Rich Mintz  

In my two days in Los Angeles this week I saw a substantially more effective transit city than the one I grew up in. There wasn’t anything I didn’t know about, but partly because of where I was spending my time I saw a whole lot of stuff, including gleaming new Metro Rapid buses everywhere, much better transit signage at stops and outside stations, bike racks on the front of every bus, better coordination among systems and routes, bike signage and sharrows, and so on.

I rode the LA MTA bus (in those days still the RTD, I think) to and from school every day for 6 years (1977-1983). I experienced the modernization of the fleet, the arrival of air conditioning, and some of the the first limited-stop service (on the 560, previously the 88, along Ventura Boulevard). But the bus was never something, in those days, that anyone with a choice would use.

A decade later, living in LA as a young adult in the early 1990s, I was a pretty heavy transit user. By then the 304, 320, and 333 limited-stop services were in place along the Wilshire, Santa Monica, and Venice corridors, and I used all of them — an improvement over earlier days, but still not worthy of the immense passenger volumes, especially on Wilshire (one of America’s busiest transit corridors). And at that time, crosstown service (N-S) was still pretty poor.

Things have changed. The Metro Rapid services (especially the 704 and 720 and the Orange Line) have made a vast improvement in mobility, with traffic signal priority and buses coming at 5-minute or better daytime headways, and I was astonished to see the map of lines with 12-minute or better daytime headways, especially on crosstown service. There was a time when waiting for a bus on Fairfax or La Brea could drive one to drink, but apparently that day has passed.

The other thing that’s happened is that multimodal trips are better accommodated. The dozen or so second-tier companies, like the Santa Monica and Culver City municipal lines, appear to be better coordinated with Metro in respect to both routing and transfers, and the whole system seems very bike-friendly, with 2-bike carriers on the front of every bus (which I saw people using).

Oh, yeah, and there’s a subway, which so far doesn’t go anywhere I need to go, but that’ll change with the opening of the first leg of the Subway to the Sea, which must be impending. The Metro subway lines prominently proclaim that they are open to bicycles at all times (like the NYC MTA and pretty much no other transit system). I could imagine myself living, say, in Venice and commuting into mid-Wilshire via a combination of bus and bike according to my whim.

When I lived car-free in LA in the 90s, people thought I was crazy. But in those days, my parents’ and grandparents’ cultural norms controlled. Now there’s a whole grownup generation after mine, and they think very differently.

I haven’t written much here lately — been busy, bla bla — but I do want to pick it up again. This might not be the most fortuitous venue, squashed as I am into a rear window seat on an oversold Delta flight that’s getting in at 1 in the morning, but one of the advantages of this position is that I can’t really do anything more strenuous than thumb-type on my iPad. So here I am.

I’m heading home from a weekend in LA celebrating my grandmother’s 105th birthday, God preserve her. I saw a lot of aunts and uncles and especially cousins, lots of cousins. The ones I used to think of as “young,” i.e., my age, are all getting to be visibly middle-aged, as I suppose I am myself (we are of course all still gorgeous and lively, etc. etc., but nobody could mistake any of us for 23 anymore).

Los Angeles dressed nice for me, perfect weather and gleaming new infrastructure everywhere. The time may come when I’m ready to live there again. I could bike everywhere! And take the Metro Rapid! Certainly on the surface, at least, the bright fresh look of LA is appealing, all the more compared to the filthy, urinous alley I live on in New York. But NYC obviously has its appeal, and once you’re back in it it’s hard to imagine being anywhere else.

Okay, so that’s taking it a bit far. Nobody was hit, nobody was hurt. Still, I fell off my bike, on a New York street! On top of a Chinese man!

Here’s what happened: I was on a ride I do often from the Upper West Side downtown, stopped at a light on the far left side of 9th Avenue, in the mid-forties, where the Lincoln Tunnel traffic bunches up. It’s congested along here, but I still prefer it to going anywhere near 7th Avenue in the forties, and if you’re heading south, you’ve got to go somewhere.

I was in the left parking lane, next to a parked car, with a stopped taxi on my right. An apparently-Chinese man on a bike came up on my left, heading into the intersection, apparently thinking he’d clear? Not concerned about why I might be stopped? Oblivious to all the pedestrians? Who knows. In any case, he didn’t clear, and he got wedged in a drainage plate in the corner dip. He fell over to his left onto a bunch of people waiting to cross the street; he reached out to grab onto me (because I was there); I, and my bike, fell over on top of him.

Nobody was hurt, no pedestrians complained, everyone just helped each other up, Chinese guy and I checked to make sure we were both okay, and we all went on our way. But now I can say I’ve been in an accident!

So I got a quasi-spam this week from a potential vendor. (I say “quasi-spam” because it’s a service that, based on my publicly available professional affiliations and so forth, someone might plausibly claim to believe I might want to buy.) The vendor, apparently with a straight face, sells something called Transparent Billing, which claims to help you manage your remote workforce more cost-effectively — and it’s horrifying.

Read their page and at first it just seems like the typical boring web-service copy, until you come to the words “screenshots of work performed.” This is where you swallow hard, and click for more information. You learn that for “only a dollar a day per employee,” you can have comprehensive automated reports on what your employees are doing, including automated screenshots from their computers and reports of their keystroke activity.

If this is what we’ve come to — already, in 2012, not in The Dystopian Future, but now — well, f*ck me, I’m moving to the moon colony. What sort of company would say to itself, “hey, we’ve got to figure out a way to build a loyal and productive workforce,” and would then pick this way?

I’ve been wanting to put on some extra miles, so this afternoon I decided to do a Brooklyn loop over two bridges, the Brooklyn and the Williamsburg. You can see my route here:

View Two Bridges Brooklyn Bike Loop in a larger map

This is almost exactly ten miles — long enough to get some real cardio exercise, but short enough to do in about an hour. (Plus there’s excellent coffee at the 3-mile and the 7-mile marks.)

I felt like going for a ride today, so I rode up to Ess-a-Bagel on 1st Avenue, near Stuyvesant Town, picked up a dozen bagels and some cream cheese and salmon salad, and rode back. It’s 5 miles there and back (about 200 calories), and I’m about to eat a thousand calories worth of what I brought back, so there’s a lesson there, but I’d rather not think about it.

Just finished Will McIntosh’s Soft Apocalypse, part of my near-future-dystopia binge. It was a bit softer and more sociological than some of the other sci-fi I’ve ready recently, which isn’t surprising because it’s set about 15 years in the future in a United States that’s recognizable as a place we might be heading toward right now. There hasn’t been an alien invasion, there hasn’t been a revolution. The economy and the social order have just gradually deteriorated, in the way that some would argue they’re already deteriorating now, and the authorities and the elites haven’t been able to keep a handle on it.

There are references to an orderly, well-run consumer society for the very wealthy, who live behind gates more or less the way we live now, but we readers never see those people directly; we spend our time among a dispossessed, squatting uncertain underclass whose members look uncomfortably like us. They’ve been to college, they remember what we remember from the 1990s and 2000s, and yet they live on and near the streets, are menaced day and night, are almost always hungry.

I enjoyed the fact that the book was set in Georgia, in places I recognize, mostly in the pine woods of east Georgia between Macon and Savannah. But I won’t tell you any more; read it for yourself.

One of the most frustrating things about the always-on Internet, at least the way the market is configured in the US, is that I’m currently paying for bandwidth four separate times to three vendors — not counting the bandwidth I use in the office — and I still don’t feel I’m getting what I need.

For home bandwidth (much of which I federate out to mobile devices via wireless), Time Warner Cable gets a piece of me, for a level of home Internet service I would rate as “meh.” I’m paying AT&T twice, for iPhone 3G and for iPad 3G. And on top of that, I’m paying Clear for a Sierra Wireless 3G/4G hotspot that I can’t depend on (the service itself is generally okay, but the device can’t hold either a charge or a connection, and it takes 3 minutes to reboot). My monthly data total, I’m amazed to report, is upwards of $170, and I’m still pissed off at least a dozen times a month.

When I’m in the UK for extended periods, things feel simpler. I carry a 3 Wireless Internet hotspot (a Huawei device, vastly superior to the Sierra Wireless) in my pocket, and run everything (laptop, iPhone and iPad data) off of that. I have to make sure to keep it charged, which is a minor pain, but the device (unlike my Sierra Wireless) runs fine when plugged in, and charges fast.

In that environment, I know exactly how much data I’m using, and can easily top up if I start to run out. It isn’t necessarily cheaper — even without paying for home broadband, my data cost in a month in the UK would be about the same as in the US if I used as much data as I “wanted” — but that’s with much heavier out-and-about use than I experience when I’m in my own city, and in any case I’d have the ability to decide how much to use.

Someone has to solve this problem, and I’m not sure who will, since the core consequence of things as they are is that people like me spend more than we should, and the providers have no incentive to see that changed. On top of that, everyone in the US hates their broadband and wireless providers, for unfriendly customer service, account restrictions, and what feels like illogical pricing.

To a large extent, these customer dissatisfactions are driven by the sales model in the US (which rolls the cost of the device into your monthly fee, and then sentences you to indentured servitude until you pay it off), and by the bundling of access rights with the device (which keeps you married to your carrier forever). As a result of these things, buying a mobile device in the US is more like buying a mattress than buying, say, a lawnmower. The US model is complex and bureaucratic, and the information market is clouded, effectively resulting in a transfer of rents from you and me to the carriers, on top of the actual market-rate payment for services.

Still, even in the US, I could imagine a company that made mobile simpler. There’s no reason why a US carrier couldn’t say “Buy as many devices from us as you want for a fair price, and then you can use a common data pool for all of them, topping it up when you need to.” If someone did, that would be genuinely transformational, and they’d have a line out the door.

In the meantime, we have to content ourselves with half-measures. I just signed up for the AT&T tethering plan on my iPhone (yeah, I know, I gave up the unlimited data). I now have 5GB per month to use, combined, for data services on my phone itself and on my laptop and whatever devices I tether to it. If I go over (unlikely), the overage charge is more than, but not absurdly more than, what I’d be paying per GB on 3 Wireless. So it’s a start.

I thought it sounded crazy too, but this blog post from Velojoy inspired me to try washing my bike in the bathtub, with hot water and the spray nozzle so I could get at the undercarriage.

My first thought was “that’s a terrible idea, you’ll rust it,” but then again I ride around in rain and salt anyway and it doesn’t rust from ordinary use, so probably washing it down isn’t going to hurt it. And indeed it didn’t. The hot water got almost all the loose salt, sand, and muck off, and made a good dent in the various oily smears in inaccessible places that I usually just assume will stick around indefinitely.

I let it drip dry for a bit, gave it a rough wipedown with an old towel, and then lubed the chain, which I always figured would be a messy process but (thanks to the lesson I got from my local bike shop) basically amounts to letting tiny droplets fall from a nozzle onto the edge of the chain as you slowly rotate the pedals backwards. It took about 90 seconds, and based on how well it rode when I was finished. I apparently did it right.

I’ve been busy living my life, as you can see from the dearth of posts, but I will say this: I try to give all my bikes some ride time, and the red Dahon folding bike rotated back into position about a week ago. I’ve been riding it for about a week, and I have to say I remember why I enjoyed it so much when I first got it. It’s nimbler and easier to control than my other bikes, the gearing is excellent, and it folds up (I took it to DC on the train yesterday for the day).

I gave it a bath (in the bathtub), had a broken spoke replaced, and had the hinge tightened (my local bike shop was kind enough to tighten everything else at the same time, so it rides snappier and firmer). I also bought a cable lock for it (now I’ve got four bike lock keys on my ring) — this kind of cable isn’t suitable for long-period or risky-location locking, but for the kind of “5 minutes popping into Duane Reade on a busy street” that I’m likely to do, it’s fine.

And now that I’m used to it again, I think I may give it an extra week.