Street Smarts

Here are some photos from my local Greenway with the Rans Street:

It sports the Rans Rear Rack, Avid BB7's, Nitto albatross bars and the polished riser spun 'round toward the rider.





















These are pix from my phone, so they aren't as clear as I'd like. The photos certainly don't do the metallic red color justice. It is quite a good looking frame, even it there were no other components on it.

I've been on a couple of "training rides" in preparation for the Tour To Tanglewood MS150 Ride, in Central North Carolina. We'll ride 90 miles over two days with a wonderful campout after the first 45 miles. The rest of my rides have been mostly along this greenway, which I can get to by cutting through a couple of nearby subdivisions, where I can easily make a 10-15 mile ride from my door to the greenway and back without having to load it up in the car. I like being able to ride my bike to my favorite riding area. My goals now are to get my city to provide spurs off this greenway to make it more utilitarian, that is to give cyclists destinations they need and want to ride to IN ADDITION to the picturesque ribbon that rolls quietly through a dozen miles of a large city and winds through several Industrial/Office parks. I'm also working on an idea to get a local University to start a "borrow-a-bike" plan like the ones I've read about at Ripon College and Duke University.

The Rans Street is a wonderful platform. There have been no comfort issues, no soreness aside from muscle soreness from healthy use, and I've ridden more this year so far than I have in the last 15 more years combined. That's what the Crankforward format can do. For people who have found typical mountain bikes and road bikes to be uncomfortable, the Rans design offers a true alternative that's similar enough to the standard upright bicycle that you have no learning curve! People who have taken my Street for a ride have come back smiling talking about how easy it is to ride. It's the joy of cycling like when you were a kid, without having the kid's body.

More folks on bikes around here. Life is Good, or at least Better.

I see more people on bikes these days around my town. Mostly they're not the lycra-wearing, riding-for--fitness types. The new folks I see are riding cheaper bikes, mostly mountain bikes, from non-bike-shop venues. The big box stores are selling more bikes looks like to me. I'm not really a bike snob; but I see some problems with bikes and their riders. The bikes are not well-fitted to the riders. The bikes are mostly equipped with fat, knobby tires. The riders have no idea how to adjust the handlebars, the seat height, the seat angle, or even to install the wheels properly with a quick-release lever. I saw a group of three riders trying to put a rear wheel in on one of the bikes and they said it had fallen out 3 TIMES ALREADY on that ride. I showed them how it worked and they thanked me. I wondered how many bikes are sold in the big box store without even a 10-second presentation on how to work the bike.

I see older people (ok my age or a few years older...40 to 50) riding flashy new mountain bikes riding down the sidewalk or shakily starting out across the intersection at the wrong time against the lights. They're all bent over, knees higher than their butts, reaching way too far to the bars. I can't imagine how they think that is what cycling is about. I just want to stop and chat with them about the sizing and differences between bicycle types. If I can start up a conversation with them, I usually tell them about some good websites they can visit, I wish I had a little business card printed up with the site URLs and some little pictures. Not everybody can visit websites, or surf the internet effectively. Surprise.

Maybe the best approach is to ride around and look for these "new cyclists" and provide some assistance/leadership in the cycling community. I'd say almost any of these "plain-clothed" cyclists could use a quick review of how to install a wheel or how to adjust the seat to a reasonably good height. Mentioning the good karma of carrying a few tools and a tube, even if you don't know what to do with them, is a good idea. If they get stuck on the side of the road or bike path, at least a good Samaritan could help using their own tools and stuff.

Of course, the next obvious thing about these new riders is their total lack of any provision to carry stuff. I see them riding down the street w/ a plastic bag swinging from their hands/handlebars. They swerve and jerk down the road looking like an accident waiting to happen. Few of them wear a helmet. Most of them have pants legs dangling down in the pedal/chain/wheel area. It's painful to watch.

If you tell them there's a better way to secure stuff and ride, then in the next breath you say it costs $400 for the Xtracycle on top of the cost of their bike, or $900 for the Yuba Mundo, or $1900 for a complete Big Dummy, they look at you like you just landed from Mars. I bet that Tahoe/Suburban/Explorer/Armada sitting at the house in their driveway costs about that much in two months. Where is the button you push to change a person's version of value? I read an article regarding the servitude of Americans to their cars where the average American pays $378 / month on their car payment. That doesn't count the gas, the insurance, the upkeep, the washing, or any other stuff you put in it.

Looks like we've got a long way to go to use the bikes we have for more utility purposes. Just parking the car doesn't help that much, we need to sell it, and buy something more appropriate.

Soul of a bike - and some off-topic wonderings

I read an interesting line some time back that said "I've had the same bike for 25 years, replaced the frame twice, and every component has been replaced." So is that a new bike, or just a reincarnation of the soul or spirit of the old bike? I had a bike I sold in order to buy my newest bike, but I wouldn't claim that that one is still, or became, the new one. In strictest terms I would look at it mechanically and say if you put a bike on the workstand and clamped it in there, replaced everything on it but never unclamped it, you could say you upgraded it. However, if you clamped an old seatpost into the stand, added a new frame and every other component, I would call that a new build, and thus a new bike is born. It seems like semantics; but there's an existentialist argument to be made that while it is completely changed, it is still your bike. Is it the soul that continues to live in the new form?

If the soul of the bike continues on in some new clothes, let's say, then when does the soul of your bike finally release from this world and let you share time with a new one, or at least a different one. If you change all the components, and the wheels and the frame, don't you have a different bike. Precisely where does the soul reside? Is it analogous to the human soul, which is yet to be concretely and definitively defined? For example, if a person gets all new organs but maintains their own brain-matter, we would presume they are the same person, and would contain or "have" the same soul. However, if a person receives significant head injury, loses consciousness forever and yet the rest of the body and organs function properly, we say that person is dead and gone. Their soul is no longer connected with the body. Perhaps it never was.

My immediate catalyst for this discussion follows from a task I've wrestled with recently. I have a relative who has lost a lung to cancer, and has significant cancer left in his body. For a while the doctors were treating him with chemo, but have stopped, saying that the chemo is killing him faster and more expensively than the cancer. So until his final breath, he will live at home knowing that his time is nigh. During this time while he's at home with his family, he has had a birthday, and therein lies my problem. Note that this next line is not to be taken as funny or sarcastic or any way like I'm trying to be comedic. What do you write in a birthday card to someone you know (and he knows) will be dead in the next 30 days or so. In fact, the hospice workers have given their opinion based upon experience with people in this situation, that he will be gone in under two weeks. This will be the last birthday card I send him. It may be the last communication we have, as it's difficult for him to talk on the phone, and additionally, throughout our lives we never really just called one another to chat, so it seems a little unnatural to try it now. Given that, could you write anything that would be worthwhile to someone you truly care about but have never had a particularly loving or caring conversation with? And on further extension, why don't we write/talk to people we care about NOW while they're alive and fully functional to comprehend our conversation instead of never saying a word until it's too late. Then perhaps we will stay up all night before the funeral trying to craft something to say about that person. It seems a peculiar ceremony to write a eulogy ABOUT someone when clearly you've had a lifetime to say those things TO the person but never did. The old saying is that there are two things certain in this world, death and taxes. Well friends, we pay our taxes every year; but I bet it's been more than a year since you told someone in the last generation (like your mom or dad) what you really appreciate about them, or about the way they raised you. I know I've never uttered a word like that. Perhaps the time has come.

Too often on the TV and in the movies we see the same scene played out: one character lies dying in a bed, maybe in a coma, but certainly unconscious or unable to respond while another character finally decides to tell the dying one how much he loved him or respected him or enjoyed him or whatever. Maybe the media has programmed us to wait until the very last second to communicate anything meaningful. But then, it's always just a few seconds too late.

Poll for the Greenway meeting Thursday 6/24

I hope there will be some traffic for this post. I want to get some feedback on a couple questions I asked in the last post. Specifically, please leave a comment and answer the following:

1) Does your employer offer any incentive (formal or otherwise) to use alternate forms of transportation, whether it's bicycle, carpool, Public Transport system, etc.?

2) What sort of incentive would it take to get you to ride your bicycle to work or on errands?

3) If there were safe places to leave your bike while you shopped/ate/socialized in public areas, would you consider using your bike?

4) When gas reaches $5/gallon, will you look for alternative means to get from point A to B, C, D and beyond on a daily basis?

5) If you live in High Point, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, or surrounding townships, what can the Triad area planners do THIS YEAR that would make you favor the bicycle over your car for short errands?

I'll post my thoughts in the first comment just to get us started.

What do you do when it costs $100 for every fillup?

This morning I filled up my personal vehicle. It has a 28 gallon tank. Would you believe $94 to get me around 310 miles? Yep, that's my truck. I suspect that's par for many people out there driving nice big quad cab trucks, giant SUV's, and miniVans. Looks like time for a change.

I'm looking at a map of High Point, NC, and envisioning three concentric circles drawn on it: green; yellow; red. Each circle represents a distance from my house: green is a 5-mile radius; yellow is a 10-mile radius; and red is a 15-mile radius. What do I see inside these zones? First of all, I see about 90% of all the places I go in a typical month live inside these three zones. Secondly, I see the highest concentration of "points of my interest" live in the green zone. There's my post office, my Food Lion, my Harris Teeter, Starbucks ( for my wife,) my kids' daycare/school, Oak Hollow Mall, two Goodwill stores, about 15 of my favorite restaurants, a drugstore, movie theaters, bars, Bruster's, 3 Parks, my church, and about half of my family friends. So like many Americans, judging by the statistics one reads, I'm pretty average in that most of my trips are under 4 miles. Let's look at a sampling of each zone.

The green zone is the easy zone; it's a 5-mile radius of my house. Anyone can ride five miles. I can ride five miles in about 18-20 minutes, leisurely. So I could easily make my trips to the grocery store, to the movies - on rare occasions, to the drugstore, my favorite eateries and to my friends' homes. So why don't I? Even though I've got one of the most comfortable and fun bikes ever made, the Rans Street? It's because I can't quite carry stuff that rides around in the back seat area of my truck. Notwithstanding the two kids, many things I would either carry with me, or would bring back with me simply don't fit in my backpack or rear trunk bag on the rack of my bike. So while my trips are easily completed on the bike, the object of my trips are largely unattainable with the current gear. Maybe it's time to change the vehicle. The green zone should be 90% bicycle use.

The Yellow zone is a 10-mile radius. This zone contains my workplace, and a few dozen more places I like to eat. I think it also contains the SuperWalmart, Lowes, Home Depot, Babies R Us, Target, Pet Smart and maybe some more theaters and drugstores. It certainly contains a large portion of the city of High Point, and a large chunk of Greensboro. Ten miles on a bike is easily doable, I ride that and more every time I go out for a recreational ride on the Bicentennial Greenway near my house. So what keeps me from riding to work, or any of the other places listed. I'd be a little sweaty, although I could carry the things I need for work. It would take me about 45 minutes ride the 10 miles to work very leisurely, which is almost half of the mileage on the Greenway and the other half on mildly used roads. Alternatively, there's a nice path straight to my work that is actually 8 miles, but it's called US68/Eastchester and I'd share the space with nearly 300,000 people, each wearing a multi-ton vehicle and not being terribly skilled at driving with cyclists. So even though there's an alternate route that's not much further and perhaps 100 times safer, I still don't ride the bike. What's wrong with me? This zone could be at least 50% bicycle use.

The red zone is a 15-mile radius. Again, I typically ride more than that when I go out for a recreational ride, and all the charity rides are more than that. It's doable. I don't really have much need for things out this far, but even so, it's not too far to ride. This zone coud be a 50% bicycle use as well.

My other trips outside the red zone would be poor choices for the bike, like a family vacation to VA, or to the beach. I wouldn't attempt that presently with two small kids. So I'll say outside the red zone is 0% bike.

Gotta go right now, but until my return, think about a map of your area, consider the three zones, and what is within them. Why don't you ride the bike more? What would it take to get you to ride the bike more? Safer routes? Better equipped vehicle to carry stuff? Free drinks when you arrive at the destination? A $5 bill in your hand when you get there?

We'll explore these prizes later.

Myrtle Beach, SC not too bicycle friendly, surprise

Been on vacation for a week or so, and getting back to "normal" after several days of chores and several hundred emails from work.

I spent a week in Myrtle Beach, SC and looked into renting a bike with a trail-a-bike for my son so we could spend some time exploring the area. Bad idea. The place we stayed was near the new Hard Rock Park, and frankly cars are not optional in that area. The only way to get to a place to buy food or drinks or stuff necessary for a few days w/ a baby is via a car. We had to traverse a four-lane bridge to get over the Intercoastal Waterway, then an interchange of the two largest roads in the area, US501 and 17. Everything under the sun was within 4.5 miles of our place; however there were about a million cars driven by people unfamiliar with the area and therefore very eratic in their driving. We saw more cyclists than I would have imagined, given the battle conditions of getting around. In and around the "Broadway at the Beach" area, I saw dozens of people riding bikes. They were mostly young teens using the bikes to get around without cars, but only in that specific area. They must live on the opposite side from where we had come. Also, I found a good number of folks riding along the main drag right off the beach, 17 business. Of course, they mainly rode up and down the sidewalk from shop to shop and to the public beach access. I noted most of them carried nothing, and had no provisions on the bikes for carrying anything, not even a drink. One would think if you were heading out for the day at the beach you might carry some kind of bag with a few items, or even a towel. Not so with people I watched. They usually only had a hat and presumably money to buy snacks or play putt-putt.

While I watched the few cyclists going up and down the main street, I was struck by the epiphany that one could certainly leave the house and be gone all day and carry the typical tourist kit with them on a cargo bike, like the Yuba Mundo or any bike modified w/ the xtracycle conversion. Seems to me the condo/house/resort rental places there could do their clients a great service by providing a cargo bike for their use while at the beach. Obviously, there are places, like where I stayed, that aren't very conducive to riding, but down closer to the actual beach, there's lots of places within an easy ride, and it's flat as a pancake there. I'm pretty sure I could carry the requisite cooler of beverages, sun screen, folding chair and baby tent, towels and a host of sand excavating equipment on a yuba or xtracycled beach cruiser. Even an umbrella for shade seems doable. So why don't the bike rental folks get on the cargo bike train? Is it money for the initial outlay? Are they afraid the harsh conditions of the sand/salt/rain and renters would destroy their fleet before they are paid for? Maybe they just don't know about such bicycles.

I will say that the place we stayed did offer bikes to rent. There were about 10 Sun bicycles, single-speed cruiser types, with torn seats and rusted seatposts lying on and around an old bike rack. In addition there were about a dozen Next 20 inchers scattered about nearby. Unfortunately, the property was less than 5 acres, was bounded on one side by the Intercoastal Waterway, and on two other sides by roads leading to the Hard Rock Park, which were quite busy, with no markings for bike lanes, or even sidewalks - where most Beach cyclists seemed to ride. The last side of the property was adjacent to a lonesome road leading away from a defunct outlet mall, curving back into what looked like a questionable residential area. It was not a ride I would have taken my kids on, even if the resort had any provisions to carry them along in their rental fleet, which they did not.

I suppose overall I was disappointed in the rideability of the area. It was not at all like the bicycle-friendly Hilton Head, SC area. Again, even an area rife with bicycle lanes and separate paths and with nearly a hundred rental shops to choose from, not one bike I've seen there had anything more than a basket on the front with which to carry things. While Hilton Head is far more bicyle-friendly, it's got room to grow as well.

If you know of a nice bicycle-friendly destination for a family vacation, by all means leave a comment. I'd love to explore it!

Memorial Day is winding down, and I got zero miles in this weekend. Work interfered and some stuff with the family took precedence over cycling. That's how it goes sometimes.

Last week I visited a new shop in Chapel Hill, NC. It's called Cycle9 . I went specifically to test out the xtracycle and the Yuba Mundo. Turns out they're only about 50 miles from my house, which is better than the 90 miles to the next nearest X dealer. WOW! The folks at cycle9 are wonderful, very knowledgeable and helpful, and friendly too! They're still getting things put together in their shop, but they have a couple of xtracycled bikes and at least two Yuba Mundo's to test ride. One of them has electric assist. I can envision thousands of uses for this type of bike, what is generally termed a "cargo bike."

Here is a short list of tasks/users for which I believe the cargo bike is perfectly suited:

1) Take out delivery vehicle. Pizza, Chinese, subs, whatever. In a defined delivery area of dense population in a relatively small radius, this bike would easily outperform a car in arriving quicker. Think about an area of student housing, either on-campus or off-campus in a large apartment complex. Consider a large office park where a couple thousand people work. A nearby restaurant could corner the market on deliveries with a couple part-time people riding the Mundo's or Xtracycle bikes.

2) Smartbikes, basically a borrowable bike that is owned by a university or town that lets citizens just take them and ride to their destination, and either leave it there or ride it back for some small rental fee or some activity fee built-in to other fees.

3) College students. Any student I knew during my college days would have loved a bike w/ the versatility and load-carrying capacity of these cargo bikes. When I was a student, I lived 17 miles from the campus, and would drive to the giant commuter parking lot with my mountain bike in the back of my soob. Once parked, I'd get the bike out, throw on my backpack, and not return until late in the evening. The bike was far superior for moving around campus, and the downtown areas where the eateries and bars and the library were on the opposite side of the campus from the giant parking lot. Later in my college career, I lived only 8 miles from campus and did use my bike to commute when I didn't have to leave school directly to go to work...10 more miles further from home.

4) Mail carriers, Paper carriers, Office Park or Parks and Rec staff who need to move items around a specified area like an office complex, Park, or mail route. The cargo bike is well-suited for these tasks as it can carry hundreds of pounds and move swiftly and easily over paved or non-paved paths.

There are many more but I'm sleepy now, so more later. In the meantime check out the Mundo at Cycle9, you'll be amazed with this bike.