Wednesday, July 27, 2016

event: 3rd Annual "LHT Full Moon Ride" is scheduled for Sunday, Aug. 21






3rd Annual LHT Full Moon Ride
View this email in your browser
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 27, 2016
 
LAWRENCE HOPEWELL TRAIL & MERCER COUNTY PARK COMMISSION TO HOST 3rd ANNUAL LHT FULL MOON RIDE
Nighttime bike ride set for Sunday, August 21, at Mercer Meadows

What: LHT FULL MOON BIKE RIDE
When: Sunday, August 21; ride starts at 9:30 pm; arrive early to check in
Where: Start and end at Rosedale Park parking lot off Federal City Road in Mercer Meadows, Hopewell, NJ
Charge: $10 per rider, $20 per family; pre-registration on-line is strongly encouraged
(Hopewell, NJ) – Adults and youngsters aged 12 up are invited to join hundreds of bicyclists expected to participate in a six-mile, late-night ride through the open meadows and dark woods lit by a full moon on Sunday, August 21. That's when the third annual LHT Full Moon Bike Ride will be held at Mercer Meadows.
Sponsored by the Lawrence Hopewell Trail and the Mercer County Park Commission, the ride kicks off at 9:30 pm, but riders should give themselves time to sign in for the event. Pre-registration at the LHT website, www.lhtrail.org, is strongly recommended and will speed up the preliminaries, according to Jay Watson, LHT board member and curator of the Full Moon Ride.
"We hope individuals and families will join us for this late night ride. From 9:30 on, riders will begin the six-mile trek as they arrive," Watson said. "This ride takes cyclists through one of New Jersey's premier open spaces, Mercer Meadows, via the Lawrence Hopewell Trail, which serves as the backbone of an extensive trail system in the park." From a starting gate at Rosedale Lake, riders will head to the Maidenhead Trail, on to the Twin Pines Trail, then back to Rosedale Park, in a ride expected to take about 45 minutes.
"We are very pleased to join with the Lawrence Hopewell Trail for the third year in a row, welcoming bicycling enthusiasts to our 1,600 acre park, which features scenic biking and walking opportunities through meadows and woodlands," said Mercer County Executive Brian Hughes.
"The Mercer County Park Commission is dedicated to providing recreation opportunities and encouraging leisure time activities and preservation of open spaces, among other aims," said Andrew R. Worek, president of the Mercer County Park Commission. "The LHT Full Moon Ride has become a wonderful annual event that brings residents out to see our parks in a different way and certainly at a different time of the day."
At the fun bicycle ride, bike decorating will be encouraged and limited glow sticks will be provided to light up participants' bikes. Cyclists are encouraged to use bicycle headlights for the late night ride, and helmets are required. Local ice cream vendors will be at the event, selling their frozen concoctions.
The participation charge is $10 per cyclist, $20 per family, with funds used to help defray LHT's operating costs and helping fund further trail construction and maintenance. Riders are encouraged to print out the registration form they are asked to complete in advance of the ride. Registration can also be completed the evening of the ride, but those who choose to register on-site should factor in extra time for registration.
Should there be any question about weather impacting the ride, please visit the LHT website on August 21 after 6 pm. The LHT will post information about cancellation, should that be necessary.
About the Lawrence Hopewell Trail
The Lawrence Hopewell Trail (LHT) is a 22-mile bicycle and pedestrian recreational trail and transportation corridor through public and private lands in Lawrence and Hopewell Townships, Mercer County, N.J. The idea for the LHT grew out of a commitment to improving the quality of life for all who live or work in the region. The LHT supports an active, livable, and sustainable community with alternative forms of transportation to reduce reliance on automobiles. It also promotes health and fitness, recreation, and outdoor education. For more information, please visit www.lhtrail.org.
About Mercer Meadows
The Mercer County Park Commission manages diverse offerings within its more than 10,000 acres of parks, recreational facilities, and open space throughout Mercer County. Mercer Meadows, where the Full Moon Bike Ride will take place, consists of more than 1,600 acres, divided among five separate districts. Miles of mowed and gravel trails provide visitors and their families with scenic walking and biking routes through the meadows and woodland. Fishing is a popular activity at the park's four water bodies. For more information, please visit www.mercercountyparks.org.
Share
Tweet
Forward
Copyright © 2016 Lawrence Hopewell Trail, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you signed up for our mailing list at a community event or our website

Our mailing address is:
Lawrence Hopewell Trail
The Historic Hunt House
197 Blackwell Road
Pennington, NJ 08534

Add us to your address book


Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list

Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp



Monday, July 25, 2016

safety news: County Receives Approvals for Pedestrian Crosswalk on Washington Road in Princeton


It's taken almost 2 years, but finally:




"Mercer County has received approvals from the Delaware and Raritan Canal Commission 
to install a crosswalk and pedestrian-activated beacons at the Washington Road crossing, 
a crossing heavily used by pedestrians and cyclists. 

"The approvals were necessary due to the proposed crossing's proximity to the Delaware and 
Raritan Canal State Park Towpath and the potential visual impacts on the elm allee. The State 
Historic Preservation Office, Princeton Historic Preservation Office, and Princeton University all 
had to sign off on the project as well. 

"The work will be done by the Mercer County Department of Transportation and Infrastructure. 
Officials said the crosswalk, as well as flashers on posts and the road, will be installed by the end
of this year."




Thursday, July 7, 2016

White Bikes, Big City - the ongoing Matthew Von Ohlen case



Matthew Von Ohlen was riding in the bike lane in Williamsburg on Saturday 
when, according to police, a motorist intentionally slammed into him. Von Ohlen
was killed and the driver fled the scene. The NYPD responded the following 
morning by issuing summonses to cyclists on the same block for running red lights. 

According to the NYPD and video footage of the crash, Von Ohlen did nothing wrong. 
[...] Yet officers from the 90th Precinct were out the next day summonsing cyclists
and passing out pamphlets about their obligations and responsibilities. 

"This is a particularly egregious example of the NYPD's skewed priorities when it comes
to traffic enforcement, and of the victim-blaming mentality that pervades the department,"
said Paul Steely White, the director of Transportation Alternatives, in a statement today.



Sunday, July 3, 2016

open door, open loop: self-driving cars in an age of self-interest


Glimpses of the future can sometimes be seen in Princeton, despite its preoccupation
with the rear-view mirror. A recent example is the new valet parking service, operated
by Newtown-based Open Door Valet. More info on the company and its owner here.
The town stands to collect 6% of any revenue from this license arrangement. Parking
valet service is available "in front of Heinz Plaza" which most of us know as Hinds Plaza.

In the article How Driverless Cars Can Reshape Our Cities, Professor Alain Kornhauser
says "The biggest impact is going to be on parking. We aren't going to need it, definitely
not in the places we have it now. Having parking wedded or close to where people spend
time, that's going to be a thing of the past. [...] The current shopping center with the sea
of parking around it, that's dead." [  A sea of parking ... and of curbing made of "setts" ]

Kornhauser has led an effort to make New Jersey a research hub for driverless cars, and
has published widely on the topic of shared autonomous taxi networks, or vehicle fleets.
His proposal to create a Center for Automated Road Transportation Safety (CARTS) at
Fort Monmouth, the former Army installation, may lack high-level political support, though.

The enabling technology for driverless cars has been the recent confluence of three factors:
powerful graphics processor hardware, artificial intelligence "deep learning" algorithms, and
"big data" for efficient training of the robotic systems. As explained here, the architecture of a
graphics processing unit (GPU) is a very good match for the highly parallel requirements of
so-called "biologically-inspired multi-layer perceptrons" aka convolutional neural networks.

Decades ago, groundbreaking research in this area was published by John Hopfield, who
has spent most of his career at Princeton University. Collaborative research at Bell Labs in
Holmdel launched in the 1980's eventually led to character and voice recognition products;
the legacy of this neural network research program and scientific talent is carried on at Nvidia,
a leading vendor of GPU silicon. They've installed a research team in what is nowadays known
as Bell Works, the huge/famous building formerly home to Bell Labs on Crawfords Corner Road.
Here's a link to Nvidia's paper End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars and the related video.

A provocative article "Makers of driverless cars want cyclists and pedestrians off the roads" is here.

The sentiment is that driverless cars will improve the safety of our roads. But in a likely setback for
the technology, the The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NTHSA) has launched a
probe into the fatal collision of a Tesla and an 18-wheeler rig, in Florida around seven weeks ago.
In this accident, which featured poor decision-making by Tesla's "Autopilot" controller - a mode which
had been banned in Hong Kong - and by the human drivers, both of whom sported safety violations,
the Tesla became instantly and literally driverless when it failed to notice the low clearance of a trailer
across its path on the highway. Tesla's Autopilot feature depends on "public beta testing" and is
never reviewed by regulators -- "highlighting what some say is a gaping pothole on the road to
self-driving vehicles: the lack of federal rules".

Meanwhile, a recent article asked Can a 700 M.P.H. Train in a Tube Be for Real? about the Hyperloop
project launched by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Princeton University has joined five other schools 
(Cornell, Harvey Mudd College, Memorial University, Northeastern University and the University
of Michigan) in the OpenLoop Consortium, competing against other collegiate teams at the
SpaceX test track in Hawthorne, CA. More info

NY Times' Silicon Valley correspondent and avid bicyclist [link] John Markoff, in his latest

             "People say that one day, perhaps in the not-so-distant future, they'd like 
             to be passengers in self-driving cars that are mindful machines doing their
             best for the common good. [...] A new research study, however, indicates that
             what people really want to ride in is an autonomous vehicle that puts its
             passengers first. If its machine brain has to choose between slamming into a
             wall or running someone over, well, sorry, pedestrian."

The article quotes Harvard psychologist Joshua D. Greene, who, when a
grad student at Princeton, had  legendary ethicist Peter Singer, author
of How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest as well as
the somewhat bike-related Is Doping Wrong?, on his thesis committee.

The article in The Guardian puts it as follows "... designers of future driverless 
cars find themselves in a moral maze from which there is no easy way out". Or
per the headline in Spectrum magazine's articlePeople Want Driverless Cars
with Utilitarian Ethics, Unless They're a Passenger.

The NYT article mentions that study of "the trolley problem" got its start in 
1967 with Philippa Foot, a British philosopher who also had a Princeton
connection: her mother, born in the White House, was a daughter of
Grover Cleveland. Trolleyology, "a neologism ... shorthand for a flourishing
cottage industry in a well-known philosophical dilemma: should you push a fat
man onto a track to save five innocent people from being hit by an oncoming
railway trolley?" is from a book by NYU's Kwame Anthony Appiah during his years
at Princeton U. Appiah's quote "My philosophy is that everything is more complicated
than you thought" stands in contrast to Facebook's "move fast and break things".


By way of a postscript about current events, click here to watch a 30-second
video of Brexit "Leave" proponent Boris Johnson being booed and blocked by
cyclists. Johnson, the former mayor of London, made his city more bike-friendly.
Economist/commentator Paul Krugman would normally have much to say about
Brexit's ramifications, but was away on a bike trip near the Vermont/Quebec border.