Tag Archives: research

Curbee

Posted on by jqr

I see that the “Curbee” bicycle footrest has come to Chicago; credit local bicycle advocate Steven Vance. I guess this shows the global nature of bicycle advocacy, that someone in Chicago can implement a refinement on a Copenhagen idea. Score one for the internet, spreading “best practices” around to people who can implement them.

The Curbee, I suppose, is a welcome to cyclists, a symbol that the city is looking out for them and trying to make their life easier in small ways. What I am looking for, however, in my bicycle ride, is TO NOT BE KILLED OR MAIMED. Got that, New York City? It’s great that Chicago can invest in a sturdy welded sidewalk bunny thing that can be used by pedestrians for hanging dry cleaning while tying shoes. But how does this help me keep from being killed or maimed?

I hate to be so existential about this kind of improvement, and I would like to be more welcoming to gestures made by municipalities toward bicyclists. Generous Me suggests, “Please, add more of these little amenities all over my route.” But as my route takes me every afternoon through the South Bronx, I am comfortable in forecasting that the Curbee will not be coming to the corner of Westchester Ave and Bronx River Ave any time soon.

In that respect, I foresee that New York City would install the Curbee somewhere near the East River bridges, where all the cool people are bicycling. Perhaps on that little stretch of protected bike lane north of Canal Street across from the entrance to the east side bikeway of the Manhattan Bridge. I’m sure that people would use the Curbee, because it seems easy to use and doesn’t require instructions. But for me, it would be useless, as I don’t go there all that often.

We can now look forward to a series of inadequately researched studies on the effect that the Curbee has on bicycling promotion. Freelance writers will soon get to gnaw on the bones of some survey like this one suggesting that people at one particular Curbee-enabled corner are now bicycling more. Of course, it’s possible to increase bicycling on individual routes with interventions such as creation of a protected lane, setting up fans to increase riders’ speed, or laying down big rolls of linoleum to reduce the friction.

What cities should be looking for are interventions that increase bicycling all over the network, not just on specific routes near the interventions. The interventions I’m talking about are ones that keep people on bicycles from GETTING KILLED OR MAIMED.

Expectations of Formal Schooling

Posted on by jqr

New York Times web site comments, for instance on the language-gap study article here, are for people to publicly align themselves with the most anodyne beliefs imaginable, not for raising points of debate.

My dad and I have discussed this several times. I am always struck by the limited vision of people who home-school, such as blogger Penelope Trunk; they don’t believe in school but they believe in the reward system that our society has developed. Did they think that somehow there is a shortcut? What lesson does this teach their kids, that special people (like them!) don’t have to check all the boxes in order to achieve the reward of being a doctor or philosopher?

These kinds of studies take for granted that everyone wants their kids to reach the same goal. There’s more than one box of apples at Fine Fare.

I have befriended lots of people who never went to school at all and never learned to read, and they were and are good people, worth emulating in many ways.

On the subject of the study itself:

These kinds of studies have two typical problems, and this particular one has at least one, small sample size. Only 48 kids were studied, 20 rich ones and 28 poor ones.

The other problem can be inferred from this sentence from the press release:

By 18 months of age, toddlers from disadvantaged families are already several months behind more advantaged children in language proficiency.

Understood that the average of rich kids is probably higher than the average of poor kids, but how widely distributed are the scores? It could be that there is substantial overlap between the two groups, which renders the study useless for predictive purposes.

Also unclear is how the kids in either group were recruited, since 18-month-old kids don’t answer the telephone or browse Craigslist, there is probably a substantial bias toward families who are proud of their kids’ language-acquisition skills and willing to spend time to showcase them.

Decision making, Spenser style

Posted on by jqr

From Robert B. Parker’s Cold Service:

You need to know what you know, what you don’t know, and what you have to know. And you need to have it in mind. You need to know what part of what you want to do can be done now, and what needs to wait, and what it needs to wait for. Is there anything you don’t understand in this situation? Anything missing?

From Chapter 34, page 157 in my edition.

Everybody knows Parker’s detective Spenser, and I’ve quoted him before on this blog. I copied out this quote on the back of a postcard and have it propped up on my desk, next to my kid calendar. I appreciate it because it sets out a decision-making process.

I wouldn’t say that I spend my day making more decisions than the average worker bee, but perhaps it’s that I spend more time thinking about the decisions I make than the average worker bee. So any kind of guidelines to decision making are welcome; that’s why it’s propped up on the desk.

More interestingly, Parker wrote the quote, he’s a writer and was focused on putting words together, slapping covers and a generic title on them, and moving on to the next one. But the words come out of the mouth of Spenser, his detective. Consider therefore the research necessary to fully inhabit the world of Spenser. Research is more than just having a sea captain inform you about the tides in San Francisco Bay, as Isabel Allende did for her novel Ripper, which I just finished reading. It also includes research into motivations and styles of work.

Consider wondering how fully does the novel’s protagonist think like the kind of person he or she is supposed to be. This is obviously most applicable to crime novels, as the detective is often a professional detective.

When and how to learn about NYC schools?

Posted on by jqr

From parentandme1

Re: When and how to learn about nyc schools?

Tue Jun 24, 2014 9:25 am (PDT) . Posted by:

“Tracey Keij-Denton” lieferacey

This is an excellent question, and one that I wondered about since I was pregnant with my first kid 5 years ago. After having gone through both Pre-K and K applications, I would say, if you want to be sure you are on the ball and not rushed, but you also want to exhale for a little bit and not worry, I would say summer of the year your kid turns 3. So if your kid was born in 2011, you’d start the research this summer. Your kid starts Kindergarten fall of 2016 and can start public Pre-k fall of 2015. The pre-k application will be due in February or March of 2015. So if you give yourself he summer to do research, you can plan to do the tours in the fall and not feel rushed. If you can’t make one tour, there will be another one. If you leave it until January scheduling can be a nightmare, especially for work I g parents.

As another poster explained, Pre-K is important because if your kid gets into the Pre-K they have priority for the school. My regret is when Wed toured schools I should have been looking at them for both the Pre-K and the elementary school, and perhaps taken more notes. You won’t cover everything, but you’ll know what questions to ask later and this list is very helpful for that.

Touring the public schools with Pre-k first will help you explore both, and then you’ve got another year to look at schools without Pre-Ks before the Kindergarten application process takes place in February of the year your kid turns 5.

Incisive critique of cycling research

Posted on by jqr

Link to bicicultures.org

There are two perspectives on this page, the one I particularly find appealing is the one on the right, by Melody Hoffman.

The United States is a neoliberal, capitalist, patriarchal, and white supremacist country. This stifles our ability to rebuild our cities so schools are blocks away from grocery stores and our homes. This stifles women seeing their potential beyond being perfect mothers and perfectly feminine beings. This stifles efforts by people of color to participate in city meetings that determine where bicycle infrastructure goes. And this stifles poor people accessing bike maintenance and adequate storage for their bicycle, lest it rusts out in their backyard. We are so far from the ideologies, values, and politics that drive places like the Netherlands that it is not even a fair comparison.

We can keep doing research that argues chain guards and drop crossbars will enable women to ride in everyday clothing. Or we can ask why women need chain guards and drop crossbars and men do not. Women are being held to an unfair standard even in the cycling world and it may be better to educate women about their options beyond the patriarchal confines that argue 1890s-inspired bicycle components will help them. There are bigger institutional and systemic barriers we need to face before we can normalize anything.

I would not like to describe myself as a negative or pessimistic person, however this particular quote really hits home for me when it comes to promotion of bicycling and discussion of bicycling culture.

I would describe my own position as fairly minimalist. I believe that when it makes sense for people to get around on bikes, they will do that. I believe that people are fairly well informed about the options they have, and that what Chamberlain calls privileges that they do not have are apparent to them. In other words, there isn’t much that simple persuasion can do to change people’s minds about getting around on a bicycle.

If the conditions change, however, then people will change their minds. So I support changes to the street grid to make it easier for buses and pedestrians and bicyclists, to the explicit detriment of private motorists, because I would like things to be easier for buses and pedestrians and bicyclists (I am one), and I don’t care so much about the private motorists (I am not one). I also recognize that absent those changes, people won’t change their ways very much.

With my New York perspective, I do not believe there are secret paths to getting around that people don’t know about. I myself like to get around on bicycle, but I recognize that the choices I make to enable that, and the privileges I have, are instrumental to that preference.

As to the basic question, “How can we get more women cycling,” my answer is, the same way we get more men cycling. We make it easier for them to cycle. Hoffman discusses some of the systemic reasons why this is so hard. Chamberlain discusses why it is easy for her, in the process shedding light on why it may not be so easy for other people.

In general, I think both writers do a good job at explaining why we cannot create our own private Netherlands just by hopping on bicycles. More so, we should not expect that a directed process to make our streetscape more like the Netherlands should result in anything of the sort, given as Hoffman notes that our sociopolitical environment is completely different. As Lugo reflects, “The desire to make bicycling “normal” seems odd to me, when there are many existing cultural ideas about transportation.” The Netherlands is an admirable model for society in many respects, but it is obvious that Dutch and Americans do not typically hold the same cultural ideas about transportation. I do not think that this necessarily inhibits New Yorkers from planning grand changes, only that we should be mindful of the cultural traction that current ideas and mores have when looking to improve our built environment.