Many a beautiful day shall pass...

 Many a beautiful day shall pass, witnessed from behind the glass of workplace windows. This is especially true in fall and spring.

In the autumn, riders have to deal with whatever the weather throws at them, plus the shortening days, plus the increasing glare of low-angled sun. Coming off of the bountiful daylight of summer, we have to get used to the encroaching night on both ends of the day.

Drivers seem more frantic, too. I attribute this to the slow arrival of morning light. In summer, the light arrives before most of us need it, signaling our bodies and minds to wake up and get busy. In the growing light coming out of winter, we're naturally energized and sense the lengthening days moving sunset comfortably away from us. The opposite end of that process runs smack into the imposed schedule of rigid hours. We unconsciously speed up to catch up with where we need to be. Morning light drags in after we've already had to wake ourselves, while the sun slouches past us to fall below the horizon. Come late, leave early, and don't help much while you're here. Thanks a lot. The only drivers who aren't rushing around are the foliage tourists.

Right now, the foliage is just passing peak in my area. The interplay of light and color on hillsides, mountains, and water is a visual feast. The middle of many days still offers mild air and the least glary sun. It looks lovely through the shop windows. People come in and remark on how nice it is.

Yeah, well the morning ride might have been just above freezing, with areas of fog. By the time I get to ride home, the sun will be almost gone, the warmth will be fading rapidly, and any clouds will bring the dusk that much sooner. In fact, for my route, the full commute is no longer safe. Shorter options all involve more handling time, saving me no time at all if I do a park 'n' ride, and exposing my car to whatever might happen to it unattended. I can ride the full route on Sundays because the shop closes an hour earlier. Then, on November 1, sunset moves an hour earlier, so my ride opportunity on work days shifts to dawn patrols.

At dawn, the roads may be icy. The closer we get to winter, the more likely this is. The lower the sun gets, the more areas remain shaded throughout the day, preserving ice along the margins of roads that are otherwise clear for motorists. Sure, the law gives me the right to claim the clear part of the lane, but anyone who has really tried that knows that you can end up dead right. Studded tires help with the ice but make cornering on dry pavement less fun.

If you're on your bike you're not doing anything else. You might indulge in various mental games or exercises, but you're not doing the laundry, cleaning the chimney and wood stove, cooking, vacuuming, dusting, tidying up the yard, writing, drawing, whatever else you want or need to do. When daylight sprawls across fifteen hours or more, twelve of those hours are still twelve hours, but they seem to hold more. Darkness feels like night even if the same time of day was mid to late afternoon just six weeks ago.

Fall and winter have their own beauty. Starlight seems sharper in a clear, frigid sky. The northern lights seem more appropriate with arctic air in place. Before we get there, though, we have to get through the darkest, spookiest time, while the leaves are still hanging on and night's emissaries linger through the day in the long shadows.

 I do have lighted bikes with which to explore the roads and trails less traveled after dark. That's all fine and dandy until you have a flat tire or other mishap, miles from home on a woods road in the dark. Also, illumination makes you visible. Visibility makes you vulnerable. I don't make a big thing about being camouflaged, but I do prefer to go relatively unseen through the forest. A companion might seem to make the darkness less spooky until you think about how scary movies are all the scarier as a group gets picked off one by one. It's just a movie, right? Ha ha ha ha...hehhhhh... What's moving through the woods over there?

When the light drains away, it doesn't just seep. The sun doesn't just set sooner, it sets faster. Functional early twilight gives way to deeper, headlight-swallowing murk in a few minutes. You know what I mean: too dark to see, but somehow the powerful lights on your vehicle can't penetrate it yet. Drivers go to full glare before the sun has even disappeared. As dusk deepens, they blind each other. A rider in summer twilight can cruise in the light monochrome for half an hour. Now the silver lasts a few minutes.

On a bike commuting day, I might miss the most beautiful conditions, but when a rider comes into the shop and asks if I'm going to get out there I know that I did and I will. On a roasting hot summer day, the commuting hours are the better ones anyway. With the coming of driving season all I have is an empty space where my bike would be hanging. Not only do I lose the built-in daily ride, I lose a great teaching aid when someone asks what I think of the latest technology. "Check out this 26-year-old frame with parts that go back even further." They don't all go back that far, but they're all part of the simple, versatile approach to a machine that is seldom perfect, but reliably perfect enough. I'll be out on it when I can.

Electronic shifting possibility

 With the widespread adoption of electronic shifting, the industry could offer riders something that disappeared when index-only mechanical shifting took over in the 1990s.

Prior to the coming of pod shifters for flat-bar and upright-handlebar bikes, and brifters for road, the indexed shifters in all categories were built around the shape and placement of friction shifters, and all -- or nearly all -- had the option to revert to friction if the indexing went out of adjustment on a ride when you couldn't stop to dial it back in. Just select the friction option and go back to the old way of feeling and listening to get the gear you want.

The mania for internally routing everything on all high performance bikes has made mechanical cable routing a nightmare. Electronic shifting is the only way that makes sense for a modern spaceship. Maybe that's less true on a mountain or gravel bike with a single chainring and less need for absolute precision shifting, but those categories could still benefit from electronic "friction" shifting.

Think about it: electronic shifting sends a signal to little motors that move the derailleur a set amount to achieve the indexed shifting that mechanical systems relied on perfect cable tension and perfect cable movement to provide. As cogs got closer together and cable routing followed more and more tortuous paths through the interior of the frame, formerly trivial amounts of drag could throw everything off. And cables will still fray and break inside the shifters themselves. Electronic shifting, especially fully wireless, moved all that to the ether. Calling rear derailleur, come in please. Do you read me?

It should be easy for an electronic system to incorporate a "friction" option that would allow for wheel substitutions, for instance, that wouldn't have to be exact. You could stuff an 11-speed wheel into a 12-speed system as long as your friggin' through-axle matches. Maybe the other parameters of the ultramodern spaceship make the kind of improvisations I'm imagining impossible. I just remember dealing with minor compatibility issues getting a wheel from neutral support during a race, and imagining something similar translated into the modern menu of compatibility hypersensitivity. I guess if it would never matter to a sponsored professional it should never matter to an amateur technolemming. What is the industry's financial and competitive motive to bother with such a thing?

I haven't checked lately, because I don't own any of the crap, and no customer has needed me to mess with theirs recently, but the "friction" option may exist in the fine-tuners already built into the shifters as they are. Last time I had to mess with one from SRAM and Shimano respectively, it didn't seem like something you would want to do on the fly, especially every shift.

A true friction simulator would let the rider control the derailleur directly through its entire travel. Push the uppy control to go up and the downy control to go down. Stop where you want. Instead of fixed increments per push, just go until told to stop. Maybe it already exists. As I said, I have no personal interest, and have not had to develop a professional one as yet. And would a technolemming even put up with it? So much skill has been eliminated from the operation of the machine that several generations of riders have never experienced it.

A rider interested in durability, versatility, and longevity probably already gravitates away from the most spacy spaceships. Unfortunately, the industry kills its elderly and dishonors its ancestors as a matter of course, so top quality mechanical stuff is disappearing rapidly. At one time, Dura Ace STI was 8-speed mechanical. Now it's all electronic except for the last remaining barcons. And the barcons are index-only. If you have nightmare cable routing they offer no refuge. Index-only makes them picky eaters anyway. Thanks for nothing.

Electronic shifting brings with it the hassle of battery charging and eventual disposal. Old mechanical shifting cables have to be disposed of as well, but they can go in with the scrap metal to be made into something else. But if you're stuck on the modern way, electronic friction shifting might be a way to blend in some of the long-lost convenience of more primitive times.

"Customer service," LOL

 One of our hardworking customers who has been a bike commuter for years recently had the fork on his Fuji Conductor 2.1 snap while he was riding, leading to the crash you can well imagine. Thanks to his good karma or something, he did not get all stove up, but the bike did.

The steerer tube of the fork broke up inside the frame. This is a sign of poor material, not abuse or neglect by the rider. It just up and quit on him.

Here's the problem: Fuji was distributed in the USA by Bike Co. Fuji's parent company, Pacific Glory Worldwide, (PGW) decided to take over distribution themselves, cutting Bike Co out. Our customer bought his bike from us when Bike Co was responsible for support. But it's a Fuji bike, so PGW shares responsibility, particularly as they were the corporate titan above Bike Co. Neither corporation has a fork or a bike in stock to replace our customer's defective vehicle. "Sorry, we checked the warehouse. Nothing there."

There's been some chatter about kicking in for a generic fork if we can find one, but the industry as a whole has abandoned the 15mm thru axle and 100mm spacing on his fork, meaning that we would have to track down either a fork with the exact dimensions to match his now abandoned piece of industrial debris or a fork that will at least play nicely with the head tube on his bike, along with adapters to fit his front wheel to the axle dimensions of the current crop of forks.

This. is. bullshit. Because of the way that retail has migrated online, our trusty parts suppliers have less and less of the variety they used to offer. The vomitous explosion of different standards has led to a wilderness of new old stock, used, shady, or weird options that might or might not work depending on how accurate the published specs are. Order it and find out! Maybe you have to send it back and try again. Maybe it actually works.

The burden falls onto us, an independent retailer dealing with all of the work we have to do already, to do the treasure hunt for a replacement part to cover a manufacturer's defect. Yet the manufacturers quit treating shops like partners and started treating us like the first rank of suckers way back in the 1990s. The mountain bike boom made the bike business a lot less good natured and collegial.

US bike industry revenue surged approximately $4.1 billion between 1980 and 1999. It has only increased about $3.6 billion in the twenty-seven years since then, based more on spiraling prices than on increased unit sales. Number of bikes sold annually started dropping around the turn of the century and have remained flat ever since. Yet the industry continues to place its faith in higher prices, lower quality, and ephemeral features that may play well in the pro racing ranks, but nowhere else. I don't mean the lower quality part. Pro machines carry a hefty price tag. But they are not built to last. They're built to perform. Any wannabes who buy pro-looking stuff are just setting themselves up to pour money into their hobby. Is your hobby riding, or just spending money on your bike?

I owned a pro-level bike in 1980-'85, but that was when pro level was coming out of old world craftsmanship and componentry that hadn't changed a great deal in two or three decades. A pro of today stuck on a bike like that would consider it punishment. The global arms race has pushed the acceptable baseline far beyond a sweet old Masi or Cinelli that a racer could beat the crap out of, but a hobbyist could cherish for a lifetime. You won't have a modern high performance bike for more than the lifetime of a small rodent. The entire bike has become another consumable. You are expected to chew it up and shit it out on a regular schedule. If your budget doesn't extend to that, so long and thanks for playing.

If you are a practical cyclist, the math gets even tougher. I push around a fleet of bikes, none of them newer than twenty years old. I built a new "bike that never was" a couple of years ago to park at the cellist's work apartment, but the basis of it was a 1970-ish Raleigh Super Course. They are all moderately sporty, but I would ride any one of them to work, and most of them to the store. All but the road bike have racks and fenders. Two (so far) have generator light systems.

As the worker bees shift to electric bikes, their plight grows clearer. Where one might have bought a series of beater cars, now they buy a series of e-bikes as each in turn develops some crippling problem. For a worker who can't get a driver's license, this is their world: a revolving door of e-bikes ridden to death.

If we want to help out our customer from existing stock, our only remaining option is a nice mid-drive Marin with an original retail price nearly three times what his Fuji cost him. We could whittle it down some, but only down to a little more than twice what the Fuji cost. And why should we take the hit for Fuji's failed product?

I put the question to PGW and had not heard back at time of writing. My guess is that they offer us a shop a credit toward future purchases from them. We can only cash in by remaining a dealer and ordering more bikes to sell. It sort of puts cash in the customer's pocket, but again burdens us for representing the Fuji brand, come what may. This kind of thing is the norm now in product support. It goes beyond the bike business as I'm sure you have encountered. The freight train of obsolescence seems to have no brakes. That doesn't mean it has achieved perpetual motion. It means it's going to fly off a curve and plummet to the valley far below at some point.

The weather dilemma

 Today presents a classic case: a significant storm has been brewing all week. The sensationalist news outlets have played up its worst potential. Where it's bad, it could be pretty bad. The organizers of the Seacoast Century bike rides on the New Hampshire shoreline have canceled the event. But I see the sun and bits of blue sky. The big stuff isn't supposed to come down for a while yet. So do I ride to work and roll the dice on conditions for the evening half of the commute?

When my commutes were less than ten miles -- sometimes a lot less -- total for the day, I would ride in all weather. I also didn't have a car, so if I didn't ride I walked. In the blizzard of 1983 in Annapolis, Maryland, I snowshoed the six or seven miles across town to work. Coworkers who had cross-country skis and lived just a few blocks from work phoned in because they had better things to do on a day when central Maryland got a visit from New England conditions. Now I live a hilly 15-ish miles from work, for a 30-mile total day. The route follows roads that aren't safe for walking, let alone skiing. If the bike option doesn't work, I'm sealed in the capsule, stuck in traffic.

When the probability of precipitation is at 50 percent or higher, but the amount is a tenth of an inch or less, and the day length doesn't crowd the evening ride, I will most likely ride. Unfortunately, sunset already puts me in twilight on the best of evenings, let alone when thickening clouds, increasing rain, and rising winds give passing motorists even more to deal with.

We've reached the part of the year in which motorists don't expect to see bikes in morning and evening rush hours. Some of them get downright resentful when presented with some idiot on a two-wheeler, obstinately defying weather and darkness when any normal, rational person would drive a car and really get in their way. How is sitting behind a fully lane-blocking vehicle for ten miles better than having to slow down a little -- maybe -- and diverting slightly -- if I'm lucky -- to pass me on a bike? We never get to have these discussions when I'm getting honked at or close-passed by someone driving a monster truck, who's sick of accommodating whacko idiots on bikes after a long summer of putting up with them. Quit already!

Malice is fairly rare, but drivers can still have trouble coping with the challenges of darkness and weather that can lead to conflicts with vulnerable road users. If everyone in a motor vehicle slowed down as much as would actually make their passage safer, they would barely travel above biking speed anyway in a good thick rainstorm in the dusk. That ain't happening.

Today's forecast with summer daylight wouldn't raise a question. I'd be suited up and out the door. We're on the fringes of the storm anyway. That's too bad in a way, because we need the rain. We don't need the wind, though. Most of the trees are still in summer green, so high winds will take more of a toll on limbs and weaker trees. And, speaking of wind, it will be a headwind on the way home.

The worst case when I drive due to weather is if the weather doesn't happen and I could have made it both ways. Worst case when I ride is that the weather doubles down and I'm plodding into the gale while getting soaked. Then add the deeper dusk of a stormy evening.

We're in the part of the year where the day gets shorter even as it is beginning. The sun rises with increasing reluctance and scurries away with increasing urgency to share its light with the bottom half of the planet. We don't have the margin for error that spring and summer lavish on us. The transportation cyclist has to decide for the entire day in just a few minutes at the start of it.

A visit from Quinn Simmons

 Because professional rider Quinn Simmons has family in the area, local riders have occasionally seen him flash by on the road or caught a familiar-looking route posted to Strava. Then, last week, we had a closer encounter.

It began on Wednesday or Thursday when a young woman arrived with a tubeless tire that wouldn't hold pressure. Steve figured out from conversation that it was Sydney, Quinn's wife. Quinn's grandparents have a place in Alton, and have apparently shopped our store before. Steve's enthusiastic welcome led to a possibility that Quinn himself might find time to stop by. He's hanging in the area before heading up to the world championships in Montreal.

Friday got off to a normal start for one of the last days of astronomical summer. Daylight still hanging just above twelve hours. The morning comes on gradually, but the middle of the day is still bright with strong sunshine. Rental bikes went out, late-summer tourists came in. Around noon, Steve settled in for a bit of lunch. About fifteen minutes into it he saw Quinn's grandparents pull into a parking space in the lot out back. He came out of the back shop as they reached the top of the stairs.

"The package is arriving," said the grandmother. At the same time, the entire Simmons family came in through the front door of the shop, having ridden in from Alton. Steve and his wife Beth welcomed them. Steve was an enthusiastic and well-informed fan. A local man, Ed, who is active with the Wolfeboro Cross Country Ski Association and who was going to travel to Montreal to watch the men's road race, happened to be in the store at the same time. Thus, a chatty and appreciative crowd filled the other side of the shop.

I had a time-sensitive job on the repair stand, and would just have been a slack-jawed yokel adding a heavy dose of awkwardness standing in the background, so I stayed in my greasy lair and enjoyed the sounds of the party. Then I had to launch a renter. Eventually the entourage filtered over to the other part of the sales floor and I got to see Quinn himself. I tried to look affable but virtuously busy. No point going over and embarrassing myself and dampening the spirits of the revelers.

Even when I raced I wasn't a well-informed fan of the sport. I wasn't even well informed about my fellow competitors. I respected the great and the near great, I just didn't keep track of them. As for the equipment they use, Quinn and the whole professional world are using tubeless tires, disc brakes, and electronic shifting on soulless carbon machines that may be lighter and more aerodynamic than any round-tubed product of a master metal fabricator, but they're sterile and vulnerable. They make sense in the racing world, but they isolate the racing world from the rest of the world by their expense.

I've said it before, mostly in jest: In the early 1970s, for $300 you could buy a bike just like the one that the winner of the Tour de France just rode, and for another $300 you could rent that rider for a one-day crit. The first part is mostly true. The second part exaggerates the low salary range for European pro riders, but for an American rider it was probably painfully close to the truth. And $300 in 1975 is equal to almost $1,900 dollars today. That seems like a lot until you price a top-tier road racing bike today and see that a piddly-ass $1,900 won't get you crap. It's a great metaphor for the wealth inequality that has surged in that same span of years. You really could buy a very respectable road bike for a few hundred (1970s) dollars. If you knew how to do your own work, you could piece together something competitive without having to buy any specific company's complete gruppo. I did, and the only things that held me back were my sporadic training and my complete lack of balls in a tight criterium. All of my bloody crashes happened in stupid ways in the outside world.

By 1979-1980, that $300 bike was a thousand dollars. I heard rumors of one amateur racer who lived in a storage unit when he wasn't on the road, living out of his car. He could afford a car? Maybe not much of a car. It's like musician economics: $10,000 instrument, $500 car. Hope you make it to the gig. A $1,200 bike in 1980 would cost about $4,500 today, still well short of the spaceships ridden in the pro ranks.

With all that separates a professional racer from a civilian now, Quinn's generosity in visiting stands out. On the one hand, cycling in the US is still such a fringe sport that a bike racer might be happy to soak up some adulation where they find it. On the other hand, he was in the final week of timing his training and honing his mind to face a pretty sadistic course against the best racers in the world. I looked at the course profile online. The spirit of Desgrange lives on in course designers everywhere. I used to think it was sad when a professional racer retired and got rid of all of their bikes. But it makes sense after putting in mind and body crushing efforts for years that a person might be happy never to throw a leg across a bike again after that. Racing at the top level is truly a great way to grind all the fun out of riding.

Modern bike technology makes a hard job easier, but only in tiny increments that get overwhelmed by the closer competition over courses that are still brutal. Racers no longer have to be smooth and accurate at shifting in friction, using levers on the downtube. Downtube shifters were preferred because the cable run was the shortest and the shifters were protected. Short cable runs meant faster response at the derailleurs. Protection meant that the controls weren't exposed to crash damage. But you had to reach down for them, and develop the precision of a classical violinist to hit the right spot consistently on the first try.

When Shimano brifters debuted in 1990, observers wondered about their vulnerability. I don't remember which of the women in the 1992 Olympic road race was featured in the television coverage, probably Inga Thompson, but she crashed and bent the right brifter. It apparently still functioned, but it demonstrated the vulnerability. Now it's all electronic, with multiple control points distributed on the handlebars. Heck, you could even have them in the saddle. Flex left glute to shift up, right glute to shift down. By 2030, racers will have a brain implant so they can shift by thinking about it. Bike shops will become authorized outpatient surgical centers to drop the wiring into the skulls of the most enthusiastic technolemmings.

"I ain't never done one of these before! You sit there and wait for the sedative to take effect while I watch this YouTube video so I know where to drill! Hey Bob! Wash your hands! I need an anesthesiologist over here!"

With all of the technology, nutrition, and logistical support, racing is still brutally hard. More is expected of the riders because these other burdens have been lifted from them. They can propel their lightweight bikes almost as fast as a responsible driver in a suburban neighborhood, but they're still doing it with a human's puny 0.25 horsepower. That's point two-five. A quarter of a horsepower. I guess the pros have managed to push that to 0.4, but that's still a tiny fraction of the average 170-200 hp of a basic family car. With the challenge of the world championship coming up, Quinn was extraordinarily kind to spend time with a few fans. We all appreciated it.

Repair or replace? Beyond mere dollars

 Every so often, we get a customer who is shocked by the price of a repair after they acted perfectly unconcerned as they piled up part and service requests at the check-in. Because a detailed estimate takes time that we typically do not charge for, it is not standard procedure unless a customer expresses misgivings when they drop a bike off.

We all ask ourselves whether to repair or replace an item when it malfunctions. As a service provider, we get asked all the time whether a bike is worth it. Or we get asked for an estimate, give it, and the customer decides on their own whether to invest.

If you pay someone else to work on your bike, you might very well spend more than you paid for it over the course of its time with you. Depending on the condition of it when you're done, someone else might start their own equation with it, based on what they pay for it, not what it was originally worth, or how long it might last with imaginative care and repair.

Last week, a customer dropped by to pick up a copy of the receipt from the repair she had commissioned for her son's bike. She was quite smiley and cheerful until the end when she turned dark and brittle and said, "This cost way more than I thought it was going to. If I'd known it was going to cost $265 I wouldn't have had it fixed. I could buy a new bike for $265."

I mentally reviewed the prices of entry-level bikes in our shop. She would not have been able to get a brand new bike shop quality bike for $265. She brought in an older Giant that her son had beaten on, the way boys do. It probably cost more than $265 when it was new. A comparable bike would cost more than $400, and probably more than $500. That comparison is tough, because the bike industry is pushing the frontiers of cheap crap on their lower end models. Direct comparison to a bike that hadn't advanced as far on the path of craptification is impossible because of how much has changed in both material quality and overall configuration. But, aiming for roughly the same niche, a replacement bike could be nudging $600, and would be less durable overall.

None of this conveys well to a customer whose brain has locked up in resentment. If I had informed her of the worst case scenario before the repair, she might have gone ahead with it or she might have made the mistake that so many consumers make when purchasing all manner of goods they need or desire. I've had to let customers decide to discard a really nice old bike that they got for twenty or fifty bucks just because they thought that more than a hundred was too much to spend based on what they paid for it. I mean a well-made bike from back when they were durable and repairable, but to the current owner just a dollar amount and an age. Likewise I have sympathetically tried to minimize the financial impact of reconditioning a less stellar specimen because the owner just really liked it.

Far more often than not, we do a quick assessment, get customer approval to install parts as necessary, and get on with fixing the damn thing as quickly as we can. In peak season, with our shriveled, elderly staff, we want to maximize productive time getting customers back on their bikes. This does lead to miscommunication like we had with our unfortunately resentful customer. On Yelp she stated that she felt ripped off.

I disagree. Inadequate communication of reasonably priced services is not a ripoff. The work was needed and well done. She gave verbal consent. The mistake was in not being super sensitive on the check-in, after we had been lulled by dozens of customers who make the same oral contract and abide calmly by the result. We have our haters, for sure. Now we have another one.

There is not a lot of nearby competition in the bike repair business. The nearest actual bike shops are across the lake -- which means around the lake by car -- or down in Rochester or Dover, roughly thirty miles or more in any direction. But there's a mobile guy who drives around in his big van. Maybe he has had better results with the time equation between diagnosis, estimate, and actual work, plus transit time. He has the advantage and disadvantage of mobility. Not a lot of storage space, though. For his sake, I hope his rig doesn't burn diesel.

Nearby competition or not, we have always relied on work quality rather than low price to keep a loyal customer base and build our reputation as problem solvers. As the bike industry has energetically added to everyone's problems, that aspect of our skill set has been harder and harder to maintain. But on the legacy stuff we are still rock solid and your ally in keeping a decent older bike going. I'm much more likely to tell someone whose bike is five years old to junk it than I am to declare that one thirty years old is hopeless. In fact, I will tell anyone who brings in a relatively new bike with multiple system failures to ditch it and look for something thirty years old in good shape. Options are dwindling as the industry kills them off, but you can still find parts to retrofit a newer bike to the older configuration. You just have to be willing to learn the skills of older riders to operate the more primitive machine. And you won't be doing trendy mountain biking or sporting the latest niche features of "category" bikes.

Another horny driver

 After a relatively placid summer on the road, I had another horny driver pass me yesterday, sounding the trumpet of doom from close behind me all the way by. As often happens, the driver actually gave me a fair amount of room. The windows were rolled up, so I don't know if anyone was also cursing me in there.

Many riders can't take the stress of riding among the megafauna. I don't prefer it, but I have no good alternatives. I'm also used to it after more than half a century of it. I started as a road rider when I was seven years old. "Transportation cycling" was how a kid got anywhere in the 1960s. Working kids carried newspapers in the galvanized metal baskets clamped on their bikes. I never had a paper route, but my brother did.

As a child I had heard of "bike paths," but never experienced one. The first designated bike path I ever saw was in the Miami, Florida, area in 1971. And it was notoriously dangerous: just a strip of tar that crossed streets and driveways right where a motorist would want to hover before entering a busy roadway. Collisions were numerous, some of them fatal. When I graduated from my innocent childhood wandering on a three-speed to more focused cycling on a ten-speed, I learned from more experienced riders to avoid the dangerous, token infrastructure.

Over the decades, offerings for cyclists have evolved. I have ridden on many forms of trail and lane. I've noticed a few things. For one, it's a tough transition when I've been riding on a segregated path suddenly to have to blend with traffic. You have to have a combat-ready attitude, whether you consciously believe it or not. Another thing you don't get on a path is the continuous draft provided by passing motor vehicles. It is much more helpful than you realize until you don't have it for mile after mile.

One quirk of rail trails is that they tend to have long straight stretches and only mild curves. Nobody wanted their train snapping quick turns. Boredom is a serious problem for the cyclist.

Other trail users are also a problem. Bike paths seldom offer as much width as a road, and people tend to ride with less alertness and discipline when they aren't flanked by large vehicles that could obliterate them in an instant. I can't imagine a world in which there is a designated, efficient bike space appended to every roadway. If cyclists are restricted to dedicated infrastructure and eventually barred from routes that don't have accommodations, transportation and travel by bike will suffer as a result.

Thinking of touring, a cyclist can ride to virtually all of the enjoyable destinations currently served by general purpose roads. The risk factor varies widely with traffic volume, filtered through local motorist attitudes. Some places seem to have a lot of bike hate. Others not so much. Where I ride on a daily basis, outright hostility is fairly low. It ramps up when I push the commute into darkness, and shows a few seasonal waves, most notably when school goes back into session. That used to bring not only direct action by motorists but an increase in broken glass. Both have diminished. I don't get three feet of passing clearance from a lot of drivers, but I see little direct aggression.

You never hear the shot that kills you. I don't assume that conditions will remain placid. Because I ride as fast as my physical condition will allow, I may blend with traffic better than I will as my powers inevitably dwindle to the point where I can do no more than poke along. The law gives me the right to poke, but the law isn't riding with me, shouldering aside any potential attackers. I'll be a sitting duck. Will I get fed by onlookers who think I'm cute or chased off because I foul the beaches? It would be unsporting to shoot me.