Archive for August, 2011

While waiting for the Red Line to take us to our hotel, we saw several cyclists; I noticed that many of them--most of them, almost all--were signaling their turns.

Sure, most of them were using that weird, left-arm right-turn signal that kids learn in driver's ed, but they were signaling.

Portland, Oregon is--to a right-coast denizen--bike paradise. I'd heard of the city's amazing bike facilities. (I'm a volunteer copyeditor for the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, and why that's the case is another story.) Actually seeing the bike lanes and transit facilities and the competent riders and drivers who know how to treat them--reading about all this did very little to prepare me for the reality.

We visited the city for a week, and had a great time. We rode on the Steel Bridge, and the bike traffic was inspiring. (We even saw a guy on a welded-together tall bike rounding corners. How do those guys dismount, let alone stay upright?) We rode the west-bank river walk. We visited Powells. (Several times!) We saw City Bikes paint their new mural. We spoke to buskers--and saw them get chased away by the police. And we drank coffee. A lot of coffee.

Let's back up a little bit:

Drivers in my home state of New Jersey have a pretty bad rep. The forums are filled with tales of drivers who scream at cyclists, and stories of idiot high-school seniors in SUVs throwing slushees at bike commuters. After all, bikes in New Jersey are ridden by children and people whose licenses were pulled after a DUI conviction.

To be fair, the cyclists themselves in the Garden State are said to be, almost to a rider, wrong-way cyclists with their saddles too low who run red lights and ride on the sidewalks when they feel like it. Or so the thinking goes. I can't really fault any driver here who thinks that cyclists are scofflaws--because most of us are. But let's get back to Portland:

After a day or so in the city, we rented bikes from the hotel: machines that the hotel called "cruisers" and I called "rattling deathtraps". We had to pump up the tires and raise the saddles, and I did my best to tighten the handbrakes so they actually worked. (It's a shame the city has no proper bike share program.)

When we were riding across the Burnside Bridge into SW Portland, I (stupidly) signaled at the last minute to make a left turn. A car slowed and let me into the lane. Maybe this is normal behavior for the city, but it's nearly unheard of back home. (My wife was smarter than I was, and refrained from making that turn.) I rode more intelligently later in the day, but cars continued to treat me in a similar fashion: like a vehicle who deserved access to the road. Jersey drivers don't even treat other cars this well.

Bikes are everywhere. There's on-street parking for bikes. Businesses have racks as a matter of course, and they're not hidden away where thieves can snip open locks with a reasonable expectation of privacy. (Privacy is a constitutional right, yes?)

This treatment of cyclists as equal road users obviously must feed back in some way. Drivers and cyclists seem to respect each other in a way that's hard to explain to someone that lives where cab drivers won't even let you change lanes.

Later on in our trip, we stayed with cousins in town and they lent us a pair of mountain bikes. When we took those bikes on the MAX, people offered to move out of the way so we could get to the bike hooks (well, they did most of the time), and more than one commuter struck up a conversation with us. Did I mention that Portland's transit is cheap? A seven-day pass for all Portland area transit is exactly the same as a single round-trip ticket on the train from our house to New York City. That's one round-trip ticket = seven days of unlimited riding.

Portlanders, if you don't realize what you have and what the BTA has done, I invite any of you to come to New Jersey and ride with me in Newark or Paramus or Clark. You'll figure it all out--and you'll figure it out quickly--the first time a cab driver accelerates to keep you out of a lane, or a bus driver tries to squeeze you off a road.

Cherish what you have, and know that you have my admiration. (And my envy.) This Jersey boy knows you've done a great job!

(A similar version of this post has been written for the BTA blog.)

I took part in this year's World Naked Bike Ride. The ride is a celebration of cycling and the human body and also aims to highlight the vulnerability of cyclists on the road.

At the Southampton ride there were about 150 riders, which is a pretty good turn out for a cold Friday evening. The dress code was "bare as you dare"--some dared more than others.

We rode around Southampton and got an overwhelmingly positive response from car drivers, pedestrians and other onlookers. We managed to get some favourable media coverage and hopefully we helped raise the profile of cycling a little.

The 2012 World Naked Bike Ride will take place in March in the Southern Hemisphere and in June and July in the Northern Hemisphere. More details are available at www.worldnakedbikeride.org.

I ordered some Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires for my touring bike, to replace the 3-year old mismatched pair I had on there--one of which is original equipment. (Relating to my last post: Knobbies are great fun, but my September tour will be almost all on roads, and I want to ride on these for a while before a week-long tour.)

Those of you who've changed anything thinner than a mountain bike tire know that they can be tough to get on, at least the first few times. The Marathon Plus is the nuclear option flat resistant touring tires--heavy, but considered reliable and a very good ride. They're also even stiffer and more ornery to get on than any other touring tire I've installed. After some struggling, I got the rear tire on the rim and put it back on the bike. The front tire, a Panasonic, was a little more trouble. (Yeah, it's the newer tire, but newer by just a few weeks; I had a nasty blowout on tour when the bike was fairly new, and had to toss the tire after a day of riding with a boot.)

I had more trouble getting the bead around the rim, and for a moment, wondered if I was digging into the tube; I gently pulled the tire iron out (I usually just use my fingers, but this tire was tight) and tried again. Eventually, with my wife helping, the tube was on and I inflated to 85psi. (The maximum is 95.)

After some other fiddly maintenance, I put the bike against the wall, in preparation for the morning commute on the towpath. A few hours layer, I hear a loud bang! Loud enough to be a balloon popping next to my ears, or maybe a gunshot from fifty yards away. The front tire had exploded, and the bike was standing there with the tire half-off the rim, the tube in shreds. The guitars I have hanging on the walls were ringing, as were my ears.

There are two takeaway lessons here. First off, though you may sometimes have little choice in the matter,. using a tire iron to seat the tire is probably a bad idea. At the least, inflate the tube more! (I'm fairly sure I could have put more air in the tube.) It could have been that the bead wasn't seated properly (I understand that can also cause a tube to blow), but I was careful about that. I massage the tire onto the rim evenly before fully inflating, evening everything out and also checking that the tube isn't caught anywhere. (Obviously I missed something this time. Just look at that picture! That's a classic pinch flat, allright.)

Secondly, replace your tires before three years pass; the tread on those was pretty low, the sidewalls almost gone.

There's good advice in this question about tight tires. I can't believe I forgot the talc trick! I'll try it in the morning when I replace the tube.

After almost a year in beta, bicycles.stackexchange.com has graduated from a beta Stack Exchange website to a full-fledged member of the Stack Exchange family.

What does this mean?

1. We have a beautiful new site design by @Jin:

It's based around "the feeling of riding a bike, rather than focusing on the bike as an object", but has some bicycle themed elements, such as the badges being cogs, the voting and star buttons on questions being road signs and the tags loosely resembling the downtube branding on some bikes.

The logo is a bicycle head badge with a heart, because we love our bikes.

With most Stack Exchange websites, the meta site gets a monochrome version of the main site. Instead we have a night-themed version of the main site, like you're riding home at the end of a long day of riding.

2. Privileges have changed.

Now that we're not a beta site, the privileges required to do certain things have increased. That means there are fewer people to do them, especially closing problematic questions.

1. If you see something problematic, please comment and flag. Your moderators will be happy to close, reopen, migrate, protect or delete questions or answers that need it, especially if there's comments and/or flags from multiple users saying that's what needs to happen.
2. Vote Early, Vote Often, and Vote Some More. Voting builds reputation, which will help more users earn the privileges that let the site be more user-run than moderator-run.

3. We're linked in the footer of regular Stack Exchange sites

This probably means we'll be getting an influx of new users. I know you're normally friendly and helpful, but please take extra care to be super-nice to the newbies as they come in.

4. One More Thing:

Be sure to check out the Error, CAPTCHA (Human Verification), and 404 Page Not Found pages.