Hemmet?

Bike helmets are supposed to save your dome in the event of a crash. They give you a crush layer to lessen the sharp impact to your dome when everything goes fruit-shaped and you don't have time to sort out which way is up on your way down. Ask around and you'll soon find somebody who owes their present walking, talking status to their brain bucket. I'm for helmets. Ok enough positive preaching, now on to the hellfire and brimstone...

On the other hand, they're a bit of a hassle. You have to remember to have it with you, it's one more thing to manage when you get off the bike, they restrict air flow on a warm day, they mess up your ironic perm on the way to the show, and most of all they screw up your whole cool thing you got going on there. So yea, there are some downsides to helmets. I can see why maybe you don't want to wear one. Fine. I'm not your mother, and unless you happen to be one of the people I'm willing to nag about helmets because it would be a real drag to hang out with you as a vegetable, do what you want. Random internet people: This means you!

Doing what you want, however, should not include making up bullshit misinformation because you don't want to admit you don't wear a helmet for vanity reasons or whatever they may be. Instead we're getting things like this - people citing a one-man study claiming that motorists might give you more space if you don't wear a helmet.

You know that kid in elementary school that insisted that seatbelts were a stupid idea because without one you could be thrown free of the wreckage and land in a grassy field, presumably one populated by magical fairies distributing lollipops to lucky-ass car crash survivors? The helmet excuse guys are that kid. Same shit, post-puberty. What happened here was somebody decided first that they wanted (or didn't want) to do something, then went looking for ways to justify it. When the revolution comes, science will crush you.
If you don't want to wear one just say you don't want to wear one. Don't fill the internet with bullshit reasons and bad logic. Believe me, I can recognize that mess a mile away, I have a blog.

Bikewatching Guide - Saddles

While observing bikes, keep an eye out for seat/saddle choices. The saddle is a very intimate decision, as it ends up shoved firmly into your junk, and saddle decisions can tell you a great deal about the rider.



The Freebie
Made of plastic. You plant your butt on it and move your legs around. What?



The Vintage
Primarily leather and springs, vintage saddle users are a mix of those who are willing to break in a stiff leather surface to fit their butts and those who can't be bothered to upgrade the heap that their bike came with.



The Minimalist
I've taken to sewing a chamois into all my pants for comfort on and off the bike.



The Sofa
Elephantiasis of the saddle is a serious affliction wherein the seat dwarfs the vehicle. Distant cousin of the seagoing barge.



The Hackeroo
Somewhere between innovative and a duct-tape-residue-on-your-ass-all-the-time-could-be-difficult-to-bail-out bad idea.



The Eunuch
Seriously, go buy a new seat.



The Banana
Science has so far only identified 'nostalgia' as a good reason to have one of these.



The Tractor Seat
A mere backrest away from being a lounge chair. Often seen as a fine idea until one realizes that bicycling involves use of the legs.



The Probe
Careful how you sit down on this one.



The Reverse Butt
What could be more comfortable than sitting on a mirror image of your butt?



The Sponge
Not much of a seat but great for absorbing rain, bird poo, and personal accidents.



The Neglected Bike
'Neath all that poo it's weeping quietly. I'm laughing outwardly, so I figure it's a wash.



The Cover
Often seen in cases of rain or sponge. 99.5% Effective as a form of birth control.



The Critter
Richard Gere joke!



The Entrepreneur Special
Somebody paid money for this.



The Backwards Idiot Seat
Hey guys check it out! Bikes have been developing for 150 years, but look at what an innovator I am! Hurr hurr hurr. These seats hold the distinction of being both very rare and waay too common. While I've never actually seen anybody actually riding one, the only way I can figure it works is as abdominal support while supermanning the whip:


*Also acceptable in cases of backwards ass.



The Not-so-subtle Gel Padding Placement
Because you obviously decided you needed a soft spot just there, and are going to make sure everybody knows it. You also make obnoxious comments in movie theaters and have something printed on the butt of your pants.



The X-rated
Will support your undercarriage to feed its coke addiction



The Complete Lack of Seat
At least has the decency to plug up the hole in the bike.

PSA: Traffic Circles, Revisited

A while back I published the rules to bicycle traffic circles. I'm sure somebody else has published them too, like maybe DMV or the California Penal Code, but I figured as a public service I would bring the guidelines to my own enormous readership. It seems, however, that my instructions may have been a bit vague, and people keep nearly running over me from unexpected directions. Therefore, I offer the following, more specific advice:

If you are hellbent on demonstrating your free spirit through the use of some sort of non-bike transportation (razor scooter, skateboard, lawn mower, golf cart, bizarre snakeboard thing, UPS truck...) you are actually not exempt from the rules that govern bikes. Maybe technically you are, I haven't looked it up, but going backwards through the circle will still result in a pileup and subsequent beatdown at the hands of angry kickstand-having mofos. In fact, you should probably be more inclined to obey, since of the forms of transportation listed only the razor scooter and golf cart are known to have brakes. I make no apologies to the UPS truck here.

The pack attitude has its advantages, namely safety around predators and aerodynamics. Neither would hopefully apply on the way to grab a tofurkey burger after class. In this context, packs tend to result in congestion and domino crashes. They do, however, allow for excellent networking before the crash and something to talk about later.

Pedestrians: You can almost do whatever the hell you please. I'm going to step down to a slightly lower soapbox and give you some reign here. All I ask is that when you're walking through a busy intersection, you at least act like you're in a busy intersection. I know that you think it looks mega chic to ignore your surroundings, but it's gonna bang up your cool real bad when I deliver you this flying head-butt I've been working on.

PSA: Traffic Circles

It appears that people are once again in need of my services. Unfortunately, those people are probably not the ones reading this. Oh well, the better to amuse me during the coffee break, I suppose.

--

Egads, man, a traffic circle of +4 confusion doth approach! What to do?
There are basically two states of being regarding traffic circles: In the circle and not in the circle. Whenever you change from one state to the other, you are merging. Merge, fool. Do not plunge. Do not dart. Do not bisect. Neither shalt thou count two whilst chatting with your friend, excepting that thou then proceedeth your arse out of the intersection.

Simple? Done.

Stripped!

We've all seen the bike carcass still partly locked up to a rack somewhere but minus a wheel or the seat or something. Sure, it sucks when it happens, but it's common enough that you don't normally take a second glance when you walk by a half-stolen bike. Usually, though, you only see bikes missing parts that are easy to pull in a few seconds, often without tools. Quick release seatpost clamps and wheel skewers are great for quick adjustments, but they all but gift-wrap the parts for thieves. And as if things weren't easy enough to steal, incompetent lock usage factors in. Way too prominently, I might add.


I came across a few carcasses that gave me pause the other day. These things hadn't just been mugged for a few parts, they'd been picked completely clean. And of course, all three were located outside the engineering buildings. Beware the kids with wrenches, for they may actually know how to steal your front dérailleur and put it to use.

Exhibit A: stolen bits include the usual seatpost and rear wheel, plus the rear derailleur and brake, the chain, and the entire front end from the stem forward. AND this one had two different locks on it.

Exhibit B: We might as well count what's left of this one. Locked wheel and frame, seat and seatpost, stem, headset, fork, bottom bracket, lock holder, and a rock. Both derailleurs are gone, shifters are awol, brakes peaced out, handlebars invisible, even the chain is absent. At least somebody at the bike auction will convert this into one major eyesore of a fixed gear.

Exhibit C doesn't look quite as crud-coverd as Exhibit B, but it's just as thoroughly picked. Somebody bothered to take the stem and the rear brake as well as the seatpost and surprsingly the chain (again!). As with Exhibit B, cranks are gone too, which is no mean feat. Hah. feat. Bike.

Just to check my 'engineers are the piranhas of bike theft' hypothesis, I went for a ride around campus. Checked outside the quad, the lunch place, the bookstore, both gyms, some assorted dorms, and most of the academic buildings on campus. Saw probably several thousand bikes, and the award for cleanest picked still goes to Engineering, hands down. The only semi-competition was found outside the Life Sciences building, where somebody evidently stole the tube and tire from a completely unlocked POS mountain bike but left everything else. I don't know how to interpret that at all. Whatever, my engineering guys are making me proud.

The Evils of the Kickstand

Ah, beautiful order.


So you have a kickstand on your fancy little bicycle, and that's cool. Lets you prop up the bike and all. The thing is, it lets your prop it up just about anywhere, free standing. Why would you want to do that? Bikes locked to just themselves get stolen, friend. The 1950's phoned up, and they sound pissed. I think they want their trust in their fellow man back.

More importantly, sometimes people don't know what's good for them. Or maybe it's that they don't know what's good for other people. Or more likely, they're just being inconsiderate. The second problem with being able to deploy a kickstand is that people tend to leave their bikes right smack in the middle of things and clog up the works. Bike racks (and I work on a biking campus, there are thousands and thousands of bike racks) are formed in nice little lines that would please the fire marshal if ever there were some sort of crazy outdoor bicycle parking fire. Even if there are no racks handy, there's nothing wrong with leaning your bike up against a wall or a tree. Not only do you eliminate 2 lbs of unnecessary metal from your ride, but leaning your bike against existing objects helps keep it out of major pathways.

This all sounds very authoritarian, I'm sure. However, people have proved to me time and again that they can't be trusted to do it right, at least not on this score. Here are a few instances, just in the space near my office:



Nice choice of location jacktard.


200 bikes, and 2 idiots blocking access to all of them.

.
This is about as thoroughly in the middle of nowhere as it gets.

My first solution to this was to disallow the use of kickstands on campus, or at least in areas where there are available bike racks. This is pretty much everywhere, as it turns out. Alternatively, we could treat the symptom rather than the ability to park stupidly by just removing bikes parked in dumb areas. This requires a lot more case-by-case enforcement, though. There's also that pesky issue of policing people's personal property when they aren't necessarily doing anything wrong, ie saying you can't have a kickstand when in fact you are one of the many responsible bike parkers around.

Fair enough, policy isn't really my style anyway. I'm much more of a vigilante justice kind of kid. And I know how to use JB-kwik. Henceforth, repeat offenders will have their kickstands welded into the 'up' position, or will be simply relocated to better commune with the local flora depending on how I am feeling and how well prepared I am.

Guilty!

PSA - Bike Fenders

Well this space is fast becoming a documentary of me acting like a know-it-all snob, but there are some things I just can't stand. People misusing things in stupid and less effective ways is chief among them.

This is your bike fender. You spent $15 on it so you don't end up with the freshman racing stripe painted on your ass when there are puddles on the ground. Congratulations, I applaud your purchase, and your resolve (or lack of automobile) that keeps you riding through inclement weather. Now let's go over how to use this thing:

Your back tire is kicking up mud and water. You would like it to not hit you in the back. You install a 3 inch wide piece of plastic between you and the tire. The tire is 2 inches wide and your back is 14 inches. Well, my back is, and I don't really care how muddy you get.

If you place the 3" fender right next to your back, all you've done is protect a 3" wide strip of your back, leaving an impressive 11" inches of you spattered in mud and leaving people behind you wondering who that skunk kid is. This would classify as a poor use of 15 bones, in my book.

On the other hand, lets say you put the fender closer to the tire instead of close to you. The downside to this is that you no longer look like you're sporting a hefty radio antenna on your ride. The upside is that mud isn't going to hit you. period. Here, I drew a diagram. It's all about cutting down the angle that mud can fly off the tire at.

Granted, the majority of crap will fly off the tire in the same plane as the wheel, since the wheel is spinning on a fixed horizontal axis. Go search centripetal force on wikipedia, I don't feel the need to explain it. However, there are other forces at play here, and unless your fender is placed in an idiot-proof spot, you will be branded an idiot. Until you wash your clothes, at least.

Ok, that was a lot of words. Now here are a lot of pretty pictures for you visual learners:

Good Fender

OK Fender

Overkill Fender

Stupid Fender

What happened, couldn't kick down for an entire fender?


I just plain don't get this one. Maybe some sort of winglet for aerodynamic stabilization?

More bikes!

I almost got smished in the road yet again today by a dude in a minivan. It always seems to be minivans and SUVs piloted by the oblivious and the super-aggressive. I'm becoming much more liberal with the finger these days. For everyone's betterment, I hereby impart the following knowledge: If there are 3 lanes going the same way and no bike lane, the right lane is mine as much as yours. It is not, however, both mine and yours at the same time as you try to wedge by me and either risk running me over or running me into the line of parked cars. If you're only going 2mph faster than me, would it kill you to change lanes if you're hell bent on passing? If you risk running me down because you're too lazy to check over your shoulder, I'm eventually going to catch up with you at a light and do something awful. Nya-nya-nya.

The gods of craigslist smiled upon me today and I snagged an old school Schwinn road bike for $40. Actually I grabbed 2 bikes at once, bringing my count up to...too many. One for riding, one for riding fixed, one for leaving at work, one for the rain/locking up around town and not worrying about. I also still have my first bike that came with training wheels and red and white padded checkered things. We're going to need more real estate soon to house this farm.

Ya gotta accessorize! Buying a good $30 set of lights and a $25 lock makes sense for $400 bike. In fact, they're pretty much mandatory if you're going to be riding at night and leaving the bike anywhere with the expectation of coming back to it. On the other hand, those little things more than double the cost of a beater. Its still relatively cheap, but its the most sting I've felt from a small purchase since I bought that free-range scorpion farm. Too much?

Then there's the tires. The tires are just about as old as me, but tire years must be akin to dog years because at the ripe old age of 25 the tires are disintegrating and covered in cracks, whereas I still have yet to lose any parts and am equipped with just the one crackola. badum-ching! Bad crack jokes aside, blowouts are bad news, and new tubes and tires need to happen soon. Damn you, obscure 27" x 1 1/8 sizing!

The second bike purchase today was totally on impulse, since it wasn't actually advertised. While checking out the schwinn I spotted a blue Nishiki Riviera leaning against the wall and grabbed it too. Total shit show. The frame is in great shape though, albeit maybe a size too small for me. If all else fails I can steal the cranks and put them on my fixed, if I can figure out how to get the stripped ones off. grr