The sole point of this post is to present some information on what other government-sponsored pools in the Vienna, VA area charge, and whether or not they break even doing that. Continue reading Post #2042: Local indoor public pools.
Category: Town of Vienna, VA
Post #2040: Reposting a little perspective on growth in the Town of Vienna budget.
As our Town Council works up the nerve to OK the single largest expense in Town of Vienna history, I thought it might be a good time to repost this.
In a nutshell, adjusting for inflation, over the past 60 years:
- Town population increased 43%
- Number of town residences doubled.
- Value of residential real estate increased five-fold.
- Town of Vienna operating budget increased ten-fold.
Post #1820: Dribs and drabs of Town of Vienna historical data.
And, I guess it’s worth saying, pretty much everything we pay the Town to do for us would already be included in taxes paid to Fairfax County. The sole exception is, I think, trash service. The Town may do it nicer, or better, or something. But if Vienna ceased to exist, Fairfax County would still maintain the roads, pipes, police and fire service, and so on, for the taxes that we all already pay to Fairfax.
From this perspective, to make the single largest capital investment in TOV history, to produce something that’s all-but-indistinguishable from a Fairfax County rec center, right down to the annual fee to use it … I guess that’s not unexpected.
Edit: Now that I re-read that, I’m not sure it’s the largest in Town history. I didn’t literally check, memory fades. And when you get right down to it, you need to CPI-adjust everything.
But memory fades, and costs are often pieced out across multiple fiscal years.
But surely, of recent projects (police station, expanded community center, and now this), surely, once I start talking about the expected annual operating loss, then at that point, this building and all it entails surely dwarfs the other two, CPI or no CPI.
If the interest rate is 5%, the value of a perpetuity is 20x the annual payment. If I take (what I see as the grossly optimistic) assumption of the Town’s consultant, of a mere $500K annual loss, a commitment to pay those losses in perpetuity is worth $10M now. (And accordingly, if the real annual loss is more like $1M, that’s about like then town shelling out an extra $20M now.)
It’s a big decision. Let’s leave it at that.
The decision to buy into the government-run gym market appears to me to be, right now, the single largest purchase the Town ever makes. For a long time, anyways.
So in theory, it needs that level of due diligence.
If nothing else, I’d like to see the Town Council put together a local panel of experts, meaning, representatives of nearby local governments that already run municipal pool/gyms (a.k.a. rec centers). Then ask them discuss two topics: Annual operating cost, and annual operating revenue, from running one (or more) of these pool/gym/rec-center things.
Heck, that could be interesting.
Post #2039: Pro-pool propaganda is an objectionable use of tax dollars.
I should preface this by saying that, for a decade, I held job in the U.S. legislative branch that required me to use strictly neutral language in any official publications I wrote.
In that job, in order to indicate that an outcome was uncertain, I was forbidden from saying “X may result in Y“. That statement, as written, is not neutral. It seems to imply that X will result in Y. Instead, I was, without exception, required to use “X may or may not result in Y“, as the only properly neutral way to convey the uncertainty of that relationship. Without exception.
So maybe I’m a little sensitive to tax-financed propaganda.
But, in fact, the Town does this all the time. They certainly did for the now-repealed MAC zoning. And, if you go back and look at the archives, at some point, the Town newsletter morphed from being a source of information, to being the official house organ of Town government, reflecting its point of view.
Again, paid for by our taxes.
And so it goes.
The deep irony is that the Town routinely runs four or more months behind, on publishing minutes from its official meetings. So if you actually want to know what’s been said, officially, so far, as a citizen, you’re shit-out-of-luck, unless you feel like spending an hour paying close attention to the video recordings of recent Town Council work sessions.
But the same Town government that can’t get minutes of its official meetings published in less than half a year can somehow manage to get a slickly-produced mass mailing, with every appearance of attempting to drum up support for a municipal pool, done in a perfectly timely fashion.
Anyway, if by magic, today’s mail brought me the following postcard. In addition to a beautiful artist’s conception of the facility on the front, it has this wording on the back, emphasis mine:
There’s no way for me to read this as anything other than advocacy. “If you like this, please let Town Council know.” (Separately: Describing this as Town Council’s proposal is also, I think, objectively incorrect. Use of citizen “wish list” was annoying in its gratuitous evocation of positive feelings.
Or, in my case, evocation of the Sears Roebuck catalog.
This in no way reflects on the merits or lack of merits of Town staff’s proposal for a municipal pool. I’ve addressed the revenue projections from that in the just prior posts. And, for sure, none of the advocates seems to stress that this will be a $1,000-a-year family membership pool/gym, similar to but with less comprehensive facilities than the many Fairfax County rec centers in this area.
In fact, if you read that postcard, it sure reads as if a temporary (not stated: 10-year-long) increase in the meals tax will pay for everything. But that’s misleading. Somehow the Town staff did not mention their consultant’s proposed schedule of fees, which, no surprise, looks pretty much like the fees that Fairfax County charges to use its similar (but larger) facilities.
Anyway, if you’re going to set yourself up running a taxpayer-financed business — which is what we’re talking about here — you need to approach it as a business decision. Not as something for which Town staff advocacy is normalized.
Conclusion.
Again, this is neither here nor there, with regard to the wisdom of the decision.
I’m just pointing out that when I worked for a government entity, if I’d manage to do what Town staff just did — use tax dollars to produce a public-directed bit of advocacy — I’d have been fired, no questions asked.
But in the TOV, this is just business as usual. We’re so used to it that I’d bet nobody in the Town power structure even gave this use of tax dollars, to sway Town Council opinion, a second thought.
Post #2038: Wading into the Town of Vienna pool, adding on a baby pool
The Town of Vienna is considering building a municipal pool/weight room, at an initial cost of around $32M, including the purchase price of the land it sits on. The projected ongoing annual cost to the taxpayer appears to be in the neighborhood of $500K. Ish. But that’s net of a projected annual revenue of about $1.7M.
This new facility would provide people in the area an opportunity to purchase a roughly $1,000/year family membership, or pay (say) $10/head/visit.
And yet, everyone in this locality already has that opportunity. Except for the location, the smaller size, and the more limited facilities, this proposal from the Town of Vienna appears to be not much different from the existing Fairfax County Rec centers in this area.
But, near as I can tell, the Town’s analysis ignores the existing government-run gyms in the area. Above, left, is the view of the market area that was delivered to Town Council this past September. Above right, I’ve added in the three nearest Fairfax County rec centers.
I will again state that these County rec centers are very nice facilities. The Oakmont rec center is, by far, the nicest gym that my wife and I have ever used. Our local Fairfax County rec centers offer a broader range of activities than the Town can offer in this location, up to (e.g.) golf courses.
Other than location, the only unique aspect that I saw for the Town’s proposal is that it leans toward having a “fun” indoor pool (= child oriented), as opposed to the more serious (= exercise-centric) indoor pools found at the County rec centers.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but anyone in Vienna who wanted to pay $1K/year for a family membership to a government-run gym and indoor pool has long had the opportunity to do so. That fee gives your family access to a set of rec centers that is top-notch, and offers a broader array of facilities than than the Town can offer.
This would suggest that any projection of revenues, from the Town’s pool, ought to be done conservatively.
Seems like a good place to start, then, with a realistic project of likely Town of Vienna revenues, is with those Fairfax County rec centers.
I thought I should do a straight-up projection of likely revenue, based on what Fairfax County has experienced with its similar, but better, rec centers.
In effect, these are the revenues to be expected if the Town is able to sell its government-run pool/gym to its own citizens (only!), to the same extent that Fairfax County is able to sell its rec center services, to its citizens.
Here’s how the two compare.
All I’ve done is taken the observed Fairfax County rec center revenues per Fairfax County resident, and boosted them for the higher average incomes in Vienna.
Alternative simple estimate: revenue per square foot. An alternative way to get at a similar estimate is simply to take rec center revenues per square foot, for the county, and multiply by the proposed square footage of the Vienna municipal pool facility. Like so:
Again, the result is nowhere near the Town’s projected revenues. Edit: In hindsight, I screwed that up, the revenue number should be more like $22M, and the resulting revenue per square foot more like $750K. Still a long way from the projected $1.7M for the 30,000 square foot proposed Vienna pool/gym.
Finally, there is limited public information available for Herdon, a nearby Virginia Town with a larger, but less affluent population. Herndon maintains a pool/gym, indoor tennis courts, a golf course, and other amenities.
In total, Herndon’s Parks and Recreation revenues — from a roughly 60% larger citizen population, and a far broader array of offered services — was $1.8M, per their most recent Comprehensive Financial report (2023 report, Exhibit A2). I get the vague impression that most of that revenue came from the golf course, but I was unable to pin it down any further. (Edit 10/26/2024: Upon reading Herndon’s budget, that must be wrong. They maintain distinct funds for their Golf Course and their cemetary. So figures pertaining to golf course costs and revenue should not appear on (what I hope was) an analysis of Herndon’s general government fund.)
In any case, this again suggests that the Town’s estimate of revenues, for the proposed municipal pool, is optimistic. Presumably, all it would take is a phone call, from Town of Vienna to Town of Herndon, to get the actual annual revenues from Herndon’s municipal pool. (Edit: If such a figure exists, e.g., if Herndon has a way of tracking specifically revenue for use of the pool/gym facility)
Will our Town Council do that much due diligence before proceeding further?
Maybe they already have, but there’s no easy way to know. At the current rate, it looks like the Town Council might get around to publishing the minutes from its most recent work sessions sometime this coming spring. (Thus, staying within the letter of the law, while keeping the citizens in the dark to the greatest extent possible.) Once the Town gets around to that, Edit: if they haven’t already voted to fund the pool, once they’ve voted to fund the pool, as this looks increasingly like a done deal to me, then maybe I’ll read those to try to find that out whether they bothered to ask Herndon about its revenues, from its municipal pool. My guess is we’ll never see that, from the Town, unless the answer is favorable to the “yes” decision to build our own government-run pool and weight room.
Post #2037: Wading into the Town of Vienna pool.
I had a friend ask about the new pool. Against my better judgment, I decided to try to get the facts straight, about a proposed Town of Vienna municipal pool and weight room.
I didn’t get very far. But if you read nothing else, pause to consider the two maps below.
Edit 10/24/2024: What a sheep I am sometimes. I fell right into this one. Just copyin’ the slides.
The price tag above excludes the purchase price for the property (the land), and the cost of demolition of the then-existing structures. The issue at hand is the amount the Town now needs to borrow, but if you’re reckoning the total cost, you need to add in the cost of the land and prep, call it another $6M.
Full disclosure: My family belongs to one of the private membership pools in Vienna. We also use the Fairfax County rec centers, which come with pools. Neither of one influences my thinking, but both give me some perspective, I think.
Continue reading Post #2037: Wading into the Town of Vienna pool.
Post #2008: Pedestrian traffic counts via cheap camera.
It took about an hour to construct the vehicle and foot traffic counts you see here. The hardware was an $18 Kasa camera, plus my laptop to view the resulting footage.
I let the camera film the street in front of my house. That was not intrinsically different from (e.g.) a Ring doorbell. (It is legal in Virginia to film anything in the public right-of-way, or anything you can view while in the public right-of-way, other than restricted areas such as military installations, as long as you don’t record conversations that you are not part of.)
I then did the simplest thing possible. I transferred the SD card from camera to laptop, and watched the video on fast-forward. It was like the worlds most boring, yet tense, home video. I stopped the film when something happened, and put down tally marks.
The fastest I could comfortably watch was 16X. Doing that, recording the events in eight hours of video took about an hour. (The camera itself is capable of noting the passage of cars, via built-in motion detection, but would not identify passing pedestrians at the distance this was from the street.)
If nothing else, this confirms what my wife and I had both noticed, that this street is used by a lot of dog-walkers.
This is just a proof-of-concept. Today it’s drizzly, and there’s a school holiday, so this would not be representative of typical Friday morning foot traffic.
The context is the value of sidewalk improvements in the Town of Vienna. With rare exception, there are no counts of pedestrian traffic in any of the Town’s various studies. (I did find one, once, but they referred to rush-hour pedestrian street crossing counts along selected corners of Maple Avenue, our main thoroughfare).
The idea being that there’s more value in putting a sidewalk where people will use it, than putting it where they won’t. Assuming that current foot traffic along a route is a good indicator for eventual foot traffic there, once a sidewalk is built. (There could be exceptions to that. But in the main, I think that’s right.)
And that, for planning purposes, you’d like to have some idea of what they’re using a particular route for.
There are currently at least two ways to get pedestrian count data on (e.g.) suburban side-streets that do not have traffic lights. Other than the old-fashioned approach of having somebody sit by the street and count passers-by.
One is to use cell-phone data, because many cell phones track and report their user’s location on a flow basis, and that information is sold commercially. Courtesy of the improved accuracy of GPS, data vendors can now tell you (e.g.) how long the average customer walks around a store, based on how long their cell phones linger there.
(I am not sure that this tracking is entirely “voluntary” or not. That is, did you download an app that, had you bothered to scrutinize the dozens of pages of fine print before clicking “ACCEPT”, would have revealed that you gave that app the right to collection and transmit your location to some central source? Or, just as plausibly, if you don’t manage to turn off every blessed way that your phone can track you, then somebody’s picking up your location on a flow basis, you just have no clue whom? For sure, the phone companies themselves always have a crude idea of where your phone is (based on which cell tower your area nearest), and I’m pretty sure they also get your GPS data, nominally so that they may more accurately predict when your signal needs to switch from one cell tower to the next.)
The problem with counts based on cell-phone tracking that it is of an unknown completeness. Plausibly, some people manage to keep themselves from being continuously tracked. Or, more likely, any one data vendor only buys that data from a limited number of app providers. Generally, it’s fine for making relative statements about one area versus another, but needs to be “calibrated” to real-world observations in order to get a rule-of-thumb for inflating the number of tracked phones in an area, to the actual on-the-ground pedestrian count.
Plus, it costs money, and it’s geared toward deep-pocketed commercial users.
Finally, it’s likely that certain classes of pedestrians will be systematically under-represented in cell phone data, most importantly school children, but also possibly joggers.
The other way to do it in the modern world is to use a cheap camera. Then count by eye.
So, as an alternative, I decided to see how hard it would be to gather that information this way. Turns out, it’s not hard at all, even with doing the counts manually. All it takes is a cheap camera, my eyes, and, for eight hours of data, an hour of fast-forwarding.
Not sure where I’m going with this, in the context of writing up the multi-million-dollar make-over of my little street. I just wanted to prove that it’s not at all hard to get data-based counts of pedestrian traffic on any street. All you need is a camera, and a place to put it. And the time to view the results, if you can’t figure out an automated system for that.
My approach may be a bit low-tech for the 21st century in the surveillance state. But it works. Fill in the hourly wage of (say) the employee who would have to watch that video, and you come up with a pretty cheap way to provide hard data on need for sidewalks, as evidenced by counts of pedestrian foot traffic.
If you’re going to spend millions of dollars on sidewalks … how could you not do this first, to see that the expenditure is efficient, in the sense of pedestrians served per dollar of expense?
More on this still to come.
Coda
As if to underscore the power of the surveillance state, about six hours after I posted this, I got my first-ever email from Kasa, with an offer for a video doorbell.
That, presumably, because this blog post had the words “Kasa” and “doorbell” in it.
This happens enough that I know the root cause of it.
Sure enough, yesterday I signed into Google, using this browser, to access something via my Google account, and I foolishly forgot to sign out. Google was therefore somewhat aware of just about everything I did on this browser in the meantime.
Presumably Google ratted me out to Kasa.
Somewhere, the ghost of Orwell is surely laughing.
Post #2000: A sidewalk, at $2000 per linear foot, in the Town of Vienna VA
Not a typo, unfortunately. And, even more unfortunately, planned for my sleepy suburban street.
And not even “a” sidewalk. For that paltry sum, we get two half-sidewalks, on opposite sides of the street. That, together with a new mid-block crosswalk, is TOV government’s answer to the Town Council directive to “put a sidewalk” on my street.
I am going to take a couple of posts to tell the story of this, as I see it.
But, to cut to the chase, the punchline involves ~$2.5 million in free COVID money that the Town picked up. Which has now become use-it-or-lose-it COVID money.
Which, I think, explains the Town’s decision to fire the money cannon at my street. Mostly. The terrain is also difficult in spots.
To cut to the final chase, I’m going to make the case that this is poor value. And, that this is unsurprising, given that the process by which the Town is spending a free $2.5 million has little focus on value to the citizens. I don’t believe the Town is deaf. It may respond if you complain. But that’s not the same as a value-focused planning process.
Anyway, this will be the story of how my Town is getting rid of $2.5M before it evaporates providing better pedestrian safety along Glen Ave SW.
It’s going to take a few posts to tell this. This is not my idea of fun.
FWIW, my sole written comment to the engineer in charge of this is that he produce one sidewalk, on one side of the street or the other.
Part of this series of posts is to try to explain why I think he won’t or can’t do that.
First things first: Could I literally pave this street with money, for that price?
Answer: Sure. In the sense of tiling the surface of the existing asphalt with U.S. currency.
A piece of U.S. paper currency covers about 16 square inches. (Bills are a bit over 6″ x 2.5″). Therefore $2.5M in $1 bills would cover (2,500,000 x 16 / 144 =~) 260,000 square feet. The street in question is about 25 feet wide and maybe 1400 feet long, so it’s (25 * 1400 = ) 35,000 square feet.
For $2.5M I could pave (tile) my street with a 50/50 mix of $5 and $10 bills.
My point is not (just) to be a wise-ass, but to get a kind of gut-check on this. There’s a lot of streets in Vienna that have nothing for sidewalks. Town staff show an almost complete reluctance to spend local taxpayer money on sidewalks. (Preferring to wait for grants, I guess, no matter how slow that process.)
My only point is that my gut tells me this is a lot of money to spend, for so little additional functionality to the citizens. In a Town that is far from lavish about spending it’s own taxpayers’ money on sidewalks.
So I’m going to take a couple of posts-to-be to analyze the situation. As I see it. FWIW.
Post #1999: Power outages aren’t what they used to be.
A couple of days ago, we lost power for a few hours in the the aftermath of hurricane Debby, as it moved up the coast. I took a walk during a break in the rain and found that a tree had split, bringing down some power lines a couple of blocks from my house.
Here are a few observations, sitting on my back porch, waiting for the power to come back on.
1: It’s noisy around here when the power goes out.
Source: Electricgeneratorsdirect.com
Used to be, power outages brought some quiet to the ‘burbs. If nothing else, in the summer, all the AC compressors shut off.
But now, I can barely hear the wind in the trees over the droning of home emergency power generators in my neighborhood. Instead of a bit of idyllic quiet, it suddenly sounds like I’m in the middle of a busy construction site.
All it lacks are the back-up beeps.
Unsurprisingly, these are all attached to the gi-normous McMansions that have sprung up in my neighborhood over the past decade. (See my prior posts on the “tear-down boom” in Vienna VA.) I’m guessing that about one-in-three of these new houses came with a permanently-installed natural-gas-fired generator.
The instant the power goes out, instead of quiet, you hear generators kicking in all over the neighborhood. I can hear at least three, from my back porch. Those turn on automatically, and won’t shut down until the power comes back on. No chance they’ll run out of fuel, because these are connected to the natural gas supply.
It’s not as if my neighbors suddenly had some sort of preparedness mania. They didn’t rush out and buy big home emergency generators in anticipation of the next snowpocalypse. It’s that if you’re going to pay $2 mil for a house with all the extras (home theater room, sunken walk-in closets with windows, wine room, and so on), the $10K cost of an installed generator is rounding error.
So this is how power outages will sound in my neighborhood, for the rest of my life. And as more small houses are torn down and replaced by as-large-as-the-law-allows McMansions, the density of emergency generating units is only going to go up from here.
2: What is the sound of one reefer idling?
Now we get to the truly annoying part.
Near as I can tell, these new-fangled generators all seem to be old-school direct-drive units. That is, an internal combustion engine (burning natural gas, in this case) is directly coupled to a generator creating alternating current (AC).
With that setup, the speed of the gas engine determines the Hertz (frequency) of the AC voltage. The gas engine must therefore run at constant high speed to maintain 60 Hertz (cycles-per-second) AC. That’s achieved by a governor that tightly regulates the speed of the engine. At low electrical load, the engine runs just as fast and as loud as at high load, it just strains less to keep the generator spinning.
To a close approximation, these things are every bit as loud at idle — with no significant electrical load — as when they are putting out their maximum rated load.
The upshot is that each one is about as loud as a refrigerated truck.
So, instead of a bit of quiet, a power outage now means that my neighborhood sounds like a bunch of big diesel trucks are parked here,running at high idle.
3: Where was I? Ah yes, thrum-thrum-thrum. Quiet emergency generators, explained.
So, as I sit on my back porch, enjoying the breeze and listening to the throb of my neighbor’s emergency generators,I figure I should explain the concept of “quiet” inverter-generators.
With an inverter-generator, the gas (or natural gas) engine turns a generator that generates DC electricity, which feeds a piece of power electronics called an inverter, which then electronically generates the required 120 volt 60 hertz AC.
For that style of generator, there is no link between the speed of the gas engine and the frequency of the resulting AC (house) voltage. This means that under light load, the internal combustion engine can slow down, and for any power demand, can be run at the speed/torque combination that most efficiently produces the required power output.
So inverter-generators are both more efficient, and on average quieter, than old-school direct-driver generators. Though you will hear the engine speed change if there is a material change in the electrical load placed on the inverter.
Old-style direct-drive generator units are simpler to make than inverter-style generators. But they are inherently less efficient, and, it seems, intrinsically louder, on average. In any case, modern inverter-style generators have taken over the small-portable-generator market, specifically because they can be marketed as “quiet” generators.
4: Direct-drive generators, inverter-generators, and three-legged-dog generators.
But my neighbor across the street, and one house up, seems to have purchased the worst possible kind of emergency generator. It’s a maintenance-free natural gas generator that nevertheless runs like a three-legged dog.
The engine on that has kind of a ragged one-cylinder miss. Which means that the engine speed and sound are constantly changing. Which means the noise doesn’t fade into the background, but is constantly noticeable. Particularly if you know anything about how an internal combustion engine is supposed to sound.
The result is an impossible-to-ignore loud thrumming noise, originating about 50 yards away.
Worse, while it sounds like it has a fouled spark plug, if I listed closely, a) the miss is a little bit too regular, and b) it seems to stop briefly from time to time. I’m guessing this may be how the engine is supposed to run, and that it purposefully shuts down a cylinder under low load. (I recall that GM tried such a strategy with some V8s, where fuel flow to half the cylinders could be cut off (e.g., when cruising at speed on the highway, where horsepower demand is low.)
So I think that not only am I being treated to the relentless thrumming of this generator for this outage. I think that’s actually the way the thing is supposed to run. So that I will be treated to this delightful noise every time the power goes out, from here on in.
I guess if I don’t like it, I can just hole up inside.
I may be without power for a while.
Maybe I need a my own whole-house generator. That way, I can sit inside, in the AC, during a power outage, like all my neighbors.
4: Quieter emergency power? Hybrid-or-EV-plus-inverter, and USB-tethered Wifi hotspot.
For my emergency power source, I keep a 1 KW inverter on the shelf of my garage. Hook that up to the 12V battery of a Prius, turn the car on and leave it, and run a heavy-duty extension cord from car to house. The car will start and run the gas engine occasionally, to keep the battery up. The only sound it makes is the occasional few-minute stretch with the Prius idling.
If the power isn’t back on in a couple of hours, I can set that up so that up so I can run the fridge. In the meantime, I got around the loss of my FIOS internet by attaching my phone to my laptop, and using my phone as a Wifi hotspot.
5: Aside: Of magnetos and bike speedos.
Source: Amazon.
Weirdly enough, I just installed a generator of sorts the day before this storm.
Old-school direct-driver backup generators are alternators. That is, they directly convert mechanical motion into alternating current.
New-style inverter-generators are generators. That is, they convert mechanical motion into direct current. Which is then converted to alternating current by an inverter. (Well, technically, a generator is anything that generates electricity, AC or DC. But if it generates DC, you have to call it a generator, not an alternator.)
And then there are magnetos, something most have only heard about in the context of piston-engine-driven aircraft. A magneto generates pulses of electricity used to fire the spark plugs of the engine. It does this by passing a rotating magnet near a densely-wound coil of wire. A common example is a typical gas lawn mower, where a magnet embedded in the flywheel creates the spark for the spark plug is it whips past a coil mounted a hair’s-breadth away from the flywheel.
And, oddly enough, an old-fashioned wired bike speedometer uses a magnet on the spokes, and a coil of wire on the front fork, to generate pulses of electricity in time with the turning of the wheel, which it then translates to speed. Not exactly a magneto, but definitely in the magneto family tree somewhere.
6: Final aside: Just say no to GPS
Finally, apropos of nothing, bike speedometers are yet another area where the tech changed when I wasn’t looking. And, in so doing, converted bike speedometers to just another class of disposable electronic devices.
Old-school wired bike speedometers work as described above. They are, in effect, little magnetos, counting the rate at which a magnet on your spokes creates a tiny little electrical signal as it passes a fixed coil of wire. In addition to wired bike speedometers, there are old-school wireless ones where the magneto signal is sent via radio waves. Near as I can tell, these have all the drawbacks of wired ones, and none of the advantages.
But, because these are both old technologies, typical units come with easily-replaced standard button-cell batteries. Buy a good one — I am partial to the Sigma brand — and they’ll last for decades. Just change the battery every few years.
And then there’s GPS bike speedometers. The latest thing.
In theory, this is a step up from magneto-based bike speedos, because there’s no need for any cables. The speedometer captures a GPS signal, so it knows your location, and can infer your speed. All for about the same $30 cost as a name-brand wired bike speedometer.
OTOH, owning one of those means that your bicycle now makes a permanent, downloadable record of exactly where you rode your bike, and when. Presumably, this appeals to people who don’t mind all the involuntary electronic surveillance we already undergo.
But I simply didn’t want to buy yet another device that tracks me. So, despite the ease of installation (no cables), I took a pass on a GPS-based bike speedometer.
If you immediately got to that punchline as soon as you saw “GPS”, then you get an A.
But, in addition, if you also inferred that these all inexpensive GPS-based bike speedometers have non-replaceable batteries, change that to an A+
And so, as with so much modern small electronics, these devices are disposables. They come with an embedded USB-rechargeable lithium-ion battery. When (not if) the battery reaches the end of its life, your sole option is to chuck your old one in the trash, and buy a new one.
Worse, there is clearly no engineering reason for this. The previous generation of bike speedometers all had replaceable batteries.
It’s just that times changed. User-replaceable batteries on cheap electronics had already become a thing of the past by the time low-cost bike GPS speedometers came on the market. And so, if you want a cheap GPS-based bike speedometer, your sole option is to buy a disposable one. Though, of course, none of them are labeled that way.
Which is how I ended up installing a little magneto-based wired bike computer on my wife’s bike. It keeps no record of where I’ve biked. And when the battery wears out, I can replace it.
Conclusion
When one house in a neighborhood has an automatic backup power generator, that’s an oddity.
When every third house has one, it’s cacophony. As soon as the power goes out, the neighborhood is full of the sound of many loud, small, internal combustion engines, each powering an old-school direct-drive alternator.
I hadn’t realized how bad it had gotten in my neighborhood until I tried catching some breezes on my back porch, during this most recent power outage. A power outage now makes my neighborhood sound like an overnight truck-stop parking area.
With any luck, maybe this is just a phase these houses are going through. These days, you can buy a power wall or similar large home storage battery, which then serves as your backup power source. So that maybe the next wave of oversized McMansions will come with quiet emergency power.
But for now, as small older houses in my area are steadily torn down and replaced by McMansions — where the built-in emergency generator seems to be a popular option at the moment — it’s only going to get louder.
Post #1993: Reflections on renewing my driver’s license.
My trip to the DMV was a pleasure.
I never thought I’d say that. Not in my lifetime. Not unironically.
But, truly, it could not have been easier. I had to renew my license in person, if for no other reason than to have my vision tested. I made an appointment on-line, followed the instructions, and the DMV worked like a well-oiled yet seemingly-people-friendly machine.
Total time at the DMV? Seventeen minutes, car-door-to-car-door.
Not like it was in the good (?) old days, that’s for sure. But the VA DMV has been on a roll for decades now, in terms of streamlining service delivery and doing as much business as possible over the internet rather than in person.
The DMV even threw in the upgrade to RealID. For a slightly higher fee. Hate the concept. Took them up on the offer anyway.
This is not to say that I am a pushover when it comes to upselling. I declined the RealID subcutaneous RFID implant, even though the additional fee was quite modest. Maybe I’ll go for that when I get my passport renewed.
In any case, I still see well enough to drive. I’m still able to bumble my way through a DMV visit.
Guess that makes this a good day. I should enjoy the now.
My next mandatory license renewal is in 2032. Logically, I recognize that number as a year that will occur eight years from now. But it otherwise lacks reality to me. Might as well be forever and a day.
Post #1979: Catching up with a few things.
Day trips: Great Falls, Maryland and Sky Meadows, VA.
Sky Meadows is one of our under-appreciated Virginia State Parks. The main hike at Sky Meadows (above) is a seemingly-easy half-mile walk up a hillside meadow with nice views. It’s only a half-mile to the top, but that’s at a constant 18% grade.
We (pant) took many (pant) pauses to (pant) admire the view. On a clear day (e.g., without forest fire smoke), you can see the tall buildings at Reston, VA, roughly 50 miles away.
Roses are red, boysenberries are purple.
My little patch of berries is doing well. Black raspberries have peaked. Blackberries (above) are doing OK. Currants and gooseberries are about done. Wineberries are still to come.
My boysenberries are now ripening. Three years ago I put in a few boysenberry plants. I did this for the novelty, as I can’t recall ever having seen boysenberries for sale in this area (Virginia). Now, having grown some, I understand why. Technically, they are cane fruits. In some climates, they may in fact produce stout canes. But in my yard, they are low, creeping, sprawling plants. They are hard to grow, in that it’s all-but-impossible to weed around them. They’re a pain to pick, as the berries are borne just a few inches off the ground.
A ripe boysenberry looks like a purple blackberry, as shown above. When less than totally and fully ripe, boysenberries and blackberries taste about the same to me. But fully ripe, each berry yields a few seconds of its own distinct flavor. Boysenberries are different from blackberries, but I would not say that a fully-ripe boysenberry is better than a fully-ripe blackberry. And blackberries are vastly easier to grow, in my climate.
In both cases, once the fruit is fully ripe, it’s very soft and won’t travel. Near as I can tell, the only way to taste a fully-ripe blackberry is to grow it. And around here, the only way to taste a fresh boysenberry, at all, is to grow it.
Bike rehab success.
I must have made the right choices in rehabbing my wife’s BikeE recumbent bike (Post #1978 and earlier). This, because she was gadding about town, on that bike, for a couple of hours today. There’s the bike, on the W&OD trail this morning.
My sole useful advice was to mind her coccyx, in the sense that a long bike ride on a recumbent can leave you with a sore butt, particularly if you haven’t done any riding in a while.
This bike rehab project remains unfinished. I managed to get the bike into ride-able condition, but I have been unable to get the three-speed rear hub and other bearings serviced. My local bike shop took on the task, then declined to work on the bike due to a damaged shock mount. (Apparently my 15-year-old repair of that mount left them unimpressed.)
This is the problem with riding what is, in effect, an antique. I need to find another bike shop in my area that can rebuild a Sachs 3×7 rear hub. That’s a bit of a trick, given that every part for those has been out of production for a couple of decades.
Poor garlic yield
This year marks my fourth attempt at growing garlic in my back yard garden. This year I bought seed garlic (i.e., big heads with big cloves) from a local grower, made sure the soil had adequate nutrients including sulfur, and generally I Did What They Told Me To Do. Including planting after our nominal first frost date in the fall.
Once again, my dreams of growing garlic heads the size of my fist are unrealized. In fact, this is shaping up to be my fourth failure at growing garlic. As with my prior attempts, my heads of garlic are tiny. About half of my garlic is still in the ground, but it’s clear that most or all of my garlic heads will be on order of 1.5″ diameter or so. Almost but not quite unusable.
At this point, I’ve tried using different garlic varieties, planting times, backyard locations, and soil amendments and fertilizers. But I always get the same result.
I suspect that I just don’t have enough sunlight to grow full-sized garlic. My garlic bed gets about 5 hours of direct sunlight a day. Growing guides variously recommend “at least six hours”, and in some cases, eight-to-ten hours of direct sunlight per day. Garlic doesn’t have a whole lot of leaf area, and as a consequence, I’m guessing it really needs more direct sunlight than is available in my back yard.
Plant propagation: Snip-and-dip success, air layering fail.
Seven weeks ago, I started to propagate some schip (skip) laurels by two methods: Air-layering, and snip-and-dip (Post #1967).
The snip-and-dip plants are thriving, as shown above. Seven weeks ago, these were green branch tips that I snipped off, dipped in rooting hormone, stuck in wet potting soil, then kept moist and out of direct sunlight. These cuttings are obviously thriving.
Air layering skip laurels, by contrast, has been a total dud (above). The internet told me I’d have a big ball of roots at the end of that cutting after just four weeks. After four weeks, I had nothing. After seven weeks, there are some little bumps on the bark that might, eventually, become roots. My guess is that for a schip (skip) laurel, I’d have to tend to that air-layered branch all summer to have any hope of having a root ball form. Snip-and-dip is a lot easier and in this case a lot more effective.
Sketchy no more.
The scene on the left is a particularly sketchy bit of sidewalk in my neighborhood, as of March 2024 (Post #1950). The scene on the right is the same stretch of sidewalk, now. Presumably, in the interim, the Town of Vienna Department of Public Works has been at work.
That was good to see, given that the Town, in Its infinite wisdom, has decided to tear up my street next year. This, due to free money from Covid.
The plan is to bury the roadside swales that have been there for half a century, widen the street, and almost manage to convert it into just another cookie-cutter suburban street. The point of which is to provide “a sidewalk” on my street. In this case, for reasons only apparent to DPW, the sidewalk will cross the street mid-block. Thus, when they are done, anyone wishing to walk down my block, on the sidewalk, will be required to cross the street in front of my house.
My bet is that nobody is going to use the sidewalk beyond that ridiculous crossing. Other than the geezers in the 100+ bed assisted living facility that the town permitted at the end of the block.
Which, although nobody will admit it, is why this one-block-long sidewalk has to cross the street mid-block. Because it’s not for residents on the block to use, it’s for benefit of the commercial establishment at the end of the block. (The sidewalk crosses the street in order to attach to the sidewalk directly adjacent to the assisted living facility).
But hey, if somebody else is paying for it, and you are in a use-it-or-lose-it situation, the more money it wastes, the better.
Anyway, kudos to the Town for putting the this particularly run-down bit of local sidewalk back into good repair.
I am not looking forward to next year’s makeover of my street. But the Town owns the right-of-way, and they can do pretty much whatever they damn well please with it. Which, apparently, is pretty much the Town’s view of the issue, as well.
Cultivating my first deadly toxic plant.
To the casual observer, that looks like a bunch of un-ripe cherry tomatoes. Those are actually potato fruit, what you get if you allow your potatoes to flower. These are quite toxic due to their high solanine content.
