Onward and Upward

I'm thinking maybe we will soon arrive at the end of Jerome a Paris' long countdown to a $100 barrel of crude:

"The oil market sentiment remains bullish ... there is an overall upward trend toward the $100 level," said Victor Shum, energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz in Singapore. "Meanwhile, we can expect extreme volatility where on the one hand some traders will take profit while others will buy back positions."

Global Insight energy analyst Simon Wardell was even more unequivocal.

"The run on $100 ... (a barrel) now seems inevitable," he said in a research note. "In the short term all eyes will be fixed on the U.S. government's Energy Information Administration ... inventory data."

Those figures to be released later Wednesday are expected to show crude supplies dropped last week. Analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires predict, on average, that crude oil inventories fell by 1.6 million barrels.

"The price rise is really driven by expectations of drawdowns in crude oil and distillate stocks inventories in the U.S. inventory report," said Shum. "Some cold weather reports out of the U.S. and Europe serve as a reminder that winter is coming and that there are still supply concerns."

This from a USA Today article that spares us any reference to the inflation-adjusted all-time record—thumbsucking platitudes like these from 2005:

Crude oil futures are about 50 percent above year ago levels, though still below the inflation-adjusted high above $90 a barrel reached in 1980 [...]

or

Oil prices are now 67 percent higher than a year ago, but still well below the inflation-adjusted high above $90 a barrel set in 1980.

Probably because prices are no longer well below the inflation-adjusted high, and according to an article about the IEA's 2007 report titled World Energy Outlook in this week's Time magazine, unlikely to go back down in the forseeable future. The New York Times ran an article today on the early effects the new pricing is having on global political and economic power structures. Both are interesting reading.

Meanwhile, we had our first hard freeze in Madison last night, down to 24 degrees. Leaves were dropping from the trees like snow this morning at sunup.

Portland Envy

(photo: Stuart Isett for The New York Times)

Today's New York Times includes an article and video segment titled The Business of Biking profiling Portland's bike culture. It's worth checking out for the commentary on bicycle culture and bicycle builders, though I had expected to see something about Clever Cycles, which strikes me as one of the most unique shops in the country.

As strong as Madison's bike culture is, Portland makes us look like pikers.

Great Moments in Bicycle Infrastructure History

So, here we are, cruising down Winnequah Road in Monona. Apparently, there must have been some kind of problem along this road with bicyclists exceeding the posted speed limit, because the City of Monona has installed some clever Bicycle Traffic Calming measures right here in the bike lane:


I'm pretty sure these were not there last year. There are about seven or eight of them over the course of a little over a half a mile, so I can only conclude that Monona's traffic engineering department had them put there on purpose. Either that or the contractor was playing a practical joke on the aforementioned department. Or on bicyclists. Or on motorists. Or on the property owners.

Okay, it's really hard to tell why they are there at all.


Fortunately, the individual cyclist is free to decide whether to veer right onto the terracotta-colored sidewalkish thing on the right or to swerve left, closer to adjacent traffic. But decide they must, or experience a nasty diversion-type fall.


I really hope those black marks on the curb are from car tires and not bike tires.

Ultimately though, it may have been cheaper for Monona to calm their savage bicycle traffic simply by making the parking lane too narrow to fit a parked car between the bike lane and the curb.

Oh, wait...

Last Good Day of the Year

Saturday, November 3 was the last outdoor Dane County farmers' market of the season. So long until next year...

Lipstick on a Pig

(click for big, if you dare)

No, I don't really think of my Surly Long Haul Trucker as a pig. But then again, had I wanted a similar, but prettier bike, I suppose I would have gotten a Rivendell Atlantis. Speaking of pretty, I've wanted a pair of hammered Honjo fenders for a long, long time. So I finally broke down and ordered a pair of the extra-longs from Velo Orange. Chris has blogged the basics of the installation, but mine varies from that a bit.


Honjo Koken knows what they're doing, and the hardware is really cool. Unfortunately, the Daruma (fork crown eye bolt) wasn't long enough to give me the position I wanted, because the LHT has a lot of fender clearence. So I made this bracket from a piece of aluminum angle, and fitted a little gasket of UV-resistant rubber sheet underneath.


Here's a pic of the attachment to the boss on the underside of the Nitto M12 rack. Just a little aluminum spacer I got at the hardware store and an M5 cap screw. And a neoprene washer inside the fender and lots of anti-sieze.


Here they are working together.


And at the seatstay bridge, a little too much clearance again, so I added this little bracket. Normally it would be holding a mirror to the wall, but here it's had another hole drilled in it and spans the space between the bridge boss and the sliding bridge bracket on the fender.


Last but not least, a nylon spacer to hold the chainstay end of the fender away from the bridge. This one's not long enough, so I'm going substitute one that's about twice as long.

These things were expensive and took a long time to install, but I think they were worth it. Now, if I can just figure out why the front one is still rattling a little...

Wisconsin has Bicycle Funding Anemia

Wisconsin's Democratic governor Jim Doyle used a line-item veto to reduce $19.1 million in funding set aside for biking and pedestrian projects in the state budget to a mere $2.7 million. The Lost Albatross nails it:

For all the lip-service our public officials seem to pay to our bike and pedestrian friendly culture, more often it would appear that regular citizens are the ones who do the most to promote and sustain the culture.

The Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin responded to the governor's veto in a press release (a PDF):

"Wisconsin could be the national leader in biking and pedestrian facilities,” [executive director Jack] Hirt explained. Instead, Wisconsin ranks near the bottom in use of federal transportation dollars for bike and pedestrian purposes. “We want to convince the governor to work with us to make Wisconsin a better place to bicycle,” Hirt said.

Good luck Jack, because we're right at the bottom. According to a 2006 interview with his immediate predecessor:

'We've always ranked in the bottom five states nationally in funding transportation enhancements,' says Dar Ward, [former] executive director for the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin. 'It's getting worse.'

Apparently, Ward was right.

Records

Crude oil prices set another record yesterday at $93.80 per barrel. Of course, this is the highest dollar amount, but not an all-time record when you adjust for inflation. That's been made clear in practically every news article written since oil began to rise in earnest in 2003. For example:

Despite the gains, the price of oil is still below inflation-adjusted highs hit in early 1980.

That phrase, or one like it, has been repeated ad nauseum for the last three years in the business section of any paper worth its salt. For the last couple of years, the record was quoted at something like $92 per barrel. Now we've come to parsing exactly what the record price was back then. CBC News:

While Wednesday's price level does amount to a new all-time high, analysts point out that when inflation is taken into account, it falls short of record ground.

During the oil supply shock that followed the Iranian revolution in 1979, inflation-adjusted oil prices rose to about $100 US a barrel level in 2007 dollars.

Reuters really gets into it, with a table comparing historical annual averages, adjusted for inflation:

The following table from the BP Statistical Review picks out key moments in oil market history. It gives average annual dollar-denominated oil prices in money of the day and the equivalent price in 2006 money. Prices are in dollars a barrel.

(I'm too lazy to reproduce the table here—you'll have to click over.)

I'm not sure what difference it makes. Whatever the record, we're in the neighborhood of it right now and that should be telling us something. Unlike in the past, where one could cite a specific event like the the Arab embargo in 1973 or the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the current increase seems to have crept up on us over the course of several years.

What does that mean?

Some Snaps

Did I mention that I make some artsy photos from time to time? I've started posting some of the older ones over on Flickr. Pretty soon I'll get around to posting some of the things I've been working on lately.

The Before Photos

Whatever this Chimayo Backwoods (Backwoods Chimayo?) bike is, it seems pretty decent. The frame is lugged Tange double-butted CroMoly and it's got LX throughout. Sorta cuss-ugly as-is though. Maybe we can help it out with a better saddle and maybe some moustache bars.


It's got a combination of things I like, such as semi-horizontal dropouts (I have a Nexus 4-speed hub laced to a 700c rim I might try on), full rack and fender braze-ons, lowrider braze-ons, longish chainstays and gobs of tire and fender clearance.


The only catch is that it measures 61 cm and has rather little bb drop. This gives me a standover height just above hanging a nut on either side of the top tube, which is strange given that the Trucker is a 60cm and gives me plenty of clearance. We'll see how that works out.

King of the Road

Clearly, I am a man of means by no means. Two 25-pound bags of spent grounds from the local coffee house for my compost piles, some buckets coming back from the community garden plot and my newly-rebuilt wheel for the Tucker coming back from the shop. C'mon, let's all whistle the Sanford and Son theme song...