Oulu 1957

Just read from the newspaper that an old film was found in the archives of Police so they decided to upload it to youtube.  Suomen Poliisi (Police of Finland) has some other videos too, but in Finnish. Sorry.

The old traffic education film shows the good and the bad ways to behave in traffic. The song is a children's song taught in kindergarten/first grade.

I recognize some of the buildings, but a lot of them have already been demolished. Maybe I'll try to go and find the locations and get a comparison video

Look at all the bikes! In the winter! :-D

Underhanded work in the underpass

I'm sure I've mentioned the pipe works the district heating company did last year (or was it the year before?) but right now I couldn't find the correct blog post. To recap: they dug up the bikeway so they could fix/replace the big pipes bringing bot water from the power plant to the buildings. Apparently they fixed the pipes all right, because I haven't seen any hot water fountains in the area.

Too bad they didn't fix the bikeway properly. They left it lumpy and edgy. Edgy in the sense that the edges of the hole they cut in the asphalt were easy to find with the rims of my bike. And the lumps? Anyone know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried? I have a possible location for the search!

One day I was riding along minding my own business when I noticed the bikeway was dirty. Hmm? It was not the usual fallen leaves and pine needles, it was icky mud! Slippery, made everything dirty mud! And some gravel, too.

Notice how the grass on both sides of the bikeway is turned into mud? Either they are driving some wide machines that don't fit on the asphalt, or they can't drive!

 There was a big excavator before, but now they've finished with the dig and it's gone. Maybe it's on the other side of the underpass. Makes me wonder of two things: a) did they drive it across the motorway (illegal, as it has 60km/h minimum speed limit) or take the long route and b) What did the excavator guy think about digging up the pipes under the underpass? One might think that was cramped... or maybe they used smaller machines! :-)

 The pipes are big. I've heard the company is replacing or installing seven kilometers of the pipes this year. I think this underpass pipe was supposed to be done two weeks ago. Are they behind the schedule? Better get busy, boys, or it'll start snowing before you're finished! :-)

video spamming

The video camera worked again so I got some footage from it. And it was sunny enough to the camera to capture something! So here's some video spamming.

First, just some scenery from the ride:

Then the confused lorry driver trying to find a way to the street again, and a map reading gent trying to find out where he is...

As it was afternoon there was a lot of people around. The groups of gangsters on bikes... and very young "English rider" :-P

Some crunchy videos

Here's some clips showing "State of the Bikeways". Some asphalt visible, puddles, slosh, frozen ruts and solid, smooth ice. 

April 3rd:

April 5th:

Slosh means Spring!

It isn't officially Spring yet. The Meteorological Spring in Finland starts when the 24hr average temperature climbs above +0°C. In Oulu that happens sometime mid-April. Right now, when the nights are -15°C or -10°C, just a few hours above freezing in the afternoon are not enough to bring the average up.

There are some signs of Spring even on the bikeway. On sunny spots there's some slosh. And there's even the odd puddle here and there.  And where the snow plow men kept the plow too tightly on the ground there are some patches of brown, dead grass visible.

The snow plow men have been busy scraping the extra ice off, and pushing the snow banks further away from the bikeways. Look at the photo below: the snow banks is more than a meter away from the edge of the asphalt. The meltwaters hopefully will sink into groundwater instead of making puddles on the bikeway. Of course, the ground is frozen solid so it'll be a while until the water can sink anywhere.

I read on the newspaper the other day about several cars driving into the ditch because the snow plow men had lost the road under the ice and snow and just plowed somewhere where they thought the road might be. The end result was that the "plowed road" was partially over a ditch...

Snow banks pushed away.

Here's what a street looks like after Ice Scrapers have scraped the ice off. There were some parked cars so they couldn't scrape everywhere. The ice left on the street is about 20cm thick, and the chunks on the pile are mostly 5cm thick with a few 10+cm pieces thrown in.

Higher And Higher

The ice layer on the street gets higher than the sidewalk next to it. And if I recall correctly, the kerb stone was pretty high on this street. A new ice age in the making?

Here's what the temperature curve looks like on a nearby weather station. From the low of -25C, the temperature as been getting higher and higher, almost reaching -5C today. Just ignore the sharp drop at the end and we have a good hockey stick curve to prove the climate is heating up! 10 degrees in the 12 last hours, and if the rate keeps true we'll reach boiling point in a week. Forecast -22C for the night and -10C for tomorrow. Pretty typical March weather.

This isn't a good curve to show the power of the sun, but I'll try to remember to take a screenshot of one of those cold night and warm days (-20C to +0C) later on. In April, maybe.

There was some snow

Today there was some snow on the bikeways. And the snowplows were also there, I happened to ride behind one for a little bit. The conditions were fine, except the snow that is : a few degrees below freezing and not very windy.

Just a few hours later the sky is clear. And the wind has changed direction, blowing from the north (12m/s) so I got a head wind again. :-/

I've loaded a few videos without a blog post, so if you just check the blog you might have missed them. But they're boring so don't worry!

Afternoon ride

Last week there was some days with a snowfall. Like Saturday, which brought 10 or 15 cm of fresh white snow. In the afternoon the weather had cleared, and as I was riding to get some milk I got the camera out of my pocket and switched it to video mode and started filming.

I chose a route (to view something new) that I don't take very often, even if it feels a bit shorter. The shortcut has it's own problems: two street crossings (with kerbs), a tight 90 degree turn, and I'm not sure it's even any shorter. On the other hand, the longer route has long stretches of straight bikeways with only one street to cross. Maybe it's the long straights make it feel longer? On the short cut route I can only ride 100 meters ahead before turning again.

Not everywhere had been plowed yet. I had to hold the camera with one hand while on the street, and the other hand was busy on the handle bar to keep me upright. The cars tracks made a layer of half-packed snow which cracked under the front wheel so I was slipping left and right. If I'd had a camera on the handle bar, it'd shown more of the sides than straight ahead! :-)

Today I saw a car in the ditch. How it got there? Maybe the driver was speeding and lost control in the curve and the car ended 15 meters away from the street. Or he was taking an illegal shortcut driving on the bikeway, lost control of the vehicle and ended in the ditch. Makes me think if this was drunk driving or a stolen vehicle? Lousy driving, anyway.

Later in the ride I went downtown to the Rotuaari (a pedestrian street) to see the new lights, and then I rode downhill to see the construction site. There was so much traffic that at one intersection I got to filter! The right turning lane was full and some cars were stuck in the middle of the intersection. And there were queues of cars around the Rotuaari, too. Lots of people shopping for Christmas and/or Friday afternoon rush hour?

The camera kept crashing and making empty files so I didn't get them on the video, but that's not so interesting anyway.

First Snow Videos

Here they are. The first one shows the skateboarding ramps are empty. Those tiny wheels do not work well in two inches of snow! <evil grin:->

The other is shows a real life braking test on a snowy bikeway. Not really icy yet because the snow hasn't been trampled on enough, but there was some ice on it anyway. The big trucks do not have studded tyres so they're  pushing the limit a bit by stopping at a steep hill. I'd say they couldn't have fit trough the underpass, so they would been stuck if they couldn't get up. They could have turned left or right but came up straight, and afterwards I was wondering if they turned back or drove through the no entry signs to the pedestrian crossing to get to the street at the very beginning of the video.

Note the mail van, it's a special, expensive vehicle designed for mail delivery ie. right hand drive so the mailman can reach the boxes :-)

The last of the videos I uploaded is sort of a video response to  bicycledutch's cycling past red lights blog post. The Dutch with their bikeways segregated from the road  often get to ignore the traffic lights. In T-junctions and when doing right turns there often is no conflict with other road users so why should a cyclist be penalized by a red light. This (cycling past red lights) is common in Very Northern Florida too.

Some commenter talked about the aversion to two-phase left turns: having to first cross one street and then wait at another red light certainly is a pain. Even if you don't have dutch intersections, if you have paths on both sides of the street you can cross the street when ever it's best for you and then make the left turn at will.

Riding on the needles

I was asked in the youtube comments if all the leaves had fallen yet. Not quite all, but most of them. And a lot of needles by these weird spruces.

Here's a clip I put together from my rides yesterday and today. As you can see, it is very much like autumn: ice on the ground and falling leaves and so on. It gets below freezing during the night but usually thaws during the day, so there isn't any snow or ice. Except I did find some for the video yesterday because the day was so cold it hadn't all melted away.

And today was windy, and the Oulu River had waves on it. Usually the river is almost as smooth as glass but today I certainly wouldn't want to go out there in a row boat!

Oh, I haven't heard by old bike so I got a single speed bike for cheap. Seems that Oulu isn't quite that flat as I thought when I had gears in my bike. Maybe I should get hub gears for it.

It's a sit-up bike, with a rack which I like. On the other hand it had flat tyres, the rear axle needed tightening (the ball bearings were about to fall off, typical of some discount stores which don't know how to assemble the bikes properly) and it has no lights which are needed this time of the year. And mandatory, too. So it's taken me a few days of fixing and tuning to get it up.

For the lights I've had to hold a lamp in my hand but I got the 'see me' led light system ready, now I've just got to install it. I took an old bike light, sawed it a bit and put a bunch of leds inside. With a bulb it took 250 mA, with leds I can run it less than 20mA and it's still visible. As it has a reflector in the middle of the lens and light goes everywhere it's not really good light for seeing in the dark.

The other light project, modifying a head lamp with a 3w led to work as a 'see far' bike light is still in the works. At least now I got the solder and other gear on the table so I might actually work on it a bit.

I was going to take some photos of the rear axle while I was cleaning it and stuff, but after I took the first photo and did some work on the bike my hands got dirty and I couldn't take more photos. You'd' have to  see the bike as it was to see what I mean. Even the chain was so gunky it was doubled in size. And I didn't have any bensin or diesel to soak the chain so I had to scrub it by hand. Any soaps I had didn't work on the gunk and I didn't have the mechanics hand scrub soap like some other blogger used recently (who was it?). So in the end I used veggie oil and it seemed to work almost fine. And it's environmentally friendly. :-P

Now I just have to get these black grease stains out of tables, door handles, floors...

Riding in the noise

Another boring video clip to keep you entertained. This one is from a ride from a few weeks back, when the grass was still brown. The chunks of ice in the underpasses had melted though, so it must have been May.

It may look like  it but this is not out of the city, but it certainly is out of the downtown grid streets. Maybe it'd be the suburbs then. Noisy motorway is not a nice thing to live next to, so very often there's a noise wall or some woods to give some protection. Maybe I should've included a clip from the non-short-cut route to see if the noise levels are noticeably lower.

My video "contest" makes people lose sleep. Sorry.

I uploaded a few videos again and baited viewers with a question in one. Two sloshy videos from the bikeways, two videos from a cobblestone ride showing riding on the streets with not so good drivers and a video riddle. 

I'm just riding when I see something that I had forgotten about for several months. There has been a few good guesses, but no correct answers yet. Want to lose sleep while trying to guess it? ;-)

Sloshy video uploaded

I took some clips and put together a video. The clips might not be in chronological order, but it's only a few days difference. You'll see what the biking conditions were on the sunny days this week. Pretty good on the bikeways, streets not so good. Annoyingly, youtube's annotations buttons are not working, again. So I'll keep trying for a week or two before the buttons suddenly work.

Even more annoyingly, the camera kept shutting down. The built-in battery has 230mAh and extra batteries (old cell phone batteries) at least 1500mAh. They can give 300mA for the led light with no problems, but 50mA for the camera seems to be too much. Even with a fully loaded extra battery set it wouldn't record more than 20 minutes in one go. Restart and again it'd record for a while. Very tiny leds show whether the camera is on or not, and they're almost invisible in the daylight. Indoors it'll record fine. Is it too cold outside or what gives? Whine whine. :-)

And because the camera kept shutting down, I didn't get a nasty close pass on video. You might spot the location on the video. I'm riding on a bikeway until the street merges from the right. It's on a hill, downhill to the left and uphill to the right. I wanted to go left, but there's railway tracks so I had to ride on the street until the next underpass 400m away. I could've turned right and rode on a bikeway next to the road there, but who wants to ride uphill when it's not necessary.

Maybe ten seconds (or even less) after the camera shut down on that street, a car came down the hill and honked at me. I started to move to the side to let him pass. But before I even completed my move, he passed me pretty fast with less than half a meter clearance. On a sloshy street where one might fall at any moment! On the other hand, there's no record of my colorful comments to his driving skills.

But, it's a dead end street and I know what the car looks like. The Easter Witch might visit a little early... >:-)

My Lucky Day

I guess I'm lucky I'm not a witness to car crashing into half dozen pedestrians, though it certainly was close.

As I got closer to the traffic lights I saw them blinking yellow. I thought "That's cool, I haven't seen that often. Now lets see what kind of mess the intersection is without traffic lights."

Blinking yellow means the lights are temporarily not working, proceed with caution. There might be an emergency vehicle coming through, so let them through, otherwise follow the traffic signs and basic yielding rules. Or it might be blinking yellow due to a burnt (red) light bulb.

Car drivers are supposed to yield to pedestrians crossing the road on the zebra lined crossing. It's also marked with traffic signs. Disturbingly many drivers pay no attention to them, or at least thinks that pedestrians should not step on the road if the car driver has to slow down or stop for them. One such driver makes his displeasure known, as he forces through the pedestrians almost hitting them.

Naughty, naughty!


Some google catch phrases in Finnish in case someone is looking for it: Tervahovintie 15.2.2012 puoli viisi auto ajoi melkein jalankulkijan päälle liikennevaloissa keltaiset vilkkuvalot

Letting things Slide

That's one phrase that came to my mind when I was trying to ride uphill on the icy bikeway. The short bikeway on the photo has not been gritted and is probably one of the lasts on the todo list. Other low priority bikeways had not been gritted yet. With the forecast promising temperatures between -1C and +1 C it will be needed, unless they expect all the ice will melt away?

 When the rear wheel started slipping when I pushed down on the pedal, I decided to take it as a sign that I'm getting stronger. I don't recall that happening in the summer! Not that the low gear I had on had anything to do with it. With two bags of shopping weighing me down and an uphill, gears are great.

Just a few days it looked like this:

when I was riding around. From that ride I also made a video video about taking corners when riding on ice. (Oh, the annotations buttons are working again for me in youtube, good. Didn't work for days. )

12 months of cycling and blogging

It's been a little over a year since I opened this blog. It started because I was reading cycling blogs from around the world and someone said you can't cycle in the winter and you don't need bikeways. I wanted to show them wrong.

The best cycle infrastructure is in The Netherlands, so you can go read Hembrow's blog what it looks like. Copenhagenize gets some snow so they can brag about how well those bike paths around the city are cleaned. But neither of those great cycling propaganda sites said how important segregated bikeways really are for cycling in the winter. I did, in the post about Bikeways in the winter. Then I noticed I had said pretty much everything there was to be said about it and started writing junk.

According to the stats, the most popular posts have been The EST and Bikeways in the winter. I'm sure these are the most popular posts because they were early in my blogging career. They got hits because curious people came to see the new blog. The other posts were visited my me. Later in the year it was obvious that I write mostly junk posts and nobody bothered anymore. Or maybe it was because I started using other aliases for commenting on other blogs and they couldn't follow me here.

Today I spent a few hours cutting clips from videos from the previous year and editing and uploading the resulting fair weather cycling video to youtube. The screenshot of the video shows the almost-midnight sun from June.

I already knew that I didn't have many usable videos from the mid-winter, as it was either too cold or too dark or both for my md80 clone. And my camera is not water proof so I didn't use it when it rained. So what you see on the video is kind of a fair weather cycling, all the rainy, dark and cold days removed.

Although at the end of the video you can see me riding when it's raining snow/sleet. I was testing my new camera mount, again. I had the camera protected by thin, clear plastic out of a candy box, and it seemed to work well. And the candy was good, too!

Video: The Chase

My newest upload on youtube was shot in August. I was videoing my ride to downtown, when suddenly a bunch of cyclists got on the bikeway in front of me. Our speeds matched, so I ended up following them for a while. And near the end, I chose to follow them (turned left with them instead of turning right) as it seemed I might get some video footage.

The green dot near the upper edge on the openstreetmap map is where the video starts. The lower green dot shows where I lost them when I stopped to take some photos of the bay and the bike bridge crossing it. The distance is about 1,5km as the crow flies.

The route did not follow the "red road" across the river. Instead the route (blue dots show the bikeways) goes a little to the west of it, avoiding busier intersections with traffic lights.

In fact, I've got many videos of crossing the river on the other bridges. But I'm not sure if I have any video from the red road bridge. That route has traffic lights on it and the traffic is noisier so it's not as pleasant and convenient to ride. So unless my destination is near that road I'll avoid it.

I can remember riding it only once or twice during the last year and I think one of them was to video the crossing. I thought it I could show what it looks like, but I can't find such video. Having all the videos named sun_001.avi, sun_002.avi and so on does not help searching. :-D

Skilly Silly Cyclist

 A few months ago there was a mass ride in London, UK. I think it was a flashride on the Blackfriars Bridge, but it could've been some other event (maybe skyride?) .

Anyway, the video showed lots of cyclists riding along the street. One of them had a video camera in her hand she was filming her kid. A few of the youtube commenters whined how dangerous that was: riding onehanded and filming at the same time. In my opinion she had plenty of clearance and the danger was minimal.

Not soon after I saw the video I was riding downtown I saw a cyclist do one better than that: texting and riding one handed while dodging pedestrians!

Link to video on youtube.

Two more useless videos

After working on the cycle video day videos, I finished two other clips. The first one, Riding on the road shows what the roads outside Oulu look like. Yes, I'm actually riding on a road, sharing it with the cars. Late September, in the evening. 17:30 or 18:00 or so, as the sun is still up.

The other clip shows how not following the traffic rules almost lead to a head-on collision with a car. Before the video begins I was following a car following another cyclist on a quiet street. I'm not sure what the driver was doing, but his driving was a bit erratic (sending emails on the phone, fumbling with the seatbelt, taking the coat off or something) and I was not sure what he was going to do, so I decided to not overtake him. Notice the cute positioning of the other cyclist at the beginning of the video.

At the end of the clip you'll see me dodging the oncoming car. My plan was to turn left to the bikeway, and I thought I could do that safely as I'd be in no conflict with the cars on the street ahead.

Except for cars turning into this street, of course. I didn't notice he was going to turn until almost too late. Maybe I was looking the wrong way or he didn't signal until very late, or both. Anyway, I aborted my left turn and swerved back to my lane.

Another case of smart man escaping trouble a wise man wouldn't have gotten into in the first place.