Kickin' taillights and callin' names?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll see what happens. 

Asinine bike law update

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

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

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

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

The latest in asinine, anti-bicycle legislation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heavy traffic on Route 28

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saved from six

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working sick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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