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Story 1, comes from Diana and Nick, they have even gone carless to bike races!

Yup! I have been doing all my work commuting and grocery shopping with the Xtracycle for a couple years now… It has huge compartments on the sides that are super easy to load, and I can definitely do a full week’s shopping with it, fitting about three big grocery bags on each side. The bike parking is good at most grocery stores in Boulder, so post-shop I just wheel the shopping cart out to my bike and load it up, kickstand side first. My favorite part is definitely riding home with my baguette, flowers, and veggies peeping out the sides. The center of gravity is nice and low on the Xtracycle so the handling is great! It holds so much stuff that I can commute with a change of clothes and yoga mat for some evening downward dogs, then hit the grocery store on the way home. Having a cargo bike has definitely allowed me to run around town doing errands just like with a car, only the parking is easier and it is often much faster.

If you have a car-less story you’d like to share please let us know And for those who have already contacted us with your story THANKS, we will get you story out in this month long series!

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If you’re reading this blog and someone else hasn’t printed it out for you, chances are you use the “Internet.” And if you use the Internet, you’re no doubt aware by now of two major news stories. Firstly, actor Corey Haim has died. Secondly, a popular search engine company has added bicycle directions to its widely-used mapping function.

With regard to the second story, upon hearing it I immediately tested out the bicycle direction-giving thingy by plugging in an oft-traveled route of mine, and I was presented by three meh-inspiring options, one of which seemed to include my mounting an inconsiderate and possibly illegal assault on the pedestrian paths in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. As far as the first news story goes, actor Cory Haim was of course the star of the 1998 film “Licence to Drive,” along with a young Heather Graham, who spent the bulk of the film passed out in the trunk of a Cadillac. In fact, the name of Graham’s character in the movie was “Mercedes Lane,” and it just so happens that streetwear enthusiast and fixed-gear freestyle impresario Prolly recently alerted me to a Mercedes advertisement starring a local bike messenger by the name of Austin Horse. The plot is the tried-and-true “bike races car in an urban environment” storyline, and here is Part I:

Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of Mercedes automobiles, for the entirely subjective reason that I find them “douchey.” Even so, I enjoyed the video since it seemed not to take itself too seriously and was also corny in a sort of endearing way. More importantly, even though it was an advertisement for an expensive luxury car, it was at least straightforward about being an advertisement for an expensive luxury car (this is what used to be called a “commercial” back in Corey Haim’s heyday) and wasn’t some kind of creepy “viral” ad designed to fool you like that one with the guy who gets the glasses tattooed on his face.

Who has this to say:

“It’s very important to have a bicycle that looks very sexy, it’s very important to have a bicycle that looks very fast. So, our job as designers is to make bikes that look fantastic and make bikes look like people want to jump on and ride them.”

Is it really that important for a bicycle to look sexy and fast? Anyway, why does this even take work? “Sexy” is certainly relative, but pretty much any race bicycle is going to look fast, since the properties inherent in a race bike are the ones that imply speed (aggressive position, lightweight components, and so forth) and if you’re one of those people who thinks speed is “sexy” then the “design” aspect is basically going to take care of itself. Anyway, here’s the sexy, fast-looking 29er:

Did it work? Well, it’s hard to say. According to the video this 29er mountain bike with a multi-geared drivetrain and suspension fork weighs about 20lbs, and pretty sure such a bicycle would be a lot of fun to ride. However, this bike also costs over $6,000:

As a cyclist interested in performance bicycles, I don’t doubt the bike performs, but this price becomes very difficult to accept when a designer from the company has just explained to me how much time and effort (and presumably money, since I doubt he works for free) they put into making sure the bicycle “looks very sexy” and “looks very fast.” Really, it just makes me want to say to Specialized, “How much am I paying for the ’sexy and fast’ look? $1,000? $5,000? What if I don’t want to pay for design? How much will you knock off the price tag if I decline the ’sexy and fast-looking’ option and just take the performance?” I mean, you wouldn’t pay $2,500 for a Langster with a $2,000 headset top cap–you’d say “Give me the bike for $500 and keep the top cap.” So why shouldn’t you do that with the design?

Recently I spoke to the folks at Bcycle in Boulder but haven’t been able to craft up the full details yet so instead of waiting on me to complete the story check out the write up at Bike Denver on the Denver Bike Sharing Launch.

What details we do have…

• Program should launch in late April with 500 bikes and 50 stations
• Stations are in a 5 square mile radius in Denver
• Denver Bike Share is running the Denver Bcycle Program
• See a map where the bike stations are located in Denver

Want to learn more?

Check out this very informative and long video on bcycle on Fearless TV. There was also another Video on Denver Bike Sharing

As I mentioned in my previous post, yesterday I (or, more accurately, my Scattante) was the victim of a brazen cockpit theft. Well, I’m pleased to report that yesterday evening I performed approximately 20 minutes of cockpit reconstruction surgery on the victim,and it has now been restored to full rideability. Furthermore, thanks to my ability to operate simple tools (roughly on par with that of a capuchin monkey) as well as my substantial cache of bicycle crap, the procedure cost me nothing apart from the subway fare I incurred in transporting the victim home. (I briefly considered simply leaving the Scattante where it was, returning later, and performing the surgery in situ, but I prefer to “wrench” pantsless and didn’t want to end up in prison–or worse, on some schlocky local news blog like Gothamist.)

Bike Steerers - $1 (Greenwich Village)
Date: 2010-03-08, 4:53PM EST
Reply to: [deleted]

Can you help me it wont fit on my bike and I cant ride without it on there that well. Im looking for trade for a necklace with a crystal or maybe a coupon for something or if youre chill with it i have a bike seat and a copple of petals too. i also found a brake handles on it as well but they come as is because i dont think they work too well. HOT HOT HOT looking to sell real quick. A bike is the best way to go in the New York City if you know whats up. Coem to visit and you wont regret it. I have a coppel of other bikes as well because im a busness man and always looking for good deals. Call to book a reservation I can meet you or you can meet me but i really cant bring too many bikes because i can only ride with like 2 at a time. Ok the steerer is looking like the one in the photo but it says Tompson on it and the boss at the bike shop says its PLATNUM plated and the best you can get its what Lanse Armestrong uses on the Tour it feels real lite. Also I think the bars are mountain bike bars with gripts of rubber so you can ride off road if you are a mountainbiker. the second picture is of anothe r bike if you want to trade for the steerer that goes in there ill bring the price down.

Thansk for looking and happy bidding!

I’m assuming this posting is fabricated, but then again one should never overestimate the literary prowess of the typical Craigslist seller. Could the stem that “says Tompson on it and the boss at the bike shop says its PLATNUM plated and the best you can get its what Lanse Armestrong uses on the Tour it feels real lite” be mine? Could the “mountain bike bars with gripts of rubber” be mine too? Am I mistaken in thinking “grips of rubber” sounds vaguely Dylanesque, like “Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather?” Since the seller was interested in a coupon I did send a reply offering an expired voucher from Jiffy Lube good for one free car wash, but unfortunately my email bounced back to me. I guess I may never know.

From Trips for Kids Website
Trips for Kids BOULDER – Launching Summer 2010!

Our connection to Boulder is well established. We’ve been rolling and having fun riding with children in and around Boulder each and every year since our inaugural season in 2004. We know the kids. We know the youth agency staffers (many bike nuts themselves). We love Boulder! Thus, we are inspired and excited to create TFK Boulder for them and other underserved youngsters in Boulder County.

Photo Credit: Trips For Kids Denver

A few years ago, we started seriously chewing on the TFK Boulder idea. “Will it fly?” We asked our Boulder friends and youth agency staffers. The PG answer, in general, was a sarcastic, “Are you kidding me? This is Boulder.” True, true, TFK Boulder seemed like a no brainer, but last year as the economy tanked, we called off the TFKB dogs. Then our motivation and belief in this new endeavor percolated again over coffee last fall on a cold, snowy morning in Boulder with a local mountain biker and homebuilder, Tom Nasky. At that meeting we decided to team up with Tom and other like-minded Boulderites to establish TFK Boulder, giving children without means, in this bicycle-crazed town, the opportunity to ride, like the rest of them.

And here we are…TFK Boulder is a go! It’s a go people! Let’s kick this thing off right in Boulder with a proper party April 10th at the Boulder Velodrome

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Community Cycles is looking to hire a full-time shop manager. The ideal candidate has several years of bicycle shop, mechanical, retail, managerial and nonprofit experience. Experience working with youth a plus and a familiarity with older bicycles and parts is required. General responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Run and oversee our community bike shop and its programs
• Manage volunteers
• Inventory and ordering
• Oversee sales and their promotion, including daily/petty cash management
• Checking in repairs/estimates
• Quality Control
• Bilingual Spanish/English a plus
• Basic computer skills a must, Proficiency with Google Docs preferred
• $24,000 annual salary

Resumes will ONLY be accepted at resume@communitycycles.org. Please copy the contents of your resume into the body of the email and attach your resume document. DO NOT phone us about this position.

In a crime that may or may not be retaliation for last week’s “ANTgate” affair, the stem, handlebars, brake levers, and grips (or, in bike review parlance, the “cockpit”) of my beloved mehloved Scattante Empire State Courier were stolen at precisely lunchtime-ish on 6th Avenue in the Greenwich Village neighborhoodway of Manhattan. Here is the grisly scene to which I emerged:

While I certainly would have preferred a bicycle ride to a subway ride home on this pleasant day, I’m only minimally bothered by this brazen heist. Indeed, my only regret is having equipped the bicycle with a fancy stem, which is undoubtedly what inspired the theft in the first place. However, as the stem fit the bicycle perfectly and was lying fallow I figured it made more sense to use it than to purchase another, cheaper stem and keep this one secreted in my underwear drawer. (I keep all my “bulletproof” components in my underwear drawer, which is why I often find Chris King headsets in my underpants at urinals.) In fact, I thought to myself this very morning, “It would not surprise me in the least if some brigand decided to ‘house’ my stem today,” and so it did not surprise me when a scant few hours later that very thing came to pass.

This past weekend, the weather in New York City turned suddenly from craptacular to spring-tastic, and while there’s ample time for throwable forms of precipitation such as snow to fall one can be forgiven for feeling as though the worst may be behind us. Still, winter weather is liable to pounce again at any moment, and while some look unto the groundhog for confirmation of spring, I prefer to seek surer signs. In New York City, these seasonal indicators include the annual running of the bike salmon:

Calls of “On your right!” emanating from pacelines in the park (I was already on the right side of the road when the calls began):

And of course the First Pallid Calfs of Spring:

But while the seasons are cyclical, other things are eternal, and among these immutable constants are concept bikes. As I’ve mentioned before, aspiring designers are compelled by the bicycle as crappy musicians are lured by the guitar, and their swoopy, useless design concepts hover perpetually and intangibly in the future like some swoopy, misshapen carrot dangling from the end of a stick, or like a Tour de France victory for Cadel Evans. Furthermore, if you look at pretty much any designer concept bike you’ll notice they all have two things in common: Firstly, they’re idiotic; and secondly, they never have hubs.

The latest fictional hubless creation I’ve come across is this BMX, which one design magazine called “rock-solid:“

This is indeed a brilliant concept, since the designer has eliminated not only the hubs, but also any place to install pegs and thus like 75% of the BMX trick repertoire:

Sure, you could always just do a grind on your chainring instead, but this bike doesn’t have one of those either. BMX riders are like strippers in that both love grinding on poles, so removing all the metal parts from a BMX bike is like replacing the pole in a strip club with a gigantic Hacky Sack. Also, while the designer has succeeded in eliminating pesky hubs from BMX bikes in his mind, he has no idea how to actually do it in real life, and so his equally brilliant peers are asking for help:

So why is the hub the one thing all futuristic bicycle designers want to eliminate? Well, on one level, I suspect that this is because the traditional bicycle wheel is probably the most functionally elegant part of the functional and elegant machine known as the traditional bicycle. Naturally, then, if you’re bent on destroying the functional elegance of that machine simply for cheap thrills you should hone in on its best part, in the same way the true subway pervert knows to go right for the crotch. On another level though, it may be that these designers have an irrational fear of the hub-and-spoke design, fueled at least in part by horrific images such as this:

Instead, they dream of happy animals safely jumping through their futuristic wheelsets. Here’s a dog:

And here’s a hairless sea dog:

I too hate to see cute furry creatures meeting their demise at the hands (or, more accurately, wheels) of the “Fred.” However, I also think it is unwise to tamper with nature. Really, animals only jump through hoops because we train them to do it, and it is probably only the aberrant squirrels that try it when they see a bicycle rolling down a country road. If these creatures are not killed in the process and instead live to reproduce, it will not be long before the planet is overrun by squirrels who are driven to leap through any round thing they see. Futuristic bike wheels; manholes; hula hoops; bagels; nothing will be safe from their bizarre compulsion. Soon flying squirrels will be bringing down passengers jets. Forget saving the track bike; we need a campaign to save the bicycle hub!

Scoff if you will, but this horrid hubless future is already becoming reality:

Speaking of squirrels and saving the track bike, this past weekend saw the running of the 11th annual “Monster Track” in New York City. If you’re unfamiliar with Monster Track, it’s not only the most monstrous of tracks, but it’s also “the biggest, badest, most controversial alley-cat around:”

I was actually surprised to learn that people still participate in “alleycats,” since the whole “Save The Track Bike!” campaign had led me to believe the alleycat was extinct and had been replaced by the fixed-gear freestyle “sesh”–which itself only exists in order to provide raw footage for the proliferation of awkward stunting videos known as “edits.” However, not only is the alleycat seemingly alive and well, but you can also see from this video that the “Monster Track” was quite well attended by slow-moving Nü-Freds on their brakeless bicycles:

Monster Track 11 from Michael Green on Vimeo.

Here’s a rider on a (presumably) geared bike filming the other riders, and when you consider that he himself is being filmed this very well could be the most well-documented “Monster Track” in the history of monstrous tracks:

But it wasn’t all videography–there was still photography as well. However, pausing even momentarily to take a picture meant you might sacrifice your position. See how this rider uses a moment of inattention to launch a devastating attack up the left side of the “Nü-Fredoton:”

His hands are almost off the bar tops, so you know he means business.

While watching this video, I contemplated the “alleycat” phenomenon. Ostensibly, alleycats are designed to replicate the daily working conditions of a messenger. However, now all sorts of people participate in alleycats–many of whom have never delivered a package on a bicycle in their lives–and so they’re now basically big fixed-gear scavenger hunts. In a sense, messengers have a lot in common with lumberjacks, since in both cases their livelihoods have become the basis for competitions, and one might go so far as to say that the alleycat is the “lumberjack competition” of the cycling world. Some messengers still resent the influx of so-called “fakengers” into their scene, and I wonder if timber workers in the Pacific Northwest sit around in bars complaining about “fakerjacks.”

Furthermore, I wonder if there’s a “fakerjack” equivalent of the now-ubiquitous u-lock holster:

I’m sure somewhere there’s somebody walking around Portland wearing a bespoke hatchet holder.

Speaking of u-lock holsters, a reader recently forwarded me a picture of something called a “FeltBelt,” which can be used in this capacity:

For a second upon viewing the flesh-colored FeltBelt I thought that the rider had somehow placed the lock through her skin. Perhaps one day, when the bicycle hub has been successfully eliminated, u-lock muffin top piercings will become knuckle tattoos 2.0.

Photo Credit Caley Fretz

The first races of the season are always a crapshoot. Nobody knows what kind of form their legs hold, who else is going to be on or off their game, or even who’s going to show up. So when a team’s first few races go as well as it did for the CSU Rams Cycling team this past weekend, it’s particularly encouraging.

Races opened up on Saturday at the Denver University City Park Crit, a triangular loop complete with three roundabouts and a nasty little chicane. Not an ideal course for brand new racers, as much of the Men’s C and Women’s B fields were. But the Rams were ready- this wasn’t their first rodeo after all. Thanks to some pre-season team practice crits, the new Ram racers weren’t quite as new as everyone else, and it showed. In the first four laps, a field of 60 in the C’s was whittled down to 30, and all but one CSU rider (who got caught up in a nasty crash) made the selection. A few laps later another selection was made, this time in the form of a breakaway of 8 heading off the front. Four of the eight were CSU.

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