Thursday, 14 February 2013

After a day of honing a sales proposal and making bunches of sales calls, I was able to break away for errands and a ride at 3 p.m. First to the library to drop off some CDs that were due today, then a visit with Lucy Siefker at FiveRivers MetroParks to talk about volunteer plans for the season.

Before 4, I was on the Mad River Bikeway, flowing with the gusty winds from the southwest. At Eastwood, I crossed the lagoon and zipped up the rough underlayment for the new bike path toward Huffman Dam.Though the paving carried me only to the well field overlook of the Harshman Mansion, I saw significant developments.

• The tunnel underneath the active railway is fully excavated and all the obstructing wiring had been relocated.
• The 20-ft descent to the tunnel is cut away into a flowing curve that flows down into the embankment.
• The descent has its final sloping, though it is still a slowly drying, clay layer. Perhaps in the next month a rough asphalt underlayment can be placed.

My next visit to the trail has to be with my trail bike or the hybrid bike, so I can explore the trail between the railway underpass and Harshmanville, and from Harshmanville up to Huffman Dam. Doug Schauer reported that the underpass on Springfield Street has already been divided into one lane for bicycles and the other for autos.

On my way back, fighting the wind and winning, I met Lucy Siefker running the trail with her bud, Jorge Sanchez.

Ride conditions
Temperature: 46°F at 16:45
Precipitation: none
Winds: 17 to 22 mph (gusts to 31) from the west southwest
Clothing: Skinsuit, longsleeve undershirt, ankle socks, open-finger gloves
Bike: Lotus Legend fixed 48x16
Time: 00:55:00 (15:45 to 16:40) for 15.33 miles
Heart rate: no data
Bikeway users: 7 cyclists, 4 pedestrians

Scoping out your commute(Bike commute day 7, to work)

In an earlier post, I list the clothing and toiletries you need for commuting day-in, day-out. But you need to be ready psychologically too, comfortable in knowing you can make it to work on time, certain of the route, and not so tired that your presence is less than the usual energy you need.

Scope out the route with maps. Do some homework with city maps, Google Earth, and the maps published by MVRPC and Five Rivers Metroparks.*Note: Both of these links go to locations that are in development while a new set of maps is being published. In the meantime, some older maps are here.*

Bike the route first on a weekend. Do it leisurely, and note the time at several checkpoints. Note the road conditions, especially if the route has areas that may damage tires. Note where the ride depends on safe conditions with other vehicles, and where road crossings may have heavy traffic during rush hours. Develop a call list for alerting agencies of unsafe conditions, starting with the numbers for Five Rivers Metroparks (937-275-7275), the Miami River Conservancy District (937-223-1271), and the street maintenance official for each city on your route.

Find alternative routes. On the same weekend that you scope out the commute route, or soon after starting to commute, ride through some alternatives to your normal route. Even the bikeways have times when a section is torn up or when the river floods a significant stretch. It's really easy to take a wrong turn or lose your sense of direction while you navigate a detour. So find some alternatives when there's no pressure to get somewhere on time.

Get comfortable with changing a tube. With the increased mileage that commuting builds, you can be certain that you'll get a flat tire on some ride. Three of the four most common sources of a flat tire are broken glass, sharp rocks, and metal trash. No matter how much you try to avoid these, tires seem to be magnets for sharp objects. The fourth source of flats, and the most common for many, is low tire pressure. Always check the tire inflation with a squeeze of your thumb and forefinger. If there's any give, use a floor pump to add air and check the pressure. The usual pressure for a 1.25-inch tire is 40 to 60 pounds, and a narrow tire (about 0.75-inch) holds about 110 pounds.

So before you need to change a tube under time pressure or in cold weather—or in a cold rain, at night, with dogs snapping at your fanny—practice the change in your living room. And then change the tube for the back wheel, with its gummy black gears (if you don't keep them nicely clean and the chain lightly oiled). Change both tubes, especially if the bike has been hanging from the rafters or leaning against the wall over the Winter. Those tubes may be old and crackly if you haven't ridden in a long while. Change them! The practice will do you well.

Just remember that an experienced cyclist can change the tube inside of 10 minutes. That's a goal you can reach with just a little practice.

Commute record
Temperature: 31 to 33°F at 07:30, 30 to 32°F at 09:55
Precipitation: none
Winds: none to moderate, out of the east
Clothing: Top with 3 layers (Lycra longsleeve undershirt, skinsuit, arm warmers, and wool jacket); Bottom with 2 layers (skinsuit and Lycra tights); ankle socks. Closed-finger gloves. (Comfortable, a bit cool; fingers too cold.)
Bike: Trek 850
Time: 0:51:00 (approx.) for 12.5 miles
Bikeway users: 2 deer, 8 tree trimmers

08:22—departing from home.

08:35—passing the zig-zag up from the Mad River Bikeway. Winds against me, sometimes perhaps 10 mph.

08:47—passing the west gate to Eastwood Park.

09:00—passing the trestle remains at Linden. Long wait for signal at Research Boulevard.

09:13—arriving at  work.

Accessibility by bike from the Miami Valley bikeways

At the dinner meeting of Dayton Bicycle Adventures, I asked several people if they planned on commuting to work by bicycle. —Now I didn't ask everyone there, just those few sitting near me.— Most replies were along the lines of "I don't have a way to freshen up after the ride." "The distance is too far." "The bikeways don't connect directly enough." "The streets from home (or to the workplace) are too busy."

The last two reasons are a heart breaker for me, since we often celebrate the 300 miles or more of bikeways in the Miami Valley. But the reasons reveal an essential truth.

How the Bikeway System Fails the Suburbs
Here is the Dayton-Xenia bikeway system plotted over a Google Earth map. The brighter green paths are the Great Miami River Trail (GMR) and the Little Miami River Trail (LMR). The pale green paths are the Creekside Trail that connects the GMR and the LMR trails and the Ohio to Erie Trail that connects toward Columbus and northeastern Ohio. The blue paths are various trails that are presently incomplete, with plans from the MVRBC and Metroparks to complete them.

Click the image to see a larger version. Then click Back on your browser.

 With those incomplete trails, the Dayton area has these conditions.

•  Much of Kettering, Oakwood, and Centerville are cut off from the bikeways. 

• Northwest Dayton and Trotwood are effectively cut off from the fully-connected system, with the poor state of the bikeway adjacent to McGee Boulevard.

• Englewood and Union are similarly cut off, with the lack of a connector from Englewood Reserve to, for example, Sinclair Park.

• Huber Heights has access to the bikeway, but only at the extreme west edge of the city.

• Fairborn is also cut off, due to the inability to develop the right-of-way through Riverside and the Dayton well fields that otherwise would connect to the Huffman Reserve and the Huffman Prairie bikeway.

• Two of the four largest potential sources of enthusiastic, year-round bike commuters—Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and Wright State University—are poorly served by gaps in the bikeway system.

• And finishing our clockwise survey, the Iron Horse Trail edges toward The Greene, then feints westerly before it disappears in the recreational facility around Delco Park. Thus Bellbrook, once the area renowned for superb cycling roads, is left isolated, even from the Little Miami Trail.

I'm one of the very lucky cyclists, for whom home is less than two miles of quiet residential streets from a bikeway (in my case either the Wolf Creek Trail or the Great Miami River Bikeway) and work is less than a mile from another point on the bikeway (in my case Research Park from the Iron Horse Trail).

But I too look forward to the day when all the trails are contiguous. Some day the system will look like this, with the violet paths connecting the green and blue bikeways that exist now.

Click the image to see a larger version. Then click Back on your browser.

How the Bikeway System Fails the Commuter
or the Errand Runner 
I'm also lucky in how well my bike commute correlates to my auto commute. My 12.5-mile commute, which has 85% of it on the bikeway, is an ideal distance for combining transportation and exercise. With very little exertion, it is a commute of an hour and 10 minutes. With a training intent, it is a commute of 45 minutes. On the other hand, my most direct commute by auto is 9.5 miles and takes about 20 minutes. The same route by bicycle takes about 30 minutes at the highest intensity. (Though that timing is from my experience of more than 15 years ago, when I was much stronger—and less cowed by auto traffic.)

I know of only one cyclist who regularly commutes between Miamisburg and the Research Park area. I see him (Jeff) only during the "rush hours" of long Summer days, since his bike commute requires more than an hour door-to-door.*Corrections at the break.* I estimate that his auto commute is 15 miles, and that his bike commute is 20 miles. He follows the auto route in outline, going north to downtown Dayton, east, and then south to Research Park. But his bike route goes to the Dayton hub on the north side of downtown, while the auto route goes to the freeway junction at the south side of downtown. That lack of correlation would dissuade most cyclists from commuting. Other cyclists consider this 20-mile distance much too far for commuting, and I believe Jeff commutes by bike frequently only during the Summer.

The regional bikeways follow a modified hub-and-spokes design. The design has two hubs: Dayton and Xenia. Each of these hubs have five spokes. The Dayton hub spokes are...

• GMR trail north to Taylorsville Reserve and on to Troy
• Mad River and Creekside Trails to Beavercreek and Xenia
• GMR trail south to Miamisburg and Franklin
• Wolf Creek trail eventually to Trotwood and Verona
• Stillwater River trail through DeWeese and Wegerzyn Parks to Sinclair Park and eventually to Englewood

The Xenia spokes are...

• LMR trail north to Yellow Springs and Springfield
• Ohio and Erie trail to Charleston and London
• Ohio Mound trail to Jamestown and eventually to Washington Court House
• LMR trail south to Waynesville and Loveland
• Creekside and Mad River trails to Dayton

The hub-spokes system works well enough if you want to ride from the periphery to the center, or from the center to one of the spoke ends. But what if you want to bicycle for an errand to a neighboring town, for example from Miamisburg to Centerville, or from Vandalia to Englewood? Then you have to bike to the hub and out on an adjacent spoke.

I'll offer an idea in another post.

Sunday ride, no commute

Sunday was a super day. First, it was the last day of Winter, hurray! Second, my neighbors Frank and Kay were hosting a game day in the afternoon, meaning fun and good times with several regulars. And third, the weather was good for a spin around the bikeways.

So I pumped up the tires on my Lotus fixed-gear, because I believed—or rather, hoped—that the bikeways were sufficiently cleared of debris to offer no problems to its smaller and thinner tires. I left the house at about 11:45 and headed through the neighborhood, across Salem, down Grafton, across the Monument Avenue Bridge, and down the ramp to the Great Miami Bikeway. So far, nothing differing from my commute route.

During this warm-up, I had wondered, Hmm. Should I go to the gym? No, there's not enough time for even a two set workout. So I guess I'll head south, though the way may be messy, as high as the river has been. So my direction was set as I cleared the ramp.

Well below street level, inside the shelter of the high retaining wall between street level and the river bank, I could feel ripples and eddies of wind. The pylons and plinths supporting the freeway overpasses prevented any immediate perception of wind speed and direction. Down on this level, areas of dust-mud and debris indicated that my choice of the Lotus was questionable—I would have to keep a close watch to avoid occasional trash on the way. Further south along the bikeway, some new construction access had been cleared recently, leaving a long 50 feet of navigation through stones.

As the bikeway lifted just north of Stewart Street, the crosswinds were light but noticeable, and became more evident as the path opened out at the approach to Carillon Park. The bikeway curves toward the west, and the wind gradully addressed my face. Good thing I'm taking this on the way out. My return should be just a bit easier, if the winds don't shift.

Beyond Carillon Park, the bikeway drops again near river level and turns south along a large silt meadow. A copse of river birches standing between the meadow and the river still held nests of debris from the floods, as high as seven feet above the bikeway. But the way was clear, and freshly sawn flotsam wood was evidence of hard work by the Five Rivers Metroparks crews over the past week.

At the turn from River Road, two dozen cars were parked along the road, and they indicated that the University of Dayton crews were doing their river work today—indeed, Spring has come. The bikeway passes close by their sheds, and two teams carried their sculls across the way, down to their dock. Others were already rowing, and still another team or two had yet to ready their craft for portage to the dock.

A half mile further south, I turned to check traffic near the public boat dock and I noticed another cyclist about a hundred feet behind me. I crossed the intersection and picked up speed for the cruise along the levee toward West Carrollton, expecting a hello and a bit of conversation. But the cyclist never cleared my shoulder, and instead took advantage of my slipstream. I kept my pace until, close to my turnaround, I needed to clear my sinuses. I motioned to him to pass me, emptied out twice—like a farmer on his tractor, and then pulled off into the shelter area. 9.28 miles was my halfway point, and a chance to ride easily and speedily back home.