dr2blog

I’ve been paying attention to batteries for years now.

A big problem in talking about about bicycle safety and making safety-related laws is the pervasive opinion that “bicycles are toys, bicycle rides are recreational, that means their use is optional, their riders are frivolous, irresponsible, and unaware of

Sometime this year I crossed 50,000 miles of commuting to work and running errands on cargo bikes since 2006, starting first on a Specialized hybrid extended with an Xtracycle FreeRadical attachment, then upgraded to a Big Dummy, and then, also, an Xtracy…

I bike to work and to lots of other places because I don’t like traffic (and the Boston area has traffic) and I don’t like looking for parking.

About a year ago, I helped move some young relatives in and out of Boston, one leaving Chinatown, the other moving in on September 1 (locally, the day when most of the students renting in the area move in; it causes predictably awful traffic and parking p…

I managed to collect a video recently that might help explain “why protected bike lanes?”

For years I’ve heard people talking about how motor-assisted bicycles “are safer” because they can “match traffic speed”, but I think this is mistaken.

I wrote this up because I saw some articles that were obviously the result of someone feeding some bullshit “debunking” the Pinto vs Cybertruck catch-fire-and-kill-you comparison to some credulous journalists.

Cars are useful, but cars have problems.

(to 311@cambridgema.gov) Possible change to light timing at Garden, Huron, and Sherman.

The new bike light on Highland at Davis Square is hard to see and makes the intersection configuration more confusing; there is a risk that someone on a bike will not notice it, see the main light go green, and proceed into the path of a right-turning veh…

In words, there is a parking-proteected bike lane on the north side of the street at 1575 Cambridge (and Dana), and it approaches a crosswalk.

Just for a little context, note that I wrote this BEFORE Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

For my brothers, and for future me, who may find ourselves tinkering with this stuff (again!)

I am glad that Harris is our (presumed) candidate now, I need to add my bit to the wave of contributions that has been rolling in after Biden’s announcement.

I have good friends and colleagues in New York State, and visit at least once a year.

To: Omnissa <communications@omnissa.com> Hi, I wish to have nothing to do with your company or your new owners, and please sever all business relations, ESPECIALLY repeat billing arrangements, that we might have.

I’ve been copying the Covid RNA-in-sewage measurements from the MWRA’s website for a few years now, mostly so I could replot it on a log scale, but also to answer (vaguely, sort of, with caveats) questions about how we are doing.

This is just a brief (I hope) gripe about the popular idea that Florida will be “underwater” in not too many decades.

I’ve been in Amsterdam for a little over a week, spouse is in the middle of a long work trip and I am hanging out with her in her off time and otherwise I am touristing.

I started utility biking seriously, and regularly, almost 18 years ago, and since then I’ve put about 46,000 miles on large, heavy cargo bikes.

I am on Team Yimby because housing supply has not met demand for years, that causes prices to spike, and makes life hard for very many people younger and/or less lucky than me.

Thought I would harass y’all (again) about stuff I care about, I’ll try to make it short and not show too much of my work.

One thing that completely baffles me about some of the delay in doing things — for example, in building wheel-chair accessible ramps at train stations, or experimenting with different ramps and elevations for complex portions of bicycle lanes — is that for

A few observations changed my mind from “pro housing but we need deal with these problems” to “pro housing”.

This is one of those things that I never noticed till I did, and now I can’t not know it, and makes me internally snark at anyone in conventional US road safety institutions discussing/promoting “road safety”.

For a while I’ve believed that too much of popular (and sometimes legal) approaches to road safety are built around fairy tales.

Area under the curve versus peak height of curve Distance traveled is the integral of speed over time; that is, if you graph speed over time, the area under that curve is distance.

This time in the Boston Globe, spilling over to a receptive audience on NextDoor.

I’ve been collecting videos on my bike for years now, enough that I can collect them into collections with various themes.