Qualified Perceptions

I no longer remember when I first started reading BikeSnob NYC, but he introduced me to a lot of important concepts and ideas about bicycling over the years, including things like, don't ride a bike that's so precious you'll be devastated when it's stolen. Periodically, he would title a post, "The Indignity of Commuting by Bicycle," and I appreciate those posts more often than I'd like to, because I do think that life as a bike commuter exposes a person to analogous sorts of microaggressions and indignities as other people report experiencing based on other aspects of their identity.

Anyway, we had that large snowstorm, back on January 25-26. Enough time had passed since the previous time the city had experienced more than a foot of snow, that people forgot everything involved in dealing with more than a foot of snow falling at once, and there has been a lot of haphazard chaos as a result. A friend of mine who is involved in advocacy for walkability, for instance, noted that it took a really long time for sidewalks and crosswalks to get cleared (full week and change); to add insult to injury, over the process of trying to clear things, the City announced it was going to be staging piles of snow temporarily in crosswalks. In the meantime, the City's efforts to declare a Snow Emergency to get people to move their cars didn't go as well as planned, and they wound up having to tow more vehicles than ever before (over 300!), meaning snow-clearing efforts even for motor vehicles were totally hampered.

As a result, many of the bike lanes that I use during better weather are still completely given over to car parking right now, because people parking their cars on the street prefer to be able to open and exit through the passenger side, and they can't do that if they park right next to the curb full of snowbank.

In the midst of it all, on a couple of mornings I have packed my avalanche shovel along with me, so I could clear out a couple of strategic spots: most especially, the post I lock my bike to in front of a coffeeshop, and a crosswalk that I know a lot of people use (myself included) but that no one appeared to want to take responsibility for, based on how it remained full of snow for a solid week after the storm. I actually worked on clearing that crosswalk on two separate mornings, because after my first clearing it became apparent that the path needed to be at least wide enough for two people traveling in opposite directions to pass each other, not just wide enough for one person.

Anyway, I've been using that shoveled-out bike parking spot very regularly ever since, whenever we head over for coffee after rowing practice. Every time, I thank myself for that particular round of shoveling. It's far more convenient than trying to lock up to one of the bike share racks, which really aren't set up well for conventional bike parking, possibly by design. See, e.g.:



Anyway, this morning while we were drinking coffee, and while my bike was parked in that spot, someone came along again and decided to rummage through my bike basket again, only this time they didn't actually take anything, they just pulled out my cable and smelly old running shoes. At least this time I have an idea of who the person was, because I had half an eye on the sidewalk from my vantage point inside the coffeeshop. Still, ugh, leave my bike alone (small-city problems; default bike security protocols would look different in NYC).

So that all just means it's probably time to just go ahead and commit to a different bike basket management system. I am thinking about designing something that can be more easily attached to and completely removed from the front rack, so I can swap in or out one of several different options, instead of always having the basket. But this is a pretty substantial change to make, so it may take a while to get that all figured out.

After coffee with my rowing teammates, I went to the grocery co-op. Last Saturday I was a little dismayed to see that although the parking stalls and walkways around the co-op had been promptly cleared, the bike parking wasn't.

It was even more dismaying to see that nothing had changed a week later, except evidence of other people also using the one end spot I tromped over to through the snow.



I realize this might not look like much, and indeed, this entire rack is far more accessible than the other bike parking rack which has all of the snow shoveled out from elsewhere piled directly on top of it, up to the tops of the hoops.

But there was also that clear evidence that I haven't been the only person continuing to ride my bike to the co-op to get groceries. And this is a co-op where there's frequent conversation about the limited car parking in the parking lot, so presumably there's incentive to try and get people to travel to the co-op via other means whenever possible. That just makes it feel even worse to get overlooked, while knowing it is really a lot to do all this snow shoveling.

I was kind of tired and preoccupied with getting groceries, so I also really didn't feel like marching over to the Customer Service Desk to talk to someone about it all. At this point most likely what will happen is I will pack along the avalanche shovel for the next grocery shopping trip, because at this point I'm pretty sure that snow will still be there next week when I go back again.

So yeah, I'm ready for spring, why do you ask?