E-bikes are the new Muffy

 Two e-bikes were parked by the entrance to the grocery store yesterday at 7:00 p.m. They were black, heavily built, with brand names that had no connection to the traditional bike industry. I usually see them on the road. Their riders wear regular -- non cycling -- clothing, and ride all year.

Lower income people who for various reasons did not use cars would traditionally buy cheap bikes. These were often in the Muffy category. Muffy was bike shop shorthand to describe bikes in the category with Huffy and Murray, two major brands in the degenerated US bike industry. The category also included Columbia, Kent, and any other department store brands. As department stores faded in prominence with the rise of Walmart, the new category of Walgoose emerged. Walgoose refers to the disgraced Mongoose brand, which left the bike shop channel and moved into the big box channel when Brunswick Outdoor Recreation bought them in the 1990s.

When smokeless mopeds first hit the scene, we only saw them in our shop as playthings of the super wealthy. The earliest proponent of them in our orbit would dispute the title of super wealthy, having modestly settled for only a few hundred million dollars. The others are also small fry, barely in the billionaire category at all. We're not talking Musk and Bezos money here, but certainly quite comfortable. The electric bikes were toys. However, e-bikes eventually reached the takeoff point. The craze has attracted more companies than the mountain bike boom ever did. Prices are tumbling, with quality to match. They still cost way more than a Walgoose, but they provide excellent value to a worker who never aspired to be a cyclist. Well, a motorcyclist, maybe.

A smokeless moped is a fantastic transportation tool for someone whose job is already tiring enough, who gets paid as little as society can get away with to do things society definitely wants done. The ones with a throttle option eliminate pedaling entirely. They're low-powered electric motorcycles, neatly protected from the need for licensing, registration, and insurance by the mere presence of a bicycle crankset and a pair of pedals.

Smokeless mopeds aren't cheap compared to a Walgoose, a Muffy, a Toadmaster, or the current incarnation of Schwein. But they offer a much better ride.

Product support for e-bikes can be bad. Because lots of little companies are slapping these things together from the same limited array of parts suppliers, you will find a lot of cheap, no-name parts. I haven't done more than skimming research into the e-bike community online, but I have picked up snippets from forum threads where enthusiasts talk about substitutions, repairs, and upgrades that a knowledgeable person can do. For anyone who doesn't know how all that stuff works, or have a friend who does, electrical problems in particular can be discouraging. But even if you get just three years out of an $800 moped, you made out better than you would with an $800 car, and took it a lot easier than you would with a cheap non-motorized bike.

The e-bikes I see regularly used for practical journeys around here all have onboard lighting systems. They are configured for transportation. Hunting and fishing stores sell versions configured for those activities. You pay more than $1,000 for a solid transportation vehicle, but it has a lot of what you need to have your best chance of survival in the mosh pit that is the American highway system.

Established bike companies offer electrified versions of sport bikes in road and mountain categories. These adaptive aids for the enfeebled are not transportation bikes, although someone might try to graft attachments to them to make them do some actual work. The same companies have their leisure bike versions with varying degrees of adaptability to daily practicality. The more an e-bike tries to look and act like an analog bike, the less useful it is in the broader moped category.

Gas engine mopeds didn't pretend to be bicycles. They knew their place in the hierarchy of motorcycles. In the 1970s, rising gas prices and periodic fuel shortages led to their surge in popularity. They were equipped like motorcycles. Their engine noise and the blue cloud of oil smoke that often surrounded them identified them readily as something that didn't belong on what passed for bike paths at the time. But it was a free-for-all on the streets. Pedalers, drivers, mopedists, all jostled along on the same network.

Classic gas-powered mopeds mostly died out. But the electric version could be around a while. Aside from battery fires, they make better house pets than gas-engine mopeds do. No drippy fuel or engine oil. Quiet running. The only leakage you might have to worry about is brake fluid. They have limitations in cold and wet weather that an internal combustion machine does not, but they still have many advantages for someone who needs cheap transportation.

E-bikes aren't bikes

 What has two wheels, handlebars, a crankset with pedals, and weighs fifty pounds? The answer could have been one of the first "safety bicycles," but these days it's a smokeless moped, aka an electric bicycle.

The first e-bikes we saw in our shop had throttles. I don't recall that they had pedal assist. Pedal assist required more sophisticated electronics than anyone had been bothered to design. Just as with a gas powered moped, the pedals were a technicality, and largely decorative. On the original moped, you needed them to spin up the engine to start it. On the smokeless version, you didn't even need to do that. Theoretically, a rider might pedal the hefty beast on the flats and down hill, using the throttle for quick acceleration and hill climbing. In reality, the pedals were used as foot rests as the riders buzzed around on battery power alone. 

The machine evolved. Now all of the classes have pedal assist, and the lowest category has no throttle override.

The first e-bikes we saw did not look like conventional bikes. The designers made no attempt to mask its difference. Later, Tidal Force came out with a line that was much more based on standard bike configuration, using a lot of available parts. If nothing else, it proved that most of those parts were completely inadequate on a vehicle that weighed about twice as much as a meat-powered bike. Brakes and suspension forks in particular flexed alarmingly. Engineers learn through failure. Tidal Force soon sank.

Motorized bicycles have a place in the transportation mix. But for bike shops they represent a trap. A big shop, perhaps controlled by a big company, can support that company's offerings as well as the parent corporation is willing to provide, but that is only a tiny fraction of the wide selection seeking to attract consumers. The different brands use a lot of parts in common, but a bike shop will need to gear up with a complete electrical department to be able to service them. In the meantime, all of the different shapes and sizes of e-bike demand a huge investment and vast floor space to present them to potential customers. 

Two smokeless mopeds I worked on yesterday had stickers from Electric Bikes of New England on them. I have not been there, but I've known about them for years. Places like that represent the best retail channel for consumers who want to buy in person, rather than roll the dice to buy online and have the bike shipped to them. These things arrive now almost fully assembled, along with instructions that have the words "Don't Panic" in large, friendly letters on the cover. Well, maybe not those exact words, but written to coax the reader through the remaining simple processes to put their vehicle on the road. We get to assemble a lot of those for people who still could not be convinced to take up the tools provided and follow the steps in the manual or the assembly video that a QR code links to.

We work on just about anything vaguely resembling a bike that someone brings us. This has included pedal-powered outboard motors, scooters, and actual bikes covering a span of more than 70 years. But we can no longer sell a decent representation of everything that falls under the general heading of bicycles. The categorization of purely pedal powered bikes already exceeded the capacity of any small shop. E-bikes represent another whole division, not just a category. They have to be designed around their motorized nature, not just modified from the roughly 150-year-old pattern of the evolved bike frame. All that remains is the basic premise of a two-wheeled vehicle straddled by a rider. The parts are connected in the same orientation as on a conventional bicycle, but the frame they're hung on is more of a fuselage. The form has evolved to the needs of the actual vehicle.

Fifty years of bike technology in a typical day

 This scrappy old street dog is actually only 48 years old, according to its owner, but fifty is a nice round number. And on any day we might see stuff at least that old, or older.

Looking at the Nishiki head tube badge, I didn't notice for a while that the bike was actually "Produced for American Eagle." 

 

Interestingly, little color accents on the fork blades are German colors, not American. There's nothing red, white, and blue anywhere on this bike, at least not all together in one spot.

Für deutschen adler?

The bike is designed for touring. Lots of people were happy to ride something like this across the continent in the 1970s. The owner said that it came with fenders and a set of lights. He did not keep those, but the bike still has its randonneur handlebars.

Randonneur bars are kind of brilliant. The tops rise from the center and are sometimes swept slightly back. This provides higher hand positions and back angles for the rider, but still mounts to a stem with a negative rise, for better handling overall.

Because the steering axis of a bicycle is not vertical, stem angle changes how the steering feels. The shape of the connection changes how your weight controls the system. A stem that drops forward of the steering axis tends to center itself better than one in which the stem rises above 90 degrees to the steering axis. The steeper the rise, the more noticeable the effect. You can get used to anything, but once you know you can't overlook it. It's very annoying. That's why on so many of my bike builds after the advent of threadless headsets I left the steerer tubes long, piled up the spacers, and mounted stems with an angle of 90 degrees or less.

The bike industry reinvented the randonneur bar, as seen on some Specialized Roubaix models and elsewhere. The newer version has a wing top for more comfortable hand support, and rises more abruptly. They can do this because stems almost all have open clamps to allow for more weirdly-shaped handlebars that no longer have to thread the needle of an old-style single-bolt clamp.

You could really go on a Safari with this bike, or so the name implies.

Double eyelets on the fork would take fender stays and either a front rack or the more common handlebar bag with bungee cord stabilizers that hooked in down at the dropout.

The crank says American Flyer

The rear derailleur was bent. This was repairable in the Dark Ages of friction shifting:

Less repairable was the Suntour freewheel.

 I liked Suntour freewheels, but they had a tendency on occasion to disassemble themselves while you were riding, allowing the innumerable tiny ball bearings to fall out along many yards of highway. You could theoretically purchase replacement ball bearings and spend a meticulous hour putting the freewheel back together, provided that the pawls hadn't also escaped, but more often you would just buy a new freewheel and graunch down on the outer plate that held the whole apparatus together before trusting it. But the failure could be catastrophic. The worst case I saw was on a climb in Northern California, near Rockport. The rider's freewheel on his loaded touring bike came apart and cracked the flange of his nice Campagnolo Record hub. He and his riding companion had to camp on the side of the road for the night and hitchhike back to the nearest bike shop the next day, to get a wheel and freewheel so that they could resume their northward journey.

Time traveling forward to the present, the 21st Century is represented by this tubeless road wheel:

Tubeless tires for bikes barely make the slightest bit of sense for mountain bikers who could be riding on serrated ledges and over a certain size of angular stones while running fashionably low pressures, but even there I hear them lament that they burped a tire on one of those hazards and ended up with a flat tire anyway, often harder to reinflate in the field than a stupid old inner tube would have been. Your magic juice can leak out, making a seal to the rim difficult or impossible to attain. This is why tubeless riders carry a tube with them.

Setting up a rim and tire for high road pressures really highlights the absurdity of applying the latest fad to every category of bicycling. Road pressures severely challenge the sealing technology that evolved at very low off-road pressures. The process makes gluing tubulars look almost casual.

Gluing tubulars is potentially very messy, but at least you can see what you're doing. Move deliberately and methodically and you will succeed. 

Mounting road tubeless puts you at the mercy of microscopic discrepancies that somehow manage to be immune to the properties of the drippy sealant you have to pour into the casing. The setup shown in the picture, on the first attempt, was okay up to about 60 psi. It would not hold anything above that, no matter how I waved the wheel around to distribute the sealant. It was leaking into the rim somewhere. 

The original stem looked cool, but the rubber seal area at the base of it was rectangular, meaning that it covered less rim along one dimension than the other. Also, the rim tape had not bonded well enough, even though that was hard to judge by looking. I replaced the stem and peeled the tape, deep-cleaned the rim with alcohol, and then baked the wheel in the convection oven we use to heat-treat skis for glide waxing, to dry it absolutely thoroughly. That seemed to do the trick. The tire settled in at 90-100 psi and held it to the end of that day. I declared victory and called the customer. He said someone would be in to pick it up for him. My work week ended, and I left for three days.

When I returned to the shop, the bike was still hanging there. I pinched the front tire. It had gone down to squeezably soft. I reinflated it and heard hissing into the rim. Resisting an urge to take a fire ax to the goddam thing, I tried tightening the lock nut at the base of the stem. The hissing worsened. I removed the groovy plastic shim included with the wheel and went straight for lock nut against rim. Before tightening that, I removed the lock nut and pushed the stem into the rim so I could inject sealant around it to coat the base of it. Then I tightened the stem, re-seated the beads, and inflated the tire. It eventually seemed to hold quietly. I had barely walked away from this when the customer's father came in to get the bike. I said nothing to him or to El Queso Grande, who was handling the transaction. The tire was rock hard and seemed ready to ride, but I guarantee it will be back within a day or two. I can decide then whether to go for the tire levers or the fire ax.

The tubeless department had been getting a little chaotic, so I found a bigger receptacle for our tubeless paraphernalia.

The three-speed that this rim tape came out of may have been much older than fifty years.

I could barely make out some inscriptions in Aramaic on these scroll fragments.

A smokeless moped with a flat tire provided official acknowledgment that ebikes are mopeds:

An old Cannondale showcases the destructive interaction of human sweat and aluminum:

When I attempted to coax a stuck ferrule out of the cable stop on the frame, the stop popped off instead, because the aluminum was so oxidized. The deterioration is eating into the frame itself.

The frame also has some nasty dents from chain suck. It is now destined to be recycled into beer cans. Cheers!

The parts shortage this season led us to farm old inner tubes when common sizes went out of stock and would vanish instantly from suppliers' shelves when they became available again.

On to the next thing: This visiting rider said that he was having a heck of a time getting his gears to stay adjusted. At first he focused our attention on the front derailleur, because it's one of those Shimano models where you have to follow a six-page PDF of instructions to hook up the cable and set the tension. Eventually, though, he also mentioned that the rear shifting was incorrigible, too. Shimano's higher end mechanical shifting systems seem designed primarily to make people want electronic shifters.

The bike wins the award for Worst Internal Cable Routing, but that's a highly competitive category. I don't expect this entry to hold the crown for long.

The bike had those crappy brown-coated cables that get abraded almost immediately. Cable fuzz causes drag, especially inside the standard undersized 4mm shift housing.

This bike did have a full cover over the bottom bracket cable guides, protecting against a major entry point for dirt and water in internally-routed cable systems. The hatch cover was full of carbon dust from the cables abrading the cable guides, and a thick dusting of cable fuzz that had worn off of the wires themselves. 

Step one is always to yank out the brown cables and get some 1.1mm stainless wires in there. Step two is often to replace the housing with 5mm if the frame will allow. But when I was trying to thread the new cables I discovered that he had a bigger problem than cable fuzz and skinny housing.

The problem turned out to be the cable stop on the top tube, where the shift wires enter the frame for their dark journey through the mysterious interior.

 

 

That little doohickey inside the tube is supposed to be on top of the tube. It managed to fall inside, but would not come back out the same way. I had to remove the fork, which fortunately gave me access to the inside of the top tube. 

If you own a bike like this, expect to fork out a lot for repairs.

 

Someone had wrapped Teflon tape around the cable stop to try to wedge it into the hole in the top tube, but that merely reduced the width of the flange that is supposed to keep the stop from dropping in. I peeled the tape away, and reduced the size of the opening from the back edge, where the stop has a longer flange, to enhance the overlap of the narrower flange across the front. It was a bit of a hack job, but much of what we do is meatball surgery for riders who not only need a bike repair, but have limited time. This is bike service in a resort town.

We do have our year-round residents. I believe the doting Dad who wanted us to change the grip-style shifter on his daughter's 24-inch mountain bike to a trigger-style shifter endures the winters with us and doesn't just cherry-pick the summers.

The close-reach kid levers on the brakes don't leave a lot of room for the index-finger lever of the shifter pod.

Finger trap made in China.

Fortunately, kid fingers are small enough to work in the space available, and the pivot of the brake lever keeps it from pinching down on the upshifting finger. A larger lever, shut down to accommodate the daughter's diminutive digits, would end up just as close.

Two department store bikes came in at separate times for separate things and I noticed these helpful stickers on the fork:

We have frequently seen cheaper bikes with the forks mounted backwards, either by the owner or by a disinterested grunt at a big box store who was numbing his way through the assemblies for a management and clientele that don't know the difference. This sticker may help to reduce the frequency of that error.

After a brief hiatus immediately after Labor Day, repairs have picked up again, though not to the flooding volume of spring and summer. And many of the problems continue to be weird and time consuming on top of the lottery odds of finding parts that you need.

The Woman with Exploding Nipples

 It could happen to anyone with a low-spoke-count, highly tensioned wheel with trendy alloy nipples. They start popping without warning. This customer had come in a couple of times already for single incidents of nipple failure.

This rear wheel had 27 spokes: nine on the left side, 18 on the right. The rims were a little deep, but not hard to work with. Weird-looking wheels are part of what makes a bike look modern.

To begin, I had to remove the tire. Because it wasn't a punctured tire, I went to remove it without tools. When I pushed down on the wheel to work the bead around, another nipple exploded. I called the customer to let her know we were going to do a complete nipple transplant, not just an individual replacement.

On the stand, two more nipples popped when I put a wrench on them to start loosening them. This wheel had been a real time bomb. Imagine ripping down a bumpy descent when one spoke after another detaches from the rim.

Fortunately, the diameter and thread on the bladed spokes matched the DT brass nipples I was planning to use. And the low spoke count made the swap less time consuming. I would never ride a low-count wheel myself, but I appreciate the time I save on jobs like this.

This has also been the Summer of Forgotten Through Axles. We've had several in a row. A rider calls up and asks if we have through axles in stock. We explain that there are different kinds (of course). They're not sure of the brand and type. We figure it out. We had one kicking around from a previous customer's special order that they then declined to pick up. We've accumulated one or two more, to try to cover some of the possibilities.

Next up on the list of modern problems, a mother and daughter had to forgo their bike ride because they had forgotten the keys to their ebikes, turning them into nothing more than immensely heavy regular pedal bikes. You can just ride them that way. It's a common claim in the advertising. But who would? No one, actually, unless they get caught out with a dead battery and have no one to call to pick them up.

Problems like this are right up there with forgetting the charger for your shifters. If you have electronic derailleurs and a dead battery, you got nothin'. 

There's still plenty of good old abuse and neglect to keep us busy. I figured out that the handlebar tape on these bars was about 15 years old when I removed it the other day.

The bars themselves were old enough and had been through enough rough use that I recommended replacement. The last bars I saw that had that much salt and oxidation encrusting them had been on a bike that had lived in Singapore for a year or two. Those bars were so deteriorated that I could poke a screwdriver right through them. These bars were nowhere near that level of deterioration, but still a risk according to most manufacturer recommendations. Better to be safe. It also gave us a good opportunity to put on a much shorter stem for the new rider of the bike.

Accidents will happen. One of the local ebike aficionados took a digger on their chunky steed. The owner called to see if we would work on it. To make it easier, he had contacted the president of the company that made the bike to hook us up with a direct pipeline to parts and advice. With clout like that, ebike ownership is smooth sailing indeed. When a bike weighs upwards of 60 pounds, it hits the ground with more force than a bike weighing less than 30. It also hits a rider with more force, should you happen to get on the wrong side of things as they're going every which way. The rider was apparently not hurt badly enough to be worth mentioning, so that's good. I was just musing about it as I looked at what was scuffed and tweaked.

The trickiest part will be replacing the battery case, which is cleverly inserted into the welded rear rack on this Pedego bike. It has thick cabling inserted into it, and has an irregular shape that does not appear to slide easily out of either end of the framework of the rack. The screws that hold it in place broke loose when the bike crashed, because they were never designed to restrain such a heavy piece of equipment in an impact at an angle. The good news is that the owner of the bike doesn't need it fixed instantaneously. We can put it off for at least a week or two before getting mired in its complexities.

More service activity

By the end of the week, it's all a blur.

A road bike customer asked whether we could get him short cranks because he's got some sort of calcified tendon problem, and can't bend his knee far enough to get around a pedal stroke on 170mm crank arms.

A quick dip into internet research brought me immediately to Bikesmith Design, a machinist who specializes in exactly what our customer needs. In fact, our customer's brother or brother-in-law or friend or something went to an event in Minneapolis years ago for HPVs and met the machinist, who was already working on shorter cranks because HPVs need them to fit into the confined spaces within fairings on recumbent human-powered speed vehicles.

I got the machinist and the customer talking directly to each other so I could get on with other items in the deluge. Eventually, a couple of sets of little cranks arrived, with detailed instructions for our customer to follow as he explored the limits of his bad leg. One set was 85mm long. Mark, the machinist, suggested that the customer use the 85s on a trainer, because they weren't strong enough for real rides on hilly roads. There was a detailed process to determine what the final crank length should be, as well as a set of 100mm cranks that were fully cleared for road riding. The customer opted instead to have us mount the 100s right away, so he could go try them on the road.

Short cranks don't just lower the top of the stroke, they bring the bottom right up close, too. I raised the seat as much as I could, but the post wasn't long enough to cover 70mm. I sent the customer away with a longer post so he could make the swap after feeling out the new riding position. His fork is cut really short, so the best I could do to bring the bars up was flip the stem. If he reconfigures the bike permanently he will need to replace the fork to get a longer steerer. I don't recommend steep rise stems, and I definitely wouldn't put a big clunky stem raiser on the carbon steerer of the existing fork.

The owner of the Specialized Turbo Como 3.0 ebike we recently assembled came by a few days later and said that she'd had a problem with it not running right. "I just turned it off and back on again," she said. "Then it was fine." Hilarious. The bikes are so computerized that now you can use the classic advice: "Hello, IT department, have you tried turning it off and back on again?"

We assembled another $10,000 mountain bike. This one was shipped here by its owner so he could ride with his buddy, for whom we had built up the new one a couple of weeks ago. Here was a bike that he had owned and ridden for a while, and it shifted like crap. These wide-range drive trains with the 42- or 50-tooth large cogs make all kinds of noises and move really stiffly anyway, but this one looked like it had never been adjusted properly. Nothing was bent, but it threw the chain right over into the spokes without hesitation.

When the owner picked that bike up, he spent the entire time with his phone up to his ear as he monitored an important call.

The heavy hitters are here. One guy called asking for "several road bikes." I was stunned into silence. The pandemic bike frenzy has been big enough to get a few minutes of national news acknowledgement, as well as lots of coverage in the cycling media. But the caller might have been spending a few weeks or months on a private tropical island, having a cleanse and a digital fast. I gathered my wits. They may be few, but they scatter far when I drop them.

"You said 'several road bikes.' Is that to rent or to buy?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah, sorry. To buy. All of my kids are big enough now that I wanted to get them nice road bikes that they won't grow out of."

I explained about the current shortage. Because I believe in providing as complete a picture as possible, I always start by explaining that the bike industry has been in decline for close to 20 years. Next I point out that the coronavirus broke out first where everything gets manufactured these days, torpedoing production before interfering with shipping and distribution as it swept around the globe. Thus, already small planned inventories were reduced even further because factories couldn't meet production targets, just as the public suddenly decided to rediscover bike riding after a long period of neglect. And they all got here a couple of months before you did, my unfortunate friend.

That may seem like a lot of unnecessary detail, but anything less makes the bike industry look sloppy and negligent, and retailers look like slackers. The bike industry is tech-obsessed and self-sabotaging, but they're not sloppy or negligent about it. It isn't even entirely their fault that the public lost interest at the end of the 20th Century. The mountain bike boom had already lasted almost twice as long as the 1970s ten speed boom did. The true believers in the surviving form of mountain biking were always a minority, but they were firmly enough addicted to form the nucleus of the addict pool that the industry farms today. The general population changed hobbies the way they always do.

Now they're back. We'll see where it goes. I doubt if it will last a year, let alone ten or fifteen. Meanwhile, our particular shop operates in an area where most of the categories have attracted a handful of adherents who come in on a regular basis to keep our brain cells challenged.

The owner of a Yamaha smokeless moped that he bought last year from somewhere else had had it shipped to us to assemble. This year, he brought it in because "it's making a grinding noise when I pedal hard." This is the same guy who didn't notice that he had Biopace chainrings for the first ten years that he owned his mountain bike, and then brought it in one day concerned because the chainrings had somehow turned oval. It was conceivable that he had only just now noticed that a mid-motor ebike makes noises when the motor engages. However, grinding might be a sign of something actually amiss. He mentioned that he'd read things on line from owners of the same brand who complained of grinding noises.

The Yamaha is light enough that I can actually lift it into the work stand without my little block and tackle rig, as long as it's early in my work week, and I got almost a good night's sleep the night before.

There was play in the bottom bracket. Or was it the bottom bracket? The crank axle disappears into the motor housing, engaging who knows what in there. I could see the face of a sealed bearing on each side. The play wasn't in those bearings. The motor itself was shifting. Under hard pedaling, this could cause gears to engage improperly. The owner said that he had tightened the mounting bolts and the noise had become worse.

I put a wrench on the bolts. They did not want to turn. They seemed bottomed right out. So I undid them, greased the dry threads, and reinstalled them. They torqued down properly instead of binding up. The motor no longer wiggled. There was a faint trace of play in the bottom bracket bearings themselves, but I couldn't do much about that. It was almost imaginary.

The bike made no alarming noises on a test ride. I called the customer to report that we had finished with it, and suggested that he should start a warranty claim with the original dealer if it made any further noises. I had also changed the chain, which was worn almost to the end of the gauge, and absolutely black with grimy lube.

The rate of repair check-ins seems to have slowed. In any normal season we would get these pauses, sometimes long enough to be alarming, but this is not a normal season. There's a blend of exuberant wealth, sober caution, and reckless, pent-up sociability. The people with money seem very happy. The reckless are ready to run out and embrace life, which sounds great until you consider how they are also exporting death and expecting everyone to be okay with that. Color me cautious, but I'm not going to bother to confront anyone outside of my job, because I don't need to get coughed on by some psychopath.

The temptations of Marpril

Today's high temperature was about 62 degrees at my house. In a forecast discussion one day last week on the  National Weather Service site, a meteorologist had written that the pattern looked more like April than March. It's true. The high temperatures have been consistently well above freezing, tagging the 50s on occasion. But 62 -- that's the territory of May.

Freakishly warm days can hit at any time. I've seen it hit 60 in January, and turn warm and wet enough to melt off the snow cover all the way to the highest summits. That was 1995. But the odd warm day or two can pop in and out in any month of winter, with less dramatic consequences. Still, the closer you get to the real end of winter, the more these benedictions make you yearn for more like them.

I yielded to it today. I overdressed, of course, but not so much that I was gasping for breath and pouring with sweat. My route passes through one well-known micro-climate where I was glad of every layer I had on, for the seven seconds that I was in that shaded hollow full of snow and spruce trees.

The temperature drops back to more Aprilish conditions starting tomorrow. Tomorrow's 50s with clouds and developing showers mimics the latter half of next month, while the progressively lower temperature waves take us closer to the beginning of it as the week goes on.

The early meltdown has drawn a few riders out. On Sunday, a woman brought in her thoroughly modern gravel bike to investigate a flat tubeless tire. David diagnosed it as just a dislodged bead due to low air pressure. The rider had been told to run 'em soft because it's faster, and it absorbs shock. Because she works out of town, she goes to an excellent shop in Concord. She described her mechanic there as "hard core." Based on his equipment recommendations, I would add "trendoid." But looking back over my life I realize that I have lost every war I was ever in. The industry sold its soul to planned obsolescence in the 1990s, and the addicts who depend on it live in a world viewed through their perceived need.

You don't have to be hard core to be dedicated.

Clearly almost no one respects my opinion about the technology. I do enjoy riding my archaic shit. I love how it works. I do not yearn for anything more sophisticated. All the gimmicky bullshit has not bought us any more respect on the roads, or recruited sedentary legions from the sidelines. The only technological innovation that has stirred much interest is the addition of an electric motor.

How many times over the years did some smartass look at the price of a high-end bike and say, "For that kind of money, I want a motor!" Well, here you go: put up or shut up, asshole.

You can get hassled or run down just as easily on an e-bike as on one powered by meat alone. Think that a motor enhances safety? Ask a motorcyclist about that.

For today, I made it around a nice little 15-mile route on a fixed gear with no parts on it newer than the late 20th Century, except for the tires. They're more recent, but they may not even be from this decade. Oh, and the chain was new within the last couple of years. I could tell I had no strength, but I had enough. A utility rider doesn't need to maintain 20+ miles per hour for hours. You don't need to be first up the hill. You just need to get up the hill.

One ride leads to another, or so you hope. And so begins a season.

Imagine no motor vehicles

Coline commented on the previous post: "I have just returned from a family visit to France where cyclists are everywhere and not targets of abuse. This may change as now great numbers of electrocycles are being moved about badly by non cyclists who do not seem to think that they need to learn how to use them!

Worse were the trottinettes, scooters which hurtle silently about with total disregard for anything or body, least of all their own safety. Brave new world!"

I had said that I would rather share the road with smokeless mopeds than with monster trucks, but Coline raises a good point about the behavior of newcomers who make up their own rules when they buy equipment and dive into alternative transportation.

Back at the University of Florida in the mid 1970s, most people got around campus on bicycles. Cars were barred from most of it, and the sprawling distances made walking from class to class difficult for many. People did walk, but large numbers of riders would hit the streets at every class break and at the beginning and end of the day. The town supported at least four bike shops.

If you weren't a cyclist, just a bike rider, you would join the flow and move placidly with it to your next stop. But if you felt fit and frisky it was as frustrating as any traffic jam. It even included a few real mopeds, puffing clouds of blue smoke. I had a good crash one time when I tried to push the pace and got hooked by a rider in front of me with a sudden urge to turn left. My error. 

Crowded multi-use trails also provide a preview of what a motorless -- or at least less motorized -- society would be like. The herd average would set the speed limit. Because the vehicles are much more maneuverable than big, bulky automobiles and trucks, they can behave more erratically and swerve more unpredictably.

It would reduce the amount of distracted piloting. You can stare at your phone and walk into a fountain, but you can't really bury your face in the screen for too long when you're trying to stay up on two wheels in a crowded field. I'm sure that distracted cycling happens already, but it's more self-limiting than distracted driving or distracted walking. You hit that lamp post much harder on a bike.

We who ride in traffic complain about the range of hazards we face from the masses of metal charging along beside us. But the simple fact of our weakness licenses us to work to the limit of our strength more often than would be the case if everyone moved by meat alone. It's nice to find a quiet road where we can set our own pace, fast or slow, but those roads are made quieter by the fact that so few people cycle on them. The dominance of motor vehicles means that the road is seen as reserved to them. If the system was built solely for bikes, would the lanes be as wide? Would the grading be built for the speeds that some of us are willing to reach? Think of your average bike path. Even if a descent would allow you to top 50 miles per hour, do you think that the designers would have planned for it? The motorways are a playground because of motorized speeds. Some stretches are a slog because the terrain is boring, or stressful because the motorized users are always abundant, but the good parts can be very good indeed.

I'm more in favor of Biketopia than of continuing our current exaltation of horsepower, but I can appreciate the accidental benefits that the culture of speed has conferred on those of us who work for our momentum. A true Biketopia would design with that in mind. We would need some motorized equipment to maintain the network of bike routes at a high standard. We are not an afterthought. We shouldn't be, anyway.

Surly goes electric. What EV.

Someone I know asked someone else I know what I thought about Surly’s new electrified version of the Big Dummy, called the Big Easy. I don't know why he didn't ask me directly. Anyway, it was the first I'd heard of it, because I don't pay much attention to industry news.

While I’m no fan of smokeless mopeds, I have previously acknowledged that electric assistance makes sense for a cargo vehicle. It brings all of the undesirable complexities of motors and batteries. It does alter the power to weight calculation by adding irreducible weight even when a dead battery or other malfunction negates the power assist. But it does increase load carrying capacity when it is working as intended.

I still assert that a smokeless moped is a motor vehicle with pedals, not a bike with an auxiliary motor. If a bike seemed heavy enough to tempt you to add a motor in the first place, the extra poundage of a battery and motor will definitely discourage you from pedaling without the assist. Once you accept that motor, you’ve stepped onto the same kind of production line that led from the earliest sailing ships with steam engines to the ones with vestigial masts and then no spars at all.

The quest for power warps everything it touches. The Telemark revival of the 1980s was an attempt to increase the versatility of touring skis by using a 19th Century technique to control traditional length skis in downhill maneuvers. Touring skis are long and skinny so that they move efficiently on flat to rolling terrain. Alpine skiing -- the dominant form today -- developed only in the 20th Century when skiing finally reached the Alps. The quest for downhill power and control took over the evolution of ski gear to create skis very poorly suited to anything else. Even the Telemark revival killed itself by turning Telemark skis and boots into just another downhill-only tool. Say what you will about alpine touring gear, trudging up and up with climbing skins for the sake of the downhill run, you would not want to use that stuff, or modern Telemark stuff, to go for a rambling bushwhack where you will encounter mixed climbing and descent. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Telemark skiers were tackling the whole range of terrain on skis around 70mm wide, controlled with leather boots and very basic bindings. By the late 1990s, all of that gear was mutating rapidly into the alpinesque monsters of today. It's all a risk/benefit calculation. You can get seriously mangled with long, narrow skis and non-releasable bindings. But by eliminating one aspect of risk and increasing the power of the tool for one phase of operation, the other functions were seriously diminished or lost.

In bikes, every category illustrates how the quest for one kind of power diminishes the overall versatility of the type.

A cargo bike is already shaped by specific needs. You're not likely to hop on it to go for a ride on the local pump track, or a group ride with sporty friends. But it's an investment. And the more complicated the mechanism, the more support it will need over its lifespan.

By joining the electric parade, Surly has obligated itself to support a complex product that uses expensive components over which they have very little control. The motor assembly is made by Bosch. The frame is built around that specific unit. The weight of the vehicle demands powerful hydraulic brakes. You still wouldn't use it to take the family on a summer vacation to visit the major national parks. That leads to another interesting question: National parks arose at a time when personal mobility was about to increase rapidly. Land was set aside because of various natural attractions as people were developing more and more ability to go and see those attractions. If personal mobility dwindles because people realize that it is more environmentally responsible and affordable just to live where they live and keep most of their trips short, will the justification for the grand and wonderful places crumble, opening them to the destructive extraction of finite resources? This may seem like quite a leap, but the Big Easy lists for $5,000.00 USD. It's either a car replacement or a car supplement. Extrapolating a widespread shift to relatively short-range transportation devices leads to a scenario in which a highly developed public transportation system would have to pick up where the cars and SUVs had left off. Either that or the adamant non-pedalers are simply running us down with electric behemoths instead of fossil-fuel guzzlers.

Because the Big Easy is a Surly product, it is solidly built and as simply designed as possible. I still don't want one, because its vulnerabilities outweigh its benefits, same as all the smokeless mopeds. Any complex piece of equipment is only as good as its support. Can you get parts? Are they the parts that actually need replacing? Can you get in and out of the mechanism without destroying it? Can you get good instructions and diagrams? What sort of facilities will you need to perform maintenance and repairs? I got into bikes for transportation because I could do absolutely anything I needed to do in a one-room apartment. It's a lot easier to maintain a vehicle that you can lift with one hand than it is to work on one that requires a hoist or a hydraulic lift.

No one has stopped driving cars because they don't make parts for a Duesenberg anymore. The evolution of machinery has left many fossils behind. But the extinction events seem to come along more frequently these days, driven as much by the accounting department as anything else. Just buying a product forces you to bet on the health of the company and its future prospects. When a product includes critical assemblies from multiple companies, you're at risk from every one of them.

E-bikes and the illusion of something for nothing

A recent convert to the smokeless moped posted this graphic showing their growth in Europe.

It's from this article on a site called Explain That Stuff.

Electric bicycles entice the consumer with the lure of smokeless, relatively silent assistance when the going gets tough. When the flesh is weak, your personal assistant will kick in to carry you through.

A tandem weighs less and provides the chance for pleasant conversation. But a second person does weigh more than a battery pack, and doubles the chances of farts. And maybe the conversation grows wearisome.

An under-performing stoker and a dead battery both still weigh the same as their energized counterparts, but you can ditch the stoker at a coffee stop and try to recruit fresh talent. I suppose you could also scrounge up a fresh battery somewhere. As the smokeless moped expands to become a common appliance, facilities might offer battery swaps along popular routes. Maybe they do already. But with the rate of obsolescence in new technology, what are the odds that such a service could remain current -- so to speak -- with all the proliferating options? You may be stuck with the dead hulk of your 60-pound slug of a bike, even when you're left alone to do all the work.

I wonder if anyone has collected statistics on how many dead ebikes have already ended up chucked in canals.

The ebike relies on the illusion of something for nothing. But aside from the up front cost of purchase and the ongoing cost of charging, you face maintenance and repair of its electrical parts, and eventual decommissioning of the dead battery. You also have to horse the thing around when you're not riding it: transporting it to riding venues if you drive to ride, lugging it in and out of wherever you store it...

As you use your magic moped, you rapidly deplete its reserves of pixie dust. Energy has to go into the equation in the form of your pedaling and the all-important battery charging. Pedal-assist devotees point out that they can choose how much assistance to request, and extend their cruising range. It is still more finite than the muscle power of an acclimated rider. I don't say trained, because that carries connotations of athleticism and competition that many riders pride themselves on avoiding. But anyone who rides frequently is trained. Strength, power, and efficiency all improve with use.

The smokeless moped requires an extra type of training to learn how to interact with the power assistance. To get that go when you want it, you have to use a setting that produces a very noticeable result when you push hard on the pedals. The rider learns quickly how to feather the power to avoid wobbling -- or even getting thrown -- but it does take at least a minimal period of adaptation. My own experience comes from test riding a variety of specimens brought in for repair, and from observing new owners, or novice riders on borrowed equipment.

The bike shapes the rider. You learn how to get along with your equipment. Happy moped riders fall into the comfort zone of the machinery. I suppose someone, somewhere, has tried electric bikes and rejected them. And others push the limits of the medium and lead the charge for expanded capability. (see what I did there? I'm on fire today! Oh wait, that's just the battery overheating...).

Joking aside, compare the cost and benefit of a heavy bike dependent on outside power to make it functional versus your primitive old push bike powered by meat alone. My rationale for transportation cycling, from back in the late 1970s, still applies. I will be eating anyway. I do need physical activity to maintain my body's fitness and health. I will have a basic metabolism even at idle. The energy in my body already can be applied through the supremely efficient bicycle to move my individual self to a lot of places I need or want to go. The up front cost is the bicycle itself, and an evolved set of accessories. Most of those cost nothing to own after the initial purchase. Some are consumable at varying rates. Clothing wears out. Bike parts wear out. But by learning to use tools, and sticking to open source componentry I can maintain a bike almost indefinitely. Frames and parts can be combined in different ways to produce desired riding effects. Pump up the tires. Lube the chain. Go.

Your body is the battery. Your body is the engine. Your body is the beneficiary.

The smokeless moped does have a place in the transportation mix. As an urban commuter it offers partial exercise benefits to riders who can't get sweaty on their way to a job that might require them to look spiffy as soon as they hit the deck there. The energy required to charge them is certainly less than the amount consumed by a full-size car or truck transporting a single occupant. Electric assistance is also good for anyone weakened by age, injury, or illness. But stop calling it a bicycle with a motor when it is really more of a motor vehicle with pedals. The motorized aspect is so embedded in its nature that it can't be separated.

The motor of this specimen drives the chain from the pulling end. This avoids the problem of 20-pound wheels with a motor in the hub, and heavy electric lines that have to be detached every time you need to fix a flat, but it also gives the bike a complicated gear box and does little to reduce the chronic weight problem that afflicts all battery-powered vehicles.

Electric bikes have spawned a whole segment of componentry to meet their specific needs for tires and other parts that can stand up to their weight and the increased wear as a result of power assistance. This is better for the breed than early models that used standard bike components, but it increases yet again the number of products a shop needs to carry to be ready to serve all potential customer needs. Even if shops practice "on-time ordering" someone has to have the crap in stock.

Open source componentry means that a rider can live off the land more easily. The recent Ars Technica article cited in an earlier post sneered at rim brakes and praised disc brakes, but I can find a functional set of rim brake pads almost anywhere.  Even in a local setting, can your local service source get the parts you need for your specific vehicle? How long will it take? I'll be in and out of the shop with a set of brake pads or a chain, or a chainring, or a crank arm, or tires and tubes, or pretty much anything in about five minutes. Installation takes longer, but acquisition is a snap.

My commuting costs when I lived in a town were under $100 a year. They were probably well under $100 a year. And I didn't have to remember to plug my bike in. Even in a rural area, riding a minimum of about 30 miles commuting per day, I only have to keep up with tires, chains, and some chain lube. Because I might choose to ride more than the basic distance, I use up consumable items more quickly. But the rate of consumption is still really low unless you're racing, with its risk of crash damage, or mountain biking, for the same reasons. The harder you ride, the faster you wear everything out, including yourself. Find a balance that suits your personality.

The smokeless moped rider will not notice paying much more on a day to day basis, but the up front cost tends to be higher, and the replacement cost will mount. Given the way electronic things go, replacement will also be more frequent. Batteries die of neglect just as much as from frequent recharging. The more complex the vehicle, the more delicate are its storage needs.

Something for nothing turns out to be more costly than you think.