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BICYCLES
April 2, 2001
Weirdly enough, I find myself in the position
of bike ambassador to Silicon Valley. Bike
commuters are rare enough that I'm the first
serious bike commuter that a lot of people
have met. So there are a bunch of people I
know who seem to be going from the "maybe I
should get a bike someday" mode to the "what
kind of bike should I get?".
The trouble is that they're
asking me this question.
So I'm going to write down
what I know, have heard, and
further theorize about bike
equipment.
A brief history of bikes:
Once upon a time, every kid was
outfitted with a fairly simple bike:
you were expected to sit upright on
it, it had a single, fixed gear
ratio, and you pedaled it backwards
to stop: these days these are called
"Cruisers".
Then there came the 10-speed, and
everyone wanted to own these On the influence of sports and
relatively fancy bikes which I gather sport fashion on technology:
were more-or-less originally intended What continually happens is
for road racing... I'm going to call that someone produces an
these "road bikes". innovative technology for some
sort of extreme, artificial,
Then sometime after that, there came sport situation, then it
the invention of the "mountain bike", becomes stylish to sport your
which was built a lot more ruggedly, "sport" equipment in non-sport
with some lower gears for situations, then people come up
hill-climbing. with more moderate versions
that are cheaper and more
Mountain bikes became very popular, practical, but these quickly
but most of them never saw the side become un-sexy and people are
of a mountain, which probably is what ripe for the next invasion of
inspired the invention of the sportiness.
"hybrid" (a mix between the "road"
and "mountain" styles), which is the The tech that spins off from
kind of bike I've been riding for sports sometimes strikes me
over half a decade. as a great innovation, but
quite often it seems majorly
silly. E.g. multiple-gears
are great, but the
light-weight tin-foil racing
Note that what we're wheels that we were stuck
talking about here -- with before the mountain
bikes for commuters, bikes were a pain.
for transportion --
is strictly speaking
completely ignored by
the industry. The
"transpo" bike is a tool,
not a toy: this is a
strange concept to them.
Let's consider my hybrid, with which
I have a love-hate relationship.
It's fairly ordinary... it cost about
$350 new, way back when, which makes
it a decent but relatively cheap
bike. I probably spend that much
again on repairs for it every two
years or so (which is a frustrating
situation: replacing the drive train
is only slightly cheaper than
replacing the whole bike).
I have many, many complaints about
this thing. It's probably long past
time that I should experiment with a
second bike... more about that later.
The complaints:
(1) Straight-across handlebars.
It's a pretty well known ergonomic fact
(one of the great discoveries of
the computer industry), that it's
a bad idea to hold your hands in
front of you palms down for a long
period of time. Just as with
flat-keyboards from the pre-ergo
days, the straight-across bike
handle bars that the mountain bike
revolution has subjected us to
force you to do just that.
(2) Lean forward posture.
But long before the "mountain"
bike, we were subjected to a fad
from the road-racing world for
leaning forward on your hands to
reduce your wind resistance.
So we all go about supporting our
weight on our hands as we go
bumping along the road, typically
without any shock absorption
except for our wrists.
(3) No chain guard.
My bike came without any chain guard
whatsoever, not even one of those
diminutive little rings next to the
big chain ring. Looking around, it
seems to me like about half the
hybrids out there are sold like this.
Wanna make some easy cash? Find a
sleazy trial lawyer to partner
with, and arrange an accident where Name another piece of
your pants cuffs get stuck in the consumer equipment
gearing. With any luck you'll get with completely
an old-fart of a judge that exposed gearing
remembers riding a cruiser around next to the user's
when he was a kid. clothes.
(4) The claim that cycling can cause
impotence is old news at this point,
though I don't know of any definitive
evidence one way or the other. The
new bike seat designs that have come
out really are more comfortable, it Been using a
makes sense to switch to one. Terry Liberator
for years now
(2004): not bad.
It seems pretty clear to me
that the standard design of
bike seats is pretty stupid. (in fact, in my This is an early
opinion, the "ergo" seat design,
It's not unusual for me to standard design so the gap in
arrive somewhere feeling of bicycles the middle is big and
like someone tried to kick overall is obvious (which is
me in the balls and only pretty stupid). okay) and it rides
just missed... a little hard, which
is less okay.
I ride a fairly typical hybrid,
without any fancy rock Later products have
shocks, and lately I have more shock absorption.
taken to wearing padded
shorts a lot, though that's
always seemed like a really
backwards solution to me.
(Everyone's seen the Dilbert
I've met a number take on the subject,
of women who seem right? "Great Solutions in
to think that bike Engineering History")
seats were
designed to Sport riders
accommodate men love having
only... in fact to change
they don't seem to into special
be designed for gear. Transpo
human beings. riders hate it.
(5) In general, many necessities are optional.
In addition to the problems of chain
guards and ergo seats, it's fairly
difficult to use a bike as transport
without the following "options":
Some sort of attachments to carry
stuff: it used to be common to have
baskets on the front (sometimes the As is not uncommon,
rear sides), now tiny flat beds on the current standard
the back of the bike are favored. is nearly useless
But even that doesn't come standard for any practical
with the bike. purpose:
Fenders, especially a That tiny rear
rear fender to keep flatbed is
your back wheel from pointless E.g. the
shooting muddy water compared to a bag of
up your butt when it's front basket. groceries
raining. (Sometimes that problem.
flat bed isn't big enough.) So of course,
the basket is
Head-light and flashing regarded as
tail-light. old-fashioned
tech.
Helmet No cool person
will be caught
Water bottle dead with it.
and cage to All water bottles sold for
carry it. this purpose are useless
unless you enjoy the
Rear-view flavor of plasticizers. Re-use a one-liter
mirror soda bottle instead
(e.g. seven-up or
Simple repair club soda... cola
tools -- tire flavor makes the
pump, patch water taste almost
kit, maybe a First aid kits as bad as the
spare tube, aren't a bad cola does).
etc, (the bike idea, either.
analog of the
car-jack).
"Toughies" (kevlar tire
inserts) or possibly After all, why would you want the
puncture resistant inner tires themselves to be able to
tubes if you can find resist a puncture? What a
them. frivolous weight addition that
would be.
And of course: locks.
Interesting thing about
That's plural. toughies: because
You need to lock they're not integral to
the front and back the tire, there's
wheels and frame, always a ridge where
and maybe the the two ends meet, and
seat... sometimes *that* wears
through the inner-tube.
BIKE_SAFELY
It might be unrealistic to think that all
of the above items could be or should be
made standard, but I think a strong case
can be made that consumers are getting
screwed by an artificially lowered
up-front price.
Anything that you buy as an optional
attachment is going to lack the
economies of scale that make a
mass-produced bike fairly cheap.
Everyone knows that building a custom bike
from raw parts is horrendously expensive
compared to buying a new bike.
If you're buying a transpo biking system,
you're stuck doing exactly that kind of
custom assembly, where the "bike" is just
one component.
(6) (update, 2004) Funny, I forgot to add
this one: Bike brakes are terrible.
Consider the difference in mass between a
bike and a car, and consider the fact
that they have roughly the same stopping
distance. Is this because bike brakes
have to be light-weight devices? Nope:
it's because bike riders have their Note: there's a trick
centers-of-gravity jacked up and pushed to stopping short on
forward, over the front wheel. If the a diamond frame bike:
brakes were any good, people would fly get your butt off of the
over the front handle bars when they hit the seat, and crouch down
them. behind it, with your sternum
almost touching the seat.
Recumbent bikes make a lot more
sense in this respect. Then you can get away
with really slamming the
brakes, even if you're
going down hill.
There are some other points I can add...
in general there's a problem with the
expectation that most people are cycling
for sport rather than transportation.
The bikes themselves
are often not very Over the years, whenever
durable (they don't my hybrid needed repairs,
have to be: most I'd replace the parts
people buy them and with the beefiest ones I Heavy walled wheels,
throw them in the could find... heavy tires, heavy
garage). gears... then I
started breaking the
frames. I did this
And bike clothing tends to *twice*: once it was
be made out of plasticy under warranty and
fabrics that start reeking they replaced the
after you use them even frame. A year later
once... a week's worth of I broke that one.
wear and they're positively
foul. (Actually, if you
care I think both
If there's something times I broke the
that you absolutely "dropouts", the
have to have when you hooks that are
ride -- bike shorts; welded into the
a polar fleece frame, which hold
jacket, gloves -- you the rear wheel.)
better have more than
one set (in fact five
or more wouldn't be
out of line).
Another thing I could gripe about:
the old toe-clip problem. First of
all, the basic peddles that come on
most bikes are clearly sub-optimal:
You can push down with the front
foot, but not pull upward with the
rear one; and even worse, your feet
tend to slide off the peddles if
you push forward.
So what do you do? The traditional
solution is toe-clips: these are
insanely dangerous for urban
cycling. They take a lot of
practice to learn to insert your
feet into when you're getting
started (and you need to do this at
every light) and if you have to do
an emergency stop, Good Fucking
Luck. If you're slow about getting
a foot out and on the ground, it's
really easy to flop over and maybe
mess up your wrist when you land.
Ah, but modern bike technology has a
solution! *Special shoes* and special
peddles that clip to the bottom of the
shoes. I haven't tried these, but:
(a) in general, the idea that you need
to completely change your outfit when Even helmets are a little
you want to ride your bike is a loser dubious. You're probably
for transportation cycling. It's bad better off with a helmet
enough you've got to waste time on the than without, but if the
lock-up procedure. need to buy a helmet and
lug it around with you
(b) They look really dorky. And yes, discourages you from
I've seen the ones that are supposed riding, you'd be better
to pass for ordinary street shoes: off just riding and going
they look like *really dorky* ordinary without.
street shoes.
The word is that
For this one, there *is* helmet laws for
a pretty good solution kids are a bad idea:
out there though: The health benefits
there's a product called of the exercise
"mini-clips", that are vastly outweigh
like slightly beefier any risk of head
plastic toe-clips injury.
without the straps.
They don't grab your You pass a
feet anywhere near as helmet law,
tightly as the regular the kids don't
toe-clips, so they take get helmets,
much less practice to they just
learn to get a foot into stop riding.
them. And they're a
hell of easier to get
your foot out of. This is one more item
for the "too bad it's
not standard" list.
One more gripe, though: My bike
originally came with plastic peddles.
They worked okay, but after years of
heavy riding, they wore out. I go into a
spiff bike shop, and after being subjected
to their spiel in favor of the dorky shoe
system, they finally agree to put a set
of regular peddles on the bike. "You're
going to really like these" they tell me.
"These are really good."
It turns out they outfitted me
with these insanely sadistic
spiky sharp metal peddles,
reminiscent of racing cleats
on shoes, except that these
are pointed at your body.
Actually, that's
Don't screw up getting on the still another complaint
bike, or they'll scrape your I've got, though I
shin off. Careful walking the don't know that there's
bike, it's *distantly possible* a reasonable solution:
you might slam your shin into Often, you *need*
one of those peddles, eh? to get off your bike
and walk it. Oops,
forgot your shin guards,
didn't you?
Another complaint, in two parts:
(a) Every beginning cyclist, when
they want to park their bike for Caveat: there's a simple
just a minute, tries leaning their trick for temporary bike
handle bars against something. parking: you prop the seat
This works for a minute at most against something, *not*
before the bike suddenly decides the handle bars. Prop the
to fall over. *back* of the bike against
something, let the front do
whatever it wants.
(b) When you need to walk up a stair-
case with your bike, you pick it up
by the cross-bar and throw it on your
shoulder. The smart cyclist keeps it
pointed nose-down so that the front
wheel stays pointed straight ahead.
If by some strange chance the outside
handlebar should brush something, the This is one of the better
wheel swings to the right, then arguments in favor of wearing
pendulums back to the left, and a helmet. If you remember to
the inside handle bar smashes you in keep your head down, the
the face. handle-bars hit the helmet,
not your face.
Both of these points result
from the same oddity of
standard bike design: When
the bike isn't in motion,
twist your handlebars, see
how far you can turn them.
On most bikes you can flip
them around almost 180
degrees before the wheel hits
the bike frame.
Think about that for a moment.
Is there any reason at all for
that wheel to be able to do that?
The obvious fix -- for
point (b), at least --
is to add some stops to Even 90 degrees seems excessive,
keep the wheel from but every so often that's helpful
turning more than, say, when you need to spin the bike
90 degrees. around in a tight space (e.g.
on Caltrains).
It wouldn't be that hard
to have some kind of
spring that tends to
return the wheel back to Also, this would
the center position. probably make the
bike more stable
when trying to ride
with out hands.
(Yeah, I know, that's not
recommended. If I haven't
planned ahead and put tissues
in my shirt pocket, letting
go of the handle bars for a
moment is almost inevitable
while I dig them out.)
And still another complaint
(I've given up counting):
Consider the freewheel. These days, it
seems like there's a competition to
squeeze lots of gears on to it, so you
can advertise an umpty-seventeen speed
bike. The trouble is that a lot of
these gears are so close together in
size that there's not much of a change
in gear-ratios when you change gears.
But gear-ratios are the name of the
game, specifically a *wide-range* of
ratios, rather than necessarily a large
number of them. I want a really small
back gear for fast road riding, and a
really humongous granny gear for hill
climbing, and a few in between for
accelerating from a stop.
My theory is that this notion
(coarse-grained gear-ratios) is a
hard order to fill with the current
style of derailleur and freewheel.
The freewheel has to approximate a
cone, so that the derailleur can
slide the chain sideways across it.
I suggest that this means it's time for a new
technology in bike transmissions...
getting bent (someday):
Given the fact that I've been whining about
the inadequacies of diamond frame bikes for
years, maybe it's about time I try something
different, huh?
((I was toying with buying a "Bike E" recumbent,
but for various reasons, as of March 24, 2004 I
still haven't gotten to it. These days I'm
riding a basic mountain bike with some shocks on
the front forks.))
Review of the Mountain Bike:
seems really sluggish compared November 10, 2004
to my old hybrid. Probably I
need to lose the knobby tires,
but I don't think that's the
whole problem.
The shocks are nice in some
respects: riding down a dark,
unfamiliar street, I can slam
right into a pot hole without
it being a disaster.
In other respects though:
they make the front end of Nov 26, 2005:
the bike softer, so it It turns out that
kneels down a little when these front shocks
you slam on the breaks, are even worse than
and the old fear of going I thought.
over the handlebars raises
it's head again. Even with them
cranked down as
This mountain bike seems to stiff as I can
have a little trouble stopping get them, I have
short, compared to my old problems with
hybrid. Wonder why, eh? them suddenly
"clicking through".
The front-end
likes to kneel
down suddenly
and throw me off
the bike: I've
wiped out twice
like this now.
This sudden
"click through"
behavior isn't
*completely*
unpredictable
though, it seems
to have something
to do with
braking and
turning at the
same time.
Now that I'm
conscious of it,
I seem to be
able to avoid
it...
We're still at
My current guess: a stage where
seat post shocks it requires too
are good; front much skill to
fork shocks are ride a bike
stupid. safely.
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