Bike Jersey or Does This Make Me Look Weird

Summer is coming, which means I get to take out my summer sweats. Much like my winter sweats, my summer sweats are made up of the cheapest possible stuff I can beg, borrow or steal. I have a shirt that I got from the team building fun run back in '04 and some shorts that I really can't wear around town anymore.

Sometimes I think about getting a proper bike jersey, but I dunno... is it reasonable for a guy like me to wear something like this.

http://cyclo-core.com/2014/01/cycling-podcast-illness-injury-motivation/

That takes some serious confidence to wear that. I am a pretty confident but, I don't know. I worry that if I wore something like that, I think I look like this:

http://wundergroundmusic.com/cyclist-listening-to-electro-imagining-hes-in-the-movie-tron/

But in reality, I would like this:

http://pixgood.com/fat-man-on-bike.html

Nothing wrong with that guy either. I mean, look at the confidence. He's getting in shape and he doesn't care what anyone else thinks. I am not that sure of myself. However, I like looking at stuff on the internet and I found a website  that allows you to design your own jersey.

I took at a stab at it. Here's the front:

I made this

And here's the back

I made this, too.

What do you think. Pretty sweet, right? If that doesn't get my confidence up nothing will.

Just a short post today

I saw this and thought it was funny. The liberty village bike is spot on. What do you think?

http://imgur.com/26JYZSC

Things might be getting better

When I started cycling, my commute was about 18 kilometers each way. I biked through some pretty hectic traffic and many people thought I was crazy. I guess you need to be a little nuts to drive cycle in a town that has actually reduced the total kilometers dedicated to cycling infrastructure.

Add to that the fact that there is open hostility towards Bicyclist in Toronto. Mostly from guys like this

http://www.news1130.com/files/2013/05/mayor_ford_350-188x250.jpg

Here is an example of open hostility towards Toronto Cyclist during a council meeting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nySs1cEq5rs

And if you think it's just politicians, check out the video that shows just how little regard car drivers have for Bike Lanes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQTNhTFFKXA

Every so often though, I get a little optimistic about the state of cycling. For example, it would appear that despite the reduction of dedicated bicycling infrastructure there is a growing trend towards two wheels as a viable mode of transportation. Strange that more and more people are bicycling, yet the city of Toronto is doing less and less to support this mode of transport.

Or maybe not. Meet the new Manager of Cycling Infrastructure

Photo from the Toronto Star

Her name is Jacquelyn Hayward Gulati and if you bike in Toronto you should be excited about her being named to the position.  She has done some great work with the Mississauga cycling infrastructure that has resulted in the City of Mississauga winning a bunch of awards for cycling infrastructure and fostering smart commuting.

These two pieces of news are the things that make me think maybe cycling in the GTA will finally be taken seriously and be embraced by the city and its citizens. Of course, I've thought this before so we'll just have to wait and see.

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helmet vs no helmet

I was reading a post on a sub reddit I visit that discussed the new California Bicycle Helmet law. Apparently, there is a lot people in Cali who are not impressed with this law. Some people made comments about how this law was going to negatively impact bicycling and would deter people from taking up bicycling as a mode of transportation.

I am all for individual freedom, however, I just do not understand how someone can cycle in North America and NOT wear a helmet. Here's why:

Over the 8 years I have been commuting regularly I have been involved in a couple of vehicular collisions. That's "Police-Report" for I've been hit by cars. The last one happened last year in fact. I won't bore you with the details, but I will post some pictures.

Here's my arm

Pretty bad road rash, but nothing to serious. I still have a few scars on my arm and they look pretty bad ass. 

Here is my leg.

Once again, not a bad a little road rash. It made it difficult to wear pants for a few days, which I thought was awesome, but my wife didn't. 

But these are just road rashes. And not really bad ones at that. Why am I talking about this on a post about mandatory helmet laws. Well, here's my helmet.

The reason I have only minor road rashes is because I landed on my head. Below is what my head looked like even with the helmet. I ended up going to the emergency room for about 6 hours and had a bunch of tests and x-rays and cat scans and other stuff (Yea, Canadian health care!). I was diagnosed with a mild concussion and sent home.

Those black spots are actual pieces of asphalt that had to be picked out by a lovely  nurse named Amanda.

The big topper on this, the person who hit me didn't event stop. They just kept on going, If I hadn't been wearing my helmet, I am pretty sure my injury would have looked more like this:

Good luck combing that over. That helmet saved my life and I just do not understand why others would ever take that risk. Cause bad things happen sometimes and when they do, they happen fast.

Do you even bike, bro?

Not that long ago, the Torontoist.com had a great little article on where people run in Toronto. Two guys used data from a variety of a GPS based run and cycling tracking apps and made a sort of heat map for most common routes and courses. The result is a neat little map like the one you see below.

All photos: http://torontoist.com/2015/02/where-torontonians-bike-and-run/

You can zoom in and out as you needed and overall it is a pretty neat idea. You can read the full article here.

Not sure if the Torontoist meant to do this or not, but you can move that map to any other town in Ontario. For example, I moved the map to my town of Milton. You can see it below.

Pretty small and not near as bright when compared to Toronto, but I like it. You can even zoom in and see if your most common route is highlighted, like I did here.

Like I said neat. So I started playing around with it and I found that the map is pretty exhaustive. You can look at the most common routes for cities like:

London:
Looks like people like biking along the Thames and maybe picking up some fish and chips

Chicago:
Lets go by the Waterfront and pick up some deep dish pizza or something.

Baghdad:

Lets go find one of the two people in Baghdad who own a fitbit.

It's actually a lot of fun to check out some different cities and see what sort of activities have been capture. Go ahead and check it out.

I got rights, man!

I get that as a bicyclist I take up space on the road. Space that others think should be only for cars, truck and buses.

I have been commuting by bicycle for the past 9 years. It is a great way to get some exercise as long as you don't die. You think I might be exaggerating but I've been hit by a vehicle four separate times. That's an average of a serious collision once ever 2 and a quarter years.

Which is why I tend to get really mad when guys like Mayor Jeff Graham of Watertown, NY decide to talk about bicyclist in his community.

https://www.watertown-ny.gov/images/pages/N81/graham_sm.jpg

He recently went on radio and suggested that anyone who rides in the winter should be arrested. You can hear the interview here. Most of it is just some Watertown resident rambling about sidewalk clearing (which I fully agree with, by the way).  However, if you skip to the 1:50 mark, you hear some real pearls of wisdom.

He ends his remarks by lamenting that we can't arrest people because we have "rights". This is what makes me really mad. I am not an activist, I'm just a guy trying to get home to see my kids. He makes it sound like ever bicyclist is a hard core political activist who uses cycling as a political counter culture blah blah blah.

I am not "exercising my rights" or "sticking it to big oil" or any of that crap. I just like cycling. I like cycling all year around. And when Mr Mayor McDumbdumb suggest that I am being reckless and stupid because I have a right to be reckless and stupid, other people think of me as reckless and stupid.

I just want to ride my bike.

You do fall down sometimes

This does happen every so often.

http://cdn.ebaumsworld.com/thumbs/natural/picture/1244713/84203138-1405052562.jpg

Outfitting for winter

I like winter bicycling. The cold never really bothered me too much and I like feeling like a tough guy. I saw the following pic recently and I thought to my self "Well, that's not right". The pic in questions was recently published in the Toronto Stars GTA section.

Photo by Toronto Star

It's a great introductory article on how to prepare for winter cycling. You can read the whole article here and it well worth the read. 

However, when I looked at the above pic closely, I realized my pick would be somewhat different. In fact it would look like this.

Now that's a lot of stuff crossed out there. Either I am the world most unsafe rider (which might be true) or that guy is Mr. Money Bags. Look at all those battery powered lights. That's 50 bucks in blinking lights alone. Now I do pretty good, salary wise, but I'm not making "Four Blinking Lights" money.

In the near future, I will do a post on exactly what I ride with, so you can decide for yourself  what level of safety you are looking to embrace.

Winter Bike To Work Day- Feb 13

I honestly believe that most people who think riding in the winter is hard simply haven't tried it yet.

Feb 13th, 2015 is "Winter Bike to Work Day". You can check out the link here 

You can register your location and see how many people in your area have committed to biking to work. So far, the GTA is not doing so great with just 26 people biking to work. We can get that up.

http://winterbiketoworkday.org/

When you register, you will be asked to fill you start and stop locations, but you do not need to give specific address information. For example, I listed "Milton" as my starting location and "Downtown Toronto" as my ending.

There is also a 2 question survey about your biking preferences. In all the registration process took about 3 minuets.

http://winterbiketoworkday.org/

There I am. I hope to see others signing up. Feb 13th is already looking like a pretty sweet day.

New Years Resolution: Stay Awesome

It get's cold in Canada. I love biking in the cold. The colder the better. My wife thinks I'm crazy. My friends think I'm crazy. People at the bus stop think I'm crazy.

My son thinks I'm cool, but he's 3 so what does he know. 

This is me.

That's ice around my mask and my eyebrows. Now I'll admit, when ice forms around your eyebrows, it's pretty cold and some people will think that biking in the snow is cold. but...

I'm not this guy.

http://imgur.com/MfAJh08

Which is to bad really, cause that is a sweet beard.