A Biker's Guide to Riding Metra

I've spent much of 2011 taking my bike on Metra trains daily, so I feel qualified to offer up some tips for anyone considering taking a bicycle on Metra:

1) Check the schedule! Before you leave the house, make sure you're heading for a train that allows bikes (basically, everything except morning rush hour heading into town, and evening rush hour heading out of town.)

In particular, make sure it's not a blackout date - Metra is terrible about publicizing bike blackout dates. If you don't do your homework, your only warning will be when the conductor barks "NO BIKES!" at you on the platform, leaving you with only seconds to either lock your bike on the platform and leave without it, or skip the train entirely.



2) Bikes are last on, and last off. Wait till everyone else is on the train before boarding. Wait till everyone else is out of the passenger compartment before rolling out. It's the rules, and it's just plain polite. You're likely to whack someone with a pedal or handlebar if you're in the middle of a crowd of people getting on or off. Don't worry - the train will not leave without you.

3) Have a bungee cord with you. They're incredibly cheap at Target or Walmart. The rules require you to strap your bike to the bottom rails. I see bikers routinely using U-locks, chains, or cloth straps for the same purpose, but it's incredibly awkward and time consuming - particularly annoying when someone else needs to put their bike on top of yours.

4) Unless you're going to the end of the line, stay with your bike. Or at least pay attention to it. People with bikes are constantly getting on and off, all up and down the line. If you reach your stop and haven't been paying attention, you may find another bike on top of yours. Likewise, your bike might end up blocking someone else's.

5) Take 3 seats only - park all the way back. The handicapped/bike/luggage area contains 5 fold-down seats. A bike can easily fit on top of only three of them, if you push it all the way against the compartment wall (toward the door.) It's rude and thoughtless to take up 4 or even 5 seats when three will do the trick - but I see it happen all the time.

Also, tuck your bike tight against the seats. The pedal that's against the car wall should go under the rail so the bike is upright and fully against the wall.

6) Don't block the aisle. For better or worse, a lot of people choose to move around and between cars right before reaching a stop. Bikers who have just unstrapped their bike often stand in the middle of the aisle waiting for the train to stop, oblivious to people in the aisle behind them.

7) Listen to the conductor's instructions. On the trains, they are God, and what they say goes. Yes, sometimes some of them are assholes, and that sucks. But arguing with them won't help. Seriously - I've seen it tried.



And while I'm at it, a couple of tips for non-biker passengers:

1) Move for the bikers. If you're in the folding seats, the biker has the right to boot you out. Don't complain, don't grumble, don't be an ass about it - in fact, you shouldn't even have to be asked. There's dozens of seats on every car, but only one place where bikes can go. If you see a bike coming on board, be gracious and move to another seat. Is it fair? I don't know, but that's the chance you took when you sat on the folding seats. There's a sign right there announcing it.

2) Don't hang out in the vestibule. The vestibule is for people getting on and off the train, and you're in the way - especially for people trying to haul a bike out the door.

Mucca Pazza at Tour de Fat

One of Chicago's great cultural treasures, in my irreverent opinion at least, is the band Mucca Pazza. Billing themselves as a "circus-punk marching band", this group of 30 musicians and performers employs all the trappings of a high school marching band, including their own mini-squad of cheerleaders, but with a wild abandon that represents what high school band might have looked like if the teacher had left and never come back, and the most energetic students took over running the show.





Mucca Pazza does indeed march during their shows, and dance, and spin, and run about through the crowd in every direction. At any moment you might get a cheerleader waving pom-pons in your face or a 5-second guitar solo played almost for your exclusive benefit. Some of the musicians wear amplifiers, with helmet-mounted megaphones on their heads, broadcasting their sound in one particular direction, and perhaps sending it to different areas of the crowd like a rotating tornado siren as they turn about. Groups of horn players might position themselves in different areas and play back and forth across the crowd. A trombone player might need the space between you and your neighbor for his instrument's slide. The show you get depends on where you are, and will be different for every member of the audience.





The band's energy is frenetic, and improvisation is everywhere. It's enough to make any standard rock band look dusty and tired.



I happily bought their album, but listening to a recording on speakers cannot remotely compare to the experience of being surrounded by musicians playing their hearts out and having a blast doing it. And there's no cheerleaders, either.

Preservation in a global economy

My interest in historic preservation comes from some fairly simple origins: namely, I have seen far too many beautiful buildings torn down. I see it and I am outraged, because I know we cannot and will not ever build such things again. They cannot be replaced.



"Historic preservation" is a double misnomer, for me personally. I'm rarely interested in buildings as an embodiment of a specific history. If history gives further ammunition for the conservation of a beautiful building, then so be it; but what I'm really and truly interested in is creating and maintaining beautiful urban places. And I don't want to see buildings preserved - locked in amber - but put to new and productive uses. Too often I feel that preservationists looking to save a building float pie-in-the-sky notions of museums, community centers, and other non-enterprises that cost money instead of generating it. I want old buildings to be living parts of the current and future economy.



Lately, over the last year or so, I've often felt a growing sense of helplessness and hopelessness over the fates of countless minor buildings and forgotten neighborhoods, places left behind by the vagaries of progress. I try to envision a future that would return life to these buildings. Amid a struggling economy, a global economic downturn, rising competition from overseas, and an American culture that is both increasingly insular and wracked with paranoid fears over its physical safety, I cannot do it.



If you use Bing.com to take a virtual flight over older city neighborhoods, you'll see a pattern of scale. Everything we build today is gigantic. Gigantic schools go into old neighborhoods, and they're surrounded by tiny little houses on tiny lots. Goliath size vs. fine grain. The notion of acceptable size in America has inflated to the point of ludicrousness. I try to envision a modern chain store adapting to the fine-grained construction of the historic city - a Wal-Mart inserting itself into a dozen side-by-side storefronts. It's a nice fantasy, but try to sell it to corporate reps who are beholden to a particular development model.



It is a sad fact, little recognized but indisputable, that construction is the province of the wealthy. It takes serious money to build or renovate something, even with a heavy investment of sweat equity. And so the poor, or those of simply less-than-average means, wind up with the leftovers and the off-castings of the above-average. Today this means that the jobless are stranded in neighborhoods like this. Tomorrow it might mean that they are living in deteriorating suburban ranch houses. But neither bodes well for the future of surviving buildings in collapsing neighborhoods.

These problems are all interrelated. Overmassive scale, awful places, nemployment, sluggish economy, beauty allowed to rot, people left behind. If all the effort we've expended in the last 60 years in flinging ourselves further and further apart from one another were instead redirected into building up our cities as the dense, beautiful, walkable, humane places they once were on track to becoming, we'd all be better off.

A brief pause

I try to keep a regular schedule for posting, but with the holidays underway and family obligations pulling me this way and that, I need to take a short break. I'll be back at it come January.

Till then, thanks to everyone who's been reading (and especially those who have been commenting) this year. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have!

In the mean time, have a few older photos that reflect the current weather.

Friday Photo Special: Critical Mass, August

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Critical Mass. This was my second time riding in one, but I'm familiar enough with the dynamic from the LATE Ride and other such events. Inevitably, when you get thousands of bikers riding en masse on city streets, some conflicts with drivers occur.



I don't know if that's good or bad. I can totally sympathize with a bunch of angry, stressed out drivers slogging through traffic, trying to get somewhere, maybe late for a date or a meeting or a train or a flight, and then getting held up through multiple green lights by this mass of bikers going nowhere.

On the flip side... well, how many of these drivers really have somewhere so important to be that it can't wait five minutes? It's a good thing to get pulled out of your little driver world every once in a while. Driving is not the be-all end-all of tasks in life, and cars do not have exclusive rights to public streets.

Anyway, Critical Mass is generally a joyous occasion, full of thousands of happy bikers. At some kind of tipping point, don't sheer numbers give them the right of way?

But if there's one true flaw with Critical Mass, it's that it just doesn't ever stop itself to let some traffic pass. At all. Considering the mass of riders can be strung out for many, many blocks, it's not very fair to drivers to make them sit through the whole thing. It's small wonder that a handful get impatient and start nosing their way into intersections, resulting in the inevitable and pointless confrontations.



All that said? Riding in this enormous group is a heck of a lot of fun.



This was the coolest thing on this ride - a newlywed couple getting their photos made, who happily got out into the middle of the street to mingle with the passing bikers.











Additional photos at my Flickr space.

Friday Photo Special: The LATE Ride rides again!

Shots from the 2010 LATE Ride, Saturday night / Sunday morning July 10/11:






I'm not sure how this contraption operated, but it was slow. After I finished the entire ride, and was heading back north on the bike path -- now totally empty -- I passed this crew, still struggling toward downtown, waaaay up north at Montrose. There were 7 of them on the bike, plus a few more festively lit bikers riding with them, so I guess they couldn't have been too lonely.


West on Roosevelt.


North on Halsted.


South on the lake front bike path.




I love the LATE Ride. And it's about the only time I ever see the sun rise over the lake.

More photos here.

Lawn ornament extreme

The urge to decorate is, I suspect, fundamental to the human psyche. People like stuff. They like to personalize and elaborate and accumulate. Guys like Mies and Gropius were, truth be told, fighting a losing battle.











Some folks, however, take their decorating more seriously than others. Some lawn decoration is just that, bits of stuff scattered and arranged here and there about the back yard or front lawn. Sometimes, however, it becomes part of the building, as with this whimsically decorated house on Asbury in Evanston.










And sometimes, the decoration can overtake the house entirely, redefining it, as with this building in Ukraine Village.





That's the House of Crosses, alternately know as the "It's what I do" house. Sadly, most of this 20-year accumulation of art was removed in 2007.


For my money, though, nothing quite tops this custom-sculpted facade reworking at 6011 S. Ashland. The building and lot belong to a towing company. How they wound up with such a wonderfully decorated building is a mystery.

Machines for Living

It's not just that the occupants of this Northbrook home own three vintage cars. Nor is it the fact that all three cars, including a 1964 Imperial, a 1966 Chrysler Newport, and a 1966 Chrysler New Yorker, are operational.



No, it's the fact that they park them in front of a set of patterned Midcentury garage doors of the exact same vintage as the cars themselves that makes me grin with delight every time I see it. Long may they run!