People walk all the time downtown

In a four month span of time, 6 pedestrians were struck down in Columbia. Three were fatal, and one of the fatalities happened on the same day that two other pedestrians were hit (non-fatally) in separate incidents! As you might imagine, this string of wrecks has gotten a lot of attention.

Columbia is at risk for losing its claim as the best place to walk and bicycle in Missouri.

The police department is launching an education and enforcement campaign to improve pedestrian safety.

The Bicycle & Pedestrian Commission and the Public Transit Advisory Commission are developing recommendations to improve pedestrian safety.

The Mayor signed on to the Mayors’ Challenge for Safer People, Safer Streets that the Secretary of Transportation announced this month.

All of the incidents, both fatal and non-fatal, happened on MoDOT roads. While Columbia has actively improved conditions for walking and biking, MoDOT builds roads in Columbia the same way as in the rest of the state, without much regard for pedestrians. The Mid Missouri Roadway Safety Council is considering adding a pedestrian safety component to its programs.

I want YOUR help in making our roads safer for walking: walk more, and drive slower.

The more people who walk, the safer it is for all people who walk, as drivers get used to seeing people walking and looking out for them. You can make our roads safer for walking simply by walking!

When you are driving, slow down. The survivability of being hit by a car is strongly influenced by the speed of the car. Of course, slower vehicles are less likely to hit people in the first place! Especially when you are driving in an area where lots of people are walking, such as near a university or a school, slow down and watch for people.

Lots of people walk to get around downtown.

As my second quarter wraps up, I have a few thoughts about Sustainable Transportation (my online masters program through the University of Washington). Our current transportation system isn’t sustainable in any sense. We waste our time and our gas idling in traffic. Our cities are vast parking lots. As our roads and bridges fall apart we are more dependent on them than ever.

What’s the solution? That’s what my masters program is all about. There are many solutions.

I’ve learned about electric cars and hydrogen cars and hybrids. Hybrids are a step forward, electric cars are the next step, and fuel cells are the Holy Grail.

I’ve learned about transit and biking and walking. Even better than clean cars, this type of transportation solves not just pollution but also congestion and parking.

I’ve learned about mixed use zoning and increased population density. Biking and walking aren’t feasible without destinations to walk and bike to, and transit isn’t feasible without enough people to ride the bus. Even smaller rural towns like Kirksville could benefit from mixed use zoning and increased population density! A city doesn’t have to expand its borders when its population increases, if it can build more densely. That doesn’t mean sky scrapers and crime, but could mean accessory dwelling units (such as mother-in-law apartments). Trees and eyes on the street prevent crime, not gates.

I’ve learned about coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind, and solar power. I’ve learned about tidal power and offshore wind. Natural gas is tremendously cleaner than coal, but fracking is terrible. Nuclear is politically impossible. Solar and wind are expensive, but getting cheaper and cheaper every day.

We won’t achieve sustainable transportation entirely by biking, walking, and transit. We won’t achieve it entirely by fuel cell cars, either. We’ll achieve it by a combination of all of the above (except maybe nuclear power).

As I finish my 2nd quarter (of 6 total) and my 3rd and 4th classes (of 9 total), I’m eager to get started on the next classes, and more eager yet to finish the program and begin to implement what I’ve learned in making Missouri a better place– not just to walk and bicycle– but a better place to move in, whatever your mode of transportation (which ought to be walking and biking as much as possible!)

Strava Heatmap of popular bicycle routes near Kirksville

Strava, MapMyFitness, RunTastic, Endomondo, RunKeeper– there are lots of apps that do more or less the same thing. Using GPS, they track where you walk, run, or bike, and you can post the map of your ride to Facebook or other social media.

Which one do you use? It depends partly on what you want to do with the app and partly on what your friends use. Of course, it’s not necessary to record your ride at all. It can be fun to look up the % grade of the grueling hill you toiled up, or just to see on the map where you were. If you’re interested in how many miles you went and your average speed overall, a simple bike computer can do that. If you want to know how fast you were going on a screaming descent with the wind roaring in your ears, the app will tell you. There is typically a social aspect too, where you can see where your friends rode and share your maps.

I was curious about the Strava heat maps. Strava collects all the users’ data and creates heat maps showing where people are biking, running, and walking. City planners even use Strava heat maps for bike/ped planning. I used Strava heat maps to plan routes during my 40 Missouri State Parks bicycle trip. We discussed the use of Strava heat maps in my masters program classes. I noticed my brother was using Strava. So I decided to give it a whirl.

I hadn’t considered Strava seriously because I understood it was designed for competitive people. That is true. You can designate a race segment, such as the Son of a Beach Climb at Thousand Hills State Park. Anyone using Strava who rides that segment will appear on the Leaderboard according to their time through that segment. (The Leaderboard says that Brian Snyder climbed this hill at 19.7 mph! It’s all I can do to climb it at 4 mph. Did he have a motor on his bike that day?)

The first time I used Strava, I got Queen of the Mountain (QOM, or fastest time) on the “Proctor WB” segment! I wasn’t even on my road bike. Looking more closely at the Leaderboard, I realized that I am the only woman who has ridden Proctor WB while using Strava. That is not surprising. Men are generally more competitive than women, 3/4 of cyclists in the US are male, and Strava users are overwhelmingly extremely fit, white males age 25-50 (which highlights a weakness of using Strava for city planning). The Leaderboard is separated by gender, so it is easy for women to ‘place’ or achieve a QOM. Men get a KOM– King of the Mountain– and they are not easy to come by, as evidenced by Brian’s 19 mph climb of one of the steepest hills I know!

I’m not competitively inclined, and competition is not something that motivates me. However, the competitive aspect of Strava entertains me. And I’m glad to contribute to the Strava heat maps.

A Buddhist Temple is a surprise in rural Missouri.

This beautiful weather is too good to be true. I fully expected the recent cold snap to end by skyrocketing up to 90 °F with high humidity. Or, if we had any mild days, they would come with high winds as the next warm front or cold front blew in. Yet we have mild weather with no end in sight! A couple of rainy days, and it’ll get a little cooler, but ‘a little cooler’ is a far cry from the sub-freezing of that last cold spell.

Finally I can quit dreaming about my last bike tour and I can ride my bike.

I rode on the back roads out toward Hallsville and came across a Buddhist Temple in the middle of nowhere. It was the most surprising thing, far more surprising than the alpaca farm that had miniature donkeys, horses, sheep, and goats as well as alpacas. Alpaca farms in rural Missouri, it turns out, are common. I’ve biked past at least 3 this week. Buddhist Temples are not so common. I met a Cambodian monk-in-training wearing saffron robes with a hunter orange jacket who didn’t speak English.

I rode a short loop, and since I started using Strava, I discovered that I am Queen of the Mountain on 2 segments. I’m guessing that no other women using Strava has ridden the Creasy Springs Corkscrew, because although I didn’t walk the hill, I stopped halfway up to catch my breath! It’s easy to be #1 when no one else is in the race.

My friend Clink, who biked to Alaska last year, is biking to Florida right now. He left early in the season because it’s already hot in Florida. When I saw on Facebook that he was leaving, I jumped on my bike and rode to the edge of town with him. For the next 2 or 3 months, I’ll be eagerly following his trip!

Maybe this will be the year that I remember to wear sunscreen BEFORE I have a bad sunburn. The first ride this week, I forgot bike gloves, a headband, sunglasses, and sunscreen. The next ride, I forgot sunscreen. The last ride, I forgot sunscreen and electrolytes. I rode with some much faster riders who were polite and stayed behind me or else stopped and waited periodically for me to catch up. I had water but I only brought a banana, and I should have brought electrolytes.

On the last leg, I told the faster riders, “You go on ahead, I can find my way from here.” Then I missed my turn and had to climb back up the hill I’d just come down. I felt nauseous. I stopped, drank the last of my water, and took my headband off to cool my head. I went on, and felt nauseous again. There was no point in stopping because I didn’t have any more water, and anyway, water wasn’t what I needed. I needed salt.

At last I made it home and ate salty food but I admit it was pretty dumb. I should have called for a ride when I felt nauseous. I’ve known 3 people who ended up in the hospital because of electrolytes. How crazy would it be for that to happen on such a mild day! The high was in the low 70’s, and my bike computer said it was 84 °F on the pavement.

Enjoy this perfect weather, and stock up on the memories of it to tide you through the cold snaps and heat waves that are coming. Wear your sunscreen and remember your electrolytes!

Roasting an egg on a stick

I’m so relieved at the milder temperatures forecasted next week. I have spent too many days huddled indoors, dreaming of past bicycle rides and imagining future rides. Luckily, I have a good supply of vivid memories of my bicycle trip last summer that I took with my dad to 40 Missouri State Parks.

Memories of food are particularly vivid. I devoured an enormous plate of lasagna at Stefanina’s in Troy, MO, eating with Eric, the enthusiastic and effective superintendant of Cuivre River State Park. He got funding from Toyota, which has a factory in Troy, to build an ADA-accessible fishing dock. I looked enviously at the work already in progress after just a few short months, and compared it to the painstakingly slow progress of the FLATS trail at Thousand Hills State Park. (Both the fishing dock and the FLATS trail Phase 1 are now complete.) Stefanina’s is a beautiful Italian restaurant in a former Catholic church. The meal was all the more memorable when Dad suddenly yelled out, scooted his chair back, and clutched his leg. We looked at him sympathetically and without alarm– we knew he was suffering a leg cramp, a charley horse, a severe shooting pain in his calf.

Weeks earlier, when we reached Bennett Spring State Park, Dad had more than a charley horse. His leg refused to hold his weight at all. He leaned on me and limped into the dining lodge. I savored every bite of the almond-encrusted trout, and the chocolate cake dripping with chocolate sauce.

I had some kind of dessert every night. For the first 3 weeks of the trip, I had toasted 2 marshmallows every night. Then the bag was gone and I didn’t buy another. I had had enough marshmallows. I developed a salivation reflex when I saw golden arches. I dipped french fries in my snack-size M&M McFlurry while I uploaded photos and journal entries on the McDonald’s Wi-Fi. But the apple pizza we shared in Lexington was so sweet that I had a bad sugar crash while we toured Lexington Historical Museum.

We got creative with food. I spotted a tiny bottle of ketchup in a grocery store. When we stopped pedaling and took a break, I ate my boiled eggs with ketchup. We ate half a dozen eggs every day, scrambled for breakfast and boiled for on-the-bike snacks. We ate dozens of bananas, yards of cheese sticks, and gallons of V-8.

For a few days, Dad grilled steak and chicken over the fire and roasted potatoes in the coals. Then he decided cooking that way was too much work. We had a few more restaurant meals and instant food after that.

I wasn’t keen on the freeze dried backpacker meals, but they were easy and tasted good enough when I was hungry. At Lake of the Ozarks State Park, we met Tom, a fellow bike-packer who had had mechanical trouble that day and had arrived in the park with a bag of carrots and 6 yogurt-covered raisins for his supper. We gave him as much food as we could persuade him to take, including freeze dried beef stroganoff. Beef stroganoff, it turned out, was Tom’s favorite meal.

Food is one of my favorite things about bicycle touring. After a couple weeks on the bike, I have the most prodigious appetite. Not only am I able to eat a great deal, but eating is more enjoyable. Even mundane food takes on a certain flavor when you are burning a lot of calories. It wasn’t that I was hungry a lot– we rarely ran out of food. It’s just that I could always eat, and I loved every bite.

42 folding bicycles

I’m not anti-car. Owning your own private automobile is great. You can go anywhere, anytime. The problem is that an automobile takes up a lot of space on the road, in the driveway, and in the parking lots of all the places you visit. Each additional vehicle affects traffic congestion incrementally. There are several parking spaces in your town for each vehicle you own. Our homes used to have front porches and now have big garages, but our SUVs are so big that we still have to park them on the street!

When I was a kid, we packed a family of 5 into our 4-door sedan. We fought over who got a window or, if only one parent was present, who got to sit in front. Nowadays a 4-person family doesn’t seem to fit in anything smaller than an SUV.

Before my time, one car was enough for the whole family. In my day (imagine I’m saying that in an ancient, querulous voice), two cars were normal. Nowadays, every kid gets her own car when she turns 16.

There are more cars than ever before, cars are bigger than ever before, and yet cars are emptier than ever before. Each SUV is also an SOV: a single occupancy vehicle.

I’m not really an old curmudgeon (although I’m practicing). Like I said, the freedom to go anywhere, anytime is great. But it costs. It costs time, money, and space. It costs you individually and it costs our community.

For every car (including SUVs and trucks), there are about 8 parking spaces. No matter where your car is parked right now, there are 7 parking spots somewhere in town that are empty, waiting for your car! That is hard to believe when you are circling fruitlessly, searching for a parking space, but it is true.

That’s a huge waste of space. That space could house the building of a business stimulating our local economy. It could be a home for a low-income family. It could be a park with growing trees.

Instead, it is just empty, dead asphalt.

Every car adds congestion to the road. The amount of space a car requires per person is enormous compared to any other way to travel. Buses are the most efficient way to move people. Bicycles are also very space-efficient. Car pooling is pretty good too; of course the more people in the car the more space-efficient. Motorcycles and scooters are not as space-efficient on the road but take up less parking space. But SOVs (whether they are SUVs or smaller cars) are horribly inefficient on the road and in the parking lot.

Traffic jams are caused, not by an accident or a slow moving bicycle, but by all the SOVs.

Once upon a time, a car gave someone the freedom to go anywhere, anytime. When enough people had cars, each additional car took a little of that freedom away from everyone.

Bicycling gives me the freedom of going anywhere, anytime without the expense of an automobile. When bicycling isn’t an option, carpooling is space-efficient and time-efficient. I lose a little flexibility of when and where I go, but I make up for it in shared expenses and time, especially if I’m the passenger.