Rich Mintz  

Because I was curious what it would look like on a map, I plotted my daily bike route from home to work and back again. I tagged a few of the points of interest, and some of the hazards.

View My daily bike route in a larger map

I take other routes from time to time, and branch off for errands and so forth; but after doing this for about a year, all other things being equal, on an ordinary day, I go exactly the same way up, and exactly the same way down — up 6th Avenue, and down 5th.

This route is the most direct, more or less. I used to divert to the bike lane along 8th Avenue (protected above 14th Street) in the morning, and the bike lane along 2nd Avenue and Allen Street (protected or separated almost the whole way) in the afternoon. But I’m a competent street rider, I’m familiar with the route, and I know most of the hazards, so I’m back on the straight route.

The morning ride is harder, both because there are some gentle uphill stretches and because traffic is heavier on 6th Avenue than on 5th. It’s a bit more than 2 1/2 miles each way — 2.6 miles in the morning, and a bit more in the afternoon.

One interesting fact is that on almost all my avenue portions, I’m riding on the left, not on the right. That’s true on 6th and 5th Avenues, and it’s also true on 1st and 2nd and 8th and 9th, because of where the bike lanes are. But even when I’m riding on 7th Avenue, which isn’t a designated bike route, or one of the avenue portions that aren’t marked for bikes, I tend to stay left rather than right — there are fewer buses and generally fewer obstructions.

Almost without exception, if there’s a bike lane provided (protected or not), that’s where I ride. Not only is it possibly required by city law (there’s been some dispute about this); it’s the place where those drivers who are looking out for cyclists are expecting to see us, so it’s where it’s safest for me to be.

And virtually the whole way, in both directions, I’m riding legally, with traffic and on the street. There is one significant exception, and that’s my confession: in the afternoon, when crossing Canal Street near the Holland Tunnel exit, I do something illegal and potentially dangerous. From the foot of Thompson Street (at 6th Avenue), I ride west across 6th Avenue, ride diagonally westward across Canal to the wrong side, do one short block against traffic on Canal, followed by a short southbound block on the sidewalk on Varick (to avoid cobblestones).

Here’s a snapshot of Google Street View facing southwest from Thompson and 6th (the starting point of this maneuver) in the direction I’m about to ride. Imagine me crossing behind the taxi you see there in the traffic, then riding along (toward the right in the frame) on the wrong side of Canal, passing the postal truck on its left.

I didn’t use to do it this way, but because of the way the street grid comes together, the alternative (cutting east to Broadway) is worse, involving more travel on more congested streets. I could, of course, walk my bike two longgggg blocks on the sidewalk, but that’s my fallback, not my starting plan.

Because of the timing of the lights at 6th Avenue and Varick, and the fact that there are usually NYPD traffic officers in both intersections, there’s not actually any traffic coming as I do my riding against traffic. And I’m actually protected by a curb cut ahead of me at Varick, so I’d be hard to hit accidentally. You can see the curb cut here, in the distance at left (live link this time):

View Larger Map

But you can believe I’m exceptionally careful before and during this tricky crossing, watching that all the traffic on Canal, 6th, Varick, and Laight Streets is behaving as expected.

Is there any doubt that Esther C. Werdiger is an awesome cartoonist?

If I could draw like she does, competently and freely and angst-riddenly and good-naturedly, I’d quit my job and just make cartoons about my imperfect but all-I’ll-ever-have life.

This engaging postmortem account by Mark Hendrickson of what went wrong at Plancast got me thinking about our experience at BusyTonight, a late, great search engine technology startup where I was a principal. It was a great career experience for me, but we did a lot of things wrong, spent a lot of money that will never be returned (mostly lent by friends and family), and closed after about two years with no sales and no prospects.

User experience consultant Whitney Hess, who brought the story to my attention, called it a case study of what happens when you don’t do your user research, and that’s probably right. We didn’t either — we went into the development of BusyTonight with plenty of technical knowledge, an understanding of the problem we wanted to solve, a solid approach, and talented staff. The thing we didn’t have (aside from “enough money,” of course, and a host of other things that would have benefited us) was any evidence that anyone would want to buy the thing we were selling. Or, to put it another way, nobody cared enough about the problem we were trying to solve to get excited about our solution. And we didn’t give enough credence to inferior but better-funded and better-marketed alternatives, which eventually ate our lunch.

I landed on my feet, as did my two partners. But it would have been nicer if instead we had made our fortunes, no?

I’m currently wrapping up Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India, the NYRB edition of a collection (first published in 1925) of letters written in the 1770s. Fay traveled from Dover to India (with her husband, a lawyer) at a time when the British imperial outposts were genuine outposts, beset by dangers of all kinds. When you set out for India in those days, safe arrival at which was not guaranteed, and Fay and her husband were detained and held hostage twice during their twelve-month (!) journey.

It’s hard to empathize nowadays, when anyone with $1000 can book an advance plane ticket and be safely in India next week, more or less guaranteed. Exoticism will never entirely disappear as long as people are tribalist and closed-minded (i.e., forever); but a world in which even modestly paid manual laborers have access to cheap mobile phones is very different from Fay’s world. When she dispatched her letters, she had no guarantee they would even arrive.

In “Why Don’t People Move to Opportunity,” Matt Yglesias points out that even for unemployed or underemployed people with limited job skills, the rational thing to do is to market those limited skills in a high-median-wage metro area. So why don’t they? For some, the cost of moving (both in dollar terms, and in terms of social connections left behind, which are expensive to replace in both time and money) is the deciding factor. But for others, it’s simply that “the rent is too damn high,” which is conveniently the title of Yglesias’s upcoming book.

In the general case, Yglesias will presumably argue (and I will agree) that restrictive zoning, parking requirements, and so forth, which have the side effects of artificially limiting the supply of housing in attractive precincts of central cities to much less than the market would prefer, lead to an artificial boost in the cost of living that distorts American settlement patterns, making urban living seem less attractive and popular than it actually is and leading (in a vicious circle) to a further concentration of policy and resources behind conventional suburban development patterns.

In this specific case, Yglesias will presumably argue that under the current state of affairs, the cost of living in high-wage metros is artificially elevated, but the extra money spent doesn’t benefit the polity in those communities — it’s skimmed off by rentiers who have an interest in maintaining policies that are at their foundation antisocial.

Obviously, as someone who was pushed out of California almost 20 years ago in part by Proposition 13, I agree, and I can’t wait for the book.

Cam Booth surfaced this map of the Chicago transit system overlaid on a map of the New York subway, with the lines showing in white. The surprising thing here, as Booth notes, is not the extent of the Chicago system, but the density of New York’s.

My latest TV find is The Supersizers Go… on the Cooking Channel, a three-year-old series in which a British pair (food critic and comedienne) spend a week at a time living the lives of different periods and gorging themselves on the contemporary dishes. It’s a fairly light conceit, and I don’t quite understand what “supersizing” has to do with it (unless you postulate, counterfactually, that in every period other than ours, people ate more than we do). But it’s entertaining, and mildly informative.

This week Giles and Sue went Victorian, and it does seem that people in Victorian days ate a lot more heavily than we do — their experience reminded me of when I moved to Atlanta in 1999, and had to adjust to a lot more fried food and meat and sweet tea than I was used to. My favorite moment was when they were served (by their cook, as a side dish, at an ordinary dinner on an ordinary evening) a plate of calf’s-ear fritters, which looked as though they’d be delicious if they had zucchini inside, but alas they didn’t. The rest of the boiled calf’s head was sitting nearby on a plate, dressed with about a pound of parsley; you can see it here.

It’s not Downton Abbey, but given the choice between this and watching Bobby Flay yelling, or Nadia G wielding her assets, I’d pick this. More on this episode here.

Just wanted to point out an example of an elegant, functional user interface that anyone can understand. Not surprisingly, it’s from Amazon, which runs what is probably the most effective customer-centric technology business in history.

It’s the full-screen menus from Amazon’s streaming video product. Buttons are big, icons are intuitive, legends are added where needed, functionality is limited to the minimum necessary.

Worth adding that I’m watching this program for free, as a benefit of my Amazon Prime membership. (And by “membership” I mean I pay $79 a year for the privilege of buying five times as much from Amazon as I otherwise would, because shipping costs are eliminated as an impediment to clicking the “buy” button.)

Because of travel I was barely on a bike for 4 days, and I couldn’t stand the idea of waiting another day (this is how you know exercise is becoming a normal part of life — when you start getting antsy if you don’t do it). So, I thought, hang the snow, I’m going out today. I figured that everything would be pretty much plowed, and we only got a couple of inches in any case, and it was still above freezing, so why not?

And everything was fine. I went out on the Puma, figuring it would be the most stable on icy ground because it has the widest, nubbiest tires, a heavy frame, and a low center of gravity. But in the end I didn’t encounter any ice. Most of the travel lanes were plowed and sanded and salted, traffic was light, and I had a pretty much normal 5-mile roundtrip, via the Trader Joe’s in Chelsea. There was some slush, but I coasted through it carefully and had no undue problems.

The only problems came when I got home, and realized that both my undercarriage and my … undercarriage were covered in sandy muck, which you’ll see here. And about ten minutes after coming in, about a half-pound lump of semi-frozen sand glumped onto the floor. So my pants are now drying, and I’ll give the bike a washdown later this evening.

Severe Australian hair salon interventionist Tabatha Coffey is back for another season on Bravo, and this year Tabatha Takes Over isn’t just turning around hair salons, she’s taking on a range of retail businesses. And in episode two, she took on the turnaround of a business that meant a lot to me twenty years ago: Club Ripples, the gay club on the shore in Long Beach, California.

In 1993, I probably spent eight or ten Sunday afternoons at Ripples, driving down from LA with my boyfriend and meeting up with my Orange County friends. It was a convenient halfway point between us — in those days, I was living in West Hollywood and working in Costa Mesa, driving 50 miles each way in the carpool lane, passing Long Beach about midway — and it was nice to get out of the gay ghetto I lived in and experience another gay-friendly but not-quite-ghettoized community. And there were new people to look at and talk to, and Long Beach (population “only” 400,000) had a friendlier vibe than LA, and it was sunny and quiet and you could hear the seagulls. For a short time, we even considered buying a house in Belmont Shore, a gay-friendly neighborhood even then and much more affordable than LA, and moving.

Back then, Ripples on a Sunday was packed — it was a local hangout for gay people from Long Beach, a fun day trip from LA, and a magnet for gay people from Orange County. I was never really a bar person, and whenever I went to a gay club I felt like everyone else was prettier and more vivacious than me, not to mention in on something that nobody had bothered to let me in on. But Ripples felt incrementally warmer and more welcoming. People talked to you, and being by the beach made people a little less uptight. From LA it was a schlep, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Now it’s 20 years later, and Ripples has been suffering. It’s obvious from Tabatha’s show that some of its wounds were self-inflicted, and she did what she could to help with that (and through the happily-ever-after lens of a reality show, she appears to have succeeded). But it’s also true that the club scene has changed. One of the Ripples owners said this to Tabatha and she waved it away, but I think it’s true.

Even in 1993, which isn’t that long ago, there were many fewer ways to meet people than there are today. The modern coffeehouse scene was very new (no Starbucks, or almost none). There was no Internet as we know it now; nobody had a cellphone, let alone a smartphone; AOL charged by the minute. If you wanted to have a social experience with other gay people, you pretty much had to go to a bar and stand around until you saw someone you wanted to talk to. And so that’s what we did, even those of us who didn’t really like to drink and didn’t feel comfortable in those surroundings.

“Kids today” still go out and stand around, of course they do. The difference is that they don’t have to in order to be sociable; they have other choices. And so businesses have to be competitive, which is where I think Tabatha is right on. I hope her changes to Ripples stick, because the place meant a lot to me once — and it was open and serving gay people with a smile when I was six years old, which is a long history indeed.