You don't have to be rich to cycle, but it helps

Graph from the RTA.

If you ask me, this has nothing to do with the cost of cycling - you don't need a $5,000 bike and lots of fancy equipment to go for a ride. Instead, this has everything to do with attitudes to exercise and obesity. I'll see if I can find a graph that shows obesity vs income - I reckon it will be the reverse. It's well known that the poor suffer much more from diseases causes by eating, drinking and smoking too much and exercising too little. In the old days, the poor were skinny and the rich were fat - now the opposite is true.

The above graph probably holds true for exercise activities that cost next to nothing - like going for a walk or a run.

It's interesting to note the reactions to Tony Abbott and all his cycling of late. Much sneering has come from the Labor party, which supposedly represents those at the left of the spectrum on this income graph. In the old days, this mob would have sneered at the nobs as they cantered past on their horses or in their landaus. Now, they sneer from their recliners as the nobs jog, swim or ride past

Lycra vs distance

The things you do on a Saturday afternoon.... I was browsing a report from Victoria that contains all sorts of cycling stats, and I liked this graph.

What I didn't realise until I saw it is that only 4% of bike journeys are over 10km. 100% of my bike journeys are over that distance - in fact, if you add up the two trips I make each day, it puts me in the top 1% as far as journey length goes.

Donning lycra for a trip of less than 5km is a silly idea. Not putting it on for trips over say 15km is also a silly idea. It's like when I walk from my car to the beach in summer - if I cadge a parking spot within a certain distance of the beach, I'll go barefoot. Any further out, I reach for the thongs. My feet are comfortably happy on hot concrete and tar for a so far, and no more.

So, if you see a "lycra clad road warrior" on the road this week, it's probably because he/she is putting in a few miles, and is not just toodling down to the corner shop for a pint of milk.

It goes neatly with this graph from the RTA regarding how many minutes trips last for.

Snot bracelet

Yes, it has been a slow week for posting. I've been laid out with the flu, and not up to doing much apart from grumbling and snoring in bed. I took a tentative ride yesterday, which turned out to be a big mistake. I felt like complete crap during the ride, and even worse afterwards. It took a few pills to tone down the headache that came on after getting home, and I conked out early and slept for 10 hours straight.

Today was much better. I woke up feeling chipper, and after a few kilometres, I found that I was largely flu-free. Apart from the green, porridge-like leftovers in my lungs.

About 10km from home, I hit a pot hole and scored an immediate pinch flat. That's where you hit something with an edge so hard, the tube splits. It's not a puncture, where something sharp penetrates the tyre and flattens the tube. At least it was the front tyre, meaning I didn't have to mess with a greasy chain.

It was pretty cool at that time of the morning, and the combination of a bit of riding and the cold air caused all the built up snot in my lungs and nose to come loose. After fixing the flat and putting the wheel back on, I thought I'd do a bit of nose clearing before moving off.

Big mistake. When you are moving at speed, anything you blow out of your nose tends to clear the body quite nicely. I managed to blow an enormous lurgie straight onto my forearm, where it sat like a disembodied jellyfish that had been coated in superglue before being applied to my arm. I tried wiping it on my knicks, but all that did was mash it into the hairs on my arm. I was just going to have to put up with it until I got into the shower.

Once I got going, it dried into a hard green crust that looked like it was going to require a paint scraper to dislodge. And then the left over bits in my nostrils dried into crusts, and I knew that I couldn't pick them off - because of the tyre change, my fingers were coated in black tyre and road dust, and if I picked my nose, I'd end up with tell tale black smears around my nostrils. I'd just have to put up with that too.

Flux

It's that time of the year - the temperature variation is starting to become an issue.

It was 15 degrees when I rode to work - needed a hot shower when I got in to thaw out the extremities.

25 degrees on the way home. Needed a cold shower and a cold drink to cool off.

Wednesday photos

Up again early this morning, only to face a day that was grim, grey and wet. As I sat at my PC eating a few Weet Bix and reading the usual round of blogs, the rain was pouring down outside. I read a few more blogs than usual and waited for the worst of it to pass me by. I figured I could at least start dry, but that I'd be soaked before I got to work. My biggest problem was deciding what to wear - to add an undershirt beneath my jersey, or just ride in normal summer rig.

I kept to the normal summer rig, which was good, as it didn't rain at all on the ride in, and I was sweating after 10 minutes. The humidity was 93%! The bloke above was a bit of a nong - it was dark enough for almost every car to have its lights on, but this cyclist had no lights or reflectors fore or aft. Just because you can see an oncoming car, doesn't mean they can see you.

The ANZAC bridge was wet and empty of foot and cycle traffic. I think I saw only 3 or 4 other bikes on the whole journey - 90% down on usual. The pedestrians were absent as well. Even the seagulls were in hiding. The wind was quite strong though - enough to have the flags on both bridges pushed out hard.

As Kae has been posting pictures of flowers in bloom, here is a shot of a street full of trees with red flowers - except none of them are showing up. Trust me - there are red flowers on these trees.

HMAS Adelaide in the background. It was going to be sunk as a dive wreck last weekend, but a judge ruled that the sinking could not go ahead. Bloody NIMBYS up at Avoca should all be rounded up and shot.

The ship in the foreground was offloading something white and powdery. There is a pile of it on the wharf, and the pile is surrounded by front end loaders that are scooping it up and dropping it into a line of waiting trucks. Sand? Fertilizer? Crack? No idea.

Posterity

I just had to save this comment that I left over at a Western Heart regarding the nanny state:

The ninnies are killing the daycare industry. In a few years, daycare will be either cactus or too expensive due to the plethora of regulations, policies and so on issued every month. Carers are quitting in droves due to the bureaucracy, stupidity and paperwork.

The problem is that the nannies have a job for life, and many of them feel that they must be doing something to justify their office, salary, budget and so on, so they keep on churning shit out. They should all be employed on a short term contract to produce something specific as and when required - like every few years. That would help to stamp this rubbish out. They all have this idea of, "I have to be seen to be doing something - otherwise, I will be out of a job". Trouble is, the fuckers are going to put everyone else out of a job first.

What it looks like to get hit by a car

It's been three years since I was collected by a car whilst riding home. This post over at Copenhagenize is where I grabbed this footage from a car test lab where they show bike dummies being whacked by cars. Plus a lot of gabbling in Dutch that I can't understand.

Have a look though at what happens to the cyclist when the bike is taken out from underneath them. They cartwheel to one side in a most spectacular fashion.

When I was hit, the car hit the front of my bike, so I didn't go onto the bonnet and into the windscreen. However, I was always sure that I did a complete circle to the left, landing on the road on my right hand side. A 270 degree rotation. Until I saw this footage, I thought that was impossible - now I am not so sure. I might have had enough angular momentum to flip all the way around with no bonnet in the way to impede my progress.

You can also see why I ended up with a wicked case of whiplash, which still gives me grief.

The bloke that hit me didn't see me - his brain simply failed to process what was in front of him. When you've behind the wheel, for God's sake, pay attention and keep your eyes open.

Bike flamethrower - must get one

Read about it here. Poor bugger got arrested. Perfectly sensible adaptation if you ask me. Can't see anything wrong with it at all.

Freaky photo

Try blowing this photo up and then look at it - as soon as I opened it, it did my head in. I can't look at it if it's any larger. This was not deliberate - I turned the flash off, and this is what happened.

It was another early start this morning. Beautiful sunrise over the city. It was good to get away early, as it was horribly humid and around 23 degrees. I would have cooked if I went any later.

Funny that it was Earth Hour yesterday. The importance of electricity was driven home to me this morning when my headlight went flat shortly after taking this photo - I need electricity to keep me from being run down by a car when doing an early start. A minute later, the batteries in the video camera went flat as well, so if I was run over, you'd never know who did it.

Cycling vs cars on 60 minutes

I haven't watched 60 Minutes in at least a decade. Found this by chance on their website - it went to air a few weeks ago.

After reading the transcript, they might as well have been interviewing me!

I've done a driving course with Ian Luff - have major respect for the guy. He's right about cyclists being idiots and going through red lights, but I don't agree with the whole registration business.

Bike lockers that work

Some of the bike lockers under the Town Hall building in the Sydney CBD. These are the best lockers I've ever used. They stuck them in a few spots where you couldn't park cars (and most parking lots have quite a few of these), and everyone who wanted to use them was issued with a padlock. It was first come, first served from that point on. If there were 20 lockers and you were the 21st to arrive, you had to lock your bike up the old fashioned way. That was a good incentive to get into work early.

I like lockers because no bastard can steal bits off your bike. You can leave your pump, bike computer, front wheel etc attached and know that all those bits will be there when you get back.

How much for a house in the US midwest?

Answer is here.

And how much for a house in Australia?

Who cares. It's unaffordable in most cases.

Any bets on how long Earth Hour will last?

Am I the only one who thinks there was a lot less hype and hoopla about Earth Hour this year?

I'm wondering how many more years this thing is going to drag on for. I give it 5 at most.....but then again, as the WWF is behind it, and the WWF is a tax-sucking cash cow, they can probably afford to promote it for the next thousand years.

I downloaded usage data for March from here, and looked at electricity consumption for the last four Saturdays.

I have cut the time period of interest down to 6pm to 11pm, so that you get a general idea of what power consumption looks like on a Saturday night. I've also changed the axis to a min of 6000 to provide a better view of the data.

So, can you see any significant difference between last night - the 27th - and the previous three Saturdays?

Here is a different view - I have taken 6pm as the base point, and then shown how demand has changed from that point.

There's nothing outstanding here as far as I am concerned. Look at the data for the 20th - the line falls at the same rate as last night, and it continues falling throughout Earth Hour. However, last night, demand fell a bit in the first hour, and then flatlined. There was a much bigger drop on the 6th.

why people get run over

Watch the bloke in the yellow shirt. Not once did he bother to look in my direction before wandering onto the road.

Riding around Darling Harbour

I couldn't be bothered editing this clip, so you get the whole 2 minutes (or however long it is) that it takes to ride around the back of Darling Harbour.

Why bother showing this?

I thought it might interest some people to see what it looks like to stay in a narrow bike lane at 40km/h. I tailed another bloke this morning, and we clocked an average of 42 on the flat for the whole distance. Not bad for two blokes with grey in their hair.

At this time of the morning, there was next to no traffic. It can be a little hairy when you have cars blasting past at about 70km/h (I think the speed limit is 50 - but no one keeps to it).

Effective camouflage

The Bay, sometime around dawn.

Believe it or not, there are two pedestrians in this photo. Look hard, and you can see them on the left.

A regular feature of our local "letters to the editor" are complaints from pedestrians about close calls with cyclists on The Bay Run. I wonder how many of those close calls take place in darkness, when the pedestrians are ambling around on the wrong side of the path, dressed in black from head to foot with iPods plugged in and blaring away?

A tale of two papers

We had a nasty end to a police chase this week - one idiot car thief smashed into a car being driven by what turned out to be another crim, and four people died. The interesting thing is how the SMH and the Daily Telegraph handled the story.

Let's look at the feedback from the readers.

The SMH published 8 letters on Tuesday on the subject, and I reckon that six of them were not supportive of the cops pursuing criminals. In other words, a typically wet, soft cock approach from the SMH.

The Telegraph ran a story and invited readers to comment, and they got 163 comments - a better sample size. I read through the first 60, and found only 1 that liked the idea of stopping police chases. The other 59 generally wanted car thieves to be flogged, jailed, flayed and so on. One even suggesting shooting out the tyres of criminals (and that wasn't posted by me by the way).

Either the editors at the SMH have weeded out all the flog-em and hang-em type letters, or the typical reader of the SMH really is a complete socialist dishrag.

My take on it is this - the SMH only really sells in the metrosexual parts of Sydney; no one west of George St buys it. The Telegraph is the paper of the western suburbs - the battlers. Where are most cars stolen? Out west. Who are the main victims of crime? Those out west. Who can least afford to be a victim of crime? The battlers out west.

Compare two families. You have your typical high income eastern suburbs family with two cars. The cars are fully insured. If one gets stolen, it's a hassle to get by with one car, but the family can afford taxis or a hire car. They probably took the option on their insurance to have a hire car provided in case of this eventuality. At worst, they can rely on public transport to get around. They can walk to their local shops if need be. The kids can also walk to school, as the area is quite compact. Their car is trashed and written off. Leasing a replacement BMW is not an issue - they have good credit, and the dealer brings the car to them for a test drive. The paperwork is a doddle. Car theft is a minor inconvenience.

The other family is out west. They are on the median income - $50,000. They have one car, 10 years old. It is not fully insured, as they can't afford the premiums. They certainly didn't choose the hire car option on their insurance - they couldn't afford that either. They have no public transport in their area. They can't get the kids to school. They can't get to the shops, which are 5km away. They can't get to work. They can't even get to the Police station to do the paperwork. The car is discovered, burned to a crisp. They get $5,000 back on insurance, and now have to go through all the hassle of buying a new car - once the cheque comes through. Until then, the breadwinner either gets a lift to work, or the pay cheque stops coming in. They have no spare cash in the bank - they are living off their credit cards already. The theft of their car could drive them into bankruptcy. It's an extremely stressful ordeal.

Car theft doesn't happen to SMH readers. Hell, half of them probably don't own a car, relying on a bicycle of train to get around. They probably applaud the destruction of each car as a way of saving Gaia. But it happens to Telegraph readers, and they're fed up and pissed off.

It's interesting to see just how far apart Sydney-siders can be, when they live no more than an hour apart.

Thursday photos

The cherry pickers were at it again today, installing fairy lights in this row of trees along The Bay. There's one bloke in the one on the left and two in the other. God knows what all this is costing.... and who is paying for it. They've been at it for weeks, with no end in sight. It's not like they're even proper trees - more like overgrown shrubs.

To the obnoxious twat in BKK 51C - even though your car is rather small, you were never going to be able to turn left from the bike lane. The bike lane is pretty narrow - even narrower than your car. How about you just stay in your own fucking lane from now on and not get in the way of everybody else?

I was very taken by the design on this jersey, as well as the definition in his legs. Yes, I am straight by the way. However, cycling has made me partial to a nicely cut calf muscle. My knicks must be too tight, cutting off the circulation to my balls.

A dapper gent in a suit on a very upright bike. I read a good article at Copenhagenize today about getting rid of the term "avid cyclist", and I agree. I am not an "avid cyclist" - I cycle, and I blog about it, and I do plenty of other stuff. We don't call the mum who drives her kids to school an "avid motorist", do we? Why should we stick that label onto people who choose to use a bike for some of their journeys?

Yes, he was even wearing proper shoes!

He zipped along at a reasonable clip too. I wouldn't want to travel any distance on that contraption and in that get up, but if he was only coming in a few kilometres on the flat, this would be the perfect way to get around. I was trying to get up close to read the office security badge in the back pocket of his back pack in order to see where he worked - failed.

Another jersey design that caught my eye.

And that was Thursday. We are getting down to the fag end of the week now. Monday always starts on a high, with the legs well rested and the bloodstream pumped with vim and vinegar. Once the muscles have warmed up, hills are eagerly looked forward to with the aim of getting up them faster than ever before.

By Thursday, the shine has worn off. Whilst the hills still have their alluring charm, attacking them results in waves of pain and exhaustion that start at in the calves and explode as they shoot up into the thighs. Reaching the crest of each rise brings on a crescendo of sweet agony from each leg. The downward slope provides a brief respite before the next hill looms up ahead, with the challenge of "can I shave a few seconds off this hill today?" Even if I can't, I still have a go.

Monday did involve a nasty coughing fit though - the crusty, green remains of a brief dose of flu had to be hacked from each lung, and they didn't surrender easily. The coughing was so bad, I thought I was going to vomit - which is not easy when you're on a bike and in motion. It felt like one of those 3am on Saturday vomits coming on - the kind when you've already chucked up the 2am kebab and the shooters, then chucked up again, working your way down through the cheap red wine and curry and then chucked again, finally reached the chips and beers that you had at the start of the night. As Abraham Lincoln put it, I was "down to the raisins". Bleah.

Might I just say...

...it's about fucking time, you lazy bastards!

SNN have released podcast 177. Always worth a listen.... even if a "fortnightly" podcast comes out about 3 months late...

The thing is, I downloaded it and then synced the iPod. The iPod is now frozen with the "Apple grimace of death", and I have to find the manual and work out how to reset it. Must be some meaty content in that podcast.

What the kids are studying these days

At Andrew Bolt's urging, I did a 20 question test at the Board of Studies site today. Took me 7 minutes, and I got 17 out of 20. Not bad for never having studied any of the material the questions are based on!

The second question was a pearler - and I got it wrong. Here is the question, and the correct answer. Have a look at the question. My answer was C.

The reason for that is this - although conditions were relatively crap 110 years ago, they are clearly nowhere near as crap today. The standard of living of almost all Australians has increased enormously.

The correct answer as far as the Board is concerned is:

Sydney had limited opportunities for the improvement of people's living and working conditions.

If that is true, why are we so much richer today? Why is that wealth spread through all strata of society? Why are blue collar workers today living in McMansons, owning 3 cars and a speed boat and having holidays in Bali? Surely, if opportunities were limited, only very few people would have been lifted out of poverty in the last 110 years.

Black armband history at its worst.