Day 6 - Brighton to Barcelona - 110 km - we need a heavier boat

Today’s ride rivals yesterday for cycling fun

But I digress. What I really mean to talk about is municipal infrastructure funding and its foibles. A municipality may commence a civic initiative by releasing a Request for Proposals (RFP). An RFP is a public-facing statement of desire to undertake a project, along with an enumerated list of project particulars, and the associated bidding rules. Typically, the list of details will include mandatory project criteria, and each bid must satisfy the listed criterion as a qualification measure. 

Municipalities typically use “blind” bids: whereby the bidder makes their best estimation of their costs to fulfill each of the mandatory elements - either individually or in total - along with a top-up for profit.  

The theory of sealing the bid is to encourage the bidders to submit their lowest possible price, lest their proposal is defeated by a competitive offer. Bidders are therefore encouraged to rely on competitive advantages to reduce costs and, thereby, reduce their bid amount. This process also prevents bidders from reflexively basing their bids on undercutting rather than on solid metrics. Additionally, it allows the municipality to compare and contrast RFPs based on uniform topics and metrics.

And this is why the road ahead of me is a lung numbing 8 km of continuous pitch, with grades ranging from 4 - 11% and no shoulder. You see, the cheapest way to build a road is to use less concrete, less land, and to make it as thin as laws and by-laws will allow. The straighter the road, the less construction and materials are required, the less land needs to be owned and cleared, and the fewer work hours required, even if the resulting road is uncomfortably steep and long. The winning bid will be the less bike friendly option. It's just economics. I got to think of this for about an hour of ascent.

Still, it earned me a badge of honour with the title “MGS” - Mountain Goat Steve, though it carries far fewer privileges and entitlements than Gary’s CBE garnered.

Today, we had a great morning ride along a bike path beside a functioning canal network, followed by the hill climbing described, and then back to a bike path. Along the way, we helped to rescue a boat that was trying to slip underneath a bridge fording the canal but found that it was perched too high in the water to get past, so it was stuck within the bridge girders. The panicked boat owner asked as many of us as possible to shimmy down the steel lock ladder and board the boat to make it heavier and lower in the water. With mere millimetres to spare, it worked, though I was left clinging to the ladder as the new mobile boat drifted downstream.

Yes, I got the shot. 

BTW, the canal was also straight and thin. Damn, pre-Industrial Revolutionary RFPs.