PSA: Traffic Circles, Revisited

A while back I published the rules to bicycle traffic circles. I'm sure somebody else has published them too, like maybe DMV or the California Penal Code, but I figured as a public service I would bring the guidelines to my own enormous readership. It seems, however, that my instructions may have been a bit vague, and people keep nearly running over me from unexpected directions. Therefore, I offer the following, more specific advice:

If you are hellbent on demonstrating your free spirit through the use of some sort of non-bike transportation (razor scooter, skateboard, lawn mower, golf cart, bizarre snakeboard thing, UPS truck...) you are actually not exempt from the rules that govern bikes. Maybe technically you are, I haven't looked it up, but going backwards through the circle will still result in a pileup and subsequent beatdown at the hands of angry kickstand-having mofos. In fact, you should probably be more inclined to obey, since of the forms of transportation listed only the razor scooter and golf cart are known to have brakes. I make no apologies to the UPS truck here.

The pack attitude has its advantages, namely safety around predators and aerodynamics. Neither would hopefully apply on the way to grab a tofurkey burger after class. In this context, packs tend to result in congestion and domino crashes. They do, however, allow for excellent networking before the crash and something to talk about later.

Pedestrians: You can almost do whatever the hell you please. I'm going to step down to a slightly lower soapbox and give you some reign here. All I ask is that when you're walking through a busy intersection, you at least act like you're in a busy intersection. I know that you think it looks mega chic to ignore your surroundings, but it's gonna bang up your cool real bad when I deliver you this flying head-butt I've been working on.

PSA: Traffic Circles

It appears that people are once again in need of my services. Unfortunately, those people are probably not the ones reading this. Oh well, the better to amuse me during the coffee break, I suppose.

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Egads, man, a traffic circle of +4 confusion doth approach! What to do?
There are basically two states of being regarding traffic circles: In the circle and not in the circle. Whenever you change from one state to the other, you are merging. Merge, fool. Do not plunge. Do not dart. Do not bisect. Neither shalt thou count two whilst chatting with your friend, excepting that thou then proceedeth your arse out of the intersection.

Simple? Done.

The Evils of the Kickstand

Ah, beautiful order.


So you have a kickstand on your fancy little bicycle, and that's cool. Lets you prop up the bike and all. The thing is, it lets your prop it up just about anywhere, free standing. Why would you want to do that? Bikes locked to just themselves get stolen, friend. The 1950's phoned up, and they sound pissed. I think they want their trust in their fellow man back.

More importantly, sometimes people don't know what's good for them. Or maybe it's that they don't know what's good for other people. Or more likely, they're just being inconsiderate. The second problem with being able to deploy a kickstand is that people tend to leave their bikes right smack in the middle of things and clog up the works. Bike racks (and I work on a biking campus, there are thousands and thousands of bike racks) are formed in nice little lines that would please the fire marshal if ever there were some sort of crazy outdoor bicycle parking fire. Even if there are no racks handy, there's nothing wrong with leaning your bike up against a wall or a tree. Not only do you eliminate 2 lbs of unnecessary metal from your ride, but leaning your bike against existing objects helps keep it out of major pathways.

This all sounds very authoritarian, I'm sure. However, people have proved to me time and again that they can't be trusted to do it right, at least not on this score. Here are a few instances, just in the space near my office:



Nice choice of location jacktard.


200 bikes, and 2 idiots blocking access to all of them.

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This is about as thoroughly in the middle of nowhere as it gets.

My first solution to this was to disallow the use of kickstands on campus, or at least in areas where there are available bike racks. This is pretty much everywhere, as it turns out. Alternatively, we could treat the symptom rather than the ability to park stupidly by just removing bikes parked in dumb areas. This requires a lot more case-by-case enforcement, though. There's also that pesky issue of policing people's personal property when they aren't necessarily doing anything wrong, ie saying you can't have a kickstand when in fact you are one of the many responsible bike parkers around.

Fair enough, policy isn't really my style anyway. I'm much more of a vigilante justice kind of kid. And I know how to use JB-kwik. Henceforth, repeat offenders will have their kickstands welded into the 'up' position, or will be simply relocated to better commune with the local flora depending on how I am feeling and how well prepared I am.

Guilty!

PSA - Bike Fenders

Well this space is fast becoming a documentary of me acting like a know-it-all snob, but there are some things I just can't stand. People misusing things in stupid and less effective ways is chief among them.

This is your bike fender. You spent $15 on it so you don't end up with the freshman racing stripe painted on your ass when there are puddles on the ground. Congratulations, I applaud your purchase, and your resolve (or lack of automobile) that keeps you riding through inclement weather. Now let's go over how to use this thing:

Your back tire is kicking up mud and water. You would like it to not hit you in the back. You install a 3 inch wide piece of plastic between you and the tire. The tire is 2 inches wide and your back is 14 inches. Well, my back is, and I don't really care how muddy you get.

If you place the 3" fender right next to your back, all you've done is protect a 3" wide strip of your back, leaving an impressive 11" inches of you spattered in mud and leaving people behind you wondering who that skunk kid is. This would classify as a poor use of 15 bones, in my book.

On the other hand, lets say you put the fender closer to the tire instead of close to you. The downside to this is that you no longer look like you're sporting a hefty radio antenna on your ride. The upside is that mud isn't going to hit you. period. Here, I drew a diagram. It's all about cutting down the angle that mud can fly off the tire at.

Granted, the majority of crap will fly off the tire in the same plane as the wheel, since the wheel is spinning on a fixed horizontal axis. Go search centripetal force on wikipedia, I don't feel the need to explain it. However, there are other forces at play here, and unless your fender is placed in an idiot-proof spot, you will be branded an idiot. Until you wash your clothes, at least.

Ok, that was a lot of words. Now here are a lot of pretty pictures for you visual learners:

Good Fender

OK Fender

Overkill Fender

Stupid Fender

What happened, couldn't kick down for an entire fender?


I just plain don't get this one. Maybe some sort of winglet for aerodynamic stabilization?

PSA - your fancy umbrella

The stormy season is obviously upon us, and greets us with the open arms that are rain and wind. Fortunately us humans are a handy bunch, and we came up with these brilliant little tarps on a stick to keep the rain off of us. Then we way overthought the problem and figured out how to make our tarps break regularly.

I'm not here to judge how your umbrella looks. I'm not saying that a giant watermelon looking thing above your head won't get you hit, maybe by me, maybe by a total stranger, who's to say. But more than that, I'm saying nobody will need to hit you when your rig collapses and pokes you in the eye.

Take your basic umbrella. It's a 3 foot long stick with folding rods, and nylon stretched between them. A little collar on the umbrella neck slides toward the point and pushes the main vanes out using smaller little connecting arms. It took three lines to describe that, and they get more complicated from there. You have the ones that telescope, you have the ones that telescope and are spring-loaded (mostly awesome for poking your friends with minimal effort. Otherwise not that novel), you have the compact folding ones that bend in three places per vane, and then you have the super compact ones that either bend 21 times or are so small when open that you get to pick which shoulder you'd like to be dry.

Basically my gripe is this: unnecessarily complicated things are way more prone to breakage. We could probably even go back a step - things with lots of moving parts made of stamped and folded metal to questionable tolerances and of unknown material and origin are prone to breakage. The more parts, the greater the chance that you're umbrella is going to be doing its best imitation of a drawer of forks after an earthquake (and we all know what that looks like, sure...). I mean, the umbrella-frame antenna in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure didn't even last, and they had the knowledge and budget of the entire future world backing them.

The strongest thing I could dream up is basically a rigid, permanently open umbrella with maybe a rigid outer ring and some tension cables leading from the vanes to the stem to keep it from flipping inside out. Practicality, however, rears its ugly head. For those of you who actually want to carry an umbrella around, get the biggest thing you'll actually carry. Generally bigger = fewer folding parts. If you don't want the rigid-pole old-school kind, see if you'd haul a one foot long semi-compact. If you get caught with a busted umbrella that folds down to 4 inches, somebody might telescope it out and club you with it. Maybe me, maybe a total stranger, who's to say?

PSA: WD-40

In the spirit of the holidays, I bring you this PSA regarding WD-40.

"There are only two tools you need. Duct tape and WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't, duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, WD-40."

This has been bugging me lately. Maybe its because its the time of year when people feel obliged to buy gifts for, among others, the rough and tumble manly men who adhere strictly to the duct tape and WD-40 regimen. (adhere!) Don't get me wrong, duct tape and WD-40 are both terrific in their own rights. As far as I'm concerned WD-40 is the master of its game for what it's supposed to do. The trouble starts when people start declaring it universally helpful and applying it where it shouldn't be used. At this point you have a pile of guys thinking they've got it under control, maybe grunting a bit, and ultimately using a terrific invention to break shit further. For shame.

Let’s start at the start. WD-40 stands for “water displacement attempt number 40.” Forty was just the time that it happened to work. The job of WD-40 is to get rid of water. Along with this goes getting rid of rust and gunk, as well as preventing the same. If properly used it’s slick as hell. When it comes to these tasks, you’ve got the magic bullet. And it smells pretty good.

What WD-40 isn’t is a long lasting all-purpose lubricant. For that, you want grease, oil, graphite, Teflon, something not this. The thing about WD-40 is that it doesn’t really have staying power. It dries up, blows off, runs away, I have no idea what it’s actually doing, but after a while it just ain’t there no mo. The other (and significantly worse) thing about WD-40 is that it eats petroleum based things like some kinds of plastic and rubber. Like I said, it’s a bit of a solvent and it kills water. It’s not really meant to grease everything under the sun, tough guy. So before you douse your [whatever] with the yellow and blue can, remember that in two days your orings, seals, and plastic bushings may have turned to gum.

So what to do...how about this: If you own a hammer, a pipe wrench, and a tape measure and try to get everything done using only those tools, go ahead and WD-40 this hell out of everything. It's not really going to make it worse. If you own calipers, torx wrenches, a torque wrench, or gaskets of any sort, consult the goddam manual.

Gratuitous video of guy smashing WD-40 can: