Nick Frazier

Web Audio for the User Interface

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 16:00:00 +0000

A version of this story is published on Medium here.

When people my age hear the phrase “web audio”, they probably think of Geocities sites of the 90’s with irritating sound loops playing in the background. The possibilities then were limited, and sound was quickly abandoned as a component of most web experiences. Other than the occasional “experimental” site or band page, sound on the web since then has been the exception rather than the rule.

The technology has come a long way since then, though, and with the advances have come the opportunity to start looking at sound as a real possibility for the web. And not just for media-heavy sites. Video game designers have for years understood the value of sound design in even the most mundane menus and user interface interactions. See for example the rich sound design of the Destiny character menus. While web interactions are not quite the same, with the continued emphasis on the user experience there is every reason to consider engaging the auditory sense as part of the package.

That doesn’t mean we should start adding firework blasts and blaring trumpets to our landing page just because we can. Unexpected and unwanted sound is a deal-breaker. So the first question to ask may well be, “Do my users expect sound?” In the case of a game, music, or similar site, they probably do. If so, adding sound to your user interface could be a welcome area of development. (You still probably want to add a master mute button, though.)

It is with this frame of mind that I began to explore the addition of subtle sound design into some of my web user interfaces. I had a few goals:

The ability to play a sound on an event (e.g. rollover, click)
Good performance, low latency
Good browser coverage
Few to no distracting side effects or annoyances (i.e. avoid the Geocities syndrome)

What follows is an overview of the best practices I’ve come across during my experimentation, based on the state of the web as of this writing. Keep in mind that audio on the web is still a relatively unexplored territory, so there is still much to create and discover in the field.

The HTML Audio Element

Up until the advent of HTML5, audio on the web was best described as “primitive.” The only way to incorporate sound into a site was with a plug-in like Flash. HTML5 brought with it the <audio> tag - a modest but important step up. This tag was designed to allow developers to easily stream sounds and music right from the page with one line of code. Simple controls could be embedded by adding one attribute:

<audio id="snare" src="snare-2.mp3" controls></audio>

The result:

By itself, the usefulness of this tag is limited. However, HTML5 also introduced a javascript API, HTMLAudioElement, that provides the ability to programmatically play sounds. Adding sounds to events using this interface looks like this:

function playSound () {
  document.getElementById("snare").play();
}

… which allows you to trigger a sound using javascript. Here’s an example of this in use:

See the Pen HTML Demo by Nick Frazier (@fraziern) on CodePen.

Try clicking twice in succession, though, and you will immediately experience one of the major drawbacks to HTML audio. Playing a sound more than once is tricky. If you used only the play() function and one source, the browser will wait until it’s done playing the sound before allowing you to trigger another. In fact even with multiple sources, HTML audio has limited ability to play several sounds at once.

One trick I found to enabling more performant triggering (using only one source) is to always stop the sound before playing it. Note the API doesn’t include a “stop” function, but simply reloading the file does the trick:

function playSound () {
  document.getElementById("snare2").load();
  document.getElementById("snare2").play();
}

Now we should be able to hit those rapid fire snares like the next 9th Wonder:

See the Pen HTML Demo Improved by Nick Frazier (@fraziern) on CodePen.

Audio Formats: A Side Note

Choosing the best audio format for web use was once a tricky task. Cross-browser compatibility of formats was all over the place. You usually had to have multiple versions of the same files, with different extensions, at the ready to be prepared for whatever browser your site might encounter.

Now it’s simpler: use mp3s.

Current browser coverage for the mp3 format, from caniuse.com

Other than IE8 (which is all but dead) and Opera Mini (which doesn’t support audio anyways), mp3 files should work just about anywhere. They’re also compact. If all you have are wav files or some other format, go ahead and use a conversion utility (I use MH Audio Converter) and get everything standardized to mp3.

Web Audio API: A Giant Leap

HTML audio provides a passable solution to sound. Particularly, I found that using it through a javascript library, Buzz, made it a flexible and simple option. However, there are still numerous drawbacks:

Playing multiple sounds in quick succession is a subpar experience
The ability to manipulate the sound is limited
Syncing sounds is a pain

Enter the Web Audio API. Web Audio is the proper successor to HTML Audio, and solves some of the problems of the latter while also adding a vast amount of flexibility. With Web Audio, developers now have a robust set of tools to create sound engines on the level of platform games and pro software synthesizers.

Using Web Audio instead of HTML Audio, we can create a button click sound that layers on top of itself rather than clipping, as this visualization demonstrates:

See the Pen Web Audio Viz by Nick Frazier (@fraziern) on CodePen.

There are a couple catches, though, one of which I ran up against immediately: Web Audio is complicated. If you crack open one of the many excellent API tutorials online (I recommend Boris Smus’s book Web Audio API, the entire text of which is available for free on the O’Reilly site) the first thing you’ll notice is that merely playing a single sound can require a couple dozen lines of code.

The solution I found to this is SoundJS. SoundJS, part of the CreateJS suite of tools, is a powerful sound library with a gentle learning curve. Part of its power is in abstracting away many of the details of the lower level audio APIs, such that the same code can be run on HTML Audio, Web Audio, or even Flash audio, depending on what the user’s browser supports.

But I’ve found that where it really excels is in its handling of Web Audio. Now instead of writing a page of code to play a sound on a click event, you can write this:

function loadSound () {
  createjs.Sound.registerSound("snare-2.mp3", soundID);
}

function playSound () {
  createjs.Sound.play(soundID);
}

Try it out and listen to the difference (and sonic improvement):

See the Pen GqZKNo by Nick Frazier (@fraziern) on CodePen.

The other major catch is that the Web Audio standard is still in flux - it’s currently a working draft, and there is no support in Internet Explorer.

Current browser coverage for the Web Audio API, from caniuse.com

At a finer grain, there are currently some additional limitations to audio in general, most notably on moblie devices:

With iOS devices, sound is initially locked and will not play until a user-initiated event occurs. This is apparently a measure to reduce bandwidth.
With Android devices, there is no control over audio volume, and you can only play audio as part of a user-initiated event.

These limitations may not matter as much with the click events like I’ve demonstrated so far, but they may come into play once more sophisticated UI sound design is employed. Which brings us to our last step.

Going Further with Web Audio

When I started thinking about “UI Sound Design,” my first thought was click events. But once that was solved, I wondered about other possibilities. What about rollover events? Or scroll events? Or something completely different? With Web Audio, I’ve found that there are a world of possibilities.

Web Audio allows you to add several different types of pro-level effects to your audio chain. For example:

BiquadFilterNodes can be used as highpass/lowpass/notch filters
ConvolverNodes can be used for reverb
DelayNodes can be used for delay effects
StereoPannerNodes allow for panning left and right
AnalyserNodes enable data analysis and visualization

What if, I thought, you used a BiquadFilterNode in conjunction with an event handler that tracks mouse proximity to a button? You could change a sound based on how close to the button your mouse pointer is. Moog-style filter sweeps in your UI - how cool would that be?

It turns out that SoundJS makes this, too, relatively easy (although tweaking the library’s Web Audio context is not as well documented as the rest of the API). Using some of the more advanced parts of the API, I found that you can “insert” a filter into SoundJS’s Web Audio setup, and fiddle to your heart’s content. Adjust the filter based on mouse movements, and voila, a proximity filter:

See the Pen SoundJS Filter Demo by Nick Frazier (@fraziern) on CodePen.

If you want to experiment yourself, check out my SoundJS code in the above pen. The proximity algorithm is based on this CSS-Tricks snippet from Chris Coyier.

The Sky’s the Limit

With Web Audio, web developers seem to finally have a deep and powerful toolbox for designing and manipulating audio. It’s also ripe for developing new ideas and techniques, as it’s really just beginning to be incorporated into modern web user experiences. My own explorations scratch the surface. I’m continuing to search for new ways to engage others with sound, and I look forward to seeing where things go next.

Additional Resources

SoundJS Visualizer Demo: The source code for this demo is the best resource if you want to start pulling apart the SoundJS Web Audio graph

Designing Sound: Sound design inspiration from the masters.

Chrome Experiments: Another amazing collection of design (both visual and auditory) inspiration.

Adventures with Joshua Davis, Processing, and the Mathematics of Nature

Sun, 17 Jul 2016 14:25:21 +0000

In 2014 I took Joshua Davis’s online class on programming graphics and generative art. I’ve long been a fan of Joshua’s work, and had played around with the Processing language enough to know how fun and powerful it is. So when I found out about the class I jumped at the chance to download a tiny bit of his genius into my brain.

The final class project required us to create a 2D vector image, building on the algorithmic, color, and design techniques we had learned in class. So without further ado, I present to you - Boots and Pickles:

(Well, that’s one of them, anyways.)

My starting point was one of nature’s most amazing mathematical tricks - the Fibonacci spiral.

I had long wanted to tinker with this design and Joshua’s class struck me as the perfect setting. Helpfully, there are several excellent sources online for the basic algorithm to generate the spiral (see below).

Joshua devoted a section of the class to color - particularly tools and techniques for developing a palette. He’s a big fan of finding a color combination that works already, and “ripping it off.” So using some of his recommended tools, I did just that. I took a background from the old TV show “Soul Train” and sampled the dominant colors for my project:

The class focused on a certain workflow: (a) create a small (preferably hand-built) visual component, (b) color it nicely, (c) render it somewhere on the screen using Processing (and Davis’s own rendering framework), (d) repeat.

So I had my colors, I had my pattern, I just needed something to draw. For that, I used boots and pickles. There’s this joke about how if you say “boots and pants and boots and pants and …” over and over it starts to sound like techno music. I liked the idea of translating the joke into an image, but changed it slightly to “boots and pickles,” because why not?

Using some stock boots and pickles images, I hand-traced a few drawings on an iPad, cleaned them up in Inkscape, and added random colors from my Soul Train palette. After a few tests, something started to emerge:

The spiral algorithm came next. The initial calculations are based on this excellent tutorial by Jim Bumgardner. The code I built off that base turned out to be highly sensitive to initial settings (in other words, it was finicky). Rather than it being a tedious challenge, though, its quirky nature opened up the possibility of endless designs. I built in a little randomness to the settings, and once I had the ranges dialed in and a way to speed up the feedback loop, things started getting fun:

Every time I ran the algorithm, something a little different popped out. I’m sure if I sat there and generated patterns long enough, the “perfect” picture would emerge. But I think I ended up with two or three rather nice ones all the same. After picking one particularly good example and adjusting scale, stroke, background texture, aliasing, opacity, and so on, here’s where I ended up:

In sum, I highly recommend Joshua Davis’s class to anyone interested in intersecting art and code. I had a lot of fun with it, and got to work both my coding and visual-design muscles in many new ways.

Percentage Change, A Different View

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:25:21 +0000

I thought I’d take look, from a different angle, at how our State’s small claims filing fees have changed over the last quarter century. I wrote a recursive method (using Processing) that generated a line graph of percentage change from each of the 26 years prior to 2010. The blue line represents the first graph, 1984-2010.

As usual, these figures compare inflation-adjusted dollars.

It is interesting to see how the statistics change depending on where you start. In my last post, I wrote that filing fees have increased by 140% in the 26 year period. I thought this was a large change, when compared to other fee increases. But as you can see above, if I had looked at only a 21 year period, I would have been able to claim a 181% increase. Big difference!

(Sources: N.C. Session Laws; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Small Claims Court Filings in North Carolina: A Graphical Exploration

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The civil judicial system in North Carolina has long featured a “Magistrate’s Court” or Small Claims Court at its lowest rung. These courts were created to serve residents of the state who needed an avenue to inexpensively and quickly resolve disputes involving small sums of money. As Eric Steele observed in his 1981 paper “The Historical Context of Small Claims Courts,” these courts focus on “the ordinary day-to-day grievances and disputes involving the common man.” Without assuming that the disputes are simple just because they are “small,” the Small Claims Court has attempted to competently resolve the system’s largest docket of cases.

The modern design of North Carolina’s Small Claims Court was codified in 1965. Under Chapter 7A of the General Statutes as it was then written, civil claims filed in District Court, where the amount in controversy was not greater than $500, could be assigned to a magistrate “in the interest of expediency.” These cases generally proceeded without attorneys, entailed lower filing fees, and resulted in judgments within 30 days of the filing of the claim.

There is a strong desire in this State for improved access to civil justice in our courts. A crucial part of that is the ease of filing a small claim.

An integral feature of a small claims court has traditionally been a relatively low jurisdictional limit. As of October 1, 2004, when the General Assembly last raised the limit, all claims in Small Claims Court must allege damages of $5000 or less, exclusive of interest and costs. In that year, the amount represented about 14% of the average annual salary in the State, or 39% of the 2004 poverty threshold.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals wrote, in its 1987 opinion in Duke Power v. Daniels, that the State’s Small Claims Court was created “to provide our citizens, corporate as well as individual, with an expedient, inexpensive, speedy forum in which they can process litigation involving small sums without obtaining a lawyer, if they choose to do so.” Central to the court’s definition, then, is the concept that the court was “inexpensive,” and the subject matter jurisdiction was limited to “small sums.”

With this focus on the limit, there has been some interest in how its adjustment affects the court. In William Haemmel’s 1973 study of North Carolina small claims courts, the author identified a raise in the jurisdictional limit as a possible way to increase access to justice:

Consideration should … be given to increasing the jurisdictional amount in small claims actions. At present, claims in excess of $300.00 may not be brought in small claims court. An increase in the jurisdictional amount would increase the number of claims which would be heard by the magistrate. Thus, the overall accessibility to the small claims court by the general public would be enhanced.

There are interests other than a concern for access to justice as well. In the bill that enacted NC’s last increase, the legislators identified the move as a way to “manage resources,” suggesting that it was motivated by a desire to broaden the reach of the magistrates.

On the other hand, filing fees have been given somewhat less notice. Although the Court of Appeals defined the small claims court as an “inexpensive” forum, until recently small claims filing fees were an afterthought, indistinguishable from most any other administrative fee. From all appearances in the General Statutes, fees were raised merely as a result of budget concerns. For example, Session Law 2000-109 (1999 Session) increased small claims filing fees. At the same time, it increased public utility regulatory fees, jail fees, and fees for digital access to agency services, among others.

There appears to be little evidence that the legislature has used fees as a way to control filings or move them from one court to the other—all fees, be they District Court, Small Claims Court, telephone fees, or otherwise—were raised at the same time.

This is in contrast with other jurisdictions, where fees have been more explicitly managed as a check on filing rates. This often arises from a perceived need to control “frivolous” lawsuits. The U.S. Supreme Court amended its rules in the early 1990s to give itself more discretion over in forma pauperis motions. Rule 39.8 of the Rules of the Supreme Court of the United States allowed the Court to deny a motion to file in forma pauperis if it determined that the filing was frivolous or malicious. In Zatko v. California, the Court applied the rule to two petitioners. Its per curiam opinion explained that the new rule was necessary to provide some control over the in forma pauperis docket. The Court claimed a need for more control “[b]ecause in forma pauperis petitioners lack the financial disincentives—filing fees and attorney’s fees—that help to deter other litigants from filing frivolous petitions….”

The second of the Court’s listed “financial disincentives” to file a claim, attorney’s fees, is generally and by design not present in a small claims court. This leaves filing fees as one of the few barriers to entry for those who do not qualify for in forma pauperis status. This factor is easily quantifiable for any period of time, so it presents itself as a viable target for quantitative inspection.

The NC Supreme Court issued an Order on November 3, 2005 establishing the Equal Access to Justice Commission. This was in response to a felt need for the State to “expand access to civil legal representation for people of low income and modest means in North Carolina.” The Order also identified a need to “[d]evelop and implement other initiatives designed to expand civil access to justice, such as increasing community education, enhancing technology, developing assisted pro se programs … [for] low-income people in North Carolina.”

As the Court’s Order reflects, there is a strong desire in this State for improved access to civil justice in our courts. A crucial part of that is the ease of filing a small claim. At that level, financial disincentives (read, fees) would seem to play a central role.

In her influential work on systems analysis, Donella Meadows posited, “To ask whether elements, interconnections, or purposes are most important in a system is to ask an unsystemic question. All are essential. … But the least obvious part of the system … is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behavior.” In that spirit, I undertook to explore some of the most basic quantifiables of the small claims court system: filing fees and caseloads.

I first compiled a table of changes in filing fees using Session Laws, up to June 2010. To standardize the data, it was adjusted to July 2010 dollars, using the CPI South Urban All Items monthly figures. The following two graphs show how these fees have changed over time.

One obvious trend is that, while adjusted fee amounts in District Court in 2010 were less than double the level they were at in 1984, adjusted fee amounts in Magistrate’s Court have almost tripled. In fact, in the twenty-six-year period reviewed, District Court fees increased 48% while Superior Court fees increased merely 21%. Magistrate’s Court fees, the fees that may make the most difference in whether a claim is filed or not, increased 140%. This is despite the legislature’s reducing Magistrate’s Court costs in 2008.

I wanted to explore the possibility that these changing economics of filing small claims have had some effect on filing rates. To do that, I took advantage of an issue-level breakdown of filing rates. In 1998, the Administrative Office of Courts began collecting data on the types of claims filed in Magistrate’s Court. Since then, the AOC has been generating monthly data that could show not just trends in total filings, but trends in specific types of filings as well. The AOC provided me data on the total number of filings for each month beginning in 1998, as well as the number of those filings that included a Summary Ejectment issue.

This graph demonstrates an immediate benefit of breaking out the data. By doing so, we can see that while statewide non-Summary Ejectment filings per capita have declined in the time frame, Summary Ejectments per capita have actually changed little.

So fees have increased, and filings have decreased. This points to general trends, but it reveals little about the source of those trends. Using multivariate regression models, it may be possible to narrow the causes down, but such models applied to time series are notoriously fraught with hazards. Julian Faraway once observed, “The history of the study of the link between smoking and lung cancer shows that it takes a great deal of effort to progress beyond the observation of an association to strong evidence of causation. One can never be 100% sure.” Donella Meadows wrote, “[I]n trying to find statistical links that relate flows to each other, econometricians are searching for something that does not exist. There’s no reason to expect any flow to bear a stable relationship to any other flow.” An honest and plausible regression analysis is best left to the statistical experts to try and conjure.

Instead, I examined one possible cause visually, by culling the data for a kind of natural experiment. Many times, researchers can try to observe the effects in policy changes by finding a “control” population, and comparing the experimental population to that one. This can make it simpler to adjust for unknown variables such as economic changes and global shifts in perception and attitude. For example, if one wanted to look at whether more gun control laws reduced crime, one could compare crime data between states that enacted such laws and states that did not.

I took advantage of the AOC data set’s county-level breakdown of filings, and sought to compare counties of differing economic stations. To do so, I created two charts. Each chart shows the percentage change in per-capita civil filings from 2000-2009 for each court level. Percentages are shown for all 100 counties. In the lower chart, I’ve ordered the bars so that the leftmost bar represents the changes in the “richest” county (as measured by 2009 median income), and the rightmost bar represents the “poorest” county. In the upper chart, I ordered the bars by 2009 population. Owing to an almost certain covariance between population and income, the charts are quite similar.

Focusing on the Magistrate’s Court graph (labeled “CVM”) on the first chart, it doesn’t seem to show a clear pattern. Visually, then, we have no reason to believe that poorer, smaller counties have been decreasing their use of the small claims system in any different way than richer, more populous counties. The decrease is generally across the board.

These charts and graphs were designed to look at avenues for possible study, to ask more questions than they answer. And I think they do. Why did filings go down when the economy was improving? To what extent has the increase in fees been responsible for this? And how have the most recent fluctuations in filing fees affected filings, if at all? There are some rich avenues for exploration here.

Although the causes of fluctuations in small claims court filings in North Carolina are doubtless complex and nuanced, I hope these visualizations refine your understanding of the trends. A particularly interesting observation is the difference in the rate of increase of Small Claims Court fees versus other Court fees. The fact that Small Claims Court fees have risen so rapidly, by comparison, suggests that individuals with small claims are bearing increasingly greater shares of the financial costs of the state’s judicial system. At the same time, the numbers of monetary small claims filed each year are declining on a per capita basis. This is mainly the result of the legislature’s oversimplified fee increases: when Superior Court “phone systems” fees were raised by $1, Magistrate’s Court phone systems fees were raised by $1. This may be easier to draft, but it ignores the math. A dollar means more in a case involving $300 than in one involving $300,000. More importantly, a dollar means more to a person of low income and modest means.

The Equal Access to Justice Commission created several laudible goals when it was formed. Some are concrete but idealistic, such as the establishment of a right to counsel in civil cases. Others are not so much solutions as they are good civil hygiene (“Educate the public”). There is no mention of financial disincentives.

The true cost of filing a small claim had been decreasing since 2008, until the passage of the latest State appropriations bill. As of July 1, 2011, the cost of filing a small claim and having it served on a defendant is $126. In one day, Magistrate’s Court filing fees increased some 30%. (By comparison, the cost for a District Court claim is now $180.) And for the first time, a civil defendant asserting a counterclaim is charged as if he or she is filing a new suit, and any further filings that include a motion require an additional fee.

Blurring the Landscape

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Our intimacy with a place is proportional to the speed we move through it.

That’s the feeling I get when I run sometimes.

There’s a stretch of road near where I live called Lake Dam Road, a long shady hill that sees little traffic. It’s a connector; at the other end of Lake Dam I can turn left or right onto a large throughfare, and run on flat sidewalk for pretty much as far as I want to go.

When I drive down Lake Dam, it seems like a nice quiet neighborhood road. Traffic is easy and light. The trees are tall. And the grass on the side of the road is healthy and clean.

Except it isn’t. But I didn’t really appreciate that until I started running it. I’d go out expecting that my run would be as picturesque and comforting as any drive down Lake Dam. Then I’d see a piece of trash. No worries, I thought, things fall off garbage trucks sometimes. But then I’d see another piece of trash. Then another, then more and more. These manmade pockmarks on the landscape were largely hidden from anyone sitting inside a moving vehicle, paying attention to whatever is up ahead. But on foot, where I am not just moving through the land but working with it, an intimate part of it, the garbage hangs on tree branches and grass tufts right in front of my eyes. It’s as if nature was stretching out her hands, trying to foist the trash back onto me.

One afternoon, I walked down Lake Dam to see how long it would take me to fill up a garbage bag with litter. I didn’t make it a quarter mile.

Here you can see everything I picked up, laid out to completely cover a seven foot by three foot rectangular patch of ground. In two tenths of a mile, on one stretch of neighborhood road, I had collected twenty-one square feet of human garbage.

Included here are an entire large pizza box, a quart-sized pickle jar, full of pickle juice, several Starbucks cups, a toilet paper tube, many alcohol containers, and a cigarette pack that appears to have been purchased in the Middle East.

When I’m driving down the road, it’s easy to lose sight of what I’m passing. It’s not just litter either. It’s other environmental concerns too. It’s architecture, civic planning, poverty, homelessness. How much can you care about a place that you only recognize at 60 miles per hour?

In his excellent TED Talk from 2007, James Howard Kunstler lamented the disappearance of “places worth caring about.” He was referring to the architecture that pervaded suburbia; the dank grey buildings and foreboding public areas that discouraged their own usefulness. Kunstler’s philosophy was, and is, anchored in large part on aesthetics. Beautiful is good, ugly is bad. His very first sentence in the presentation tips off his hand: “The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.”

But what of the entropy that remains hidden from view?

Our intimacy with a place is proportional to the speed we move through it. The details are what make our community what it is. And it is the details that get lost in big-picture stuff. I can’t avoid driving through my community. But I can try to be more aware of the barriers I am putting between myself and my world when I close that car door.

Project Park Day 28 - Connections

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 12:00:00 +0000

It’s been 2 weeks now since I started regular car-free life. Most days I bike to the “good” bus stop, two miles away, then take the bus to work, bike in tow. And last Sunday morning, I biked the entire 12 or so miles to the office. And if I need to run an errand near home, I walk or bike. It’s been mostly an easy transition, although there have been a few hiccups.

A couple of days ago, for instance, I left for work early, rode to the grocery store next to my bus stop, then had to ride back home when I realized I didn’t bring any money. As a result I missed my bus. In a car, that would have been a minor annoyance. Without one, it was painful.

But there have been plusses too.

Last week Miles and I walked to the grocery store. A month ago, we would have drove the mile in our enclosed car (probably with the windows rolled up and air conditioning going), parked, walked straight into the store, shopped, walked straight back to the car, and drove back. We would have been on a specific mission, and would have spent most of the time with each other, mentally and physically insulated from the space and place we moved through.

Instead, our walk slowed us down, and helped us (forced us, perhaps) to remove that insulation. We saw the animals, insects, plants, and trees that are so familiar to our area, yet so easily overlooked. We were intimately aware of the topology of our neighborhood. All it takes is one long walk up a hill to make one aware of the valley-ness of home.

At the store, I gave a dollar to a man sitting on a bench outside. His friend asked me if I was scared of black people. I said no, and asked him if he was scared of white people. A fair question, I thought, on both counts. I bought a little bottle of milk for Miles, then we came out and sat down beside the man. As Miles drank his milk, we talked. He lived nearby, he said, but didn’t elaborate. His breath was heavy with alcohol. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

As we walked away, Miles said goodbye to the man. I wanted to do something, maybe ask him to ride the bus to the Healing Place. I made a mental note to pick up some shelter brochures, for my pack. Mostly, my thoughts were on my son. I was glad that Miles got to meet him, to sit beside him and see that he is a person, just as much as the grocery store bagger he says ‘adios’ to, or the neighbor of ours that drives the Jaguar and waves silently to him.

Take care, and see you on the road.

Resource of the Day

Rivendell Bicycles is not so much a manufacturer of quality bikes and accessories as it is a purveyor of a way of life. Their irregularly-published Rivendell Reader is a must read.

Project Park Day 13 - Dangerous Statistics

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve had ups and downs the last couple of days, with this project. On Thursday night, Stephanie found ourselves both needing the car. She had a church meeting to attend, and I had tickets to the Durham Bulls game for Miles and myself. I considered taking the bus to the game (Durham’s main bus terminal is literally right next to the Durham Bulls parking deck), but eventually we came up with a better plan. I’d take the car, we’d drop her off at church, and she’d get a ride home. Everything went smoothly until I got a call a while later, while sitting at the game. “I’m locked out of our house,” Stephanie coolly informed me. So today’s lesson is: make sure everyone has their keys, even if they are not driving!

This little hiccup was more than made up for today, however. The wife and I were cleaning house this morning, and we eventually started talking about what to have for lunch. “Let’s ride our bikes down to the corner deli,” I said. We had the car out front, of course, so driving somewhere for lunch would have been completely within the rules of the experiment. But I have enjoyed my neighborhood rides, and I wanted to share that enjoyment with Stephanie too. So we hopped on our bikes, and had a leisurely ride together in the sun. We brought home an egg salad sandwich, a reuben, a brownie to share, and two cold bottles of ginger ale. It was quite civilized. Somehow, our ride to and from the deli made my sandwich and soda seem to taste a little better.

Dangerous Statistics

The Observer's Kevin Siers weighs in on a local controversy

While visiting my parents this weekend, my mom noticed I was reading a book on cycling. “There’s a big battle going on here between cyclists and drivers,” she said. And with that, I had something to write about today.

Although my mom didn’t elaborate, a little googling dug up the dirt. Several news articles, letters to the editor, blog posts, and editorials have appeared in Charlotte-area media in the past few months, all taking one position or another on whether bicyclists and motorists should have to share the road. The ignition point, apparently, occurred on July 13, 2010, when Charlotte’s weekly paper published an article that quite viciously attacked the local cycling community (and cyclists in general, really). Tara Servatius, the article’s author, begins by presenting a statistic:

You are 12 times more likely to die bicycling to work than you are if you ride in a car, according to a study by professors at Rutgers University and the European Commission. Other studies put the likelihood of death at 10 times higher per kilometer traveled on a bike.

Using that as the jumping-off point, Servatius compares bike commuting to smoking and putting a baby to sleep on his or her stomach. Her conclusion: that bicycling on the road is an epidemic. That it should be outlawed. That lives would surely be saved if we ridded ourselves of what she calls a self-appointed “protected class.”

It is a provocative statistic, and a provocative conclusion. If it is true, it would certainly be a heavy burden to bear for someone like myself. How could someone with a wife and child at home willingly choose to take great risks to life and limb, just to save some money and perhaps feel a little more fulfilled?

But is it even a valid point?

With a bit of digging, I found a study that may be the source for Servatius’s rage. Making Walking and Bicycling Safer, by John Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra, published in 2000, indeed claims that bicycling fatalities are 11 times higher than car occupant fatalities. Per kilometer.

And there’s catch #1. Per kilometer. So if I rode my bike 12,000 miles this year, instead of driving 12,000 miles, I’d have an 11 times higher statistical risk of dying in an accident, according to the report. Except that that would never happen. I expect that I may possibly ride up to 200 miles on a bike, on a really good month, if I decided to bike commute almost full time.

What if we looked at fatalities per trip, instead of per kilometer travelled? All of a sudden, the statistics start to look a lot different: bicyclists incur 26 fatalities per 100 million trips, compared to 9 for drivers, and 29 for pedestrians. (does that mean we should stop walking, too?). Instead of 11 times more dangerous, we’re talking about something closer to three times more dangerous. Catch #2.

Then there’s the data showing positive trends in cycling safety. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s recent report, 716 cyclists were killed in traffic accidents in 2008. In 1998, the number was 760. More cars on the road in the last 10 years, but fewer cyclist fatalities. Catch #3.

Thirteen percent of the 2008 fatalities involved children under 16. Twenty-eight percent of the cyclists killed had a blood alcohol concentration of .01 or higher. Catch, catch.

And even if we accept the level of risk, what about Servatius’s leap in logic-that we should therefore not cycle? Isn’t the increased risk of death offset at some level by the decreased risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, etc etc? And isn’t there some risk to every human activity? More catches.

In the end, there are too many leaps in logic to count. One thing is for sure, though: Servatius’s data is misleading. At best.

I’m not going to try to exhaustively dissect the data out there, to determine the actual increase in risk that safe cycling imposes. Because others have already done it for me. Notably, Ken Kifer has written an excellent article on the bicycling safety statistics. Rather than rehash his analysis (with which I agree), I’ll provide a Cliff Notes version:

Pucher and Dijkstra could have used other government statistics instead which make bicycling appear 30 times safer, but they used pessimistic figures in order to argue for the construction of bicycle facilities.
The odds of surviving a collision with a motor vehicle on a bike are similar to the odds of surviving a motor vehicle collision in an SUV.
The majority of nighttime fatalities happen to cyclists who were not properly equipped with headlights and taillights.
The average motorist travels over four times as many miles in a year as the average cyclist (by cyclist here, I mean the person who rides on a regular basis). Combining the greater mileage with the speed, we find that the motorist has a higher yearly risk, even if the risk per hour is the same.
Using The Environmental Benefits of Cycling and Walking figures and using the mileage data from 1997, the cyclists has a 1/142 chance of getting killed while cycling during a lifetime. Using the Johns Hopkins figures, we can suppose our cyclist makes 250 bike trips a year for those 60 years; that’s 15,000 trips. Then he has a 1/133 chance of dying with his bike shoes on. Compare these with the lifetime risk of dying in a motor vehicle of 1/60 and 1/83.
However, these figures assume that this cyclist is no safer than any other cyclist.
Only about 1/65th of all emergency room injuries were due to bicycling, yet bicycling is the third most popular exercise activity.
The accident rate for those going to the emergency room was about 24 per million miles and for those being hospitalized was about 7.6 per million miles.

What does all this prove? Perhaps it’s that cycling is safer than driving. Perhaps it’s that cycling is no safer. Perhaps, it’s that whatever position you want to take, you can find data to back it up.

(In the introduction to a 1976 study, Bicycle Accidents and Usage Among Young Adults, authors Stuart A. Schupack and Gerald J. Driessen of the National Safety Council summed up the data problem thusly: “The primary obstacle to be overcome in examining adult bicycling is the gathering of a suitable sample from which to collect reliable data. Neither bicycles nor bicycle drivers are licensed by official agencies. Most bicycle accidents are not entered in any regular, official reporting system except for the few injury-related motor-vehicle involvements. Traffic rules are poorly enforced for bicycle drivers and violations are rarely, if ever, entered on official records. Fuel consumption figures used to estimate automobile mileage are, of course, meaningless for bicyclists. Thus, several of the important sources of information concerning automobile usage and accidents are not available when studying bicycles.”)

My conclusion? Bike commuting is safe enough. I’m not going to worry any more that I’m being irresponsible by choosing to bike. I’ll be safe, and obey all traffic laws. But I’m not going to set an example that one should “tiptoe through life, only to arrive safely at the grave.” You do what you can, and the rest is up to the fates.

Take care, and see you on the road.

Resource of the Day

The Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center, at bicyclinginfo.org, has loads of information on bicycling and walking solutions in communities. In particular, you may want to browse The National Bicycling and Walking Study: 15-Year Status Report, for information on trends in accidents, usage, and advocacy efforts.

Project Park Day 11 - Running on Empty

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:00:00 +0000

So far, so good with the Project. No serious snags as of yet. Frankly, I wish I had a little more trouble with this–it would certainly make for more interesting reporting. Going “car-lite” has just been too easy so far.

Running on Empty

While doing research for this Project, I’ve come across several arguments “against” bike commuting. The same ones seem to appear again and again, and they are mostly really arguments against putting BC on too high a pedestal. Some of them are worth writing about in future posts, but one in particular struck a chord with me.

Some detractors of BC point out that biking expends energy just as driving does. This energy must come from somewhere, the argument goes, and that somewhere is the additional food you have to eat. Once you start tracing back where that food comes from, and what resources are used to produce and deliver it, you will eventually end up at the very same oil wells from which your car’s gasoline is derived.

(This point was made apparent to me long ago when I read Richard Manning’s article for Harper’s, The Oil We Eat. Manning puts America’s food consumption in the context of the Iraq War, but the evidence doesn’t stop at Iraq’s borders.)

To make a simple leap from this point to the conclusion that bike commuting is overrated would obviously ignore a lot. Not the least of which is the fact that some people may not eat more, thus providing the benefit of weight loss. And for some people, weight loss is a good thing.

For me, however, weight loss is not a good thing. Not at all.

Since last January, I’ve lost about twelve pounds from my already-slender frame, or about 2/3 of a pound a month. This is not so much due to biking. It has a lot to do with my taking up running, and probably a little to do with life stressors, and simple inattention to how I’m eating. My doctor has shown some concern in the past, as has my family.

The picture above and to the left was taken two years ago. The picture on the right was taken this morning. Not a huge difference by “Biggest Loser” standards perhaps, but then the last thing I want to do is be in the running to win that particular contest.

Crunching the numbers, a person of my size biking at a leisurely pace expends about 250 calories in 40 minutes, which is about the upper limit of the amount of time I bike in a day. In food terms, that is one stalk of celery with two tablespoons of peanut butter, and ten large baby carrots.

There are two conclusions to make from this. One, we’re talking about the energy in roughly sixty cents’ worth of food. I don’t know how much oil would have been expended for me to eat such a colorful and delicious snack, but it had to have been less than sixty cents’ worth. The USDA has a nice data visualization on its site showing where your food dollar goes. By its count, 3.5% goes to “energy” costs. For my sixty cents, then, we’re talking about roughly two cents.

By contrast, if we assume I covered about 10 miles in 40 minutes on a bike, the same distance in my car would have burned up about a dollar’s worth of gas. (I believe it was David Owen, in his fascinating contrarian Green Metropolis, who wrote that only 10% of the gas that a soccer mom’s Ford Expedition burns is used to propel said mom; the other 90% is used to propel said Ford Expedition.) Even though these are rough numbers, it’s clear that biking wins the fuel wars.

The second conclusion, the more real and more worrisome conclusion, is the same conclusion my doctor advised me of several months ago. It’s common sense, really, but so easy for me to forget. The more active you are, the more you have to eat, if you don’t want to lose weight.

Now where did I put that secret stash of Butterscotch Krimpets?

Project Park Day 9 - I Saw It on the Internet

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since I started this project, and started biking as my primary mode of transportation, I’ve been waiting for the inevitable–a crash. I know it’s bound to happen eventually.

I didn’t expect it to only take nine days though.

Let me say right up front: It was a very very minor crash, and I’m completely fine.

You see, a couple of days ago, I saw this guy do something cool on youtube. (Alright, I realize nothing more really needs to be said at this point. Still, if you’re hungry for details, read on. Sicko.)

The video depicts a rider effortlessly bunny hopping his mountain bike over a 12-pack of beer. (Or what used to be a 12-pack, anyways. He’s no fool.) The clip then breaks the move down, and explains exactly how to do it.

So of course, after watching it a couple times, I was confident I had it down cold. Didn’t even need to try it on the bike. I gave myself a well-deserved pat on the back, knowing that the next time I rode up to something in my way … a stick, a pylon, a fallen orange construction barrel … I’d just fly right over it, just like that guy in the video.

But you know how this turns out, don’t you? So what was it that got me, you ask? Surely, you’re thinking, it was a low fence that took me down. Or perhaps a small child. No, what sent me flying over the handlebars earlier today was a curb.

A five inch, rounded off curb.

I was riding parallel to the curb, on the street side. I decided I would rather be on the sidewalk, and all I needed to do was show off my masterful bunny hopping skill (which I had never really practiced, mind you) and simply sail two feet to the right of me and above the curb. But that’s not how it played out. No, it played out like me catching my wheel under the curb, while the rest of me was still moving. Then, in super slow motion, I tumbled over my bike and into some soft wet grass. I ended up on my back, with my bike laying half over me. Fortunately, it was slow enough, and the grass was soft enough, that I ended up unscathed. I simply got up, picked up my bike, and carried on.

Several witnesses are available to confirm this story.

Resource of the Day

In honor of the hilarity of my pathetically slow “crash,” today’s resource is a comic. Ever since I stumbled on Yehuda Moon, an online comic about an old-school cyclist, I’ve been hooked. Check it out, sometime!

Project Park Day 7 - The Personal Cost of Driving

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Here's a funny picture of a horse-drawn car.

The past couple of days, being the weekend, have been pretty easy on our one-car family. We drove together as we usually would to our usual errands and weekend outings. I did take the car out by myself on Saturday, while Stephanie was doing a little painting and Miles was asleep. I’m in the habit of “getting away” when I can on the weekends, when I have nothing better to do and driving to the bookstore or the coffee shop seems like a fun idea.

Today I took some time to try and plan out the next few days (I’ve learned my lesson, see?). As I thought about what I might need to do today, that I wouldn’t be able to do tomorrow, nothing came to mind. I asked myself if I really needed to go spend money at the book store or coffee shop, and the answer was no. So I grabbed a good book and a beer, and stayed home. I don’t need to tell you that it was a nice afternoon.

How Much Does Driving Cost?

Yesterday I got out a yellow pad and jotted down some quick and dirty numbers, to get an idea of how much I pay each month for the privilege of owning and (over?)using a car. I added up taxes, inspection, registration, gas, depreciation, maintenance, and repair costs. After wondering about the accuracy of this, however, I decided to see if I could do better.

The world is full of estimates of the “cost of ownership” of a car. The “True Cost of Driving” calculator at commutesolutions.org, for example, goes for the kitchen sink approach. Figuring in such indirect “costs” as “transportation equity and diversity” (0.7 cents per mile), it gave me a figure of $1413 per month. Using AAA’s more basic estimates, I calculated my costs at somewhere between $562 and $731. The numbers seem to be all over the place.

It turns out, for me anyway, that nailing down a reasonably accurate figure for my true cost of driving is difficult, regardless of my approach. There are just too many hard choices to make. Do I include sketchy costs in my calculations, like the cost of lost work due to an accident, multiplied by the odds of having said accident? And if so, what numbers do I use? And how accurate would those numbers be? And what price do you put on the stress–of driving an undependable car, of the contemptuous lip curl that appears on my face as soon as I get on the road, of the stop-and-go traffic? Once you start adding and multiplying fuzzy numbers together, the fuzziness compounds on itself until you are, in all likelihood, left with little more than a blind guess.

So I decided that maybe I can’t do much better than the back-of-the-napkin sketch I started out with. Which, for me and my paid-for but ailing Subaru Outback, came out to about $420 per month. By comparison, a 31-day Triangle bus pass costs $68 (fuzz-free!), which includes unlimited transportation on all of the area’s four major bus services.

(Note that my figures, like AAA’s figures, do not figure in “external costs”; they simply try to find how much cash my car is costing me every month. External costs (also known as indirect costs) like the cost of oil spills, noise pollution, and interstate land, are also difficult numbers to calculate. More to the point, each one of these kinds of costs could take a few thousand words just to skim over. And I have to go to bed some time tonight. To give some basis for comparison, though: according to a study cited in “Divorce Your Car!” by Katie Alvord, every dollar spent on operating costs imposes $2.70 in external costs.)

With these figures in mind, the big question in this economic exploration may be: what is the value to me and my family (or you and yours, or anyone) of having that extra car in the driveway? And what is the value of the alternative?

Or maybe the big question is: How much fuzziness can you take?

Resource of the Day:

gotriangle.org. A centralized resource for information on commuting and transit in the Triangle, including bus maps and schedules for all major area transit lines, tools for ridesharing and the free “Emergency Ride Home” program, and even a set of resources for commuter planning and advocacy.

Quote of the Day:

Bicyclists are not licensed. Bicycles have no fees, no registration attached to them. I think they should be a little more considerate of the people that are driving.”

N.C. Representative Nelson Cole (D – Rockingham Co.), discussing his proposed legislation that would require cyclists to ride no more than two abreast, and ride single file when an automobile approaches.

[Update: In 2015 The Atlantic published The True Costs of Driving, solidly debunking the old myth that drivers pay for the roads they use through fees and taxes.]