Posts by JackElder
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In places where cycling is normal, you don’t wear lycra. Lycra is for people who want to minimise air resistance and sweat heavily. If it’s cold, you wear your jacket (the same one that you would wear if you were walking), if it’s slightly warmer, your jumper, a shirt, a t-shirt, and so on. There’s no “normal clothing”/“cycling clothing” divide. People simply wear their normal clothing while cycling. This works, even in cities with slopes.
Actually, I mainly wear the lycra because it's really comfortable. Anyone who hasn't tried it: it makes a huge difference to the comfort.
That said, I didn't own any lycra garments until my late 20s, and I did spend a lot of time cycling around various cities as a schoolkid. And yes, it's perfectly normal and entirely doable to cycle in normal clothes: I lycra up on my commute, but for anything under 10k it's not worth bothering with. There are some cycling-specific features that make clothes more useful - a long tail in the back of a jacket, to stop it riding up when you're bent forward, for instance; or the ability to squash a rain jacket down small so you can bung it in the bottom of your bag just in case. (I use and thoroughly recommend a Ground Effect rain jacket). But if you're not going to cane it, or not riding much of a distance, or not climbing serious hills... there's nowt wrong with just wearing normal clothes.
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I’ve never met you but may I recommend a Guvnor?
Pashley do good bikes, but that’s a hell of a lot of money for an ironic retro singlespeed. For a third the price, you could get yrself a functionally identical Linus Roadster. Though that Civia Belt Drive Alfine looks not far off my dream commuter… as in, if it’s running the 11-speed Alfine rather than 8-speed, I’m going to start saving up.
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I'd be willing to bet that the single guy who didn't buy his own underwear had just left home and is still coasting on his mum's care packages.
Personally, I think life's too short to wear uncomfortable underwear. The only uncomfortable underwear I have ... was purchased for me when I had an urgent need for a different style of underwear (normal underwear was pressing too tightly on fresh tattoo, didn't have time to go shopping myself). I keep it at the back of the drawer for those occasions where one runs out of desirable clean underwear, so you've got a fallback while you wash the good stuff.
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Also, on the comment that a bike network is only as safe as the intersections with traffic: +1. Very much +1. It's great not having to play in traffic all the time, but sooner or later you're going to have to tangle with cars - and those interactions can be dangerous, particularly if you're coming from an angle that the drivers aren't expecting. As an example, I cycle up the Ngauranga Gorge in Wellington when I'm riding home. I do that on the cyclepath, because I'm not mad. But at the end of the cyclepath, in Johnsonville, you hit a very busy four-way intersection with a lot of traffic. The cyclepath ends in such a way that it forces you to then ride across the entrances to two separate roads, starting from a place that drivers aren't expecting people to emerge from and where your visibility is blocked for people coming from one direction. It's incredibly nerve-wracking. So rather than do this, at the top of the gorge I go onto the road, and take the J'ville off-ramp from the highway with all the cars. This puts me in the main line of traffic, where all the drivers are expecting to see oncoming traffic,. Result: it's actually safer.
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retailers need to be sat down, told what’s going to happen, and invited to participate. I’m sure those who did decide to stock the right stuff would be rewarded with sales.
The problem is, bike retailing is a pretty low-margin business, which encourages a fairly conservative mindset. If you know you can shift a load of mountain bikes, and you’re not sure if you can shift city bikes, you’re more likely to concentrate on the MTB end of things. Twin this with the fact that a lot of people who haven’t ridden in a while balk at spending $800 on a bike (“But you can get them at K-Mart for $150!”) and it’s a definite commercial risk. Personally, I’ve seen some really good city bikes just sit in the shops week after week (there’s an inexplicable lack of love for hub gears in the general populace). This is pretty much also the reason bikes don’t come with a lot of useful stuff (lights, helmet, etc) – it’s to reduce the “sticker shock” factor when people see the price.
That said, if it’s done right, the bikes do sell. The Wellington Regional Council is currently subsidising folding bikes for commuters, and they’re selling out as fast as places can get them in. There’s demand for it.
(Disclaimer: I am part of the lycra brigade, but I think that the dearth of good city bikes is not deliberate - it's retailer caution twinned with fashion).
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to BenWilson,
Separated cycleways are excellent, of course, but bike lanes that are only painted on are still good to have. They do stop drivers from cutting too close. Essentially, they resolve the whole stupid thing a lot of drivers have in their minds that cyclists shouldn’t be blocking “their” road.
Yup. Painted on cyclepaths are better than nothing; an example would be along the Old Hutt Road/Thorndon Quay area in Wellington. This is a high-volume cycle commuter route, but it also goes past a lot of businesses. The council has strategically painted cycle lanes wherever the shared path passes a driveway. It looks a little disconnected, but seems to work well to remind the drivers to look out for cyclists: I've seen a lower incidence of drivers pulling out without looking since they went in. It's psychological cycling infrastructure, and it works reasonably well. Certainly, it's easier to put green paint on an existing road or path than to retrofit a 2m wide cyclepath. But if you're going to have to redo the whole road anyway, why not shoot for the ideal solution?
Also, if you’re chaining your bike up, doesn’t that stop it rolling?
I was wondering that. Maybe it's rolling back so far that it's protruding out into the footpath / road?
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As a longtime cycle commuter, I think you've hit the nail on the head.
One item of cycle infrastructure that's often omitted - which Stephen noted above - is safe places to park the bike. That means decent bike racks, which means proper Sheffield-style racks (the giant metal "staples" in the ground), allowing you to lock the bike frame to something large and immobile. The traditional "front wheel holder" bike racks that NZ seems to love are, frankly, rubbish; you can't lock the bike securely, and if someone knocks your bike you'll bend the front wheel.
While I'm happy to ride on the road (mostly), I agree that segregated bike paths are a great idea. Riding in traffic is intimidating for new riders; segregated bike paths get around that. The problem is, they're absolute buggers to retrofit on heavily used roads. But as you say, this is the perfect time to get around to putting them in place.
A final note here: in my experience, if a city has a good cycling infrastructure and a culture of cycling, people tend to use it. Even people who would otherwise drive a lot of the time. When something becomes "just how you get around", people use it. Cycling has the advantages of (relative in heavy traffic) speed and convenience (no waiting around for a bus); if the infrastructure is in place, people use it.
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Ironically, I would massively prefer a giant garden gnome on the top of the hill. Provided it wasn’t one of those Tui gnomes. This is speaking as someone who has conducted dawn raids on the neighbours’ garden to retrieve a gnome that had been stolen from our front doorstep (long story).
Let’s not be disingenuous about why Jackson can get big movies there – cheap skilled labour.
The number of awards won by companies in the Weta group (e.g. list of awards won by Weta Digital) would suggest that companies are coming to NZ because of the quality of the work.
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Field Theory: Tuesday Drinks, in reply to Stephen Judd,
I dread to think what the class taste enforcement squad over at the Standard are going to make of this.
All good bro, I was on the good socialist fill yer own, using my reusable bottle, drinking good working class brown ale, rather than one of those fancy middle-class pre-bottled beers.
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I bought 2ltr of the Rex Attitude at Regional Wines & Spirits fill-yer-own on the basis that I was in a hurry and had vaguely heard people mention it as worth trying. Too late, I discovered that this was invariably followed by the caveat "but only a little at a time". A pint later, I was going "bloody hell" and wondering how I was going to work my way through the rest of it. Then my wife tried it, loved it, and has quietly knocked off a glass or two per night. I would certainly recommend it as an antidote to the jaded palate.