yield

might as well - the inevitable will come regardless

spring is in the air

More messing around with the PanaLeica 25mm f1.4.

night walk about

Got to spend the evening out with my wife whilst my daughter was off doing other things. Coffee commenced, as did a short walk about with the camera. This is what came of it.

keeping the shiny side up

There are times when being Canadian is a real treat. One of those is the winter time. Many people who live here, myself included at times, despise the winter but the trick is to find something to do in the winter that is fun and then do it.

I call the realization that this is the case the "Well duh!" moment.

Enjoy the winter, and have fun, or be miserable. Decide. Well duh.

Which brings me to the subject of today's post.

Our employer (my wife and I work for the same employer) decided that it was too nasty out to come to work and closed for the day. The wind chills locally are reaching to -40 Celsius. Kind of chilly. This left us with a day to use for our own amusement.

So naturally, we went on a date.

And then, we went drift surfing in a winder wonderland.

Definitely a good day to keep the shiny side up. Mind you, aren't most days?

well done waterloo

Waterloo did a cool thing.
A very cool thing.
Really.

We are blessed (no sarcasm) with improving parking in the Uptown for bicycles. In fact, as I have mentioned before in this blog, part of the parking structure for cars is given over to bicycle parking. This is a new thing for our area (we are not Amsterdam...). The part that is for bicycles has clear signage, is easy to get to from the street, sidewalk, and a path, and has this nifty cool thing there now:

Yep, you guessed it, the city has installed a work stand.

Tools are on aircraft cable and located inside the tower tube, there is a spot to hang the bike, and an air pump.

Colour me impressed.

Keep up the good work Waterloo (all we need is some action on the street redesign that puts the proposed bicycle infrastructure between the sidewalk and the parked cars, not between the parked cars and the moving cars as was officially proposed.)

As an aside, men's clothing is boring. Can I have a men's version of this sweet tankie?

And one last thing. My 2014, a year of my bike page has started to get its updates. Check back daily if you are interested as updates will be frequent.

in quest of landscapes

We went on one such quest this afternoon. The day was blustery, windy, and generally blown about. Thankfully, there was no rain to be had, although the sky was overcast.

The quest started, as so many of them do, with a stop in the local coffee shop. This place is a lot like the TV show Cheers, with people yelling "Norm!" all the time. Well, not quite, but there is a good chance of seeing a friendly face each and every time the shop is entered. In this case, we bumped into a good friend of ours who was taking a pause in his day to enjoy a coffee and get some writing done.

There is a lot of pedestrian traffic in the Uptown. Today, through the window, an animated conversation was taking place.

After we left the shop, we sallied forth in search of our landscapes of the day. This is what we found.

more please

One interesting thing is starting to happen in Uptown Waterloo as cycling becomes more popular - parking shortages.

It is true. More people are bringing bicycles into the Uptown than ever before (I base this on what I have seen over the last few years having grown up down there, and having used the place as the setting for most of my social life over the past few years) and this puts pressure on parking facilities.

The city has provided, in its parking garage in the Uptown, a series of racks under cover suitable for parking bicycles. They are in a lit area, out of the worst of the weather, and are bolted to the ground. The usual bicycle rings seen in most urban areas are scattered about, a few per city block. There are two sections of racking at the mall entrance by the grocery store.

The problem is, often, the racks are filled up. One of the advantages of cycling is that you can, usually and traditionally in North American cities anyway, park right outside the place you wish to visit. This is not often possible, of course, with the automobile which is one of the main attractions of cycling in a crowded urban environment. This tendency to park right outside where you want to visit means that the grocery store racks are often filled to overflowing, racks or rings by coffee shops are almost always taken, and the city garage parking, arguably the best there is in the Uptown, often sits partially empty to empty. There are a couple of bikes that are there often - likely owned by commuters to the Uptown - but the racks are rarely full in there. There are no shops right beside the garage. People have to walk a bit, and in the eyes of many, that defeats the purpose of the bicycle.

Enter this:

These racks are located, for now, in Waterloo Square right in the middle of the Uptown. They are temporary in that their location has shifted around over the past few days. They are also not bolted down to the concrete. I like them for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, they are bright blue and stand out. The blue is, I think, the same blue that is used for car parking signs. The "P" in the middle is the same font and colour as is used for car parking. The colour also matches signage on other city properties which indicate bicycle parking.

I first noticed these racks here over the weekend when the region was showcasing a full size model of the LRT trains from Bombardier that we are getting in the nearish future. I wonder if these racks are going to be what is used at the LRT stops for people to use. I hope so. I also hope though that they are scattered around the Uptown liberally in the next few months. This is very much a case of "if you build it, they will come". Provide decent parking in highly visible places, and people will use it.

Secondly, they hold a lot of bikes - It would be easy to squeeze 12 bikes on one rack. Put two of them in a parking spot at the edge of a parking lot and you could house 24 bikes. Since many people (dare I say most?) when they use cars travel one person in one car, one parking space filled with bike racks like these could replace 24 parking spots dedicated to cars. That is pretty space efficient. It could be done, and is in other locations.

Arguably, the best feature about these racks is the sign itself. Because it is very similar to what is used to indicate car parking, and it is to be used by bicycles, it furthers the argument that bicycles are just traffic like anything else. This is very important as we are living in a city which has a lot of conflict between people, aided and abetted by local media, based on their mode of transport.

The more people come to recognise that all modes of transport are equally valid, the safer urban travel will become for everyone.

So more please. More signage that levels the playing field. More parking for bicycles. And, hopefully, more decent behaviour by people regardless of their mode of transport.

evening walk with the camera