I'm happy to report a snippet or two of evidence that this blog has at least some readership among the route's customers.
The main such snippet is that on both the 2/15 and 2/22 deliveries, the "unresponsive" traffic signal that I'd spouted off about in this blog less than two weeks earlier, turned green _instantly_ in response to my pickup truck's presence! Voila, two minutes shaved off my delivery time; the easiest two minutes I've ever shaved off.
That had _never_ happened before at that particular signal, in my whole two years of doing the route. When it happened on 2/15, I thought it might be a freak, but when it happened again on 2/22, there was no longer any doubt that PennDOT had done something.
The prime "suspect" of who to hereby thank (just like in 2007 when he got a certain new "Motor Vehicles Only" sign removed from the ramp leading from Business Rt. 6 onto Rt. 11 northbound just west of Dickson City after I'd spouted off on the internet about _that_, thereby upholding cyclists' Right to Travel from Scranton to Clarks Summit, Lenoxville or Canada) is a certain customer on the route who happens to also be a PennDOT bigwig and cycling-event-participation buddy of mine, going back years before I became a paper boy.
A second snippet of evidence, this one admittedly less definitive, that customers might be reading this blog (or equally likely in this case: they read the obituaries in the 2/11 Times-Tribune) is that on the door of another customer, I found a sympathy card, which I also hereby thank them for.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark
The radio hams among my valued readers will know that the "sk" that I whimsically ended my last post with means "silent key". Sk is used by hams to sign off at the end of a transmission, or, less routinely, to refer to a deceased fellow ham. For example, "Silent Keys" is the name of the obituary section of the American Radio Relay League's magazine "QST".
My dad's call sign as an Extra Class ham is K3DM. I say "is" rather than "was", because based on the last time that I checked his licence at the FCC's website (earlier today), the FCC doesn't know yet that he's a Silent Key. And, based on what I'm suddenly beginning to learn: Shhhhhhhhhhhh! Each day that it takes them to find out, gives me that much more of a valuable delay in the start of a two-year countdown to a formidable deadline that I'm about to describe.
The only way to get that short of a call sign is to be Extra Class, which is the hardest-to-earn, most elite ham licence of all. There are very few Extra Class hams around, but my dad and I knew of one other one here in Susquehanna County.
This other Extra Class ham started coming around here to the Frost Farm in the last few days, telling me that I'm first in line to get the call sign K3DM and that I should try to get it before somebody outside the family snaps it up. Once the FCC learns that it's a Silent Key, I'll only have a two-year window in which to meet the important other (i.e. besides who I am) requirement for getting it. That other requirement is, I must become Extra Class.
Well that's a _very_ tall order. I, KA3CZN, have been sitting on the duff of Novice class ever since the 1970s, partly because my cows knocked over the dipole, but also largely because I considered the mere thought of trying to learn enough to upgrade to even _General_ class to be _intimidating_.
But several things happened in the last few days that have made me decide to accept the challenge. In particular, I've had it up to my _eyeballs_ with the various aspects of modern technology that are similar to the phenomenon that I vented about earlier on this blog, about how nose-ring-generation-type, text-messaging punks don't even know that what they're doing is way more complicated to learn than, and inferior to, Morse Code.
In one example, there was an editorial in yesterday's Scranton Times-Tribune that sounded as if _I_ could have wrote it; that's how much I agreed with it. It was by a guy bashing the governmental requirement for the switch to digital TV. The guy didn't bash the _concept_ of switching to digital; just the fact that it was being done by too-central of planning (which, for example, neglects localities that won't receive the digital signal even with the best equipment) and with the coupons for the converter boxes keeping the price of the converter boxes artificially high.
The editorial, together with other recent snippets from other sources, also confirmed my suspicion that the coupons are indeed a government subsidy to the industry. So, that settles it: I'm _not_ going to bother getting a converter box; not until maybe after my TV has gone dark for a few months and the converter boxes start showing up at flea markets for $5.
Another example, also from yesterday, was the straw that broke the camel's back:
I was trying to hang up on a recorded telemarketing call. The phone that the Frost Farm has been using for the last 10 or 15 years is pretty modern in my book, but it took that whole 10 or 15 years to apparently discover this thing about it: Right after hanging up, I picked it up again just to check that I'd indeed hung it up - which I had; the button had indeed gotten depressed and I didn't hear anything, and then I picked it back up and the button popped back up - but when it popped back up, instead of hearing a dial tone, I heard a resumption of the same recorded telemarketing call! I did the same thing several times, and every time, when the button popped back up, the telemarketing call was still there!
I was _infuriated_! For about the first minute, I thought it was some new insideous trick by the company making the telemarketing call, to prevent you from being able to get rid of them. I began scheming of tracking the company down and going there and _barging_ into their office.
Then after about a minute, the thing that I was infuriated _about_, changed: It dawned on me that more likely, it's the _phone_, and that perhaps it was designed to not terminate _any_ call, even when it's hung up, unless the party on the other end has also hung up. Or something like that.
I began fuming about the implications: If I'm correct in that theory, then it might not be as safe as people generally think it is to cuss associates out behind their back immediately after ending a phone conversation with them, because _what_ _if_ the other party can _hear_ you after you've hung up (even though, in my unintentional experiment yesterday, _I_ couldn't hear _them_ during the time that the button was depressed)?!!!!!
Granted, I almost never do cuss associates out or otherwise talk about them behind their back after ending phone conversations with them (I don't recall the last time that I did; I guess it was 10 years or so ago); but, it's the principle: Once that button is depressed, there's an expectation of privacy (and although I _guess_ they _can't_ hear me, "expectation of privacy" requires something _simpler_ such as _call_ _ended_).
And since it _took_ me the whole 10 or 15 years of using that new-generation phone to _discover_ that hanging it up (including making sure that the button is depressed, shutting up the voice on the other end) doesn't necessarily end the call, I'm wondering what _other_ back-stabbing tricks modern devices might be doing to me that I _haven't_ discovered.
In short, _screw_ _all_ other-than-good-old-Morse-Code, electronic communications technologies.
Or more precisely: Bothering to become any more computer literate than I am, is going to have to take a _back_ _seat_ to studying _ham_ _radio_, and studying ham radio _vigorously_ enough to have a _fighting_ _chance_ of becoming Extra Class in time to beat other hams to the call sign K3DM. (The still-living Extra Class friend has told me that these other Extra Class hams will be swooping in like vultures the _instant_ that the 2-year time window expires; call signs that short are _very_ coveted; the FCC doesn't issue them to _even_ Extra Class hams anymore except after the holder of one dies.)
And that's why I've reneged from what I said at the end of my Feb. 11 post, about how I'd give related updates (like my two posts of today) by doing an expansion of _that_ post - which, as it turns out, can't be done with this old Mac. Only the "New Post" field works; the "Edit Posts" field doesn't appear, but who cares.
My dad's call sign as an Extra Class ham is K3DM. I say "is" rather than "was", because based on the last time that I checked his licence at the FCC's website (earlier today), the FCC doesn't know yet that he's a Silent Key. And, based on what I'm suddenly beginning to learn: Shhhhhhhhhhhh! Each day that it takes them to find out, gives me that much more of a valuable delay in the start of a two-year countdown to a formidable deadline that I'm about to describe.
The only way to get that short of a call sign is to be Extra Class, which is the hardest-to-earn, most elite ham licence of all. There are very few Extra Class hams around, but my dad and I knew of one other one here in Susquehanna County.
This other Extra Class ham started coming around here to the Frost Farm in the last few days, telling me that I'm first in line to get the call sign K3DM and that I should try to get it before somebody outside the family snaps it up. Once the FCC learns that it's a Silent Key, I'll only have a two-year window in which to meet the important other (i.e. besides who I am) requirement for getting it. That other requirement is, I must become Extra Class.
Well that's a _very_ tall order. I, KA3CZN, have been sitting on the duff of Novice class ever since the 1970s, partly because my cows knocked over the dipole, but also largely because I considered the mere thought of trying to learn enough to upgrade to even _General_ class to be _intimidating_.
But several things happened in the last few days that have made me decide to accept the challenge. In particular, I've had it up to my _eyeballs_ with the various aspects of modern technology that are similar to the phenomenon that I vented about earlier on this blog, about how nose-ring-generation-type, text-messaging punks don't even know that what they're doing is way more complicated to learn than, and inferior to, Morse Code.
In one example, there was an editorial in yesterday's Scranton Times-Tribune that sounded as if _I_ could have wrote it; that's how much I agreed with it. It was by a guy bashing the governmental requirement for the switch to digital TV. The guy didn't bash the _concept_ of switching to digital; just the fact that it was being done by too-central of planning (which, for example, neglects localities that won't receive the digital signal even with the best equipment) and with the coupons for the converter boxes keeping the price of the converter boxes artificially high.
The editorial, together with other recent snippets from other sources, also confirmed my suspicion that the coupons are indeed a government subsidy to the industry. So, that settles it: I'm _not_ going to bother getting a converter box; not until maybe after my TV has gone dark for a few months and the converter boxes start showing up at flea markets for $5.
Another example, also from yesterday, was the straw that broke the camel's back:
I was trying to hang up on a recorded telemarketing call. The phone that the Frost Farm has been using for the last 10 or 15 years is pretty modern in my book, but it took that whole 10 or 15 years to apparently discover this thing about it: Right after hanging up, I picked it up again just to check that I'd indeed hung it up - which I had; the button had indeed gotten depressed and I didn't hear anything, and then I picked it back up and the button popped back up - but when it popped back up, instead of hearing a dial tone, I heard a resumption of the same recorded telemarketing call! I did the same thing several times, and every time, when the button popped back up, the telemarketing call was still there!
I was _infuriated_! For about the first minute, I thought it was some new insideous trick by the company making the telemarketing call, to prevent you from being able to get rid of them. I began scheming of tracking the company down and going there and _barging_ into their office.
Then after about a minute, the thing that I was infuriated _about_, changed: It dawned on me that more likely, it's the _phone_, and that perhaps it was designed to not terminate _any_ call, even when it's hung up, unless the party on the other end has also hung up. Or something like that.
I began fuming about the implications: If I'm correct in that theory, then it might not be as safe as people generally think it is to cuss associates out behind their back immediately after ending a phone conversation with them, because _what_ _if_ the other party can _hear_ you after you've hung up (even though, in my unintentional experiment yesterday, _I_ couldn't hear _them_ during the time that the button was depressed)?!!!!!
Granted, I almost never do cuss associates out or otherwise talk about them behind their back after ending phone conversations with them (I don't recall the last time that I did; I guess it was 10 years or so ago); but, it's the principle: Once that button is depressed, there's an expectation of privacy (and although I _guess_ they _can't_ hear me, "expectation of privacy" requires something _simpler_ such as _call_ _ended_).
And since it _took_ me the whole 10 or 15 years of using that new-generation phone to _discover_ that hanging it up (including making sure that the button is depressed, shutting up the voice on the other end) doesn't necessarily end the call, I'm wondering what _other_ back-stabbing tricks modern devices might be doing to me that I _haven't_ discovered.
In short, _screw_ _all_ other-than-good-old-Morse-Code, electronic communications technologies.
Or more precisely: Bothering to become any more computer literate than I am, is going to have to take a _back_ _seat_ to studying _ham_ _radio_, and studying ham radio _vigorously_ enough to have a _fighting_ _chance_ of becoming Extra Class in time to beat other hams to the call sign K3DM. (The still-living Extra Class friend has told me that these other Extra Class hams will be swooping in like vultures the _instant_ that the 2-year time window expires; call signs that short are _very_ coveted; the FCC doesn't issue them to _even_ Extra Class hams anymore except after the holder of one dies.)
And that's why I've reneged from what I said at the end of my Feb. 11 post, about how I'd give related updates (like my two posts of today) by doing an expansion of _that_ post - which, as it turns out, can't be done with this old Mac. Only the "New Post" field works; the "Edit Posts" field doesn't appear, but who cares.
2/8 and 2/15 Delivery Reports
I'm happy to report that I made the audience laugh a couple or three times during my speech at my nuclear-physicist dad's funeral. One of the times was after the part about how during his stargazing with us kids, his lessons to us included everything about the nuclear reactions going on inside the stars. I bungled the word "nuclear" about three times, then finally said it correctly, and then said, "At least I'm not as bad as Bush." The full text of the speech (written largely by my sisters but with last-minute editing by me - the exact opposite of how the obituary, on the other hand, had been written) can be found in the "Robert Thompson Frost" Guestbook at the funeral-home website, www.chadwickmckinney.com
I used a bike again on a small part of the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries. On both 2/8 and 2/15, I arrived in Clarks Summit from the south rather than from the north, due to all of the renewed yo-yoing to Philadelphia that I've been doing ever since getting the news in the late evening of 2/6 that my dad had slipped on the ice and had a stroke. And when I visit Philadelphia under _any_ circumstances and don't have time to _go_ by bike, the next best thing for keeping my sanity is to at least have my bike _along_.
This meant that the bike that I used on the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries wasn't the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike that I'd recently been boasting about fixing up, but rather, my "real"-cycling bike, i.e. the dropped-handlebars one that I do most of my cycling miles with. That's always the one that I have along on my trips to Philadelphia, because it's better for distance. Even the pansy, remote-start rides that I take down there (when I "cheated" by, as usual lately, not starting from Lenoxville) are longer than the one-or-two-block ones that I do for segments of the paper route.
This also meant that I had to contend with toe clips and the lack of a kickstand, which made the at-almost-every-house dismountings very tricky, just like with the time in September that I used this bike. It looks like I might wind up using this particular bike as opposed to the other one, more often than I'd planned (due to the need for my mom to be visited more often now and hence, more of a tendency by me to whimsically bomb the rest of the way down to Philadelphia while I'm at it after finishing the delivery, as long as I'm as far south as Clarks Summit), and therefore, I hope to get around to removing the toe clips and installing a kickstand (thereby making this bike very much like the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike) in time for this Sunday.
sk
I used a bike again on a small part of the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries. On both 2/8 and 2/15, I arrived in Clarks Summit from the south rather than from the north, due to all of the renewed yo-yoing to Philadelphia that I've been doing ever since getting the news in the late evening of 2/6 that my dad had slipped on the ice and had a stroke. And when I visit Philadelphia under _any_ circumstances and don't have time to _go_ by bike, the next best thing for keeping my sanity is to at least have my bike _along_.
This meant that the bike that I used on the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries wasn't the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike that I'd recently been boasting about fixing up, but rather, my "real"-cycling bike, i.e. the dropped-handlebars one that I do most of my cycling miles with. That's always the one that I have along on my trips to Philadelphia, because it's better for distance. Even the pansy, remote-start rides that I take down there (when I "cheated" by, as usual lately, not starting from Lenoxville) are longer than the one-or-two-block ones that I do for segments of the paper route.
This also meant that I had to contend with toe clips and the lack of a kickstand, which made the at-almost-every-house dismountings very tricky, just like with the time in September that I used this bike. It looks like I might wind up using this particular bike as opposed to the other one, more often than I'd planned (due to the need for my mom to be visited more often now and hence, more of a tendency by me to whimsically bomb the rest of the way down to Philadelphia while I'm at it after finishing the delivery, as long as I'm as far south as Clarks Summit), and therefore, I hope to get around to removing the toe clips and installing a kickstand (thereby making this bike very much like the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike) in time for this Sunday.
sk
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Robert T. "Thom" Frost, 1924-2009
The written-largely-by-me obituary of my dad was printed in today's issue, the Wednesday 2/11/09 issue, of the Scranton Times-Tribune, one of a few newspapers that we sent it to. A hair-less-edited and faster-loading version can be found at http://www.chadwickmckinney.com
Stay tuned for a likely expansion of this post later, after I do my third-since-last-Saturday motoring yo-yo to the Philadelphia area where I'm apparently the one who's expected to do the Remembrance speech at the funeral Friday. The tone aims to be jovial. Oh we do cry; just not when you're looking.
Stay tuned for a likely expansion of this post later, after I do my third-since-last-Saturday motoring yo-yo to the Philadelphia area where I'm apparently the one who's expected to do the Remembrance speech at the funeral Friday. The tone aims to be jovial. Oh we do cry; just not when you're looking.
Monday, February 2, 2009
The unresponsive traffic signal and what a CPA would do about it
The paper-boy CPA has done it again! Yesterday, for the second time in a few months, my timing was such that I was leaving the distribution center at the appropriate time for observing him do a certain thing. It's rare for any two carriers to happen to leave the distribution center in the same several-minute period, but yesterday, I was a half-minute behind him, thereby getting a bird's-eye view.
And sure enough, he did the same thing that he'd done the time in October that I'd happened to be in a position to see it. I would have used it as fodder for this diatribe _then_ if my home 'pooter hadn't just broken down then; but, it's just as well that instead, I had time in the meantime to more properly introduce him to y'all, in my "Our friend the paper-boy CPA" entry.
I'll save _what_ he did (which, I imagine, was the thing that any CPA would do) for the punch line.
Incidentally, I hope that this blog's "actually multimodal" subtitle confession shows up on most computers (it usually doesn't on this old Mac that I recently hooked up, but since my fan Mr. Ardelli informs me that the Mac's model number indicates that it's _very_ "old", I suspect that it shows up for everybody except me). That's important because, contrary to the "Bicycle Messengering" other part of the title, I haven't brought my bike along on the delivery again yet since the last times that I boasted about doing so. I'm waiting until I get around to scrounging another freewheel for it (maybe I will by next Sunday). Nor, even when I do bring the bike along, does my current paperboying state of the art accommodate riding it to leave the distribution center, because that's a part of the trip on which I'm hauling the full load. In short, this diatribe will be about a location where I'm always motoring when on the delivery.
But unresponsive traffic signals is a subject that cyclists often discuss, because usually when one of those metal-detector loops fails to detect a vehicle, the vehicle that it fails to detect is a bike and it has no problem at all detecting a car or truck.
That's a violation of the principle that a bicycle is a vehicle. On the Chainguard yahoo group, they call it a violation of "VC", or the vehicular-cycling principle, but I have an even more succinct thing to call it: It's a violation of the Triad, i.e. my proposed Bicyclists' Rights Triad http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm (which in my opinion is the only succinct _and_ comprehensive summary of all of the important aspects of the vehicular-cycling principle).
The traffic signal exiting the distribution center, on the other hand (the one for those of us who turn left onto rt. 11, by the video store, to be exact) is unresponsive in a way that _doesn't_ necessarily discriminate against cyclists: It's apparently unreliable in detecting _motor_ vehicles!
A separate problem with it is how long it makes you sit there even when it does detect you. In 2007, it could be counted on to waste a whole 3 minutes of your time, and then, since sometime in 2008, it's been only about 2 minutes; I guess they must have adjusted it. The simplest option of what they _should_ have done and which they still could do - to solve the problem at least for during these pre-dawn hours that we're talking about, when traffic is sparse - is simply change it to flash mode.
The part that earns this signal an F, however, is that about once every few months, it completely _fails_ to detect my pickup truck! I don't know whether this is because I'm 4-wheel-drive and therefore high off the ground; nor am I sure whether the way that I got the frequency of the problem _down_ to only once every few months was by getting centered in the lane further back.
The expert on the matter whether you're cycling or motoring - John Forester http://www.JohnForester.com - says that when one of these vehicle-actuated traffic signals fails to detect you, the signal is defective and, therefore, it's legal to treat it as a stop sign, _after_ you've waited long enough to be _sure_ that it's failed to detect you, such as through a full cycle. At this particular light, that generally means when, at around the 4th minute, a vehicle is coming out of the Dunkin Donuts parking lot on the other side of rt. 11 and the light for _his_ direction turns green, stopping the rt. 11 traffic for him but not for you, and then rt. 11 gets the green again and it still stays red for you.
_That's_ when, once every few months, I run it.
But by that, I mean treat it as a stop sign, _not_ _simply_ run it, and here's a textbook example of why: Out of the grand total of about 4 times that I've done so, and out of an about-equal-grand-total number of times that I've happened to see an unlit cyclist who seems to routinely cruise south along rt. 11 sometime around the time that I'm starting the delivery, the timings of _two_ of my runnings of that red light were such that, on both occasions, I would have collided with that unlit cyclist if I had simply hit the accelerator at the moment that I'd decided to go and didn't see any vehicle lights coming, as opposed to made sure to fully treat the red light as a stop sign.
(I only _marginally_ _saw_ the cyclist, both times. That's two separate near-collisions, 6 months or so apart, between probably the same two vehicles, with the same two errors constituting 50%, each, of the cause of each: Failure of a cyclist to use a headlight at night, and failure of an engineer/bureaucrat to make a traffic signal that's not in flash mode do its job of otherwise clarifying right-of-way.)
I imagine that the rest of the carriers are similarly careful when pulling out onto rt. 11 there (i.e. by looking _more_ carefully than the Triad requires, as the Triad only requires one to look for vehicles that have at least one headlight, at night), judging by how long that untriadally-unlit cyclist has lasted.
Indeed, one of the things that it didn't take very long for me to notice when I started being a paper boy, is that the brotherhood of paper carriers consists of generally more law-abiding of drivers than, for example, the brotherhood of bicycle messengers.
That's based on what little I know about bicycle messengers, which admittedly isn't much. All I know is that 1) I witness some of their unnecessary-looking scofflawry on my rare visits to places like Philadelphia, 2) a certain faction of my opponents on the cycling discussion groups (the faction that I've already done some bashing of on this blog) likes to puff up bicycle messengers as a better-than-you-or-me brotherhood and glorify the scofflawry thereof, and 3) there's probably little if anything to be found on the internet that's written by _real_ bicycle messengers, because _real_ bicycle messengers probably don't have time for the mouse-potatoing, and therefore, everything that's written about them by my opponents in (2) (and even by other wannabes, such as myself) can be taken with a grain of salt.
So, in order to learn more, one of the things that I pipe dreamed for 20 years of doing for just a couple of weeks as a vacation sometime (but I've still never gotten around to doing so), was going to be to find some vagrantage somewhere around the waters of New York City that's sufficiently safe for sleeping in my canoe each night (hotel? forget it; that'd eat all of the profits; I want the adventure to be profitable too) and try being a bicycle messenger, just to show that it can be done without the red light running, etc. that messengers are infamous for. Finally, in 2007, I did the next best thing - getting this paper route, a strategy by which I figured I'd learn similar-to-messengering skills (the most-challenging-for-me one of which was the fast, back-to-back address-finding) without having to go any farther from home than Clarks Summit.
A key part of my motive (besides the money), both for the pipe dream and for this version thereof that I finally did, was to "get inside the heads of messengers" so as to be on a more credible pulpit from which to spout my promotions of how universally-applicable my Triadal principles are. And since I lived too far from "real" bicycle-messengering territory to infiltrate them, infiltrating paper carriers would have to do.
And here's what I found: When you're a paper carrier, the other paper carriers (all without even _calling_ their profession a brotherhood; this _blog_ is the only place where _that's_ done, and how much you want to bet bicycle messengers don't either; that too is probably only on the internet) stay behind you not only when you're waiting at a too-long, unnecessary red light. They stay behind you when you're going "only" 100% of the speed limit - which, on the 25 mph section of rt. 11 between the area of the distribution center and W. Grove, is otherwise unheard of.
Therefore, it would seem that this brotherhood of paper carriers (which constitutes the majority of the pre-dawn traffic approaching, from the shopping center where the distribution center is, the particular above-described stupid traffic signal) ought to have an unspoken system (and I think they do, except it seems that the CPA paper boy is exempt from it) of "drafting" each other through that signal:
In one example, if the signal is completely failing to detect a high pickup truck that day, a lower-sprung vehicle might eventually file in behind me and trip the signal for me; that's happened a number of times. In another example, when the signal _is_ detecting the first vehicle that comes along but taking, as always, two minutes to get around to turning green for it, then a vehicle that arrives second (such as myself yesterday) ought to be able to able to have a shorter wait because the vehicle in front has already made the signal start the two-minute countdown.
But did that happen yesterday? No! Not when the vehicle in front is driven by a CPA. The paper-boy CPA simply _ran_ the red light.
Leave it to a CPA.
And sure enough, he did the same thing that he'd done the time in October that I'd happened to be in a position to see it. I would have used it as fodder for this diatribe _then_ if my home 'pooter hadn't just broken down then; but, it's just as well that instead, I had time in the meantime to more properly introduce him to y'all, in my "Our friend the paper-boy CPA" entry.
I'll save _what_ he did (which, I imagine, was the thing that any CPA would do) for the punch line.
Incidentally, I hope that this blog's "actually multimodal" subtitle confession shows up on most computers (it usually doesn't on this old Mac that I recently hooked up, but since my fan Mr. Ardelli informs me that the Mac's model number indicates that it's _very_ "old", I suspect that it shows up for everybody except me). That's important because, contrary to the "Bicycle Messengering" other part of the title, I haven't brought my bike along on the delivery again yet since the last times that I boasted about doing so. I'm waiting until I get around to scrounging another freewheel for it (maybe I will by next Sunday). Nor, even when I do bring the bike along, does my current paperboying state of the art accommodate riding it to leave the distribution center, because that's a part of the trip on which I'm hauling the full load. In short, this diatribe will be about a location where I'm always motoring when on the delivery.
But unresponsive traffic signals is a subject that cyclists often discuss, because usually when one of those metal-detector loops fails to detect a vehicle, the vehicle that it fails to detect is a bike and it has no problem at all detecting a car or truck.
That's a violation of the principle that a bicycle is a vehicle. On the Chainguard yahoo group, they call it a violation of "VC", or the vehicular-cycling principle, but I have an even more succinct thing to call it: It's a violation of the Triad, i.e. my proposed Bicyclists' Rights Triad http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm (which in my opinion is the only succinct _and_ comprehensive summary of all of the important aspects of the vehicular-cycling principle).
The traffic signal exiting the distribution center, on the other hand (the one for those of us who turn left onto rt. 11, by the video store, to be exact) is unresponsive in a way that _doesn't_ necessarily discriminate against cyclists: It's apparently unreliable in detecting _motor_ vehicles!
A separate problem with it is how long it makes you sit there even when it does detect you. In 2007, it could be counted on to waste a whole 3 minutes of your time, and then, since sometime in 2008, it's been only about 2 minutes; I guess they must have adjusted it. The simplest option of what they _should_ have done and which they still could do - to solve the problem at least for during these pre-dawn hours that we're talking about, when traffic is sparse - is simply change it to flash mode.
The part that earns this signal an F, however, is that about once every few months, it completely _fails_ to detect my pickup truck! I don't know whether this is because I'm 4-wheel-drive and therefore high off the ground; nor am I sure whether the way that I got the frequency of the problem _down_ to only once every few months was by getting centered in the lane further back.
The expert on the matter whether you're cycling or motoring - John Forester http://www.JohnForester.com - says that when one of these vehicle-actuated traffic signals fails to detect you, the signal is defective and, therefore, it's legal to treat it as a stop sign, _after_ you've waited long enough to be _sure_ that it's failed to detect you, such as through a full cycle. At this particular light, that generally means when, at around the 4th minute, a vehicle is coming out of the Dunkin Donuts parking lot on the other side of rt. 11 and the light for _his_ direction turns green, stopping the rt. 11 traffic for him but not for you, and then rt. 11 gets the green again and it still stays red for you.
_That's_ when, once every few months, I run it.
But by that, I mean treat it as a stop sign, _not_ _simply_ run it, and here's a textbook example of why: Out of the grand total of about 4 times that I've done so, and out of an about-equal-grand-total number of times that I've happened to see an unlit cyclist who seems to routinely cruise south along rt. 11 sometime around the time that I'm starting the delivery, the timings of _two_ of my runnings of that red light were such that, on both occasions, I would have collided with that unlit cyclist if I had simply hit the accelerator at the moment that I'd decided to go and didn't see any vehicle lights coming, as opposed to made sure to fully treat the red light as a stop sign.
(I only _marginally_ _saw_ the cyclist, both times. That's two separate near-collisions, 6 months or so apart, between probably the same two vehicles, with the same two errors constituting 50%, each, of the cause of each: Failure of a cyclist to use a headlight at night, and failure of an engineer/bureaucrat to make a traffic signal that's not in flash mode do its job of otherwise clarifying right-of-way.)
I imagine that the rest of the carriers are similarly careful when pulling out onto rt. 11 there (i.e. by looking _more_ carefully than the Triad requires, as the Triad only requires one to look for vehicles that have at least one headlight, at night), judging by how long that untriadally-unlit cyclist has lasted.
Indeed, one of the things that it didn't take very long for me to notice when I started being a paper boy, is that the brotherhood of paper carriers consists of generally more law-abiding of drivers than, for example, the brotherhood of bicycle messengers.
That's based on what little I know about bicycle messengers, which admittedly isn't much. All I know is that 1) I witness some of their unnecessary-looking scofflawry on my rare visits to places like Philadelphia, 2) a certain faction of my opponents on the cycling discussion groups (the faction that I've already done some bashing of on this blog) likes to puff up bicycle messengers as a better-than-you-or-me brotherhood and glorify the scofflawry thereof, and 3) there's probably little if anything to be found on the internet that's written by _real_ bicycle messengers, because _real_ bicycle messengers probably don't have time for the mouse-potatoing, and therefore, everything that's written about them by my opponents in (2) (and even by other wannabes, such as myself) can be taken with a grain of salt.
So, in order to learn more, one of the things that I pipe dreamed for 20 years of doing for just a couple of weeks as a vacation sometime (but I've still never gotten around to doing so), was going to be to find some vagrantage somewhere around the waters of New York City that's sufficiently safe for sleeping in my canoe each night (hotel? forget it; that'd eat all of the profits; I want the adventure to be profitable too) and try being a bicycle messenger, just to show that it can be done without the red light running, etc. that messengers are infamous for. Finally, in 2007, I did the next best thing - getting this paper route, a strategy by which I figured I'd learn similar-to-messengering skills (the most-challenging-for-me one of which was the fast, back-to-back address-finding) without having to go any farther from home than Clarks Summit.
A key part of my motive (besides the money), both for the pipe dream and for this version thereof that I finally did, was to "get inside the heads of messengers" so as to be on a more credible pulpit from which to spout my promotions of how universally-applicable my Triadal principles are. And since I lived too far from "real" bicycle-messengering territory to infiltrate them, infiltrating paper carriers would have to do.
And here's what I found: When you're a paper carrier, the other paper carriers (all without even _calling_ their profession a brotherhood; this _blog_ is the only place where _that's_ done, and how much you want to bet bicycle messengers don't either; that too is probably only on the internet) stay behind you not only when you're waiting at a too-long, unnecessary red light. They stay behind you when you're going "only" 100% of the speed limit - which, on the 25 mph section of rt. 11 between the area of the distribution center and W. Grove, is otherwise unheard of.
Therefore, it would seem that this brotherhood of paper carriers (which constitutes the majority of the pre-dawn traffic approaching, from the shopping center where the distribution center is, the particular above-described stupid traffic signal) ought to have an unspoken system (and I think they do, except it seems that the CPA paper boy is exempt from it) of "drafting" each other through that signal:
In one example, if the signal is completely failing to detect a high pickup truck that day, a lower-sprung vehicle might eventually file in behind me and trip the signal for me; that's happened a number of times. In another example, when the signal _is_ detecting the first vehicle that comes along but taking, as always, two minutes to get around to turning green for it, then a vehicle that arrives second (such as myself yesterday) ought to be able to able to have a shorter wait because the vehicle in front has already made the signal start the two-minute countdown.
But did that happen yesterday? No! Not when the vehicle in front is driven by a CPA. The paper-boy CPA simply _ran_ the red light.
Leave it to a CPA.
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