And all those miles of bike lanes Seattle city government crows about? Please. More often than not, what passes for bike infrastructure around here is something like the godawful 12th Avenue bike lane in the picture above.

Thanks, but I’ll just take the lane.

To its credit, the city does have some projects in the works – like the Broadway cycle track – that look intriguing. And they had the good sense to do uphill bike lane / downhill sharrows when repaving the top few blocks of Pine a couple of years back.

The Seattle Bike Blog, in its post on this topic, linked to a recent Canadian study that examined the relative safety and appeal of different places to ride. Graphed out, it’s an interesting data set:

This is pretty consistent with my experience. Note the outlier of the cycle track; one of the most preferred and far and away the safest. Although I rode once on the new cycle track that runs down the center of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. and it was a bit terrifying, given how the police seem to find it very convenient for passing and U-turns.

And how about major streets with parked cars? This is what most of my commute is like. There’s a preference for having a bike lane, but only a marginal improvement in safety. This is no doubt due to the visibility, “door zone” and reaction time problems that riding in a bike lane alongside parked cars causes.

Finally, check out multiuse paths (like Burke-Gilman). Very high degree of route preference, but also one of the most dangerous places to ride, thanks to high usage and speed/skill differentials between users. Further confirmation that I’m safer on the streets, mingling with traffic.

At least until we connect Seattle in a web of cycle tracks . . .

Bad photo, but at least they got some of my thoughts on the inadequacy of Seattle’s cycling infrastructure.

But I’m worried that Seattle’s system will turn out more like Melbourne’s – tepid and underused due to the requirement that all riders wear helmets. And it’s our own fault, for not seriously entertaining the possibility, that maybe – just maybe – we could get out of our nanny-state mentality and question whether Seattle really needs a mandatory bike helmet law.

Or whether the bike share system could have an exemption from the law.

Instead, we’re going to “solve” the problem with helmet vending machines.

Much as I’d like this to work, and as much as helmet vending machines are great for those choosing to wear a helmet, I fully expect that Seattle’s system is going to be a pale shadow of what it could be until and unless the mandatory helmet law is lifted.

And it doesn’t hurt that there are a bunch of bars along the route should I need a happy hour diversion on the ride home.

But I figured I’d see what route Google chose for me. Weirdly, it didn’t even offer 12th as an option. Instead, it sent me up to 19th for the northward portion of the commute. While this does mean spending much of the ride on streets with less traffic, it also means a needlessly steep climb at the beginning of my ride. And I actually prefer riding in traffic to dealing with the speeders and uncontrolled intersections in Capitol Hill’s residential streets. It may be that Google is trying to serve up results for more casual riders, but it gives me pause before relying on Google’s directions in cities I don’t know well.

The police choosing to not Mirandize a suspect isn’t the same as choosing to disobey an unjust or unconstitutional law, or even the decision to proceed in the face of ambiguous applicability of regulation. It’s more akin to the cost-benefit involved in choosing to run a red light on a bicycle, or to breach a contract. You see, unlike the legal consequence for being caught running a red light (a ticket), there’s not a legal sanction for failing to Mirandize. There’s no independent “Miranda right;” the warning merely serves as a safe harbor allowing the police to use whatever statements the suspect may offer up after the warning has been given.

(for any criminal defense lawyer readers, yes, I am skipping over a lot of criminal law nuance here, but my point has to do with decision-making, not procedure).

Like my running the red light, the authorities here are making a pragmatic choice: give up the ability to use any incriminating statements that Tsarnaev may make against him in exchange for the increased likelihood that he yields information exposing co-conspirators, foreign support, etc. This decision is actually quite an easy one. While the FBI is preserving optionality by claiming that skipping Miranda is justified under the public safety exception (which would permit any statements to be used despite the failure to Mirandize), the much more important point is that there is almost no chance that they need any incriminating statements by Tsarnaev in order to convict him. Absent some truly startling developments, they’ve got all the evidence they need. So why not skip the warning and see what intelligence he offers up?

The rules of police procedure would say that you read the suspect his Miranda rights. And as with most rules (including red lights), that’s a good idea – most of the time. But as this case illustrates, we’re not going to maximize our chances of getting the best outcomes if we don’t critically assess, every time, whether we should follow the rules this time.

You know, doing business?

And growing that business?

There’s no question that having a Chief Compliance Officer will help tick the boxes when it comes to corporate governance. But it runs the risk of glorifying the grocery clerk mentality, the lording of form over substance. Unlike every other C-level officer, this putative Chief Compliance Officer is focused on something wholly apart from the business and its goals: complying with the dictates of government. Compliance bears within its genes the potential for mission creep. Just as the regulator inevitably seeks to expand the scope of that which is regulated, the compliance officer lives with the danger of seeing ever-more ways that laws – and, critically, interpretations of laws – can be complied with. This is especially true if “compliance” is unmoored from legal, which should, at least in theory, be laying a claim to helping the business grow.

An example: My first General Counsel job was with a regional cellular company, shortly after the Telecom Act threw the mobile wireless industry into deregulation. A compliance officer would have told my board that we couldn’t possibly sell wireless phones and rate plans on a bundled basis. That was the conservative, “compliance-centric” interpretation of the regulations, which were in a state of flux at the time. It was the approach taken by our competitor. To me, young and unburdened with a career spent working for the telephone company, it was lunacy. Of course we could sell bundles, and if the regulators came around asking questions, we had a perfectly good explanation for them. An explanation that was supported by our good faith interpretation of the law and consumer interest. So we bundled away, and took a ton of market share. After nearly a year, our competitor followed suit.

I think about that often when considering the damage a compliance-first attitude can cause a company. There’s so much grey area, and so many ways to find a “compliance solution” that prevents business from happening. There’s also the very real danger that by focusing solely on ticking off the compliance officer’s checklist the company will miss bigger, more amorphous legal problems.

There may be industries where a robust – perhaps even independent – compliance program is called for. But those industries where abuses have been at their worst (financials, I’m looking at you) have never suffered from a lack of people focused on compliance. While having a lot of grocery lists will help prevent everyday lawbreaking, it’s not proof against more systemic problems. And in the meantime, it carries a very real cost in risk of loss to business focus. Far better, then, to have someone in the legal department who is focused on compliance, but whose prescriptions are ultimately filtered through the more practical hand of the GC.

But I loved this piece from the libertarian Reason.com blog the other day – “why I’m teaching my son to break the law.”  It plays into a debate I often have with my son; at 14, he’s got a heightened fear of the consequences of breaking rules.  I can respect that concern, and as a parent, I don’t want to see him getting into trouble for trouble’s sake.  But as I try to tell him, sometimes what’s right doesn’t line up with what’s legal.  Rules aren’t imbued with some kind of moral weight just because a government body, bureaucrat or majority of the citizenry voted for them.  Sometimes the least right laws are the most popular.  Sometimes laws are enacted that are flatly unconstitutional.  And sometimes the law is an ass.

As I’ve written before, I’m convinced that being too scrupulous about rules-following is a dangerous way to ride a bike.  But it’s also a dangerous way to live as a citizen.  The only way to stay free to stand up, to question authority and to push back on bad laws. For as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed:

“The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, that perishes in the twisting.”  

Twist away.

I also have a fair bit of experience with financial modeling, so I’m intimately familiar with the illusion of certainty a modeling exercise can give you. Lots of numbers, lots of crunching, but oftentimes an exercise in GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. The less certain the inputs, the more dynamic the variables, the less confidence one can have in the reliability of the model’s conclusion. That doesn’t mean that models are valueless. Straightforward models with conservative or highly certain inputs can provide quite accurate forecasts. And even complex models with highly variable inputs can provide directional guidance. But it’s really important to be able to tell the difference.

All this explains the sense of unease I feel about the certainty with which so many climate scientists approach global warming. It’s not the sort of caution I would expect from scientists dealing with hyper-complex models. They may well be right, but I’d expect a little more discretion, particularly when it comes to the models. While anthropogenic climate change is well-established, it’s far, far harder to say with certainty what the impact of that change will be.

Why should we care? Some would say that we know the climate is going to hell, so the more scientists can be advocates, the better. But you put down the scientist standard when you take the role of advocate. A real scientist should always be prepared for evidence that his hypothesis is wrong. The scientific method demands that they aggressively seek that evidence out. It’s how science is done.

Which brings me to this recent piece in The Economist, which goes into some detail about how global temperature growth has slowed in recent years, falling out of the bottom of the range of increases forecast by climate models. Who knows what the cause is, or whether it is merely temporary. Perhaps we will see temperatures grow at an accelerated pace in coming years to make up for the lag.

But we don’t know. And our climate models don’t either.

I’d like to see more of an acknowledgement of this uncertainty. It might actually make it easier to slow down the rate of atmospheric carbon growth if climate scientists spent more time acknowledging the limits of the data. After all, we as a species aren’t going to do what would be necessary to massively cut our carbon output. We’re not going to wind down our global economic structure, tell billions in the third world they can no longer have cooking fires, and force citizens of developed nations to live in 300 square foot huts with two hours of power a day. “End of the world” predictions, in addition to making those scientists involved lose credibility, actually make it harder to have productive discussions addressing the low-hanging fruit of carbon reduction.

Just a thought before I ride my bike home.

The problem is that my rain bike isn’t nearly as fun to ride as my primary (a lightweight, steel Salsa Cassaroll set up as fixed gear). So I’m going to grab the Salsa if it looks like there is any hope that it won’t rain (much). But it’s really no good to get covered in road spray, and it’s bad for the bike, too. There’s a lot of crap on Seattle’s streets.

The solution? Obviously I need to get a new rain bike

And I always forgot how freakishly flat Chicago is. It would be silly to commute in the Windy City on anything other than single speed.