Rent to ride

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by the Night Writer

Last summer when we were in Barcelona we saw a lot of bike racks strategically placed around the city and near the beach, with each rack featuring small, distinctive red and white bikes bearing a “Bicing” logo. Bicing is the name of the municipal bike rental program in Barcelona where potential riders buy a one-year subscription via credit card – I believe it was 6 Euros at the time – and then receive a Bicing card that lets them unlock Bicing bikes at one of the kiosks. If they returned the bike to another kiosk within 30 minutes there was no charge, with longer rentals resulting in nominal costs being assessed to the Bicing-members credit card already on record. Similarly, if the bike was never returned, the replacement cost was billed to the credit card as well. I remember thinking the plan was kind of neat and might have even tried it on some of those leg-weary walking days if there had been a way to get a membership card quickly (they are mailed to you). I thought the idea had some merit in Barcelona where it is balmy pretty much year round, but I figured the climate of Minnesota made this idea a non-starter for the Twin Cities.

bicing 2

bicing

Apparently, I was wrong.

A program called Nice Ride MN is rolling out in Minnepolis this week that is very similar to the Bicing model I saw in Barcelona. As with Bicing, the memberships are pre-paid ($60/year) with credit cards as security and trips less than 30 minutes are free (keep it more than an hour and a half, though, and you’ll be billed $6/hour). The bikes are funky-looking but functional; blue and green here instead red and white, but not the kind of ride you’d likely want to steal other than for the sheer perversity of it. They are most definitely short-trip bikes, with smaller wheels and frames clearly not meant for cruising. As the Nice Ride MN site says:

Nice Ride bikes are designed for one job, short trips in the city by people wearing regular clothes and carrying ordinary stuff. All Nice Ride bikes are the same size, the only thing you may have to adjust is the seat, and it’s easy!

I can see them being especially popular around the Chain of Lakes (where biker/walker/jogger relations are already touchy), downtown and the University, though it appears from the program map that there just a couple of kiosks near Lake Calhoun and none around the other lakes. It cost $3.2 million to get this started with roughly a third of that coming from a donation from Blue Cross-Blue Shield, a third from the federal government and a third from the City of Minneapolis and various corporate donors.

More utopian versions of this concept have been tried here before, such as the infamous “White Bike” program in Minneapolis. Here white bikes were left around the city with the idea that people would use the bikes as needed and then leave them for other people to use. Of course, those bikes soon disappeared or were trashed. This latest version addresses that with the credit card subscriptions and billing.

Oh, and forget about using these bikes in the winter — they’ll be removed from the streets and the program shut down December through March (your annual subscription is actually more like an 8-month subscription).

Personally, I think that if this was a truly great idea then some private company would have come up with the plan and the capital. Instead, the government with some private help is funding it and while I might like the same money to go to, say, fixing pot-holes, I suppose you could classify it as an amenity that makes the city more “liveable”. It will be interesting to see how expensive the program is to maintain and administer and how people here respond. The Barcelona Bicing program began in 2007 and the bikes we saw last year all looked to be in good shape but I have no idea how often a bike has to be repaired or replaced. I might even consider using the program myself if I had such a need in the downtown area, though I’m afraid that design and colors of the bikes, along with my physique, might cause people to think a bear had just escaped from the circus.

It’s in the game

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by the Night Writer

There is news this week from Canada about a youth recreational soccer league in Ottawa where a team that gets ahead by six goals automatically forfeits the game. It’s the latest devolution of the “Mercy” rules in place in most youth sports these days, though this policy is enough to make one argue for a “Sanity” rule. The message it inevitably sends is that “if you suck bad enough there will always be someone else we can make pay for it.” Sure, they’re just kids now, but they grow up with that mentality and the next thing you know you’ve got multi-billion dollar bailouts for businesses too insecure to fail.

That’s about all I’m going to say about the cultural implications of this mis-begotten policy, there are plenty of people to do that. It does, however, remind me of the time when I coached a girls (9&10 year-olds) fast-pitch softball team. They were all pretty much new to the game so my focus was on teaching fundamentals and sportsmanship and trying to make it fun. The league had a mercy rule that limited a team to scoring no more than five runs per inning. If you got to five runs, regardless of how many outs were on the board, you were done at the plate for that inning. You could, however, get more than five runs if extra runs were scored as part of the same play. For example, if you had scored four runs already and bases were loaded a home run would still add four more runs. You can read more about this league here, but we were undefeated going into our last game. In the last inning the other team scored four runs to cut our lead to two, and loaded the bases with two outs. We were playing on a field scheduled for a men’s league game immediately after ours, and while we weren’t in danger of going overtime, the men wanted to get on the field for their warm-ups. Clearly, intentionally walking the batter would score the magical fifth run, ending the game and preserving the win. The girls knew this, and my pitcher asked me if she should walk the batter. I said no, play it out. This made her pretty nervous. Meanwhile, the guys were clamoring for me to walk the batter so they could get on the field. I turned to them and asked, “Is that how you learned to play the game?”

That shut them down a bit, and I called a timeout and deliberately sauntered out to the mound, and called my infield together. I told the pitcher, “you can do this, and your teammates are here to make the play.” Everyone went back to their positions and a couple of pitches later the batter hit a soft pop-up that was caught by our second-baseman, who also happened to be the tiniest kid on the entire field. The whole team was elated, jumping around and hugging. I don’t think they would have been quite as excited if we’d simply walked in the “losing” run and walked off the field, and I can’t imagine that the other team would have felt they’d been treated fairly in that scenario.

Frankly, I don’t know if anyone on that team remembers that moment now, some 34 years later (though a certain former second-baseman might), but I hope they do. I hope that as they grew up they remembered that they had been able to test themselves, to develop their own skills and had learned how to trust each other as well. I hope they learned that you have to take risks sometimes to get what you want, while always playing within the rules. Along the way I hoped they learned that winning is fun, but losing is part of life, too, and that experiencing both makes you better able to celebrate with others when they win, and commiserate with them when they lose. While any glittery trophy they received that day likely now corrodes in some rural Missouri landfill, perhaps something purer still gleams inside them. Could one moment in one season made a difference? Perhaps not, but I hope that in later seasons with other coaches the same lessons and principles were reinforced and carried over into other areas of their lives.

After all, it’s in the game.

Highway of death

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by the Night Writer

In the last 30 years I’ve driven between Minnesota and Missouri in all kinds of weather and in all seasons. Spring and early summer are the most scenic times. Missouri has always seemed to be kind of a brown state to me: mud and wet clay in the winter and baked dust in the summer, while in the fall the leaves seem to turn dry and brown all too quickly. It is a hilly state, however, and a welcome contrast to the flat lands and straight roads of Iowa that we aim our way across to get there. In the spring time the hills are green with trees, turning blue-gray as they hump their way to the horizon. Come summer, a humid haze hangs over these hills like an old gym sock, making your mouth dry just to look at them.

Spring, however, also seems to be the time when various critters get a touch of the wanderlust and a desire to see what’s on the other side of the road – especially if it’s female. Disney would say they are twitter-pated, but they are often twitter-pasted. Whether because they are distracted or, conversely, perhaps too single-minded, the animals don’t pay sufficient attention to what must be the mind-boggling closing rates of oncoming metal and rubber monsters. This particular trip seems gorier than most as we see a steady collection of gob-smacked fauna on the shoulders of the road, in the medians, and often on the highway itself. Dogs, cats, deer, ubiquitous raccoons, rabbits and sometimes unidentifiable flats of fur are garnish for the vultures we frequently see loafing in the skies ahead of us, recognizable by the spread, finger-like feathers at the ends of their wings. From the time I spent working on a road crew in this state, however, I know this is also the season for the most unlikely of road warriors: turtles.

When you think of how many swift animals such as deer and rabbits get turned into pizza it is strange indeed to ponder what impulse could incent an unimpulsive tortoise to cross the road, and the ugly odds against a successful arrival. Still, they are shattered left and right this time of year. Does Darwin know about this?

At one point, I’m driving as we cruise down a relatively straight stretch of two-lane Highway 63 when we see a black shape that looks like a large serving platter in the middle of the oncoming lane about 100 yards ahead. It could be a piece of rubber from a blown tire. I’m trying to categorize it as my wife asks, “Is it roadkill?” I’ve noticed, however, that it has actually moved a little closer to the other side of the road as we watched, and I’ve also noticed an empty flat-bed truck with a red cab coming our way. “Not yet,” I reply. “Snapping turtle.”

Sure enough, the truck has edged over and I think it’s trying to straddle the snapper; turtle shells can be hell on tires. Instead, about 50 yards ahead of us the left front tire hits the turtle at 60 miles per hour. I’m expecting squish but instead it’s boom as the turtle blows up like a grenade; blood, parts of shell and parts I don’t even want to try to describe go flying up into the air as high as the roof of the truck. I’m too shocked to look at anything but the road so I don’t see the face of the driver as the rig sweeps by us so I don’t know if he’s smiling or gulping.

It’s probably two miles before I reach back into the box of ju-jubes on the console next to me.

Got me a hard-headed woman

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by the Night Writer

This shuffled up today, from the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens…

I’m looking for a hard-headed woman
One who will take me for myself
And if I had my hard-headed woman
I won’t need nobody else, no, no, no
I’m looking for a hard-headed woman,
One who will make me do my best
And if I find my hard-headed woman
I know he rest of my life will be blessed, yes, yes, yes
I know a lot of fancy dancers
People who can glide you on a floor
They move so smooth but have no answers,
When you ask “Why did you come here for?”
I know many fine feathered friends
But their friendliness depends on how you do
They know many sure fired ways
To find out the one who pays and how you do
I’m looking for a hard-headed woman
One who will make me feel so good
And if I find my hard-headed woman,
I know my life will be as it should, yes, yes, yes

I know someone like that.