On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

The 2011 Low-Key Hillclimbs are over the hump, with 5 of the 9 scheduled events in the bag. Each one has had near-perfect weather, with warm sunshine without being hot. It's been supernatural, almost. Week 1 is always stressful: after a long "off-seson", Low-Key returns to Montebello Road. I traditionally coordinate this one, more to take responsibility for the outcome rather than due to being qualified. Honestly, organization is not my strong point, and every year something gets overlooked. But I've had excellent assistance from Howard Kveck these past few years, and he helps keep things in shape when I stumble. Sometimes there's a bit of next-day revision needed on the results based on email feedback, but in the end we typically get them fairly good. This year things went even smoother than normal. Week 2 : a late swap with Barry Burr for week 6 (more on that) had me coordinating Sierra Road, as well. Biggest trick on Sierra Road is the start, which ...

The 8 November election in San Francisco will have 16 candidates contesting the mayor's position. The city will, for the first time, use instant runoff voting for the city-wide mayor's election, avoiding the need for people to cast multiple ballots in the likely scenario that no candidate would get at least 50% of the votes. Instant runoff works by creating virtual "rounds" of voting. Voters get a number of votes on their ballot. They list their first choice, then their second, then their third for the mayor's position. In principle there could be enough votes to rank all candidates (one less than the number of candidates), or more if you want room for write-in candidates. First, all candidates receiving at least one first-place vote are ranked, and the one (or multiple) candidates receiving the least number of votes are eliminated (assuming there's at least one candidate left). Ballots which had an eliminated candidate as a first choice have lower-rank...

I've been following the mayor's campaign as I've been able, and these look to be the candidates who will get my three votes: First is David Chiu. I wrote about him yesterday, about his ride on SF2G. David's been on my virtual ballot all along, either first or second. I don't think we agree on much on the proposition ballot, to be honest. I take a fairly hard line on bonds, while he was a principal supporter behind Prop B (street maintenance bond). So I asked him about this directly at the Potrero Hill street festival, noting that my "undergraduate-level economics" tells me funding ongoing maintenance with debt is a bad idea. He agreed, but claimed our present situation is an exceptional emergency, and the bond is needed to avoid much higher costs down-stream. I still question the city's discipline to remedy the revenue imbalance when bonds are provided as a cop-out, but I respect his response. We clearly disagree on Prop D, public employees fu...

One or maybe two times per week I ride the 42 miles from home to work with SF2G , a group of long-distance bike commuters which began with Google employees but has branched out to employees of other high-tech companies on the San Francisco Bay peninsula. Really there's no way I would be able to tolerate my commute if I had to take the train back and forth five days per week (or drive even one day per week). And the nice thing about riding is after a good ride in I feel fantastic: full of energy and alert all day. It's great; if it wasn't that riding got me into work on the latish side, around 9:30 am, I'd do it more. John Murphy's been an SF2G regular for longer than I have. This year he's had the audacity to ask three candidates for San Francisco mayor to join us at the start of the ride, typically 6:30 am in Ritual Roasters on Valencia Street. San Francisco is a city of around 800 thousand people ; surely mayoral candidates have better things to do wit...

Here's how I plan to vote on the San Francisco ballot propositions: Proposition A This is a bond to repair schools. Sorry, school repairs should not be paid for out of bond debt. They're an ongoing maintenance cost, and for those you need to raise revenue. I'm against any bond measure which isn't an obvious short-term expense for a long-term benefit. Repairs don't meet that standard. A bond would just rob the school system of future funding as more of the budget goes to paying the costs of this bond. Proposition B This proposition would borrow $260M to pave the streets, among other things. Sure: road maintenance is an important investment, but this is absolutely the wrong way to fund it. The city simply needs to find funds to pave streets from its annual $6.6B budget. If you fund maintenance this year with debt, you just make it that much harder to balance the books in future years as you pay the cost of that debt, and I don't foresee it getting any ...

In the 2011 San Francisco Mayor's Election (election day is this November, but early voting has already begun), there are 12 "major" candidates... from the LOWV debate: Adachi Alioto-Pier Avalos Baum Chiu Dufty Hall Herrera Lee Rees Ting Yee There are four others running: Ascarrunz, Currier, Lawrence, and Pang, but I think it's safe to say none of these four candidates is in the running, given their lack of representation in the debates so far. San Francisco switched this mayor's election to Instant Runoff Voting . The way this works is each virtual "round" the candidate receiving the least non-zero number of first-place votes is eliminated, along implicitly with those receiving no first-place votes. Votes lower than first place on the ballots of those who voted for this eliminated candidate are then promoted until either there are no votes left on the ballot (the ballot is "exhausted") or the new first place vote on the ballot is still...

When Cara said she wanted to go on a vacation I asked her where she wanted to go. Hawaii, she suggested. Hawaii. I'd only been there once: to Oahu for a conference in Waikiki. Nice riding on Oahu, but I knew we'd not be going to Oahu this time. There was only one island which could be on this agenda. Maui. Why? One word: Haleakala. Ever since reading the description in John Summerson's book, I knew I had to go. In the rankings, only three climbs in the United States have a rating exceeding 6: Mount Washington Auto Road in New Hampshire (6.45), Mauna Kea on the epinonymous island of Hawaii (6.33), and Haleakala (6.13). Of these, two have bike races. Of these two, only Haleakala is open to general bike traffic. Mauna Kea (and nearby Mauna Loa, rated 5.26) aren't paved to their summits. So of the four, the clear choice is Haleakala. There are several ways to approach Haleakala. After all, the entire eastern half of Maui sits on the mountain, which rises fr...

I want to revisit Jerry Brown's pocket veto of SB910 , Lowenthal's bill which would require a 3-foot passing margin when passing cyclists while driving more than 15 mph, and would further allow drivers to legally cross the double yellow line when doing so and when line-of-sight allowed: Here's Brown's explanation : On streets with a speed limit of 35 or 45 mph, slowing to 15 mph to pass a cyclist could cause rear-end collisions. On the other hand, a cyclist riding near 15 mph could cause a long line of vehicles behind the cyclist. This conclusion is exactly correct if the bill required a 3-foot passing distance and that the driver go no more than 15 mph. For example, it was proposed cyclists on the Golden Gate Bridge be restricted to riding no more than 5 mph when passing pedestrians. It would then become illegal to pass a pedestrian going at or in excess of 5 mph. But that's obviously not what the bill requires. In fact, nobody giving the bill more than...

First Jerry Brown vetoed Sen. Mark Leno's SB 223 , a bill which would have allowed cities to restore the vehicle license fee which Governor Schwarzenegger had eliminated during his administration. Whether or not you think cities tax too much or not, vehicle fees are fair and rational, because they help reimburse the city for infrastructure supporting motor vehicles. Further they have a negative impact on congestion, promote public safety by getting cars off the road, and promote demand for public transit which helps promote denser schedules. The bill didn't establish a fee, it merely gave cities the right to impose them. But SB910, the Lowenthal's bill to mandate a 3-foot passing zone when a motor vehicle passes a cyclist while driving at least 15 mph, seemed different. There was no reasonable argument against the bill, which had early flaws but which was, after several iterations, pounded into excellent shape. Amazingly, despite the opposition of the Republican minor...

The San Francisco Bike Coalition has been flooding Facebook and Twitter with posts supporting Proposaition B in San Francisco, a bill which would use a $260 million bond to pave roads. The population of San Franciso is 800 thousand , so that works out to a around $300 per person in the city. Now if you got a bill in the mail for $300 so the city could upgrade its roads, on top of the city's rapidly growing budget presently at $6.6 billion (according to last night's mayor candidate debate at UCSF), you might be disturbed. It's extremely unlikely if there was a proposition asking each citizen of the city to pay $300 for roads that it would pass. You can even pro-rate it as you will, make those with higher income, more property, even bigger cars pay more and you'd rightly ask: "but I already pay taxes for a city spending money at an all-time record rate, even adjusting for inflation, why should I pay more for such a basic service?" The proposition would cr...

Strava, as I've written many times, has been a real paradigm shift in cycling in the San Francisco Bay area. Riders compete for rankings on "segments", typically climbs, of various degrees of obscurity. As we've now entered the Low-Key Hillclimb season, I've gotten a striking metric of how much of a market share Strava is grabbing here. More than a third of the 121 riders in week one's Montebello Road climb uploaded their data to Strava. This brings up the possibility of using Strava for timing. Well, as I've described before, Strava's timing is far less reliable than a good-old-fashioned stopwatch. However, I have been batting around the idea of doing something for the 2012 series. The issue is some climbs require permits for events: in particular state parks and open space. "Event" is always clearly defined, and it's always a dance to have that definition include things like the Low-Key Hillclimbs but not include groups of frien...

Low-Key Hillclimb #1, Montebello Road, went exceptionally smoothly yesterday. It's always a huge relief to get #1 out of the way. at the finish line with volunteers; Han Wen photo Low-Key runs on a volunteer coordinator model. However, I always take the first climb. That's not because I'm the best coordinator (I'm not) but because I want to establish that I'm willing to do my share. This year I'm also coordinating week 2, Sierra Road. Week 3, Page Mill, is still open. I hope to get a volunteer for that so I can ride it myself, not losing too much fitness this month... There's always a few issues. This time I tried a new, for me, timing method which is to use the Ultrachron app for the Android iPhone as our back-up timing. Primary is Howard Kveck on his manual stop-watch. Problem is while in principle the Ultrachron app does what you need, the touch screen gets in the way, and too often I'd accidentally kick it into timer mode, losing lap ...