Golden Gate Park

I can finally open up. JFK runs flat to the Cal Academy of Science. There are stop signs, but most are at T intersections and I am on the safe side. A Buddhist monk scampers across in front of me, clutching his robes like so many skirts. Past the CAS, the road tips upward as you curve toward the tunnel beneath Transverse Drive. And then—glories—the descent begins. No substantial climbs until Japan. Before the first curve I’m in my highest gear, the one I only use for stability on downhills. Of a sudden I’m passing the buffalo paddock—I’ve barely seen them, because I usually pass them at this speed, where prolonged contemplation of things on the roadside brings death.

The traffic circle by the model-boat pond draws near. A van is working through in the other direction. Will he turn, or come out on JFK? I can’t see him for the glare, but you don’t look at the eyes anyway. You have to watch their front wheels, guess their intentions. This one is going straight. I risk it and take the circle at full speed. Sharp right to say on JFK. The last few twists before the beach are usually full of cars looking to park on the weekends, but at 9:20 on a Tuesday the road is empty. Finally JFK straightens out: sat on the horizon, near the vanishing point, is a gargantuan container ship.

The Great Highway, South

The wind is with me.

The dunes here are covered with ice plant, an invader from South Africa. Its succulent, red-green leaves always remind me of the alien xenofungus in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. I take it as a sign of progress that I recognize old video games in my outside activities, and not vice versa.

When first Esther and I rode this stretch, it was the day after a storm, and a 40-mile wind sandblasted us for miles. Never since has it been so miserable.

Save for the pavement seams, the only worry is the drifted sand, which at times obliterates the shoulder. But it can be done. Dropping from the Bridge To Nowhere to dirt at speed has made me more confident of this bike’s handling. To my right are surfers, always surfers. 9:30 on a Tuesday—bah, if I’m out here, why can’t they be? The scene reminds me of the video for Neil Halstead’s “Paint A Face”—and suddenly I wish we had a screen door.

Ahead lies the climb, where the Great Highway vaults the low coastal hills and joins Skyline Boulevard. The lanes closest to the ocean are, it seems, forever closed. Of no will of its own, the city is making a strategic retreat from the shore. Blown sand covers the two lanes to the Jersey barriers. Very Akira.

Lake Merced Loop

Every cyclist hates eucalyptus trees. Invasive allelopaths, nothing in North America seems to eat them. No birds or squirrels hustle their seed pods away, no mammal crunches their alkaline, poisoned leaves. And their bark falls off. All of it piles up on the roadside. The leaves and bark are annoying, but it’s the seeds that you fear. Hard enough that you can’t just crush them beneath your wheels—the wheel rides up, yaws to the side, sends the seed skittering off. Your heart skips a beat—will this one take me down? No, but then there’s the next one.

At the southern tip of Lake Merced, where John Muir empties into Lake Merced Boulevard, I juke left to get on the path. It’s a mixed bag. LMB is a horror show to bike, but the path is filled with midagens—my portmanteau of middle-aged Asians. China uses a different algorithm for sharing space, it always seems. No one can shuffle randomly across a path while staring at the ground quite like a midagen. They are out in their dozens, LOVE PINK velour tracksuits and white sneakers flashing. This sort of brisk walking makes me want to mock, but that’s churlish; so many people do even less.

Near the end of the loop, roots have heaved the asphalt.

Greath Highway, North

There is a path that runs alongside the Great Highway, between it and 48th Avenue. I’ve ignored it before. Paths are the devil. On a bike, you’re more car than pedestrian, and you need a road more than a path. Path turns are too sharp, the sight lines are too short, you’re always slowing to get around clueless walkers, and—lest you still manage to get some speed going—planners throw bollards at every crossing.

But today I am an explorer.

The Chalet

As I lock up outside, a guy has taken his surfboard off of his bicycle (always impressive) and is performing a sort of striptease: with his towel wrapped around his waist he shimmies out of his chinos and begins wriggling into his wetsuit. I’m enjoying this morning of goofing off, but he’s just won.

“Good Morning!” he pipes as I come back out. And he’s right.

Sutro Heights

To bomb down Point Lobos Avenue from Sutro Heights, past the ruins of the baths and sharply left in front of the Cliff House, banking hard on the reverse-camber turn as Ocean Beach swings into view ahead of you, is to die a little. To wrench up that same slope, taking up the entire crumbling inner lane and panting freely as you drag yourself to 48th Avenue, is to die a little more.

I’ve done it once, three days ago. For a mile, coming north on the Great Highway, I’ve been thinking about alternate routes. Just cut into the park and avoid the whole business? How will I feel about that? Cut right and then climb up in the avenues, then back down to the park? Maybe just right into the park.

And then, at the point of no return at the corner of Balboa, I shout “Fuck it!” and put my head down.

The descent is somehow worse than the climb. South on 48th until you can’t any more, then east a block, then south on 47th into the park—all the way feathering the brakes, knowing that I can’t come to a complete stop at this angle without jumping down off the pedals. Scoping out each intersection, hoping no car will pull up and make me do that.

Golden Gate Park, again

MLK is somehow easier to climb than JFK, but I must pay for my earlier indulgence. And this way I can see the bison.

Arguello

From the east end of the park, you can power into the Panhandle and enjoy the slight downhill all the way to Baker Street. Or you can hook a left just before the Conservatory of Flowers, climb a short hill, and point your bike north toward the Presidio. San Francisco is a merciful god, the light on Fulton is with me, and the first two intersections north of the park are two-way stops—and then I catch the lights on Anza and Geary! I am a golden god!

Zoom zoom past Clement, past Euclid, to California. Climbing now. The synagogue looms on the left. The last block of Arguello is the “bump,” a 9.8-percent grade, one of the reasons this bike now has a granny gear. So easy here to accidentally lift the front wheel off the ground. I spread my fingers wide, rest my palms on the drops, put my nose near the handlebars, and push.

The Presidio

Every cyclist loves eucalyptus trees. That menthol smell, the cool air.

There are so many more cyclists here. Packs of three and four, seemingly having just crossed the Golden Gate. Seemingly having just left the house. They stare at me; I’m overdressed, now that the sun is higher in the sky.

They’ve been improving the roads in here. There are curbs where there were no curbs before. Bright red paint. But really you can’t look at them when over there are the Marin headlands.

Fort Point

It’s a human impulse to stop here, under the bridge and near the Civil War-era fort, and survey the bay. There’s no more obvious dead end in San Francisco than this little parking lot, under the bridge, under the Presidio. That said, I’m feeling good and finally warm. I’ve looped and gone back past the dog walkers before their mutts have calmed down.

Crissy Field

Flat, straight and quiet. An even better spot to reach for your top speed than the Great Highway. If only it led to something other than the Marina District.

The Embarcadero

And now back home.

Both from Bicycling and the Law: Your Rights As a Cyclist, by Bob Mionske.

“[It’s] one way of thinking about rights and duties—that duties are the flip side of rights; with rights come duties. Unfortunately, that’s not a very adequate way of understanding what is in fact a complex web of social relationships. Imagine that you have a right—the right to the road, for example. Every other person owes you a corresponding duty not to infringe upon your right to the road. Now imagine that every other person also has a right to the road. Your right to the road is not absolute, nor is theirs—you owe a corresponding duty to every other person not to infringe upon their right to the road, just as every person owes you the same duty. Now let’s expand that a bit: You don’t have one right; you in fact have several rights, for which every other person owes you a corresponding duty. In turn, every other person has a similar bundle of rights, for which you owe them a corresponding duty. Thus each right encompasses elements of both a right and a duty: Where one person has a right, other persons owe a duty. Similarly, each duty encompasses elements of both a duty and a right: Where one person owes a duty, other persons have a right. It is because rights and duties are so inextricably bound together that we say ‘with rights come duties.’” [17]

“Some cyclists argue that bicycles are not cars and therefore shouldn’t be subject to laws regulating cars. There are two variations of this argument. The first variation in effect confuses ‘vehicles’ with ‘cars’ and disregards the fact that all vehicles—including bicycles—are subject to the law. In fact, as we’ve seen, cyclists gained legal rights when bicycles were classified as vehicles; they were given all of the rights that operators of other vehicles enjoy. Thus, the argument that cyclists shouldn’t be subject to the law because they’re ‘not cars’ actually undermines the cyclist’s right to the road. The second variation of the argument is that bicycles are vehicles but they are not cars, and that there’s no reason the laws should not reflect the differences between these classes of vehicles in ways that actually meet the needs of cyclists. This argument is more sophisticated and is legally defensible.” [37]

You ever wonder if your wheel is true? I mean, really true?

A while back my fellow volunteer Geoff at the Bike Kitchen linked to a discussion on the Park Tool site about measuring spoke tension and visually inspecting the pattern of tension in the wheel. Someone there had written a fairly complicated bit of Visual Basic that would turn an Excel spreadsheet full of spoke tensions into, basically, a radar plot where the spokes are the tensions on the actual spokes. It was a cool idea: it gave you a way to see at a glance whether, for example, you had too-high tension at noon and six o’clock and too-low tension at three and nine o’clock. This sort of thing is pernicious, because you can have a “true” bicycle wheel that nonetheless has wildly uneven tension on the spokes. People rarely check for this, yet it can prematurely wear or damage your spokes and rim.

I recently noticed that the front wheel on my Puch was slightly out of dish, and that I had a slight rubbing on the left brake pad—due, in part, to the dishing problem. It’s quite odd for a front wheel to be out of dish, so I wanted to make sure everything was on the up-and-up. I don’t use Excel, but that’s no obstacle for an arch-nerd like me. Fire up Stata, type ssc install radar, and off to the races.

There is some tedium in this approach. You have to put the wheel in the truing stand (I took the opportunity to re-center ours) and then, starting with the spoke ahead of the valve hole, measure each spoke’s deflection with a tensionometer. I do all the spokes on one side, then the other. This front wheel has 36 spokes, so that’s two sets of 18 measurements. With those data, I could then plot the spokes’ tension:

The way to read one of these plots is as follows. Each radius shows the tension for two spokes, one on each side of the hub. Thus “1” shows the tension for the two spokes immediately forward of the valve hole, “2” the next pair and so on. On a “perfect” 36-spoked front wheel, the resulting plot would show two 18-sided regular polygons perfectly overlapping, with their radius at the desired tension. (A perfect rear wheel would show two regular polygons, but the “left” polygon would lie inside the “right” polygon, because the left-side spokes are under less tension to compensate for the asymmetric dish that accommodates the gears.) This wheel is far from perfect. Note how, on the right-hand side, spoke 18 is quite loose, and spokes 1 and 17 are quite tight, partly to compensate. On a third of the wheel, from 4 to 16, the right-side spokes have a pattern of loose-tight-loose. The wheel might run true (in fact it wandered a bit around spoke 18), but it wasn’t distributing the stress very evenly.

With the dishing tool, I could see that the wheel was indeed out of dish, but only slightly. It could move a millimeter or so to the left. To deal with this, I did the canonical thing: first I got the wheel as true as I could, then I loosened the right-side spokes a quarter-turn and tightened the left-side spokes a quarter turn. That fixed the dish. Already the wheel looked a lot better:

The tension was more even, but there was still that weird saw-toothed pattern around the valve hole. Compare the right-hand spokes to the relatively more even left-hand ones. To fix this, I loosened each of the really tight spokes by a quarter turn and tightened the spokes in between. With that, plus a few more tweaks, I got the tension to here:

Not a vast difference from the second measurement, but the oscillations are smaller—and the height of the right-side peaks is about the same as the intervening left-side ones. I’m willing to call that pretty good.

For comparison, here are the three left-side readings superimposed. Relatively little change on that side of the wheel, save for raising the tension slightly:

The smoothing out of the right-side tension is more noticeable:

What’s the point? You can true and indeed build wheels without touching a tensionometer. People with better hearing than me can even tell if a spoke is at the right tension by plucking it and listening to the note. But most of us aren’t that amazing, and the typical way that we go about truing a wheel is to spin it in the stand, slowly closing the calipers until we hit a high point, twiddling the nipples, and repeating. That works, kinda, but in this case I was able to see right away that I had some problem areas in the wheel and correct them all at once. You can also just see more detail about the rim from graphs like these. Notice the low-tension spots on the left side between spokes 13 and 17. Not coincidentally, this rim has a slight “hop” at spokes 15 and 16. That will be the next thing to attack.

But to the story at hand. Nocera writes about a recent complaint by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against Boeing. (For those just joining us, the NLRB is the federal agency charged with enforcing the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Its two main duties are to oversee union-representation elections in workplaces and to investigate Unfair Labor Practices, which are actions by employers or unions that violate the terms of the act.) Boeing recently shifted the construction of some of its 787 Dreamliner planes to a new, non-union plant in South Carolina. The unions at Boeing’s main facilities in Puget Sound filed a complaint alleging that Boeing made this move as retaliation against those same unions. The NLRB’s general counsel found in favor of the unions and directed Boeing to maintain production in Puget Sound.

Those are the basics of the case, and I will talk some about those. Nocera does something else in his article, though: he takes this NLRB decision as an example of how Democrats have certain “ideological blinders” when it comes to job-creation. Indeed, at the end of his piece Nocera makes it clear that he wants to use this action by the NLRB as one half of a “pox on both your houses” attack on Democrats and Republicans over their failure to create jobs.

So, there’s two things to deal with here: the Boeing case itself, and this larger point about job creation. I deal with them in that order.

NLRB v. Boeing

I have done some work on union-representation elections. I’m a sociologist who works with union data, not an expert on labor law per se. I say this to stress that I’m not an expert on this particular issue. However, I know the Wagner Act pretty well, and I have reviewed the facts of the case. So let me say this much: Yes, Boeing broke the law. Let me also say this: people are really amazed, it seems, to find out that what Boeing did breaks the law, and that tells you something important about how poorly labor law in the U.S. is enforced.

Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA forbids employers from retaliating against workers for protected activities like forming a union, engaging in collective bargaining, or striking. The important charge in this case is that Boeing asked its unions for a complete moratorium on strikes. The union—which has no legal obligation to agree to such a thing—said that it wouldn’t do that unless Boeing in turn agreed to keep its production in unionized plants. Boeing then said that it would move production unless the union gave up its legally protected right to strike. The union said no. Boeing then said publicly that it was going to move production to South Carolina because its workers in Washington had gone on strike in the past and would do so in the future.

If these facts are true—and the NLRB’s general counsel has said that they are—then this is a straightforward example of an employer retaliating against a group of workers, in a way that’s proscribed by the law.

Joe Nocera doesn’t understand any of this, as far as I can tell. Consider these three paragraphs:

The law, to be sure, forbids a company from retaliating against a union. But the word “retaliation” suggests direct payback — a company shutting down a factory after a strike, for instance. Boeing did nothing like that. It not only hasn’t laid off a single worker in Washington State, it has added around 3,000 new ones. Seven out of every 10 Dreamliners will be assembled in Puget Sound.

Before expanding to South Carolina, Boeing asked the union for a moratorium on strikes — precisely because it needed to get the airplane into the hands of impatient customers. The union said it would agree only if Boeing promised never to manufacture anywhere but Puget Sound. Boeing refused — as any company would.

It is a mind-boggling stretch to describe Boeing’s strategy as “retaliation.” Companies have often moved to right-to-work states to avoid strikes; it is part of the calculus every big manufacturer makes. The South Carolina facility is a hedge against the possibility that Boeing’s union work force will shut down production of the Dreamliner. And it’s a perfectly legitimate hedge, at least under the rules that the business thought it was operating under.

First, Nocera argues that “the word ‘retaliation’ suggests direct payback — a company shutting down a factory after a strike, for instance.” Yes, it does suggest that example, but it isn’t limited to that.

Let’s take a crude example: Your boss calls you in and tells you that he thinks you’re going to vote for a candidate that he dislikes in the next election, and that he will fire you unless you agree not to vote. You tell him that you have a legally protected right to vote, and that you won’t agree not to vote, one way or the other. Your boss then fires you. It’s true that you never did the thing he was worried about—he fired you before the election. But wouldn’t you be inclined to call his action retaliation?

The same point holds here. Joe Nocera—or you—may not like that unionized workers have a legally protected right to strike, but they do, and if you move production because they have refused to surrender their legally protected right, you break the law.

Second, Nocera says that Boeing demanded that moratorium on strikes “precisely because it needed to get the airplane into the hands of impatient customers.” Then he says that Boeing refused the union’s counter-demand “as any company would.” You should notice something missing from that otherwise-parallel construction: there’s no “as any union would” in it. Ask yourself, was a strike actually threatened? Assume for the moment that one was: what were the union’s demands? Are they demands that Boeing could have met? Nocera tells the reader none of this.

Consider also that “as any company would” comment. This is where the semantics are important: Boeing’s unions did not demand that all production physically stay in Puget Sound. They demanded that all production be done by workers represented by the unions, be they in Washington or South Carolina. There is ample precedent for this. Forty years ago, General Motors planned to open several new, non-union auto-assembly plants in the American south. The United Auto Workers offered GM a choice: have cooperation in a few non-union plants and turmoil in the rest, or have cooperation in all of the plants. GM chose cooperation in all its plants, and the UAW organized those southern plants. (Because someone is bound to ask: wages in those southern plants were lower than in the northern ones, but higher than what GM proposed to pay non-union workers.) I mention this case only to point out that it isn’t logically impossible for a company and a union to reach such an agreement. We used to do it all the time. More importantly, GM did not tell the UAW no and then say they were moving to southern plants because the UAW wouldn’t give up its right to strike. It’s that point, not the relocation in and of itself, that is the basis for the NLRB general counsel’s complaint.

Third, there’s that last paragraph. I’ve already explained why it isn’t a “mind-boggling stretch to describe Boeing’s strategy as ‘retaliation.’” But then there’s the next line: Nocera says that “Companies have often moved to right-to-work states to avoid strikes; it is part of the calculus every big manufacturer makes.” Yeah, it is—but they don’t tell everyone that! Every mealy-mouthed PR flak since the 1950s has emphasized that they were moving to anti-union states to get more “efficiency” and “flexibility”; what’s more, they only mentioned avoiding strikes when they didn’t already have a unionized workforce whom they’d demanded surrender their right to strike.

I can’t make this point enough: it’s easy in the United States to break unions by moving to the parts of the country where the government operates hand-in-glove to restrict workers’ rights to organize. Companies do it all the time, with no legal repercussions whatsoever. Hell, even if you do have a unionized plant, you can always justify your move on “economic” grounds, and the workforce essentially won’t have a legal leg to stand on.

In short, you can only get busted for this sort of thing if you’re completely boneheaded about it. Which Boeing was.

In summary: if Joe Nocera or anyone else wants to argue that this general counsel’s complaint has propelled us into a new era where the government will tell plants where to locate production, at the unions’ say-so, they are wrong. In fact, the general counsel’s complaint doesn’t even direct Boeing to move production back to Puget Sound. All it directs is for Boeing to maintain production in Puget Sound, i.e., not shut down what’s already there. You know, not retaliate.

(If you want to know more about this case, and about the widespread and inaccurate reporting on it, I suggest Media Matter’s excellent summary.)

Job Creation

Nocera’s discussion of this case is wrapped in rhetoric about how badly we need jobs. “Nothing matters more right now than job creation,” he says. I agree with this, as anyone who heard me punching the walls during the asinine debt-ceiling/spending-cuts negotiations can tell you.

But before we get into any nitty-gritty, let’s take a step back. Boeing was relocating production from Washington to South Carolina. This would create jobs in South Carolina, you betcha. The detail-minded among you might notice, though, that a relocation involves taking away jobs in one place and adding them in another. So before we talk about anything else, let’s pause and agree that moving jobs from one part of an economy to another is kind of a stupid way to “create” jobs. Let’s agree, in short, that using this Boeing case in an article about job creation is a deeply flawed idea.

Why is Nocera using this example? Again, two paragraphs.

Nothing matters more right now than job creation. Last week, President Obama barnstormed the Midwest, promising a jobs package in September and blaming Republicans for blocking job-creation efforts. Republicans, of course, have blamed the administration, complaining that regulatory overkill is keeping companies from creating jobs.

They’re both right. Republicans won’t pass anything that might stimulate job growth because they are so ideologically opposed to federal spending. But the Democrats have blind spots, too. No, the Environmental Protection Agency shouldn’t be rolling back its rules, as the Republican presidential candidates seem to want. But a fair-minded person would have to acknowledge that the N.L.R.B.’s action is exactly the kind of overreach that should embarrass Democrats who claim to care about job creation. It’s paralyzing, is what it is.

“They’re both right”—that’s the hook that Nocera is aiming for. Nothing makes you sound like a deep thinker in the American media today than to point out how both sides have bad ideas. This type of argument leads directly to pining for politicians who would rise above this partisan polarization, this ideological division—which is pretty darkly funny, given that that’s exactly what Barack Obama campaigned on.

But never mind that. How are both sides wrong? Republicans “won’t pass anything that might stimulate job growth because they are so ideologically opposed to federal spending.” Yep, that seems pretty well documented. Indeed, the last time I checked, we spent all of July watching the House GOP refuse any measures that would help out working people, and right now they’re opposing an extension of the payroll-tax holiday. The GOP in the House and Senate also fought to reduce the size of the administration’s first stimulus package all the way back in 2009, when such a thing could have been most useful. And of course, if you believe basic macroeconomics, you’ll note that the GOP has done things like oppose the extension of unemployment insurance or any attempt to re-negotiate ARM mortgages, things that reduce aggregate income, reduce aggregate demand and thus reduce employers’ interests in hiring more workers. I have no problem agreeing with Joe Nocera that since this recession began, the GOP has been the bitter enemy of anyone who was counting on economic growth to someday create a job they could fill.

How are the Democrats wrong? Republicans complain that “regulatory overkill is keeping companies from creating jobs.” And the NLRB’s action “is exactly the kind of overreach that should embarrass Democrats who claim to care about job creation.”

Hm. OK, let’s be clear here: I’m a real left-winger. I’m the type that knows Obama isn’t a socialist, because I am and I hate his policies. So comments like the above leave me confused: what new regulations were created under Obama and are now keeping companies from creating jobs? Can you list some of these for me? I would love to know the specifics. After all, I support greater economic regulation (not because I think that it kills jobs, but that’s another story), and I’ve been crossing my fingers and keeping my eyes peeled for any sign of it.

Obviously, Nocera wants this NLRB complaint to be a sterling example of such “overreach.” Which is why it’s important to note, as I did above and many others have as well, that there is no overreach going on in the NLRB’s complaint against Boeing—all there is is enforcement of the existing law, in the face of a particularly stupid and egregious violation on Boeing’s part.

Nocera sums up his argument as follows: “That is what is so jarring about this case — and not just for Boeing. Without any warning, the rules have changed. Uncertainty has replaced certainty. Other companies have to start wondering what other rules could soon change. It becomes a reason to hold back on hiring.” He makes, in other words, the classic case for how uncertainty about government regulation is keeping employers from adding jobs. But this has been debunked over and over in this recession. Even the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a conservative employers’ federation, has said in its own reports that poor sales is the main reason that employers have been reluctant to add jobs in recent years. Not taxes, not over-regulation: lack of demand.

So, again, let’s summarize: Boeing was relocating jobs to South Carolina, not creating new jobs out of thin air. The NLRB enforced existing law. It created no new policies, set no precedents. Yet these two actions, combined, are supposed to show us that Democrats are just as bad as Republicans when it comes to not caring about job creation.

Awesome. Can I get a job as a columnist at the Times? The bar seems pretty low these days.

…You know, the real tragedy in discussions like these is that the Democrats haven’t been good for job creation in this recession. It’s pathetic and infuriating how they’ve been almost as willing as the GOP to let millions of people’s lives be blighted by mass unemployment. But they’re doing that because so many in the party, including Obama, have bought into the basic right-wing mantra about how cutting spending supposedly leads to economic expansion, all evidence to the contrary, and because the party is sufficiently dependent these days on funds from Wall Street (because—adding irony on top of irony—our union movement is so weak) that it can’t actually govern in the interests of working people. But instead of complaining about that, we’re forced to defend this under-performing party against utter nonsense like this op-ed.

I suppose that there are more complicated ways to make public posts, but I’ve played around with Wordpress enough to hate it. So, we’ll try this one for now. For the record, I’m a real person.