Thanks to certain constrains on actual vacations, this past summer Leland and I have been searching for the perfect weekend getaway. To be considered the location must be accessible by train and walkable once you arrive. We’ve learned not to put any short, rigid schedules into the hands of the airline business, and with a car in the mix you can’t count on returning to the city any more relaxed than you left it.

The rails have lead us to three destinations, so far: Mattituck on the North Fork of Long Island, Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore, and now Rhinecliff on the Hudson. Perhaps the most surprising thing these destinations have in common is their cost: it’s hard to spend the night in any of them for less than $200 after taxes. You could spend less overall by flying somewhere outside the reach of NYC cost inflation—although, the uncertainties of airline travel extend into cost as well.

Each trip involved a different train company, because of Capitalism. The worst was the Long Island Rail Road for being shoddy and slow and actually waiting for automobiles to illegally cross its track as it ambled out the North Fork. That train line is a real asset to the area, yet it’s treated like a useless relic by nearly everyone there including its cheerless operators. The ride on NJ Transit was unremarkable, and cheap. The best transportation of the three was our just-completed trip on Amtrak to Rhinecliff, not much more expensive than the LIRR ticket though much faster and nicer.

But on none of the train companies is transporting a full size bicycle a pleasant affair. LIRR allows them except, arbitrarily, on holiday trains even if they are not at all full and you really just need to go one stop at the end of the line instead of riding on a highway at night. (Thanks.) For Asbury Park we did not try, although when we got there we were surprised to see bicycles more integrated into everyday life than in any of the other towns. Serious old Amtrak only allows small folding bicycles on most of its trains, including ours to Rhinecliff. (They have an “auto train” tho, which could not possibly be profitable in any universe, I would just like to point out.)

As for folding bikes, we have one Brompton. The original plan suggested by our hotel The Rhinecliff was to rent a second bicycle from a shop in nearby Rhinebeck, and somehow it would be waiting on our arrival. But as our trip date approached, their offer of managing this process evaporated, and we were left to fend for ourselves on arrival. This meant walking the two and a half miles to Rhinebeck, which should not have been a big deal, right?

Oh, but wouldn’t you know Americans need an honest-to-god highway to travel 2.6 miles these days. We tried in vain to find a small road or even (dare to dream!) footpath to walk between these two places sharing half a name and surely some kind of history. But from the looks of it no one had walked this short, basic route in a generation. One oncoming SUV helpfully honked to suggest that we move further off the median or, you know, die. A Taurus pulled over to ask us directions. (Just once I would like to see a motorist stop another motorist for directions, or try to.) A few body-armored cyclists bravely shared the road with the stream of 55-mph motor-traffic, but in general the asphalt was as free of natural transport as its surroundings were naturally beautiful.

We kept our spirits up as best we could by taking turns on the Brompton and declaring that everyone racing by us within inches met Harry’s Code. Soon, we hoped, we would have a second bicycle and the unpleasantness of the return trip would be at least reduced in duration.

But it was not to be. We found upon our arrival in town that the Rhinebeck Bicycle Shop is an establishment that has worn its helmet chinstraps and lycra a little too tightly, or perhaps sat on too many tiny bicycle seats for too long, but in any case its shopkeeper had no interest in extending his rental business to our perfectly normal situation. For the princely sum of $25 a day they reluctantly rent bicycles, and they deigned to offer that service a few hours that Saturday, but not on the Christian Sabbath of course, so we would have to return it Monday morning and that would be three days (?) and even $75 was not worth it to them to pick up the bicycle in at The Rhinecliff, so would we please go away and stop trying to give them money.

So ended our extended train-to-bike experiment in and around this particular Amtrak stop. After decent lunch at Rhinebeck’s Terrapin Restaurant we awkwardly circumnavigated the cute town as two dudes with one bike. It was difficult to get very excited about the place after its inhospitable bicycle shop. Finally, we faced our destiny walking the miserable highway shoulder back to Rhinecliff, this time passing a woman carrying a baby. Someone did walk the route, after all! Who knew how far or what for, but she certainly wasn’t afforded any safe or decent pathway by her local government.

The Rhinecliff hotel itself is a great experiment, one I hope finds both success and imitation. It’s a very recently restored grand old railroad hotel. The rooms are fairly described as luxurious. The one area where we found the hotel lacking, obviously, was in concierge services. If they hope to attract “city folk”, as they say on their website, they are going to have to help us find something to do other than stumble around on highways when we get there.

I suppose that most guests call on one of the county taxi services, and that’s fine. I have a dozen reasons for disliking taxis, and none of them are guilt from the minor amount of gasoline burned during my occupancy. Mainly it is that they are unpleasant and unpredictable. In New York cabs at least you know what you are going to pay. But with ragamuffin suburban or country taxis companies you don’t know anything at all until you’ve arrived alive and the vehicle has sputtered out of your life. Like I said, I just don’t consider time in autos to be much of a vacation.

Aside from lodging, The Rhinecliff seems to do good business as a fancy evening and Sunday brunch venue for the locals, and for this they’ve paved an ugly extended parking strip in view from the guest room balconies. Which is fine, they need revenue in seasons when weekend getaways are less demanded, and we’ve gotten an idea of how most locals feel about using their legs. But the hotel would be wise to make similar (if vastly less expensive and invasive) accommodations for their guests arriving by train. That is, they should just run their own bicycle rental operation. For the price of our one night stay they could just cold buy a passable two-wheeler to rent out the next guest. Or, actually, any enterprising person around that or any Amtrak station could start a rental business out the back of their ubiquitous pickup trucks: You could take reservations online and meet people at their trains, guys!

One thing is clear, in the meantime: we’ve got to get a second Brompton.

America’s rail-road has 99 problems and a firearms policy wasn’t one. Nevertheless, our nation’s illustrious Senate, which is to Amtrak a piggybank, has made its next payment contingent on on a change in firearms policy. Because why not wage a proxy battle over gun rights inside a dysfunctional, neglected piece of our national transportation infrastructure?

It should have been pretty easy to cast this crude legislative interference in a negative light, but only a handful of Democratic senators could be bothered to vote against it. And now, a chorus of whining has erupted from the usual liberal editorial suspects, all too eager to lose another battle over gun control. But it’s a little shocking just how badly the offended New York Times editorial board writes up their rebuke:

In a shocking genuflection to the gun lobby, the Senate has voted to deny Amtrak its indispensable $1.6 billion federal subsidy unless it allows passengers to transport handguns in their checked luggage. The budget support would be stripped in six months unless Amtrak scraps the gun ban that it wisely adopted five years ago after the terrorist railroad atrocities in Madrid.

It’s shocking! That a Mississippi senator will use $1.6 billion of leverage to reverse a railroad’s irrelevant gun ban. Shocking.

In reality the gun ban was anything but a wise response to those particular terrorist attacks; it was a crude, we’re-doing-something response. The 2004 Madrid train bombings did not involve any firearms. They didn’t even involve regional trains. Bombs were stashed in backpacks, and easily left on commuter trains. This kind of attack was neither unanticipated nor unprecedented; we didn’t learn anything from it to inform policymaking unless it was in terms of emergency response or train durability. Until the government has a way to detect and deactivate bombs with lasers from outer space, it will probably happen again. It’s certainly not deterred by an impossible-to-enforce firearms ban on the world’s most pathetic railroad.

Still, our Times editors have endless dumb things to say on this subject:

Proponents said the change was needed to put Amtrak back to its pre-9/11 gun policy and equate it with airline security measures that allow unloaded, locked handguns in checked baggage. This is lunatic reasoning for a nation supposedly sensitized by the 9/11 attacks. Why should gun owners be treated as privileged travelers?

The only lunatic reasoning here is the assertion that being sensitized—terrorized—by 9/11 should help define a train company’s firearms policy. The Times’s fear mongering is Rovian in its gall, but Dukakisian in its awkwardness.

Amtrak has none of the hermetic procedures where airport passengers are screened shoeless at detectors while their checked baggage is separately secured. Trains stop at stations and passengers come and go. Amtrak presently has a system of checking passengers and screening baggage at random, much the way New York police monitor mass transit.

So. There is someone over the age of twelve that buys into the fairy tale of “hermetic” security zones at airports. But the truly disturbing thing is that we have a supposedly liberal editorial board in New York hankering for general passenger searches at Penn Station. And the truly dumb thing is their inability to see that the absence of thorough searching undermines the notion that Amtrak’s current rules stop terrorists, or any rebellious type (tweens?), from carrying weapons on a train.

The terrorized Times must not care that, by the numbers, their fears are completely unfounded. Riding regional rail is vastly safer than highway driving. Simply shifting trips from cars to trains does, in all certainty, save lives. Discouraging rail trips, by imitating the onerous security procedures of airlines, would only result in more bodies being shredded by metal, glass, and asphalt at 60 miles per hour. It’s the same slightly counterintuitive (but not that complicated really!) butterfly effect that makes bicycle helmets such a poor, and even negative, safety investment.

And it’s no coincidence that successful train bombings of the past decade struck subways in London and commuter rail in Madrid rather than regional rail. Those trains are the easiest to board and exit without being noticed among the millions who ride them each day. This will always be the case. On top of that, busted old Amtrak is a particularly poor symbol of American power. Terrorists may as well attack a homeless shelter. As long as the door is wide open to murderous mayhem on subways and commuter rail—and let’s face it, it is—our government and Amtrak are needlessly wasting resources and encroaching on civil liberties by burdening America’s few regional rail passengers with unwarranted search. We put up with enough crap as it is.

After their Madrid hit the bombers did in fact go after a regional rail line, one of the fancy high-speed ones that you have to be Japanese or French or Spanish to invest in. But their bomb didn’t go off, and the police figured out where the bombers were hiding and caught them and now the world is safe from train bombings until the next group of assholes decides to kill a bunch of people and ruin their own lives in the name of some radical politics or religion. It’s the world we live in guys! But it doesn’t change the fact that all trains are vastly safer than cars.

I am not one of the Times’ privileged, despised gun owners. I have no reason to travel with weapons and the typical, actual Amtrak rider doesn’t either. But. The same Senate that is forcing Amtrak to accept guns on board also makes the train company run wildly unpopular, deeply unprofitable routes through the kinds of places where people do like guns. They are just being consistent, you see!

It does make sense for Amtrak to allow registered firearms in baggage on lines that their typical passenger will never use. And who knows, maybe one person somewhere in the country will take a hunting trip that involves a train, once. It could happen, and anyway, it just isn’t productive for Amtrak to involve itself in the country’s terrible gun politics. It’s their job to run trains through regions with widely varying attitudes and laws about gun ownership. Going back to their old policy will not result in northeast corridor trains being jammed with guns any more than they were in 2000, or even currently.

But our national train company will probably try for the worst of all worlds, as is its wont. They are already crying about what it will cost to re-implement the old policy, because obviously planes being used as missiles and bombs being placed in train baggage means you can not just have rednecks’ guns locked up within the passenger cabin like before. Disjointedly, Amtrak is also sad that they don’t get to search everyone’s bags like the airlines do, and the Times editorial board is sad too. So they will probably use this silly senatorial occasion to indulge in additional unnecessary, federally sponsored unwarranted searches that they (and New York’s MTA) have randomly instituted in the past decade.

Who cares that trains are safe when you can exchange freedom from unreasonable search for a blissful feeling of security?

The cycling culture blog Copenhagenize has stepped into a hornet’s nest. Or rather, discovered a hornet’s nest and set about whacking it with a broom for few weeks straight. It’s hard to know if the hornets have been altered by this thrashing, though individually they do seem to tire out and fly away after enough good swats.

The spat is, of course, over helmets. This particular piece of safety equipment’s mindshare, or perhaps more accurately heartshare, is roughly proportional to its volume. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone is inappropriately emotional about it. Deeper feelings about what bicycles are for seem to be encased in or repelled from the helmet’s foam. Are bicycles dangerous? Are they healthy transportation for everyone? Should streets accomodate bicycle riding, or should bicycle riders accomodate streets? What about six-lane highways?

If you want to know if helmets are effective, there is only one place in the world to get a fair evaluation: Wikipedia. But seriously, guys! The article Bicycle helmets is one of the better examples of the Wikipedian ethic of never-ending, soul-crushing, creativity-abhorring trench warfare actually working. Rather than producing or even trying to produce good prose, Wikipedia is an unstoppable font of fact. You can’t argue with a page of facts, and you certainly can’t remove any relevant fact from it. You could try to add one, but good luck finding any adequately sourced fact that isn’t already there. The only thing you can count on doing is learning something.

In the case of Bicycle helmets the facts are simply not where many people believe them to be. Not the fact of dueling studies—which makes a convenient excuse to reject all accumulated knowledge and fall back on conviction—but the facts of what studies have been conducted, their strengths and weaknesses, and what results to look for if you do hope to improve overall public health and safety.

Anyone that wants a rounded opinion on the topic should spend fifteen minutes reading Bicycle helmets—especially anyone that wants to tell others what do, to ‘raise awareness’, or most critically to legislate. If it helps, there is something of the cigarette industry drama there, troubling reports by a corporation that has friends in several governments:

Another source of field experience is our experience with damaged helmets returned to customer service… I collected damaged infant/toddler helmets for several months in 1995. Not only did I not see bottomed out helmets, I didn’t see any helmet showing signs of crushing on the inside.

Yes, that’s an engineer for Bell, the company that convinced gullible Australia to enshrine its product in the law of the land. The problem is that the whole point of these helmets is to absorb energy, the same as crumple zones in a car. If they fail to compress and instead transfer their energy to the skull, they are acting like nothing but gigantic shiny hats. If. There’s no point in extending the helmet war by overreaching.

But it’s hard not to finish the page with a dimmer view of helmets. If you started out supporting government enforced helmet use for adults, you’re likely to come away with the idea that the issue is so uncertain that adults should be able to make their own choice about their own bodies. Or if you already had this ‘libertarian’ notion, the next step is a belief that government funds are better spent in ways that have been shown to lower death and injury rates, and that nagging friends and family is actually just rude. After that it’s the realm of the personal. Should I wear one to the store? Should I even wear one for athletic cycling? Should I cycle in the nude, while reading Karl Marx?

Make up your own mind, but beware: This process is known to produce monoculture-incompatible results.