Maybe mechanics shouldn't be riders

 A mechanic who had been with us for eight years decided that he didn't want to put up with our winter ski business any longer, so he quit. What was interesting about his career here was that he was not a rider when he arrived, and never became one. He had ridden his ten-speed as a kid, but his real interest was climbing rock and ice. Where winter mountaineering had led me to embrace cross-country skiing, reinforced by the fact that racing cyclists were using cross-country skiing for off-season conditioning, Sam never warmed up to skiing and the needs of skiers. And, although he expressed passing interest in getting a bike, he never followed up on it.

Despite what would seem like complete disinterest in the activity itself, he mastered a number of procedures on the latest and most annoying aspects of the modern machine. He successfully set up a few tubeless tires, and competently bled brakes. The things I found irksome did not bother him, because he had no stake in them. They were just procedures to learn and complete. He grasped the necessary skills to cope with a wide range of routine service.

I have successfully done both tubeless and hydraulic brake work. They still piss me off because of the added and utterly unnecessary expense and complication of the essential bicycle, and the way that they warp and modify offerings to those of us who want to refuse the technology. There is little about the modern marvel that I find attractive or even efficient. But Sam was not encumbered in that way.

One of the best mechanics I ever learned from had a lot of trouble staying on his bike. In the eight months that I worked in his shop, I saw him crash at least three times. But you give him a pile of tubing and he could make you a frame, then spec the rims, hubs, and spokes and build you a wheel that would last for years. My other longtime mentor rode a lot, very skillfully, but wasn't a top finisher for the most part. She and her husband were immensely creative and resourceful machinists and fabricators. She still is, although she has far fewer projects going these days. I know that her tastes run to the retro, both the era in which we both started riding, and historically. She started a company that made accurate replica Ordinaries, and owns a draisine. The first fixed gear I rode was one she knocked together in her family's machine shop in 1975. She would have been a strong contender in stage races back when riders were forbidden to accept outside support.

A regular rider will develop tastes and preferences beyond what's harder or easier to work on. I know from talking to my car mechanic that he had nothing good to say about cars after about 2015, and preferably older than that. The techno doodads we get now are fun and convenient, but they're not built to last, or engineered to be easy to work on. Just buy a new one! The phrase applies to just about every consumer product.

I know what I like, not only to ride but to maintain. Someone more devoted to the profession might be satisfied to serve the new while riding the old. I can't be that detached about the degeneration. Through the eons of human existence there must have been millions like me, witnessing in helpless horror the cumulative results of highly popular bad decisions.

Someone who measures their self-worth by their skills with the machinery as it evolves will have more time and energy to master the delicate procedures it demands of them. I do what I have to do. But I got into bikes in the first place because they were simply efficient and easy to maintain, while I focused on the myriad of other things that interested me at least as much. It was his other interests that got Sam to finally bug out and leave this craziness behind.

Know anybody looking for some part-time work as a bike mechanic? The pay's for shit, but the employee discounts can't be beat. It helps if you actually like bikes.

A coded message from AYF

 For years, an American Youth Foundation summer camp in the area had run bike tours as part of its offerings. Camp Merrowvista in Tuftonboro had even had a dedicated bike service staff and an account at Quality Bicycle Products. Many counselors took advantage of this to outfit themselves with Surly Long Haul Truckers or Cross-Checks.

Because the camp was self sufficient, we seldom heard anything from them. For the brief couple of years when we stocked Cross-Checks and Long Haul Truckers in the shop, we were also able to help some of these new Surly owners to prepare their bikes for years of reliable use. Mostly, though, we only knew of them by seeing their tour groups on the back roads.

Curious about the state of the program, I checked the Merrowvista website. What I found reflects the sorry state of road cycling in the United States. First of all, cycling is not featured anywhere prominently in text or photos. I had to dig for it. Then what I read was kind of depressing.

The camp has reinstated bike touring after they dropped it during the pandemic. They refer to this as a suspension, but the way they described their assessment of it, they might have considered ending it completely. Instead, they modified it to make it safer for the campers. In other words, they took it mostly off of the road. It isn't even in New Hampshire anymore. They transport the participants to a rail trail in Vermont. The routes use "rail trails, dirt roads, and scenic rural routes."

The camp is on a scenic rural route. They used to ride from the camp on a circuit around the Ossipee Mountains. On bikes equipped with panniers and safety flags, their tour groups could be seen representing the activity on the roads that were part of their territory here in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. Now they're gone. The scenic rural routes are just too busy and full of impatient drivers. The danger zone of the immediate shore roads around Lake Winnipesaukee has expanded to take in the roughly parallel routes of 109A and 171.

A little at a time -- or maybe not so little -- cyclists are being forced off of the public right of way that we all fund with our taxes.

In addition to the modified routes, the set of programs that included the bike tour now includes "off-bike activities" for campers not interested in bike touring. The little screen addicts can now engage in "expanded in-camp programs and other Four Trails experiences."

I do sympathize with the difficulties that go with organizing and supervising any group ride on public highways.  A group of adult roadies with some racing experience can manage itself better than a group of young campers who will need more direct instruction. A motorist has a harder time passing a group of riders as opposed to one experienced rider holding a steady line, cooperating with traffic.

The ultimate cooperation with the motoring public is to go away completely, I guess. Thing is -- and I can't say this often enough -- a cyclist is a whole lot easier to pass than a slowpoke motorist who chokes the whole lane for mile after mile. That math doesn't work when the driver is faced with three or more riders. The average speed is slower.  A motorist passing the group has to keep track of the ones near the vehicle when oncoming traffic forces the overtaking driver to have to squeeze into a gap in the peloton to wait for the next opportunity to pull out and around. More likely, the overtaking driver pays chicken with the oncoming traffic while all the motorists blame the cyclists for being there at all.

He travels safest who travels alone. Not always, of course. A lone cyclist on a very lonely road could end up dead in a ditch or even stuck in a shallow grave in the woods if the right weirdo comes along. But in general, a single rider can negotiate with the faster, larger vehicles better than multiple riders. You may feel like you're asserting your power in a group ride that holds back a whole string of traffic, but you're really just building up the fund of grievances against us. The AYF knows this, and has made a strategic decision to preserve what they can of their program in the face of road realities and shifting tastes among the campers and society in general.

A video I watched recently about "why Americans were so skinny in the 1970s" got a lot wrong, but one thing they got absolutely right was that kids played outside and used their bikes to get around. That translated into the bike boom, the cross-country ski boom, and the rise of jogging and running. Kids these days have a lot more sedentary options for their leisure time. Don't blame them for taking them. Teach them something different. However, rampant development has wiped out a lot of the habitat for self-propelled, free-range kids, and professionally crafted fantasies fed to them through their devices have replaced their own imaginations for devising diversions. 

Smaller motor vehicles would absolutely make the roads safer for vulnerable users. They would make the roads safer for other drivers, too. And they could be made more energy efficient, whether they're burning petroleum or using up battery charge.

Dream on. For the moment, a few stubborn roadies continue to hold a little space on the road, while the kids and their handlers keep at least a few younger pedalers coming along. From this little corps of survivors may we launch a new world, safer for pedalers.

Huge beasts facing extinction

 Modern pickup trucks remind me of prehistoric megafauna that we only know from the fossil record. They're weird looking. They're ponderously large. They eat a lot. They're doomed but don't know it. Like any megafauna, they'll kill you if you get too close. They're the bulls. The roads and streets are their china shop.

I've spent my entire lifetime observing the accelerating pace of consumerism as the driving force of global destruction. And maybe we're just like mold on a piece of fruit, living the high life while we destroy our home, because that's our role as decomposers. Our attempts at space flight are the equivalent of launching our spores. Unfortunately, no good fruit lies within a lifetime's travel of our feeble capabilities. Or maybe fortunately.

We might have choices that molds do not. Some physicists contend that we are made up of particles set in motion by the Big Bang, incapable of altering our trajectories. Some biologists contend that we are hardwired to think and act in certain ways. By that reckoning, only some of us are hardwired to believe in predestination; all of us are subject to it.

Those of us whose trajectory and hard wiring allow for the idea that we could alter course from the doom to which we have set ourselves will act in ways that we believe will establish a pattern for a better way of life.  Everyone else will ignore us. Whatever is going to happen will do it anyway. Que sera, sera.

As luck would have it, as gasoline prices shoot upward as a result of the incompetence and mindless aggression of the current regime, it's about to be bike commuting season. That will take a lot of financial pressure off until September. 

Unfortunately, the spike in diesel prices will drive the cost of firewood up again. It never really recovered from the spike in diesel prices from the pandemic. I don't have the energy to cut three or four cords off of my own land anymore. Poor people's fires are a persistent problem in curbing emissions. Sorry about that. I'll have to quit buying lattes, so I can put that money toward a complete solar makeover. Except I don't buy lattes. I buy green beans and roast them in an old popcorn popper. A frugal and resourceful friend taught me that.

Frugality is terrible for economic growth. Product durability is terrible for economic growth. Manufacturers don't want to make replacement parts. They want to sell complete items. Something has to be new to drive demand. New customers will buy whatever they're told is good at the time that they enter an activity. Existing customers have to be convinced that a new product will make them enjoy the activity more than they do already.

A balanced ecosystem is composed of overlapping cycles of imbalance among related elements, like a surge in seed production leading to a surge in small birds and rodents leading to a surge in predator populations. The system runs on death, but that's just life. As soon as one organism innovated by consuming another one, the food chain was born. The human economy doesn't have to run on death and destruction as much as it does, but it's only natural. Our talent for technology leads to larger imbalances than we can control. Sprinkle with a large amount of negative emotions, heat, and serve.

From the shop windows I get to watch and listen to the vehicles that people leave idling, sometimes for as much as an hour, while everyone bitches about fuel prices. Elections are won and lost on the rising cost of living a wasteful existence. The vast majority of people driving today did not live through the long waiting lines and fuel rationing of the 1973 gas crisis, the one that launched it all. It should have been a wake up call for the ages. Instead it was just a sustained inconvenience to most people, that they were willing to pay their way out of through fuel prices that climbed inexorably from thirty cents a gallon to more than a dollar. Nowadays, we would flip a U-turn in the middle of a crowded expressway to get to a place selling fuel for twice that.

There was every reason to start adopting less petroleum dependent social structures, starting more than 50 years ago. The ten-speed bike boom gained some of its power from the idea that healthy, well-fed people in a peaceful country could propel themselves around and gain both physically and economically. Just about everything in the modern industrial economy was stacked against that, though. Transportation planning centered on moving motor vehicles as rapidly as possible through the plumbing of our streets and highways. Sad experience has shown that traffic always manages to exceed capacity, so that ever-widening roads simply choke with more vehicles, but we're having trouble finding our way out of that trap. Planning principles seem to be shifting gradually. Like all vitally needed progress, it is way too slow.

The thing about living a simple life close to one location is that I don't get to experience much of daily life anywhere else. I do know that the local economy is heavily influenced by the affluence of both seasonal and year-round residents. There are poor people, even homeless people in the area, but also a great many retirees who planned well enough to live comfortably here at least for a time. Maybe some of them find funds running out sooner than they expected, but an awful lot of them seem to maintain their lifestyles pretty well. And the seasonal population includes actual billionaires. Bottom-rung billionaires, but billionaires nonetheless.

While the town is usually quiet in the gap between winter recreation and the real onset of springtime, the quiet times throughout this winter and the technical first days of spring have been ominously deserted. While I did extensive work on a nice late 1990s Olmo and a 2008 Fuji carbon road bike this week, the cash register logged daily totals of $11, 20-something, and at least one day of flat-out zero.

A kids' camp in the area brought in the first installment of their heavily abused mountain bikes. I discussed repair versus replacement options with the guy who dropped them off. Given the shabby quality of low-end and midrange components, comparable replacement for a bike they probably paid about $500 for, more than ten years ago would likely cost at least 20 percent more than that. Maybe they got a better deal, buying through a shop closer to them than we are, that has since gone under. The parts spec was already a bit chintzy. In the same price bracket today, it's much worse. So, while these aren't the nearly immortal bikes of the late 20th and very early 21st century, they're still worth paying a bit to nurse along. Abusive campers would obliterate a cheap mountain bike of today.

Well before the pandemic, bike prices were rising much faster than the general rate of inflation. They soared along with every other price during the pandemic, but by the time that the industry could produce enough units to meet the demand from 2020-'21, that demand was gone. Faced with a surplus, bike companies began dumping as much as they could, but the ones producing primarily meat-powered ones are finding that no one wants them anymore. That's an overstatement, but not by much. The vast majority of consumer dollars seem to be going to the many available e-bikes at competitive prices, enticing buyers who only learn later how abysmal the product support is. We're decades away from a support network for e-bikes as ubiquitous as what motor vehicles enjoy. 

Ah well. Onward through the fog.

The difference between bears and humans

 First off, there isn't just one difference between bears and humans. But as I begin to emerge from my own hibernation, I'm forced to contemplate a particular difference: Bears fatten up in the fall and emerge in spring having burned off their reserves during their winter inactivity. Humans who hole up in the burrow for the winter fatten up on all of the tasty comfort foods one can make or buy while huddling close to the fire.

My winter routine used to involve a lot more playing outside. Now, most of my exercise comes from splitting firewood. My house also has a lot of stairs to climb. This is probably all that interrupts a continuous conveyor belt of baked goods from the oven to my plate. It's even worse at work. Unless I have to deal with a busy ski rental day, I have plenty of opportunities to nibble. I even wrote a song called "Snacking out of boredom and depression," about the tedious days when work hours just feel like incarceration.

People are exhausting. What makes a busy rental day interesting is the process of feeding them through the system smoothly and quickly. When the shop is going really nuts, I'll have three or four things going at once, between rentals, calls for reservations, ski service check-ins, and sales questions. When it's kind of a party atmosphere, the time passes lightly. 

A massive workload in the repair shop in bike season does not alleviate the urge to snack. However, thirty miles of bike commuting a day does a lot to melt away the excess calories. Hey, if I'm burning them, they aren't excess.

Daylight Relocating Time began last Sunday. It has the weird effect of making the month of March disappear, as the morning moves back to January and the afternoon leaps forward to April. It's a beacon on the voyage to riding season. A brief spell of warm weather adds to the illusion, but the longer range forecast shows a reversion to more wintry temperatures. New England teaches you to leap at opportunities but not lean too heavily into what look like trends. What season is it today?

While I have switched the clocks and adapted my schedule, I still react to the light more than the official time. It's just as hard to wake up in the dark in March as it was in January. It's not full-on jet lag, just odd moments of time displacement that follow for the rest of the day.

Lacking base miles, and facing weather that might not support outdoor riding, I haven't bothered to get on a bike seat yet, but I have to do it soon.

Kickin' taillights and callin' names?

 Does hostility in American society originate in driving, or does aggression on the road originate in the essential competitiveness and hostility of American society?

Whether I'm in my car or on my bicycle, any journey on the public right of way involves a running critique of the road users around me. It is usually profane. Sealed in my car, I know the other parties can't hear me, nor do I want them to. On my bike, I mostly mutter to myself, while the targets of my ire speed past, sealed in their sensory deprivation tanks. I wonder all the while what they must be saying about me. No hard feelings. It's just how we are. 

When I first heard about the damning video of Alex Pretti behaving less than angelically in an encounter with federal goons days before his street execution by the same or similar goons, I thought that cursing and kicking taillights is such an angry cyclist thing to do. Pretti was an avid rider, well known and liked in the bike scene.

Nearly every road rider has had an incident in which we fought back against motorist aggression in a running skirmish. One guy I met used a penny-farthing as his daily ride, so his favorite move was to ride up to an antagonist stuck in traffic and kick the side mirror off the vehicle. I smashed a frame pump over the trunk lid of a punk kid's car after two of his passengers clammed on me after ordering me off the road. These are things that riders generally do in young adulthood, the prime years for heroics in wars both official and unofficial. But I've known riders as old as 60 who would pop off, yell obscenities, and wave vulgar gestures at offending motorists. As a cyclist, however, he was "young." He had only taken up serious road riding a couple of years earlier. And he was exceptionally spirited. A few years later he got bored with it all, sold his whole fleet, and we haven't seen him since, but he ran hot and hard while he ran at all.

As cyclists, we develop underdog spirit that drives us to keep pedaling in the face of the motorist majority. For most of us it leads to some shouting, some gestures, maybe a fistfight or two. But some riders get more serious about the disparity in deadly potential between massive vehicles that weigh up to several tons, and squishy little humans on conveyances that weigh somewhere between 19 and 30 pounds on average. They actually pack heat. 

I vaguely recall an incident a number of years ago, within this century and possibly within this decade, in which a cyclist caught up to a motorist that had wronged him, and shot the driver, before pedaling away. Bad show, but an understandable temptation. That very temptation is a great reason not to pack heat.

A rider I knew in the mid 1980s carried a .380 in his jersey pocket. I always worried that he might decide to use it. In my own consideration of whether to be that seriously armed, I think about when it would be appropriate. Best I can figure, you only know it's justified at the moment that it becomes too late to use it effectively. Most motorists who are going to kill you on purpose with their car will do it from behind, because they are cowards and bullies as well as homicidal psychopaths. Even with a mirror or a rear-facing camera, how can you be sure that the vehicle setting up to brush you isn't just trying to throw a high inside pitch, rather than eliminate you entirely?

I've had guns shown to me by motorists while we were both still moving. None of them ever got around to actually pointing it at me. In the one or two incidents that led to conversations on the side of the road, no weapons were used at all. If it escalated beyond words, it was just good old traditional playground bully shoving, punching, and wrestling. A gun would not have made my point any better than the foolish fisticuffs did.

Pretti's armament was supposedly visible in his earlier incident, which did not lead to deadly force or charges filed against him, so it seems like carrying was a habit. I haven't seen anything about whether he would do it on rides. But carrying a gun is like buying a lottery ticket. You don't want this to be the day you didn't do either one, in case your number comes up.

When his number did come up, he deemed that it was not an appropriate time to respond in that way. That is so often the answer when it comes to deadly force. It's a risk/benefit calculation every time. The federal goons calculated that they faced no risk in filling him full of lead, so they assuaged their emotions with massive overkill. It's a textbook example of irresponsible gun use. 

The signature vehicle of federal agents is a big SUV. So is the signature vehicle of egregious assholes who like to pick on cyclists, though any motor vehicle will do. We just tend to go with the stereotype of the monster truck as the ultimate emblem of Earth-raping, road-hogging, selfish bastards. Any unprotected human seems weak and puny with nothing but the moral high ground as we face the armored cavalry. Taking a piece off of one of them seems like a righteous blow. We live in that curious space between a nation of laws and the reality that any individual temporarily annoyed could smash us and make a plausible case for why it wasn't their fault. When we do retaliate, we're just as likely to be prosecuted for striking a blow against the sacred property of a driver who threatens us.

At the moment, every citizen opposed to how the regime is conducting both foreign and domestic relations stands in that gap. As with cycling itself, some venues expose you to more constant danger than others. I don't mean side paths and bike parks representing safety. I mean that some places are much worse than others for traffic crowding, social and legal support, and driver hostility. Likewise, if you live where the regime currently sees no value in putting the squeeze on you, it's all theoretical, and perhaps unbelievable. If you're in one of the hot zones, you're under virtual occupation.

In places offering resistance to high pressure from the regime's agents, citizens have an advantage that cyclists do not. They're essentially doing Critical Mass, mobbing the agents with observers and sentinels who record proceedings and warn residents when the goons pull into a neighborhood. It reminds me of songbirds mobbing a bird of prey. Where cyclists draw massive ire with mass demonstrations that slow traffic, mobs of citizens defending their constitutional rights and those of their neighbors draw well deserved praise. It's the same principle of strength in numbers. We need that now. We'll need it for a long time. We'll need to bring it to the ballot box in November.

We'll see what happens. 

Asinine bike law update

 As of yesterday, news sources were reporting that the bike registration bill proposed by Rep. Thomas Walsh of Hooksett had received up to 13,000 negative responses through the link for public comment. He ventured that the bill would probably not move forward at this time.

Regarding the $50 fee, he stated that it was "just a place holder." Pretty hefty place holder there, Bub! A friggin' dollar is a place holder. Fifty smackers is a shot across the bow. Be warned, freeloading cyclists!

According to New Hampshire Public Radio reporting, "Walsh, a Republican who serves as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said that he proposes the bill as a way to help address the $400 million funding gap in the state's 10-year highway plan." Makes sense to try to dig a big chunk of a $400 million deficit out of the lowest cost and least impactful road users in the state. He probably saw our vulnerability to impact from larger, more damaging vehicles on the road and thought it showed that we're completely defenseless. Now he's digging himself out from under a metaphorical pile of 13,000 angry bodies that tackled him.

In possibly related news, a judge has blocked the termination of motor vehicle inspections, after the (for profit) company in charge of administering emissions testing filed suit. According to the suit, ending emissions testing without EPA approval violates the Clean Air Act. Twenty-one states already do not have emissions testing, presumably with the EPA's blessing. In any case, that puts the average $45 per vehicle back into the state's coffers. I don't know how much of that goes to pay the Kentucky-based company that handles the emissions portion of the annual exam. Some of it must make its way into that beleaguered highway fund.

The latest in asinine, anti-bicycle legislation

 Representatives in the New Hampshire House have introduced a bill to charge a fee of fifty dollars per year to register a bicycle in the state. There is a fine of $100 for non-compliance.

The bill, HB1703, has a hearing in the House Transportation Committee on Tuesday, Jan. 27 at 11:00 a.m. Riders in New Hampshire can register their opposition to the bill at a convenient comment page on the House of Representatives  site. 

Use this link to open the page. Follow the prompts at each dropdown menu to select your desired response. It takes a couple of minutes at most, and is very important to help the sponsors of the bill and the legislators considering it to gauge public response.

Fifty dollars per bike per year. That's every single bike you intend to ride on any road or trail that receives any kind of public funds. It also applies to e-bikes, many of which are ridden by low-wage workers already dealing with astronomical rent costs and low housing availability, along with all the other cost of living expenses.

I would imagine that the sponsors of the bill look at people with a thousand-dollar bike rack and several bikes costing more than two grand each and see a big bucket of disposable income. Add to that the annoyance motorists feel at bikes in general, and recklessly-ridden e-bikes in particular, and you can see why they would propose a fee designed essentially to kill cycling on public roadways entirely. Two of the sponsors are from Merrimack, in the heavily populated, very built-up southern part of the state. The third sponsor is from Hillsboro, still in that "Concord and south" zone. Ironically, Hillsboro was also the site of a very popular 35-mile mountain bike race in the 1990s. RIP the Hillsboro Classic.

New Hampshire Republicans are also constantly looking for ways to levy taxes that aren't really taxes, to make up for the beloved but now catastrophically overstressed property tax system on which the state has depended for more than a century. Coincidentally, $50 a vehicle is what they gave up when they voted to do away with motor vehicle inspections.

The bill text does say that all revenues collected will be given to the state's transportation department for the construction and maintenance of bicycling infrastructure. Greaaat. Only well-to-do and highly motivated residents of New Hampshire will be able to afford the fees, so it will operate rather like tariffs on imported goods: kill demand, reduce the revenues received, and deteriorate the quality of life in general for lower income citizens on which the capitalist economy depends.

Of course there will be outlaws. And how much will law enforcement waste its time chasing rogue riders? On the other hand... it's a guaranteed hundred bucks a pop, so maybe they'll go on a spree. If the bill passes, we are in for a very interesting few months after its implementation.

Then there are the thousands of visitors who come here in the warm months with their bikes. They get a freebie, but will find that a lot of supporting businesses have gone under because of one strain too many on the bike shop economy. As for rental fleets, will they (we) have to pay $50 per bicycle every year to have our vehicles to offer to visitors? By the basic text of the bill, yes. Fold that cost into the rental fee and you encourage renters to do something else with their day, or simply visit Maine or Vermont.

A commenter on social media said "Oh, that's just like New Jersey." I looked up New Jersey's bill. They charge eight dollars per bike. It's still unenforceable and a gross intrusion, but at least a pocket-change kind of gouge.

The New Hampshire bill says that a rider must have proof of ownership and proof of registration on their person at all times to present to law enforcement on demand. Do you still have the receipt for every bike you own? I don't have a receipt for any bike I own, because they're all uniquely assembled from frames and parts. They're like ghost guns of the cycling world, except that they are designed to make life better, not end it abruptly.

I knew a guy down in Maryland who would build entire Saab automobiles out of salvaged parts. They were the old 3-cylinder jobs. No matching VIN on those.

The New Hampshire bill is designed to fail. Maybe it's a piece of protest legislation by representatives who just hate the plague of two-wheelers living it up and "paying nothing." Maybe it's intended to make a lower, but still ridiculous fee like $20 seem reasonable. We'll see where it goes from here. I have been heartened to see the link to oppose the bill posted on social media sites that skew pretty hard right in my area.

It reminds me of a bill proposed in Maryland in the early 1980s, that would have restricted bicycles to roads with a speed limit of 30 miles per hour or less. That would have effectively penned cyclists into residential neighborhoods and downtown areas. It was beaten into the ground by a tidal wave of opposition. I seem to recall that another version floated up just a few years ago and met a similar fate. That may have been in Iowa, which derives a good chunk of revenue from RAGBRAI, even as bike haters derive a good chunk of gut-churning rage at the traffic congestion any large group ride will temporarily induce. Whaddya gonna do?

Please go to the site to add your opposition and stay tuned for updates.

The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator

 Ski season has been on-and-off as the little bits of snow come and go, separated by lazy lobes of polar vortex flopping down onto New England to blend nastily with the native east coast humidity. Somehow, the inherent moistness makes mere single digit and barely subzero cold bite hard enough to make visiting Alaskans bundle up. And yet interior heated spaces parch like Death Valley, along with your skin and nasal membranes.

Into this dropped our shipment of Fuji closeout bikes. My colleague started putting together a Jari 1.5, but was interrupted by enough in-season business that he didn't get very far. It ended up on my stand. Poking at it I saw that it had a large-diameter bottom bracket shell, but a thread-together bottom bracket. Intrigued, I checked the spec on the Fuji site. The specs say "FSA T47 threaded."

The Quality Bicycle Products website lists 26 entries under "BB-frame interface." I'm not shocked. I knew it was getting up there. I'd seen stuff about T47 several years ago, but hadn't seen it as OEM spec, probably because of the price points at which we usually sell. It's also satisfying to see the bike industry slinking back toward threaded bottom brackets after trying so hard to make the press-in concept work.  However, it has put a massive amount of product in the hands of hapless consumers who will have to deal with the quirks of their particular bike when it needs something that is no longer the darling of the industry and the tech lords of fashion. You might say it separates the true devotees from the dabblers, but what it really separates is hostages from their ransom.

The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator. Forget to look in there for a few days and you don't know what sort of unappetizing glop will be growing. Twenty-six bottom bracket entries from 24 companies. In the headset category, 11 SHIS upper diameters; 12 SHIS lower; seven SHIS stem fits; six crown race diameters. Thirteen rear axle sizes just listed on QBP.

Don't forget to synchronize your chain with your chainring teeth and derailleur pulleys!

The bike industry has always been a proving ground for weird shit and increasing complexity. At first: no pedals. Then: pedals attached to the front wheel. Scary! and you have to keep getting your legs past a taller and taller wheel to gear up. And so on. Chain drive had a cousin, shaft drive, but that branch of the family has yet to flourish the way the chain lineage has. And chain drive begat derailleurs, and derailleurs begat index shifting and still the tribe of cyclists was persecuted and driven into the wilderness. And the prophets saw that there must be suspension.

And 700c begat 29-inch, and the shorter riders did lament, for they experienced foot overlap and stand-over issues. And the industry granted them 27.5. And the ISO was 584. When we get to a bead seat diameter of 666, look out. That's a hell of a tall wheel. "The devil went down to Bentonville, he was lookin' for a trail to ride..."

I've slid from kitchen hygiene to theology here. My own mind is a lot like a crowded refrigerator full of dubious leftovers. And the biking world is a lot like a world of conflicting theologies, where simplicity battles complexity, and practicality wrestles with relentless obsolescence, some of it purposeful, some of it speculative. Some of it is downright frivolous. Caught in the churn are the customers themselves. Even the term customer is industry driven. The people themselves identify just as riders, trying to find their own way on these machines.

Heavy traffic on Route 28

 The joy of being in the motoring public continues. It struck me the other day that it only takes three cars to completely screw you on Route 28: one slow one in front of you and one coming the other way in each of the only two passing zones worth bothering with. There's a third passing zone, but that's just a pointless gesture most of the time.

I've documented before how drivers who amble along on the open road portion of the trip will speed up once the road narrows, with houses, driveways, people, and pets possibly popping in from the sides. Whipping around someone in the last passing zone before Wolfeboro won't usually get you enough of a gap to avoid being tailgated by the last idiot, who is now treating the road like a video game.

This morning was an exception. On impulse, I zipped past a floater in that last zone and dropped him like he was in reverse. I would have lost several minutes if I had stayed behind him.

There were more than three cars this morning. Oncoming traffic was fairly heavy for around here on a non-vacation winter weekday.

Every time I drive to work I think about how much smoother my trip would be on a bicycle. Not in winter, though. Ice and snow encroach, narrowing lanes. It takes half an hour to put on all of the clothing to make the ride, another 20 minutes to peel it off at work. Then a half hour to robe up for the return trip in the dark. And if anything happens to you, it only confirms the public impression that you had it coming.

There are workers who have been getting around on e-bikes all year round in this area. They mostly ride them like low-powered motorbikes. One of them hit a deer last winter. Others have come to various misfortunes. They choose it out of necessity, not principle.

The winter e-bikers mostly ride fat-tire versions. They pay a lot less overall than they would to have a car, but they have to pay something, whether it's their own time and a little bit of money to do their own work, a moderate sum to get a shop or other technician to do it, or the lump sum to replace a bike when they've finally thrashed it to death. They don't come into our shop much, but they might have other options in the subculture that's developing around their vehicles. They don't usually resort to us until the bike is completely fubar.

If I wanted to be enslaved completely to my fuel bill, I could drive to work all year. I would lose my mind. And the parking situation gets very competitive during the summer. It's bad enough when winter conditions are good, although who knows what will happen as the economy provides less and less disposable income down the pay scale? We might have fabulous conditions for winter playtime, and hardly anyone with the time and budget to play. We just passed Martin Luther King Day, the January three-day weekend, and took almost no calls to check on our ski conditions. Granted, conditions were pretty meager, but that's never stopped people from at least asking.

The second home crowd, many of whom have third and fourth homes as well, centers on the summer. We might see one or two of them between Labor Day and Memorial Day, but the lake in liquid form really drives the economy here. The peak is from the Fourth of July into about mid August. That has shrunk considerably since the 1990s.

The denser traffic and tight parking really make me glad to be on a bike during the busiest part of summer, but I'll already have been out of the car for at least a couple of months by then.

Saved from six

 Management rearranged the remaining bones of our skeleton crew to get me back to five days instead of six. So that's truly great. Now we're back to just dealing with the fickle weather, mushy economy, and receding consumer interest. Business as usual.

Yesterday I spent the morning poring over the Fuji B2B site, because the current US distributor is dumping product after Pacific Glory Worldwide terminated their contract to distribute the brand in the USA. Some categories are already wiped out: all e-bikes, for instance. Bikes sales took off very slowly last season, and Fuji models didn't generate a lot of excitement. Then again, nothing did. Aside from e-bikes, most inquiries were looking for gravel bikes.

Although most growth in the bike business is in e-bikes, specialist shop Seacoast E-Bikes is having a buy one, get one free sale. Times are tough all over.

This winter is marked by economic and political uncertainty in addition to storm timing and consumer interest. Individual retailers might not have that in the front of their minds. Retailers and consumers alike are tempted to brush it off as overly dramatic. But with tariff policy and oafish threats against longstanding allies throwing turbulence into global trade, and so much of our consumer hunger fed with foreign-made goods, we are seeing effects regardless of whether we are willing to acknowledge the underlying cause.

A bike shop has to project future demand in order to take advantage of the incentives suppliers offer, for discounts on product and shipping. The Fuji dump is offering free freight on the bikes if the bill is paid within 90 days. There's no way we will sell a significant proportion of the bikes we order within 90 days, but the discount off wholesale still offsets the freight charge we will face. What we don't know is whether anyone will be in the mood to buy anything by the time the weather warms up enough to get most people thinking about bikes at all.

It's always been a bit of a crapshoot. The stakes just keep getting higher and higher. If no one wants what you're selling, you can't even liquidate. It's all just junk.

Working sick

 When I tested positive for Covid last Saturday evening, management scheduled me for the next two days off to see if I could recover fully before they absolutely needed me the following Tuesday.

Mind you, I had already felt functional enough to return to work after the previous bonus days off when I was really feeling sick. The positive Covid test automatically made me feel sicker again, but I wasn't really. No fever. Some congestion. Very occasional cough. Not too different from how I feel in the winter anyway. Indeed, years of testing negative because I felt a slight scratchy throat or a somewhat persistent sniffle had given me excessive confidence in my lonely habits of social isolation to avoid infection of any kind.

My life is a one-man show. The cellist has her career, which takes her away for months at a time. I'm left to manage the estate. Nothing gets done unless I personally lay hands upon it and do it. In the winter, that means all snow removal and firewood splitting on top of the usual grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, cat care...

During prior, more conventional illnesses, I knew where I stood by how I felt. Colds were colds, flu was flu. Norovirus was the devil's work. All known quantities. This Covid shit is something else entirely. As complacent as the public has grown with it, it still presents surprises to each individual who gets it, especially for the first time. Which of the more optional symptoms will you get? The puking and diarrhea? The blood clots? The deep respiratory infection? The long drag of joint pain and brain fog?

My recovery slowed, but did not reverse. My sinuses produce a more alarming and disgusting product than the run of the mill snot of a normal winter. The cough last night, after I had to put in two or three hours with the snow thrower after I got home from work turned deep, vibrating my rib cage. My brother, who has been through it himself and cared for others around him warned me about pushing too hard. But if I don't push enough when the situation demands it, I won't be able to get out of the house.

At work, I wear a mask. No one says anything, but I catch varying reactions ranging from mild alarm to humorous contempt. Anyone who thinks I'm being silly is welcome to a snot rocket in their coffee cup. But even a sympathetic reaction marks me as weakened. Just as an animal, I hate to appear weakened. And, having this still-new-to-science disease, I am weakened, and no one can tell me how much. Maybe what I feel is pretty accurate. Maybe I'll drop through into something really debilitating. Roll the dice!

The sickness coincides with a period in which I will be working six days a week indefinitely, because our year-round part timer quit, and our seasonal part timer only wants to work three days. It's impossible to find anyone to work here, not because of inherent character flaws in the working population, but because the job is chronically low-paying and weird. At each point that we've had to hire someone, from the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, we had some degree of "cool factor" to attract someone young and intelligent. We have no "cool factor" now. I have no idea what would make anyone want to work here. Apparently, no one else does, either.

The shop itself is an evolved product of its specific environment, as independent shops so often are. "The Industry" tries to analyze shops like ours from outside, so that they can set expectations and pressure us to move product. They don't want to listen and cater to individuality. They want to predict production quotas and dump merchandise. Meanwhile, in through the other door walk the customers, with whatever they think bikes are, or looking for whatever they think bikes should be.

It's winter now, so most of the business is ski related. That's another whole realm in which we chose our specialty -- cross-country -- and try to please as many customers as possible. Just like the bike industry, the categories of cross-country skiing have gotten more separated, more complicated, and more expensive. A shop has to guess how many of what kind of skier of what height, weight, and experience level will come in, and how much money will they be willing to spend. We've gone from having a little bit of everything to having not quite enough of hardly anything. Except for having way too much of some things no one seems to want.

Day will follow day in an endless grind in which the day of the week itself will become almost meaningless. It only matters to me because of how it affects customer behavior. Weekends tend to be busier and more festive. Other than that it's just a bleak plod toward the grave. I can still make myself useful to a few people. You're only worth what you contribute to society.

As the only person who cleans up in the workshop or maintains any of the equipment, being here nearly every day helps me stay on top of that, and the trash. I've already cleaned up a lot of the neglect that accumulated while I was away for almost a month caring for the cellist. Part timers don't have to care about the long term effects of their lax habits. They know that we're grateful at this point just to have a relatively sentient being who can cover things in a rudimentary fashion while the full-time people try to catch up briefly on sleep and laundry. Frankly, I'm just as glad not to have to clean up after some of the well-meaning slobs who have deigned to "help" us over the years. But it's going to grind me down.

Life is just a journey to death anyway. No one knows how long it will be and how comfortable or uncomfortable. Dreams are just dead weight. All anyone really needs is a job to go to and a place to rest up between shifts. The sooner you cauterize away any notions of fun, frolic and creativity, the better you will be prepared for reality.

Parts replacement versus "mechanicking" again

 A rider brought in his fat bike because he had accidentally burped out one of the caliper pistons in the SRAM G2 Ultimate front brake. So it's a four-piston caliper with three stuck, one on the floor, and no juice left in it.

I figured I had one shot to do it economically with what he had: reinsert the rogue piston, juice the system with fluid I didn't mind losing, and use the usual pressure tactics to dislodge the other pistons. This meant trying to do at least a semi-effective fill and bleed to get any kind of pressure from the lever.

The procedure failed because the piston seals for the runaway were too damaged to hold the fluid. It gooshed out around the piston too quickly to impart any force on the remaining pistons. There is no back door way to get those bastards out of there. I can reassemble and keep trying, or troll through YouTube videos, but the shop's hour costs about $80.

This is yet another example of how the industry and its technolemming devotees have set themselves up for ever more expensive repairs for the sake of taking a bike ride.

One more time with the old chorus: Mountain biking started out as relatively cheap fun on beater bikes. Certain visionary riders saw that it could be so much more as long as money was no object. Money, and the precious life hours of mechanics who know better, but are stuck in this futuristic nightmare.

It fits right in with every other dystopian horror we're living through.

I've got one more thing I can try that might save this particular bacon before I report to him that he can tinker with it at his leisure or get a new caliper and start fresh. We'll see how it goes.

EDIT TWO HOURS LATER: The one more thing worked. It worked smoothly enough that it wasn't even too pricey, relatively speaking.

Welp, it's Covid

 I felt good enough to go back to work yesterday. I masked just out of courtesy, even if I had just a cold or flu. It acted like a cold or flu, albeit a bad cold or a middling flu. Today I dropped the mask, feeling not quite a hundred percent, but only minorly inconvenienced. Like, I wake up feeling this shitty on most winter mornings.

With the cross-country skiing destroyed by a heavy rain that turned into an ice storm and then froze hard, we haven't been renting skis, so the bike repairs that popped up were welcome.

The first call was a road rider who had noticed as she rode her trainer that the chainrings seemed really wobbly. She brought the bike in. The BB bearings on the drive side were pulverized.

As part of the initial inspection, I sprayed the bottom bracket area with Finish Line Speed Degreaser. I smelled nothing. Ooohhhh, that's not good. I'd noticed a typical diminished sense of smell with this sickness, as one gets with any sinus congestion. But this was absolute erasure of a smell that usually permeates the shop when you use the product.

I bought new Covid tests on the way home from work, since the ones I had on hand were at least three years old. I've led a bit of a charmed life so far, avoiding people like the plague since 2020. I don't mask much. I just choose my times and places to avoid crowd density, and I'd been really lucky with our own clientele. I've hardly had a sniffle of any kind since the end of 2019. Until now.

Not any more. The colors popped up vibrantly. No squinting at faint lines, wondering if I could pretend not to see it. I wouldn't even have thought to check if I hadn't noticed anosmia.

I continue to feel better and better. Now's the time use my super power while I scoop the cat boxes and take out the disgusting kitchen trash.