricane Irene left an astonishing mess on Vermont and elsewhere, and I would never minimize that. One community there has had paved access to the rest of the world cut off, so they have taken to using an unpaved path into town, largely by foot. They drive or shuttle to one end, walk the half mile through the forest, then catch school buses or whatever on the other end.

The New York Times wrote about it here.

Hurricane Irene had washed away large stretches of the road down from Killington, Route 4. Huge craters left Route 100 impassable.

But on Wednesday, Aug. 31, at 7:55 a.m., three days after the storm closed down much of the state, the four school buses pulled up right on time, and off hopped 18 children from the dark side of the mountain (their electricity was still out).

“They were so proud,” Ms. Prescott said.

They had reason to be. Their families had discovered a half-mile-long forest path that they could walk, from Route 4 across the mountain to their school bus. At first, the woods were still and unsettling. “My hands shaked a little bit,” said Jillian Bradley, a second grader.

. . .

Porta-Pottys donated by A1 Sewer and Drain have been placed at each end of the forest trail. Volunteers sit under tent canopies supplied by Celebration Rentals, giving out sandwiches, beverages, doughnuts, gummy bears and red licorice. Six golf carts from Green Mountain National Golf Course transport the elderly and infirm. All-terrain vehicles from Central Vermont Motorcycles and the Hendy Brothers John Deere dealership are used for safety patrols.

Okay, so I’m a churl. But safety patrols? Nourishment? Porta-Pottys? For a half mile walk?? Are we really that helpless and pitiful when a half mile of our pavement is taken away?

–EBR

Why do we tolerate this in our city? Our freeway interchanges have far better landscaping — and shade — than this.

–EBR

A couple of years ago I had a case in Sells that required me to travel there with maddening frequency.

During my many visits, I got to watch ADOT complete the drainage project portrayed in the photo above. It runs alongside Highway 86, which bisects town in a long, hot swath. I remember thinking how it might be fun to ride a bmx bike into that drainage ditch, if only I owned or knew how to ride a bmx bike.

But crossing that drainage structure on anything but a bmx bike seemed a little daunting. And it’s not like there are many available spots to do so — it’s a long walk between road crossings.

So what I have been puzzling over for some time now is, what were the ADOT planners thinking when they designed this? Did it not occur to anyone that people have to cross this highway to get from the north side of Sells, where many people live, to the south side, where many of the tribe’s services and the stores are? (Satellite image of Sells here.)

Did the ADOT planners ever go to Sells? Did they build a model of this drainage system and look at it? Because it seems like if they had done so, it would have been really obvious that some pedestrian facilities should maybe be included.

I don’t know how much was spent on this thing and I don’t know how bad the problem was that it was designed to solve (I am hoping it was designed to solve an actual problem). But I do know that it shouldn’t take a wild-eyed, university-educated, free-thinking, bike-riding vegetarian pedestrian activist to notice that people in Sells might like to be able to walk across the high-speed highway that goes right through the middle of their town.

It makes you wonder if the Fourth Avenue Underpass debacle, whose awful design has been the subject of mitigation studies and the site of one fatality, was so unusual.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the traffic engineers could find a way to make sure these things stop happening?

–Erik Ryberg

I have a hard time paying much attention to a fellow who believes that art should never be publicly funded and who does everything in his power to keep his children from riding a bicycle on the street. He always sounds so cheap and mean to me. However, this is one of his rare pieces that does not attack vegetarians, which I found to be refreshing.

Erik Ryberg

How global warming contributed to the snow
A warming world increases atmospheric moisture, which leads to massive snowstorms

By Mike Tidwell

February 14, 2010

You can’t even find your car on the street, the kids have been out of school for days, and “blizzard conditions” is now standard weatherman talk in the D.C.-Baltimore region. So if global warming is happening, why in the world are we literally buried in snow?

It’s a good question, and thankfully, the answer is pretty straightforward. In fact, the growing pattern of extreme snowfall in our region has the fingerprints of climate change all over it — even as temperatures steadily rise across America and the world.

Let’s agree on one thing: Our weather has been totally unrecognizable this winter. Of the ten heaviest snow storms ever recorded in Baltimore since 1870, three have occurred in the last seven weeks. Before this winter, the city had never gotten even two storms of 19-plus inches in a single season, much less a trio. And we’ve shattered the old record for snowiest cumulative winter ever here, 62.5 inches, set in 1995-96. Philadelphia and D.C. have posted very similar snow statistics.

How could global warming be driving a pattern like this? One word: moisture. A warmer atmosphere holds more water. Plus, warmer surface temperatures are triggering more evaporation of ocean water worldwide. That water goes up, up, up into that atmosphere. And what goes up must sooner or later come down.

This is precisely what scientific studies are now documenting. Water vapor in the global atmosphere jumped by about 5 percent in the 20th century, P.Y. Groisman and his colleagues reported in 2004. This while there has been an observed, significant uptick in heavy winter precipitation events in the Northeastern U.S., according to a 2006 study. And all the while, global temperatures have risen sharply, including an average warming of 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the Northeastern U.S.

Consider further: We’ve had “Snowmaggedon” I, II and III this winter not because of record cold weather. The temperatures in our region have been only moderately colder than normal for the Mid-Atlantic winter. No, it’s because of record amounts of moisture here, pushed into our region by repeated Nor’easters. This historic wetness from the south has met cold-enough temperatures here to produce snow levels that neither science nor old-timers can recall.

Just last fall, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, established by Congress in 1990, predicted more violent storms in the Northeast due to climate change. “Strong cold season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent, with greater wind speeds and more extreme wave heights,” the agency said. So, yes, we are getting record winter precipitation events here even as overall temperatures are rising.

And, yes, there is the usual caveat: No single storm episode can be blamed definitively on global warming. But the overall trend — the shear freakiness of this winter weather — fits the pattern scientists say will only intensify with more warming.

Read the whole piece here.

–EBR

The looming death of this company may be the canary’s warning that our entire economy is swirling down the toilet, but we might as well gloat over it while we can.

Their arrogance, and their encouragement of arrogance on the part of their customers, against the scary, unsettling effects of global warming make it hard for me to shed many tears over their demise.

–Erik Ryberg

I have about 24 hours left to get this ice-bike.  I hired a welder yesterday to build me one, and a carpenter to build the platform.  Total for labor and materials is less than U.S. $100.00.  Whether these fellows will really be able to finish the job in time is kind of up in the air, this being Mexico and today being New Year’s Eve.  But I have my fingers crossed.

Today I am voyaging to Puebla, a city in the volcanoes about 2 hours away, to celebrate the New Year and sample some of the local specialty, mole poblano.  And to get my mind off whether these guys are going to have that bike done before I board the bus tomorrow!

Yesterday I had another horrible experience at the bike shop.  I was there to buy the wheel for the sidecar.  Naturally I also bought a rim-strip (they apparently use cheap plastic handlebar-tape for this purpose), a tube, and a tire.  At the counter I began mounting the tire with my fingers, just to make the whole thing easier to carry.  The salesman immediately grabbed it from me and began to mount the tire himself.

Now, I expect most of my readers know that to mount a tire on a rim you first seat one bead, then the next.  If you try to seat both beads at once, you can’t do it.  This is just about the very first thing you ever learn when mounting a tire.

This fellow, who worked at a bike shop, did not know that.  I watched in awe as he struggled and struggled with the tire.  I watched in wonderment as he braced the wheel on the ground, grabbed with both hands, fought and fought.  Finally he wandered off to get a crowbar (!) and I grabbed the wheel and quickly mounted the tire and ran out of there.

It is so odd to me, how ignorant of bicycles these bike-shop employees are.  The fellows who run the little bike mechanic’s shops are accomplishing so much with so little, and yet these guys in the commercial places, surrounded by high-end equipment, cannot even mount a tire.  Bizarre.

–Erik Ryberg

” ‘We have all the (bike) lanes and we have good weather,’ Mannheim told the transportation subcommittee. All the city needs is the bikes and the system for renting them to people.”

This quote calls attention to something.  The rental deal would mean that we have to share existing bike lanes with the people riding these things.  Some of whom, I am sure, would not be people that have much experience riding a bicycle around town.  Let alone a bicycle with a motor assist.

The program is geared towards getting carheads to make the switch to riding a bike.  That’s great.  However, the concept of renting these things out to people who are fresh out of their cars seems downright dangerous.

When I think about it these electric bike things are really just nicer, more environmentally friendly versions of the two-stroke “spooky tooth” bicycle.  The “spooky tooths” are a nightmare based on how I’ve seen people ride them.  They would be reckless enough on regular bikes but with the motor assist it’s really just absolutely scary.

Beyond that I am really not so sure how “green” these bikes really are.  Without solar panels charging the battery, these things are completely connected to the grid.  Even if they are utilizing the sun’s power to charge to battery, it still requires a great deal of energy to manufacture a solar panel.

Of course we here at TBL are just a little bit biased towards the purist form of pedaling yourself.  It’s the only true “green” way to get around quickly in our opinion.  Though the city should be investing more in transportation alternatives, I really don’t see electric bikes as the best option.  Why not expand upon the existing bike-share program to make it extend beyond the small downtown area?  If people are willing to come over from the Dark Side, they might as well do it all the way.

-lauren

–Erik Ryberg

And one other thing, that I offer simply to avoid more work. When a police officer stops you for, say, riding your bike on the twelve-foot portion of sidewalk between the bike rack and the street (yes, this actually happened to a client of mine, and he got a ticket for it), and he then asks if he might look in your messenger bag, THE ANSWER IS NO. It does not matter that your messenger bag is entirely free of stolen loot, body parts, bags of heroin, and automatic weapons. It makes no difference at all that you are, other than your sidewalk-riding, a law-abiding citizen.

The police have no right to search your property simply because you got on your bicycle in a safe place (the sidewalk) instead of a dangerous place (the street). Or because you didn’t have a light on your bike. Or because you rolled through a stop sign.

Indeed, if the police truly have probable cause to search your bag, they will not ask your permission. They will just do it.

By waiving your right to be free of unwarranted searches (which is what you do when you offer the cop your bag or answer “yes” to his question of whether he can look in it) you are opening yourself up to all kinds of problems and almost certainly a lot more hassle as he rummages through it. Is the bag even yours? Are you absolutely sure your boyfriend/girlfriend didn’t toss a pot pipe in there? Are you sure the cop himself won’t toss a pot pipe in there? (It can happen.)

And why should he be looking through your stuff anyway? Do you think he would let you look through his stuff?

You have First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights for a reason, so exercise them for chrissakes! Don’t let them get rusty! Take your opportunity to practice using these rights (hopefully some more than others) while the cop is writing you up for your sidewalk violation.

Seriously: people died to give you these rights, starting well before the American Revolution, and certain Clarence Thomases and Samuel Alitos are working very hard to take them away from you. So do us all a favor and give these rights some exercise to keep them healthy.

And don’t ride your bike without a front light that is visible for 500 feet to the front and, at least, a rear reflector visible to the rear for 300 feet when illuminated by a motor vehicle head lamp.

–Erik Ryberg