Thunderstorm Damages The Picnic Arena

The Picnic Arena is a new fancy thing they came up to liven up the downtown. Usually they have all kinds of events and festivals at the pedestrian street Rotuaari at the very center of the downtown area. But at the moment Rotuaari looks like this:

 and the repairs will last whole summer. They're building a new stage for performers and installing new street lights and steet furniture and what not.

The next best place for the events is the market square. For the Picnic Arena they built a huge 'castle' out of scaffolding and cloth. I think the concerts and other events are kept inside the cage. Anyway, look at those walls covered with cloth. That makes them huge sails, catching the wind. Well, the first thunderstorm gust came and one of the walls started to collapse. You can see two tilted rows of the wall below the crane. I think they had already dismantled most of the bent wall. And they had taken all the 'sails' down.  There was rolls of cloth laying on the ground, but they're not visible in the photos.

 A photo from the opposite side shows that the legs on the inside of the wall buckled under the weight of the wind. The legs are strong enough to keep the structure up, but when the wind pushed the whole wall sideways the legs could not hold.

 On the day I took those photos there was another thunder storm about to start. On the sea side of the sky the sun was shining, inland were huge cloud formations growing. The weather has hot and humid, with not much of a wind. Typical pre-thunder weather. On the way back, the wind started to pick up, although it could have been because my route was closer to the coast. I managed to get home about 15 minutes before it started to rain.

Midnight Snack for friends

The lamp on the parking lot is on- it's on timer or the light detector is in a dark place, because it's...

still light enough to play tennis outside. The tennis court is in surrounded by trees from all directions, so sunlight can't get there when the sun is low on the sky. These guys were playing after midnight!

The sun is below horizon, but the sky is bright and the light reflects from the clouds above.

The last photo was taken facing north, that is where the sun is. While taking the photos above, I met a friend. She was hungry so I gave her a snack...

Once she had her tummy full, I gave her a smack. I hope she enjoyed the Last Meal she ever got. Mwah-hah-hah-haa! (evil laugh)

Interesting things I saw

Some heavy machine has cracked the edge of the asphalt, and punched a pothole from hell to the other side of the bikeway. The hole is almost half the path wide!

About a week ago there was an article in the local newspaper how boaters and jetskiers were breaking the speedlimits on the river and being a nuisance. And guess what was going on a few days later? Two jetskiers sploshing about right next to the swimming beach. They were zigzagging, turning in circles and jumping their boats. Very nuicance-y.

A convicted murderer escaped from the prison last week. He had been working outside alone, when he climbed over the wall and disappeared. Did I manage to get a photo of the escape?

Nah, these were just regular climbers at the Hydro Plant.

Two videos: young cyclists and traffic lights

Here's two new videos from my rides last week.  Video about the Traffic lights at the southern end of the bridge over the River Oulu shows how the Dutch principles work in real life. There's only a few bridges over the river so they have a lot of traffic. Therefore putting the cyclists and pedestrians in a location where they are very visible to the drivers will improve the safety for a lot of people. In this case, the geometry of the 5-street intersection puts the cyclists about 10 meters in front of the cars. Definately not in a blind spot!

Another clip I posted on youtube shows some young cyclists around the town.

Bike week photo scavenger hunt

The national biking week was in May. The City of Oulu had a photo scavenger hunt, in which people were supposed to find locations shown in the photos. At the location you get a code word. Collect enough locations and you're in a raffle.  Most of the locations are well known and obvious, so anyone can easily get the required number of locations collected. A good way to get people on the bike.

There are four locations out of 12 locations that I've not found. Most likely they are in areas where I don't ride frequently, so I don't recognize them. Three of them are buildings. One is a tree, and I've not found the correct one yet. There is quite a lot of trees around here, so it might take a while. The correct results are available on the website and a quick search would tell me where they are, but that would ruin my fun. 

I had taken photos of four of the locations and most of them have been mentioned at the blog, too: a bike bridge, Hydro Dam Bridge, the combined heat and power plant, and the water tower (not sure if this has been on the blog?)

Recently I found the Sightseeing tower. Last week I took photos of the Chapel of St. Luke, a statue and Ouluhalli (an indoor sports arena). These were locations I knew and they're easy to find.

Now I have covered eight of the locations, with four to go. One building I think I can find, as the name of the building is on the wall. :-) I'm not sure if I can find any of the other locations left, as I have no means of looking at the photos provided as a clue. And I might not recognize the building if I'm looking from a different direction. I'll keep my eyes open, just in case.

Mayor of Toronto wants to remove bike lanes

The same guy who inspired me to start this blog is at it again. A post on Copenhagenize followed by another post with video about Jarvis street bikelane removal caught my attention.
 
Looking at the bikeunion.to video, I'm not sure what Mr. Ford thinks he is going to achieve. Remove the bike lane and the drivers will get about 1 meter more of the road space. The other two car lanes do not look very wide to me, so I don't think they could squeeze in another lane for cars. A quick google search tells me there used to be a third, reversible lane before the sidewalks were widened, trees planted and the bikelanes were installed. Or at least that was the plan, I'm not sure if this really happened.

Of course, motorists do not want to sit in rush hour congestion, so some of them keep whining for the 3rd lane back. But there's congestion on streets with no bikelanes, too, so blaming the bikelane sounds pretty stupid to me. And removing a bike lane that was installed a year ago for no other reason than to "smooth traffic flow" as the saying goes, sounds monumentally stupid to me. Maybe the mayor wants to have his own monument so people will remember him.

The video asks "What's wrong with the bikelane?" To me, it looks too narrow and there's no protection from cars. Nothing has been done to the junction to make it safer for the cyclists. You hear me Mr. Mayor, you need to make that bike lane wider, not remove it!

Ride into the sunset

A few weeks ago, around mid-June I rode to the beach to take the sunset photos. I actually made the trip on two nights, and on one of them I had the md80 video camera on my bike. I finally got it edited and uploaded it to Youtube.

The day had been warm, and despite it being late, around 11pm, there were a lot of people on the beach. The sunset was around midnight, so there was about an hour of tanning time left. Of course, the sun is so low that you catch more rays by standing up than by laying on a towel. :-)