I tried Jump Bikes. Now I think e-bikes may be the future of commuting.

I'd never been on an e-bike before I went to Washington, D.C., last week. I've seen a lot of them. I thought they looked goofy: the giant downtube, or the giant hub on the wheel providing power:

electricbike.com

And I'm consistently annoyed by the gas-powered "Whizzer" style bikes that people ride on the bike paths in Wichita, blowing blue smoke and making noise.

ebay.com

So I was a skeptic. E-bikes seemed lazy and ugly. They seemed to fill a niche that didn't really exist: why not just buy a moped or scooter? But just before I left for D.C. I saw reports that Uber, the beleaguered ride share company, had bought Jump, a dockless e-bike share company that is only in a few markets (D.C., San Jose, and San Francisco). Uber riders have been able to book JUMP bikes via the Uber app since January 2018. For the time being, JUMP’s app will continue to exist, but I suspect they'll eventually be completely integrated into the Uber app. When I got off the train to my hotel, sure enough, I saw one. The bikes are aesthetically pleasing, with their little aerodynamic basket in front: 

The Jump is on the other side of the fat (phat?) downtube. 

Dockless bike shares are controversial among a certain set of people, who complain about the possiblity of "abandoned" bikes littering cities. This has naturally and appropriately drawn sarcastic scorn from critics of car culture, who point out that cars themselves are mostly "dockless":

Uber's motivation for buying up Jump was apparently that a big fraction of Uber's trips are very short (maybe under 3 miles). And since the demographic that would tend to use the bikes is at smartphone saturation (for better or for worse), it makes sense for Uber to try to divert those rides to e-bikes, where the company wouldn't have to divert 80% of revenue toward drivers (because the "driver" of the e-bike is you, and you're paying for it. Get it?).

So, needing to entertain myself for a couple hours, I tried one. Step one was to download the app, just like Zagster and a million other such companies. 

Obviously, I tried a few other sharing services while I was there, too. All those apps on my phone? That's not even all of them I could have put on there. I know I missed D.C. Insider, Ofo, Mobike, and Capital Bikeshare (I used Capital Bikeshare, but you don't need the app to do it). There may have been others. D.C. is to bike/scooter share what the Idaho panhandle was to anti-government militias in the '90s. 

Ofo trying to capture the Blind Melon revivalist market.

And that's not even counting the scooters.

Once the app was downloaded, I got an account number emailed to me, and I chose a PIN. The same email warned me to "start slowly to get familiar with its boost." 

I scoffed. Please. I've ridden a million bikes. I've ridden almost as many motorcycles. I know power.

Next was checking out the bike. The app tells you that you can either walk up to a bike and check it out, or reserve one through the app. No need in my case, since I was standing by the bike. But in case I couldn't find a bike right away, I could have held one for up to 20 minutes ahead of time, with the knowledge that the clock would start ticking once the reservation was made (if I didn't make it to the bike in time, the reservation would cancel automatically).

Next, I needed to actually rent the bike. I was instructed to enter my account number and PIN using the keypad on the back of the bike, then to remove the U-lock and slip it into the two holster loops on the left:

This is actually from the end of the ride, since I was too big a bonehead to remember to photo it up front. FYI: The solar panel only powers the electronics.

Then I was to adjust the seat height to one that works best for you. This was a little complicated because, as a #bikesharerenegade who often lets his kids ride bike shares with him, I needed to adjust the seat several times for my kids and me. I was not reassured that Jump bikes use the same janky, slippy clamp and post as virtually every other bike share:

Then: "Test your brakes. And get ready for the smiles." Oh, I was ready:

That goofy smile is system-delivered. Tan lines are an upgrade. 

The jump bikes have a threaded bottom bracket. Yay! 

A spring keeps the front wheel from flopping around.

We headed for the proving ground, Rock Creek Park:

This is from the bottom of the park, looking up north and east.

That gentle upslope you see is no joke. It's actually a pretty legit climb, a little over a quarter mile at a near-seven percent grade. It would easily qualify as the biggest hill in Wichita were you to transport it 1500 miles west: 

We coasted down the hill without really even pedaling, then turned back uphill. And wow. When you step on the pedals, the bike really jumps. I immediately regretted my initial scoffiness. It was legit, even a little unnerving the first time. When my daughter did it, she couldn't help but laugh with delight at the acceleration. That same eleven year-old daughter of average athleticism absolutely hammered this hill on the Jump Bike. I should have timed her, because I legitimately think she would have been in Queen of the Mountain range, thanks to the e-bike boost. My friendly neighborhood wattage calculator, assuming 75 watts from my daughter, gives me this (the Jump Bikes generate 250 watts, according to WikiPedia):

The bikes have three speeds, courtesy of Sturmey-Archer:

But honestly, you don't need the bottom two unless you want to climb Quintana-style. Even a modestly fit rider can crush hills on this thing.

The bike was cheap: $2 to rent, which buys 30 minutes, or 11 miles at 250 watts:

That's enough to get me halfway across Wichita. If you go over 30 minutes, you're $0.07/minute for additional use. If you run out of pedal assist power, you can note that when you end the rental and Jump will "take care of it from there," which I assume means swap out the battery. If you leave the service area of the bikes, you're warned that you might get charged a fee for retrieval. This is dirt cheap; about half what it costs over time to ride a scooter share (yep, they have those in DC too). This leads me to my final point on e-bikes, and potentially e-bike shares: they're the future. They're the future because they're so democratic. They're cheap, and almost anyone with even rudimentary bike skills and basic fitness can ride one. My mom is in her seventies and has not been on a bike since her teens, I suspect. But she could easily pedal an e-bike 20 miles in an hour or so. And if she couldn't, it probably wouldn't be because of leg, lung, or heart fatigue. It would be a matter of regaining some basic bike handling skills and butt toughness. 

A full charge gets you about 30 miles of range, just slightly below what my Chevy Volt gets on a charge. I drive said Chevy Volt because I can travel the vast majority of miles I travel under electric power. The reason I drive a Volt instead of, say, a Nissan Leaf is because I like the insurance policy of a gas engine behind the electric battery. If I go beyond the 40-ish miles the battery gives me I can get another 240 miles from the gas engine. The beauty of e-bikes is that I’m that insurance policy. If the battery quits, there’s a couple hundred watts of human power on the pedals to get me home. 

The advantage of the "e" in e-bikes is mostly sweat. Or lack thereof. Jump bikes make me think a future garage may have not two cars, but a car and an e-bike. The e-bike will be adjustable so that the bike can be used by multiple members of the family:

The lovely and talented Tracy Williams, MD.

The bike could be shared like the car was. But the cost of owning the bike would be essentially zero compared to the cost of a fancy gas-powered wheelchair. And you can criticize the decreased work of riding an e-bike versus an unmotorized bike, but riding an e-bike is still a helluva lot more exercise than piloting a gas-powered wheelchair. And it gets you out to interact with humanity in a non-fist-shaking, non-furious way. Ever see somebody on an e-bike with road rage? Me neither. It goes fast enough, relatively sweat-free, to get you places in a reasonable amount of time, but not so fast that it turns you into a raving lunatic at every 20-second delay for a crosswalk or light. 

At the end of our test session, we locked the bike back to a rack:

Biggest criticism? That U-lock is tough to get in place if the space is tight. You have to wrassle a really heavy bike around to get the tines on the lock to line up with the holes through the frame and wheel. It's tough. A much better design would be like Zagster's here in Wichita:

I don't think security would be an issue, since 1) the bikes are tanks, and 2) they're tracked with GPS. The Jump bike automatically ends your ride when the lock is put in place, though, which is nice. To incentivize people to put the bikes back where they'll be easy use (and presumably easy for the Jump folks to pick up and charge), they offer $1 credit for returning any bike parked outside of a virtual fenced-in "hub" back to a hub. Try as I might, I cannot find a map for these. 

Updated 5/14/18 with a picture of the Sturmey-Archer shifter.

Strava's global exercise heatmap is addictive

Take a good long look at Strava's global exercise heatmap

Just here in Wichita, there are so many hidden little gems. I'm not much of a runner anymore, but love the 400 meter tracks:

That's the Friends University track near the center. To the left is the Mayberry Middle School track. 

At Wichita State University's Cessna Stadium, you can make out lines going up and down the bleachers, especially on the west (left) side. 

And the trails along the river are well-represented, no doubt thanks in part to BikeShareICT:

As are the mountain bike trails at Miller's Meadow (RIP):

And Air Capital Memorial Park: 

For giggles, I found my childhood home in western Kansas. I'm not the only person who's recorded activity there, but I'm one of few. This isn't a surprise considering how few people live there:

Links for Thursday, November 2, 2017: Why Amsterdam works for bikes, dirty mustaches, dockless bike sharing, weird fertility quotes, and menstrual synchrony

Norman Garrick, author of one of my favorite papers on the built environment's effect on health, on why Amsterdam is so good for bikes:

1. All streets are bike streets

2. Separated cycle tracks, not bike lanes

3. When possible, go completely car free

4. Two speeds, both slow

5. Stress-free intersections

That favorite paper? Right here: Community design, street networks, and public health

“A French scientist caused a sensation in 1907 when he recounted an experiment showing that the lips of a woman kissed by a mustached man were polluted with tuberculosis and diphtheria bacteria as well as food particles and a hair from a spider’s leg.”

Is dockless bike sharing the next Uber?

FWIW, I hate the "Uber for ...." thing. But I'm told that it's interesting shorthand for investors. The part of this article I'm fascinated by is the "dockless" part. To my reading, dockless bike stations eliminate so many of the traditional obstacles of traditional bike shares. Less permitting, less infrastructure, less up front expense. I even wonder if they're the way that small- to medium-sized towns get into the bike share game. But you can't just ignore the city governments:

'Technically the dockless companies can enter a market without asking permission. They only need to leave some bikes around the city, and anyone with the app can start riding. But since bikes are portable and can be left anywhere, they’re vulnerable. An unhappy city regulator could round them up and haul them away at any time. “[This is] ask permission, not forgiveness,” Jordan says, reversing a popular Silicon Valley mantra. “It’s not like Lyft, where the cars are moving around, or Airbnb, where you don’t publish the address.”'

The fertility business is booming, especially on the sperm donor side

Up front: I'm totally, 100% on board with whatever fertility treatments people need to receive in order to reproduce. But there are soooo many weird quotes in this:

"Want your sperm donor to have a B.A. in political science? Want your egg donor to love animals? Want the genes of a Division I athlete? All of these are possible. Prospective parents overwhelmed by all the choices can leave it to the heavens and pick a donor by astrological sign."

and:

'The Seattle Sperm Bank categorizes its donors into three popular categories: “top athletes,” “physicians, dentists and medical residents,” and “musicians.”'

But some of the quotes from donors are heartbreakingly sweet:

'The donor said she was a “homebody” who loves taking pictures and being with family on the beach. Her personal goals, she wrote, include being “the best possible mom I can be for my children. I want to be ‘present’ when I am with them and invest into their lives. . . . I want my life to matter.”'

Here is the original Nature paper describing the synchronization of women's menstrual cycles

 

Links for Thursday, October 26, 2017: walkability and city growth, eating alone is bad for you, BMX is back, and diet avocados

Is wichita's poor walkability holding it back economically?

From the Chung Report: 

Our respondents believed Wichita is fairly inaccessible on foot, with 77.4 percent saying they either disagreed or strongly disagreed to the idea that Wichita is walkable. This means this aspect of Wichita likely won't attract millennials over other cities that are more progressive when it comes to transportation. And our peers do seem to be more progressive.

WalkScore.com, a website that determines walkability and bikeability for U.S. cities, calls Wichita a "car-dependent city," which means most errands require a car. Cities with scores of 70 to 89 are considered very walkable while scores of 90 to 100 are a "walker's paradise." Wichita scored a 35 on walkability and a 44 on bike infrastructure, meaning the city has minimal bike infrastructure. This same site gave Des Moines and Omaha walk scores of 45 and Cleveland a walk score of 60.

These trends aren't going unnoticed. Advocacy groups like Bike Walk Wichita (disclosure: I'm on the board) have made tremendous progress in getting more attention paid to walkability and bikeability over the last decade (including a bike share and dozens of miles of new bike lanes and paths). But clearly there is work to be done. 

Eating alone may increase your risk of metabolic syndrome

Metabolic syndrome, FYI, is a catch-all term for people at risk of developing diabetes and heart disease. It's a constellation of extra weight around your waist, higher-than-normal blood sugars, abnormal triglyceride levels in the blood, and higher-than-normal blood pressures. A few observations about this study: we've known for a while that being alone in general is bad for you. Like, 30% increased risk of dying on any given day bad. So it's not a surprise that eating alone is associated with risk. But is it any different than being alone in general? I don't think the authors make that case. 

Individuals who ate alone 2 or more times per day in their dataset were more likely to live alone, were more likely to be unmarried, and were more likely to skip meals. Interestingly, alone eaters ate out less, which is generally considered a good behavior. Women who ate alone ≥2 times per day were 29% more likely to have metabolic syndrome than women who didn't eat alone. But once they accounted for other factors, like XXXXX, the assocation went away, statistically-speaking. Eating alone two or more times a day was associated with a 45% increased risk for abdominal obesity and a 64% increase for metabolic syndrome in men. This was especially true in men without spouse. The men without a spouse were 300% more likely to have metabolic syndrome, while married men were only 48% more likely to have metabolic syndrome.

BMX is "back"

(it never left) Link posted here because I like the video. 

Someone created "diet" avocados and I just want to die

My disgust with this isn't related to the specter of GMOs or hybrid crops. I'm actually generally in favor of both (see the Hawaiian papaya story to understand why). I just find the idea of taking a food that is perfectly good for you in its native state and monkeying with it to make it "diet" depressing. Avocados aren't a wonder food, and their trendiness will eventually fade. But they're fine the way they are. Their high fat content has never hurt anyone, and it might even make you feel full longer. So for heaven's sake. Eat a normal avocado. Don't fall for this. 

Links for Friday, October 6, 2017: no thyroid testing in obese kids, where "blade runner" came from, Uber and drunk driving, and blazing fast Citi bikes

Don't test the thyroids of generic obese children, says Choosing Wisely

The endocrine section American Academy of Pediatrics has listed its five "Choosing Wisely" tests to avoid. TSH levels in obese kids is one of them. I completely, completely agree. But telling a mom or dad that is equivalent to malpractice in their eyes. It really illustrates one of the central problems with the way we practice medicine: order the test, make mom happy, keep the family as patients, but cost the system some extra money that could be better spent on something else. Refuse the test and you make mom unhappy (sometimes very unhappy), you lose the family as patients, and the family simply goes somewhere else with a provider that will comply with their wishes. Sure, you can have a prolonged conversation with the family about why you're not doing it, but the cost of physician time exceeds the cost of the lab test pretty quickly. Whew. OK. Rant concluded. 

The title of "Blade Runner" comes from an obscure physician-penned novel about a future dystopian society that has eugenics as the core of its national healthcare strategy.

It follows the adventures of a young man known as Billy Gimp and his partner in crime, Doc, as they navigate a health-care dystopia. It’s the near future, and eugenics has become a guiding American philosophy. Universal health care has been enacted, but in order to cull the herd of the weak, the “Health Control laws”—enforced by the office of a draconian “Secretary of Health Control”—dictate that anyone who wants medical care must undergo sterilization first. As a result, a system of black-market health care has emerged in which suppliers obtain medical equipment, doctors use it to illegally heal those who don’t want to be sterilized, and there are people who covertly transport the equipment to the doctors. Since that equipment often includes scalpels and other instruments of incision, the transporters are known as “bladerunners.” Et voilà, the origin of a term that went on to change sci-fi.

The name Blade Runner actually came not from the story itself, but from the title of a nearly incomprehensible adaptation by William S. Burroughs, The Blade Runner: a Movie.

Uber's effect on drunk driving is disappointingly inconsistent

The team delved into whether ride-hailing affected crash rates in four cities: Las Vegas, Portland, Ore., Reno, Nev., and San Antonio, Texas — American cities in which Uber, the nation's largest ride-sharing company, launched, ceased, then resumed operations. And the results were mixed. Crashes involving alcohol decreased as Uber resumed services in Portland and San Antonio, but not Reno. And in no case did Uber's resumption of service result in fewer total injury crashes or serious crashes overall.

It's easy to look at this kind of story and be really, really disappointed. But I think it's just further proof that changing human behavior is complex. It is not a matter of greater knowledge = better decisions. If it were, the smoking rate and the rate of texting while driving would both be nearly zero. I'm optimistic for ride sharing and autonomous vehicles' role in reducing drunk driving deaths. 

Citi bikes have so penetrated New York City that over 50% of peak-hour taxi trips would be faster if taken by Citi bike. 

See graphic above. No word on how the bikes compare to ride sharing, though. This statistic kills me. But then again, I'm from the least congested city in America.

Circling the parking lot = circling the drain

A couple weeks ago, I spent some time in a YMCA parking lot to do the Wichita Area Metropolitan Planning Organization's bike/pedestrian count. I was in a pretty rural area, and the bike/ped traffic was light. It gave me a chance to watch the steady stream of cars in and out of the lot, though. The Y was rocking, which made me happy, but I couldn't help but wonder about the goals of the people in the cars screeching in and out of the driveway.

A woman who worked in the office of a YMCA recently told me that one of the biggest safety issues the organization deals with is parking lot safety for pedestrians. So many people circle the parking lot in their fancy gas-powered wheelchairs during busy times that pedestrians crossing the lot were in danger of being run over.

This is not the kind of wheelchair I'm talking about. I might respect someone who circled the health club parking lot in this rig. By the way, there was a third dog riding on the scooter. Respect. This must have been a logistical nightmare to get out the door. 

She was talking about people circling the lot, mind you, so that they could walk the minimum distance to get into the building and walk...on a treadmill. Or ride a stationary bike or something. 

This problem is a bit of a throwback for me. I remember as a kid, when the remote controls for TVs were still mostly up-and-down affairs (hit the up arrow to scroll upward through channels, hit the down arrow to go the other way; ditto volume), I would, out of habit, walk all over the room looking for the remote so I could change the channel on the TV. I would walk multiples of the distance it would have taken me to simply get off the couch and walk to the TV and push a button. But like the Kodak people who couldn't imagine a world without film, I couldn't imagine a world without the satisfying weight of that remote, with its sleek aluminum Sony case, in my hand. 

Is there a name for this particular brand of self-defeating convenience? I've stretched Google's abilities to the limit and I can't identify one. But it clearly pre-dates modern technology. And don't get me wrong. I've ridden, and continue to ride, an absurd number of miles in cars. But I've felt like an asshole for almost all of those miles that didn't involve traveling outside of town. 

But back to parking. Scott Wadle of the City of WIchita likes to say that there's no such thing as free parking. While he means that we all subsidize the space that cars take up whether we mean to or not, I think of it in more cosmic terms. All that space could be used for something else. And the physical activity it would take us to park in vertical garages and walk to our destination, or the slightly greater physical activity it would take for us to bike to work would be a small price to pay to get green space and health back. An optimist's view of the coming autonomous fancy gas-powered wheelchairs is that we'll need far less parking, thus opening up more and more space for commerce and for public use. A pessimist's view is that we'll eventually transition to a WALL-E situation in which your autonomous gas-powered wheelchair picks you up at your door to deposit you in front of the door to your office, at which point a smaller, more Segway-inspired motorized device takes you to your desk. Where you sit. All day. 

I'm not going to talk about "productivity" or "optimization" here. There are plenty of places to get a dose of that perspective. But just consider this when it comes to the YMCA or your local health club: grinding away on a treadmill for 30 minutes a day after driving an oversize luxury wheelchair to the building is not my idea of freedom. It's a chore. But if I turn that chore into the choice to walk or ride by the health club while I watch all the wheelchair circle: that choice makes me unspeakably happy.

Links for September 12, 2017: Little Library Locator, Kerry to Cannondale's rescue, bike manners in China, and ICT flash dine

Ever wonder where to find a little library near your house? My 10-year old did. She found the answer at Little Locator.

Did John Kerry help save Cannondale-Drapac?

If so, bravo, Mr. Secretary. With Rigoberto Uran's podium at the 2017 Tour de France, things are looking up for one of only two American-sponsored teams in the UCI peleton.

Are stationless bike shares brining out people's bad manners in China?

I've never traveled to China, but my hunch is that the bikes being scattered all over Beijing have a lot more to do with 1) a lot of people in a small space, and 2) the Wild West unregulated atmosphere of bike shares there:

In many cities, the supply of bicycles far exceeds demand, bringing chaos to sidewalks, bus stops and intersections and prompting grumbles that excessive competitiveness — seen as a national trait — is spoiling a good thing. In Shanghai, where officials have struggled to maintain order, there is now one shared bike for every 16 people, according to government statistics.

In some places, the authorities have confiscated tens of thousands of bicycles and imposed parking restrictions. News outlets have documented the waste with astounding images of mountains of candy-colored bicycles, each hue representing a different bike-share company.

I'm signed up for the ICT Flash Dine. You should sign up, too: