My Thursday bike ride to Clarks Summit included riding right across the lake at Lackawanna State Park.
After the first few feet, before the water got deep, I dismounted and walked a little ways just to get a better feel for whether it was crackling (because I was entering in a slightly different place than the ice fishermen were, plus I suspect that a 27 x 1 1/4" or 1 3/8" tire concentrates the weight a little bit more than shoes do). But it wasn't crackling an iota, nor even hardly sagging (and years ago, logging with my tractor on the Frost Farm's beaver lake, I got away with making a whole bunch of trips with it sagging _a_ _lot_ - the trick is to just keep moving - but I was nuts back then), so I re-mounted and zipped right across, and up the boat ramp on the other side.
No knobbies; just slicks on my road bike. But traction was no problem, thanks to evenly-spaced patches of a thin crust of snow on the ice.
These sporadic weekday rides that I take to Clarks Summit are somewhat related to the paper route in that they're usually timed to include a stop at the distribution center when it's still open, to pick up a check.
Hmmm, I better hurry up and take an extra ride or two just to Lackawanna State Park; it got to be like spring yesterday so I bet I've only got a few more days to see if I can try riding the _length_ of that lake instead of just across it.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Oops, I was too quick to compliment PennDOT
That traffic signal does not detect a bicycle!
Therefore, it fails the Susquehanna County Wheelmen Triad Compliance Spot Check, which I happened to conduct on it at 2:45am 3/1/09.
Obviously, this blog isn't being read by my PennDOT-bigwig, cycling-event-participant-buddy customer after all.
The Triad http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm requires that cyclists act and be treated as driver of vehicles. Readers of SCW's sporadic newsletter "The Triadal Core Protection Forum" (which has been on its duff since 2004 and which this blog semi-supercedes) will recall my rarely-limited-to-Susquehanna-County spoutings about how basic it is for a traffic signal to detect a metal bike like it detects any other vehicle (and about how ultra-yuppies with carbon fiber bikes, on the other hand, can be left out with unshod horses as far as I'm concerned - I'm practical, too, you see).
But it usually takes a while for a rural-resident cyclist such as myself (even in my own county, all three of the traffic-light towns in which are even further from the Frost Farm than Clarks Summit is) to happen to be cycling through a signalized intersection at a sufficiently wee hour (i.e. with no cars around to trip the signal for me and thereby hide the problem) to apprehend it failing to detect me. That is why, for example, the SCW Systematic Ride of Susquehanna County - a several-year project that I completed in 2000 although I never got around to sifting through the data therefrom afterwards - had to include 3am-start editions for at least one each, of its Montrose, Hallstead and Susquehanna legs.
In Lackawanna County and partly for similar reasons, this blog's previous discussions about our most-impeding-of-paper-carriers-in-Clarks-Summit traffic signal - namely the one where we turn left onto rt. 11 next to the video store while leaving the distribution center - focused on how long that signal took to respond, and sometimes not respond, to the presence of our motor vehicles. Besides distance from home, the other part of the reason I focused only on the motoring aspect was that, as I discussed back in "About the name of this blog", this blog makes no apologies for the fact that motoring is current state of the art of how I always do at least certain parts of the route (and that applies especially to how I leave the distribution center, when I have the full load).
So it took me until 3/1/09 - two years into doing this route - to happen to get a chance to do an SCW Triad Compliance Spot Check of this particular traffic signal.
3/1 just happened to be the second Sunday in a row that I'd arrived at the distribution center at 2:30 instead of my usual 3:45 (because my Route Associate was taking a well-deserved couple of Saturdays off from preparing the inside sections for me, and this time I'd finally worked up enough guts to try the more challenging version of preparing them myself, namely waiting until Sunday morning to do it instead of taking any Saturday trip to Clarks Summit). The previous Sunday, 2/22, I'd found the distribution center to be already open at 2:30 (instead of the apparently-usual 3:00), but on 3/1, it wasn't; so, I had some time to kill.
I used some of that time by yanking the bike down from the pickup truck and riding it the couple hundred feet to that traffic light.
And there I sat for a whole 4 minutes or more (entertained, at least, by punks in the parking lot of the restaurant across the street who were having a little bit too much of a fracus to notice me), and then I turned around.
I also found, later that same morning while going through that intersection with my pickup truck as usual after loading the papers, that it's back to taking a minute or two (as opposed to the "instantly" of 2/15 and 2/22) to turn green for a motor vehicle.
Therefore, it fails the Susquehanna County Wheelmen Triad Compliance Spot Check, which I happened to conduct on it at 2:45am 3/1/09.
Obviously, this blog isn't being read by my PennDOT-bigwig, cycling-event-participant-buddy customer after all.
The Triad http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm requires that cyclists act and be treated as driver of vehicles. Readers of SCW's sporadic newsletter "The Triadal Core Protection Forum" (which has been on its duff since 2004 and which this blog semi-supercedes) will recall my rarely-limited-to-Susquehanna-County spoutings about how basic it is for a traffic signal to detect a metal bike like it detects any other vehicle (and about how ultra-yuppies with carbon fiber bikes, on the other hand, can be left out with unshod horses as far as I'm concerned - I'm practical, too, you see).
But it usually takes a while for a rural-resident cyclist such as myself (even in my own county, all three of the traffic-light towns in which are even further from the Frost Farm than Clarks Summit is) to happen to be cycling through a signalized intersection at a sufficiently wee hour (i.e. with no cars around to trip the signal for me and thereby hide the problem) to apprehend it failing to detect me. That is why, for example, the SCW Systematic Ride of Susquehanna County - a several-year project that I completed in 2000 although I never got around to sifting through the data therefrom afterwards - had to include 3am-start editions for at least one each, of its Montrose, Hallstead and Susquehanna legs.
In Lackawanna County and partly for similar reasons, this blog's previous discussions about our most-impeding-of-paper-carriers-in-Clarks-Summit traffic signal - namely the one where we turn left onto rt. 11 next to the video store while leaving the distribution center - focused on how long that signal took to respond, and sometimes not respond, to the presence of our motor vehicles. Besides distance from home, the other part of the reason I focused only on the motoring aspect was that, as I discussed back in "About the name of this blog", this blog makes no apologies for the fact that motoring is current state of the art of how I always do at least certain parts of the route (and that applies especially to how I leave the distribution center, when I have the full load).
So it took me until 3/1/09 - two years into doing this route - to happen to get a chance to do an SCW Triad Compliance Spot Check of this particular traffic signal.
3/1 just happened to be the second Sunday in a row that I'd arrived at the distribution center at 2:30 instead of my usual 3:45 (because my Route Associate was taking a well-deserved couple of Saturdays off from preparing the inside sections for me, and this time I'd finally worked up enough guts to try the more challenging version of preparing them myself, namely waiting until Sunday morning to do it instead of taking any Saturday trip to Clarks Summit). The previous Sunday, 2/22, I'd found the distribution center to be already open at 2:30 (instead of the apparently-usual 3:00), but on 3/1, it wasn't; so, I had some time to kill.
I used some of that time by yanking the bike down from the pickup truck and riding it the couple hundred feet to that traffic light.
And there I sat for a whole 4 minutes or more (entertained, at least, by punks in the parking lot of the restaurant across the street who were having a little bit too much of a fracus to notice me), and then I turned around.
I also found, later that same morning while going through that intersection with my pickup truck as usual after loading the papers, that it's back to taking a minute or two (as opposed to the "instantly" of 2/15 and 2/22) to turn green for a motor vehicle.
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