Saturday 6/12/10 Binghamton-paper delivery report

Well I'm finally getting around to writing this particular delivery report that I promised to the Northeastern Pennsylvania Bicycle Messengering blog. As I boasted earlier, I substituted on this Binghamton-paper route over New Year's and, in my last post to the blog, I boasted that I was ready to do it again on June 12.

I'm happy to report success in not only bringing the bike along (admittedly on top of my loaded-with-5-cent-bottles-to-supplement-the-trip's-revenue pickup truck like I've been doing for a lot of my Binghamton visits lately) but using it to deliver the Saturday Press & Sun papers to all 95-or-whatever houses in only two bikeloads.

(Compare that to my regular 180-house Sunday route in Clarks Summit that this blog tries to be devoted to, where everything is in considerably less compact of a geographical area and, more importantly, the Sunday papers are fat: It's still taking me a long time to weed the excess motoring out of that one. There, I still haven't gotten much beyond filling up as many carrier bags as possible with which to do 8-to-16-house segments by foot, and that's why this blog has been silent for a while.)

Anyhow, these Saturday 6/12 Binghamton papers were delivered to me at 5:10 and I delivered to the last house at 7:18; so, although that's 18 minutes late, it's a scores-of-percent speed improvement over when I did it over New Year's, back when I was an even-more-complete newbie to the route. I would have finished only 14 minutes late instead of 18 if NYDOT hadn't violated my Triadal http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm rights by having its detector loop fail to detect me when I was trying to get back across 12A from the commuter parking lot while returning to resume the delivery after obeying a call of nature in the woods behind the commuter parking lot.

This bike that I used was what I described earlier in this blog as my "devoted-to-paperboying bike" - i.e. the one with, most importantly, 1) a kickstand and 2) the homemade front panniers consisting of halves of plastic filing boxes. But the update on that is that that bike has now been promoted to also being my primary bike: I'm happy to report success in, early this month, finally accumulating a frame-breaking number of miles on my old Fuji (i.e. the Time-Traveling Iron Steed of The Last Bike Ride Out of the 20th Century) that had been my primary bike for 10 years.

New comment policy

Regrettably, just now, I finally got around to figuring out how to change the "comments" setting to "moderated". I had been meaning to do so for a while, due to the increasing number of spammers. I apologize in advance to all other commenters, who will now have to wait until I come online and approve their comment before it appears.

[Edit: I changed the time stamp on this post, to lie by a few hours so as to have it appear below, rather than above, my other post of today.]

Ready for another Binghamton-paper delivery!

Back at New Year's I boasted about substituting on a Binghamton-area paper route. I'm happy to report that I'm going to do that again tomorrow morning, i.e. Saturday. Stay tuned for a report on it when I get around to writing it sometime afterwards.

I've got the bike ready to use this time (unlike the other time), and that ought to help speed the delivery up. But I'll be cheating and driving the pickup truck to the start again, because I still have loads and loads of the N.Y. 5 cent bottles that the Forest City Recycling Center gives me and that I cash in on every time I go to Binghamton, making the motoring trip more than pay for itself.