(no subject)

[roadrunnertwice]

Link-wander resulted in rediscovering JWZ's epically bitchy bike advice post from '08, so I'm sharing. Fun game: send it to a friend and try to guess how much of it they'll violently disagree with!

(I actually quite like the post, except for the part about riding on sidewalks. An oft-overlooked virtue of the abrasive geek textual aesthetic is its implicit assertion that the problem at hand is a: knowable and b: not too many levels harder than whatever else you have to deal with on a regular basis. It's reassuring, if that's what you're wired for.)

Comments

[killing_rose]

Hm. As someone who's biked in places that have great trails, but where it's fairly unsafe to bike on the streets, I have to say that I have biked on the sidewalks. And, in the city I grew up in, that's normal. Would I bike on the sidewalks in the town I currently live in? Not typically.

Are there days that I know I cannot handle having cars to the left of me and have biked on the sidewalk? Yeah. Biking in a three foot space scares the hell out of me. It always has. On bad sanity days, I can't even handle it. Call me a bad cyclist if you must for biking on the sidewalk, but people's mileage does vary.

(As to the rest of his post...I am left blinking. A lot.)

[pinesandmaples]

I violently agree with some of his advice, like the part about bike shops adjusting the bike to fit the rider. When my wife bought her bike, the salesman tried to tell her she could adjust it at home. I blinked at him and told him to go find a manger to adjust her bike. It wasn't a great day for him, no. (Surprise: He's not with that shop anymore.)

[ell]

I violently disagree with most of what he says :-)

Especially all the dissing of road bikes. And the idea that spending 4 to 5 times the money (Assuming you need a new tube) to let a bike shop do what any reasonable person can do themselves in 10 or 15 minutes and not disrupt the ride or their life by dragging the bike to a shop is crazy. Fix 4 flats yourself and then you can walk into the nice bike shop and have gotten a better bike...

Also, what is it with everyone dissing the spandex? These days I am riding 20 to 50 miles a day and really, I don't want my ass chafed to shreds. So I ride with appropriate clothing. Same reason I go to work in khakis and button downs (engineer), run in running shoes, swim in a swimsuit, play kendo in a dogi and armor. I wear the clothing appropriate to the task at hand that maximizes my utility and minimizes discomfort. Why is this concept so difficult for people to grasp when it comes to bikes?

[copracat]

I agree with a lot of what JWZ says but not quite with how it is said. That's a post that appears framed to maximise offensiveness.

Cycling is a way of improving my life, not adding jobs to it. I don't want to be a bike mechanic in my spare time. The best way to cycle is to choose the things that suit how you want to live and what you want to achieve.

Is it legal to cycle on the pedestrian footpaths in SF? In my city you have to be under 12.

[rivenwanderer]

I hate the "your bike WILL get stolen, so buy the cheapest you can find and don't get any accessories" advice that so many people have. Why not get a super-heavy-duty chain (I have this one: http://www.onguardlock.com/?page_id=329 ) and a basket or back rack to carry it? I mean, if you don't want to spend a lot on a bike, fine, but I don't think that it's impossible to prevent theft. Nobody has this attitude about motorcycles or scooters, do they?

[jld]

“…in San Francisco it's against the law for anyone 13 and older to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk.”

[jld]

Also, what is it with everyone dissing the spandex? These days I am riding 20 to 50 miles a day

That might be why. For people who aren't riding hours at a time, normal pants can work just fine, and utility is maximized by not buying and managing and taking the time to change into and out of special-purpose clothes.

[vlion]

Hahaha, didn't know jwz was a cyclist. His advice sounds pretty good to me, tho' I can't say there's a lot of theft around here.

I always ride on sidewalks in any sort of sketchy road situation, and those are most of the road situations. It's quite illegal, but I'd rather not be hit by a car than to hit a pedestrian.

[sara]

Yeah, amazingly enough I've spent the last three years in one of the nation's bike-theft capitals, riding around on nice bikes. I've lost a couple of headlights (which is why I switched over to hose-clamping LED flashlights onto my handlebars) but amazingly enough, those heavy-duty U-locks really do work as advertised.

One of these years I will probably walk out of the library and find out I'm short a wheel, but at this point I need to put new wheels on both bikes anyhow.

[sara]

You can buy a new bike for $20? Because that's what it costs me in shop labor to get four innertubes changed out. For that, no, it doesn't make sense to break my knuckles open doing it on my garage floor, thanks.

[juliet]

Have you considered checking out on-road cycling lessons in your area? There are ways of riding that'll make you safer (and make you *feel* safer, too, which is an important part!) in even fairly sketchy road situations. And then you'd be at much less risk of both the car & the pedestrian negative interactions :)

[juliet]

My advice to people in London (high-bike-theft area) is to use 2 different locks (a D-lock/U-lock, ideally 'gold' Sold Secure standard[0], and a cable lock), and lock frame-and-both-wheels to something solid. The theory being that yer opportunist bike thief is likely to have tools for *either* cable locks *or* a D-lock, but not both. So they will move onto easier pickings than your bike. Also then you won't lose just a wheel. I actually now use a thinnish cable to lock my saddle to the D-lock as well, after losing my very nice saddle :(

If a proper professional thief is determined to steal *your* bike in particular then there's not much you can do about it (there's no locks that you can't get through with the right kit; it'll just might take a while), but that's moderately rare, at least here.

[0] UK scheme that rates locks bronze/silver/gold depending on how long it takes to get through it with a standard range of tools. Gold is 5+ min with a decent suite of kit; bronze is a minute with a small number of tools.

[vlion]

Given that in my two car-bike collisions the driver (1) sped up to hit me and (2) wasn't looking (and ran a red light), I do not believe I will be safer in any sense riding on the road than the sidewalk.

In my riding area, the main traffic areas without bike lanes are highly congested and moving quite a bit faster than typical bike speeds. Biking on those areas requires the drivers to move almost into the opposing lane to pass the bicyclist. Since those areas are congested, that is not a realistic expectation.

In short, sidewalk biking is the safer route in the dangerous areas. In the non-dangerous areas, it isn't dangerous. :o

[pinesandmaples]

You are not the target audience for this article.

[pinesandmaples]

You and I must be wildly lucky, according to JWZ up there because I've never lost my bike, either. I do the double-lock, always to something, and always in a well-lit area that's fairly trafficked when I'm locking at night. Do people who get their bikes stolen just not lock it?

[roadrunnertwice]

This advice lines up with what I've heard, the main difference being that I was told a pair of U locks with different lock mechanisms also works as a complicating factor.

Of course, I don't really follow that advice... But my city seems to have a startlingly low theft rate, so I've gotten away with it so far. (Not so much in MPLS, where I lost a wheel, a seat, and a few sets of lamps.)

[sara]

Well, that and I had the bike rack at my workplace installed right outside my office window. *GRIN*

Yeah, I once had someone cut apart a rack to steal a bike of mine (it was about a $200 bike, too, so not exactly fancy-schmantzy). It's just like your house: if someone wants in, they can get in; you do better to adjust your mode of thought than your physical surroundings, sometimes.

When I take the tandem out, I usually try to remember the cable as well as the U-lock, because it'd be a real pita to lose a wheel while out on the bike with the kid.

[dragonfly]

I bike on sidewalks where I want to. It's legal to do so in my city except in a few specific instances, and I am the best judge of the safety of the sidewalk vs. the safety of any given stretch of street. So, there. I'm with JWZ, or whatever hir name was. I didn't really see anything there that surprised me. I'd like to hope my bike isn't as vulnerable to theft as it apparently would be in SF, but it wouldn't surprise me if I were wrong.

[sara]

I don't know that the statistics bear you out on that, actually -- my understanding has been that driveways are insanely dangerous when sidewalk-biking, which jibes pretty well with my own run-down-by-cars experiences.

On the other hand, statistics also say that beds kill more people in the U.S. each year than bicycles, and nobody ever tells you to quit sleeping for your own good.

[ell]

no, I was not implying that one can buy a new bike for $20. Go back and carefully read the OP and my response. I was implying that saving the $20 per flat that the OP quoted 5 times would net me a gain of $100 which is substantial enough to make a big difference to the type of bike that can be purchased. I was commenting on the irrationality of the OP's frugality in purchasing the actual bicycle versus his careless spending on a simple repair that is easily done.

As for $5 flat repairs, you are a very lucky person. It does cost the rest of us around $20 at the shop.

[ell]

That is true, but I am the person that the target audience is warned to stay far away from for advice and that is what I fail utterly to understand. Because I do a lot of biking, love bikes, own a few different ones, and wear gear appropriate to my activities, that makes me a poor choice for advice?

[ell]

I tend to forget that most people on bikes aren't doing what I do. Optimism, I guess. But when I commute the 6 miles to work, especially in the summer, I also tend to wear the spandex as I have to change anyway when I get to work (live in the south) because it's 98 degrees and 98% humidity by 8 am for 3 months out of the year.

[sara]

*raises an eyebrow* I don't need reading lessons, thanks. You may need to reconsider the attitude you're bringing to this series of conversations, though.