Cycling In Regina Isn’t Always Easy

What’s it like for a Regina cyclist to go see a movie?

Besides homicidal/comical drivers (from Alberta),

there are flooded Multi Use Pathways,

and underpasses that are creeks.

Persist past those hazards, and there are gravelly “Shared” bike lanes with parked cars ready to give you the “door-prize”.

Can you see drivers being as patient and persistent as Regina’s cyclists? Despite the flooded dead-ends without detour signs, I made the 11km bike ride from the south west, to the north east in under an hour, so I could catch the latest “Star Trek Into Darkness” [10/10]. I’d highly recommend trying it. The film was great fun too. *rim shot*

Mini Solar Tour in the Fog of Wood Mountain and Glentworth

I went on a road trip Saturday with my friend Adam K., down to my parents’ place, and his grandparents’ farm. On the way around southern Saskatchewan, we saw close to 150 deer and antelope, a snowy owl, a dozen hawks, a handful of Canada Geese, smaller birds, two dead raccoons, and the final resting place of four children who passed away in 1919 (Spanish Flu maybe?).

The road into Regina was ice, and the road to Moose Jaw was quite a bit better, but still partly covered in a thick layer of ice. There was a semi on the eastbound highway that had done a 180, and blew open its trailer door, strewing boxes across the ditch at Belle Plaine.

We filled up in Moose Jaw, then ate at the Steakhouse in Assiniboia (we had waffles). The GPS kept trying to convince us to turn off the paved road instead of going to Limerick. We went to Limerick, I took a couple photos, and on through flooded Flintof and dry Wood Mountain we continued. Many deer were along the way, and the misting rain continued through the trip after Moose Jaw’s southern hills.

- A hawk about to land

After second lunch we strolled around the various energy and heating systems my parents had installed for their home.

Convincing SaskPower that a generator ring/link was a good idea for a Saskatchewan power meter, took some convincing. Fortunately Dad is persistent.

- 1925 built Ukrainian Catholic near Glentworth, SK

More photos next time of the animals who made this print:

Transportation: Where to go, and how to get there in #YQR

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Most of my speech as heard in the video above, and posted to my Regina politics blog:

I’m very pleased to have been asked to speak at Campion College about transportation issues. I got my Computer Science – co-op degree from here a decade ago, and I never imagined at the time that I’d wind up the President of a different sort of “co-op”, the Regina Car Share Co-operative. At the time, I had no idea that “car sharing” was even a thing. I’d heard of car pooling of course, but they are different. It wasn’t until I returned to work at the UofR, that I got an email about a group of people holding a pot luck supper in Regina to discuss forming a “car share”, and I thought that sounded like maybe a good way to use a car without the unpleasantries of maintaining one. A few years later, I was chosen to help guide a remarkable group of volunteers who make organized car sharing possible in our city, as it is in almost every other major Canadian and American city today.

Why am I interested in transportation? Well, I’m interested in nearly everything, but where curiosity meets reality is on the streets. Nearly everyone in the world has a daily need to move about the farm, town, or city they live at, and so modes of transportation are essential to how and where we live. If transportation isn’t timely or fun, people don’t enjoy where they live as much as they should. I don’t think car repair is fun, and feel dealing with SGI is about the worst thing that could administratively happen to someone (short of being charged with a crime). So I’ve set out to make transportation both timely and fun for myself, and it just so happens that I need to make it that way for the people around me too, in order to be successful.

Another big reason I’m interested in transportation improvement, is that it’s a major contributor to air pollution and climate change. These are not small, or easy problems to solve, but our little daily actions collectively point our society in either the right or wrong direction. Right now, Regina is unquestionably pointed in the wrong direction, and among our collective actions pointing us there is how we get around every day. Since public talks are always more fun with interaction (I think so anyway, because otherwise I tend to get sleepy especially if the speaker has a mono-tone voice like mine,): How many people got to University today by themselves in a motor vehicle? How many car pooled? How many took the bus? How many biked or walked?

Not A Lot

Not much to say tonight, except it was a busy and fulfilling weekend, with lots of community gathering, and plenty of optimism for the Spring, gardens, cycling, busing, and all sorts of improvements ahead.

How very much I look forward to being able to catch buses more easily on Sundays, or just skip them by being able to comfortably cycle to my destinations instead. Spring can’t come soon enough, but I’ll wait; The downside to wishing for time to fly by, is lamenting later on that the years passed by too quickly.

Thinking Is Not Hard

Thinking is not hard to do, but some people treat it like others should do it for them. Clicking that link may be painful, as it has details of a state representative saying cyclists pollute worse than car drivers because they are exercising and breathing out more CO(2) in doing so. I guess the worst thing you could do is get in a car, go to the gym, and get on a stationary bike, eh?

Idiots are all around us, and sometimes they are elected as government representatives. Because this story casts cyclists in a negative light, I suppose you’ll be hearing about it on Gormley’s radio show later on. You can then expect the usual cast of zombie callers recounting the last time they were irritated by a cyclist on a street they owned.

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There’s nothing more polluting, in every sense of the word, than a Republican on a high horse.

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Yesterday I noted on Twitter that there are many easy changes someone can make in their weekly routine, to make a dent in how much climate change (air pollution) they directly and indirectly create. For instance, someone can cut meat out of one of their days in the week, to have at least a 1/7th impact immediately on their demand for meat. If the demand falls enough, fewer animals will need to be raised to make farmers the same amount of money. More importantly, meat requires much more water and energy input for the same amount of food energy plants can directly provide to humans.

Some (intentionally) hard of understanding trolls came by to mock the information. It’s hard not to laugh at someone who thinks its hard to point out a time when Saskatchewan has faced a water crisis. Although the title is worded in a clumsy way, Forbes helps explain why basing so much of the world’s food supply on meat, is a folly.

This information didn’t slow down the trolls though, who went on to suggest that I’m a damned dirty easterner, never grew up on a farm, and couldn’t have the faintest idea of what it takes to understand the food system. Besides all that, I apparently want all people to stop eating all meat, and starve. It’s hard to argue with iron-clad logic like that, eh?

Some of these comments come from people who earlier chided me for thinking of solutions to our oil dependence. When did conservatives start subscribing to pre-Copernicus thinking? There are centuries of tradition after that sort of anti-science, anti-discovery thinking to “conserve” with their defence of the status quo. There’s no need to be so anti-intellectual and anti-solution.

Russian Dash-cameras

The meteor strike last week made more people realize the prevalence of dash-cams in Russia. I’d seen shocking vehicle footage on YouTube before, one of a brick flying from a truck and killing a passenger in a car going the other way. The Guardian put together an assortment of unusual vehicle incident videos. The one of the car being hung up on the street car wire is particularly unusual, as are the two with jets. Unfortunately one with a jet, is a crash, where four on the plane died. I’d be more than a little terrified if a hail of debris suddenly washed over the highway in front of me (with a wheel hitting the car in front too).

SGI Bike Uprising

Doesn’t SGI know it’s not cool to cause an uprising amongst those most likely to ride motorcycles up and down the streets of SGI brass?

The increase in motorcycle insurance rates cannot be to just break even, since the value of the insurance is past the value of the object it is insuring in some cases! A car’s insurance starts out being 1/25th of the total vehicle at times in its life. Toward the end of the vehicles’ mechanical life, it’s still less than 1/2 (annually) in most cases.

SGI should be fair, and any case where the insurance is more than 50% of the bike, knock it down to that if it’s not lower than the rate being charged already. Even then, after two years, they could afford to buy the motorcyclist a new bike of the same age/quality, and still make money! Could you envision paying $4000/year to insure your $8000 car? It’s absurd.

Some rates will go up and others will go down, but the most dramatic change will be sport bikes and bikes with engines over 400 cubic centimetres.

Saskatoon’s Colby Guldie just bought a new motorcycle and found out his rate could go from $180 a month to $368 month. He says that’s not fair.

“You know, if I’m at fault for an incident I think, yeah, I should be paying more, that makes sense to me,” he said. “But I’m five years running now with a clean motorcycle record. I don’t think I should be having my rates doubled, bam, just like that.”

Guldie says it’s unfair that SGI is lumping smaller bikes with much faster ones. He’s already written to politicians and to SGI and says he’ll attend public hearings to fight the proposed increase.

While almost all motorcycle users will pay double-digit increases, some will pay even more.

To look at an extreme case, someone with an old sport bike (1982 and older) with a 1200-cc engine who used to pay $1,001 a year might have to pay $4,309 in future — a 331 per cent increase.

Explaining the proposed hikes, SGI president Andrew Cartmell said motorcycle users have relatively high injury claim costs. The proposed increase is “significant”, but with the rates as they currently are, motorcycle users are essentially being subsidized by all the other drivers, he said.

(emphasis mine)

They need to use the SGI points system to fix this problem. If someone has a perfect driving record, they should get a discount to close to the amount they’ve been paying now. Even so, it feels like a “bait and switch” scam to those who’ve bought bikes thinking they had affordable insurance rates. In Saskatchewan, every motor vehicle must be insured to be driven, yet there is only one insurance provider: SGI. Traditionally they have the best rates in the country, but this motorcycle-boondoggle is an example of why they need competition here.

Regina Transit Petition

Regina Transit is planning to rearrange existing service to provide a few efficiencies. I see that more investment is needed to make significant improvements that transit riders have been requesting for well over a decade already. As Regina is growing, we’re reaching the limit our streets and parking lots can take, and it’s showing up in the frustrating rush hours that Reginans were not subjected to until a few years ago. Both drivers and transit riders alike stand to benefit greatly from additional money spent on adding buses to the fleet. It’s one of those all-win scenarios that City Council can leap upon and raise the city esteem.

Please get the petition, print it, sign it, and get your voting age friends and family in Regina to sign it too.

Regina Related Video

Electric car infrastructure finally in place along the Trans-Canada Highway!

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University of Regina Cougar Cheer Team wins nationals again.

Sandy Wind Blows

The largest hurricane recorded is underway, and it’s hitting the US and Canada. Is it because of climate change? The short answer is, yes. If you’re asking that question because you’re wondering if climate change is real, the answer is, yes it is real and we have to make a better effort to reduce greenhouse gas pollution immediately.

Wind blowing people over will become a lot more common if we don’t convince our politicians to collectively act where individuals cannot. Centuries ago, it used to be that the punishment for ignoring reality was your own obscurity and demise. With a socialized state, industrial revolution, and global economy, the consequences of teeming masses of people willing to ignore reality results in economic and ecological collapse. Good luck getting Harper’s government to care while they are busy making money, and stripping power from the people.

ADDED:

Science is not a topic suitable only to a limited number of people. It’s essential that our political leaders, and our people understand it enough to make long term decisions that don’t jeopardize our health and safety. Presently, the debate is too charged with rhetoric paid for by people who have no interest in science, but have found a willing audience who gladly take hold of the escape that denial offers. You only need to read the people raving about socialist plots in my own blog’s comment sections to find people so deranged and out of touch with the reality that can literally blow them over and flood their city.