Car Chases and Bike Bells

I made it home yesterday without getting wet. The Wife had instead taken the Tulane shuttle bus uptown and then walked half a mile to the house, so while my trip took fifteen minutes, hers was more like an hour. A minute after she got home we heard multiple police sirens screaming down South Claiborne Avenue. They just kept coming and coming, and a moment later they were all screaming down the road in the other direction. I was washing something in the kitchen sink when I heard The Wife say something about it, and when I finished I noticed the front door was open. Looking outside I was surprised to find half the neighborhood walking toward the intersection, and half the police force parked in the middle of the road.

It was a car chase that had ended badly for both parties. One of the police cars had slid on the wet streets, wrapping the rear half of the cruiser around a tree and injuring the officers. As we later learned, the truck they had been chasing, which had been flying down Claiborne at around 60 mph, had been caught. I'd venture to say that guy is in some serious trouble. So anyway, the police shut down the 3-lane roadway for the better part of an hour, strapping the police officer to a back board for a trip to the hospital. One of the other officers told us the injuries didn't look too serious. The whole thing was much more interesting than the six o'clock news, though, and we all hung around outside until things calmed down. For a moment I thought about bringing out a bottle of wine and some glasses. You know New Orleanians use any excuse for a party.

The Wednesday ride was interesting! The usual plan for Wednesdays calls for a nice smooth paceline with speeds in the 20-23 range. Today, though, we had Jay and Ali (on his TT bike) who started pushing the speeds up on the way out to the turnaround. As a result, the group speed was fluctuating quite a bit depending on who happened to be on the front at the time. When Jay took a particularly long and fast pull, Donald came past me on the left saying something like, "Oh, so they want to play?" So Donald flies off the front even faster. For the next few miles it was kind of a race up there near the front, and I guess we dropped a few people along the way.

As usual, that made for a relatively slow start to the return trip, not that it stayed that way. We ended up pushing pretty hard most of the way back, but it was much smoother and consistent.

The School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, which is in my building at work, is starting classes soon and as usual the Bike Room is starting to fill up with commuter bikes of all shapes and sizes. Some of them are getting kind of interesting. I've definitely noticed more people commuting by bicycle lately, and I've especially noticed that more and more of them are riding bikes with sensible commuter things like fenders and racks and panniers. This morning I thought I'd take a few pics of some of the more interesting things. There's the single-speed conversion bike with the leopard skin seat, a nice collection of oddball bells, an old Schwinn with a relatively rare old Brooks saddle (with springs!), and various baskets and handlebar accessories, some of which I can't even identify. And of course there's The Wife's bike. It sure would be nice to see this trend continue, but I guess as soon as the price of gas gets back into the comfort zone people will start driving again.