More Bicycles on DC Streets 1903

In an earlier blog post I looked at a short film available as a video via the Internet meant to show US Post Office operations from 1903 in Washington, DC. I found another.


The version on YouTube is so poorly rendered as to be almost useless

The default viewing version is poorly rendered here but the downloadable mp4 file is acceptable.

In this film, meant to show Post Office operations, you can see a certain amount street traffic as well. (The video is apparently meant to show how bags of mail are transferred between a street car and a Post Office horse-drawn wagon.) There is less than a minute and half shown of a major street in Washington DC. Whatever time of day this was, filmed in July 30 1903 (a Thursday), there wasn't much traffic generally, however I am struck by the number of bicycles. It isn't a vast number, but they are clearly being used for transportation by adults.


Cyclist appears suddenly at left, proceeds at measured pace out of view


Next cyclist appears at right, again riding at a measured pace


Due to low resolution, it isn't obvious but a cyclist is proceeding right to left on the next cross street in the distance and is just visible in the space been the streetcar and the Post Office wagon.


Cyclist rides into view, apparently against the flow of traffic on this side of the street

Street mail car, U.S.P.O.
Summary-The first scene appears to have been taken on a main thoroughfare of large city. In the immediate foreground is a horse-drawn U.S. mail vehicle waiting at the side of a streetcar track. Soon a streetcar approaches the camera position. It stops beside the mail vehicle and the driver unloads mail sacks from the streetcar. He then puts some sacks from his wagon onto the streetcar. As the film ends, both the streetcar and the horse-drawn mail delivery wagon leave the scene.
Contributor Names-Weed, A. E., camera.; American Mutoscope and Biograph Company.
Paper Print Collection (Library of Congress)
Created / Published-United States : American Mutoscope & Biograph Company, 1903.
Notes
- H34992 U.S Copyright Office
- Copyright: American Mutoscope & Biograph Company; 22Aug03; H34992.
- Cameraman, A. E. Weed.
- Cameraman credit from Niver's, Early motion pictures, p. 314.
- Filmed July 30, 1903 in Washington, D.C.
- Source used: Niver, Kemp R., Early motion pictures, 1985.
- Available also through the Library of Congress Web site as digital files.
- Received: 2/2000 from LC lab; ref print and dupe neg; preservation; Paper Print Collection.
Repository-Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA dcu
Digital Id-http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/awal.1878
LCCN Permalink-https://lccn.loc.gov/00564571

The Cost of Cycling for the "Modern Athletic Girl" of 1896

WHAT THE "MODERN ATHLETIC GIRL COSTS. The Various Items of the Necessary Summer Sporting Outfit. From The Journal newspaper (New York), Sunday June 26, 1896 (https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84031792/1896-06-28/ed-1/.

The Journal newspaper of 1896 in New York carried far more pages than other urban newspapers in the U.S. at the time and worked hard to fill the pages up with various kinds of human interest material. 1896 was the height of the so-called "bicycle craze" in the U.S. so here we have an article that combines that topic with women and sports. Probably because of the exceptional popularity of bicycling at the time, it is discussed first, then golf, hunting, and other sporting endeavors. Cycling is also given here as the most expensive at almost $200.

The father of an up-to-date society girl who decided to take up athletics this Summer consented with pleasure to buy his daughter a $100 wheel, thinking that $125 at the highest would be all the money necessary for him to spend on her bicycle outfit. The following Is an' Itemized account of the bills which were sent him for everything pertaining to her bicycle outfit: Bicycle, $100; lamp, $5; cyclometer, $1.25; bell, 50 cents; foot pump, $1.50; bicycle stand, $2.50; lock, 50 cents; silver name plate, $2; knee protector, $3.50; Summer bicycle costume, made to order of linen homespun, $25; linen knickerbockers, $5; one pair low bicycle shoes, $4; one pair boots, $6; three pairs of silk stockings, $G; three pairs golf stockings, $6; linen hat to match suit, $3; six shirt waists, $18; pair of gloves, $1.35, making a total of $191.10.

Arguably the amount and cost of the "required" clothing is intentionally varied and high in order to support the article's point that such activities are expensive; it is more interesting to see what are given as typical accessories, including lamp, cyclometer (measuring distance covered), bell, footpump, stand, and lock. (I wonder how the lock would have worked - in looking at ads and articles about cycling at the time, I have not commonly observed a lock set-up for bicycles.)


Detail of above illustration with woman on bicycle

Descent: My Epic Fall from Cycling Superstardom to Doping Dead End (Book Review)

From Flickr, user Vanil-Noir

Apparently there is a sub-category now of cycling literature, the "I was a great bicycle racer, but then somehow I became a doper and it all went to hell" tell-all, as-told-to-someone-who-can-write memoir. We have Tyler Hamilton's "The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs" (2012) and then there is David Millar's "Racing Through the Dark" (2011). Mr. Dekker is a little late to this activity, since all three are reporting on much the same period of doping, but Dekker attempted to continue his career later than the other two so only got around to publishing this late in 2016 (in Dutch; the English version was published in the US about a year later).

As a highly successful Dutch bike racer in a land of cyclists, Dekker was presumably as much of a name there as Lance Armstrong had become here. In Dutch, the title of his book was "mijn gevecht" which apparently translates to "My Fight" (or maybe "My Struggle"?). With himself, I guess.

I thought that to be clever they used "descent" as the title in the English version since cyclists who win typically have to be good at descending mountains as well as racing up them, to give the title kind of a double meaning, but in reading it I eventually decided that was just coincidence. The cover of the Dutch version has Dekker in 3/4 profile, looking as come-hither as a sanctioned cyclist-doper can for his Dutch admirers. It's a little . . . odd.

I gave this two stars because . . . well, I didn't really like this book. It was pretty depressing, in fact. The main plus is that it is just over 200 pages with fairly large print - it is a fast read.

Tyler Hamilton's book was not so heavily focused on doping, he talked a lot about racing. The discussion of doping was mostly amusing since it became clear that he ran into problems largely because the team he was on after being with Lance Armstrong didn't spend the kind of resources organizing doping and that Hamilton realized eventually that poorly organized doping is not a good idea once he accidentally ends up with someone else's blood transfused into his system instead of his own. Oops! David Millar's book is hideous because it talks way too much about David Millar - but even he has more blow-by-blow description of races he was in than this book. "My epic fall from cycling superstardom to doping dead end" means you read far more about doping as well as drugging and drinking and sleeping with hundreds (his word) of women than about any races he was in. One wonders why VeloPress thought it was publishing a book about cycling. There are endless examples of how he wasted money, giving Euro values in most cases - 25,000 Euro for this evening, etc. Ugh. Simply ugh. (The apparent need to list his Euro salaries for all the different years he worked is just plain weird. I half expected him to say how much he got for writing this book.) And there is certainly far more detail about the mechanics of doping as he practiced it, and a fair amount of description of how members, managers, and others of his now defunct Rabobank cycling team supported his and others' doping.

I read to the end - now not sure why. Does he make some statement or apology at the end that redeems himself at the end? Spoiler alert that probably isn't a surprise - no, he doesn't.

I might have felt better about investing the time to read this if I had come away with some understanding (or feeling of understanding) of why someone would do this, why he did this. This is almost entirely missing, other than that it was the culture of the team and (in effect) "everyone did it" (although he does mention at least one other rider who didn't, but who only had moderate results). He describes the trip down but makes no attempt to explain what we might be able to learn from this from his perspective.

Bicycles on DC Streets 1903

"Collecting mail, U.S. Post Office"-digitized short film shows a few bikes in street traffic

This short movie from the collections of the Library of Congress shows two post office boxes on a street corner and was apparently intended to show how the Post Office employees serviced them. Separately the video shows something of what street traffic was like, including persons on bicycles, which from my perspective is far more interesting. (The video is not identified with any tags or other access points suggesting cyclists are part of this. Typical.)


First cyclist enters screen from left at around 15 seconds, riding parallel to a streetcar

The first bicycle rider shown looks to be an adult man riding at a moderate pace, likely to get from one place to another - bicycle as transportation that is faster than walking and less elaborate than using a horse-drawn carriage.


At about 20 seconds, second cyclist appears in upper middle of screen as traffic clears, riding across intersection from cross street

Much like the first bicycle rider, bicycle as transportation. I was amused by the man walking across the street in another direction, who ambles rather casually.


At 28 seconds, third cyclist appears from left, who has a boy sitting on the handlebars as a passenger

All the cyclists shown are traveling at a moderate pace. If you look closely, you can see the rider here pedaling steadily. It is almost certainly a single-speed bike.


At 32 seconds, fourth and last cyclist appears from right, cutting through the intersection

A little hard to tell, but this appears to be a younger rider, moving at a faster (but not that much) pace. He seems to ride in front of two women who are going to cross the street. He has a bag of some kind in his hand held to the handlebars.


No bicycle shown here, but you can see four different horse-drawn carriages at once near this Washington DC intersection in 1903

Most of the "traffic" shown during the video consists of horse-drawn carriages. Two different streetcars pass, one in either direction. There are a moderate number of pedestrians, and then the four cyclists, one with passenger. All the traffic is moving at a moderate pace - the horse-drawn carriages in particular. Most of the pedestrians are shown walking briskly and enter the intersection without pause - one suspects that absent many cars, concern about entering intersections was much more casual.

One assumes that this was shot during the middle of the day and that the various traffic elements are representative. The use of bicycles looks pretty high. Interesting.

LimeBike Parking is Difficult in DC

LimeBike dockless bikeshare bikes "parked" on National Park Service land near the Jefferson Memorial

In yesterday's blog post I had a video about how to park a dockless bikeshare bike produced by LimeBike for its users.

Over the last three days, during which there was some snowfall, I have seen these same three LimeBikes parked in a row near the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC. First they were parked on the sidewalk, all standing up. Then after the snowfall they were all laying on the sidewalk where they had previously been standing. This morning someone had stood them back up but then on the way home someone else (one assumes) had tossed them over the chain-fence so that they were lined up as shown on the grass, laying there in a row. I suspect the National Park Service would not approve.



This parking arrangement of course does't follow the advice in the video, where they are particularly critical of laying bicycles on the ground. Because so far there are far more of these bikes than available bike rack slots at the locations where people seem to want to take them, I would say I have never seen so many bikes laying on the ground before the introduction of dockless bikeshare bikes.

Absurd Instructional Video on How/Where to Park a Dockless Bikeshare Bike

Let's just make a joke out of it then it will be ok

The LimeBike people seem to think this is a helpful gesture towards getting their users to park their bikes appropriately. It includes several "do this" and "don't do that" points.

It is worth noting that the LimeBike User Agreement has this minimalist statement: Upon conclusion of your ride, the Bike must be parked at a lawful parking spot, i.e. the Bike cannot be parked on private property or in a locked area or in any other non-public space.

The video suggests that what is needed beyond "lawful" parking is to show good "parking etiquette." For example, do not lay the bike on the ground, but do park at a bike rack. Do not block driveways or pedestrian paths, do park "in this zone" - which is shown as the parking strip next to the roadway that in residential areas in particular is often grass or dirt. Do not park at bus stops or street corners, but do park next to a bus stop.

After listening to this the two main characters launch themselves into the sky leaving their bike on the path - whether this falls under "blocking a pedestrian path" or not is unclear. The don't stay to clarify.

In Washington DC at least, some of this gets a little ... complicated. What is a lawful place to park? Since I have observed the U.S. Park Police carrying away dockless bikes parked up near the Washington Monument (before it was recently closed off to everyone) apparently they aren't too thrilled with them on NPS territory, period.

The kind of "zone" that is shown as ideal isn't necessarily all that common around here. What is best is to park them at bike racks, but there simply aren't enough of them.

Hmm.

A Great Cycling Comedy? Jour de Fête

Trailer-like video for the re-release of a restored version of this 1948 movie in 2014 - embedded video starts where cycling is featured

Jacques Tati was a film director and actor in France after World War II up through the early 1960s. His films are quite remarkable, making certain social commentary in films that were mostly physical and visual humor (although it is more complex than that).

His first 1949 full length film, Jour de fête (or The Big Day), centers on a postman in a French village who spends much of the film making deliveries (although I have only seen snippets, not the entire thing). Wikipedia has a short summary of the plot. Apparently the thought was he should perform more like the (then) super-efficient United States Post Office.


Two minute clip where the postman joins French racing cyclists on the road

It is not clear to me in the above scenes how he manages to appear to maintain such a high rate of speed; perhaps the playback is sped up somehow, although it doesn't look that way when he is with the other riders. Sitting bolt upright as he is, it would be hard to maintain such speed, particularly given what seems to be a single-speed bike and how it appears to be geared.


The postman chases his bicycle that travels a considerable distance without a rider

Again, I don't know how they did this - keeping the bike rolling for these distances without falling over. I like that the pedals keeping going around, as they would on a fixed gear bike.