Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to Keir Leslie,
I cycled to work over in summer in steel caps and fluoro vest, because that was what I had to wear
Way back when I was a student that seemed common in the working classes (I was, of course, in the non-working class :)) A surprising number of truckies rode to work, and ~10% of the bakery staff.
From working in a bike shop in a gentrifying area the poorer people generally bought bikes that could be ridden in street/work clothes, it was the richer people who were excited about our lack of lyrca (it's expensive to stock). But with gloves and especially lights we made a point of stocking cheap ones as well as good ones. Because cheap-but-usable beats not having them at all, no matter how much we didn't like them.
Also, self-adhesive reflective take by the metre in red and white. Buy 50mx25mm rolls for ~$100, sell it at $5 per "metre" (always be generous). It looks a bit hideous unless the bike is white or red, but it's amazingly effective. My current commuter bike is white for that reason - it's about 30% covered in reflective tape.
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Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to Gareth Davidson,
Heh. I sometime think I should get a fake beard and suspenders to go with my recumbent. Just to fit in, you know :)
But honestly, it's not the lycra, it's the attitude I collect from some lycra louts that puts me right off. I know that bunch riding is dangerous and requires discipline and care monitoring of the riders around you. Great. But I *don't* ride in a bunch specifically because I'm not that disciplined and I'm not willing to accept the danger. So lycra louts that try to apply peer pressure to me on the basis that all cyclists are pack cyclists... fail. Slow down, spread out, accept that you're sharing a road or path with other commuters.
Todays eBay shopping is a pile of 0.5W surface mount LEDs and a battery pack so I can light up my helmet. thermal glue them to a strip of aluminium, wrap that round the helmet. I'll use a small arduino and a couple of driver transistors to give me more control over light output than is really necessary, but that's actually simpler than making a timer circuit to flash them (and $25 for the circuitry). It will also make most video cameras unhappy, hopefully even in full sunlight :)
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Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to BenWilson,
I’ve got induction-powered Reellights on the Archi bike,
How are you finding them? I've got friends who use them but I have not been impressed. They seem more vulnerable to failure than hub dyno lights (ie, I see a lot that are not working) and they're not very bright. But they are a lot cheaper than a hub dyno.
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Also, enjoying being back in Sydney, I seem to know so many more people here. Went to a bike festival in the park today, lots of fashionable cyclewear and decent utility bikes, from dutch bikes though to lightweight mudguards for fixies. The Clover Moore “bike lanes everywhere” project is starting to pay off in getting past the 5% who will ride regardless. Which is excellent.
Sydney is undulating, a bit like Auckland. Electric assist seems to be key for breaking a couple of barriers – the unfit and the mommy riders. But it also allows you to do 10km or so without sweating. And that’s now quite practical, albeit at the $2000 price point rather than the sub-$1000 point that most people want to start at. But $2000 seems to be pretty affordable, at least going by the number of ebikes I see and the crowds around the ebikeshop stalls. There’s a lot of longtail bikes with baby seats and motors, including one owner with two kid seats and a kiddie trailer.
Plus my new job interview had a few rounds of “you’re going to ride your bike? In the rain? In the winter?” But they have ample parking and a shower, so it was just a mental block.
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For commuting I too bought some of the floppy shorts with bike knicks inside, and decided that I love them. Bike knicks FTW, obviously, by the nylon shorts have pockets! Pockets! Plus they separate from the knicks, and outlast them, so now I have two pair even though I'm on about my 3rd and 4th set of knicks since buying them. On a recumbent the chamois is usually worse than useless, because I'm not sitting on it it sits out from my crotch and chafes. Plus the shorts mean Tess doesn't have to stare at my crotch for ten minutes before announcing that she doesn't like to look at it.
I wear cheap yellow high-vis shirts because they're cheap and have a ridiculous SPF - us pasty white people need that.
Also, SPDs. I have the shitmano street shoes with SPDs in them and double sided SPD pedals on all my bikes. Being actually attached to the bike is something I'm so used to that I struggle when I'm not. And single sided pedals... never buy them new, ask around, someone is bound to have a set they want to get rid of.
For short trips I'll wear whatever I happen to have on, and for touring I go long sleeves and a full-coverage hat-helmet cover thing, because sunscreen is a very ugly thing when you don't have a hot shower waiting for you at the end of the day.
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Hard News: Neither fish nor fowl, in reply to Patrick Morgan,
We once ran the workshop with Wellington Police. It was enlightening to see Police take shortcuts like the ones RB writes about. They turned without indicating, wandered through Stop signs, and overtook queues of slow moving traffic. Not strictly legal
Strictly illegal, as you know. I used to collect helmet cam footage of velocops breaking the law, specifically so I could use it in court if I ever did get a ticket. The idea of saying "so I'm accused of doing this...", play video of velocop doing it, video of a different velocop doing it... repeat until asked to stop... "I was merely following the example of the Police, yeronner".
I've had some amusing off-the-record chats with velocops about this stuff, and they invariably talk like cyclists rather than law enforcement when it comes to a: some of the sillier road laws that only work for motorists and b: treatment by motorists. Some of you will be shocked to hear that a reflective jacket with "POLICE" in big letters on it is no more visible than a black cardy, if worn by a cyclist. The one that surprised me is that flashing red/blue bike lights and a clearly visible pistol are apparently not visible either.
I wonder why bank robbers don't use this amazing invisibility as well (maybe they do, and we just don't hear about it because they're never caught?)
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Incidentally, in Sydney a friend of mine is the cycling official for the CBD council, and a lot of their work is on a: persuading more people to cycle; and b: persuading the road-building muppets to build things that work for cyclists. A big part of it is building things that look as though they will work in the eyes of novice cyclists, unfortunately even when those completely do not work for actual cyclists. Even actual novice cyclists. Not so much because the muppets think like novice cyclists, but as a way of getting the novice cyclists to actually ride into the city.
So there's a conflict: experienced cyclists often avoid the cycle infrastructure, and that strategy is accepted and supported by the designers of the infrastructure. But a sizeable minority of motorists dislike that behaviour and feel that if there's any dedicated infrastructure at all, no matter how unsuitable, cyclists should be forced to use it. Either by the law, or by (charitably) threats of violence.
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Heh, I was asked not to ring the Wellington "broken traffic light" number by the plod, after I was told by a plod to ring it rather than just riding through broken lights. So I did. Once per week, per broken light. Which, BTW, you are legally required to treat as a compulsory stop. Anyhow, "broken" does not have the intuitive meaning to the motor traffic people - it means "does not trigger for cars" rather than "does not trigger for vehicles". As you say, neither fish nor fowl.
What struck me was that cyclists who have been fined are more likely to infringe, but the author still things more enforcement is required:
There is definitely a role for enforcement to reduce the number of cyclists who ride through red lights. As with any other road user, cyclists need to be held accountable for illegal...
That suggests to me that what is needed is better design to reduce the incentive for infringement and education to persuade people to obey the rules, the same thing that is done when motorists habitually infringe.
The other thing missing from that survey was observation, and comparison with the dominant road user group. No, not scofflaws, motorists. Geez, you people.
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Up Front: Oh, Grow Up, in reply to Damian Christie,
admit I’m a grown up … All the while paying a mortgage, raising a child, managing people and all those other grown-up things
I guess that makes me a child of 40-something :) I haven’t managed anyone or employed anyone since I turned 20, have never owned a house or had a child and the only sneakers I wear are old man style comfortable white shoe “sneakers”.
Living in Sydney makes a difference, because here a shoddy one bedroom apartment that only costs 10x the median wage will be half an hour by train from the CDB (median income being $40k/$70k for the household). Owning an actual house is out of the question (700k+). We’d rather pay rent than spend 20+ hours a week commuting (partner has done it, I prefer to learn from other people’s experience).
For me, adulthood was deciding that I have to go to the doctor myself. Which I think ties into Lucy’s “the buck stops with me” rather than any of the external symbols.
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Up Front: Oh, Grow Up, in reply to Emma Hart,
the font of all knowledge.
Comic Sans?