Across the Great Divide

Cyclomuter 1: Mark Boeyink.

Name: Mark Boeyink

Commuter since: 1999

Photo: Karl Laun

Home: St. Paul (Como Park)

Workplace: Minneapolis (Warehouse District)

Bike shop: One on One Bicycle Studio, Minneapolis

How many bikes? Two, as soon as they replace the frame I totaled in my last “incident.”

The commuter bike: An '80s era Raleigh Super Course, donated by a friend who upgraded years ago and took pity when I totaled the frame (for the second time) on my Bianchi.

Equipage: A messenger bag is all I bring. At various times I’ve carried laptops, a 12-pack, a complete change of clothes, books and a pretty wide array of other items. You can figure out a way to transport more than you think.

Essentials: I try to travel light: besides my bag and whatever it’s holding at the time, headlamp, rear light, lock. I always wear “pants savers” when I’ve got long pants on.

Luxuries: I should add fenders, because I’ve ruined a couple pairs of pants with greasy road spray. It would be fun to get a bike computer for speed and distance.

Clothes: Lycra-free. Riding clothes are business casual when the weather is dry and not too hot (keep it on for work). When it’s hot or wet, riding clothes are stuff my wife wishes I’d thrown away with emergency clothes at work or something I haul in. I’ll throw a reflective vest on in the late fall when I’m riding home in the dark.

Typical route: I feel lucky to have a route that is almost entirely bike lane or bike path. I take the University of MN bus/bike route from the State Fairground to Dinkytown, wind through campus, head over the Stone Arch Bridge, jump on W. River Pkwy, and then I’m just a few blocks from my office in the Warehouse District of Minneapolis. It’s about 7.5 miles each way; 30 to 40 minutes, depending on energy levels, stoplights, and headwinds. See TCBike map.

What got you started? My initial goal was to get some exercise on a regular basis. With work and kids, and some apathy towards indoor exercise, I wasn’t getting to the gym. Seemed like a way to workout without taking much time out of the day.

How often? 4 or 5 days a week, March through November, depending on snowfalls. Not equipped for winter biking.

What makes it work for you? Casual attire is the norm in my workplace. Indoor parking for the bike. A route I really like. It’s not that much slower than car commuting, and on a sunny, 70 degree morning, the time flies.

The Best: I truly felt like an urban biker one weekend when my family was out of town. Stopped for a brief happy hour after work on Friday. Swung by my friend’s exhibit at a North Minneapolis art show on the way home. Went to the bank and other errands on Saturday. Took the bike to church on Sunday (12 mile round trip). Never started the car.

The Worst: The two trips to the ER, one of which I remember.

The Weirdest: I’ve killed two squirrels, without losing my balance either time.

The Funniest: “Pimp my bike” – the guy with the mullet, and an oversize sound system on a modified trailer. Very unique.

Favorite stop/sight: St. Anthony Falls any time of year, but especially after heavy rains or winter melt. When the wind is right and the falls are cooking, you can sometimes feel the spray. I’ve spotted herons, cormorants, and even a bald eagle from the Stone Arch Bridge.

Advice? Bikers, take a more considered approach than I did. Get a decent bike (not a $25 special with shot tires), figure out your route to maximize bike-friendly traveling, get comfortable gear, start slow if you need to – parking along the way to work and riding partway can be a more enjoyable (and sustainable) way to start than going from 0 to a 20-mile round trip the first day.

If you get serious, a back-up bike will avoid the frustration of missing the first beautiful day in two weeks because of a bike malfunction (or sacrificing your vanity by cranking up the seat on your partner’s bike so you can ride in on SOMETHING).

Motorists, when you see a bike, don’t throw the rulebook out the window. If you get to the 4-way stop first and the bike stops so you can take your legal turn – please take it!

*****

Are you a Cyclomuter?

Getting There is Also Being There.

Now that I'm committed to driving the speed limit, a round trip to Door County, Wisconsin — which has great country-road biking — is just about the right length for listening to an entire book on CD.

Only one problem. The novel we found available at the library was overwritten, the main character was most unsympathetic and self-centered, and there were entirely too many romance-novel adorations of strong, muscular withers.

But since I was already doing one unfavorite thing — driving to get from point A to point B —  I challenged myself to find ways to enjoy the experience. Based on this trip and an earlier one, I've come to this realization: I'd rather listen to a bad book than ponderous one.

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The Metropolitan Council, which sets transit policy for the Twin Cities, has announced a fare increase to help cover increased fuel costs. To State Senator John Marty, that's exactly the wrong approach when the public should be encouraged to take buses and light rail.

He proposes dropping the fare to increase ridership and stimulate demand for new routes and greater frequency.

The Met Council is being timid when it should be visionary, says Marty.

*****
Bill Lindeke of Twin City Sidewalks is now contributing to Twin Cities Streets for People, which compiles links to stories about "people-centered mobility" and welcomes reader contributions about local placemaking, biking, walking and urban living. Let's hope he brings the site more of his visual approach to city appreciation.

Here's a link to a story in the Park Bugle that profiles two St. Anthony Park bike commuters. Advice from one:

Start slowly. Don’t assume that you can start out commuting both ways, five days a week, blizzard or shine. Don’t tell yourself when you start that you’re going to do the whole thing at full speed every single day. Try taking the bus to work (with your bike on the front rack), then riding home. Do practice commutes so you know how long it takes and whether you’ll need a change of clothes or a shower when you get there. Don’t expect a quick and easy transition. After a lifetime of getting in a car every morning, it was hard for me to make this change, so go easy on yourself and work up to your goal gradually. A slow start is better than a quick burnout. But most of all, enjoy it! There is so much to see when you’re riding your bicycle.

I've been planning to add profiles as a regular feature here  to show the diversity of riders and to demystify commuting a bit.

In fact, if you're a cycling commuter willing to submit to a Q&A about your ride, you can download this questionnaire  and send it to me. Look for the first profile in a day or so.

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Speaking of Twin City Sidewalks, Bill posted an empty sign awhile back and quizzed readers about its location. This one will be easy to ID for at least one blogger I know, but for others, its stainless steel blankness raises the question — who will step in to fill this void?

Forget Climate Change if You Have the Right Insurance Policy.

Private contractors aren't only in Iraq. They're on the scene wherever public resources are deemed not sufficient  to serve the needs of the wealthy. In this case, in the wildfire-threatened American West:

New Jersey-based Chubb Corp. [...] began offering free fire protection to its clients in 13 Western states in March. Already 11,000 homeowners have signed up, more than a third of those in wealthy and fire-prone enclaves like Lake Tahoe and Marin County. The company plans to expand the service to other states before the start of next fire season.

Chubb hired Montana-based Wildfire Defense Systems Inc. to protect homes with a replacement value of $1 million or more. The company is now subcontracting a pool of 50 fire engines throughout the West dedicated exclusively to Chubb policyholders.

A relative and career forest fire fighter confirms that insurance company crews have been showing up to foam the roofs of multi-million-dollar houses in places like Big Sur. In California, public agencies trying to manage fire on a broader scale have already run through half their budgets before reaching the main fire season, which starts in August.

My brother-in-law, recently in Wisconsin from the wildfires of California, says he stopped seeing smoke in the sky only after he crossed the Black Hills of South Dakota.

In Search of the Perfect Retirement.

A caravan of six giant touring buses, all towing cars, headed up the hill on the Wisconsin side of the I-94 St. Croix River bridge. And why not? The gasoline crisis is simply about expensive fuel, not supply shortages like the last time.

We could not see drivers behind the shaded glass in the tall, impassive machines, so we imagined the couple from a remote small town in California we had just heard about.

For 20 years, they had worked at outfitting one of these coaches with all the creature comforts so when they retired they could spend a year touring the U.S. looking for the perfect retirement locale. When they started, their bus was new and diesel was about $1 a gallon. By the time they began their excursion this summer, the fully-equipped-for-living chassis still had few miles on it, but it was a 1980s model.

And diesel along their migratory route ran between $4 and $5 a gallon.

It was costing them $1 per mile to discover America, and after just six weeks, they cut short their quest, choosing the resort hill country of north Arkansas.

One of the main attractions — low taxes.

On a per-capita basis, Arkansas ranked 45th among the states in total tax collections for FY 2005. But looking at comparative state and local tax levels, on average, “low tax” Arkansas actually takes a nickel more of income than “high tax” Minnesota ($113.59 per $1,000 vs. $113.54).

 

The difference in average income among the states (Arkansas ranks 48th vs. Minnesota’s 11th) accounts for the big swing in rank between the two measures. Our wandering retirees were attracted not so much by the state’s overall taxes, but that Arkansas doesn’t tax pension income.

Back on the highway, we passed one of those buses. The model name on the back:

Notes on the New Economy: Delivery's Demise?

The service economy doesn't just run on ideas and information. Florists, farmer's markets, landscapers, party rentals, moving companies and others deliver their services the old fashioned way.

Two years back, when gasoline prices crossed into $2.50-plus territory, businesses that handled building materials and other products tacked fuel surcharges onto their prices. Now, some delivery services are going away entirely.

Simon Delivers, which once promised to revolutionize grocery shopping, is closing up shop. Jim Thill writes about a customer whose mail delivery has gone to do-it-yourself, and pizza delivery may be next in some places. Those higher delivery fees don't all go to the driver, by the way, but to offset higher ingredient prices that also are being driven by transportation costs.

Environmentalism as Guilt Management.

The “be less bad” environmental approaches to industry have been crucial in sending important messages of environmental concern— messages that continue to capture the public’s attention and spur important research. At the same time, they forward conclusions that are less useful. Instead of presenting an inspiring and exciting vision of change, conventional environmental approaches focus on what not to do. Such proscriptions can be seen as a kind of guilt management for our collective sins, a familiar placebo in Western culture.

In very early societies, repentance, atonement, and sacrifice were typical reactions to complex systems, like nature, over which people felt they had little control. Societies around the world developed belief systems based on myth in which bad weather, famine, or disease meant one had displeased the gods, and sacrifices were a way to appease them. In some cultures, evens today, one must sacrifice something of value in order to regain the blessing of the gods (or god) and reestablish stability and harmony.

Environmental destruction is a complex system in its own right — widespread, with deeper causes that are difficult to see and understand. Like our ancestors, we may react automatically, with terror and guilt, and we may look for ways to purge ourselves — which the “econ-efficiency” movement provides in abundance, with exhortations to consume and produce less by minimizing, avoiding, reducing, and sacrificing. Humans are condemned as the one species on the planet guilty of burdening it beyond what it can withstand; as such, we must shrink our presence, our systems, our activities, and even our population so as to become almost invisible. (Those who believe population is the root of our ills think people should mostly stop having children.)

The goal is zero: zero waste, zero emissions, zero “ecological footprint.” As long as human beings are regarded as “bad,” zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the “be less bad” approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species’ role in the world.
— Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, William McDonough & William Braungart

I’ll confess: there’s just a bit of the eco-purgative in my cycling, recycling, composting and ratcheting down consumption. And I agree with McDonough that it all falls short as an effective strategy for redirecting entire global systems — just as prayer, smaller government or “drill more” are inadequate responses to impending collapse. Such acts soothe individual souls and perhaps stave off doom for a moment, but do not separate us from its grim trajectory.

McDonough aims for new principles of eco-effectiveness — and more important — putting them into systemic practice. If we were to believe the salvation doctrine of the free market, this new sustainability is where energy company profits, venture capital and government policy should be fast converging.

It may yet. Right now, 12 new cities are being designed to apply McDonough’s ideas. In China.

Iraq Electrical Power: This Surge Isn't Working So Well.

During his service in Iraq, my nephew worked in an Army unit that disarmed IEDs, so we were relieved when he began working behind the wire as a logistics officer, where we figured he'd be safer. One day, his email contained a photo of his burned out-office, a portable prefab building that contained the unit's supply records and computers.

Sabotaged or hit by a rocket?

No, electrical fire. Now, it turns out faulty electrical work was a known, but inadequately addressed problem at U.S. bases in Iraq.

Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents.

[...]

[An Army survey] noted “a safety threat theaterwide created by the poor-quality electrical fixtures procured and installed, sometimes incorrectly, thus resulting in a significant number of fires.”

The Army report said KBR, the Houston-based company that is responsible for providing basic services for American troops in Iraq, including housing, did its own study and found a “systemic problem” with electrical work.

But the Pentagon did little to address the issue until a Green Beret, Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth, was electrocuted in January while showering.

 

So much work was being contracted out in Iraq "that companies like KBR were simply overwhelmed by the scale of the operations. Some of the electrical work, for example, was turned over to subcontractors, some of which hired unskilled Iraqis who were paid only a few dollars a day."

While inadequate oversight by the military and KBR played a role in the problems on U.S. bases, this February 2006 article in an electrical engineering journal conveys the scope of reconstruction and some of the larger problems faced by electrical contractors in Iraq.

All of the money pledged so far for Iraq's reconstruction adds up to roughly $60 billion, according to a report last July by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). U.S.  officials whom I interviewed in Iraq this past October said that the current consensus was that the final tally might be as high as $100 billion. For comparison, in the first two years of their reconstruction after being devastated in wars, Germany, Japan, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan together received a total of $25.6 billion, in 2003 dollars, according to the United States Institute of Peace, a congressionally created organization devoted to conflict resolution. The first European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt much of Western Europe after World War II, spent the equivalent of about $90 billion in today's dollars between 1948 and 1951.

Electrical power isn't just a problem for U.S. forces.

In the most recent survey by the International Republican Institute, a prodemocracy advocacy group in Washington, D.C., 2200 Iraqis were asked which of 10  different problems "requiring a political or governmental solution" was most important to them. The first choice, by a margin of about 10 percent, was "inadequate electricity." "National security" came in fifth; the "presence of multinational forces" was   seventh; and "terrorists" was eighth.

Big Business McCain and His Small Business Friends.

One of John McCain's gambits over the past several weeks has been to announce the formation of small business advisory groups in potential swing states, including Virginia, California and other states. Tiny New Hampshire has quite a robust list, while Minnesota, home to one of his campaign's co-chairs, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, has a pretty meager showing.

Given the relatively minor name recognition and political clout most of these "small business leaders" have, they are useful to McCain mostly so he can stand in front of them and proclaim himself in favor of business growth while spinning bald-faced lies about the effect his opponent's policies will have on these exemplars of the American Dream.

Backed by a handful of marketing consultants, cleaning service contractors, insurance agents and filling station owners, McCain makes as if he is supported by about 8 percent of the U.S. population — all those beleaguered small business owners.

FactCheck.org goes into the detail of how McCain first inflates the number of small businesses, ignores that most of them do not actually employ workers, and then conflates them with the relatively small proportion of business owners potentially affected by a tax increase on top earners.

Of the 26.8 million that SBA counts as "small businesses," fewer than 6 million are actually "employer firms" with any payroll.

From this, we must conclude that to arrive at his 23 million figure, McCain is counting mostly "business owners" with no workers, including those who simply report small amounts of income from sideline or freelance work. McCain is arguing that Obama's tax increase would "destroy jobs," but he's counting mostly firms that don't produce any.

[...]

Based on the number of taxpayers who now report any sort of business income on their returns, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center projects that 663,608 taxpayers with business income, or business losses, will fall into the top two tax brackets in 2009, when any Obama tax changes would first take effect. Not all of those can properly be called "small-business owners," however. Some are farmers. Many are lawyers, accountants or other professionals who get some of their income in the form of partnership distributions. Others may be passive investors in real-estate partnerships or similar investment arrangements and not really persons who own and manage a business.

         

It is also not clear how many who report business income actually employ any workers.

 

         

Of the small businesses that do employ workers, Boston Review points out that many benefit as "state social supports—from education and training to health care—supplement workers’ wages and benefits, and help small businesses recruit and retain their workers."

Nor should we believe that small businesses are some monolithic political force with identical interests. Our service economy includes both businesses employing low-skilled, low wage workers and high-skilled, higher-paid knowledge workers that may value different ways the "welfare state" helps support their stability and success.

The Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, underwrites incomes for low-wage workers while increasing the labor supply in low-wage service industries. Food stamps, child care subsidies, and public health programs such as Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program increase productivity and reduce turnover among low-wage workers, to say nothing of improving their quality of life, at virtually no cost to their employers.

[...]

High-skilled firms have needs different from low-skilled ones, but public policies are just as important for them. These firms tend to employ highly educated and potentially mobile workers who are attracted to communities with good schools and universities, well-maintained recreational facilities, and effective environmental policies. Moreover, when workers lose their jobs, unemployment insurance gives them the economic security to defer work in order to train for new skills. Here, too, there are bases for supporting a more active government as a way to ensure the supply of skills on which small businesses will build in the future.

    

By siding with mom & pop stores and plucky, job-creating entrepreneurs, McCain can still advance  the interests of big business — oil, pharmas, financial services, defense contractors, airlines, big box retailers... — without being associated with their down sides, which are plenty in this economy.

Bridge Congestion Worsens.

Heading across the Stone Arch Bridge today, I caught the newly connected I-35W bridge reflected in one of those giant photo cubes promoting Red Bull that fill the middle span of the old bridge.

Crossing from west to east banks, you hit about a dozen annoying speed bumps that cover the power cables needed to illuminate the cubes at night.

Here's how you can save yourself the trip.

Heading from east to west, you may have to pass through the T3 mounted police checkpoint. When I was there, though, they were only stopping cute women in uniform, confirming that Minneapolis police officers do not need to go to St. Paul if they have a cool ride.

Presumably the backpack placed on the bridge was not left by an anti-energy-drink terrorist.

Do Not Try This Excuse With the Taxman.

I'm all for prosecuting tax dodgers, but couldn't the Revenue Department have found a bigger crook than this?

A 31- year-old Minnesota man was arrested Tuesday for failing to file income taxes since 1995 — starting when he was 18. According to the story, he owes the state more than $12,000, or less than one grand a year.

He did concrete and masonry work for a living and failed to register his business with the state. It wouldn't surprise me to learn there are more than a few other tradesmen across the state operating the same way, and not only evading taxes on their own income, but paying their buddies or other laborers off the books, too. So while his tax bill might not have amounted to much, his public arrest might serve as a warning to others who cumulatively represent a sizable revenue loss.

But he also seems to have had a strain of the tax protester in him

Carter allegedly told revenue department employees he did not believe in taxes being used for stadiums and did not need to pay taxes to have streets maintained because he owns a four-wheel-drive truck...