Today was the Tour de Tucson, also known as The Day When You Can Not Drive Any Where Because Traffic is so Snarled. It’s a ride around the perimeter of the city held every year. There are a lot of road closures in all parts of Tucson. I felt bad for the people trapped in traffic. It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, they need to go shopping and they’re in bicycle induced gridlock. Unlike 2013, the weather was perfection. It was in the mid-70s with light breezes. Jim and I rode up the trail awhile.
This is new in Tucson. It’s TuGo, a bike share program. Unlike the bike shares in the Seattle area, bikes must be returned to a docking station. Seattle lets you leave the bike anywhere you want. People frequently abuse that policy by putting them in trees, or the middle of a sidewalk. It will be interesting to see how well this works. It’s $8 for a day pass, but you can only have the bike for thirty minutes at a time. If you over run the thirty minute time frame, then it’s $4 for another thirty minutes. It seems sort of expensive to me, but I have zero knowledge of these systems. The payment algorithm seems stupid as well.
We stood on Congress for awhile watching the Tour go by. A local man won this year with help from the P&S Group. They are a really good team from Hermosillo. Apparently the top two finishers this year had P&S riding tempo for them. The two local guys and P&S swept the top six positions.
This is part of the course. It runs across a wash. The sand is very deep, people have to dismount and run until they get to the bottom of the hill on the far side. If I were to ever do this ride, I would leave the course rather than do this. The kid in the picture was on a mountain bike and he could not make it through.
The cue for the turn.
The course this year was different. I will give the organizer credit for the fact that they changed the route so that no one would have to ride across the tracks of the Modern Street Car. The tracks are deep and have caused a lot of falls since its inception. Having groups of fast movers going across tracks would have resulted in injuries.
We’re feeling much better about things now that it is not so dang hot! It’s much nicer to do the bike or the hike when one’s flesh is not sizzling.
We saw those kinds of rental bike stations in Paris and were impressed with how popular they are. It would be nice to see them catch on here in the states too.
ReplyDeleteThat bike share program does sound expensive to me. I thought the goal of these was to help folks who might not have the $$ for their own bike? If that's the case, I don't think those prices are gonna help the cause. I agree with you on the sand. That would be brutal. We've had to hike-a-bike on occasion, but you sure don't want to do it for too long, especially if it's hot out.
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