I cycled to all the villages in alphabetical order
diziet.dreamwidth.org
diziet.dreamwidth.org
- bike/walk/run every street in your city. Can use for instance https://wandrer.earth/ with Strava to track it. It's quite nice, discover all kinds of things in my own neighborhood I didn't know of. By habit you always take the same routes. This makes me take a new road on my way back home and see new stuff.
- Draw art on the maps using gps. I've done multiple. Takes planning and often a few attempts executing when you realize that road is closed, that path was flooded or whatever. I've even gotten in the news a few times from this. For instance when I ran this pest doctor during lock downs https://imgur.com/a/qRkB5QN
- Bike the longest distance using the smallest area. Basically find a roundabout and see how long you can take it. Or the opposite, the largest area in your city, basically bike its border.
My wife and I are looking to move back to my home town possibly next year after 10 years abroad, and we are checking all kind of online resources about the city.
Is wild to me that a random expat on Youtube is teaching me all kind of things that I didn't know about my own city. I guess the almost 30 years I spent there I really only frequented a very small section of it, and entire sections of the city are complete blind spots.
In my city (Denver) there's an independent group that keeps a map of low-stress streets to ride on (which they share as a google map plus phone apps), which is different than the official bike routes map put out by the city.
https://www.bikestreets.com/maps It includes some off-street routes outside to the city limits but just looking at the ones within the city, there might be a nice route to try out for me.
Note that for really long rides, it is best to map segments of it in chunks to avoid main roads.
Reminds me of this easter egg from the last 747 delivery flight:
Every geek's gotta love that sentence pair.
This is basically how I did lockdown as well. The result was a web app called VOS where you can plan walks which help you wrap your head around astronomical scales:
This also eventually turned into a series of TikToks:
I even felt a small urge to take pictures of the place name signs of those cities and turn it into art. Soon after that stroke of genius thought, I stumbled upon an exhibition by a Dutch artist [1] who visited nearly every city in The Netherlands, took a picture of himself, his car, and the place name sign, and I lost interest.
Obviously I got the inspiration in an Amsterdam metro line that stops at ABCOUDE [2].
It might be interesting to retry this with the entire OpenStreetMap database.
[1] Forgot his name, can't find it on the internet, ChatGPT has no clue.
It's a good location for this as it's quite flat, very few hill, and those that exist are more like a hump.
Although road-signs are all in miles, it's not unknown for other distance markers (e.g. on walking / cycling trails) to be in kilometres. When I was studying in Birmingham in 2006-2010 the signs on the canal network were in kilometres.
For me, my default unit is kilometeres (although I am one of those awful Bremoaners [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bremoaner] who even moved to Berlin after the vote).
Same for booze. It's illegal to sell most booze in imperial units (e.g. a shot of whiskey must be either 25ml or 35ml, no other values, and the choice between 25ml and 35ml shot size is for an entire bar, they can't be like house vodka is 35ml but this expensive Scotch is 25ml), but, it's mandatory to sell beer and cider by the pint.
It's a temporary fudge that then politicians are reluctant to actually follow through and do the clean-up later because that's only going to annoy the handful of strong opponents and makes little real difference to ordinary punters for whom this isn't a priority.
Sometimes this works out OK in politics, e.g. in Britain it was never strictly made illegal to sell leaded fuel only new cars which need such fuel - but it soon made no economic sense to make such fuel as a fuel refinery, so the ban was unnecessary. Politicians could go from telling the niche of pro-lead constituents they'll still be able to buy the fuel they want to commiserating them that it's no longer for sale, never having actually banned it.
Is it? Is it not 568ml of beer? I.e. not sold as an imperial pint measure, but as 568ml?
Of course everyone calls it a pint of this or the other, but I think on all the glasses etc the measures are in ml not imperial pints? It's been a while since I've been to a pub (before COVID) so I guess this might have been rolled back after Brexit?
The only place a pint is legal is draught beer and cider, which are poured into glasses and the glasses are marked either with a line or "to the brim", with either a crown mark or a CE label signifying the maker claims these glasses comply with regulations.
The people making a "beer glass" and putting the crown mark on it need to ensure it conforms, if they've got gear that can tell them it's 568.26125ml that'd work, because that's what a pint is, but the law says "Pint", not "568.26125ml".
I was expecting it to be that easy to surround myself with similar people here, but apparently not.
Still, should be seeing Calamarain next weekend.
In a jury lounge with around fifty randomly selected strangers this doesn't seem probable, and I can't imagine a similar outcome if I'd been at Bedford(which I think is the next closest crown court).
I'm more accepting of bumping in to fellow travellers at the curry house or pub, because we're choosing to go where others suggest. Still, Cambridge is joyously weird.
Note to self: Probably should have used the jury duty downtime to meet some interesting "normal" people though.
If either the dev or the friend arrived by unicycle, I probably know them…
I think it’s an intrinsic thing with British pub culture, the same can be applied to various genres of literature, game design, films, and so many other things.
(not same person as cyclist)
(btw, I love Jordan Prince's channel on German idiosyncrasies).
Fun fact: in Cambridge city centre there are several streets called things like Market Hill and Senate House Hill. They are called “hills” because they used to be about 0.5m higher than other nearby streets. The difference is most visible on Benet St where there are steps from the road (gradually raised over the centuries) down to the churchyard around the tower, which is the oldest building in Cambridge, about 1000 years old.
How can this be, you ask incredulously? It's almost entirely open water between those two locations, other than incredibly flat land as you cross eastern England and ditto before reaching wherever the next spot that is above 300'.
also some more reference: https://www.greatfen.org.uk/about-great-fen/heritage/brief-h...
It just never is Norway or Switzerland.
If you have flat land and mild winters, mild summers, sure you are going to get load of cycling, making infra is no brainer.
What's the cycling modal share in your city, and is it higher than Oslo's?
https://ecf.com/news-and-events/news/city-oslo-joins-cities-...
>With a modal share of 7% (2018), Oslo’s bicycle strategy has a modal share target for cycling of 16% by 2025. Furthermore, Oslo has seen a ten-fold increase in the annual construction of bicycle infrastructure, from 1.5 km/year to over 15 km/year, with an updated mandate to build 100 km for the period 2020-2023.
>Oslo has a strong focus on road maintenance, which complemented by winter cycling campaigns, has drastically contributed to higher numbers of winter cyclists. A priority network of bike lanes was established for high-level winter maintenance, which in its first three years of operation has resulted in an 78% increase in cycling traffic during the winter months.
It turns out that when you consider "how will people cycle in the winter" as a problem to be solved, rather than simply an excuse for doing nothing, you can dramatically improve your city. Amazingly, when you treat cycling as a first class citizen in the transportation network, and keep the cycle lanes in proper condition rather than abandoning them to the elements the second things get tough, people will use them year round even in cold climates.
And while they did this, they cut pedestrian and cyclist fatalities down to zero. Any city can do this, if it actually tries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIcwzqRlZ68 "Are Dutch Cities Really that Different? Debunking Cycling Myths"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
and the flat excuse:
Sorry!