Bikes are like cars now

 Our energetic trail builder has been forging alliances all around the region for the ambitious vision of turning Wolfeboro into a unique destination for mountain biking. He recently met the owner of a prominent shop in neighboring Maine, who told him that the pandemic had provided a great opportunity to start nudging service prices up to "where they should be."

This shop owner starts from the laudable goal of paying his staff a good, livable wage. To earn this, the technicians are certified to do suspension work, provide full service to electric bicycles, and any other credentials that will look good in a simple black frame on the waiting room wall. He described it as similar to taking your car to an auto service center, where the people all wear neat jump suits and have documented training. "And you pay for that," my friend said.

And you pay for that. Thing is, the best car service I have ever gotten has been from a hard-drinking, independent genius whose shop uniform may start the day clean, but ends up fully grimed by the time he knocks off somewhere between 8 p.m. and 1:00 the next morning. You'll never find him there before noon. He's semi-nocturnal, because it suits his biorhythms and he finally gets some uninterrupted hours when the phone doesn't ring and people don't drop in on him. He has some certificates hanging crooked on the grubby walls of his waiting area, which is mostly a place for his dog to lounge. The fancy service place isn't just charging for competence and your best interests. They're charging for the jump suits and the spiffy building and the cheerful person who checks your vehicle in, and the ones who answer the phone.

I can see both sides. I hate having to interrupt a tricky bit of mechanical work to answer an insistently ringing phone or launch a party of bike renters or just answer casual questions from someone who hopes to impersonate a customer long enough to be able to ask to use our restroom. I would love to make more money and achieve respect for my knowledge and ability. But I also remember when bikes were a vehicle of true independence. If you want to invest in more and more expensive tools, and learn how to service the more and more temperamental and complicated mechanisms of the modern super bike, you may still achieve a measure of independence. But because of the complexity, and the perfect precision with which all the pieces have to work together, your freedom only lasts as long as someone can make you the parts that fit your particular marvel of modern engineering. It misses the point of the bicycle entirely.

We've gotten used to the idea that a car is old when it's been on the road for three years. People do hold onto them for longer than that, or buy them used from the first owner who loses patience, interest, or trust after three years. The used car owner then holds onto it for another three years before handing it on to the next level of owner, who can't afford to buy anything fresher, and puts up with the increasing eccentricities of an aging vehicle. Eventually the car is too degenerated to function anymore, and gets scrapped. But the system has evolved around motor vehicles to provide the parts it needs at all of these stages. My used car is a 2003. When I got it I felt warm and happy because it wasn't too old and hadn't been driven hard. But the years sneak by, and suddenly it's 17 or 18 years old, and it's been driven by me. But I can still get it fixed. Something will finally break that dooms it. Maybe by then I'll be working for The Dream Shop in Wolfeboro, earning a livable wage, so I can buy a newer old piece of junk to pilot through my declining years.

This is the vision of the crowd that wants riders to pay like drivers. There's already a bit of a used bike progression, but because parts support isn't there for obsolete high-tech bikes, the used buyer of a formerly cutting-edge bike depends a lot more on luck to get any use out of the investment before something breaks that dooms it.

Your odds are better buying a 30-year-old bike than a 10-year-old bike, or even a five-year-old bike. They're even better buying a 40-year-old bike. For instance, I just changed the gearing on this 40-year-old Motobecane road bike, to give the rider the lower gearing of a compact crank and a wider range freewheel.

I'd done the rear derailleur and freewheel earlier in the year. The other parts weren't available yet. The crank is a 74-110 arm set offered by Quality Bike Products under their Dimension house label. The rings -- bought separately -- happen to be ramped and pinned for easier shifting, but the rider is used to flat rings, and shifts in friction, so there are no clicks to coordinate. The inner ring says "for ten speed only," meaning the current version, with a skinny chain and ten cogs in the back. I had to use spacers on the chainwheel bolts to set the ring over properly for the 6-speed chain. If or when he replaces the ring later, maybe we can get a thicker one and ditch the spacers. The whole job took a fraction of the time needed to rebuild the brake lever and caliper on a mountain bike, or replace suspension pivots, or chase down electrical gremlins.

The down side to simple bikes is that the work still takes skill and art, but the machines are so starkly simple that customers don't respect the people who work on them for a living. They don't want to do the work themselves, but they assume any idiot can do it. Therefore, you must be an idiot. Many days, I agree with them. I didn't get into bikes because I wanted to work on bikes. I got into bikes because anyone could learn, and bikes offered a great alternative for a world already getting smothered in asphalt and choking on fumes 50 years ago. Emission standards improved the fume situation somewhat, but the proliferation of pavement and the culture of haste have only gotten worse. And the emissions ignored by the standards are destroying the climate itself. Widespread adoption of the bicycle by those who could, aided by a societal resolve to support that alternative, would have bought us more time to work on the traffic systems and polluting output of the motor vehicles we still legitimately needed. I would much rather sell tools and parts, and share knowledge, than clean up someone's crappy, abused piece of junk or touch my cap and bob my head respectfully to the squire when he brings his immaculate machine for me to fine tune and polish.

People can break their bikes in more profound ways than the local auto service center will see in the cars that people bring to them. Because the whole mechanism is exposed, it's all vulnerable. I don't see how a flat rate book can account for stuff like the twisted wad of this derailleur:

This rider didn't just shove it in or pedal hard enough to yank it up in the back. He rode it all the way around the dropout, making a full wrap with the chain and cable.

With the trail system and the Dream Shop fantasy, its supporters believe that if you build it, riders will come, and bring business with them. But that also assumes that the consumerist, privileged lifestyle of expensive toys ridden by highly paid people with both the leisure time and the temperament to play that way will survive much longer in the economic and social adjustments being forced on us by our decades of unwillingness to enact incremental changes to head off the problems that are now boiling over. In my research on some other service topic I found a guy's blog post from the beginning of the pandemic shutdown, about trying to make an "apocalypse-proof bike." If it has suspension and a complicated shifting system, it ain't apocalypse-proof. You want a real apocalypse-resistant bike, build yourself a fixed-gear. Find a frame with long horizontal dropouts so you can stack cogs that will allow you to get off and shift manually among a small selection of maybe four gears, tops. You'll need a two-sided hub.

The trail builder wants to build a little Bentonville North, with trails for all abilities, including completely non-technical path riders. It still ignores the real-world transportation cyclist. We have to dream our own dreams and live in the real world, negotiating our way among the indifferent majority. I guess their nod to the transportation cyclist on the open streets is the e-bike section of the service department, because the only way bikes are going to become popular is if they are actually motor vehicles. And you'll pay for that.

Some swords make lousy plowshares

Early in the pandemic response in this country, transportation cycling has been held up as an emerging alternative in areas where public transportation was shutting down or scaling back. Since so many news sources are paywalled, I am not including links to footnote my assertions. Considering that gas pump handles have been rated as grossly infectious as the Broad Street community water pump that caused a cholera outbreak in London in 1854, you might want to consider cutting back on trips by car just to reduce your visits to the gas station.

In some places, people are being encouraged to go outside and get sunshine and healthful exercise away from crowds and indoor facilities like gyms and fitness clubs. In other places, the social distancing mandate amounts to virtual house arrest. This complicates your decision to bike or not. Check your local jurisdiction.

Here in New Hampshire, we actually have idiots suing the state because of the ban on large gatherings. Fortunately, the kind of people who would do that are the kind of people I routinely avoid anyway. One can only hope that they fester in their own Petri dish and leave the rest of us alone. Their suit has been dismissed by a Superior Court judge. No word on whether they will push it further. When they filed suit, the number of confirmed cases was 44, with no deaths. They cited this as a reason to carry on as usual, because so many other people had outright died of causes we consider routine, like car crashes, and influenza. Now confirmed cases stand at 78, still with no fatalities. But the day is young. Meanwhile, we are still free to ride or walk recreationally as well as for transportation.

Thinking apocalyptically, like the bullet-hoarders and panic-buyers of guns, I look at the bikes currently in vogue for their usefulness in the event of complete societal collapse. How easy would it be to rack this thing up and use it as your trusty mount through the savage landscape of a ravaged world? How long would it last without access to fresh hydraulic fluid, tire sealant, shock oil, and tinfoil chains?

Early mountain bikes were based on actual bicycles. They evoked the early geometry of safety bicycles from back when few roads were paved. They used the most widely available tire size in the world (26Xdecimal -- eg:1.75, 1.95, 2.1). This is different from 26 fractional (1 3/8, etc.). Until the explosion of suspension technology, the format remained the same even as the frame geometry tightened up to suit a sportier style of riding. Designers discovered that they didn't really need hugely long chainstays and super laid back head angles, although slack head angles have returned in the current era of motorcycle-based designs and long-travel forks.

Any mechanical transportation will eventually die out unless support industries manage to survive or reconstitute themselves. Even a chain for 6-7-8 speed wears out eventually. I wonder how long massively heavy one-inch block chains used to last? That was also before the age of derailleurs. As vigorously as I resist the over-engineered modern marvels of today, I don't pine for some 90-pound wrought iron monster fixed gear to tool around on. But that brings us to the rubber problem.

Early bikes used solid tires. Really early boneshakers used what were basically wagon wheels, with iron bands around a wooden wheel with solid spokes. Real sketchy cornering traction with those bad daddies, but of course no worries about flats. The next big innovation was solid rubber. High wheel "ordinaries" used that. As a friend of mine who rides such things observed, "we laugh at broken glass, but we're all in a dead panic when a squirrel runs out in the road." Hitting a darting rodent can launch a rider on a tall wheel into the dreaded header, a face plant from six feet up.

Scaling back to a partial apocalypse, or simply adopting the income of your ever more numerous working poor, you will be best served by a simple bike with a rigid frame and fork. This is by far the easiest to maintain, providing the most value for the dollar. A cargo bike might be nice for the big loads, but a trailer serves for the temporary need, and you can leave it home for more nimble cruising. Even a good set of racks and some panniers can increase your load carrying capability, as long as your bike will accept them. Anything too sport-oriented will not have the clearances and eyelets for solid rack mounting and stability with a light to moderate load.

Electric bikes will be tempting. They certainly have a place if everything doesn't fall apart. But in a real post-apocalyptic scenario your ebike is only as good as your charging capability. Since solar panels wear out and wind turbine blades fatigue and have to be retired, even "green energy" will become scarce. You really need to plan on muscle power alone. And various equines who might become more common again. But the rise of the bike in the late 19th Century gave people who couldn't afford to feed and house a large animal the chance to extend their cruising radius for little or no money after the initial purchase.

My own fleet has been selected with versatility in mind. While my early mountain bike acquisitions reflected the state of the art circa 1990-91, the bike I built around 1995-'96 already declined aluminum in favor of chromoly, and had a rigid fork because suspension forks were changing rapidly, and were still heavy and wobbly, even at the high end of the price range. The constant change makes any super-technical bike a poor long-term investment. But any manufactured item is only as good as the availability of parts. The industry can kill its ancestors and favor its short-lived children simply by stopping production of anything that fits the old stuff. Ultimately we will all be walking, and making shoes out of whatever we can find.