Bloomington City Council Hamstrings Award-Winning Bike Lanes

Update:  Mayor John Hamilton has vetoed this measure. Thank you Mayor Hamilton for your support of the 7-Line! The city engineer has issued a new order keeping the Dunn Street stop sign in place for 180 days. After that a new council will vote again on making that sign permanent, and hopefully not amend the request this time.

Going against the recommendations of their Bicycle and Pedestrian Commission, their Traffic Commission, myself and two other members of the public, and four members of their own body, the Bloomington City Council voted to place three new stop signs on 7th Street. The signs will stop cars on the line, but also will force bicyclists to stop on the 7-Line, Bloomington's bike lane that was named one of the top ten bike projects of 2022.

The 7-Line is a protected bikeway that stretches from the downtown B-Line up to Woodlawn Avenue, close to the heart of the Indiana University campus, and using the 7-Line minimizes the time it takes to get from downtown to campus by bicycle. There are enough heavily-trafficked cross-streets that in many places you might as well still be walking, but bike signals allowing bicycles to cross College Avenue and Walnut Street help to get across those streets. Riding east from the B-Line, you climb a fairly steep hill that peaks on Walnut Street; from there you go down the hill unimpeded all the way to Dunn Street; stop signs at Dunn, Indiana Avenue, and Woodlawn slow you down a bit, but then the roadway opens up to a designated greenway that takes you to the east side without much traffic to worry about.

 

Going west, the hill between Dunn and Walnut isn't nearly as much fun. It's a bit of climb, but at least you can focus on pushing the pedals and not losing momentum as you go up. That is, until the new stop signs are implemented. These will force bikes to stop dead, a third of the way up the hill, and stop dead again two thirds of the way up. This makes it a practically useless route for cyclists (Why Bicyclists Hate Stop Signs).

So why did the council make this horrific change? The author of the change, Dave Rollo, tried to claim it was all about pedestrians trying to cross 7th Street - but given Rollo's and the other councilmembers' continued antipathy to the 7-Line, the real goal was clearly simply to cripple the route. If pedestrians were the real issue, there are many other crossings around town that need stop signs much more than this bike route. Take this 9th and Walnut intersection for example:

 

 There is even a crosswalk here; but you'd better have your skates on if you want to try to cross it. Traffic comes up from the south and it moves fast across those three traffic lanes and a parking lane. Not for the faint of heart, and absolutely not for the disabled or elderly. This is a perfect place for a stop sign; of course, that would inconvenience drivers, and we can't have that, can we?

RIP to the 7-Line. Eighth Street is one-way east, Ninth one-way west. I will have to try out those alternates to decide on the new best way to bike across town.

College and Walnut survey responses.

The city is planning another study of College and Walnut streets. These are two streets through the middle of downtown Bloomington which were last redesigned in the car-drunk 60's or 70's, resulting in two three-lane, one-way, high-speed corridors slicing through the downtown and causing pollution, noise, and dangerous walking conditions. They desperately need to be redesigned to a more environmentally friendly standard. Our new city council will probably have the final say on any changes to be made as a result of this survey, which I think is an encouraging prospect - several members of the current council would be much more car-friendly. The study is discussed on the city's transportation plan web page here: https://bloomington.in.gov/transportation/plan at least as I write this. They ask for feedback through the traditional Google document, so I filled it out as follows:

Do you use College or Walnut regularly? If so, why? And what mode do you usually use (walking, strolling, bicycling, transit, driving, etc.)?

Yes, because it's unavoidable. Walk, bike, and drive

What do you think is currently working well on College or Walnut? What do you enjoy about the streets? 

Not much.

What do you think needs improving on College or Walnut? What situations do you find yourself in on those streets that are frustrating to you? 

The sidewalks should be much wider, there should be better bike support and fewer lanes for cars. Space reserved for car storage should have the prices adjusted dynamically based on demand, with the funds returned to the downtown area for improvements.

What is important to you about College or Walnut? What is important to you in regards to any changes proposed for the streets? 

Cars should be going much slower. There is no justification for cars going 40-50 miles an hour through an intersection where pedestrians are trying to get across. Note that this will not be solved by simply lowering the speed limits - the streets need to be designed such that driving at a killing speed is nearly impossible.

Any other comments you would like to share: 

Level of Service is not a relevant metric for these streets - only pedestrian safety should be considered.

New "No Turn On Red" signs posted in downtown Bloomington

In 2021, Indiana University law school student Purva Sethi was attempting to cross a street in downtown Bloomington. A driver attempting to make a right turn on red, apparently didn't look right before making the turn, struck and killed Sethi. In response, the Bloomington City Council sensibly authorized the banning of right turns on red on that and many other intersections.

Over the last year, the city of Bloomington has installed nearly 80 new "No Turn On Red" signs in the downtown area. Congratulations to the city for making this excellent improvement for the pedestrian safety! Next, the Indiana Department of Transportation needs to make similar improvements on the roads they control in the city. Trying to cross the 45/46 bypass is a particularly dangerous proposition.

New Leaf, New Life – Statement on a New Jail

 The Bloomingtonian published a press release from New Leaf, New Life on the new jail being planned in Monroe County.

Their comments:

• A bigger jail is not required and will produce barriers to improving the criminal legal system.
• Historically, whenever a criminal legal system has access to a bigger jail, it finds people to fill it.
• Cheaper, immediately available solutions to jail overcrowding remain available by simply not incarcerating people for technical probation violations, low-level and non-violent crimes, and returning to use or substance use violations.
• The $70M price tag for a new jail is both fiscally and socially irresponsible.

I like the comment that bigger jails find people to fill them. An instance of induced demand, clearly.

Read the full press release here: https://bloomingtonian.com/2022/12/14/press-release-new-leaf-new-life-statement-on-a-new-jail/

Reporting bias against scooters

 
Here's what happened: On September 18, 2022, Madelyn Howard, heavily intoxicated, came cruising in her Mercedes northbound on Walnut Street at 12th Street, near Domino's Pizza, at a high rate of speed with the passenger-side wheels on the sidewalk. Two people were on the sidewalk at the time. The first managed to jump out of her way, but the second did not. Up on the sidewalk, Howard plowed into Nathaniel Stratton, 22, and he later died from his injuries.

A tragic incident, and a cautionary tale of why driving while intoxicated is a terrible crime. So why is it, that months later, the media fixates on the least important part of the incident - that is, that Stratton happened to be on an electric scooter at the time?  In story after story, reporters explain that it was an "e-scooter related death", and the city of Bloomington, apparently trying to make the streets safer for drunk drivers, banned e-scooter riding at night in response.

So here we are, two months later, and we find that scooter operating licenses are on hold, partly due to this incident, as reported in the screenshot above. I've heard that scooter operators are considering pulling out of smaller cities completely, and who can blame them with poor reporting like this? WFIU gets it completely wrong.

The High Cost of Free Black Friday Parking

On this Giving Tuesday, I heard a plug for a donation from my local public radio station, WFIU. As I was getting out my wallet to send something in, I heard an announcer say, offhandedly, "Sales may have also been helped by free parking downtown during the holiday weekend." So instead of a donation, I'm writing this note to help to set the station straight on this topic.

No, local public radio station, sales were almost definitely not helped by free parking downtown. Setting aside the attraction for drivers of cruising the streets to find that one perfect parking space, and whatever parking meter revenue was given up by the city, there's no telling how many people took advantage of the free parking to let their cars sit and take up space for several hours, blocking access for people who may have wanted to come in and shop. Retail sales depend on customers coming in and out of the stores, not people coming in and browsing for hours at a time. And anyway, people who are going to balk at spending a dollar or two on a parking space are hardly going to be the kind of free spenders that will seriously boost the sales numbers.

So overall, I'd have to say it's unfortunate that the city decided to subsidize drivers and Big Oil in this way. It's revenue that the city has lost, and left shouldering the burden for no benefit are (1) taxpayers who may happen to live downtown, (2) poor people who lack access to a vehicle at all, and (3) people who may choose to ride bicycles or take the bus downtown. Maybe for next Black Friday, the city could offer free bus transit rather than encouraging drivers to bring their personal vehicles downtown.

Downtown businesses report strong turnout on Black Friday weekend

Limit CPU/Memory When using Docker

After having trouble with the Singularity Pull command on a computing cluster, I decided it might be easier to download the image via Docker to my home machine and upload it from there. I tried it, but Docker turned out to be such a huge resource hog that it rendered my computer unusable. Okay, the thing to do is to limit the resources Docker is allowed; but a quick search seemed to indicate that, while plenty of people had the problem, the only thing to do was to not use virtual machines. Now that is great advice and I wholeheartedly endorse it; but sometimes it's inevitable. Eventually I got to an obscure SuperUser post that had an answer with zero upvotes that pointed to a blog post that explained what to do:

https://itnext.io/wsl2-tips-limit-cpu-memory-when-using-docker-c022535faf6f

Summary: Limit the CPU's and memory available to WSL2 (Docker's underlying mechanism) via a config file. I'll want to remove those limitations pretty quickly as I use WSL pretty heavily, but until I get these few tasks completed at least this will allow me to keep using my machine.

Including config.h in every file in Visual Studio

Rather than explicitly including a header file in every source file, I like to use gcc's -include flag to add a config.h file, a file holding global configuration options that every source file may or may not be using. For a long time I didn't think that Visual Studio had a similar option, but I finally dug it out here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/fi-name-forced-include-file?view=msvc-160

The flag is /FI and you can set it in Visual Studio by right-clicking the project, selecting Properties, then C/C++, Advanced, and setting the "Forced Include File" property. Convenient!

Julia on a multi-user system

Had occasion to install Julia on a multi-user system today. I downloaded the tarball to my own directory and ran Make. The instructions say that the install is fully contained in the single directory, so you don't have to worry about files being installed in different locations on the system. Once it finished, I moved the directory to a globally accessible location and tried it out. It worked mostly, but nothing about the package

manager would run properly. Eventually I realized that if the directory that I had initially created existed, the package manager worked, but if I deleted it, the package manager stopped working. 

I deleted everything, recreated the directory in its final, globally available location, and ran Make again. Success! Apparently something in that compile process is looking to see what directory it is in and going back to it for data. I'd like to know what that is.

WSL permissions bits

Conflicts between Linux permissions and Windows permissions are a perennial problem for people who switch back and forth between WSL and Windows. One thing that helps is, when mounting a drive, to provide the -o metadata parameter to make sure that files have both Windows and Linux permission bits:

$ sudo mount -t drvfs g: /mnt/g -o metadata

Here's some good information about how WSL permissions work:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/chmod-chown-wsl-improvements/

Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model

The capabilities model allow an institution to evaluate how well it supports various data and research requirements.

https://carcc.org/2020/07/09/announcing-the-rcd-cm-2020-community-data-participation-window/

What I found most interesting is what it refers to as the "five facings"

Researcher Facing Roles

Includes research computing and data staffing, outreach, and advanced support, as well as support in the management of the research lifecycle.

Examples: Research IT User Support, Research Facilitators, CI engineers, etc.

Data Facing Roles

Includes data creation; data discovery and collection; data analysis and visualization; research data curation, storage, backup, and transfer; and research data policy compliance.

Examples: Research Data Management specialists, Data Librarians, Data Scientists, etc.

 

Software Facing Roles

Includes software package management, research software development, research software optimization or troubleshooting, workflow engineering, containers and cloud computing, securing access to software, and software associated with physical specimens.

Examples: Research Software Engineers, Research Computing support, etc.

 

Systems Facing Roles

Includes infrastructure systems, systems operations, and systems security and compliance.

Examples: HPC systems engineers, Storage Engineers, Network specialists, etc.

 

Strategy and Policy Facing Roles

Includes institutional alignment, culture for research support,  funding, and partnerships and engagement with external communities. 

Examples: Research IT leadership 

Which, at the risk of sounding like a Myers-Briggs evaluation, seems to sum up nicely the important categories of staff in research computing.

Traversing a graph database with Gremlin

This is an invaluable tutorial on how to use the Gremlin query language to get results from a graph database. For some reason, all the internal links seem to be broken, but it's a ten-part series I think. Lesson six on projection and selection is particularly useful.

 https://www.datastax.com/blog/2017/09/gremlin-recipes-1-understanding-gremlin-traversals

GDB in threaded code

GDB (https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/ ) is a handy way to debug command line applications. But in the case of applications that are running many threads, it doesn't by default follow a single thread, so as you step through the code it jumps between threads and it's easy to lose track of where you are. The solution is the scheduler-locking command, which forces the stepper to only step through one active thread at a time.

(gdb) set scheduler-locking on

See here for details: https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/All_002dStop-Mode.html

Creating a Hyperbook in Microsoft Word

When someone creates a document they'll possibly set up a table of contents which conveniently links to the chapter headings they've created. They'll very likely provide hyperlinks to their sources or references so it's easy to go out on the web and find the sources. But it's pretty rare to provide handy links inside the document pointing to other places in the document - a hyperbook. Now, there's no reason not to keep providing outside links as well, but a good hyperbook is like a self-contained Wikipedia - lots of good information and lots of links to related subjects of interest directly on the page.

To insert internal links into a document in Microsoft Word, do the following.  On the Insert tab, there's a Links panel. Click that, then Link, then Insert Link. The dialog that comes up offers a variety of ways to insert internal links. Very nice for creating hyperbooks.

Force-closing an SSH connection

On occasion when I'm using SSH to connect to a remote server, I run an application that hangs. If the terminal's running inside a GUI, you can always close down the entire terminal and restart it, but there's an easier way: hit Enter, then type "~." (squiggle dot) That force-closes the SSH session leaving your terminal intact. I learned this from SuperUser:

https://superuser.com/q/467398

Downloading files from Google Cloud

In doing some testing with GATK 4, I found myself in need of downloading files from Google Cloud. Google Cloud likes to use URL's
that start with gs: For example, the URL for some tumor data is

gs://gatk-best-practices/somatic-b37/HCC1143.bam .

You can't just visit that URL in your browser though; or at least I couldn't. I had to install gsutil as described here: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil_install#linux . This is one of those weird installs where they provide a script online that you can run; a bit dangerous, but at least they don't ask for sudo. It downloads about a gazillion files then asks permission to muck with your settings. I said no, of course, and it gave me a couple of files to source if I wanted. One of them had to do with providing autocomplete, but the other one simply added a directory to the path, so I created
an environment module to do that work. Now I can download the files I need:

$ gsutil cp gs://gatk-best-practices/somatic-b37/HCC1143.bam .

Github offers successor options

Github is putting some thought into what happens to to your repositories if you're "unable" to manage them - a kind way of saying if you die. Nothing I have would have any consequence, but certainly I'm involved with some organizations that would need taking over. Here's how you name a successor for your repositories:

https://github.blog/changelog/2020-05-11-account-successors/

Covid-19 infections by county, rate of increase

So this image shows rate of increase of the number of cases on a daily basis. It's not as smooth as I would like.