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The other morning I woke up and thought to myself: "My cycling isn't nearly nerdy enough. Sure, I've got the spandex. But what I really need is an enormous rear-mounted selfie stick on the bike so I can capture footage of my rides and the city." So I searched around and found a seat mount rig from Insta360 that looks like this (please note that the stick extends to 1 meter):
Now, I don't have an Insta360. I've heard they're fantastic. I have an old GoPro Max that is, well, okay. I find it has terrible dynamic range. The sky is often blown out. It also shuts off constantly when I'm snowboarding due to the cold. It's suboptimal and at some point I'll likely invest in an Insta360. But for now, I used an adapter to connect my GoPro to the mount.
Below is what the photos/videos end up looking like. As an aside, captured on the right is Good Gang Ice Cream on Annette, which my friend Chris Spoke (of Toronto Standard) tells me is top.
And here's a video from Instagram.
The way these 360 cameras work is that, as long as the camera is perfectly aligned with the selfie stick, then the entire apparatus disappears in the videos it captures. But if the camera gets misaligned because, for example, things start bouncing around, then it can show up. I'm not exactly sure what's happening in the above, but something is getting in the way of a clean 360-degree stitch.
I'll keep working on it.
Most of the major streets in the older parts of Toronto look something like this:
That is, the right-of-way width is 20 meters. The built form lining the street is retrograde. There are 4 lanes for driving cars (sometimes streetcars run in the two inner-most lanes). And 50% of the entire road is allocated to on-street parking. Now to be fair, on-street parking is usually prohibited during "rush hour." So no stopping and parking during periods like 7-9am and 4-6pm.
But I think this approach to traffic management has become far less relevant today. It made more sense when everyone was driving to an office for 9am and then leaving for the suburbs at 5pm. But today, people want to work from home so they can go to the gym at 11am, go grocery shopping at 1pm, and then get a perm at 3pm.
What I find curious about these decisions is that bike lanes seem to get most of the blame for traffic congestion. We say things like, "nobody really bikes in Toronto except for the 2 weeks of the year when it's nice. So we shouldn't allocate valuable road space to them!" But very rarely do people seem to direct their frustrations toward the parked cars that sit on our roads for, what, ~83% of every day?
One approach allows people to go places and the other is dedicated to storage and immobility. This also says nothing about the relative benefits of people biking: it's objectively a more efficient way to move people, it can improve overall traffic flows by taking people out of cars, and it improves health outcomes (saving taxpayers money).
This is not to say that bike lanes don't also impact vehicle road capacity. But it's a question of what's most optimal for moving the greatest number of people. And I would bet you that on-street parking is far more disruptive to overall traffic flows than bike lanes. Parked cars, it turns out, aren't very good at moving people across a city.
Cycling is good for you. This much is obvious. But what might be some of the lesser known benefits?
Here's a fascinating study (that I discovered through Lloyd Alter's blog), which looked at the association between active travel modes and brain health — specifically dementia risk. For this study, the researchers analyzed nearly 500,000 people in the UK and then tracked them for a median period of 13.1 years. How people got around was classified according to the following groups: non-active (like driving or taking public transit), walking only, mixed-walking, and cycling and mixed-cycling. This latter category is meant to capture people who cycle exclusively and who mix it with other forms of mobility.
Based on this, the researchers uncovered these cycling benefits compared to non-active travel:
19% reduction in all-cause dementia
22% reduction in Alzheimer's disease
40% reduction in young-onset dementia
17% reduction in late-onset dementia
Cycling was by far the best performing category. Why is that? Well, exercise in general is good for brain health. It increases blood flow and oxygenation to the brain, decreases cortisol levels (stress hormone), and reduces anxiety and depression, among many other beneficial things. But perhaps the most important feature for this particular discussion is that it's simultaneously a physical and cognitive activity. In other words, it's exercise, but your brain also has to do a lot of other stuff like balance the bike, avoid obstacles (such as car doors being flung open), and generally navigate an environment with many stimuli.
The other morning I woke up and thought to myself: "My cycling isn't nearly nerdy enough. Sure, I've got the spandex. But what I really need is an enormous rear-mounted selfie stick on the bike so I can capture footage of my rides and the city." So I searched around and found a seat mount rig from Insta360 that looks like this (please note that the stick extends to 1 meter):
Now, I don't have an Insta360. I've heard they're fantastic. I have an old GoPro Max that is, well, okay. I find it has terrible dynamic range. The sky is often blown out. It also shuts off constantly when I'm snowboarding due to the cold. It's suboptimal and at some point I'll likely invest in an Insta360. But for now, I used an adapter to connect my GoPro to the mount.
Below is what the photos/videos end up looking like. As an aside, captured on the right is Good Gang Ice Cream on Annette, which my friend Chris Spoke (of Toronto Standard) tells me is top.
And here's a video from Instagram.
The way these 360 cameras work is that, as long as the camera is perfectly aligned with the selfie stick, then the entire apparatus disappears in the videos it captures. But if the camera gets misaligned because, for example, things start bouncing around, then it can show up. I'm not exactly sure what's happening in the above, but something is getting in the way of a clean 360-degree stitch.
I'll keep working on it.
Most of the major streets in the older parts of Toronto look something like this:
That is, the right-of-way width is 20 meters. The built form lining the street is retrograde. There are 4 lanes for driving cars (sometimes streetcars run in the two inner-most lanes). And 50% of the entire road is allocated to on-street parking. Now to be fair, on-street parking is usually prohibited during "rush hour." So no stopping and parking during periods like 7-9am and 4-6pm.
But I think this approach to traffic management has become far less relevant today. It made more sense when everyone was driving to an office for 9am and then leaving for the suburbs at 5pm. But today, people want to work from home so they can go to the gym at 11am, go grocery shopping at 1pm, and then get a perm at 3pm.
What I find curious about these decisions is that bike lanes seem to get most of the blame for traffic congestion. We say things like, "nobody really bikes in Toronto except for the 2 weeks of the year when it's nice. So we shouldn't allocate valuable road space to them!" But very rarely do people seem to direct their frustrations toward the parked cars that sit on our roads for, what, ~83% of every day?
One approach allows people to go places and the other is dedicated to storage and immobility. This also says nothing about the relative benefits of people biking: it's objectively a more efficient way to move people, it can improve overall traffic flows by taking people out of cars, and it improves health outcomes (saving taxpayers money).
This is not to say that bike lanes don't also impact vehicle road capacity. But it's a question of what's most optimal for moving the greatest number of people. And I would bet you that on-street parking is far more disruptive to overall traffic flows than bike lanes. Parked cars, it turns out, aren't very good at moving people across a city.
Cycling is good for you. This much is obvious. But what might be some of the lesser known benefits?
Here's a fascinating study (that I discovered through Lloyd Alter's blog), which looked at the association between active travel modes and brain health — specifically dementia risk. For this study, the researchers analyzed nearly 500,000 people in the UK and then tracked them for a median period of 13.1 years. How people got around was classified according to the following groups: non-active (like driving or taking public transit), walking only, mixed-walking, and cycling and mixed-cycling. This latter category is meant to capture people who cycle exclusively and who mix it with other forms of mobility.
Based on this, the researchers uncovered these cycling benefits compared to non-active travel:
19% reduction in all-cause dementia
22% reduction in Alzheimer's disease
40% reduction in young-onset dementia
17% reduction in late-onset dementia
Cycling was by far the best performing category. Why is that? Well, exercise in general is good for brain health. It increases blood flow and oxygenation to the brain, decreases cortisol levels (stress hormone), and reduces anxiety and depression, among many other beneficial things. But perhaps the most important feature for this particular discussion is that it's simultaneously a physical and cognitive activity. In other words, it's exercise, but your brain also has to do a lot of other stuff like balance the bike, avoid obstacles (such as car doors being flung open), and generally navigate an environment with many stimuli.
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