Doug's Bike Week 2005 Journal
All photos by Doug Mink, unless otherwise noted.Check out what happened in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004.
MassBike Board members (past and present) leave on a post-meeting ride
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I was late to the MassBike Board meeting in Falmouth on Cape Cod because
I had to print out the minutes from the last meeting because I didn't get
finished typing them until Sunday morning, other people got stuck in
traffic, so I wasn't late to the start of the meeting. It was held in the
conference room of the Woods Hole Research Center which does land use studies
and has one of the greenest buildings I have ever seen. We had a tour after
we adjourned, and then Ted Hamann and Ed Gross, who live in Falmouth, and
Rob Miceli, who has bike everywhere on the Cape, gave us a tour of
the southern part of Falmouth. It's always fun to bike around a town with
people who can answer every question you ask and even those you didn't know
enough to ask.
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Dick Bauer talks about the Somerville part of the Cambridge/Somerville Historical Ride on Cambridge Common
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Saturday morning I biked to Cambridge, jsut like every weekday, though I
stopped at the Cambridge Common to join this year's joint
Cambridge/Somerville History Bike Tour.
Somerville's History tour was fun last year, and I heard
good things about Cambridge's previous ride, so I hoped for synergy. So did
lots of other people: there were 150 at the start, and as proof of how good
the ride was, there were still 125 at the next to last stop two hours later.
It was fun to connect with people I have biked with before and new people
with interesting bicycling pasts while riding through places I have gotten to
know over the past 25 years. The high points for me were the Davenport St.
murals, the round house on Summer St., and the renovation sites we got to
explore near Union Square at the end of the ride. There were two food stops,
always a great attraction to me, too. Cambridge leader Tim Ledlie has
the map and history pamphlet
on his web site, along with links to all of the sponsors. Thanks
to Dick and Roberta Bauer for showing me around their interesting converted
two-family after the ride.
A trompe l'oeil meets cyclists at the Davenport St. end of Orchard St. in Cambridge |
Lilacs on the back of Bussey Hill in the Arnold Arboretum
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With no breakfast today, I took a more leisurely route through the Arboretum
on an unpaved path, getting a glimpse of my favorite local tree, a weeping
beech, and seeing the famous lilacs from behind. After crossing Route 9 at
the end of the Jamaicaway bikepath, I followed the same former bridle trail
along the Riverway all of the way to the beginning of the Muddy River Path
at Netherlands Rd. The Emerald Necklace Greenway Project would like to get
this path paved so cyclists don't have to deal with heavy Brookline Ave.
traffic or the bumpy sidewalk path along it. After a pleasant ride up the
Charles River, I encountered a couple of nice women from Cambridge handing
out tire patch kits to bike commuters. I told them about trying to patch
my flat tire on Tuesday and finding that all four tubes of cement in the
house were dried up, so they gave me two patch kits. I rode home at sunset
with great light, but didn't take any pictures.
Olmsted's bridle path along the Riverway should be paved |
ABC TMA's David Straus modelling the Bike Week T-Shirt at the Back Bay Breakfast
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This morning, I got to take a different commuting route, heading northeast on
the Southwest Corridor to lunch at the Prudential Center. Somehow, the SW
Corridor path is friendlier than the Emerald Necklace paths. Maybe it's because
you have to stop or slow down for so many intersections, but I struck up fairly
long conversations with two other cyclists on my way in, though I couldn't
convince either of them to drop by the bike breakfast. Once I got to the
Prudential Center, I met lots of old friends and neighbors--two of my
Roslindale bike buddies were there, too. After a bit of schmoozing, I biked
over the Harvard Bridge, where the fog lines which used to allow a 2-foot
safety zone next to the curb have not been repainted, to Vassar St., where
I shared the bike lanes with quite a few other cyclists, to the Kendall Square
Bike Breakfast. There was a pretty good turnout, with more people snared
off the street than on Boylston St. in the Back Bay. I missed most of the
food, but had a good time meeting new people and telling Lyall Croft, a former
colleague on the defunct Boston Bicycle Advisory Committee, about the Neponset
Riverwalk proposed for his hometown of Quincy. Then it was off to work
calibrating fiber spectra of distant galaxies and attending two talks on
relativistic cosmology.
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Cyclists getting information and food in Harvard Square
| Wednesday of Bike Week has been Harvard's day for breakfast for the past few years, and today had the best attendance ever, despite a slight drizzle that hit me as soon as I crossed Memorial Drive on my way toward Harvard Square. It stopped and there were enough people to eat most of the food Harvard put out. Holly Bogle from Harvard's Commuter Choice program ran the show; she encourages all non-single-passenger-automobile commuting, but is a bike commuter herself. Stephanie Anderberg represented the City of Cambridge, which also wants to see more people on bikes. It was great to meet a few more people from the massbike list and some members of the Harvard cycling team. |
Tuesday, May 17
Goslings and parents along the Muddy River
| This morning was warmer, but still cloudy as I headed off up the Emerald Necklace. This year's first goslings were out along the Muddy River in Brookline. The annual pancake breakfast at the Broadway Bicycle School in Cambridge was as tasty as usual, with some great blueberry and pecan pancakes, as well as lots of urban cyclists. MassBike board member David Loutsenheizer showed off his German-made Trek commuter bike, with a fully-enclosed chain, internal gearing, and hub generator, and I ran into my MIT classmate Meredith Porter and got caught up on his family. After a day at work, I stopped to listen to a band playing in Roslindale Square as part of a celebration of Adult Literacy Week. |
Blooming redbud and azaleas in the Arnold Arboretum
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After a ride through Arnold Arboretum, where the blooming redbuds and azaleas
rival the more famous lilacs--yesterday was Lilac Sunday--I had my first flat
tire of bike week while riding along the sidewalk next to the Jamaicaway.
While walking my bike toward a bench to change the inner tube, Steve Gag,
half of the
Boston Bike Festival Steves, came by, and we discussed the current
status of the Festival. After the tire was fixed, I visited the first bike
commuter breakfast of the week at University Park in Cambridge. The
Charles River Transportation Management Association sponsored it and
had great croissants and bagels. Jeff Rosemblum of the
Boston Bicycle Planning Initiative
lives only a few blocks
away in the direction in which I was leaving, so we talked for quite a while
about projects for the MassBike MetroBoston chapter to work on.
After spending the day adding documentation to an archive of astronomical spectra and refining the calibration on data from our new multifiber spectrograph, I pumped up my already flat tire and headed to the annual Redbones barbecue via Ace Wheelworks, where I got a couple of new tubes. Chester St. in from of Redbones was jammed, and there were lots of interesting bicycles and bicyclists around. Scott Jenney talked me into trying the latest electric bicycle he is selling (not too hard a job), and I had fun riding it around Davis Square. Half the MassBike Board was there, and one of the cofounders of MassBike's new Cape Cod chapter, Rob Miceli, even made it up from the Cape. |
Steve and Hannah at Southeast Expressway underpass mural on the Neponset Trail at Pope John Paul II Park 
Group ride on Harbor Point | Steve Winslow of the Bike to the Sea groups, which is working on a trail called "The Northern Strand Trail" from the Mystic River to the Atlantic Ocean in Lynn, asked me to lead a tour of the Neponset Trail for his group. We tried last year, but it rained really hard and we didn't see much of the trail before we were soaked. This year's forecast was not much better, but the clouds held off, and we only felt a few drops at the furthest point from our start. Steve and his wife Helen brought their grandchildren, Hannah and Ashley, who did a great job on Alley Cat and mountain bike, respectively. Everyone enjoyed riding around Columbia/Harbor Point past the Kennedy Library and UMass/Boston, with some of the best Boston skyline views in the city, even on a cloudy day. My wife Claudia came along, and we made it home before much rain fell, and there were even some sunny breaks. We had one accident, a collision with an unnecessary bollard on the Harbor Path near UMass. |
Kids on Milton Family Ride) | I always consider Bike Week to be (at least) nine days long, from Saturday through Sunday, and people who set up Bike Week events fill both weekends with fun things to do. Today, I started my day in Milton, at the Second Annual Milton Bike Day sponsored by the Milton Rotary Club. Since most things which support bicycling on the ground in Massachusetts are accomplished by cities and towns, interest in bicycling has to be encouraged in each of the 341 communities in the Commonwealth, and Milton's event, which includes races, a family ride, information tables, food, and a bike auction is a good example of what a group of people who want to encourage bicycling can do, even if they are not all bicyclists themselves. I ended up helping Mike Blackwell of the Milton Bike Committee with the Family Bike Ride. |
Cormorant on Scarborough Pond in Franklin Park | After the ride, I zipped up to Franklin Park to catch the end of the annual meeting of the Franklin Park Coalition. They are sort of the host nonprofit for the Boston Bike Festival on Sunday, September 25, so I thought it would be a good idea to show the flag. On the way out, I told a fellow complainer about the lack of bike racks in Franklin Park who to call in the city government and had a pleasant ride home on Circuit Drive (past Scarborough Pond where I saw the local cormorant) and the Blackwell Path through the lower Arboretum. |
Larry Slotnick, David Wean, and Jeff Rosenblum | Jamaica Plain's annual "Wake Up the Earth" festival got postponed by last Saturday's constant rains and moved into Bike Week this year. Mixing left-wing politics with environmental issues and art and good food, I always meet people with whom I have worked on community projects, parents whose kids went to school with my daughter, and other people whom I've known for years. This picture shows Larry Slotnick, whose brief term as acting director of MassBike set a great example for Tim and Dorie who followed him, David Wean, Southwest Corridor activist (whose daughters went to school with mine), and Jeff Rosenblum, who has reinvigorated bicycle activism in Boston in the past six months. I also talked to a friend who is starting a new private middle/high school which will use bicycles as part of the science, math, and physical education curriculum. |