Humble Pi

Posted on March 10, 2026 by twsobey

Title: Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

Author: Matt Parker

Completed: March 2026 (Full list of books)

Overview: A few years ago, my friend and favorite math buddy recommended this book to me. It took a while to get to it but was enjoyable. A few of the stories in here were familiar to me but he does a good job connecting them while dropping amusing enough asides in that even non-math-nerds would laugh at the jokes. Thanks, Betsy for the recommendation.

Highlights:

  • If you ask someone what number is halfway between one and nine, they will say five – but only because they have been taught to. Wake up, sheeple! Humans instinctively perceive numbers logarithmically, not linearly. A young child or someone who has not been indoctrinated by education will place three halfway between one and nine. Three is a different kind of middle. It’s the logarithmic middle, which means it’s a middle with respect to multiplication rather than addition. 1 × 3 = 3. 3 × 3 = 9. You can go from one to nine either by adding equal steps of four or multiplying by equal steps of three. So the ‘multiplication middle’ is three, and that is what humans do by default, until we are taught otherwise.
  • But astronomy does give Julius Caesar the last laugh. The unit of a light-year, that is, the distance travelled by light in a year (in a vacuum) is specified using the Julian year of 365.25 days. So we measure our current cosmos using a unit in part defined by an ancient Roman.
  • Resonance can affect buildings as well. In July 2011 a thirty-nine-storey shopping centre in South Korea had to be evacuated because resonance was vibrating the building. People at the top of the building felt it start to shake, as if someone had banged the bass and turned up the treble. Which was exactly the problem. After the official investigation had ruled out an earthquake, they found the culprit was an exercise class on the twelfth floor. On 5 July 2011 they had decided to work out to Snap’s ‘The Power’, and everyone jumped around harder than they usually did.
  • On the Millennium Bridge, people did start to walk in step, because the movement of the bridge affected the rhythm at which they were walking. This formed a feedback loop: people stepping in synch caused the bridge to move more, and the bridge moving caused more people to step in synch. Video footage from June 2000 seems to show over 20 per cent of pedestrians walking in step – more than enough to get the resonant frequency ringing and the middle of the bridge swaying about 7.5 centimetres in each direction. Fixing it was a costly two-year retrofit, during which the bridge was completely closed. Removing the wobble cost £5 million, on top of the original £18 million build. Part of the difficulty was breaking the pedestrian-bridge feedback loop without changing the aesthetics of the bridge. Hidden beneath the footpath and around the structure are thirty-seven ‘linear viscous dampers’ (tanks with a viscous liquid that a piston moves through) and around fifty ‘tuned mass vibration absorbers’ (pendulums in a box).
  • One of the first bridges to be destroyed by synchronized pedestrians was a suspension bridge just outside Manchester (in what is now the city of Salford). I believe that this Broughton Suspension Bridge was the earliest bridge destroyed when people walked over it at the resonant frequency.
  • This is a common theme in human progress. We make things beyond what we understand, and we always have done. Steam engines worked before we had a theory of thermodynamics; vaccines were developed before we knew how the immune system works; aircraft continue to fly to this day, despite the many gaps in our understanding of aerodynamics. When theory lags behind application, there will always be mathematical surprises lying in wait. The important thing is that we learn from these inevitable mistakes and don’t repeat them.
  • players noticed that Gandhi was a bit of a jerk. Once he developed atomic technology, he would start dropping nuclear bombs on other nations. This was because of a mistake in the computer code. The game designers had deliberately given Gandhi the lowest non-zero aggression rating possible: a score of 1. Classic Gandhi. But later in the game, when all the civilizations were becoming more, well, civilized, every leader had their aggression rating dropped by two. For Gandhi, starting from 1, this calculation played out as 1 − 2 = 255, suddenly setting him to maximum aggression. Even though this error has since been fixed, later versions of the game have kept Gandhi as the most nuke-happy leader as a tradition.
  • the only quote from me that has been made into a poster by teachers and put up in their classrooms is: ‘Mathematicians aren’t people who find maths easy; they’re people who enjoy how hard it is.’
  • Because of the Quebec Bridge disaster, starting in 1925 any student graduating from an engineering degree in Canada can attend a voluntary Ceremony of the Calling of an Engineer, where they are given a steel ring to remind them of the humility and fallibility of engineers. It can be a tragedy when a mathematician makes a mistake which causes a disaster, but that does not mean we can do without mathematics. We need engineers designing bridges, despite the pressure that comes with it.
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Life After Cars

Posted on February 14, 2026 by twsobey

Title: Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile

Author: Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon and Aaron Naparstek

Completed: Feb 2026 (Full list of books)

Overview: For years, I’ve listened to their podcast and really enjoyed the content. Much of it I agree with, but even when I don’t, it helps me refine my ideas about why I feel cars destroy communities. This book clearly lays out the explanation for the many ways in which cars harm people, cities, the environment, and even drivers. This book should be read by everyone who likes living in vibrant places but feels like it could be better. If you want to vacation in places with fewer cars (Paris, Amsterdam, Disney) but think home could NEVER be like that, you should read this book.

Highlights:

  • Automobiles have produced far more collective damage to the world, in terms of death, illness, and environmental destruction, than nearly any other invention in human history.
  • In 1969, 42 percent of American children walked or biked to school. In 2017, that number was 11 percent.
  • In the first panel of Action Comics number 12, published in May 1939, mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent is outside the offices of the Daily Star, a precursor to the more famous Daily Planet. A small crowd has gathered, and when Kent asks someone what has happened, he is shocked to learn that a friend of his has been hit and killed by a reckless driver. Enraged, Kent calls the city’s mayor and asks why Metropolis has “one of the worst traffic situations in the country.” The mayor’s response will likely be familiar to anyone who has tried to get an elected official to take traffic violence seriously. “It’s really too bad,” the mayor says. “But—what can anyone do about it?” Kent vows to do something about it himself.
  • What is most shocking is that the biggest threat to the citizens of Metropolis in 1939 was not a monster or alien invader nor even Superman’s famous archenemy Lex Luthor, who wouldn’t appear in print until a year later. It was the car.
  • At least twenty-five more people would be killed in auto-related fatalities in the United States through the end of 1899, a high number given that only around 2,500 motor vehicles were produced in the country that year.
  • an editorial cartoonist for The St. Louis Star depicted a man kneeling before an automobile, the car’s headlights appearing like eyes and its grille illustrated to look like a gaping maw. The man, wearing a jacket labeled “reckless and vicious drivers,” offers a plate of children’s bodies as a ritual sacrifice to what is labeled as the “Modern Moloch.”
  • A pedestrian struck by a driver at sixteen miles per hour has only a 10 percent chance of being severely injured or killed, while a pedestrian struck at thirty-one miles per hour has a 50 percent chance. That jumps to a 75 percent chance of severe injury or death at thirty-nine miles per hour, and a 90 percent chance at forty-six miles per hour. Which means that being hit by a driver just doing the legal speed limit on most roads in the US equals almost certain death. And the increasing mass of modern vehicles means the equation is only getting less favorable for people outside the car.
  • Even the famous expression “America’s love affair with cars” was a car industry creation, not some folksy saying that arose spontaneously. Peter Norton discovered that the phrase appeared in a 1957 Chevrolet ad before being popularized in a television special that aired on October 21, 1961, on NBC. Called Merrily We Roll Along and starring comedian Groucho Marx, the special was sponsored by DuPont, which at the time owned a 23 percent stake in General Motors. In the special, Groucho says that “our love affair with the automobile” started long ago, and that “it was a real love affair, one that changed our whole way of life.”
  • According to some residents, the bike lanes were unnecessary, because so few cyclists used them. Other residents insisted the lanes were dangerous because there were so many cyclists using them.
  • According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of South Florida, cyclists are just about as law-abiding as drivers. The researchers recruited one hundred bike riders from the Tampa region and equipped their bicycles with sensors, cameras, and GPS trackers. After recording the cyclists’ movements for two thousand hours and analyzing the data, the study found that the cyclists obeyed traffic laws 88 percent of the time, while similar observations of drivers showed that they obeyed the law 85 percent of the time.
  • After surveying nearly eighteen thousand people in seventy-three countries, they found that 100 percent of respondents admitted to breaking the law while driving, walking, or cycling. Where things differed was in the reasons various road users gave for flouting the rules. Drivers and pedestrians said they typically broke laws to save time. Cyclists, however, said they typically broke laws to stay safe, doing things like riding on the sidewalk to avoid mixing it up on a dangerous road with cars and trucks. Cyclists also said they broke laws to save energy—rolling through a stop sign, for instance, to avoid having to start pedaling again from a dead standstill. The researchers said that while such behavior was technically illegal, “most bicyclists can generally be described as rational individuals trying to function safely and efficiently given the context and norms of where they live and the transportation system put in front of them.”
  • When Sean Kenney, an artist, moved from the US to Amsterdam with his wife and two children in 2020, he was aware of this history. The ease of getting around by foot and by bike was part of the appeal. What he was not prepared for was the culture shock that came with moving from a place where kids are uniquely at risk of being harmed by cars to a place that had spent decades making its streets safe for even the youngest pedestrians and cyclists. After signing a lease on an apartment, Sean received what, to him, seemed like a strange apology from his new landlord. The landlord handed over a few sets of keys: one for Sean, one for his wife, and one for their nine-year-old daughter. The landlord motioned to Sean’s six-year-old son and said, “I’m sorry that I only have three sets of keys for the four of you, but you can get another made at the shop around the corner.” Sean looked at his young son and then at the landlord. “A key for the six-year-old?” he asked incredulously. She gave him a quizzical stare, as if the two of them were speaking totally different languages.
  • It took years of methodical inquiry along with the occasional epiphany, but finally the researchers isolated a chemical compound that they believed was to blame for killing half of the coho salmon that try to make it to spawning grounds each year. It comes from the tires of our cars.
  • In Traffication, Paul Donald writes extensively about the way noise affects a wide range of animals: “When exposed to prolonged traffic noise, zebra finches become less good at finding food, roosting bats become more susceptible to disease, great tits suffer severe sleep disruption and frogs become unable to produce antimicrobial proteins to fight infection,” he writes. “Mice develop problems with motor coordination and their brains shrink.” Donald cites research showing that prolonged exposure to the stress hormone cortisol, which is released when animals are exposed to even low levels of traffic noise, is shortening the lives of at least some species by breaking down the telomeres on their chromosomes: “Birds raised in the presence of traffic noise are prematurely aged, and their future lifespans already curtailed, before they have even left the nest.”
  • In 2022, 46,027 people died in vehicle crashes in the US—and 9,188 of those were pedestrians, a worrying development that researchers believe may be due to the ballooning size of American cars and SUVs, as well as the proliferation of screens and other distractions.
  • in 1965, the same year that Nader published his book, The New York Times reported that physicians were picketing the New York Auto Show demanding a reduction in tailpipe emissions, among other measures to protect human health from the scourge of the automobile.
  • It’s worth noting, too, that eliminating tailpipes altogether, as electric cars do, doesn’t get rid of pollution that harms human health, because electric cars don’t eliminate the spread of microplastics and other toxic chemicals. Scientists in California looking at plastic particles in ocean water believe that tire dust and fragments probably are the largest source of this pollution. Particles from brake wear contribute to high levels of magnetite in the environment that have been linked to the development of Alzheimer’s disease, one of the leading causes of death among older people globally.
  • giving people transit as an option can substantively improve their health. Japanese researchers took the opportunity to look at the data from a natural experiment that occurred when planners added a transit station to a line that passed through a rural area. Annual health care costs for people in the area affected by the change went down by more than US$600 per year in just four years. “This study’s results are consistent with previous studies suggesting that increased access to transit may increase physical activity among transit users and may lead to decreased healthcare expenditures,” the researchers wrote.
  • This at a time when Americans were being told that urban decline was an inevitable scourge that could be solved only by “slum clearance” to replace dwellings and business districts, often belonging to Black and brown people, and that “crime” was driving people away from urban life. (Appleyard and his team found that in fact more people cited concerns about traffic degrading their neighborhoods than about crime.)
  • Using data from Germany, where more than 50 percent of trips are taken by car, they concluded that “cycling rather than driving was positively associated with orientation towards the common good in all models…. These findings are significant for policy and planning because the benefits of cycling over driving are more profound and sustainable than previously thought.” In other words, cyclists make better neighbors. Why, then, do we make it so hard to choose biking and walking?
  • Stanford Open Policing Project showed that Black drivers were 20 percent more likely than white ones to be stopped, and that after a traffic stop, they were 1.5 to 2 times more likely to undergo a search for contraband and weapons—even though “[B]lack and Hispanic drivers were searched on the basis of less evidence than white drivers.” This is why we, and many other advocates, call for automated camera enforcement of moving violations like speed limits and red-light running (as well as passive controls on reckless driving, such as speed governors). Cameras don’t discriminate. Too often, cops do.
  • According to a police report, the young driver in this case “failed to control speed as he accelerated to intentionally blow black diesel smoke in the path of several bicyclists.” He hit six of them, leaving their bodies and bikes strewn across the roadway. All six miraculously survived, although several sustained life-altering injuries. The local district attorney closed the case without charging the kid, who graduated from high school a couple of years after the crash. Funny, who faces consequences and who doesn’t.
  • “I think there’s this real fear to give up that mobility access and to talk about life without driving,” said Anna Zivarts, an organizer and videographer who wrote a book called When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency
  • After a century of building more and more spots in the hopes of finding a place to put our cars wherever we stop driving them, we are left with anywhere from a billion to two billion parking spaces in the United States. No one is really sure how many; at the same time, everyone also seems to be sure that there could never be enough. Because while we’ve been striping all those parking spaces, we have also been building up an enormous sense of entitlement among drivers, who expect to be able to bring their vehicles up to the front door of whatever their destination might be.
  • a nine-mile (fourteen-kilometer) section of one of the most important highways in the United States was completely shut down. (Had 2,500 gallons of fuel spilled in the ocean, it would have been seen as an environmental disaster, but 2,500 gallons of fuel spilling in a major American city, lighting on fire, and choking the air with poisonous smoke was seen primarily as a major headache for drivers.)
  • Pandemic-era outdoor dining programs saved jobs, provided a COVID-weary populace with an opportunity to forget their worries at least for a moment, and had the knock-on effect of creating an entirely new constituency for better and higher uses of public space. Almost overnight, the people who supported rethinking how cities and towns manage parking weren’t just fanatical anti-car advocates or Brooklyn-based podcast hosts. They were conservative mayors applying their market-oriented philosophy to help the local economy. They were small business owners of all political stripes, many of whom would have previously scoffed at losing so much as a single parking space in front of or behind their establishments. Perhaps best of all, they were the countless restaurant patrons in cities and suburbs alike who suddenly understood that in the space it takes to store one or two cars, a dozen or more people can enjoy a meal.
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Inside

Posted on January 10, 2026 by twsobey

Title: Inside: One Woman’s Journey Through the Inside Passage

Author: Susan Marie Conrad

Completed: January 2026 (Full list of books)

Overview: My dad was at an Explorer’s Club meeting where the author was discussing this book. After, he asked her if she knows my father-in-law who is also in the local kayaking community. She paused for a moment before replying, “Yeah. Your son helped me break into my car.”

A few years ago, we were coming home from camping and stopped at the co-op in Mount Vernon. As we were getting ready to go, I noticed to women trying to get into a car with kayaks strapped to the top. I went over and talked with them for a bit. We quickly realized we knew some of the same people including my father-in-law. When they told us they were waiting for a locksmith to come open their car after locking their keys inside. Since the locksmith couldn’t give a clear ETA, I offered to help. We got the car open just as the locksmith pulled into the parking lot. They congratulated us and seemed genuinely happy that they didn’t have to open it.

When I hear Susan had written a book about paddling the Inside Passage, something I’ve wanted to do for years, I decided I had to read it. I’m still just as interested and might start looking at doing chunks of it before tackling the whole thing.

Highlights:

  • Within ten minutes, my body started to relax and my hands loosened their grip on the paddle shaft. Soon my hips settled deeper in the cockpit and the boat sat quiet and steady beneath me. “Hah!” I yelled across the water toward Bobbie. “She senses my fears—just like a horse. I stop fighting, she stops bucking!”
  • Common paddling wisdom asserts that it takes about 1,000 strokes to travel one mile in a sea kayak, in average conditions, without the assistance or impedance of wind or current. With this math, I would take approximately 1,200,000 strokes.
  • STUDYING THE CHARTS and reading everything related to the Inside Passage revealed what I considered four “rites of passage,” or crux areas I would encounter—four chunks of open water that I would paddle through that had the potential to be dangerous and that, quite frankly, scared the hell out of me. The first was Boundary Pass, which divides the San Juan Islands from their Canadian cousins, the Gulf Islands. The US-Canadian border runs through the middle of this four-mile, open-water crossing, which is smack in the center of a major shipping lane.
  • My second crux area, the Strait of Georgia, carves a gaping hole between Vancouver Island and the mainland, encompassing over a hundred miles of open water.
  • The third crux was Cape Caution, an ominous headland perched above the northern reaches of Vancouver Island that faced an uninterrupted sea horizon—all the way to Japan. Just uttering the place name conjured up images of scenes from The Perfect Storm. Appropriately named, the cape is exposed to everything the Pacific can and will dish out.
  • The fourth crux was where two large bodies of water collided at the Alaskan border: Dixon Entrance and Hecate Strait. Why they were referred to as “the punching bag of the Pacific Ocean” became apparent when I studied their immensity on my chart.
  • My awareness lifted higher to Washington state’s Mount Baker, standing proud and stark white on the mainland in its 10,781 feet of grandeur. The Great White Watcher, or Komo Kulshan, as the Salish call it, is one of the snowiest places in the world.
  • There are simply some places where oil tankers should never go—the Great Bear Rainforest is one of them.
  • The numbers scattered on top of the beige contours, indicating the height of the mountains less than one mile offshore, made me take notice as well: 2,730, 2,605, 2,765, 3,345 feet. At the point where I would enter it from the south, Grenville Channel was about a mile wide, with low-lying forested hills. Within ten miles, the channel would be contained between steep walls rising more than two thousand feet. Twenty miles further, the fjord narrowed considerably, squeezing more tightly in with vertiginous walls. Peaks over three thousand feet would tower above me, and sheer cliffs would plunge below me: my chart showed depths of nearly 1,200 feet in some areas. I was paddling through what had once been a river of ice, the obvious handiwork of the deepest Pleistocene glaciers.
  • I would stash my kayak as far away as possible from my camp, and stow my food bags and garbage inside the hatches at night, along with a triple-bagged handful of mothballs. A fellow kayak-adventurer had shared the tip of using the strong odor of mothballs to mask the odor of food, emphasizing they not touch the food, to avoid contamination. I figured he was still alive to write about it, so I dutifully shoved them in the hatch each night, hoping he knew what he was talking about.
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Practical Lock Picking

Posted on December 22, 2025 by twsobey

Title: Practical Lock Picking, A Physical Penetration Tester’s Training Guide

Author: Deviant Ollam

Completed: December 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: I’ve been into lock picking for years. I don’t remember when I got started but it was probably around 2010. Back in 2016, I challenged students at One Stone to pick a lock in my Maker Space to win the prize inside the locker. Then in 2024 I gave a presentation to Washington CTE teachers about using lock picking to teach engineering.

Despite picking scores of locks over more than a decade, I still feel there’s a lot to learn. This book reviewed a lot of what I’ve learned already and helped me learn a few new things. If you’re just getting started picking locks, this book will give you the basics, but there are so many other resources available to do that in a shorter format. That said, this goes over the basics and dives a lot deeper than the shorter ones. If you know you want to get into this hobby, this book provides everything you need to get from knowing nothing to knowing how to pick fairly advanced locks.

Highlights:

  • Remember, it’s not a lock’s job to hold something shut. You can easily prevent someone from, say, accessing a particular room of your house by applying brick and mortar to the doorway. That will surely keep unwanted people out, right? What’s the problem with such a solution? The answer, of course, is that such a solid wall of stone isn’t the best thing to have if you’re also concerned with allowing authorized people in. That is what locks attempt to do for us…they assist in giving otherwise robust security a means of quickly, easily, and reliably opening when necessary.
  • our deadbolts, our padlock shackles, and other similar hardware that actually provide the means by which things remain shut. Our locks are mechanisms that simply trigger the release of said deadbolts and shackles at (we hope) the appropriate time.
  • It is a common misconception that pins (particularly the key pins) within a lock can come from the manufacturer in a wide array of varying sizes. In fact, the key pin sizes (and the corresponding depths of the bitting cuts on the blade of the key) only appear in regular, evenly-spaced intervals. I have never encountered a manufacturer who utilized more than nine or ten distinct sizes of key pin in this simple design of lock (and thus, their keys only featured nine possible distinct depths of cut). Many manufacturers fabricate their whole line of lock products with as little as five or six possible bitting depths.
  • consider for a moment the small points of metal that protrude upward from the blade in between the flat lands of each bitting cut. These are a natural result of the size and shape of the cutting wheel and the distances by which each bitting cut are separated from one another. The resultant “points” that remain in between the cuts on the blade of a key can provide a satisfying series of perceived “clicks” as the blade rides into the keyway (as each pin stack passes across the ridges), but the points themselves are not a crucial element of the lock’s easy and successful operation.
  • Most locks, if you look closely, will exhibit at least a few signs of such imperfection. Many products, in fact, will be glaringly deficient in their quality control.
  • If you are starting to learn lockpicking and it isn’t going well, the odds are overwhelming that the problem has to do with your use of the tension tool… specifically, too much pressure being applied to it.
  • Occasionally, the terms “edge of the plug” and “center of the plug” will be substituted for “standard” and “flat”, respectively. Such terms refer to where in the plug the tools are inserted, as you will soon see. (As always, I’ll point out here that I greatly prefer these terms over any designations that are region-specific. Some people will make reference to “top of the keyway” and “bottom of the keyway” but, for reasons that I have discussed in Chapter 1, I try to break people out of the habit of using those sorts of names.)
  • see how high you can comfortably lift it in the direction of the pin stacks. You may be able to observe that at certain positions you are rather limited in your lifting range (Figure 3.14), while other times you can reach very far up beyond the keyway (Figure 3.15). You are feeling the pin chambers and the flat spaces between them. Bear in mind, you should never concern yourself with lifting the pins beyond the “top height” that you can reach in-between pin stacks (the height felt in Figure 3.14), since a normal operating key in a typical pin tumbler lock would never need (or indeed, be able to) lift up beyond the height of the keyway.
  • Two exceedingly different-length pins cannot usually occupy chambers directly next to one another. This is because cuts on the blade of a key must be made at specific, gently-sloping angles.
  • Many times, it’s far more efficient and a great deal easier to bypass locks instead of picking them. The term bypassing does not refer to the act of, say, finding a particular door to be locked and then going through a window instead. No, bypassing is the act of triggering the release of a locking mechanism without manipulating the pins or combination mechanism in the traditional “picking” sense.
  • Interestingly, homemade shims fabricated from thin metals like beverage can aluminum are often the best tool for the job on dual-latching padlocks. Factory-made metal shims are often much thicker, which can result in difficulty during insertion and twisting. Some locks simply don’t have enough “wiggle room” in between the shackle and the lock body to accommodate two thick steel shims. The thin aluminum shims often fit into these sorts of crevices with ease, however.
  • Often, it is possible to lock a doorknob or handle, but this merely prevents the knob itself from turning, it does nothing to secure the latch itself. As anyone who has watched old spy-themed TV shows knows, slipping thin material (on television and in films a credit card is a popular device for this purpose) into the crack near the doorjamb can often result in the latch becoming disengaged temporarily. This is known as “loiding” and many times it works just as quickly as viewers are led to believe.
  • One of the most common modifications (one which I perform upon every new tubular lockpicking tool that I acquire) is the removal of a “reset washer” which is often installed by default.
  • I am often asked exactly what the best setting is for this adjustable collar component on a tubular pick tool. Like many aspects of lockpicking, there is no single hard-and-fast rule upon which you can rely… but I have found what I believe to be a decent “average” standard that you can at least use as a benchmark. Try the following… unscrew the adjustable ring somewhat on your tubular pick. Now, using just a single finger, spin it back in the “tightening” direction until it stops. From this point of slight friction, turn the ring an additional quarter-turn tighter. That is a healthy baseline..
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Hell Yeah or No

Posted on November 23, 2025 by twsobey

Title: Hell Yeah or No what’s worth doing

Author: Derek Sivers

Completed: November 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: For many years, I’ve been interested in the writings of Derek Sivers. It goes back far enough I don’t have any idea where I first heard about him, but the idea of sharing all my book notes came from him. I’ve had several of his books on my to read list for a while and when he announced they were free for a week on his website I decided now was the time. (I was going to get it from the library for free already but this was just the prompt I needed to get to it).

Reading through this book, there were many ideas that I completely agreed with and several that I disagreed with, but each idea was conveyed clearly and succinctly which encouraged me deeply think about my views and understand why I felt that way. Knowing what I do about Derek, I suspect he would be much happier knowing that he made me consider my own views far more than he would be if I just accepted his which is somewhat uncommon these days. Either way, this was a quick read and I’d recommend reading it when you have time to ponder.

Highlights:

  • And then if you stopped doing all these things you’re doing just for the money or the attention, what would be left? Who would you be if you didn’t do these things? If you were completely satiated, then what? After an understandable period of relaxing, what would you pursue? Don’t say “sit around and do nothing,” because that’s still just relaxing. I mean after that, when you’re ready to be useful to others again.
  • No matter what you tell the world or tell yourself, your actions reveal your real values. Your actions show you what you actually want. There are two smart reactions to this: Stop lying to yourself, and admit your real priorities. Start doing what you say you want to do, and see if it’s really true.
  • Stop fooling yourself. Be honest about what’s past and what’s present. Retiring outdated titles lets you admit what you’re really doing now. And if you don’t like the idea of losing your title, then do something about it! This goes for titles like “leader,” “risk-taker,” and “good friend,” too.
  • If you’re not feeling “hell yeah!” then say no. Most of us have lives filled with mediocrity. We said yes to things that we felt half-hearted about.
  • Though it’s good to say yes when you’re starting out, wanting any opportunity, or needing variety, it’s bad to say yes when you’re overwhelmed, over-committed, or need to focus.
  • I rebel against anything that feels like addiction. When I hear myself saying “I need this,” I want to challenge that dependency and prove my independence.
  • Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me that “the standard pace is for chumps” — that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school.
  • During my last unmotivated funk, I realized that because nothing is exciting me, that means nothing is exciting me more than this boring necessary stuff. And since I don’t want to waste my inspired times on brainless work, this is a perfect time to do those dull tasks.
  • Imagine what it’s like to be the silver medalist. If you’d been just one second faster, you could have won the gold! Damn! So close! Damn damn damn! Full of envy, you’d keep comparing yourself to the gold winner. Now imagine what it’s like to be the bronze medalist. If you’d been just one second slower, you wouldn’t have won anything! Awesome! You’d be thrilled that you’re officially an Olympic medalist and get to stand on the winner’s podium. Comparing up versus comparing down: Your happiness depends on where you’re focusing.
  • The problem is taking any one person’s advice too seriously. Ideally, asking advice should be like echolocation. Bounce ideas off of all of your surroundings, and listen to all the echoes to get the whole picture.
  • Don’t be a donkey. You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience. If you’re thirty now and have six different directions you want to pursue, then you can do each one for ten years, and have done all of them by the time you’re ninety. It seems ridiculous to plan to age ninety when you’re thirty, right? But it’s probably coming, so you might as well take advantage of it.
  • Ninety-three percent of drivers say they are safer-than-average drivers. When I learned this, it shook my soul. At first, like almost everybody, I thought, “Yes, but I really am above average!” Then I realized I was doing it again. So I decided to gamble on the opposite. Now I just assume I’m below average. It serves me well. I listen more. I ask a lot of questions. I’ve stopped thinking others are stupid. I assume most people are smarter than me. To assume you’re below average is to admit you’re still learning.
  • I had collected 232 unbroken sand dollar shells. I put them all out in the sun to dry, amazed at my good luck. I bragged to my family. I tried to think of all the things I could do with 232 sand dollars. After two days the excitement wore off. I realized I was never going to do anything with them. Now it was just stupid for me to keep all of these sand dollars sitting there doing nothing. The excitement was in finding them, not keeping them.
  • What do you hate not doing? What makes you feel depressed, annoyed, or like your life has gone astray if you don’t do it enough? Answers to this double-negative question seem to be better indicators of what’s really worth doing.
  • I felt ready to do something new, so I started to learn. But the more I learned, the more I realized how little I knew and how dumb-lucky I had been. I continued learning until I felt like an absolute idiot.
  • Learning without doing is wasted. If I don’t use what I learn, then it was pointless! How horrible to waste those hundreds of hours I spent learning, and not turn it into action.
  • Alvin Toffler said, “The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
  • Many people learn only in their first third of life, so schools don’t teach unlearning.
  • the differences among men, and the differences among women, are much bigger than the differences between men and women. So instead, to compensate for your tendency to exaggerate those differences, just assume that men and women are the same. They’re not the same, but if you follow this rule, your thinking will be closer to correct than not.
  • You really learn only when you’re surprised. If you’re not surprised, then everything is fitting into your existing thought patterns. So to get smarter, you need to get surprised, think in new ways, and deeply understand different perspectives. With effort, you could do this from the comfort of home. But the most effective way to shake things up is to move across the world. Pick a place that’s most unlike what you know, and go. This keeps you in a learning mindset. Previously mindless habits, like buying groceries, now keep your mind open, alert, and noticing new things.
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The 99% Invisible City

Posted on November 16, 2025 by twsobey

Title: The 99% Invisible City A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design

Author: Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt

Completed: November 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: I’ve been listening to the 99% Invisible podcast for over a decade and when they released this book, I had to read it. When I got it, hardcover was the only option and my system for taking notes works best with ebooks so when they announced that we’ve hit the fifth anniversary of its release, I decided it was time to revisit it. Much of it I remembered but several of the stories felt new again.

The podcast helped me realize that everything can be interesting if you dig deep enough into it. This book dives into several topics that were more difficult to cover without visuals and gives insights into what’s happening just below the surface of the city. Since reading it, I’ve noticed several Thomassons and started paying attention to the different colors of paint on the roads while running and biking.

Highlights:

  • On city streets today, you can see the spectrum of safety colors that have been formalized and revised over the decades by the American National Standards Institute: RED: electric power lines, cables, and conduit ORANGE: telecommunications, alarm and signal lines YELLOW: gaseous or combustive materials including natural gas, oil, petroleum, and steam GREEN: sewers and drain lines BLUE: potable water PURPLE: reclaimed water, irrigation, or slurry lines PINK: temporary markings, unidentified facilities, or known unknowns WHITE: proposed excavation areas, limits, or routes
  • Even though they are generally positioned at eye level directly adjacent to entryways and are adorned with reflective red stripes, Knox Boxes are easy to overlook. Like Kleenex, Dumpster, or the once-trademarked escalator, Knox Box is the common brand name associated with a generic thing: in this case, the rapid entry access boxes affixed to all kinds of urban architecture. When disaster strikes, these urban safes go from being functionally invisible to highly essential in an instant. Seconds count in an emergency, so getting inside a building quickly and safely is critical. Knox Boxes offer a simple solution: when emergency personnel respond to a call and arrive on site, they use a master key or code to unlock a rapid entry access box and retrieve its contents. Inside a typical box is another key or code for accessing that specific building.
  • Genpei Akasegawa noticed an oddly useless staircase alongside a building. A few steps led up to a landing, but there was no door at the top where he would have reasonably expected to see one. What struck him as particularly curious, though, was that the railing running along these stairs to nowhere had been recently repaired. Despite serving no function, the stairs were apparently being kept in working order.
  • Thomassons are also delightful to find, so one could argue that the association isn’t as negative as it might seem at first. Thomassons are treasures waiting to be discovered and analyzed—whether or not they are art, they are an intriguing lens through which to look at and understand change over time.
  • Meanwhile, fake metal trees were put up next to a popular bridge in Moscow to give people an alternative place to attach locks. Approaches like this echo the treatment of graffiti in some cities where special mural-making walls are presented as alternatives to illegal vandalism. Like kissing the Blarney Stone in Ireland or sticking a wad of gum on a rather gross wall in Seattle, putting up a lock may seem like a novel lark, but when a lot of people line up to do the same thing, such traditions can lose their romantic appeal.
  • Converted cannons can still be found sticking out of streets and sidewalks around Britain, often serving as traffic barriers or survey markers. Around the world, people pass by cannon bollards all the time—these stalwart remnants can be found shielding building corners in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and protecting pedestrians from cars along the sidewalks of Havana, Cuba.
  • There are five key principles of good flag design according to Kaye, many of which can also be applied to all kinds of other designs: (1) keep it simple, (2) use meaningful symbolism, (3) use two or three basic colors, (4) no lettering or seals, and (5) be distinctive or be related. In other words, a good city flag should be simple but memorable, easy to recall, and usable at different scales.
  • “if you had a good city flag you would have a banner for people to rally under to face those more important things.” Bad city flags go unused, ceding visual branding territory to sports teams and corporate interests, which come and go. When city flags are done well, they are remixable, adaptable, and powerful long-term tools for civic engagement as well as sources of local pride.
  • Marr explained that he had read it on a plaque prominently placed right outside the building where he was speaking and that his motto is to “always read the plaque.” It’s a mantra that has an obvious literal meaning, but it’s also another way of reminding ourselves to constantly be on the lookout for stories embedded in our built environments.
  • In James Loewen’s book Lies Across America, the author points out that historical markers often say as much or more about the era they were dedicated in as they do about the specific times, places, and people they are ostensibly there to commemorate. Many markers in the American South that whitewash slavery are very much products of the turn of the twentieth century when the backlash against progressive Reconstruction was in full force.
  • The vast majority of the graphic designs crowding your visual field are advertisements. It’s probably okay to ignore most of them.
  • business leaders with vested interests in their ad space fought back. Corporate lobbyists argued the ban would be bad for the economy and compromise real estate values. They also tried to appeal directly to everyday citizens whose taxes might have to pay for removing old posts that would no longer be supporting billboards. There was even an argument that illuminated ads helped people to safely navigate the city streets at night. Clear Channel Outdoor, one of the world’s biggest outdoor-advertising companies, went so far as to sue the city, claiming the ban was unconstitutional.
  • The Civil War’s unprecedented death toll also helped inspire another great innovation of the US Postal Service: home delivery. It was too painful and personal for mothers and wives to receive news of the death of a loved one in public post offices, so mail carriers started delivering letters directly to families so they could read the bad news in the privacy of their own homes.
  • Presented with wide open spaces, drivers will go faster. Intentionally closing off space by adding trees and other landscaping along the side of the road may make a driver a little more anxious but also more cautious, which can in turn make roadways that much safer for everyone.
  • Peter Norton recounts in his book Fighting Traffic, cars began to be viewed as harbingers of death. One newspaper cartoon of the era depicted a car as a toothed monster being worshiped on a pedestal, framing it as a modern Moloch—a polemical automotive-age resurrection of an ancient biblical deity associated with child sacrifice.
  • There are many variants of traffic-calming designs out there, including pinch points, chicanes, gateways, and various other kinds of raised pavements and curb extensions. Suffice it to say that urban designers have tried a lot of tricks to slow drivers down.
  • When it comes down to it, the trust that people put in the security of most entryways is now once again less about the lock itself and more about faith in a broader social order that respects the division between public space and private property.
  • Following Otis’s death in 1861, his sons iterated on their father’s invention and began marketing it more aggressively to the public. They targeted hotels, convincing them that with a fancy elevator in place, rich guests could quickly ascend to the top floors and escape the noise and bustle on the first level. Historically, the ground floor was the most accessible and thus the most desirable, but it didn’t have to be, they argued.
  • London has used a roundabout and statue at Charing Cross as a central point of reference to measure certain distances. Metropolitan police initially served only neighborhoods within a radius of twelve miles from Charing Cross, and hansom cab drivers were obliged to take fares only up to a fixed distance from that central point. Today, London cab drivers are still tested on their knowledge of an area six miles in any direction from Charing Cross.
  • Some of these places are clearly designed, like gores or berms, but they are often overlooked. Most of these spaces, though, are leftovers in planned areas that were created incidentally through the process of car-centric urban development.
  • For the markers left behind in San Francisco, though, this wasn’t the end of the story. Many individual headstones from old graveyards ended up being reused as building material around the city. Intact headstones and fragments of them can be found all over San Francisco. Some wound up at Ocean Beach, arrayed to reduce coastal erosion, while others ended up in Buena Vista Park, lining trails and gutters.
  • There are numerous design strategies and technologies aimed at keeping these feathered nonfriends from occupying urban spaces and outdoor surfaces, including spikes, wires, netting, and even miniature electrified fences. Such innovations largely fail to do what they are designed to do, though. They mostly just move pigeons around, pushing the birds to adjacent structures.
  • It was Modernists like Le Corbusier who favored rectilinear steel, glass, and concrete forms that in turn made cities perfect places to skateboard. “Modernists were the ones that reinterpreted a bench in a park as a slab of granite,” Bracali notes, adding that this design paradigm involved a turn away from “flowing landscapes [with] grassy areas” toward “paved open plaza spaces,” which produced great surfaces, ledges, and edges for skateboarders.
  • Given the long history and modern prevalence of defensive designs, the outrage and days of protests against Tesco’s spikes took the company by surprise. Subsequent criticism of anti-homeless spikes around London reached a crescendo when then-mayor Boris Johnson called them “ugly, self-defeating and stupid,” which arguably also describes certain British prime ministers.
  • In the 1700s and 1800s, revolutionaries would smash them in order to move around more freely in the shadows. During the French Revolution, the tables were turned and some lampposts were used as gallows for hanging officials and aristocrats, leading to the French phrase “À la lanterne!” (“To the lamppost”), a call to execution akin to “String ’em up” in English.
  • When the sweeping Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was hung up in the House of Representatives, disabled demonstrators left their wheelchairs and crawled up the marble steps of the Capitol building to make sure the bill was passed by physically demonstrating the challenges they faced in a built environment that excluded them.
  • Mariño came to see bicycle rights as civil rights. For him, cycling embodied individuality as well as “women’s rights, urban mobility, simplicity, the new urbanism, and, of course, environmental consciousness.” Having also been exposed to protest culture in the United States, Mariño organized local cyclists to put up signs and get permission to temporarily close two major streets, leaving them open for cyclists and pedestrians. Thus, the first Ciclovía was born, and from there, its influence spread. Four decades later, on Sundays and public holidays, a vast interconnected network of Bogotá’s streets is shut down to automotive traffic, creating an extensive “paved park” for runners, skaters, and cyclists.
  • These weekly Ciclovía events draw as many as two million people out into the streets—about a third of the city’s population—to enjoy the seventy-plus miles of repurposed road space.
  • The problem, as he sees it, is that citizens are used to cities being car-centric. “People have internalized that that is how cities look and so assume that’s normal . . . that the streets are dedicated to cars.”
  • “We must first remember that all cities were car-free little more than a century ago,” writes Carfree Cities author J. H. Crawford. “Cars were never necessary in cities and in many respects they worked against the fundamental purpose of cities: to bring many people together in a space where social, cultural and economic synergies could develop. Because cars require so much space for movement and parking, they work against this objective [by causing] cities to expand in order to provide the land cars need.”
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Second Annual First Mistake 5k

Posted on November 10, 2025 by twsobey

Last year we had a lot of fun with the First Mistake 5k. We had 40 runners, lots of hills, and four Mistake Station (including one bottle of Malört, free haircuts, and firefighters hosing us down). I wonder if we can do better this year. Registration details are below. If you’re interested in offering a Mistake Station, contact me to talk details. See you January 1.

Life is full of bad ideas. You will likely make many mistakes next year, let this race be (one of) your first. What could be better than a free race on Jan 1? Let’s check-off as many mistakes as possible now. You know that outfit you haven’t worn since high school? That would be perfect for this race. Maybe eat a big greasy breakfast 30 minutes before the start. Did you party hard on New Years Eve and go home with a stranger? Bring that mistake with you, especially if they aren’t a runner. It’s gonna be “That Kind of Fun”.

  • When: 9am on Jan 1, 2026
  • Where: Chief Sealth Trail at Henderson, just east of Rainier Beach Link Station
  • Route: 5k with 600′ vertical, map. Modified “Default Route” for those who know
  • Cost: Free (see “What to Bring” below)
  • Registration: Use this Fancy Form
  • Prizes: Yes, everyone gets a finisher metal (but no, not a medal… see “What to Bring” below)

What to Bring

Aside from the usual running gear and water, please bring a canned beverage. This can be soda, beer, coffee, wine, NA cocktail, sparkling water, or whatever. As long as it’s in a metal can and you can drink it, it’s perfect. All the cans will go into a cooler. When you cross the finish line, you get to pick out any remaining can as a prize. Congrats on your surviving first (and possibly second or third) mistake of the year.

Aid Stations

No, it’s not that kind of race. If you need water, snacks, or other things while running, you’ll want to bring them with you. There might be “Mistake Stations” along the course where runners are offered the opportunity to make more mistakes. Anyone want a tall glass of warm milk just before the worst hill climb? How about a haircut from a rando with a set of clippers? Chili pepper roulette? We’re still working on these. If you have ideas or want to set up a station, let us know.

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Ring and Other Metalwork

Posted on October 26, 2025 by twsobey

I learned to weld in shop class in 8th grade. Two years later, my new shop teacher showed me how to weld well. Working with middle schoolers now, I’m shocked that we ever let any of them near metalworking equipment but also very glad I had the opportunity to try. I’ve continued to weld and tinker around with metal for years.

Back in college, several friends were very involved with our school’s art program and encouraged me to submit a piece for the student show. I got some railroad spikes (although thinking about it now, I’m not entirely sure how I got them…) and welded a few into a hand. I then took a few others to the milling machine in the physics lab to cut notches so I could bend them before welding them into an “I love you” hand.

In recent years, I’ve pulled out my oxy acetylene kit to create other interesting pieces to hang on our fence like my dragonfly and ladybug. Not everything requires heat. I also got a small spool of copper wire someone was throwing away and was able to cold work it into a bonsai tree.

When talking with friends about these different projects, I realized I haven’t ever written about my favorite piece which is much more delicate than the rebar pieces and more intricate than the bonsai.

Back in 2008, Dom and I had been together for seven years and I thought it might be time for something new. I talked with a local jeweler about some different designs he could make for an engagement ring. They all sounded amazing, but none felt quiet right. I asked for a week to think it over before making the final decision. When I came back, I was a little nervous about what he would say. I had decided what I most wanted to do was make the ring myself. I wanted to get fine metal wire and tie a Turk’s Head Knot. I was concerned he would be annoyed that I’d wasted his time. Instead he offered to order silver, white gold, and rose gold wire for me at cost, plus let me borrow some of his tools. When I finished it, he happily ran it through his ultrasonic cleaner and even gave me a box to put it it. In fact, he seemed almost as excited about the ring as I was.

Thankfully, Dom said yes and we definitely went back to Mike the Jeweler for our wedding rings which are unique as well, but that’s a different story.

Who are these young kids???

Looking back on a couple of decades of working metal, I’m still uncertain about why anyone would think that 7th and 8th grade students were mature enough to handle glowing hot metal, but given the right situation and proper safety protocols, I can certainly see the benefit. Those classes have clearly impacted my life. Now that I’m in a position to support middle school shop/technology education teachers, I’d be happy to work with any interested teacher to ensure we can safely allow students in the twenty-first century to have the same wonderful learning experience I had. In fact, I’ve already started at home with my daughter banging away on glowing metal from our home forge at the age of three.

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A Closed and Common Orbit

Posted on October 17, 2025 by twsobey

Title: A Closed and Common Orbit

Author: Becky Chambers

Completed: October 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: After finishing The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the first in the Wayfarers series, I assumed the second book would continue to follow the crew we met already. This was a different direction but very enjoyable. I enjoyed reading this on my phone in the brief moments between other activities.

The discussion about how to treat AI was interesting to think about but also clearly demonstrates just how far we are from achieving real artificial intelligence. Despite what promoters claim, there was no way to mistake ChatGPT for any of the AIs in this book except the frustrating “non-sentient” versions that barely helped the characters buy train tickets.

Looking forward to finding out which characters show up in the next book in the series during the interstitial moments that I no longer use to check social media.

Highlights:

  • Names are important, and if you pick your own, it should be something with meaning to you. That’s how modders go about it, anyway. Chosen names are kind of a big deal for us
  • ‘I’m so sorry to put you through all this trouble.’
    ‘Oh, no, this isn’t trouble. It’s gonna be work, yeah, but it’s not trouble.’
  • personal power generators, empty fuel drums, receivers and transmitters of all kinds. But likewise, there were lovingly tended strips of plantlife basking under sunlamps, and glowing fountains that glittered in the dark. There were sculptures made of scrap, smooth benches utilised by chatting friends and amorous couples, soft lighting fixtures that looked like the pet projects of individuals with disparate senses of style. There was nothing bureaucratic or single-minded about the public decor. This was a place built by many.
  • My pricing is . . . variable. Whatever it says on the package, or whatever I promised. Between you and me, I really don’t care how much things cost. As long as I have food in my belly and can buy dumb stuff to decorate my house with, it doesn’t matter whether people are paying me the same amount every time.
  • Your mind comes from your body. It’s born out of it. And yet, it’s a wholly independent thing. Even though the two are linked, there’s a disconnect. Your body does stuff without asking your mind about it, and your mind wants stuff that your body can’t always do. You know what I mean?’
    ‘Yes.’ Stars, did she ever.
    ‘So, tattooing . . . you’ve got a picture in your mind, then you put it on your body. You make a hazy imagining into a tangible part of you. Or, to flip it around, you want a reminder of something, so you put it on your body, where it’s a real, touchable thing. You see the thing on your body, you remember it in your mind, then you touch it on your body, you remember why you got it, what you were feeling then, and so on, and so on. It’s a re-enforcing circle. You’re reminded that all these separate pieces are part of the whole that comprises you.’ The Aeluon laughed at herself. ‘Or is that too fluffy?’
  • So much scrap. Scrap everywhere. Piles and piles and piles, on and on. How could anyone use this much stuff? And why would they get rid of it, if most of it just needed some fixing to be good?
  • The land on their side was where all the scrap went, and where all the factories were (there was more than just the one!). The land on the other side had cities. The cities were where the scrap came from. The people in the cities didn’t like scrap or think about it much, but they liked stuff, and since they didn’t talk to other Humans or species, they couldn’t get new stuff, or materials to make new stuff (they’d already used up everything they dug out of the ground, Owl said). If they wanted new stuff, they had to make it out of old stuff.
  • I love learning. I love history. But there’s history in everything. Every building, everybody you talk to. It’s not limited to libraries and museums. I think people who spend their lives in school forget that sometimes.
  • We live in a society, Sidra. Societies have rules.’
    ‘You break rules all the time.’
    ‘I break laws. That’s different. Social rules have their place. It’s how we all get along. It’s how we trust each other and work together’
  • How did Blue stay so patient? Sidra had wondered this often. Perhaps it was something in his genes, something his makers had written into his organic code. (Was it less admirable, then, if it was something inbuilt, rather than cultivated by conscious thought and effort?
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Potholes and Pavements

Posted on October 12, 2025 by twsobey

Title: Potholes and Pavements: A Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network

Author: Laura Laker

Completed: October 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: This book was harder for me to get through than many of the others about infrastructure and I’m not sure why. As shown by the highlights below, there were many pieces that I loved.

I realized early in the book that much of the work done to set up the National Cycle Network was underway while I lived there yet I knew nothing about it. My hope is that they can overcome many of the challenges Laura outlines and implement the suggested improvements before my next trip to the UK. I look forward to riding several of the routes and allowing my daughter explore with greater independence. I also hope the US can look at what is being done in the UK so we can get beyond the excuse that, “we’re not The Netherlands.”

Highlights:

  • the 2022 National Travel Survey found that in England 71% of all trips we made were less than five miles. You or I could cycle that in less than 30 minutes, saving money, and fitting in a bit of exercise and, dare I say it, joy, into our day.
  • Between half and three quarters of Brits want to cycle more, both for everyday trips and for fun, and polls say we support investment in everyday routes and leisure routes, even if it means taking road space from cars. The main reason we don’t cycle more is an understandable fear of sharing space with motor traffic.
  • In Leicester, one of the many cities to embrace the challenge, a mile per week of new main-road bike lanes were rolled out at their peak, at just over £29,000 per mile – a bargain basement price when you consider a trunk road comes in somewhere at around £1 billion per mile.
  • In the 1950s, cycling was a very normal means of transport in the UK: around a third of distance travelled was by bike, which was more than in the Netherlands at the time.
  • Pedestrians and cyclists were sidelined and, as motor vehicles were increasingly prioritised, traffic volumes grew, and walking and cycling felt less and less safe or appealing. Public transport was on the decline, too, and access to the streets – a public space – increasingly required access to a car.
  • The Green Cross Code was relaunched in 1978 with David Prowse, the actor who played Darth Vader in the original Star Wars films, instructing pedestrians on how not to get run down in the street. This is a trend that continues today in road safety campaigns that hand hi-vis jackets to children walking to school, but fail to tackle the driver behaviour that puts them at risk.
  • Around 75 men and women lay down in Bristol’s Castle Park, forming the spokes of an enormous wheel, with bicycles on kickstands sporting colourful balloons as its rim. Grimshaw later claimed this act was deemed so offensive to a nearby hotel that the council was persuaded to landscape the park to prevent it happening again.
  • ‘It’s easy to motivate people, really. You have to give them a challenge, don’t you?’
  • By the 2005 deadline there were a whopping 10,000 miles of designated routes. If their early work juggling funding, multiple construction projects and a far-flung workforce on a shoestring was impressive, this achievement was truly monumental. When the dust settled, they had raised £200 million for the work, more than quadrupling the original Lottery fund.
  • it links together ancient travelways, including Roman roads, canal towpaths, disused railway lines (including viaducts and tunnels) and drovers’ roads,’ with a handful of brand-new bridges now connecting them. Revived, once again these ancient travelways linked places and landscapes. They connected city, town and village dwellers with green space, artwork, history – and one another.
  • These barriers are mostly installed with the understandable purpose of keeping motorbikes off foot and cycle paths, but in doing so they keep anyone with a non-standard cycle out, including tricycles and cargo cycles that carry children or luggage, and some even require panniers or even less conveniently, a child seat to be removed. Sustrans’ barrier removal is a slow process and often landowners permit cycling and walking on the condition that anti-motorcycle barriers are installed, even though they may not comply with disability legislation.
  • At the entrance are some chunky metal pipes, bent into shapes to prevent motorbike access. Caroline says these were heating pipes discarded during the bulldozing of a local hospital and commandeered in typical John fashion. They went on to form a standard, albeit non-wheelchair-friendly, design across the network.
  • I’d say it’s the kind of morning that makes you glad to be alive, but every morning on the bike does that for me.
  • Following a growth in new cycle routes during the pandemic, the French government claimed there were now 50,000km of cycle routes – more than 18,000 miles more than Britain’s, albeit in a much larger geographical area. In early 2023 France pledged to spend €2 billion on cycle infrastructure and supporting measures over the following four years, with €250 million a year for bike routes alone, to double the cycle network by 2030 to 100,000km. Meanwhile, in Britain, cycling was still fighting for scraps.
  • Attempts to keep those on foot and cycles safe have, perversely, tended to focus on those least able to prevent the carnage: cyclists and pedestrians themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these patchy initiatives encouraging the use of hi-vis, helmets and constant vigilance from anyone on foot or bike from childhood onward have not yielded the hoped-for improvements in road safety.
  • Cycling isn’t fundamentally a dangerous activity; it’s actually more dangerous not getting regular exercise, in terms of our health
  • Leaving university to join the police in 1999, by 2012 Andy had been promoted in record time to superintendent. Then a detective working on violent crime, his chief constable moved him to the role of ‘specialist operations’ in Northamptonshire police. This involved road policing and guns. Andy recalls saying, ‘I’ve never issued a traffic ticket, and I’ve never held a gun, so why on earth would I want to work there?’
  • In trials in Manchester and London, proving Andy’s point, updated collision reports increased the proportion of crashes in which speeding was a factor by three to four times. What was assumed to be the cause of around 250 deaths a year nationwide is now understood to kill somewhere between 750 and 1000 people each year. That’s the equivalent of my entire secondary school dying each year because of people breaking the speed limit. Speeding is, in fact, a factor in around half of all road deaths. There are now plans to roll this change out nationwide.
  • Even in the hardest cycling territory in the UK, 10% of people could commute by bike. In 2017, using census data and cycle journey planning tools, researchers from the universities of Leeds and Westminster developed the Propensity to Cycle Tool. They calculated a Dutch-style network of genuinely quiet roads and traffic-free paths could raise current cycling levels by five times their current 2%. With widespread e-cycle availability, it’s 17% – more than one in six. Across England, with both a network of safe cycle routes and widespread ebike availability, one in four commutes could be done by cycling.
  • the idea of cycling across Cornwall in a dress seems delightfully whimsical.
  • the case for roadbuilding is based on a flawed understanding of what happens when you widen roads. Increasing road capacity, it turns out, generates more car trips, first by making it easier to drive and secondly by squeezing out other options – surrounding roads get busier as more people drive, and cycling and walking feel increasingly dangerous. Add that to declining investment in public transport and you are left with few other options. This long-understood phenomenon is known as induced demand. It’s the same with new cycle routes: more and better increase cycle journeys. Ultimately, you get the users you build routes for.
  • Traffic engineers talk about something called design speed: how fast a road or route allows you to safely travel. These little lanes, which terrify American tourists, come with an optimistic default 60mph speed limit. While people take this as a target, the measured design speed can be far, far lower. Two drivers travelling at 60mph in opposite directions have a combined speed of 120mph, requiring a stopping distance of 400m – which means you need to see each other long before you both slam on the brakes. British lanes rarely allow for that kind of long view. In reality, engineers tell me, some of our most eccentric little lanes come with a design speed of more like 7mph.
  • Residents have told the council they want lower speed limits because they can’t walk to the shops, ride horses or cycle in safety when there’s fast traffic about, and because they want rid of the noise from speeding drivers.
  • Outside Chester station, Chris rides three sides of a long rectangle, the taxi drop-off route, to pull up at the kerb in front of me. When I chuckle, he says in explanation, ‘A single photo of me cycling the wrong way or on the pavement and I’d get Daily Mailed.’ A cycling gotcha is like catnip for some publications.
  • One pressing crisis is the cost of living, and cycling and walking are incredibly cost-effective – if there were safe routes, households could give up one or more vehicle. Each car we own, Chris points out, costs us roughly the same as a family holiday, every year. I know which I’d rather spend my money on.
  • In 2020, during the pandemic, councils up and down the country introduced planters on streets to prevent through-running traffic and enable social-distancing while people got out to exercise. While all addresses in LTNs are still accessible by car, reaching them might require a slightly longer drive. The idea is that by making cycling and walking more direct than driving you reduce short car trips and improve safety – and it seems to have worked. According to Lambeth Council, traffic on streets within the Streatham LTN decreased by 54%, while increasing 13% on boundary roads. It was a net reduction of 5% or 6100 vehicles in the area each day. The measures are now permanent.
  • Wheels for Wellbeing campaigns for disabled cyclists, both those who already cycle, those who would like to and those who don’t even know cycling is an option. As well as producing reports and research with national and international reach, the charity’s inclusive cycling hubs in south London loan out non-standard cycles so people can experience cycling for themselves and learn which cycle works for them. The charity’s national survey, published in 2021, found that for 64% of disabled cyclists cycling is easier than walking – and for 59% their cycle is their mobility aid. Of 245 survey respondents more than half (60%) used standard bicycles, 26% tricycles or recumbents, 16.6% cycles and 8.53% tandems. The challenge is to ensure the environment enables people to cycle, however they do it. ‘Cyclists dismount’ signs, steps, barriers and chicanes all hamper people like Isabelle.
  • The benefits of access to nature and physical exercise extend to everyone, and the mental health benefits are huge: research shows physical activity can cut depression rates by 30%. Cycling can also be a low-stress transport option, in the right circumstances. Isabelle says, ‘For some people in the middle of a mental health issue getting about can be stressful, but I’ve heard from people living with mental health issues who find they do not use public transport because that’s so stressful, but they get on their cycle: they are in control, they are not around other people, they can really get in the zone. That does amazing stuff for your soul.’
  • Subjectively, drivers seemed more aggressive towards cyclists following lockdowns and speeding rates increased dramatically on quieter roads – which disabled cyclists found particularly off-putting.
  • Unable to find the data himself, he wrote to schools across Wales to find out two thirds of primary children lived within a three-mile catchment area – or walking and cycling distance – making the case for better facilities enabling them to travel actively.
  • By 2019 the more than 100 miles of superhighways were carrying 248,500 miles of cycling journeys a day, with a single weekday peak of 29,000 cyclists. Half of users are women and 14% previously used a car. What’s more, cycling trips were surprisingly competitive over longer distances: analysis measured journey times along one seven-mile section of route, representing the average cycle superhighway trip length, and found ebike trips were just five minutes slower than driving and regular cycle trips 12 minutes slower.
  • Holidaymakers said after trying ebikes that they were tempted to buy one when they returned home. However, even though they’re far cheaper than a car, the cost is still daunting and, unlike in Europe, there are no purchase subsidies to help people switch to ebikes. According to a 2019 analysis, an ebike grant in the UK could be more than twice as effective at cutting CO2, per pound spent, as existing electric car grants. In France, ebike grants had a massive impact, increasing how much recipients cycled each year on average by seven times, from 200km to 1400km. People reduced their driving distances by 660km and CO2 output by 200kg each. Almost a third of users said they wouldn’t have bought an ebike without the grant. It also made cycling more equitable: while men make most cycling trips in France, ebike take-up was almost gender-equal (48% of grant beneficiaries were women).
  • The Celtic countries seem to be winning the human-powered transport race as I see it and Glasgow, like Cardiff, is at the pointy end. In 2018 the Scottish government doubled its active travel spending to £80 million. The plan is that by 2024 10% of Scotland’s devolved transport spend will go to cycling and walking, not just in cities but in rural areas. There’s also, rather boldly, the target to cut car journeys by 20% by 2030.
  • a Beithir, a mythological Scottish creature. Described as ‘the largest and most deadly kind of serpent’, it’s a water-dwelling dragon with a sting that could kill you unless you reach a body of water, say a canal, in time.
  • A reminder that Scotland is investing more than any other UK nation in cycling: £58 per person per year, versus £1 a year in England, £28 in Wales and around £7 in Northern Ireland.
  • women are less willing to share with traffic, or to use circuitous backstreet routes that introduce long detours. They need direct, safe routes. Because we don’t have many of those in the UK, for every one woman cycling there are currently three men. The pandemic quite suddenly emptied the roads of traffic and, hey presto, people got on their bikes in droves. One group the quiet roads and new safe cycle routes benefited was women – around the world the proportions of women cycling grew in response to a drop in traffic and billions of pounds’ investment in cycling.
  • When we rediscover it, we wonder why we ever lost it – this gift of freedom, this very pure joy that exists atop a bicycle. It’s one the car industry promises, with its slick and ever-present advertising, beguilingly comfortable cockpits and easy access to power, but, on freedom and joy, cars rarely deliver. The bicycle, humble in essence with, for the most part, few frills and gadgets, does the opposite: it delivers freedom and exhilaration by the armful, even on a gentle potter through the neighbourhood
  • These aren’t necessarily cyclists, per se – people who define themselves using the bicycle – they are people who happen to use bikes to get somewhere, to access the city.
  • For many of these journeys a motor vehicle, with all the expense and inconvenience of parking, isn’t the tool we need, it’s just the only one we happen to have. It wouldn’t take a lot to give ourselves other options; it’s actually very simple, even if it’s not necessarily easy.
  • While most of us are careful behind the wheel, plenty aren’t – with devastating consequences. A good network will design out most of the danger, but not all. Take the worst drivers off the road for good; introduce graded licensing for young drivers and use lifetime bans where appropriate. Speed limiting technology exists – we just need to deploy it and remove the ‘exceptional hardship’ clause that lets so many dangerous drivers off the hook.
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