This was a big week for me: I wrote something that I'm getting paid for (only freelancers know how exciting that can be) welded something and made a pretty drastic change to my fixed gear bike (more on both later).
But this was a week for my miniatures, so, without delay, this summary:
Good Karma Bikes Has A Move Date & Needs Volunteers
Getting the final move date took so long you’d have thought Ted Cruz was filibustering at San Jose City Hall, but it finally came together: after being forced to change their banners on their ‘visit our new location’ signs, Good Karma Bikes’ finally got their move date. Even I had no idea where the new address was, so I looked it up on my iPhone and began drawing the map on an Expo board. Minutes later, I had the graphic and must give a shout-out to everyone who tweeted, retweeted and otherwise shared the image.
This move is only 0.3 miles but it’s a good long distance considering how much stuff needs to go. So please volunteer to help them pack (and you may even see me there helping with some boxes).
Stop Trying to Beat the Train
I would have to guess that Silicon Valley has a higher number of geniuses per capita compared to other places around the country and yet some still can’t understand that you can’t beat the train at a crossing. Amtrak, Caltrain, VTA whatever: it's the house at the casino, peeps.
These accidents are caused both by stupidity and cars just crowding the roads; there are too many motorists and too few incentives for people to bike to work instead.
When there were four incidents in one day I had to act as only a maturity impaired man with a box of 1:87 scale miniatures can. Happily, this got retweeted quite a bit.
And not to sound like a character on the television show ‘Silicon Valley’ - but when a car gets hit by a train it can be very inconvenient for me. That may not sound politically correct but because my wife takes public transport to get home and has to coordinate her commute with Marty-McFly-hitting-the-lightning-bolt-at-the-clock-tower-accuracy, I have to be ready to pick her up at whatever VTA or Caltrain station works that day. When there are serious delays I know I’m not the only person affected by this because that is what happens with cars: it is an interconnected system with multiple points of failure and one crash of one vehicle can affect thousands of other travelers: just look at 680 this very morning.
Put another way: it doesn’t make a difference how good the latest Tesla is if it is blocked by Nissan Leaf…or some other car...or blocked by a new car accident.
Area Woman Complains About Parking at BART
I have written about ways to solve parking problems for years and within minutes of seeing a My KRON4 news story yesterday morning about this issue I created this graphic (I was in the shop at the time and my miniatures from the Good Karma graphic hadn't been put away yet).
I just had the pleasure of writing my latest column for Blaze in the UK and for the next one I'm discussing how ridiculously wide a lot of streets in Silicon Valley are (a fact that wasn’t lost on me when I participated in the wonderful Viva Calle SJ event this past Sunday):
The way a lot of places work goes like this: we build infrastructure for cars, we get cars. A week after the infrastructure is built, complaints arise and new car infrastructure is built. Complains arise again, and…the cycle continues.
But it can’t anymore. The KRON4 story correctly pointed out that adding car spaces isn’t easy and is absolutely not cheap. So how about we get rid of car spaces and add a ton of good bike parking and make it easy for those who can do it safely to ride to the BART station?
Hopefully people who make decisions will see this question and seriously answer it - and that everyone in the Bay Area like Good Karma Bikes on Facebook and get ready to help them with their big move. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.
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