Riding Across The USA

Here's a photo of me riding across the USA on March, 10 1981.  That's my old World Sport.  I loved that bike.  I put 10,000 miles on it.   Notice the old fashioned click-click-click mechanical odometer attached to the front axle.

 (click to make the photo bigger)

The giant map i'm riding across is in Hodges Gardens, Louisiana; this was taken during family weekend (car) trip. 

Notice that on the map i appear to be riding from Wisconsin to Washington.  Ten and a half years after this photo was taken i moved (via car, sadly) from Wisconsin to Washington.

Capitol Hill Streets Missed in 10 Months

I love visiting places: seeing a new place and learning something.   It's why i love to travel to far away countries and why i love to bicycle in the city.  I get a huge thrill from just being in a place, any place, every place.

I've always loved maps, maps are such an amazing representation of real world data.  I love maps so much.  i have to admit in addition to the honor of being somewhere and the thrill of learning, there is a bit of an urge for checking off boxes too. I'm a collector.

As a kid, i loved coloring in states, counties and countries i visited -- i still do in fact.  And maps to me, are just screaming out YOU COULD BE HERE!   A street map is just a graphical set of places to be, to see, to learn about.  To color in!   Maps are to be drawn on.  When i was in high school i bought a map of my city and a felt tip marker and tried to keep track of every street i had bicycled on.  And later i got another which i colored in with every street i had been on in a car.  I covered quite a lot of the city.  I loved being there.

As i moved to Seattle, I started a streets bicycled on map, on paper with felt marker.  I kept it up for a long time.  I don't know how accurate that was and i eventually stopped coloring it in.  And any motivation towards completeism i ever had, any interest in being on EVERY street, was trumped by my belief in the reality, and beauty, of imperfection.

But i still wonder how many streets in Seattle i have bicycled on, how many i have missed. I'm always excited when i ride on a new street or new block.I know there are neighborhoods that i have probably covered almost completely in the last 20 years. When i first got my Washington Topo(tm) map software as a gift, back in about 2002, my first thought was to start coloring streets.   But i was too busy and didn't have the patience.  

What i did do however, was draw in bike rides.   Frequently at the end of a ride i would draw it on the map afterward.  I saved those over the years.  A couple of years ago my friend Kent gave me an old GPS unit, and since then i often take it on bike rides with me so it will draw my route on the map when i get home.  Sometime last fall i unconsciously got in the habit of drawing, either freehand, or with the GPS, my bike ride EVERY DAY.  Sometimes i would post them on this blog at the end of a ride.

Then in April i started merging them together into a full month of riding map for each month; this is fun because it shows a big mess of rides and that data shows where i go often, rarely, and not at all.  Today i combined all of my rides for October into one file and then merged that into the 2011 year to date file. 
 

It showed me that i've covered a lot of central Seattle. I've covered almost all of downtown.  I haven't ridden as much in Wallingford or Ballard as i have in past years, i've covered the bike trails and main routes around town, and ridden many different routes south to Bike Works.  This map is cropped so it doesn't show the routes i've taken outside of the city (i tried to post that, but the lines just weren't visible they were so small).  But there is something that really jumps out on this map. The large group of neighborhoods that make up Capitol Hill are so thoroughly covered that it's a solid mass.  I had to take a closer look at that.

Wow!  When i blew it up i immediately could see that from I-5 to 19th Ave E and from Madison Street to Interlaken Park i had only missed a few blocks.  So i made a map with only the missed blocks drawn in.

 

So without trying, with out even a thought, i've cycled almost every block in this 2 square mile neighborhood in just the first 10 months of the year. And that's only counting the rides that i drew in.  There are a few, such as the cemetery, that i know i did, but didn't get drawn in.

Since i'm only left with a couple dozen out of the 1,000 or so blocks in the area, i'm left with a quandary: should i just go about my daily business, not thinking about this and see how many of the red blocks i cover normally in the next two months, or should i set out exploring, see places i haven't seen in awhile, or have never seen, bicycle even more in my city. There is certainly a voice inside of me suggesting it is somehow more PURE if i don't go out of my way, but of course i can't resist the opportunity to explore. 

Check back at the end of November and again at the end of the year for an update.

UPDATE (end of November):
I covered many of the missed streets this month.

Purple streets are blocks i rode this month, but had not for the first 10 months of 2011.  Red blocks are still missing.  Yellow blocks are not drawn in but i'm pretty sure i have ridden them.  I'll do them again.  And the X's are blocks that the map says exist that don't really exist.

A lot of these that i 'filled in' this month, i covered in my daily travels, but quite a few i went out of my way to experience. In at least one case i took some friends along on a ride home from BikeWorks covering a section of 13th Ave E.

 I had fun plotting routes and exploring.  And it was good motivation to get out and ride.  I'm pretty sure that i had been on all of these streets in previous years, all but one or two blocks looked familiar.  A few more in December and i can call it a complete coverage year!


UPDATE (December 11):
This afternoon on my way home from running errands near the University i covered the few blocks connecting to 19th Ave that i had missed and then when i looped down the dead end on Pike St off of 18th i completed my fun task of picking up the few missing streets on Capitol Hill, so i covered every block of every street in every neighborhood on Capitol Hill in 2011. 

Thursday Night Route Choices

One of the great things that has happened in the last couple of years at Bike Works is the social aspect. When i started volunteering at the bike repair work parties on Thursday nights i always enjoyed the ride home. Those night time rides are glorious: the streets are empty, wet or dry, cold or warm, it's just so nice to be out in the night. But it was a bit of a downer riding alone.

In the last 12 to 18 months we've developed a nice group of folks who ride north together almost every week. It's an enormous amount of fun -- a bicycle gang running through the dark city at 10pm. It's social and all bike geeky too. We chat and argue and enjoy riding together. We learn from each other: from conversation of course, from riding styles, from bikes, and we learn different parts of the city from each other.

One of the very cool things about these rides is the way people slowly peel off the group as we roll through the city from neighborhood to neighborhood. We might start out with 6 or 7 people, someone will peel off after a mile, and then a mile later someone else will peel off. By the time we get to Broadway there might be only a couple of us, sometimes more, sometimes fewer. I'd love to see a map plot animation of each person peeling off.

Every week as we gather out front of Bike Works preparing to ride home, there is the issue of which route we will take this week. It's about 6 miles from Columbia City to Broadway. There are 7 basic routes with plenty of variants on each. Each route has benefits and drawbacks, supporters and opposition. We've ridden all of them, and most have at one time or another been the default route.

I draw many of my rides on my topo maps, and sometimes take a GPS with me, so i made an image with all seven rides on it, measured the distance and total climb on each. I was a little surprised that 5 of the different routes are essentially the same distance, one is a bit longer, and one is significantly shorter. I thought there would be more variance.

In blue, the beautiful Lake Washington Boulevard route is the longest at 7.0 miles and has the most climbing with 537 feet.

In purple is the zig-zag route, or the 31st route (i call it Melanie's route, because she's the one who showed it to me). It's 6.5 miles with 462 feet of climbing.

In green, the Beacon Hill route is 6.3 miles, with 495 feet of climbing.

In red, a little flatter is the city's official marked Letitia route. It's 6.2 miles and 399 feet up.

In white i've occasionally ridden via Renton Ave. It's 6.2 miles and 447 feet up.

In yellow, directly up MLK is 6.1 miles with 384 up, often seen as a 'quick' route.

And in black, mixing with the heavy traffic directly on Rainier Blvd the whole way is only 4.3 miles with 374 feet of climbing.

I usually rate the hilliness of a ride by calculating feet per mile of climbing. All of these routes come in above my arbitrary Seattle average of 50.0 feet per mile; most are around 65 feet per mile. Strangely that makes Rainier the steepest, at 88.0 feet per mile -- but probably only because it is so such a shorter distance.

August ride map

I rode 407.5 miles in August down from the 450 in July but up 2.9 from last year.
I rode on 22 days.

July ride map

In July i rode 450 miles, only 9 miles off of a record for July.

I rode 19 days, 61%, down considerably from previous months,
partially because i was out of town several times for work, or
HAM radio volunteering but also because i lost a little interest
early in the month.

June riding

In June i rode 498 miles, riding 22 days (73%).

roads ridden in May

In April i posted a map of all of my rides for the whole month.
Here's May. In May i rode 503 miles. I rode 26 of the 31 days (81%).

finishing up April

I didn't ride all 30 days in April. And i didn't write all 30 days. I did enjoy riding and i did enjoy writing. For completeness here are maps of the last five rides i did in April:

On the 24th i had breakfast with Joe & Amanda and afterwards we went for a ride down to Seward park. This was not like the laid back, casual rides i've been doing lately, we were flying! Joe & Amanda are very fast riders and i was just hanging onto Amanda's wheel for all i was worth! It was fun.

The next evening Auri & i rode to dinner, trying out a new Japanese restaurant on Pike. It wasn't anything to write home about. Nice ride though.

On the 26th i rode to Jeanette & Richard's house to play Settlers of Catan. The ride back at midnight was glorious, i had the city to myself as i rode up through the forest in Interlaken park! Didn't see a car the entire ride!

Thursday the 28th i rode to the Bike Works Vounteer Repair Party and we had a nice, small group ride home along the ridge together.

On the 29th Auri and i rode to have Sushi.

In April i rode 425 miles. I biked on 24 out of the 30 days, that's 80%. (I rode 59% of the days of the previous 3 months, including being sick for a couple of weeks and having my bike dissembled.)

This is a graph of the days i bicycled, and the distance, in each of the 4 months so far in 2011.

As promised, here's The full map of all of my rides in April.

...a close up of rides in Seattle in April

and a closer close up of rides on Capitol Hill in April.

How Steep is Finn Hill?

In the bike shop the other day, my friend Ryan and i were chatting about Finn Hill just north of Kirkland along Juanita Dr NE. (For 15 years i called it Juanita Hill thinking for some weird reason that Finn Hill was further east.)

Finn Hill, is a feature on many bike routes. It is one of the only ways to connect downtown Bellevue to the Burke Gillman trail north of the lake on an around-Lake-Washington ride. It's a fairly serious climb on what can usually be a relatively flat ride. I had climbed it south to north on an around-the-lake half century ride a few days before.

Some people curse it, others add it to their ride for the challenge. For me, i ride it to get from here to there. Holmes Point Dr, which drops down to the lake from the south part of the climb and then back up to the summit is one of the steepest streets in the region and is often used by cyclists for training.



I almost always ride it from south to north. Ryan and i started discussing the attributes of the two different directions. I usually am known for having a pretty good ability to estimate distance and climb. Ryan said that he found the southbound climb to be frustrating because it was steeper. I insisted that the northbound climb was steeper. I've ridden that hill dozens of times over a couple of decades and it's always been clear to me that the northbound climb was steeper.

So when i got home i fired up the Topo(tm) software, as i often do after riding.

Here's what i learned:

From the south it's about 3.5 miles to the top, 3% average grade, with a brief max at 8% grade.



and from the north it's about 1.5 miles to the top, 5% average grade, also with a brief max grade at about 8%.


Ryan was right. I was wrong,

I don't know why i always felt like the south way was shorter and steeper. I usually ride from the south, maybe that descent just seemed very long. The last couple of times i have climbed it at sunset and descended in the rain in the dark, which was pretty hairy.

Off the Freeway

I work at a bicycle advocacy organization. Among my tasks is answering telephone and email questions about bicycling in general and frequently those questions are about possible routes.

Today i got a request from a father in Bellingham (far in northwest Washington) who had a wonderful idea as a parent. His son graduated from high school last month and is heading off to college next month. As a way of symbolizing the rite of passage, and a (possibly last) chance to spend some time together, they decided to bicycle together to his university, WSU (in the far southeast corner of the state). I thought it was a great idea. (He seemed to need my encouragement.)  Neither are serious bicyclists, but they've been enjoying riding together the last year or so and decided to take on this very big undertaking (It's 400 miles or more).

His reason for calling was a routing question. He said,

"I know we go 100 miles down Interstate 5 to Seattle, get on Interstate 90 and go east a couple hundred miles, but i don't know where to go once i get out towards Spokane, can you tell me what turn to take?

There was a long, long pause as i gathered my thoughts and prepared for a nasty conflict.

The route he was suggesting was awful: 5 to 8 days of really miserable riding on Interstate freeways.  This is not that unusual; many people forget to stop thinking like a car when they get on a bike. Still, i was shocked... and nervous. I had a good suggestion for that last day of riding, (there is also a major highway similar to his suggestions) but i also had half a dozen much better routes to suggest for the first week.

I took a deep breath and started in... Stevens Pass, North Cascades Highway, White Pass, Chuckanut Drive, The Skagit Valley, The Centennial Trail, back roads, country roads, bike trails, away from the highways. Quiet roads.

I finished my monologue and prepared for the response. People get very defensive about routes and it's a strangely common reaction to be pretty angry at the suggestion of quieter routes.

I was met with silence. A long silence. A concerning silence. I wasn't even sure he was still there.

Finally he said,

"I'm really embarrassed, i've lived here my whole life and it never occurred to me that there was any other way to get to Seattle except on I-5... of course it would be nicer to ride on some of those other roads."

And why don't more people bike?

I've had the same experience in Seattle with new or prospective cyclists asking me about routes around town, assuming that the ONLY option was the nasty, clogged, smelly, loud, intense, motor filled arterial. Forgetting that the quiet streets, the neighborhoods, the pleasant and interesting streets even exist. Missing the point.

Cyclists need to stop thinking like cars. Actually i think everyone: city planners, drivers, developers, pedestrians, EVERYONE needs to stop thinking like cars, but it's amazing how often i see cyclists stuck in that car-think.