Posts Tagged ‘bike advocacy’

At Brooks Museum in Overton Park. See:

http://www.bicyclefilmfestival.com/

If you’re like me, you like speed, especially on a bike.  If you’re like me, you also have a lot to look forward to in life.

I’ve ridden both a 14 gear road bike and a single speed, knobby-clad mountain bike on my daily commutes.  For safety, the mountain bike wins hands down.  While having better handling, fewer flats and better breaking, the lack of speed is probably the most critical to safety.  After all, hitting something at 25 mph as compared to 15 mph can make quite a bit of difference.  I’ve also found that drivers don’t typically expect to see a bicycle traveling at 25-30 mph.  I know this because I’ve almost hit several as they turned in front of me.

If you’re worried about carrying too much speed on your commutes (because, like me, you can’t control yourself) , try a single speed.  And no, it doesn’t have to be a fixie.

I work in an industry where standards are commonplace. Many standards work to ensure that different products play nicely with others. For example, the IEC 60601 standards help to ensure that your pacemaker doesn’t stop due to electromagnetic interference when you pop a hot pocket in the microwave. While bike technology has moved forward immensely in the past 20 years, bike companies are kind of like the music industry – extremely fragmented. While this is positive for technology development and individualism, it is frustrating for guys like me who just want to ride their bike to work and be able to fix it at home.

Riding a bike frequently, like 16 miles a day, requires quite a bit of bike maintenance. I am constantly fixing something on one of my two bikes I ride frequently. Besides being expensive and time consuming, it’s often frustrating. Bike parts are ever evolving and thus always require some new tool or servicing technique or a specified amount of torque. Yes, some of the technology has improved the reliability but mostly it has changed to better specialize bikes for a specific purpose like trials riding or Super D. For someone who just wants to ride his bike to and from work it’s annoying. If I want to take my vehicle into a shop for someone to fix all of the time, I would buy a car.

Here’s what I would like to see: A bicycle design standard that specifies the following:

1. 1) All of the mating features of components,

1. 2) Standard bolt sizes,

1. 3) A standard home tool kit that enables the owner to service all parts

1. 4) A standard road tool kit that enables the owner to service parts that are most likely to fail on the road,

1. 5) A detailed service manual,

1. 6) An option to buy bike, kits and manual at the point of sale.

As I hope we are moving toward a society in which more people will be using bicycles for regular transportation, a standardized bicycle with standardized tools would be very beneficial for several reasons. Bike parts would be cheaper, more widely available, easier to service and likely, more reliable than currently available parts. This being the case more people would be inclined to taking up cycling as a mode of transportation because after all, in the current world of bicycles, the layperson probably has a hard time figuring out what a bike is.

Who’s willing to lead the initiative?

It started a bit dreary but turned out beautiful.  Come join us.

I, and a few friends, rode our bikes to the Grizzlies game this past Friday. This activity was planned as part of NBA ‘Green Week’. While I definitely appreciate the Grizzlies using resources to support this ride, I definitely feel there could be some green, and other, improvements made to the ride.

We (the riders) met at the First Congressional Church in Cooper-Young. Most of the riders arrived from somewhere outside of Memphis in undesirable vehicles. The ride to the game was also supported by the Grizzlies van and six large Memphis Police motorcycles. Does it sound green yet?

The ride started with the roar of the motorcycle escort followed by the cyclists rolling out in a long stream. It was clear from the start that the cops hadn’t supported a fun ride previously. The pace out of the gate was clearly too fast. I’ll always be completely confused at why people show up to a fun ride with $5000 road bikes in full lycra and push the pace at the front. This seemed to be the case with this ride. A Memphis Farmer’s Market-ride couple was quickly left behind and abandoned the ride.

Although wildly strung out, the ride to the FedEx Forum was enjoyable. Only one undesirable vehicle locked up its brakes trying to avoid one of our police escorts.

The game was fun and I enjoyed my buddies’ company. The Grizzlies managed the Mavericks in a tight game until the end when they prevailed by a decent margin.

The ride home after the game was enjoyable as well. It was definitely cool to see so many riders with all of the different lighting systems moving down the road in a long string. I’m sure we looked like a rolling Christmas tree. Of course, on the way home we were also escorted – this time by two V-8 powered undesirable vehicles. The escorts seemed to thoroughly enjoy gunning their engines and racing to stop traffic at the next light. We all probably smoked the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes on the way home.

Despite the undeniably ‘ungreen’ aspects of the ride, I really do appreciate the efforts of the Grizzlies, The Peddler, other cycling clubs and Jason Potter, the ride organizer. The south, and the Midwest where I’m from, are not the greenest minded and I think rides like these funded by prominent organizations are a step in the right direction. I just hope in future rides we can further ‘green’ our green rides. I also feel that we would do well to conduct the ride without any sort of police escort. These rides are opportunities for new riders to learn from more experienced riders how to ride safely on the road, how to ride in close proximity to other riders, how to communicate with other riders and how to obey traffic laws.