BikeSnobNYC's Blog, page 24

If Cooler Heads Prevail, Then I'm Balding My Way To Victory

First things firstly, I've got a new Outside column about how bike share is a big deal and how the concept of the "litter bike" is an oxymoron:


It's true, I can't think of any bike-related tech that's emerged during my lifetime that is even remotely as revolutionary as bike share.

Well, okay, maybe the CoolHead:


Hey, that's fine if he wants to sell the idea of pouring water in your helmet, but how the FUCK do you do something like this and not use the tagline "Cooler Heads Prevail"?!?

Sorry, for the strong language, but that's some fucking bullshit.

Speaking of my lifetime, I've spent 11 years of it curating this blog.  Yep, that's right, yesterday was the 11th anniversary of this blog:


I'd planned to write a big post about this milestone full of all sorts of introspection and reflection, but since Outside had just published my Eroica story I instead dedicated yesterday's post to that trip.  Here, by the way, are the Mead and the Marin side-by-side:


How far we have or haven't come.

So instead I decided to curate the reflectrospection post today, but as it happens I recently took delivery of a badass new test bike:


If it spent one more day in the box my eager test pilot was going to kill me, so I spent the morning getting it together.  Islabikes sent both road and cyclocross tires and to start we went with the roadies.  They also sent fenders, a spare tube, and a set of hex keys for assembly (the BSNYC-branded grease is mine):


And if that weren't enough they also threw in some tires for me to try:


Plus these totally pro name transfers:


I assume one was for me but he insisted on using both:


And who am I to say no?


I figure I've got a few more years at best before he refuses to be associated with me in any way so I might as well enjoy it.

Anyway, it's a shockingly nice kid's bike and I almost resent him for it, even though I did have some sweet Skyway Tuff Wheel II mags when I was his age.  We've only done a brief shakedown ride so far, and I must say he's taken to the drop bars very quickly, which makes me concerned he may be a roadie:


And before you point out the obvious:

Yes, he's not wearing a helmet to ride his new bike around the freaking block.  Do you wear a helmet for short test rides?  (Actually, if you're the kind of person who is inclined to point out such things you probably do.)Yes, I left the pie plate on.  In this house you earn the right to lose your pie plate, goddamn it!  And how do you earn it?  Either by out-sprinting the old man or else by figuring out how to use a chain whip and doing it yourself.  (Also I didn't feel like it, but maybe I'll take it off when we upgrade to a titanium cassette.)
Rest assured we'll report back after we've put in some proper saddle time.
In any case, the bike is now together, but alas the 11th anniversary blog post remains unwritten, and I suspect it always will.  What is there to say really?  When I started this blog I had a real job, a flip phone and no kids, and now here I am watching my progeny discover the joys of descending in the drops.  If I could do it all over again I wouldn't do a single thing differently, except maybe for making fun of David Byrne less (hey, he didn't have to go out of his way to promote cycling, he could have just sat back and counted his "Psycho Killer" royalties).  Also, I'd probably have skipped calling myself "Bike Snob NYC" and gone with "Wildcat Rock Machine" from the get-go.  But if this blog and its original name hadn't netted me a trip to Gothenburg, Sweden I'd never have spotted the fabled Rock Machine in the first place so there you go:


In closing, let's all take a moment and reflect on my outsized contribution to the world of cycling.  Oh sure, I may update this blog a bit less assiduously than I did in its heyday, but I've also created a vast media empire, including a weekly column for Outside, a daily blog for Transportation Alternatives, and, well, that's it really.  But hey, I outlasted Michael Ball and Rock Racing, and isn't that what really counts?


You're goddamn right.

The Making Of L'Eroica California, The Movie

As I mentioned yesterday, my tale of riding an old-timey bike at L'Eroica California is live for your perusalization:


Of course, in that tale I left several questions unanswered, chief among them being:

What pressure was I running?What did I have for dinner every night?Which was better, the original Italian Eroica or the California version?In this post I will endeavor to answer exactly none of these questions.  I will however tell you that one morning I was doing cold early morning laps (well, lap, at that hour I generally only do one) in Central Park:


And the next I found myself in southern California:


Wait, southern California?

[RECORD SCRATCH SOUND]

I thought L'Eroica was in Paso Robles!

Well yes, it is.  However, the original plan was that I was going to meet up with Bregan, who works with the Eroica organization, and with Ultra Romance, who has a beard, and Nam, who does not, and together we were going to undertake some sort of three-day bikepacking expedition from Los Angeles or some point north of there and ride all the way to Paso Robles.  See, they're all inveterate bikepackers, whereas I'm very much an urban sophisticate with a high-threadcount sheet requirement (or, if you prefer, "woosie").  So basically the idea was that I'd provide live fish-out-of-water entertainment and they could all laugh at me for three days instead of wasting precious battery power watching cat videos on YouTube.

I had certain reservations about joining the bikepacking trip.  For one thing, I have not slept in a tent or out of doors since sleep-away camp.  For another thing, I don't really want to sleep in a tent or out of doors.  If I'm going to sleep somewhere other than my home I very much want it to be more luxurious than my home and not the other way around.  Nevertheless, I agreed, since sometimes you've got to try new things, all the millennials are doing it, yada yada yada.

However, as L'Eroica drew nearer I realized two things: 1) My wife's a big shot at work and I can't leave her in the lurch for a whole week while I traipse up the coast; 2) I still didn't want to sleep outside.  And so I backed out.

Instead, I flew into Long Beach and visited my brother and his family, who recently relocated to Huntington Beach from the Napa Valley.  My brother is in the restaurant industry, which is what brought him out there in the first place, and he's currently the general manager of a restaurant that's situated in a very nice hotel.  So I traded trailside bro-downs for family time:


And sleeping a tent for sleeping in a luxurious hotel suite:


I feel strongly that I made the right choice.

Knowing that I'd be hauling multiple bikes and possibly multiple people during this trip, I'd rented myself a sweet-ass Kia Sedona minivan:


And the next morning I hopped in it and headed north to Paso Robles.  While I may be a semi-professional disparager of American motordom, I'm also a gigantic hypocrite, and I'd be lying if I said I don't savor any opportunity to drive the California coast.  Sure, driving a minivan isn't exactly the stuff of which automotive dreams are made, but it was also a minivan with exactly zero screaming children in it, so as far as I was concerned it might as well have been a Porsche 911.  For my soundtrack I chose the album "Joe's Garage" by Frank Zappa, partially because I figured it would put me in a California state of mind, but also because it's roughly forty-seven hours long and I wouldn't have to fiddle with any buttons.

My first stop on the way to Paso Robles was Studio Cycle Company on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles:


Bobby at Studio Cycle had kindly agreed to take delivery of the Cortina AX2 from Marin and prepare it for me, and when I arrived it was indeed ready and waiting.  As a shop Studio Cycle skews mountain, and some of the bikes in for service took me on a ride down the singletrack of memory lane:


After purchasing some sundries (water bottles, spare tubes, energy globules, and so forth) I loaded everything into the Kia and continued north along the scenic route until Santa Barbara, where my hunger got the better of me and I stopped for some tacos:


(A photograph I took of some tacos.)
Next I had to pick up the Mead Ranger, which Paul at Classic Cycle had shipped down from Bainbridge Island and which was waiting for me at a UPS store in Atascadero.  I wasn't able to park directly in front of the UPS store, but there was a space a few doors down in front of this super trippy weed dispensary:


Far out, man.

From Atascadero it was just a short hop to Paso Robles, where I was staying in a big house with my erstwhile bikepacking compatriots as well as various other bike world muckety-whos:


Unloading the bikes into the garage, I unboxed the Mead and took my first glimpse at it:


Here are Paul's assembly instructions:


As I mentioned in the Outside story, putting it together was a fairly straightforward affair.  The Marin of course was already together, so all I had to do was put on pedals and cages and make the usual adjustments:


Bregan also lent me a Cambium as no semi-professional blogger should ever have to go Brooksless, and I adorned the undercarriage of the Brooks with an EH Works tool roll:


The bike was fantastic, and besides that stuff the only thing I'd change if it were mine would be to swap the 175mm cranks for 172.5s.

You're goddamn right I notice crankarm length.

That evening we all piled in the Kia and daddy (that's me!) drove everybody to the Eroica reception:


Where vintage people examined vintage bikes:


And I wondered if the Mead would prove superior or inferior to an antique shifting system such as this:


Having briefly ridden a bike with a rod shifter during my Rivendell visit I'd imagine it would be the former.

After the reception my housemates and I went to dinner, and here's basically the whole crew:

Excellent Italian @eroica_california #eroicacalifornia #BSNYC (pictured by Nam) not tagged because he’s not on Instagram :(A post shared by Jeremy K. Spencer (@writertype74) on Apr 13, 2018 at 11:27pm PDT

I was in excellent company, and after finally meeting Ultra Romance and Nam for the first time I enjoyed them so much I almost regretted skipping out on the bikepacking trip.  (Almost.)  Nam dressed me down for backing out and for not knowing who Cardi B was, and Ultra Romance exuded a preternatural serenity: I'd putter into the garage to tweak one or the other of my bikes and there he'd be poking holes in some yams.  And of course he also took all the photos for the Outside story:


It was genuinely impressive to watch him work.  We'd be riding along, then he'd scurry up some hill or bomb some descent, then I'd forget about him, and awhile later as I rounded a turn or something he'd leap out from behind a rock or dangle out of some tree to get the perfect shot.  Imagine the "It's Man" from Monty Python with superb bike-handling and photography skills and you've got the idea:


He's got quite an adoring following, too.  "There's your man crush!," one woman whispered to her partner as he walked by, and many of the younger Eroica Freds (young people comprise a relatively small portion of the overall Eroica demographic, but still) stopped him for selfies.

(I'm fairly certain only one person recognized me, but that was only after I mouthed off to the MC at the post-ride barbecue.  I'm generally the asshole in any group cycling situation, which tends to stand out.)

As for the riding, Saturday was when we did the Nova Eroica approximation, and you can see the route in detail here.  As you can imagine, the riding out there is almost too good.  One minute you're in the mountains:


And the next you're at the beach:


Then that evening we went to the big Eroica dinner:


It's a diverse demographic, if by "diverse" you mean pretty much every pattern of male baldness was represented.

There was also an auction during which none other than Andy Hampsten, who rode the following day and is generally the most agreeable man on the face of the planet earth, handed out the items:



Then on Sunday I did the short Eroica route on the Mead, which you can see here.  As you can see, I was not the only rider who resorted to walking:


Ironically, the first thing I saw upon crossing the finish line on my 102 year-old bicycle was a sign offering free e-bike rides:


Now you tell me.

Then we ate some barbecue, which is where I mouthed off to the MC:


And with that my work in Paso Robles was done...

...but my time in California was not.  Some years back, when I stopped in Los Angeles on a book tour, Chronicle put me up in a bungalow in Los Feliz.  Prior to that visit I'd never really understood LA, having only visited (as an adult anyway) while working as Michael Moore's assistant--a job that mostly involved people from both coasts screaming at me, as well as wearing an alphanumeric pager which these same people used to charge me with impossible tasks for sport.

As far as I could tell from those visits, sitting in the back of some car service or another, LA was just a bunch of sprawling boulevards that resembled Sunrise Highway on Long Island.  Staying in a bungalow in Los Feliz however was rather beguiling, and I'd been longing to return to it ever since.  So after L'Eroica that's what I did:


I realize of course that this is a rather rarefied view of Los Angeles, and that if I were to actually live there I'd be less likely to acquire a bungalow in Los Feliz and more likely to be living under a bus shelter:


Nevertheless, it was great to be able to roll out the front door and up to the Griffith Observatory the next morning:


And to walk over to Vons that evening for my sad solo lonely guy dinner:


But before I could get too ensconced in my glamorous new LA lifestyle it was time to fly home.  So I drove both bikes over to Studio Cycle so Bobby could ship them to their respective destinations, and then I shipped myself back to New York, where before I knew it I was back in Central Park:


You can take the Fred out of the city, but not for very long apparently.

I Came, I Saw, Eye-roica'd

As you may recall, back in April I went to L'Eroica California and promised to give you a full accounting.  Well now that Outside have published this story I can begin to do just that:


(*I didn't ride 100 miles.  Well I did in total, just not all on that bike.)
Please note this story focuses mostly on what it's like to ride a modern-day gravel bike and a century-old museum piece back-to-back.  What's missing is some of the backstory as well as some of my trademark awful photography, which I'll provide you with in the very near future.  And speaking of photography, the photos in this piece were provided by none other than the globetrotting and formidably bearded Ultra Romance:


(Bicycling)
He went to find adventure and you'd better believe he found it, because it doesn't get more adventurous than photographing a washed-up bike blogger put on a sorry show of riding a bicycle.

Anyway, there it is.  Enjoy the Outside story (or don't, see if I care) and I'll be back in due course with a detailed list of everything I ate all weekend as well as an exhaustive inventory of everything in my suitcase.  (Sadly I forgot the courage.)

Bikes Will Be The Ruin of Civilization. Obviously.

So much happy news today!


I mean really, where to even begin?  Aw, what the hell, let's start with this one:


Fitts, who admitted that he struck and killed 80-year-old Theodore Schwalb in an Allston crosswalk Wednesday afternoon, was on television a few hours later, blithely confessing to what sounds a lot like vehicular manslaughter.

“As I’m driving, I’m driving too quick . . . to the point where it’s like, I couldn’t really stop,” Fitts told Boston 25 News reporter Drew Karedes, who should get a medal for not punching this guy in the face on the spot. Fitts also said the light was green and that he beeped at the man repeatedly but struck him with his SUV because swerving would have led him into a pole.

Why could he honk repeatedly but not brake? That was left unstated. And as for why he didn’t bother to stop?

“People hit and run people all the time,” Fitts said. This is sadly true, but it’s also not much of a legal defense: Fitts was arrested later that evening.

Infuriating?  Yes.  Surprising?  No.  Rhetorical questions?  Absolutely.  See, motorist entitlement long ago reached the point where people act like they're driving locomotives on dedicated rights-of-way instead of private vehicles on shared public thoroughfares, and that whatever or whoever wanders into their path simply gets what's coming to them.  I seem to remember learning all sorts of stuff in drivers' ed about driving slowly around children and yielding at crosswalks and watching for balls rolling into the street and reducing speed in wet conditions and poor visibility and all the rest of it, but in practice that's emphatically not how it works.  (Except in the Hamptons.  Drivers will totally yield to you when you're in the crosswalk in the Hamptons.  But that's only because they realize it's possible you may be a fellow rich person and they don't want to take the chance.)

No, the way it works is that green means go and red means stop--well unless it turned red and the driver in front of you held you up, in which case you're allowed to run the light because you should have made it if only the person in front of you hadn't decided to turn.  Also, the speed limit is a speed minimum, and you should never take your surroundings into account.  School zone?  Park?  Shopping area?  Doesn't matter.  Simply go as fast as you can get away with confident in the knowledge that anybody stupid enough to venture into the street deserves to die.  Blizzard coming?  Don't modify your behavior in any way, just go forth into the breach just as you would on a summer's day:


Whether it's blizzards, or floods, or their fellow human beings, drivers just can't stop driving right into stuff.

But let's not lose sight of the real problem, which of course is bikes.  In particular, dockless bikes are ending up in vast graveyards that will soon engulf the entire planet:


Oh, wait, sorry.  Those are cars.
Here's one of those bike graveyards:

Chilling--if you've never seen a landfill, that is:

All the shit we use just ends up in giant piles, most of which are right in our backyards, but sure, let's freak out about those bikes in China.

Anyway, given what I knew about the "litter bike" phenomenon (that being limited to what's been written in news articles that use phrases like "litter bike), I watched with interest as a dockless bike program launched in Yonkers recently:


I live just a few miles from the New York City/Yonkers border, and my rides take me through there regularly, which meant finally I'd have a chance to see the devastation wrought by dockless bike-sharing systems firsthand:


Indeed, as it happened, I didn't even have to go to Yonkers, because shortly after launch the bikes started migrating here to the Bronx:


This was only natural, since (as I wrote in the Bike Forecast) it's a straight shot down from Yonkers and it's now super easy for Yonkersians to hop on a Lime and access our deeply dysfunctional subway system.

Of course, technically you're not supposed to use these bikes to go to the Bronx.  In fact, just the other day I walked out of my home only to find a Lime Detector Van (not to be confused with the Cat Detector Van from the Ministry of Housinge, yes I am a huge dork) on my street.  In it were two people from Lime (or a contractor representing Lime, I don't know how they work) looking around my building looking for an errant velocipede that was apparently popping up on their tracking system.  Naturally at this moment a neighbor saw me emerge and instructed them to talk to me about the lost bike, since as the resident cyclist obviously I should know where it is.

Anyway, even though Lime is actively rounding up their wayward bikes and the system isn't supposed to be operating in New York City, they're still a regular sight around these parts:


And as of this morning had encroached upon the Isle of Manhattan:


Now I should not that as an anal retentive sort I prefer the idea of an orderly, docking system.  However, I can assure you I have no problem with the Lime bikes invading my territory, and in fact it makes me happy whenever I see one because it's tangible evidence that people want and need to ride bicycles across different municipalities.  I can also see myself using them, though so far apart from a test run I haven't had occasion to do so.  Plus, they just seem to sit there on the sidewalk not hurting anybody, so what's the big deal?

Surely however it must be a different situation in Yonkers, where there are thousands (I'm assuming) of the things, and where one even got tossed in the river:


Ironically the only reason you can still see it is it's probably sitting on a pile of car parts.

Well, it's been a few weeks now, and on my regular rides through that city I can say that the Lime bikes are indeed begriming the city by sitting primly in front of libraries, train stations, and other such places:


Furthermore, incredibly, none of these bikes are sticking out of smashed car windshields or up in trees or lying across railroad tracks.  So far the worst thing I've seen is one that was upside down, which will only rattle you if you're the sort of person who thinks "Wacky Wednesday" was a horror story:


("The giraffe is in the sewer!  There is no God...")
Otherwise it's pretty tame stuff.
It's almost like people find bikes useful and that they integrate themselves into everyday life fairly seamlessly.
Who'da thunk it?
Finally, Lauf are Lauf-ing all the way to the bank with their front-suspended gravel bikes:


Yep, looks like the cross-country mountain bike is officially going the way of multiple chain rings and rim brakes and drop-bar all-terrain whatevers are the future:

If the fork doesn’t convince you that the True Grit is part of the mountain bike family tree, the geometry will.

The 1,120-gram carbon frame is designed with a longer cockpit to pair with a shorter stem — 394 millimeters of reach with a 90-millimeter stem on the Medium Long model we rode. Plus, the head tube angle is very laid back at 70.5 degrees. Sounds a bit like a cross-country hardtail, doesn’t it?

Maybe so, but I'm holding out until Rivendell makes a gravel fork:

Wonder if there will be a disc version.

Drawing the Line

Firstly, last week I wrote for Outside about Elon Musk and his various ventures, and apropos of that here's a truckload of Teslas blocking a bike in Brooklyn:

oooh this is right where Tesla parks its diesel-exhaust-belching semis in the middle of a 2-way bike path pic.twitter.com/7quyLb813Q— Alan (@akgerber) June 5, 2018

I think you'd call this ironic, but ironically in 2018 I don't even know what irony is anymore.

Secondly, last weekend I failed a bike race in Central Park by not completing it:


Overall I've been greatly enjoying my return to the pastime of go-fast sport-Fredding, but on this particular morning the idea of pushing harder seemed not so much impossible as it did unappealing, like when you're halfway through that giant bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and just decide "Fuck it," pull the napkin out of your shirt collar, and go flop down on the couch.  And so I quit.  What I realized after this (apart from the fact that I suck, which I already knew anyway), is that I needed to undergo a period of de-Fredding by riding around in regular clothes for a few days and just going wherever.  And yesterday that's what I did.

The joy of the Fred ride is that when you're in all the stretchy clothes and riding a special bike with those crazy pedals where your shoes click into them and stuff you're fully committed to riding.  The problem, however, is that you're fully committed to riding, and sometimes the best thing about being on a bike is stopping for awhile to do other things.  It can indeed be quite enjoyable to ride a bike while dressed like a human being, and to carry a bag with a lock in it and stuff, thereby opening yourself up to new experiences.

Sometimes the best thing about riding a bike is getting off the bike.

Anyway, as I prepared to head out, I had an idea: I'll bring a skateboard with me!  There's a skate park I'd been meaning to visit, and while I kept telling myself I was going to scout it out to see if it was someplace I should bring my kid (he's interested in skateboarding) the fact of the matter is I wanted to try it out myself.  And I shouldn't have to tell you that at my age and with my lack of skills this was a very bad idea.

Besides physical injury, my biggest concern was embarrassing myself, but fortunately when I arrived there was only a small handful of truants present.  Nevertheless, I did my best to stay out of sight when I goofed around, and I'd say it was a solid 20 minutes of pathetic flailing on my part before I fell right on my ass.

Clearly this was a sign that I should quit before sustaining more serious injury, and so I got back on my bike and undertook a rather pleasant spin around the city.

Of course the truly enlightened cyclist gains some insight from every ride, and the insight that I had during this one is that maybe my obsession with riding bikes isn't such a bad thing inasmuch as it keeps me out of trouble--and most importantly away from other human-powered wheeled conveyances.  Alas, had I only stayed in the saddle yesterday I wouldn't have such a sore ass today.

With profound insights such as these maybe I should start a YouTube channel:


Welcome to the fold.

Finally...ebikes?  Pshaw!  The solution for cycling uphill without getting tired is "pump action":


And it's designed by the "inventor of the fake yellow line you see on football games," so you know it's sound:


Why it took a physicist to invent that, and what any of this has to do with bicycles I don't know, but when the man who invented the idea of showing a line on TV speaks you damn well better listen:


Of course, unless I'm missing something, this appears to be incompatible with derailleur drivetrains.  And certainly having a wide range of gearing options is a hell of a lot more helpful for going uphill than an elastic pulley system.

But then again he did invent that line thing.  So I'll be upgrading all my bikes immediately.

New Outside Column!

You know how when you're on a bike everyone seems to treat you like you're in the way, even if you're with a bunch of other people on bikes and you outnumber drivers by a large number?  Well my latest Outside column is about that:



More or less.
I suppose eventually things will reach a tipping point and things will change.  After all, everything does sooner or later.  Hey, when I was a teenager trying my hardest to look punk people used to throw bottles at me from cars.  Now elementary school kids get their hair dyed blue.  (Well they do here, anyway.)
Of course I'm still getting things thrown at me from cars, only now it's because I ride a bike.  (Okay, fine, it's been awhile since someone threw something at me from a car for riding a bike--unless you count insults, which still happens fairly often.)
Speaking of Outside, via the Twitter it's come to my attention that an excerpt from my last column has made the hallowed virtual pages of the Merriam Webster book of diction:

Too bad they spelled "crabon" wrong.
Of course I always thought if I were ever to wind up in the dictionary it would be my face beneath the word "bloviate," but this will have to do.

All Grovel Before The Gravel

It's Friday, which means this weekend you'll probably be cycling.  And if you're like most cyclists, you'll probably use some sort of bicycle to do it.  But what kind?  There are so many!  In fact, according to a popular glossy cycling periodical's buyer's guide, there are currently over 4,500 different recognized styles of bicycle.*  One of these bicycle types is the "graveling bicycle," and Velonews has an interesting interview with Gerard "Vroom-Vroom" Vroomen about where he thinks this whole thing is going:


Being old, I still associate Vroomen with bikes like this:


If you're less as old as I am, the Soloist had a reversible seatpost and allowed you to go from regular Fred to TT Fred and/or Tridork with a few twists of a hex key.  I can assure you it was no less dorky in those days than it is now, but people were all over it just the same.

Now, however, Vroomen is all about the gravel bikes, and he has this to say on what the future holds:

What we call gravel bikes now — but hopefully we’ll come up with a better name for them — I’m 100 percent convinced that will become a bigger category than road bikes and than mountain bikes 10 years from now. That really is a bike that addresses today’s needs for people. It gets people off the paved roads, it’s still fast, and it works really well on a mixture of different surfaces. For sure that will be a big trend.

I completely agree with this for like half the year.  The other half of the year it's so slushy and rainy that all I want to do is ride a road bike on the road.  I think this is probably true in a lot of places, and even as someone who's declared road riding dead myself I think its survival is pretty much assured for this reason alone.

Of course you can always just put road tires on your gravel bike.  But you won't.  That's not how bikes work.  All of cycling tends towards specialization, and it's part of the disease we all have that we have to be riding the "right" bike all the time.  That's why even a no-BS company like Surly offers roughly 1,500 different models now.

Another reason I think the road bike will never go away is that the kinds of people who are attracted to stretchy-clothes riding cannot resist fairings and other stuff that seems aero.  And while Vroomen himself may have invented the world's first aero gravel bike, there will always be people like this:



You'd think he'd have deleted that video by now.

As for displacing the mountain bike, it seems to me that for amateur riders the gravel bike is sort of replacing the cross-country mountain bike, and a mountain bike will only be considered a mountain bike now if it has hydraulic and dropper everything, a 1mm stem, at least fourteen levers on the handlebars, and is totally incapable of actually being pedaled to the trailhead.

Vroomen also predicts the death of the front derailleur:

There’ll be no front derailleurs anymore. That’s for sure. I think when you ask people, “Hey, if there’s 1-by-14, would you ride that or would you still ride 2-by-14?” People would say, “Well, of course I’ll ride 1-14.” And now we’ve established that, and it’s just a matter of when you switch. Is it 1-by-11? 1-by-12? 1-by-13? You wait a couple years, an extra cog shows up in the rear, that’s how we’ve been going since the first rear derailleur. So those are trends that I think are pretty clear.

This is really one to ponder.  On one hand, the more cogs you add in back the more overlapping gears you have with a double.  (At least I think that's the case, I can't be bothered to check.)  On the other hand, the more cogs you add in the back the more annoying it is to shift all the way across the cassette when you crest a hill with a single.  Certainly for gravel bikes the single ring is preferable for a whole bunch of reasons, but a road bike is another story.  Then again I guess we're moving towards a road bike-free future.  Still, it seems like electronic shifting would have to get really fast for the front derailleur to disappear completely.

Anyway, it's all compelling stuff to ponder, assuming you're a terminal Fred, which if you're reading a bike blog on a Friday afternoon you probably are.  But don't ponder it too much, lest you break your brain and decide, "Fuck it, I'm leasing a Hyundai"--or in my case decide, "Fuck it, I'm riding an aero bike made of wood," which in these gravel-obsessed days is just as transgressive.

Of course the big question isn't whether we'll all be riding gravel bikes in the future; the question is "Will that gravel bike be 3D-printed?"


Leave it to Silicon Valley to disrupt ruin the bicycle.





*This is a lie I made up.

New Outside Column, New Tires, Same Great Taste!

It's been an exciting couple of days over here at Bike Snob Industries, LLC.  Firstly, my latest Outside column just appeared on the Internet:


Once again, illustrator Taj Mihelich has done an incredible job, though for obvious reasons this one will always be my favorite:


As for the Tesla illustration, this tweet was the basis for it:

We’re going to include some fun games as hidden Easter eggs in Tesla S, X & 3. What do you think would be most fun in a car using the center touch screen?— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 22, 2018

Though I didn't end up referencing it, go figure.

Anyway, as you probably know, Elon Musk is currently on a mission to end clickbait, which obviously hits me right in the pocket.  Now I know how the fast food industry felt when New York City announced it wanted to ban trans fats.

In other exciting news--are you sitting down?--I put new tires on my (well, Renovo's) wooden Fred Sled!


The bike came with 23s, and especially given the wide rims on that fancy-pants crabon wheelset I'd been thinking something wider would be real improvement.  Current Aerowoods will take 28s, but this one ain't current, which meant that unless I was prepared to break out the file I was pretty much limited to 25s.  Of course I realize buying bike parts on the Internet is evil, but I happened to notice a sale on a certain high-end Italian racing tire in the 25c sizeway, and I couldn't resist.  (Hey, now that Elon Musk wants to destroy my livelihood I have to be frugal.)  So on they went:


The top tire is the 23 and the bottom one is the 25.  It's tough to see the difference, but once the rear wheel's tucked in behind that tight faired seat tube (seat branch?) you get a sense of the extra volume.  As for the ride quality, I can emphatically say that it it is indeed exactly two millimeters better.  In particular the cornering seems to have improved a bit, but I corner as timidly as a shut-in peering down the hallway so there you go.

Finally, Peter Flax wrote an impassioned piece about why he's so upset about Chris Froome winning the Giro of Italy:

It's a strong opinion elegantly and engagingly presented, though I'm not sure I agree:

In moments like this, it is sad to have to say this out loud: The sport of cycling belongs to the fans. These are good people whose patience and passion has been tested for decades now. These are the good people who ultimately enable the business of pro cycling to exist and flourish. These who are the good people who camp out on remote mountain roads to celebrate a beautiful sport and be within an arm’s reach of their heroes for a few fleeting seconds.

And Chris Froome is shitting all over these people.

Did he though?  Or did he do his job by winning a bike race?

I'd argue the latter, though generally speaking I'm not someone who operates on faith:

How long can our faith be stretched before it just snaps?

I believe that faith is like some kind of gooey film on your body: it should be sloughed off with the Loofah of Pragmatism long before it has the chance to congeal and turn brittle:


A-meh and holy luau.

This Just In: App-ropos of Nothing...

...there's a new TransAlt app featuring the Bike Forecast!


It's free, it's available on both the App Store and Google Play, and best of all it's free at no cost to you!

Plus, you can send in tips:


Ticket sting?  Sinkhole?  Freshly dumped, still-perfectly-edible produce in the dumpster by the Whole Foods?  Let your fellow cyclists know and you will be richly rewarded in the afterlife!*

*[Hateful Ambien-induced tips will be subject to censure and/or series cancellation as applicable.]

Yes, thanks to this app, TransAlt is now the most technologically advanced advocacy group on the face of the planet earth, and just wait until we drop the new virtual reality system that lets you ride under the illusion that there's a protected bike lane on every street:


(Virtu-Smug being beta-tested indoors at TransAlt HQ.)
What an exciting time to be alive!

Ride Bikes This Weekend. Or Don't! See If I Care.

As I mentioned, yesterday I overslept and missed my morning ride.  So, by way of a make-up, I did the next best thing and took an evening ride:


Yes, thanks to my proximity to the legal mountain bike trails at Highbridge Park in Manhattan I can zip down there in no time and knock around a little bit before the sun sets.  Sure, it's not exactly an "epic," but sometimes all you need is a small helping of dirt, roots, and rocks (and a little broken glass)* to get yourself back on track.  Plus, it was a lovely warm evening, summer was in the air, and everybody out on the street was in good spirits.  Best of all, on the way home I stopped at Target, where I refrained from taking off my shoes and cooling off in this open hydrant for awhile:

That Jones bag, by the way, has been just the ticket for my sub-epic non-bikepacking lifestyle.  It affords me just enough room for a pump, some snacks, my sunglasses, and an extra t-shirt in case I need to look presentable and/or not feel disgusting.  Basically it's my purse is what I guess I'm saying.  As for Ol' Piney, I continue to love the bike, and I'm glad to be reunited with it after a long, wet spring during which the trails were muddy and best left alone most of the time.
Not only did I do a make-up ride, but I also managed to wake my ass up early today and do a quick double sawbuck on the Renovo.  And if that weren't enough, a few hours later I headed out again on Ol' Piney up to the forbidding Trails Behind The Mall [html tag for dripping blood font]: 

Yeah, that's right, I did two rides in one day, and that's not even including this morning's school run!  It's all very impressive--so impressive Strava says I'm "right in the zone" this week, which is the nicest and most encouraging thing anybody's said to me ever.
Anyway, with any luck I'll manage to counteract all that activity by parking myself on the beach this weekend.  (Though now that I think about it, chasing kids around the beach requires much more energy than recreational bicycle cycling.)  Hopefully your long weekend is an enjoyable one, ride safe, and I'll see you when I see you.
Yours and so forth,

Wildcat Etc.

*Glass quip aside, the trails at Highbridge were in fantastic shape and very clean.  I assume I have the hard work and dedication of NYCMTB to thank for that.  Lob knows I don't do shit.