Greg Boone

Category: Blog

  • E-bikes are the future

    Early last year we bought a new bike for the first time in ages. Danielle has had her bike for about 20 years, and I’ve had mine since I was doored in 2013. LĆ”szlĆ³ has a 16″ he may grow out of before he learns how to ride it. Even though we love biking and we do it a lot, we have hewed more toward a mantra of the correct number of bikes being n+0, not the more traditional n+1 formula. I really believe you can do most things with the bike you have. The exception is when you need to do something highly specialized: Biking on snow, in rugged mountain terrain, racing, or in our case, hauling.

    We hit 1000 miles just before the battery died after hauling two kids home from the park.
    The Bag and Drag method of carrying a kid’s bike and a kid.

    We bought a Tern GSD and we’ve already put 1000 miles on it (this despite losing about a third of the first year to being out of the country and a warranty issue compounded by a supply chain issue on the brakes). Our goal with this rather expensive e-bike was to prevent us from needing a second car. It primarily hauls LĆ”szlĆ³ around from school, day care and back, but it can run errands. We can fit a pretty full grocery shop if we pack the bags well enough and make good use of the front rack. I even used it to haul two bags of manure and some mulch recently.

    To be honest, it would have been easier to haul this on a heavy duty trailer like a Carla or Bikes at Work but I did get home from home depot.

    So far, this is a more-than-capable machine for our needs.

    I want to rhapsodize about the electric assist piece though. The first e-assisted bike I rode was probably a Jump bike, one of many brands of bike sharing that broke onto the Denver scene in 2018. These multi-user bikes have gotten a little better. I rode a Lime in DC recently that had a full throttle, which can the exercise out of the equation; nice on a scorching hot day. Regardless, they are fast. A lot faster than their non-elecric counterparts, and that help with road confidence at busy intersections.

    The second e-bike I rode was my mother in-law’s since-discontinued and since-stolen Giant, which she purchased in 2020. It was smooth, the assist had a mode that changed dynamically based on the power on the pedals. It was really fun. E-bikes like these fill some important gaps in American casual cycling: Accessibility, confidence on the road, and fun.

    And now there are loads of e-bikes on the market. All the big players have them and some new companies have come on the scene. They come in all different styles and sizes, and they’re affordable, especially if you live in a place with a government subsidy you can take advantage of. (These are extremely successful, by the way.) Cargo bikes have followed the trend of and, even some of the higher end brands have sub $4k bikes now.

    Universality

    I’ve heard story after story of people who thought they’d never bike again due to an injury, or just getting old. Biking is work, especially if you have anything other than ideal riding conditions. Battery assist, geometry, and good components help a lot with this.

    Instead of rim brakes, they tend to use mechanical or hydraulic disc brakes which give better breaking power with much less squeeze and fiddling. These are more essential for a bike that can move 20 mph with ease, but riders benefit even at lower speeds. Many e-bikes (including ours) also have internally geared hubs, which means you can adjust them while stopped ā€” helpful for giving you the right amount of torque off the line without having to guess at it before you stop. I used to be a skeptic of these features because they make self-repair more difficult, but the trade-offs favor safety and accessibility, and reinforce the universal good that bikes of all kinds embody.

    Confidence

    Urban cycling can be intimidating. You get to the stop line at a traffic light and a line of cars pile up behind you. When the light turns green, it’s easy to feel self conscious about how you’re holding up the line, more so when drivers are actually aggressive. Better bike infrastructure helps of course, but so do e-bikes. With electric assist, you can easily accelerate quickly enough to put some distance between you and the line of cars behind you.

    That confidence needs to be met with safety. It is worth buying from a reputable brand when pricing out an e-bike.

    A bike is much less expensive than a new home, so check for UL certifications and remember to take care of your battery: Store it indoors, use the correct charger, and, during the winter, keep the battery in your home. For cargo bikes, it’s extremely worth it to pay for a bike with UL 2272 or, better, 2849 and other safety certifications. Cargo Bike Life keeps a good directory of the cargo bikes that meet or exceed this bar. Branding is more than just a label, they are not all created equally and you can feel the difference in the smoothness of your ride and your pedals.

    Fun

    Finally, e-bikes are just fun. That’s important for commuters and everyday riders. It’s more fun to ride without battling traffic. It’s more fun to ride in the dead of summer when you barely break a sweat. As a car alternative, kids riding in the back of a cargo bike have way more fun than in a car ā€” even in the winter.

    You can still get a good workout on an e-bike if you bike for exercise. Believe me, hauling 80 pounds of children on the back of a bike at faster than a jog pace is work, even with the battery assist. Combined with the accessibility benefits, e-bikes bring the joy of biking to people who would otherwise be blocked from it. Having fun is kid of the whole point of biking, and if you also love your regular bike, your ebike will be a good reminder of what you love about that one, too.

    I’m sure there is a way to pull this canoe with the cargo bike, but the hitch hooks into the seat post so this is one of the more unusual and fun things I still haul with my Surly LHT.

    It’s no surprise to me that e-bike subsidies sell out quickly and have extremely high success rates. They’re cheaper to begin with, are more universally accessible, and when it comes down to it, add some fun to the rider’s life.

  • Analog media is for the children

    We recently set up our record player in our living room. It had been connected into the whole house speaker system but we found we simply weren’t listening to records due to the cumbersome nature of that setup. We picked up a couple records at Rushmor on Record Store Day this year and took the opportunity to fix that problem.

    LĆ”szlĆ³ was particularly into the record player if not exactly the records we were playing. He was bummed there weren’t any Muppets records on offer for RSD and honestly me too. He somehow remembered that we have a “Miss Piggy exercise record” so we dug out that and a handful others we bought mostly before he was born including a 1970 Sesame Street album with a book and poster inside. This LP, critically, features Bein’ Green by Kermit the Frog, and I had to pinky promise I was serious that we would hear Kermit’s voice in our house.

    He has no trouble shouting at Siri and demanding whatever song he wants to hear at any given moment. Often when he doesn’t get the song he wants, even if it’s close, he gets really upset with the HomePod Mini as if it were a personal affront. (Which, like, yeah, I’m right there with him.) Yet this other machine that delays that gratification for about 20 minutes has almost the opposite effect.

    In fact, there’s a lot stacked against this LP: It’s in good condition but has it’s flaws. Sesame Street in 2024 is very different from 54 years ago, and many of the characters in today’s Sesame Street were yet born when this album was created. Top that all off with a machine that is difficult to operate, and I was expecting a lot to overcome. To my delight and surprise, the kid has become a student and devotee of “his records.”

    I think about the activity of engaging the physical media and imagine it activates his mind, primes him for the experience. He invites all the characters on the cover and the ones he hears on the record into his world. He opens the book and scatters the contents of the gatefold jacket across living room, interacting with the poster and characters while he listens. He can’t yet read but he follows along with the pages, examining each picture, imagining himself eating cookies with Cookie or bathing like Ernie, and committing each song’s lyrics to memory.

    You don’t get that effect with on-demand media like Apple Music, Spotify, no matter how cool Apple and the artists make their animated album artwork. You get closer with something like a Tonie box, but it’s a half measure. You have physical objects to keep track of and collect, but without the interactivity of resetting the record or winding a tape. You attach the Tonie and walk away.

    I have had a long fascination with physical and analog media. I wrote a way-too-long paper about physical media, digital copyright, and collection when I was an undergrad, and might have dedicated an academic career to it in another life. I was particularly moved by Baudrillard’s “A Marginal System: Collecting,” and the puzzle of the relatively new (to consumers) idea of digital objects.

    The argument I’m sure I thought I made was that digital objects are so abstracted from their function and physical from that we needed to find better ways to understand how humans make meaning from them. We cannot possess a digital object because it is so infinitely copyable that it is at once ephemeral and immortal. When we ruin or lose a cherished musical recording like an LP it’s emotional. When Spotify or Apple Music loses the right to offer a favorite song, is there even anything to grieve?

    I never went on to get a PhD to stake out my claim on this idea, but I still feel the first principles behind it in my bones. I saw it pretty clearly recently when LĆ”szlĆ³ put his first scratch in a record. I taught him how to change records on his own and we all got a little too comfortable with our confidence in that one lesson. He tried to put on a record and slid it right under the needle on its way to the platter, and a huge gash is now forever carved right across “J – Jump” on side B.

    I’ve seen him get upset about a track not being available on Apple Music when we’re pretty sure it was before. But I’ve never seen anything like this. He was beside himself. Blaming himself and truly going through the stages of grief before he could calm down and recover. There was a real personal element to his attachment to that record, ownership of his ability to play it, and the tiny destructive act ripped that victory from his hands.

    Part of how we calmed him down was to explore all the ways the scratched version could continue to bring him joy: You can frame the album or the poster tucked inside, and you can still read the book tucked inside. Heck, he can still play all the other songs on the record, so it could have been a lot worse. We also promised to find another copy as soon as we could and have a lot of fun listening to it once we did.

    This whole incident is juxtaposed sharply with the reaction to the disappearance of a favorite song from a streaming service. Some of the tracks available on Apple Music from, for example, The Muppets (2008) soundtrack, have changed over time. That disappearance has been a lot less emotionally consequential in our house because they never really existed in the first place. A streaming service is a kind of Schrƶdinger’s Jukebox: All the music you want to hear is either always ready to play or it never existed, you won’t know for sure until you trick Siri into playing it.

    Though if those monsters ever take the Captain Underpants First Epic Movie offline, heads will roll. Mark my words.

  • 2024 Total Eclipse cartography

    It’s no secret I’m on a maps kick. I’m constantly sketching cool maps I want to make or GIS and scene design skills I want to develop. I also got really interested in the upcoming solar eclipse that will cross the North American continent 2,830 miles from Mazatlan, Mexico to Gander, Canada and some 43.3 million people along the way in a little over an hour and a half (four timezone changes make it seem longer).

    There have been some truly astonishing maps made by people who are much better at it than I am (in no small part because it is their jobs to be good at it). The New York Times has a great visualization of the path on a global and continental scale and an infographic showing how cloudy it typically is on April 8th along the path of totality. Washington post has a mile-by-mile scroll-able strip of map that simulates what it might be like to travel along the exact totality. This one has an added 3D effect using elevation data to give some depth to the edges of the map. All of them seem inspired by the incredible 2024 eclipse map and the data supporting it produced by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio out of Goddard Space Flight Center.

    When we decided to go view the totality in southern Illinois, I got inspired by these maps, too, and started to sketch an idea for an observation guide we could take with us. The initial idea emerged from this pencil sketch in my Fieldnotes.

    a hand drawn map of Illinois and surrounding states with a band running across the southern portion indicating where the eclipse would cross.

    I started reading about how NASA made their map and eventually got sick of erasing cities and features on paper and popped open QGIS to start tinkering with the data. I liked the general idea of the map, showing ellipses that cover entire areas that will be shaded along the path of totality indicated with both lines and imagery of Earth at Night.

    The result is a series of maps at 1:1,500,000 scale that show areas like the one above across the country. I laid it out in QGIS’s print composer to have a half inch margin with a title, and on the back a zoomed out version centered on the same point (scale 1:5,000,000). Then I added ellipses similar to the ones in NASA’s map to show the whole area covered at that moment.

    I learned a lot about GIS and QGIS in particular making this map. The Blue Marble imagery from NASA Visual Earth doesn’t have associated world files, so I had to find or generate them. This meant the images could not be added as layers because QGIS didn’t know where to put them. Fortunately, there is a GitHub user who generated them in a gist. I learned how to crop the Black Marble layer to generate the strip of dark layer on top of the Blue. Beyond that, I learned a lot about positioning, scale, and where QGIS’s limitations are re scene design and printing. A lot of the features are there, but I suspect designing these pages would have been easier in InDesign or even Natural Scene Designer.

    Still, I’m pretty happy with the result:

    A 1:1500000 scale map of the eclipse totality centered on Indianapolis, IN. The image is described more fully in context.

    Just like in the bigger map, the black stripe represents the path of totality. A gold line runs the center of the map to show the center. Inside the stripe are contours to visualize totality duration at 30 second interval. Purple ellipses show total area covered at specific times. They are at 4.5 minute intervals, centered on the time in the map title. Finally, grey contour lines outside the totality, indicate the sun’s obscuration outside of totality. These are at 5% intervals.

    In this example, the eclipse is centered on Indianapolis at 15:08:30 Eastern time. Areas to the northeast will experience totality next, and places to the southwest already experienced it. Places like Frankfort, KY; Cincinnati, OH; or South Bend, IN will experience between 95 to just shy of 100% of totality.

    After some encouragement, I opened a web store to sell digital downloads of these maps to print at home. I have maps from the Texas-Mexico border all the way to the Maine-New Hampshire-Canada tri-point. Go find the one closest to you and let me know what you think! The store is definitely a work in progress, so there are some maps that don’t have full preview images right now. I hope to find time to work on that on the train tomorrow.

    I also made a poster that shows the entire path across the United States. If you buy that, you can add a section map for free.

    It's safe to say none of these maps would be possible without NASA's work, especially not mine. Not only the satellite imagery they are uniquely capable of creating, but the eclipse specific data is the product of skills they uniquely possess on the SVS team.

    This map uses datasets from several NASA missions. The eclipse data were calculated by visualizer Ernie Wright using elevation information from SRTM, lunar topography from LRO, and planetary positions from the JPL DE421 ephemeris.

    ā€“ NASA SVS 2024 Total Solar Eclipse under "Making the map"

    It takes a pretty specific set of skills to know how to find, use, and combine those data to make map elements like this and I'm glad our government makes it a priority to do this work.

  • Books of 2023

    I read some great books again last year, and now that we’re a solid six weeks into the new one I figured it was about time I stopped tinkering and published this post including some authors I got to know last year and some who were brand new to me. I also did not engage at all in Goodreads and I feel pretty OK about that given the current controversy over review bombing. But even that aside, I mostly found that the user generated reviews weren’t very complete or thoughtful. Often they were outright flawed. They rarely provoked in me a new way of thinking about a book I’d read.

    Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

    After reading Kindred last year, I checked Sower out from the library among the first books I read this year. I liked it quite a lot despite it scaring the daylights out of me. It’s a truly prescient work that more than holds up under contemporary scrutiny. I have Parable of the Talents up first this year. It’s extremely fortunate to have these great works from Butler, and a selfish tragedy that she died before she could write more.

    Buy Parable of the Sower online or at your local bookstore.

    The Round House, Louise Erdrich

    This is the first book I ever read by Erdrich and it didn’t win the awards and accolades it did for nothing. Anyway, The Round House was a fantastic read and I hope future generations of Minnesotans grow up knowing Louise Erdrich among state’s best authors. I finished The Sentence (2021) in January and aim to read even more. Erdrich’s perspective as a Native Minnesotan brings a refreshing change to the ideas of setting and settling, in the Midwest.

    The Round House is a rare book that had me rooting for the protagonist to do the wrong thing while worrying, even dreaming, how he would ever survive living with the consequences if he did. I still think about these character as if they are real people, wondering what their lives are like and what they’re thinking about in 2023.

    Buy The Round House online or at your local bookstore.

    Tenth of December, George Saunders

    Another famous author I’d never read before, and another good book to start on. Like most of Saunders’s books, this is a collection of short stories that typically thrust the reader directly into the action. It’s impressive that he makes this work as well as he does. The “Semplica Girl Diaries” and “Escape from Spiderhead” were especially interesting works of science fiction, and the closing story was as touching as it was haunting. (I do wish Netflix’s adaptation, Spiderhead, was as compelling as the source text.)

    I also started Sauders’s Pastoralia, but decided to finish it another time.

    Buy Tenth of December online or at your local bookstore.

    Time is a Mother, Ocean Vuong

    I haven’t read all of these poems yet, and I’m not sure when I will. I return to this book in between others to break up the pattern and focus on more fleeting observations of our present and the extent to which we’re prepared to encounter it.

    I love how poetry makes me feel. I’m not the best interpreter of it, but I love the fleeting moment when it hits me and I instantly feel the weight of a line or verse before it passes me by in favor of the next one. The feeling of completeness at its conclusion. Vuong is excellent at this.

    Buy Time is a Mother online or at your local bookstore.

    The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka

    This was certainly the most challenging book I read this year, and I dare say it may have been the best. The premise is simple enough, the main character is dead and has seven days (moons) to figure out how he wants to spend the rest of eternity. The path to get there is not so simple. Bureaucracy gets in his way, but so does his former life as a photographer and fixer for various figures in the first decade of Sri Lanka’s civil war. I’m still wrapping my head around some of the details in this book. The author had a way of allowing the reader to get completely lost without losing my interest, and he absolutely nailed the ending.

    Karunatilaka won the Booker Prize for this one, so if my ambiguous summary and enthusiastic endorsement doesnā€™t do it, trust the 2022 Booker panel.

    Buy the Seven Moons of Maali Almeida online or from your local bookstore.

    The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel

    This was a fun book. An easy read. The Glass Hotel was nowhere near as dark as Station Eleven but it’s just as comprehensive of a puzzle plot.

    The brother and sister main characters, Paul and Vincent, are brought together through extreme circumstances and then similarly extreme events split them apart. Paul is accused of spray painting Why don’t you swallow broken glass on a picture window in the hotel lobby where they work. Vincent decides to flee her circumstances with a hotel regular, Jonathan Alkaitis who, unbeknownst to her, runs a massive Ponzi scheme.

    I loved the adventure of this book and greatly admire the research Mandel put into crafting the circumstances of Alkaitis’s Ponzi scheme, and especially his victims.

    Buy The Glass Hotel online or from your local bookstore.

    The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans

    This book is a fantastic set of short stories, the title novella centered around a woman who works for a government office called the Institute of Public History. The institute is responsible for issuing corrections when history is misrepresented in public: art, plaques, news, etc. Her job is to determine whether a correction to a correction is needed, and unwinds a complicated, multi-generational story of how white supremacy occupies the mind and culture of a place.

    “Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want” was another stand out story in this collection.

    Buy The Office of Historical Corrections online or from your local bookstore.

    The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

    Two identical twin sisters, Black with light skin grew up in a town so small it is on no maps. They left together to start new lives until one of them vanished as if into thin air. Years later, their lives slowly reconverge. Or do they? This thrilling adventure explores concepts like passing, family, and generational wealth and trauma as a demonstration of the power and mechanics of 20th century racism.

    Brit Bennett kept me on the edge of my seat through this whole book. I was constantly rooting for the two sisters to reunite, while also remaining nervous about what would happen if they ever did. By the end, I intentionally read slower just to avoid finishing the book.

    Buy The Vanishing Half online or from your local bookstore.

    On reading itself

    It would not surprise me if somebody challenged every single one of these books under one of the many broad and capricious new laws set in motion in the last few years. Every book banning is a tragedy. This current iteration is especially tragic in part because so few people ā€” “60 percent of all challenges in the 2021-2022 school year came from 11 adults“ā€” have such tremendous power in some places.

    The strawman atop of which these bans are premised is incredibly fragile: There is no value to a book if it contains any sexual content, even, or especially, if that sexual content is central to the plot. That argument goes about as far as it is deep. It is sure great for whipping people up into a frenzy, though. I guess the people making it have singular, positive, and consensual experiences with sex and, despite the evidence to the contrary, assume everybody else does too.

    The idea that young minds can’t handle sex, violence, and especially sexual violence, or that they’ll be corrupted by it, or that they’ll somehow only discover it as a result of reading one of these books is preposterous. Literature has a way of inviting the reader to discover. I’ve thought of them as opportunities for empathy in the past, too, for books that are outside of the communities, experiences, or cultures to which you have ready access. For a book like The Round House, that might lead to you discovering that native women are disproportionately victimized by sexual violence, or the complexities native people face when seeking justice through the normal channels, and the byzantine systems we expect native people to participate in just to live on the land we stole from them. Or, maybe you are or know a victim and don’t know what to do with your feelings, feel like you are not OK, or feel isolated by your experience and need validation that your experience is normal, manageable, and how to move on. The power of good books is how they empower readers to derive broad meaning out of specific circumstances.

    Why any adult would deny that is beyond me, except that certain kinds of people think the world is modeled after them, their taste, and maybe what they think best resembles their god. In the end, these people are about having and wielding power to exterminate diversity, nothing else. So while I was glad to learn that these people have about a 50% success rate, I’m still dismayed by the narcissistic power of a few people with too much free time.

  • Open Source Cartography

    During my sabbatical, I came upon a podcast called Very Expensive Maps by way of Jason Kottke. It’s hosted by Evan Applegate, cartographer who talks to better cartographers.” It quickly landed among my favorite must-listen-to podcasts alongside Las Culturistas, How Did This Get Made, and The New Bazaar. The first episode I listened to on a long drive featured Melinda Clarke and Deborah Young Monk, makers of The Melbourne Map, a 1990 tourism map of Melbourne, Australia. They had this amazing story about trying to get this map made that involved flying above the city in balloons, finding counterfeits for sale, and how they made decisions about what to include. The episode was a good reminder of why map making is an inherently

    The next episode was three Venn Diagrams converging to make a perfect circle for my interests: public service, cartography, and open source. Tom Patterson, who made his entire career creating maps for the US National Parks Service and is also famous for leadership on the Natural Earth data set and his amazing collection of blog posts, tutorials, and resources for making shaded relief maps that are useful and beautiful.

    Most people have encountered some kind of shaded relief map. Google’s Terrain base layer has a hillshade. It puts texture on the landscape by lightly shading the side of hills away from “the sun” at a standard angle. It’s not a 3D map, though, in the way that a cartographer like Patterson would make it. Mount Everest on Google, for example, looks fine. Clearly it’s a big mountain, a steep one, densely surrounded by other big steep mountains. Patterson’s Everest gives you a better sense of the mountain’s physical features, its prominence, and the landscape.

    Making a 3D map like Patterson’s takes years of skill development to create, even with today’s tools. I appreciated his perspective on map making: “Right now we’re in the golden age of cartography.” You don’t need all the time, materials, and training required to make maps like they did before the dawn of GIS. Listening to these two interviews inspired me to start making my own maps.

    QGIS

    The open source geographic information system QGIS is an extremely powerful piece of software. It’s been around since 2002 but really picked up development after a major rewrite in 2018. It doesn’t have the extensive data network that ESRI’s ArcGIS has built in, but it can connect to many web services, including Arc’s. Like many good open source projects, QGIS is also extremely extensible, and there are plugins out there that bring in many features and tools it lacks out of the box.

    Public data

    A lot of the data you need to make a good map is easy to find and open source if not public domain.

    You can make a pretty decent looking map without having to pay for any subscription service.

    Basemaps and imagery

    You can certainly create your own imagery using Digital Elevation Model (DEM) files or land cover data if you want to have more control over how you visualize terrain or land cover. If you want to save yourself some work or don’t need that much control over the visualization, ESRI, Google, Stamen, Open Streetmap all make great basemaps to use, and there are others out there. These are particularly good options, in my extremely novice opinion, if you want satellite data and don’t particularly care how fresh it is.

    A really satisfying thing about making your own imagery, though, is that you get to play around with the data. You can exaggerate elevation if you want, or change the angle and azimuth of the “sun” in your hillshade. I’ve been tinkering with the DEM-based hillshade on a map I’m working on and it’s a lot of fun to try to balance “realism” against emphasizing what I want the reader to see.

    Layout and formatting

    For a map I’m working on for a Christmas gift, I modeled the colors, symbology, and labeling very closely off of the topographic “7.5 Minute Series” made by the USGS. Many US government agencies make their design specs public. These are good starting points because they’ve made intentional decisions about scale, page size, etc. that make them useful. The 7.5 Minute series also has thousands maps across the US to reference for the decisions I had to make for own: Which communities to show, streets to name, where to place labels on bodies of water, how prominent to make transportation lines, etc.

    Choices

    The challenge with mapping is how you choose what to show. The more you try to cram onto the canvas, the more you sacrifice interpretation. Maps are inherently rhetorical objects. They present arguments to viewers about what’s important to know right here, wherever that may be.

    I’m making a map right now for a Christmas gift and decided to use Google’s Terrain basemap. It has a gentle hillshade with no labels or colors for other land features. It’s good enough to provide texture without distracting from the information I want to show, which was the watershed and public land boundaries, and topographic contours of a specific area of Wisconsin. I also strayed from the more rigid 7.5 minute distance boundary because I wanted to show more of the area around the map center. Predictable distance was less important than predictable wall space.

    I’ll post a PDF after I give the gift. Don’t want to spoil it.

  • A few observations on the European urban environment

    Thereā€™s a lot of wistful mythologizing that happens among certain Americans about European road design and land use. Itā€™s easy to only remember the things that were really rad about European streets once back stateside, and to assume itā€™s always been this way. Itā€™s also easy to assume we can quickly update our urban environments at home, do absolutely everything the same and weā€™ll never have another pedestrian death. Itā€™s a fallacy that makes a lot of assumptions and lacks context: Cities are laid out differently in Europe. Most of them were first built hundreds of years before most American cities. Many were destroyed during WWII and rebuilt through the second half of the 20th Century. Still, itā€™s good to see what we could learn if we were so willing.

    No Turn on Red Everywhere

    This has allows stop lines to be set further back from the intersection and cars stay there until the light turns green. Iā€™d guess the stop lines were a good 10 yards back from the corner. When you cross, thereā€™s no guessing about whether a car sees you ambling across the street or negotiating cars blocking the crosswalk. Thereā€™s no reason to be in front of the stop line, so intersections are usually clear when you have a walk signal. It even makes driving a little less stressful because intersections are orderly and you just wait your turn.

    As far as I could tell, and remember, turning left on a solid green was also disallowed. If you need to turn, youā€™re waiting for a light like everybody else. This means thereā€™s fewer cars sitting in the middle of intersections with other cars moving around them, or sitting in the way of pedestrians, ready to move without notice.

    Turning right on red is an advantageous standard for cars, but a disadvantage for many other road users, especially pedestrians and cyclists. I lost count of how many times a right turning vehicle blocked a bike lane a long time ago. If the maneuver were illegal, maybe we could redesign our streets to make more equitable use of them.

    Raised crosswalks

    I was impressed with how often crosswalks were raised to meet the curb. This is an important accessibility improvement over the traditional curb cut where instead of lowering the sidewalk to meet the road, you raise the roadway and get a speed bump in addition to a crosswalk. Beyond that, I also noticed that sidewalks were often positioned either at the very front of an intersection, or set back a few yards, along with the stop line and traffic signals.

    When crosswalks werenā€™t raised to meet the curb, though, curb cuts were rarely designed to make a smooth ramp to the road surface. This may help some who rely on the feel of a pavement change to help them navigate the city, but it made crossings with stroller wheels difficult. I imagine itā€™s similar for wheelchair users. We had to lean the stroller back and then set the front wheels down or weā€™d crash into the curb and LĆ”szlĆ³ would fall out. (Yes, I know, we should always use the five point harness but we canā€™t all be perfect all the time now can we?)

    An otherwise great mid-block crossing on a busy road is limited by this sharp curb cut.
    This crosswalk is set back from the corner by a few yards, but is not raised. It was easy to assess safety and see the cars waiting, but also more difficult to get our stroller over the curb and onto the sidewalk.

    Mid-block crossings

    As a driver, this was admittedly a little frustrating, but as a pedestrian: bliss. There were often many opportunities to cross a busy road safely. Paseo de Extremadura, a main arterial road through Barrio de la Latina pictured above, had many mid-block crossings with a narrow median just large enough to be a refuge if you got stuck halfway. They werenā€™t much, but they did serve an important function in preventing mid-way left and U turns. As pedestrians, we often only had to worry about cars moving in one direction at a time.

    Google Street view of a mid-block crossing on Avenue de Flandre in Paris.
    A mid-block crosswalk with a larger median along Avenue de Flandre in Paris.

    Most of these arterials also had dedicated bus and/or bike lanes (Ave. de Flandere, above, had both). At least in Paris, bikes and taxis were allowed to use bus lanes, which promoted use of public transit and cars already on the road over private vehicles, because if you were in a bus, taxi, or on a bike, you were moving more than everybody else stuck in traffic.

    Like every example, though, there were definitely exceptions. Crossing over Avenida Portugal to get into Casa de Campo had a generous pedestrian refuge in the Jardines Avda Portugal. To get into the park, though, the crosswalks were fewer and further between. It might make some sense since itā€™s a slower road and less dangerous to scoot across without a marked spot, but it was especially odd when these crosswalks didnā€™t match up with park entrances or when crossing would have brought relief from the sun. Still, itā€™s easier to deal with one direction of traffic when you have to decide whether itā€™s worth going out of your way to get to a crosswalk.

    An aerial view of the Avenida de Portugal in Madrid. A yellow line is drawn between two crosswalks showing the distance between them at 601 ft. On the opposite side of the median, crosswalks are much closer together.

    Pedestrian zones and alley limits

    Itā€™s also easy to see the giant pedestrian zones in big cities like Marienplatz in Munich and think ā€œwe need this in [insert your city here]!ā€ Something I noticed more on this trip, though, were the smaller pedestrian zones lurking around every corner. I noticed this particularly in Paris, but also in Ljubljana and even smaller rural communities.

    A pedestrian zone sign marks a small area near 17 Grudnovo nabrežje in Slovenia. There are a few trees, and some buildings surrounding an open space. A black van is parked along the curb in the foreground.
    This small pedestrian zone is enough to keep traffic out of this alley and allow safe passage on foot to this restaurant and the homes just beside it. It ended just beyond the backside of the building at center.

    Some were basically alleys, I suppose, but they felt narrower than American alleys, typically one-way for cars, and open for bikes and pedestrians. I grew quite fond of seeing the sauf velos signs all over the place. In some cases these narrow passages also turn into little communities, but they were more often just alleys.

    Itā€™d be interesting to think about how to redesign the grid of alleys in Milwaukee to make them one-way for motor vehicles, and open for all other road users. We have a lot of kids who play in our alley. If we made it one way, we would only have to watch one direction and also eliminate that too-familiar problem of turning into the alley only to see someone coming the other way at you.

    Plenty of people still drive

    All of this combined led to streets that felt calmer as a driver and a pedestrian. We did plenty of driving and the main thing that stressed me out was trying to follow along with my phone giving difficult-to-follow directions in a new location which, like, isnā€™t that unusual.

    With the exception of the densest of urban environments (e.g., Paris, downtown Madrid or Munich), cars could actually get around. I suspect fewer people were trying to drive because itā€™s possible and less of a hassle to go another way. Itā€™s nice to have a variety of different ways you could get places, and be able to choose a mix of how you get around.

    I long for a day when Milwaukee could try any of these things city- or county-wide. It could start with some data driven pilot programs, maybe, in areas of high pedestrian incidents. But the guiding questions ought to be ones like: What is the advantage to pedestrians who live around a busy area like N Teutonia and W Capitol if we ban right turn on red and require signaled left turns (and then actually enforce it)? If we donā€™t need right turn space in road ways, how might we build out dedicated transit and bike space? IF we lower speed limits on Fondy, how might we improve accessibility to places like Sherman Phoenix or promote equity to NW Milwaukee residents who commute to downtown? Itā€™s frustrating to have the state put such a heavy hand on our local decisionmaking and funding, but itā€™s a nice to have improvement models to advocate around.

  • The end of the Summer of Desktop Linux

    My sabbatical draws to a close and with it my dependence on computers owned by me and me alone. Since Automattic is, with little exception, a Mac shop going back to work means this is probably the last post I’ll write from my Raspberry Pi for a while. It’s a bittersweet ending because, despite the frustrations of an under-resourced computer, it’s been a joy to use Linux as my main workstation for a while.

    Highlights

    I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how interoperable this computer is with the Apple ecosystem that governs the rest of my life. I managed to make this computer into an AirPlay receiver via ShairPort Sync so I could stream music and radio to the speakers hooked into the headphone jack. I didn’t look much into whether Apple Music’s web player would work on this browser because I’m certain I don’t have the RAM for it even if it does.

    I didn’t try going the other way: sharing from the Pi to an AirPlay device, mostly because I didn’t need to, but also because the more complex motions of AirPlay remain dependent on private APIs. It kinda stinks but I also don’t need things like wireless screen sharing from a desktop that can barely handle the display it’s plugged into.

    The same is true for 1Password.com, which is nearly at feature parity as a web app with it’s desktop counterpart. Some of the more advanced things like the SSH agent and browser extensions require the desktop app (maybe obviously?), but the web client came in quite handy on many occasions. I’m starting to think this world wide web thing might stick around.

    Fortunately, Apple’s iCloud services are pretty extensive and reliable on the web these days, so the occasional file I did need to transfer between devices could be uploaded to iCloud Drive from a web browser and immediately available on other devices.

    Finally, swapping SD cards around to run different computers on the RPI4 base was really nifty. I had to troubleshoot some of the other Pis in our house and each time but didn’t have SSH access. All I did was pull the card, pop the other computer’s card in this one and I had full access with the same monitor, keyboard, mouse and (relatively higher) system resources. Even on a very repairable computer, it’s rarely this easy to swap boot systems.

    Lowlights

    Lack of RAM is a major limiting factor on this device and has been since the start of this experiment. It is really hard to use and especially multitask even with just a web browser with only 1GB of memory. Chromium’s ability to unload the pages not in use helps a lot but is by no means a complete solution. Switching between tabs, loading new pages, all of it is very slow. Task manager reliably shows Chrome as the main offender.

    The raspberry pi OS task manager showing about 81% of system memory in use.
    Chrome also seems to spawn a lot of processes. I’m not enough of a computer scientist to understand why.

    Even with no pages loaded, Chromium and the system use about half the available memory, once I load an interactive page like the post editor for this blog, that jumps to 68% when I’m typing, and more if I’m typing a lot. With 1password.com loaded but in the background, or any additional tabs open, I’ll easily use more than 90% of available memory in an idle state. Facebook would basically crash the computer if a single video loaded (would be fine if you could choose when that happens). It reminds me a lot of what it was like to use web apps in 2007. None of these run well, but some companies have prioritized low resource consumption.

    Too many desktop applications assume you have 2GB of RAM, if not a lot more, in order to function at all. On a machine with only 1GB of RAM, you could maybe run one of these as a standalone single-purpose computer, but the combination of tools you’d need to be productive. Even open source CLI projects like WordPress’s new wp-env tool for local development have a constellation of requirements that add up to a lot more RAM than I have. It’s a bummer, but if I were doing that kind of work, it’d be worth investing in a higher powered machine anyway.

    Overall: Success

    If it weren’t for the performance issues, I could see myself using this machine as a daily driver. I like how it’s compact, transparent, and extensible. I enjoyed getting to know it and learning how it works. The good news is that Raspberry Pi have models up to 8GB so I could upgrade, if I ever find one in stock, and doing so involves nothing more than putting the SD card in a different computer. I might wait and see what the future has in store for the Pi 5, though.

    This might be the end of the summer of desktop Linux, but I’m not done with it yet.

  • Rock Island State Park

    A few things to know about Rock Island State Park:

    1. It requires two ferries to get there: to Washington Island, then to Rock.
    2. You can buy both tickets before you leave the mainland.
    3. The ferry to Washington Island arrives at Detroit Harbor. The ferry to Rock leaves from Jackson Harbor. Eight miles by road separate the two so, youā€™ll want some kind of wheels.
    4. However you choose to get to Jackson Harbor, you need to leave those wheels on the shore. No cars, bikes, scooters, etc. Allowed on Rock Island.
    5. Rock Island is fantastic and worth the extra effort to get there.
    Green blue waters of Lake Michigan in the foreground, the focus of the photo is the early 20th century boat house at the Rock Island harbor. Two arched entrances for slips are at water leve, with a large hall built on top. In the background, the green of the islandā€™s fields and forests.
    The iconic Rock Island boathouse.

    Rock Island State Park lies a mile north of Jackson Harbor, which form a narrow and often perilous strait between them that connects Green Bay with the rest of Lake Michigan. The ferry to Rock Island runs most days between Memorial Day and Indigenous Peopleā€™s Day (nĆ©e Columbus Day), unless the weather is crummy in which case, some or all ferries for the day may be canceled. If youā€™re planning a visit, think ahead and be prepared to adjust your plans based on the weather. I planned to visit a day earlier, and am glad I didnā€™t have to stick to that plan because the remaining ferries were canceled by the early afternoon.

    Choppy waters splash against the ferry hull as it passes the strait between Washington and Rock Islands.
    A view of the sometimes tumultuous gap between Washington and Rock Island. If you sit on the side, prepare to get splashed.

    You can tent camp on the island, and itā€™s pretty cool to see campers lined up for the ferry with all their gear, backpacks, coolers, etc. But if you donā€™t have time or desire to, itā€™s a perfect day trip destination for hikers of almost any ambition. The hike around the island on Thordarson Loop is just over five miles, with another three miles of spur trails through the interior.

    If you plan to camp, one of the only ways to stay on the island, Iā€™d recommend planning some extra time, or even an extra night on Washington on either end of the trip just in case a storm blows in and you canā€™t get there or back the day you expected to. Bring extra food in case you need to spend an extra night, too. There are extremely limited resources once youā€™re there.

    The 1910 lighthouse on Rock island taken from the south.
    The 1910 Lighthouse. Inhabited until the 40s when the light was automated and in service until the 80s when the light was replaced with a separate, and fully automated tower.

    I hiked the Thordarson loop segment to the lighthouse and back, and nothing else. This was mostly because I had another 8 miles of biking and 200 miles of driving on the other end of my day and I didnā€™t want to burn myself out. If Iā€™d have been there the day before, I probably would have stayed longer and hiked the whole island.

    Other islands and distant Michigan shores as seen from the top of the light tower at the Rock Island lighthouse.
    Through the windows on Rock Island looking toward Michigan. The Escanaba area is faintly visible on the left side of the horizon.

    Rock Island State Park is gorgeous from the boat house that welcomes you, to the light house, to the quietude of a no engines wilderness. Itā€™s the only park in Wisconsin of its kind, and wears that distinctiveness as a badge of honor. From the lighthouse, you can see Escanaba poke over the horizon on a clear day, with St. Martin Island immediately in front of you, and a stand of Delta County, MI wind turbines behind that. Even if you arrive ona full ferry, you can find yourself alone in the wilderness more easily and quickly than you expect. It should be on every Great Lakes outdoors personā€™s bucket list.

    An empty trail through a verdant wood.
    The green tunnel of the Thordarson trail headed toward the light.
    A large stone fireplace with Icelandic inscription above the hearth.
    The biggest fireplace Iā€™ve ever seen is in the main room of the boat house.
    Looking out of the boat houseā€™s slips in a blue/pink duotone filter.
    Inside looking out from the slips at the waterā€™s edge, below the boat house.

  • 20 miles of Washington Island

    Despite a cold rainy start that had me questioning my decision, the day turned into a cool, relaxing day on the island filled with plenty of biking. I managed to catch most of the main attractions, at least the ones I was most interested in seeing. When I added up the mileage, Iā€™d done about a 20 mile day. I havenā€™t done a ton of days longer than 20 miles in the last five years, and this one felt really good.

    Gregā€™s Surly Long Haul Trucker bike parked against a log fence. In the background, Green Bay looking west lies through the trees.

    Lake Michigan is a surprising lake. Like any large body of water, its shoreline takes on new colors, textures, and populations depending on what where you catch it. Down in Milwaukee, itā€™s blue, covered in marina, and busy with mostly recreational traffic. Islands are fascinating because the waters open up in every direction, exposing the lakeā€™s immensity in a unique way.

    Washington Island is big and compact enough that most of the action is inland from the shore. There are cattle and lavender farms on the island, a grassy airport, and miles of road on a tidy grid to connect all of it together. Iā€™m glad I didnā€™t follow my instincts to only look at the lake because I would have missed some wonderful highlights.

    Iā€™m not typically a person who goes out of my way to look at churches but this one was worth the stop. This is the islandā€™s Stavkirke (Norwegian style Stave Church), maintained today by Trinity Lutheran (ELCA), was built in the 1980 and 90s, topped in 1999. Itā€™s modeled, though, after a much older church in Borgund, Norway. That church was built in 1150.

    Itā€™s unfortunately unusual to see buildings constructed, furnished, and decorated almost entirely out of wood. Maybe thatā€™s why another tourist looking around was trying to find the stonework that must be there (there is none), but you neednā€™t suspend disbelief to appreciate the intricate joinery and carving in this space because itā€™s all on display in front of you.

    Another inland highlight from the day was my favorite kind of geographic oddity: A recursive lake! That is, a lake on an island in a lake. Little lake hangs up in the northwestern corner of Washington Island and was home to a Late Woodland Peopleā€™s settlement, one of the oldest known communities to inhabit Wisconsin. Itā€™s a 41 acre, spring fed lake that drains directly into Lake Michigan. At only 6 feet deep it would be a decent lake for some good paddling, but not much else for recreation. Itā€™s quiet and peaceful. On the south shore is the Jacobsen Museum and a few homes, and the rest of the lake is protected by the Door County Land Trust.

    I briefly stopped at Schoolhouse Beach in between Little Lake and the Stavkirke. The air was a little too cold and windy, and the water a bit too wild, for my taste so I didnā€™t swim. Instead, I took a rest and enjoyed the view of Green Bay stretching north toward Upper Michigan and appreciated the unique rocks. These rocks were polished by glaciers and refined by the sloshing waters of the Great Lakes over thousands of years, and is one of only a few limestone pebble beaches in the world.

    Lake Michigan makes for a pretty good natural rock tumbler.

    The last thing I want to highlight is the Nelsenā€™s Hall Bittterā€™s Club. Nelsenā€™s is the oldest continuously operating tavern in Wisconsin and never closed during prohibition on account of the owner, Tom Nelsen, having a pharmacistā€™s license. This allowed him to continue serving Angostura bitters as a tincture by prescription. As much as I appreciate the legal hacking required to make that happen, I canā€™t imagine getting too tipsy on bitters alone. I took a shot of the stuff to join the club and Iā€™m now a card carrying member.

    A business card sized piece of paper stamped with a pink thumbprint from Nelsenā€™s Hall. It reads: ā€œThis certifies that Greg Boone has taken ā€˜the Cureā€™ by consuming the prescribed measure of bitters and as such is a fully initiated member of the Bitters Club. You are now considered a full-fledged Islander and entitled to mingle, dance, etc. with all the other Islanders.ā€
    My official Bitters Club CertifĆ­cate, inked with a thumbprint of bitters. Nelsenā€™s remains the largest purveyor of Angostura bitters in the world in part thanks to the club that sells it by the shot.

    This week was a good one to be up on the island because itā€™s a slow week before Labor Day weekend, one of their busiest. So there wasnā€™t a ton of mingling and dancing to do, but the folks I did get to chat with were friendly and accommodating. I look forward to coming back soon!

  • Washington Island by bike

    Yesterday, I drove up to the very tip of Door County to hop on the Washington Island ferry and cross Deathā€™s Door for the first time. Iā€™ll spend two nights here at the Jackson Harbor Inn, about 8 miles from the ferry terminal, and adjacent to the Karfi ferry to Rock Island State Park, Wisconsinā€™s furthest extent into Lake Michigan.

    The Potawatomi Islands are an archipelago that spans the gap between Wisconsinā€™s Door and Michiganā€™s Garden Peninsulas, and demarcates the boundary between Green Bay and the rest of Lake Michigan. Washington is the largest of these islands, and the only one with a permanent population. (Though much of the land on other islands, like Detroit Island, remains privately owned, Washington is the only connected to mainland with a year-round ferry.) They were also the focus of a land dispute between Michigan and Wisconsin resolved by the Supreme Court in 1936.

    Anyway, Iā€™m here for a couple of nights solo tripping. I got in yesterday afternoon and stopped for lunch at the Albatross before finishing the ride to the Inn. It was one of those rides that felt really long because I didnā€™t know exactly where I was headed. In fact only took about a half hour from Alby and was a stunning forested ride. It was similar to riding Madeline Island on Superior (and the islands are about the same size), but itā€™s a more compact island so you get more of the feeling of riding surrounded by forest feeling common to mainland Wisconsin.

    Last nightā€™s dinner at the Jackson Harbor Soup was a fantastic place to take in the emerging evening. From the dockside seating you can watch the cranes settle on the reef and the gulls and terns make their way to a perch for the night. Quiet fishermen make their way to the dock before night falls, and the lake takes on its evening calm. Rock Island, across the strait, beckons the morningā€™s voyagers to explore the wheel-free environment but until then, remains forbidden to all but the nightā€™s campers. Itā€™s quiet, peaceful, and the exact mix of moods I needed my sabbatical draws to a close next month.

    The Friends of Rock Island State Park (FORI) run a volunteer program to help the Wisconsin DNR support the park. There are two weekly opportunities during the season: Lighthouse Museum Docent and Camp host. Both have volunteers stay on island in facilities furnished by the park, and get one round trip to and from Washington Island provided. It sounds a bit intense, but also like it could be a lot of fun for a week, and the facilities are pretty rad. Something to do someday in the future, maybe.

    Today itā€™s a bit rainy and cloudy, so Iā€™ll stay on the island and explored around here, maybe bike up to the island tower, maybe check out the Little Lake, maybe just venture out for a bike ride. Weā€™ll see what the day holds. I want to check out Rock Island before I leave, but might hold out for better weather tomorrow.

  • Things and humans Iā€™ve transported by bike this summer

    So far, and in no particular order:

    • My kid and all of his day care necessities by:
      • Thule trailer,
      • Weehoo tagalong trailer,
      • cargo bike,
    • My kid and a friend of his by:
      • Thule trailer,
      • cargo bike,
    • One inflatable kayak with life jackets and a paddle (plus my kid),
    • Several hauls of groceries,
    • A few Target runs,
    • A cooler full of Peteā€™s Pops, beverages, and snacks,
    • My backpack,
    • And one canoe, with life jackets and paddles.
    A man on a touring bicycle pulling a canoe by trailer behind him.

  • Solo-trip planning

    I havenā€™t done a truly solo trip in a long time; maybe never? The last time I can remember traveling without friends or family outside of a work trip was in 2011 when I went to PĆ©cs after my grandpa died. I left on a Thursday and took a long weekend. Even on this trip, Danielle joined me once she was off work. So, with Danielleā€™s consent to solo-parenting for a few days, I decided to take a solo journey during my sabbatical for what seems to be the first time in my life.

    I like traveling to weird places, and extreme places are my favorite kind. Itā€™s kinda the only reason we became interested in South Point in Hawaii ā€” to go to the United Statesā€™s southernmost point (in a state). A fun fact I enjoy whenever we drive through Wausau, WI is that itā€™s the center of the northern half of the Western Hemisphere (40ĀŗN 90ĀŗW). Itā€™s also Wisconsinā€™s pole of inaccessibility. Milwaukeeā€™s smallest park is about 3 miles from my house. Itā€™s not much to write about, but it is a monument to an important, if largely forgotten, community in Milwaukeeā€™s history.

    Part of why Iā€™m interested in these places is the juxtaposition between the superlative and the ordinary. Kaszubeā€™s Park is tiny, hard to find, and in an unusual part of town for a park, but itā€™s otherwise pretty basic: a few trees, some picnic tables, and, in this case, an anchor. If I worked down there, I might go there to eat lunch. South Point, HI is wholly undeveloped apart from a pier for fishing and mooring.

    I say that to introduce my destination: Washington Island, WI and Rock Island State Park at the extreme tip of the Door Peninsula, and site of the eponymous Lake Michigan strait: Deathā€™s Door. This is easily Wisconsinā€™s most remote destination. Getting there requires a two hour drive to the very end of the Door Peninsula, then a ferry crossing. Iā€™ll spend two days on the island and then head over to St. Germain to meet the rest of the family for Memorial Day.

    As for what Iā€™m doing, itā€™s a little up in the air. Iā€™m staying at Jackson Harbor Inn and have a kayak tour of Rock Island planned. Recursive lakes being another obscure geographic interest of mine, Iā€™ll probably bike out to Little Lake Natural Area. Beyond that, I intend to enroll in the Bitters Club at Nelsonā€™s, do a lot of biking, and enjoy the outdoors.

    Iā€™ll have two weeks left on my sabbatical when Iā€™m done, so this trip is also a bit of a final hurrah before real life starts again.