Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Do we really need billionaires?

 As someone who works in a town where trickle down economics drives most of its economy, I see its benefits and the clear boundary beyond which it never flows.

The luminaries of Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro don't give a crap what happens to Ossipee, Effingham, Brookfield, New Durham... Communities with frontage on Lake Winnipesaukee attract wealthy homebuyers. Some of the families have invested in businesses that exploit the other lakes in surrounding areas. Those water bodies don't attract the A-list. They're just good for cash flow. The real life takes place overlooking The Big Lake.

Subtract the billionaires and millionaires, and what do the lakefront towns have to offer in a reality-based economy? The English monarchy no longer needs masts for its sailing ships. Water-powered mills went out more than a century ago. The stony soil is hard to farm. The roads have to wind over and around steep little mountains, and skirt the shores of numerous lakes. Transporting manufactured goods takes longer than in places with straighter highways and easier grades.

Building up a modern economy would mean destroying the quaintness and natural beauty that attract tourists and seasonal residents. Residential development is already doing that, along with the retail sprawl that follows. The state might build up its intellectual economy, but tech jobs seem to be targets of AI. There won't be much left but retail clerk and food service jobs, and those depend on having a decent amount of people around who can afford to buy things and eat out. Oh, and retail is increasingly conducted online now.

Visitors buy things on impulse and necessity, and locals try to support local businesses, but the local businesses themselves have trouble sourcing their products because online retailers feed upstream from their suppliers, driving costs up and margins down, as well as sometimes cleaning out the supply chain completely. Online retailers have a fraction of the overhead that brick and mortar stores do. Massive giants like WalMart can buy with the budget of a small country, effortlessly outbidding a small country store.

There were seasonal residents before there were billionaires. Indeed, fairly average, upper middle class people used to be able to afford camps and cottages to come and rough it for a few weeks every summer. People generally got along fine without soaring, glass-fronted palaces listing for millions of dollars. The boom in the 1980s that ushered in that era drove most of the modest cottage owners out of the area because they couldn't afford the tax hikes that came along with the spike in real estate valuation. It's only gotten worse from there.

It doesn't help that New Hampshire derives most of its tax revenue from property taxes. It was a good scam when seasonal residents shut down their places in early fall and only needed someone to snowshoe in occasionally to check on them through the off season. The more people who live here year-round the more services they need, including some sort of schooling for the young 'uns. Also, the more elaborate the homes, the more care and feeding they might need when the lords of the manor are absent. It drives municipal costs higher for fire departments among other things.

The real estate boom of the 1980s led to a population boom as new residents flocked in to build and maintain the new homes and condos. While much of the new construction went to seasonal residences, the surge required year-round personnel to make sure that everything was ready when the owners arrived. That meant more families with kids in the schools. That meant higher taxes. A collapsing economy would mean more people moving away if they could.

Already, fewer people visit than we saw in the 1990s. Traffic still gets snarled, because the road system was never designed for this kind of population. New England frugality combined with difficult terrain to produce only as many roads as they absolutely needed. Main Street is a numbered state highway. It's actually two state highways that meet at Pickering Corner and turn north for a few miles as Center Street before separating to their separate terminations. Route 28 comes all the way up from southern New Hampshire. A traveler on it could have been driving for a couple of hours already before getting wedged into South Main Street in little ol' Wolfeboro. Route 109 runs from Maine coast sort of east-west to Sandwich, NH. They will always funnel travelers through the center of town. Maybe some of them give up and park long enough to spend money. Or they just crawl along in their air conditioned capsules, maybe taking in the sights, maybe hating every minute. Who knows?

The town has become a center for retirees who can afford it. I would say rich retirees, but where is the threshold of richness? When everyone rode simple, affordable mountain bikes, I had a better sense of the number and ages of children in the area. They might not all buy their bikes from our shop, but we did have the best service department for miles. I don't know what they do now, because we almost never see them. I saw a dip in the school population in Effingham for a couple of years, but that seems to have rebounded. People move to the more obscure communities of Carroll County for their own reasons, like establishing a sovereign citizen compound or taking a shot at homesteading. As homeschooling has grown, institutional enrollment may not reflect the number of families and their offspring. People are around. I don't know all the ways in which they finance it.

Traditional industries include logging and sand and gravel mining. The area has trees and lots of glacial till. One pit complex has its own rail line directly to Boston. Those piles of sand and gravel you see when you pull into North Station on the Downeaster came from Ossipee. Neat, huh? However, shipping the actual substance of your state to another state is ultimately not sustainable.

One rich person is actually a colony of symbiotic organisms feeding off of the wealth assigned to that individual. This is supposed to be the justification for trickle-down economics as the primary model for the distribution of money, but it only goes as far as the personal interests of the named owner. It might work if rich people were perfectly evenly distributed across the country, but they aren't and they can't be. The rich person's discretionary spending goes to the things they like. Our shop happens to have a few wealthy people, both seasonal and local, who like various aspects of what we offer. As time goes by, succeeding generations feel less affection and obligation, meaning that our time as a favored business will fade. It's already happening. The theme park buyers have much more enthusiasm for the little bakery and the boatyard.

To some extent, that's just life. A business has to evolve with the generations as they come along. We're already so old and creaky that the younger generation of riders writes us off without a second thought. We have no representative among them as we did in the 1990s. Someone might buy the name and the tools, and make the business relevant again, but it won't be the same business. Cross-country skiing is even more endangered than road riding in the age of climate and economic collapse. People need money and motivation to want to do laps on a short course of snowmaking in the increasingly common winters when nature does not provide. I have my gear, but I couldn't afford to update it. I wouldn't trudge around that loop on my back-country gear. Well, maybe I would just for exercise during the work week, but if I'm going to trudge I will more likely just go for a hike on my day off.

The world is changing. The economy is changing. Ordinary people have less money, young people have different ideas how to spend what they have, and there aren't enough handy billionaires to take up the slack. We will never be where we were in the 1990s, feeling confident and well funded and full of unfounded hope. The middle class I grew up in was a sustained illusion. The devices that projected that illusion fell apart as the century ended. Don't look back and fall for the bullshit about how a whole family could be supported on one income in the 1950s and '60s, because that was already based on unsustainable factors. Look at the current data and figure out how to do the best we can for the people alive now, and inevitably joining us.

We will die competing for big shares of it. We will die trying to squeeze profit out of every product and service. I don't mean in the sense that "everybody dies." I mean soon, and nastily. Some people are fine with that. Assholes like that have driven our thinking for far too long. They're the ones promoting fossil fuels, reviving colonialist thinking, and making excuses for wars of territorial expansion. They're the ones who have been stockpiling guns in the United States since the 1980s, and lulling themselves to sleep with fantasies of the glorious civil war they're going to have. Because this country has a surfeit of both assholes and guns, they are a political force to be reckoned with, but that doesn't mean by fighting them on their own terms. It won't go well for them, but it will be bloody and waste a lot of decent people's lives. That's how these wars always go.

Unlimited wealth, unlimited liberty, and unlimited personal armament are not ingredients for a pleasant future. While a majority of people might partake responsibly, we are seeing in our lives right now how a minority can use the leverage of money, the threat of force, and a lack of empathy to put survival at risk and make life difficult for everyone.

Monday, August 25, 2025

Replacing car trips with e-bikes

 "Replacing car trips with ebikes." That headline greeted me as I skimmed through the ol' inbox a few days ago.

First of all, it's a great idea. It would reduce the volume of large, boxy vehicles in traffic, although it would probably increase the overall number of vehicles. Second, it would reduce fossil fuel consumption. By extension, that would reduce tailpipe emissions. It would drastically alter the parking situation. But it would also drastically complicate the riders' lives in ways that they haven't imagined.

Motor vehicles have been the norm in this country for so long that massive support systems exist to keep them rolling. How many parts store chains can you name? NAPA, O'Reilly, VIP, AutoZone, WalMart... you can get auto parts everywhere. You can go in with pretty fragmentary information about your car and the people behind the counter can usually find what you need in their voluminous cross-reference books. No such network exists for bicycles, e- or otherwise.

Most people drive vehicles that they don't even begin to understand. Car broken! Go to mechanic! Mechanic fix! It costs a lot of money, and we often feel that the mechanic might be shady or not that competent. But at least we have options, and the mechanics -- professional or home DIY -- can get parts, tools, and manuals, as well as the ubiquitous YouTube videos.

Electric bikes have almost none of this. Not only are they a much younger technology, they come in from a scorned and neglected sector by identifying as bicycles. In addition, many companies have abysmal tech support.

Because smokeless mopeds are so popular, independent support will evolve quickly, but it's happening very unevenly. In Wolfe City and the surrounding area, smokeless mopeds have been playthings of the rich for more than a decade. For some of them it's been since the 1990s. As the category has taken off in the past few years, the opposite end of the income scale has taken to it heavily. The wealthy have had resources that the worker bees will never enjoy, including calling up the CEO of an e-bike company and getting parts sent directly as a favor, executive to executive. That ain't the real world.

A local working class e-bike user who grew up working on his own internal combustion vehicles has delved into the inner workings enough that he is considering starting an e-bike service business. We are encouraging him, because smokeless mopeds are not bicycles. They share traits in common, but the motors and electronic aspects demand knowledge that the average bike shop shouldn't be burdened to acquire.

You might say that the competitive economy presents challenges and opportunities, and that anyone unwilling to embrace this new aspect of "bicycle" evolution is a slacker and defeatist, but you would be a dick. Simple economic reality stands in the way of this idealistic vision.

Someone starting a business from scratch can decide how to expend capital to equip that business. Let's assume adequate funding to establish the business. For smokeless mopeds you will want a powered lift, or at least one with some mechanical advantage built in. Depending on your expected volume of business, you might want two or more. I have only the vaguest idea what you would need for tools to service the electrical aspects, but they aren't free.

You will need space for this operation. If you also service regular bicycles, that will probably call for a parallel service area with the usual few thousand dollars in tools and workstands, plus staffing. Smokeless mopeds being a separate genre, you can probably focus solely on them.

My car mechanic has a three-bay setup in a side-street industrial park, for just himself and an occasional assistant. Smokeless mopeds don't take up nearly as much space as cars and SUVs, but they're generally bigger than regular bikes. Just as car repair places tend to accumulate derelict hulks parked here and there around the place, so do bike shops, including smokeless mopeds. Owners abandon them over the bill, or you scavenge them for parts, or you just get tired and go home at the end of day after day and never quite get around to processing the carcasses.

Once a business is mature, and has been operating in a dying industry that went into decline right after a phase of merciless competition between retailers, it has been getting by on slim margins and a shrinking customer base for years. We have no bag of cash to finance an effective expansion into a rapidly changing market sector only vaguely related to our original core strength. It's hard enough to keep up with the ridiculous bullshit produced for pedal-only bikes.

For now, the network of commercial and private e-bike mechanics barely exists. New owners are coming in much faster than support is forming around them. The vehicles are fairly reliable, but when they fail it could leave you stranded. The rider who is considering starting a service business almost lost his storage shed and more when the battery caught fire during charging. Fortunately, someone else spotted the fire in time to knock it down before it really took off. Battery fires are the most spectacular hazard of e-bike ownership, but hardly the most common.

Electric bikes either work or they don't. An internal combustion vehicle will enjoy its youth all shiny and tight, devolving gradually through the various stages of beater car (or truck), probably passing from owner to owner in the process. But electric motors don't generally just run rough and metaphorically burn oil. They either work or they don't. If something is loose, you don't want to let it rattle for too long. If power is intermittent, you need to find out why, or risk having to pedal your 60-pound behemoth with nothing but your li'l legs. Because that's another thing that evolved to support cars and has no comparable service for bikes: towing.

E-bikes are mostly massively heavy. Batteries and motors are heavy. You can buy light e-bikes and you can buy powerful e-bikes, but you can't buy light, powerful e-bikes. This may change, but for now the lightweight materials that might help with that equation are things like titanium and carbon fiber, which have mostly appeared on high-priced bikes. Carbon fiber in particular can suffer from the abuse and neglect that most of us inflict on our daily drivers. Light, thin metal and plastic might serve to lighten cheaper bikes, but with a resulting loss of ruggedness. Things will bend and break more.

You can't blame the industry and its cheerleaders for encouraging as many consumers as possible to become test pilots for generation after generation of failed experiments. The bike industry did it with mountain bikes through the 1990s without a twinge of shame. They also destroyed their market in the process, but they raked in some good bucks for a while before the dropoff. And the evolved product really excites the few people who can afford to buy one and ride in the style that the bikes have been shaped for.

E-bikes probably won't shrink to a niche product the way mountain bikes did, but their wide variety creates a parallel universe to the categories of bicycling. The categories don't line up exactly, because the e-bike spectrum extends from very bike-like all the way to virtual motorcycles. An e-bike is a motor vehicle. Expect costs to reflect that, even if they're lower than for a car. They'll never be as low as for a nice, basic transportation bicycle.

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Racing hard, or hardly racing?

 There's a long, steep hill to climb from "better than average" to "one of the best." Anyone who has tried to race knows this.

The rider is both driver and engine. These two functions operate separately more than you might realize. The pilot knows what should be done, but the machine doesn't always provide it.

"Scotty, I need more power!"

"She's givin' all she's got, Cap'n'! If I try to get more out of her she'll explode!"

Nothing feels better than digging deep and finding what you need. If you choose your companions right, you can have that feeling from your teens all the way to your 60s, perhaps older. It's all relative, of course. I'll be riding to work after a couple of days' rest, feeling pretty spry because I'm pushing the big ring and down around mid-cassette in the back. Then I do the math and realize I'm pushing what was my early season lowest gear in the 1980s.

The reflex to attack never goes away. The ability to do so definitely diminishes. So far, however, I have been able to exploit terrain, wind, and the scavenged draft of passing vehicles to meet the most immediate desires, like making a green light at the only traffic light on my commute, or sticking an elbow into the flow on Center Street inbound to work.

The sight of another rider sparks that hunting instinct. In an individual time trial, a competitor chases the clock, but also anyone who started earlier in the queue. In a road race, riders make their attacks and others chase. This can go on for miles. In short-course races the same thing happens on a smaller scale. The snake eats its own tail as the attackers thread through the stragglers. Officials will pull slow riders from a short course, just to clear up the clutter. I hated short courses and was usually pulled.

Racing balances a paradox: to be competitive, you have to go to the edge of everything: traction, strength, endurance, power, fear, without losing control and taking out a bunch of other riders. If you seem erratic, out of your depth, other riders might actively seek to weed you out. Sometimes, they would do it anyway just because some of them decided that you didn't belong with them. You have to risk everything without looking like you're risking anything. Push the margins of control without revealing that you're at the margins of control.

Over time I discovered that I didn't like racing as much as I liked training, and that I didn't like actual structured training as much as I liked just riding how I felt on a given day. Racing was too disciplined and becoming increasingly scientific, not to mention expensive. That's only gotten worse.

There are more than 50 distinct shapes of disc brake pad, not including ones that have already been discontinued. There are several different pad compounds, which might be described in different ways, such as: metal, metal ceramic, metallic, semi-metallic, organic, resin, or sintered. Some brake rotors can only take resin pads. But good luck finding a quality bike with rim brakes anymore. Everyone assumes that disc brakes are entirely superior in all respects. So what happens if you're out in East Bumfleck and you need a pad shape that the local shop doesn't have? Hope that Amazon drone delivery can find you? Stock up on pads and make sure they're always with you? People with electronic shifting go on trips and leave their chargers at home. You think most of them will remember to have brake pads in their kit? And that's only a fraction of the complication and expense. In general, a racer will be out there flinging around a bike that cost anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000, come what may.

As Lance had ghost-written for himself in the 1990s, it's not about the bike. But the bike is the machine that extends our capability and desire into motion. Racing eats people and equipment. You can't refuse technology and remain competitive among real racers really racing. And among the dubs and dilettantes you are even less safe. Those riders are liable to blow up at an inopportune time, like the middle of a tight corner, a crowded field sprint, or a twisty descent. Or maybe it's you who blows up.

Heart rate lags behind effort: you launch the sprint and the old ticker might not hit full bpms until you've leveled off. Pain lags behind effort: you attack that climb or push the pace because you feel good, and the legs feel like lead the next day. Each day of the commuting week gets harder anyway, because the demands of traffic management and hilly terrain make it impossible to avoid some level of destructive exertion. The commuting life is a stage race.

Riding alone, I get to choose when to let up. As soon as another rider is on my wheel, I can't slow down when I feel like it, because I might be that guy who sits up and takes out a whole paceline, or blows out of his line in a corner and sends the riders outside of him over the median.

A rider ahead presents a different prospect. It's fun to chase them down -- if you can -- but then like the proverbial dog, what do you do when you've caught the car? When I see another rider on my commute, I'll close distance to see if I know them, but if I don't it gets awkward. If I've caught them, it's because they're going slower than I want to go. To maintain my pace to work, I need to pass them. But then I look like the old fart on a heavy bike trying to prove a point. I'm not, really. I'm just trying to be on time to work, or get home for a shower and supper. 

A couple of weeks ago, I chased down a rider on 28, thinking it might be a guy I know whose commute sometimes coincides with mine. When it turned out not to be, I still hung back there because he was a sparky racer type maintaining a decent pace. But then we hit a little jumper of a hill, and the guy stood on the pedals and dogged right out, rather than shifting down and pushing into it. Over the crest on the flats beyond, he didn't really pick it back up. On the next little drop, aided by the draft of a passing pickup, I sling-shotted around him.

"Late to work!" I said on the way by, to excuse the maneuver. I figured he would counterattack or get on my wheel, but when I finally could glance back he was nowhere. It seemed odd, since I was riding those high-to-me gears that are low to anyone young and in shape. Maybe he was just being nice to the elderly. No time to muse, I had to keep going to work. It was true.

As I noted in the previous post, I pay attention to the feedback from my body. You hear all the time about people who "died doing what they love." That can be poetically beautiful, but what I really love is remaining alive; getting home to a nice supper and some snuggling with the cats. Hanging out with my spouse when she's in town. I got lucky in the genetic department, but I know better than to think I'm immune to aging. I know other riders who were looking good until they developed issues that seem to stem from pushing too hard for too long. That urge to attack will lure a committed athlete to dig too deep and scrape something down in there that doesn't heal.

I keep hoping there will be time later to plan the purposeful "last hike" or other exit strategy, when I feel more like exiting. But one never knows.

Saturday, July 26, 2025

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

 The problem with bike commuting into my golden years is that I can't be sure from day to day whether I feel slow and weak because I just needed more sleep or if I just broke through one more rotted floorboard on the way to the grave. I can check my stats, which I have logged faithfully since 1988. They already show an unsurprising decline from when I was 32 to my present advanced state of decrepitude. But within that steady descending staircase are shorter and longer plateaus. The drops are not uniform. Sometimes I experience a bit of rejuvenation.

Twinges in my chest could be from my remaining feeble attempts at upper body conditioning, or from stacking three cords of hardwood in 90-degree temperatures. Or it could be gas. Cramming down breakfast before hurrying out the door leads to re-swallowing the last mouthful for the next 14 miles.

This time of year, riders around here get to sample the traffic of more populated places, as the summer influx makes this area one of them. It demands more combat readiness to be able to claim space and manage motorists where things get thick and fast.

The worst hill on my route home is the traffic circle at Route 171. On the way to work in the morning, I get a little boost from gravity to speed me around and out the bottom. On the way home I pay for that. The grade is mild. As just a hill it would present no more than an annoyance. But with motorists squeezing past me it demands an explosive effort to stomp through it.

The entry/exit chutes to the circle on Route 28 are curb-lined, narrow lanes. By law, I should be free to ride through them in my rightful place in line. By normal motorist custom, I get passed wherever I am. If I want my place I have to race for it. I try to get as many of them ahead of me as I can before we're committed to the tight space, but they can really jam me up when we get to the circle itself and have to either defer or play chicken with other vehicles coming through from 171 or 28 southbound. It's worse if I have to slow to a crawl or do a track stand while drivers either bull through or screw up the traffic flow by trying to be nice to me. Sprinting from a near stop will give me sore legs the next morning. Pushing a big gear brings those hints of a chest pain and the feeling of trying to accelerate an old car with bad compression. You can almost see the cloud of oil smoke behind me as the engine grumbles impotently.

Breath control is critical to quell those alarming coronary symptoms. Breathe freely. Gear down enough to keep from grunting. Old people die on the toilet because they hold their breath and strain. The same hazard stalks the aging rider who tries to push the anaerobic threshold. I suppose my daily overdoses of caffeine don't help. The circle requires a near-anaerobic sprint to make sure that I clear it without some pushy bastard who zoomed up behind me crashing on through because I don't belong on his road. It's only a dozen pedal strokes, maybe 20, to get to the exit chute and a widening shoulder. Breathe. Breathe. Keep just the right amount of load on, so the heart doesn't backfire like a clapped-out sports car that's seen its best day. Ease back up to speed because the next stretch is unaccountably fast. Enjoy all this while it lasts.

Cadence signals to the motorists whether you are a healthy beast they should respect and avoid or a wounded creature caught out in the open. I imagine Phil Liggett describing my condition: "He can't push a big gear anymore. Notice how his shoulders are rolling and he can't hold his line." Maybe he'd say something about a valiant effort by a rider who has had a long career. That would be nice.

A smart cyclist uses terrain at any age or stage of fitness. The older you get, the more it matters. I know my commuting route very well. Don't push the climbs too hard. Recover on the descents, or use them to accelerate into the traffic flow. Save energy for the places where you know you'll need it. That's the same at any age, just at a different average speed. My commute is a road race, not a criterium, but it has its urban element in Wolfe City. I need the ten or eleven miles of warmup to feel fully ready for whatever traffic is going to throw at me that day.

On the way out of town, I get one good bit of gravitational assistance from the parking lot down a hundred yards or so to the sharp bend in Mill Street. I need to control the lane on Mill Street, because it's too narrow for a car to pass me safely with oncoming traffic. Of course this never prevents any motorist from passing me anyway. So it's a sprint out of the gate to get to Bay Street, where I can fall back to a better pace to warm up properly. The route out to the highway starts with a series of climbs, often with motorists pushing past. They need a whack on the snout in a couple of places, but for the most part I can just let them run.

E-bike riders have been leaning forward in their chairs through this whole essay, raising their hands and going "Ooh! Ooh!" The thing is, once you accept the assistance you become dependent on it. I don't mean surrendering to the atrophy already consuming you. I mean the bike itself will be miserable to pedal without assistance. I have considered an e-bike since way before they were fashionable. I've watched the technology evolve. If I did get one, it would be a mid-drive cargo bike. Might as well make it worth its weight. But I can't afford one. It's old muscle or nothing. Just hoping to get away with it one more time.

Sunday, July 20, 2025

"Consult a professional bicycle mechanic"

 Another tubeless tire victim came through a while back. He said he'd had the tires mounted at a shop where he lived. The staff there assured him that the process is simple and reliable. A few days later, the rear tire was losing pressure within hours. Now he was away from home, trying to enjoy his trip.

With tubeless tires, the problem never seems to be the simple one you want it to be, like tightening the nut at the base of the valve stem. It's almost always the rim tape. Rim tape is the fatal weakness of the whole ridiculous system.

When I removed the tire, the rim tape was wrinkled and detaching. This had been professionally installed by a confident technolemming who fully believed in the technology. This was the A game of a committed disciple. It's nice to see that even the true believers can screw the pooch this badly.

Wrinkly

Floppy

And the sealant mess looks like the floor of a triple X adult theater at closing time.

I had estimated a price to throw a tube in there before I saw that the rim tape couldn't be saved. I knew it would be compromised. I didn't anticipate that it would have floated loose completely. It didn't make a huge difference to the price, but it added a bit, as well as requiring more comprehensive cleaning and drying to get new rim tape to adhere properly.

The only way to make a reliably airtight rim is with a fully sealed floor. This requires novel approaches to spoking. The majority of players in the tubeless sector rely on tape. The sealant in its fresh, liquid state actually attacks the adhesive of the rim tape, as seen here. Any flaw in the tape job provides a starting point for the sealant to start weakening it. In addition, rims seem to be coming with shallower center sections now, as well as really tight tire sizing. This means that anyone mounting a tire might take advantage of the absence of an inner tube to use tire levers to pry the casing onto the rim, only to cut the rim tape.

Tubeless makes everything worse, but the fad has not run its course. And like all diseases, it will never be fully eradicated. All we can do is treat it when it flares up and inoculate against it as much as possible.

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Car culture chains the United States to dirty energy

 No other country on earth was as smitten with the automobile as the United States. The oil industry itself originated in Pennsylvania, but the love affair that has driven us to cling to oil addiction took a while to get rolling. Like the bicycle, the automobile began as a luxury item. Unlike the bicycle, rank and file consumers held off until Henry Ford devised a production method to bring costs down. The Ford Model T put the automobile in reach of ordinary workers. A thriving industry took American industrialization into the fast lane.

After the Second World War, the American hotrod drank deeply of cheap gas while forging an image of freedom and daring and mechanical creativity. American cars were big, with big engines. Speed limits crept higher and higher, allowing these beasts to gallop across the miles of wide open spaces in the American interior.

When the first gas crisis hit in 1973, it didn't serve as an early warning that we should try to detox from petroleum. Worldwide, economies just retooled to accommodate the rising price and manipulated supply. Fuel prices pushed upward ever harder on the cost of living, but people paid it. The United States instituted a 55 mile per hour speed limit, which brought the average cruising speed down around 65 on most highways for a while, but that has been rescinded in most places now. Good luck finding the road less traveled nowadays. If you do, it probably goes somewhere very obscure, or the stretch isn't very long.

Emission controls have improved the smell and cleared up the worst of the brown haze that hung over any populated area. Improved fuel economy standards help a little with the environment. Only steadily climbing wages and salaries keep up with relentlessly inflating prices. Consumers focus only on whether they can afford to fill the tank, not whether they should push hard on elected officials to shift to energy sources that don't carry the vast liabilities of petroleum.

Gasoline equals freedom of movement in the American mind. That means oil. Electricity means convenience and entertainment in the home and in rechargeable handheld devices. Who really cares what fuels the power plant? Coal seems so 19th Century, and yet it still fuels about 19 percent of electricity generation in this country. Natural gas fuels more than 40 percent. Straight-up oil fired power plants account for one to three percent of energy generated. Combined, that's more than 60 percent.

Renewables account for 21 percent of energy generation. Biomass is considered renewable, but it still involves combustion, requires energy in the machinery used to harvest and process whatever is being burned, and contributes to the environmental impacts of commercial forestry.

The most visible connection Americans have to petroleum use is their vehicles. For more than a hundred years, generation after generation has grown up with engine noise, clouds of exhaust, crashes, and increasing traffic congestion. We're obsessed with the price of their fuel.

Electric vehicles have become a common sight, but their drivers have to plan carefully to make sure that they can recharge as needed. Recharging takes a lot longer than a quick pit stop at a self-service gas station. An electric vehicle represents a conscious choice to accept inconvenience. The inconvenience may seem trivial if you live where you can charge at home and never venture far, or have access to charging at a place and time that coincides with work or another interval when you wouldn't need to go anywhere anyway. But what if you need to make an unexpected trip in the middle -- or near the beginning - of the time you had set aside for charging?

We live by the car. We may die by the car. Our dependence will continue to help politicians who enable it, and even glorify it as a defiant expression of liberty. It's really nice to be able to hop in a speedy vehicle, protected from the weather and relatively secure, to arrive fully rested wherever you're headed. I get that. As much as we all hate the downsides of their ownership and use, generations have accepted the costs in order to have the benefits. The majority has spoken over and over. A sizable chunk of them will throw in behind some nightmarish politicians rather than risk losing access or having to pay higher prices for their fuel. It's freedom juice.

Saturday, July 12, 2025

E-bikes will kill the bike industry as we know it

 We're witnessing the beginning of an evolutionary shift in the bike industry and in popular bike usage. Where people used to talk about the dangers of riding on the streets, now they talk about the dangers of sharing the sidewalk with numbnuts on e-bikes. But that's not what will kill the bike industry. The sheer ease of riding a smokeless moped, combined with the popular misconception that you can neglect them they way you used to neglect your meat-powered bike, have driven sales at a phenomenal rate.

In our shop just this year, a few callers asking about bikes we carry have asked about gravel bikes, and dozens have asked about e-bikes. Then we've had a smattering of calls for kids' bikes. Maybe one or two for technical mountain bikes. Repair business is steady, but it's only enough to overload our understaffing. If we had one more mechanic we would worry about paying them. General retail, mostly clothing, used to cover a lot, but those sales are flat, too.

Yesterday I was working on the firewood piled in my driveway when I heard the buzzing of tires on the road out front. Two riders on fat-tire e-bikes blazed past at full throttle, pulling close to 30 miles per hour. Bareheaded, in shorts and tee shirts, they flashed past, headed north. The only sound was their buzzing tires and Dopplered conversation. Nothing could go wrong. They were only riding bikes after all.

In more congested traffic situations, grim accidents are piling up, but only grumpy outside observers blame the bikes themselves. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. E-bikes don't cause crashes. Unprepared riders on e-bikes cause crashes.

Yes, the mass and speed of the bikes make the crashes worse, but they only combine with the lack of street smarts among the riders.  Bad riding habits lead to more dangerous situations. The motor assistance just makes it easier to get there. People will ride the e-bike who would never consider riding the rapids of a busy street on a bike powered entirely by themselves.

I see riders on e-bikes on the street below the backshop windows. Most of them have bikes with a throttle option, which appears to be their default. Looking across the bay toward the train station where the rail trail terminates, I can see many other moped riders. They jet up effortlessly to a cruising speed a purely pedaling rider would train hard to achieve and maintain.

I pull out of my driveway and warm up at maybe 10-12 miles per hour. The smokeless moped rider hops on and spurts away at 20. Who would put up with the snail's pace of a bike without a motor? What do they gain in the short run by giving up the power assist? There is no long run. People flit from place to place and thought to thought. If the bike is cheap transportation, and a few dollars more gets a faster machine requiring less effort, who will bother to work harder?

Demand for bicycles was already falling fast as the 21st Century began. The decline accelerated, with only a brief plateau when 2020 brought a surge of demand coinciding with a dearth of supply. The bike industry was struggling after its profitable bender through the 1990s. E-bikes will end up being a bigger category than mountain bikes were at their height, but the profits won't go to traditional bike companies unless they seriously retool into motor vehicle companies. How much money will be left over for the far less popular non-motorized bikes?

Legend has it that bike manufacturers in the 1880s and '90s were surprised by the high level of demand from working class people to buy what were considered luxury items. The manufacturers hadn't recognized yet that they had created a revolutionary transportation device that needed very little maintenance for the amount of mobility it provided to people formerly limited only to shoe leather. The same calculation drives the market in e-bikes now.

Change happens faster and faster in the technological world, but pedal-powered bikes won't disappear overnight. Especially if laws and regulations restrict the age of riders on motorized bikes, pedal power will remain the child's first experience on a two-wheeler. However, I have already had to deal with motorized balance bikes for a couple of richie rich little kids whose parents want them to have the latest greatest thing. On private property, anything goes. Buy your 12-year-old a Lamborghini and let them blaze around your private race track. Meanwhile, out in the slums, kids may have to settle for the time-honored ritual of learning to wobble along under their own power until they're old enough to get a real grownup vehicle that doesn't require them to sweat.

My parents, and other adults born between the world wars, recount their experiences riding bikes. Very few people carried the habit into adulthood in the United States. In the 1950s and '60s, the bike was just a step on the way to becoming a driver. You could even buy an accessory for your bike that looked like a motor and made varoom noises. No one knows what the future holds for our species. Maybe we cover the planet with our sprawling cities, through which we dart on our motorized little bikes. The only wide-open spaces will be the ones utterly inhospitable to life. Nature will consist of cockroaches, rats, bacteria, and viruses. So will our diet.