tagged

Señor Moderantor, over at Rant Your Head Off, has tagged me… which, from what I understand means I’m supposed to come up with five things most people wouldn’t know about me. Even though this is the blog version of a chain letter, I’ll play along because I’ve enjoyed reading the “tagged” entries over at some of my favorite daily distractions: Tim at Bicycles and Icicles and Jill at Up in Alaska.

So here goes…

1. I have a M.A. in philosophy for which I wrote a thesis defending philosophical anarchism.

2. My seat on the Durham Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission, a citizens’ board that advises Durham’s city and county councils how to make the region more bike-friendly, is a different approach for me. I’ve never before worked so closely with governments; but then again, given number 1., perhaps that’s not so surprising.

3. I have lived and worked among the homeless of Atlanta, GA and Washington, D.C.

4. I used to teach literature, science, math, and philosophy in an alternative school for teenage mothers who had dropped out of high school after getting pregnant.

5. I have played basketball with Kevin Garnett.

edit: I forgot to pass this on… I’m going to tag Martino. Further, I challenge him to tell us his five things using only photography. Let’s see if he plays along.

Flores Mosqueto

Flores Mosqueto, en Santiago de Chile.

Gender Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty System

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Phillip Barron
Originally published in the Radical Philosophy Review, Volume Three, Number One (2000) (pp. 89-96)

Abstract: Although the demographics on male versus female death-row prisoners suggest that males are the criminal justice system’s primary targets, I argue that the system also discriminates against women. Utilizing contemporary feminist theories of gender, I argue that female prisoners are punished primarily for violating norms of gender correctness.

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new category — published works

In an effort to better organize my site, I’ve created a new category of posts — published works. Posts in this category will be links to other websites or, when I have permission, reproductions of texts that I’ve published elsewhere.

cycleart — bike themed art show

Heck Yeah Coffee and Arleigh (of arsbars) are sponsoring a bike themed art show in Charlotte. Submissions due January 12th — contact Arleigh for more info.

Nice to see another bike themed art show. The Altered Esthetics show this summer was a great success.

Stewaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaart

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy or more committed volunteer. Congratulations Stewart.

http://www.newsobserver.com/166/story/519942.html

Tar Heel of the Week: Trail advocate isn’t content to coast
Joe Miller, Staff Writer

CHAPEL HILL - Stewart Bryan loves riding his mountain bike.

That’s why he spent two hours on the phone Monday pricing trail-building tools, three hours Tuesday with a tool salesman, and another three at a meeting that night advocating trails for a new Wake County park. Then he spent three more hours in meetings Wednesday night and Thursday, and on Friday spent hours testing a machine that carves single-track trail from the side of a slope.

“Sometimes it’s hard to find time to ride,” says Bryan, 53.

What do the meetings, phone calls and machine tests have to do with mountain biking?

Everything, if you want a place to ride in the Triangle.

Bryan, of Chatham County, is the incoming president of the Triangle Off-Road Cyclists, a year-old nonprofit organization dedicated to giving mountain bikers places to ride.

The all-volunteer club’s advocacy is why eventually there will be 20 miles of mountain bike trail at Forest Ridge Park on the shores of Falls Lake and smaller networks at two future parks: White Deer in Garner and the northern Wake landfill in Raleigh.

The group’s latest success is at the Briar Chapel housing community being built off U.S. 15/501 south of Chapel Hill. Thanks to the nonprofit, and especially to Bryan, Briar Chapel will have at least 25 miles of trail, making it the biggest single-track trail network in the region.

That is nearly 70 miles of new mountain bike trails in all. Coupled with the 100 or so miles already on the ground, that’s a lot of recreational fun — most of it built by volunteers at no expense to taxpayers.

A hobby blossoms

Bryan’s arc as a mountain biker shows how this phenomenon of cost-free public works came to be.

Twelve years ago, he was looking for a way to connect with his then 12-year-old son, Nathan. Nathan had just started mountain biking with a friend; Bryan decided to give it a try.

“I borrowed an old mountain bike that was too small, and we rode to some local trails,” Bryan recalls. “I looked like a circus bear on a bike.”

Despite his sideshow appearance, Bryan was hooked. He bought a bike better suited to his lean 6-foot frame and started looking for places to ride. That was when the seeds of his volunteerism were sown.

“There wasn’t much else around here,” Bryan says.

The only legal trail at the time was a four-mile network at Lake Crabtree County Park in Morrisville. The trail Bryan had cut his teeth on in Chapel Hill was “bootleg” — a trail cleared by enthusiasts on private land with (or sometimes without) the tacit approval of the landowner.

In the mid-1990s, during mountain biking’s boom nationwide, bootleg trail was pretty much all local mountain bikers had. The old Morrisville network, Capital Boulevard, Regency Park and Dunn Road were all good places to ride but were short-lived — gone when landowners decided to build.

Bryan had never volunteered for anything — “I guess I was never that passionate about anything” — but he realized that if he was going to ride trail, he would have to build it.

Forging a path

He started attending workdays at Lake Crabtree, where the NC FATS Mountain Bike Club had built the trail and was responsible for maintaining it. He later volunteered at Harris Lake County Park, which opened with trails in 1999.

In 2002, he learned that a few other mountain bikers from the western Triangle — Brian Williford and Gaynor Collester — were talking with park planners about building trail at the new Little River Regional Park north of Durham.

A club — the Durham Orange Mountain Biking Organization, better known by its pachydermic acronym DOMBO — was formed for the sole purpose of building the trail. In 2004, after a core group of a half-dozen riders had put in 50 or so Saturdays building trail, the park opened with seven miles of single-track.

“We worked out there for two years,” Bryan says. “It was a long process.”

Bryan could have felt he had paid his dues, that he could retire his chain saw and pulaski ax. Instead, he played a key role in starting TORC, a Triangle-wide club intended to replace smaller local clubs.

The significance of the umbrella group with affiliations to regional and national mountain bike clubs became apparent earlier this year when development company Newland Communities started mulling amenities for Briar Chapel. The community in eastern Chatham County plans 2,389 homes built over seven to 10 years.

“We wanted nature to be one of the cornerstones of the community,” says Ed Timony, project manager for the development.

Out of a two-day “envisioning process,” Timony says, Newland decided it wanted lots of trails. The company hired Greenways Inc. to build hiking trails and walking paths. The Durham firm had no experience with mountain bike trails, so it called the Colorado-based International Mountain Bicycling Association. IMBA’s statewide representative at the time, Carter Worthington, said Bryan is your man.

A ‘why not?’ attitude

“I met with Stewart out on the site with a huge map and showed him the walking trails,” Timony says. The map included what someone at Newland thought might make a nice little mountain bike trail, along a power line easement.

Timony chuckles. “Stewart looked at it, scratched his head and in a polite way said, ‘That’s really not that good of a trail, in a power line corridor.’ “

Bryan recommended a network significantly larger than Newland’s three-mile ride through a clear-cut. Timony, Bryan recalls, looked at it and said, “Sure, why not?”

As Bryan has continued to explore the property and find additional terrain suitable for riding, Timony has continued to say “Sure, why not?” So far, 25 miles of mountain bike trail are planned for Briar Chapel.

Newland is so pleased with the plan that it cut TORC a check for $25,000 to buy a mini-skid steer, a kind of junior bulldozer that expedites the trail-building process. That was three times more money than the largest grant ever awarded a local mountain bike club.

Yet it is still a bargain for Newland. Williford, IMBA’s current representative for the state, says commercial contractors charge about $8,000 per mile to build mountain bike trail.

Briar Chapel, Forest Ridge, White Deer Park, the northern Wake landfill and TORC’s various other projects — from providing skills clinics to leading rides — promise to keep Bryan busy as club president. This week alone, a month before his official induction, Bryan put in nearly 20 hours — in addition to his regular job as a self-employed general contractor.

As Bill Camp said Wednesday night as he presided over his final meeting as TORC president, “I’ve enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to getting my life back.”

A year from now, when his reign as the Triangle’s chief mountain biking advocate is over, Bryan, too, can look forward to getting his life back.

Maybe he’ll even have time for a mountain bike ride.

weekend cycling and duke cycling

Two more new local bike blogs to let you know about. The first is put together by high school student Nick Drago. Check it out; it’s called weekend cycling. It’s mostly a collection of photographs and stories from rides — solo and with friends.

In addition to cycling, he’s a skilled web-designer — his site is pretty slick.

The second one is the Duke Cycling team’s blog — a race report log and truly community site. You’ll notice there are several authors, each with his/her own sense of humor.

dumptruck vs. bike

dumptruck.jpg

Construction truck hits grad student
Mingyang Liu
The Duke Chronicle
Posted: 12/11/06

A graduate student in the political science department was taken to the Duke Emergency Department after a construction truck hit him and ran over his bicycle just before 1 p.m. Tuesday.

“He was trapped for a short period of time and Emergency Medical Services retrieved him,” said Sara-Jane Raines, Duke University Police Department administrative services executive officer. “I can’t tell the state of his injuries right now. He is still being assessed.”

The accident occurred on Science Drive, Raines said. The truck was turning right into the driveway across from the Fuqua School of Business when the two vehicles collided, she added.

The Durham Police Department is currently investigating the accident.

Witnesses said the bicycle was traveling between the truck and the sidewalk.

“The truck was making a turn and the bike tried to beat the truck to the turn,” said one construction worker who witnessed the accident.

“That’s basically what happened.” Bill Brady, a third-year student at the School of Law, arrived at the scene shortly after the accident.

“The bicycle is just a mangled mess,” he said. “What I heard is that he’s lucky to be alive.”

Raleigh Rides

I want to let y’all know about a new local bike blog. Jennifer Lewis has put together Raleigh Rides; a site organizing social rides just down the road in Raleigh.
Straight from the site…

The Raleigh Routes Adventure is intended to be both part fun and part advocacy. If you would like to join in the fun, the rides are open to everyone of all skill levels and with all sorts of bikes. We go at a fairly slow pace, making plenty of stops to take pictures and water breaks along the way. We also encourage post-ride dining! Eventually, our goal is to do all thirteen (13) bike routes by the end of the year. For a high-resolution version of the map, click here — warning: I mean, HIGH RESOLUTION.

I wrote to Jennifer to find out more; specifically I asked why she’s organizing the rides, what she hopes to get out of it.

Wow, word gets around quick.

I hope to get out of this quite a few things. Some of the personal ones include learning more about Raleigh and Raleigh’s bicycle facilities, meeting new people, and gaining confidence in my skills as a cyclist. Some of the more idealistic things include that I hope to raise more awareness about the bicycle-friendly assets that the city has, and to encourage others to get out and ride and meet others that are interested in riding, and hopefully to also start planting the seed for a cycling advocacy group in Raleigh.

And I believe that in order to make Raleigh more bicycle-friendly, I can’t just start complaining and demanding changes – I need to learn my city and what it has to offer - thus the idea to ride all of the bike routes in order to learn what it’s really like out there.

Who/what kind of cyclist should be coming out?

jennifer.jpg

The rides are open to any kind of cyclist - we’ve had “experienced” people in full racing regalia, and then my friend who showed up on his little BMX bike without a helmet (he got one for the next ride) and very little cycling experience (but he can definitely make his bike jump a curb).

I must add as a precaution that the first four routes are not that demanding because they are designed as recreational routes - the distances are not that long (on the routes… getting to the routes is another story, see the post about Route 2) and they are on residential streets. For this reason, these routes are great for newbies who’re just starting back on their bikes, and “expert” cyclists who don’t really want a major work-out but just want to meet new people or check out the routes and their conditions or support the activity with their presence. For the remaining routes, I’ve looked at the map and they are cross-town connectors so they look like they will be more demanding - pretty long (5+ miles), and they might be on some relatively busy streets.

That being said, we stop frequently for breaks, we’re not training for anything or trying to break any land speed records so we’re definitely traveling at a slower pace, but the rides may be a little demanding in terms of level of comfort with road-riding and riding in traffic. To compensate for that, most of our rides will be on Sundays in the afternoon, when traffic is the lowest. This might be counterintuitive to the aspect of the ride that is intended to check out the conditions on the route, but I also feel like Sunday afternoons are a more convenient time for a lot of people. So these rides will still be good for newbies, although they will need to be mentally prepared to ride in a little bit of traffic and for a little bit longer distance. And then afterwards, of course, we go get some food. There were some ideas of making the rides food-themed. Our first ride was ice cream, our second was smoothies, the third turned out to be more like fruit/coffee at Whole Foods, and we’ll see what Route 4 cooks up. I’m hoping we’ll go for flan or cannolis one of these days.


What’s the coolest thing that’s happened so far?

Really the most exciting thing for me that has happened so far has been the turn-out and interest in the rides. I’ve been really amazed by the emails I’ve gotten about it with hardly any advertising (initially, I just sent an email at their request to Bruce Rosar and Jake Petrosky for them to use to distribute as they wished. Now I’m keeping a list of people who have expressed an interest and have asked to be notified about upcoming rides).

I’ve also gotten advertising from people I hardly know, which has been really neat, including the North Carolina Bicycle Club and 1304 Bikes. And I’ve also been really buoyed by the support of my friends who’ve come along and been regulars so far, and who also encouraged me to start doing this when I was questioning the idea.

raleighride.jpg

On a more sensational note, though, I’d like to say that the most jaw-dropping, damn-I-can’t-believe-he-did-that thing that has happened so far has been my friend Mack Nance, who like I mentioned rides the BMX bike (with no gears, little teeny-tiny trike-sized tires, and heavy as lead). Mack rode the first two routes on his BMX bike, hardly broke a sweat, kept up with the rest of the group (who were on road bikes and mountain bikes) the whole way even on some mega-hills, and even had some energy at the end of the first ride to race Danielle Newton on her tricked-out racing bike (he lost, but it was close). I was really impressed.

For more information about Raleigh Rides, check out the website or email raleighroutes@hotmail.com.

The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Durham roads may get even better for bicyclists

Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun

If a sport is defined by the rules that compose a game, then I don’t think of cycling as a sport. Sure, there are sporting events that are based on riding bicycles, from homegrown mountain bike races on the Cane Creek circuit to the NORBA Nationals and even the Olympics. Some people say that multi-stage road races like the Tour de France are the purest expression of cycling’s ethos. Those lean trained bodies, the glossy frames with glittering flawless componentry, the self-organization and strategy of the peloton for some add up to what cycling is all about.

Although dominant in advertising, racing bikes and the racing lifestyle represent one of the smallest of all subsets of the world’s cycling community. Not only are bicycles most commonly used for transportation, according to a recent report of the Worldwatch Institute, bicycles are also the most efficient vehicles. So I say that to find the essence of cycling you need only to look to the streets of any metropolitan area, mostly in the mornings and evenings, as the working class pedals to work.

Whether from looking to save the city some money on transportation planning or some carbon monoxide emissions, City Council and County Commissioners voted last month to give Durham’s bike commuters a boost.

Not very often does a city get to rethink its transportation planning through the eyes of a cyclist. But Brian Bergeler spent the better part of 2006 doing just that. He and the other experts at Greenways, Inc. were contracted by Durham to take a comprehensive look at Durham’s cycling infrastructure – from off-road greenways like the American Tobacco Trail to wide outer lanes and bike lanes – and to make recommendations on what Durham can do better.

Greenway, Inc’s results were packaged into the Durham Comprehensive Bicycle Transportation Plan, which both the City and County adopted last month.

The Bike Plan is both an audit of existing bike facilities as well as a compilation of recommendations for what Durham can do next, prioritized from the simplest to the most luxurious. Bergeler says that the “paint project” ideas are the most attractive to him. Without laying any new pavement, Durham could “double or even triple (with full implementation) its existing on-street bicycle network.” For example, by repainting sections of Cornwallis Rd., Fayetteville St., Roxboro Rd. and Broad St., Durham could quickly expand its bike-lane network without breaking the bank.

Dan Clever, a bike commuter and member of Durham’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission, echoes Bergeler’s enthusiasm. “Phase One,” says Clever, “identifies several roads in the city that can easily accommodate bike lanes or signed routes. Implementation of Phase One would link most of Durham’s key destinations.”

“The plan is an invaluable guide towards expanding the viable transportation options for residents and visitors deciding how to get around in the Bull City,” says Alan Dippy, also a member of the citizen board BPAC. “It’s an impressive document, in scope and detail, and I think what makes it so exciting is its potential to connect people on bicycles with each other and with all the great things Durham has to offer.”

Bergeler explains that the Bike Plan’s scope extends beyond paving and (re)striping roads “to encouraging companies to provide showers and lockers to bicycle commuters, to appropriately enforcing the rules of the road on [sic] motorists who endanger the lives of cyclists.”

Now that both the City Council and the County Commissioners have endorsed the plan, Durham transportation planning departments (both for the City and Metropolitan Planning Organization) have a map, which if followed, could lead to a more bike-friendly Durham.

Dippy adds “when one looks at all the positive changes and growth Durham is experiencing, the adoption of the Bike Plan is an important, timely and proactive step towards insuring safer roadways for those who opt to leave the car at home.” If you’d like to learn more about the Bike Plan, feel free to attend the next BPAC meeting.

BPAC meets on the third Thursday of every month at 7pm in City Hall.

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