The Overhead Paradox

Customers will say that a high repair estimate is more than they paid for their bike. This implies that the bike is not worth fixing. But if you bought a good bike and took good care of it, it should last you fifteen, twenty years or more. If you have been paying someone else to work on it, of course you will end up paying more in service than you paid for the bike originally. But, given the general deterioration in quality and a rate of price inflation that has been romping merrily past the general consumer inflation rate since long before it was fashionable to bitch about it, the bike you buy for the same number of now-inflated dollars will be absolute trash compared to your old bike.

The exception, of course, is if your old bike was trash in the first place. The real trash tends to take itself out of the running just by wearing out completely, or dying of exposure as it's dumped out in the weather. But even a modest bike is worth fixing if you like it and it meets your needs.

Our first impulse at the shop is to figure out how to fix whatever anyone brings in. We've learned over the years to identify the few that can't be made good because they never were good, but anything with a shred of quality triggers the impulse to bring it back. Unfortunately, the shop itself costs a certain amount to run. I guarantee you that I see a tiny fraction of our hourly labor charge, but the rest of it goes to the keep the whole business solvent. More or less solvent, anyway. We have overhead. This leads to the paradox. A well established bike shop provides a meager living to a technician smart enough to do the work and stupid enough to keep doing it for a long time. Experience lives here. We've accumulated tools and parts so that we can work on anything back to about the 1950s, but we're still in the game, so we have co-evolved to deal with the whole time line through the decades to the ridiculously over-engineered bullshit of today. 

The ideal bike mechanic is also a highly skilled machinist, like my friend and mentor in Florida. She grew up in a machine shop and did time in retail bike shops in the Orlando area. She and her late husband set up a machine shop at their own home and withdrew from the retail scene. This meant that they could offer all kinds of specialty services without the overhead of a store front. Shops in the area still use her as a resource for the jobs that would tie up a work stand for too long and call for skills that the average transitory young bike mechanic will never even have known about.

I am not a skilled machinist. I grew up moving constantly, reading books and wondering what it would be like to live in one place long enough to have roots. We were not going to have a Bridgeport, a band saw, lathes, and other heavy, stationary tools in the garage. And my father was an officer, the military equivalent of white collar management. We were herded toward careers with cleaner fingernails. I was not a tinkerer. We engaged in some tool use, but only to repair or refurbish something we owned, not just for the sake of working on it. This mostly meant paint and planking on a wooden sailing dinghy more than working with metal and grease and oil. My gateway to mechanics was the used 10-speed I bought in 1975. It held no secrets, wearing its drive train on the outside.

I like classic bikes because they don't require a lot of work. The type evolved through the 1990s, gaining some actual improvements even as the technofascist complexities came to dominate. If I think about it long enough I can pinpoint the last change that really was an improvement. Probably interrupter brake levers. Just about everything since the early years of the 21st Century has been mostly either to make a previous bad decision work a little less badly or a classic example of "just because you can doesn't mean you should."

The overhead paradox mostly affects owners of older bikes and cheaper bikes. I've had customers go ahead with an expensive repair even after I told them it was a poor investment, because they had some attachment to the bike. I've had customers abandon a decent candidate for repair because they didn't want to spend the money on it, preferring in some cases to buy a new bike of lower quality just because it was new.

Most new bikes today have some form of the same features at every price point. Cheap bikes have flimsy derailleurs, stamped sheet metal chain rings, way off brand cable disc brakes, and heavy, floppy suspension. Bikes that still have rim brakes might have stamped sheet metal brake arms that shouldn't even be legal. To get reasonably robust examples of the modern idea of componentry, count on spending more than $1,000.00. If you're really going to try to ride like you see in the videos, spend more than twice that. Working on any of that will take time and require treasure hunts for parts, but less of the old-school skills that will die with my generation. And how much does it really matter when civilization itself may coincidentally die about the time my generation does anyway? The Baby Boomers lived as if they would be the last generation to need the Earth's resources, and it's looking like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sure, other generations have followed and reproduced copiously, while guzzling a large share of what's left, but the Boomers set the tone in the 1980s. The values have been passed down long after they should have been replaced with more thoughtful progress.

Meanwhile, we're still here, and riders are bringing in beloved old steeds in need. One rider brought in his old Puch road bike from the 1970s.

                                                     It was 100 years 50 years ago
He's been riding it more or less like a "gravel bike." It will do it, because the roadier end of gravel bike geometry is basically like a general purpose touring bike from the 1970s: a little slack, a little long, with room for a somewhat plump tire. Of course the modern form has evolved into more specific geometry suited to loose surfaces, allowing for wider tires, and designed around the current ridiculous 1X drivetrains. But his old rod would do what he wanted for far, far less than a new bike with modern problems. I put on interrupter brake levers and aero primary levers, along with 27X1 3/8 knobby tires. Off he went, happy with the improvements.

On Sunday, I volunteered at the Makers Mill, a community "makerspace" that hopes eventually to offer a work space for community members to make and repair things. They offer classes in various skills ranging from textiles to woodworking to welding to jewelry making, as well as art classes. I helped them a little with their initial planning for the bike work area. With all of the YouTube experts in town who smugly avoid our shop, I figured that there was a deep pool of expertise waiting to bury them in helpful mechanics. Turns out that those people are apparently too busy elsewhere.

The problem with something that inexperienced people think is really simple is that they meet someone who knows a little about it and they assume that's all there is to know. Thus the person who knows a little must know more than enough. Volunteer organizations are staffed by whoever is willing to show up on a regular basis. Who has the time and the desire? That's who will be there. I am not the one with the most time. But I have been there enough to rip the lid off of the crypt of horrors that is the true depth of arcane bike knowledge. And they have hardly seen any of the really demonic new crap.

Late in the afternoon on Sunday, the owner of the Puch arrived at the Mill, hoping that we could snug up his brakes (I had had to fabricate cable knarps to make new bridge wires for his vintage Weinmann center-pulls)

The brake adjustment was simple enough. And oh, by the way, his seatpost seemed to be kind of stuck.

I had not messed with his seat position when I worked on the bike before. I clamped it in the work stand around the seat tube of the frame itself, suspecting that the OEM seatpost was probably too short to extend far enough to hold the work stand clamp anyway. I had not determined that the post was rusted into the frame, but the news did not surprise me. I might even have dripped a little penetrating oil down along it so that he could try to dislodge it later. 

Later had now arrived. I had advised him to go after the seatpost with a pipe wrench and not worry about destroying it. He'd chewed into it, but had not moved it. These struggles don't usually end well for the seatpost. We crushed this one in a big vise as we tried to twist it loose. Then we sawed off the protruding part before attacking what remained in the seat tube.

Stuck seatpost removal is always like trying to dig your way out of a jail cell with the handle of a spoon you stole from the dining hall. It's a grim, long process of scraping. We enlisted the Mill's machinist, but he's not a bike guy. I provided some guardrails to protect vulnerable parts of the bike while he addressed the generic problem of an aluminum tube stuck inside a steel tube, cemented by rust. We were hampered by the fact that the machine shop there has mostly a motley assortment of donated tools with lots of duplications of things that were not the right size for the job at hand. We managed to cut down and chisel away some of it, but more remained beyond the reach of the tools we had. The machinist took the frame to his home lair where he will work on it with his more extensive resources.

Because the Sunday event was free, the owner of the bike was not paying for the two or three people working for almost two hours on his soluble but time-consuming problem. Thus we sidestepped the overhead paradox. The cost was borne by the volunteers working for free. I did get some food and social credit for it, and I was happy to help keep a worthy old bike on the road, but I would starve to death if I did it all the time.

Used bikes can be great if you know what you're looking at. Prices fluctuate depending on demand. A seller who knows what they have, dealing with a buyer who accurately assesses the bike's value, are liable to settle on a higher price than if a generic scavenger just sells it as "a bike" to some random rube. But even then, the buyer might be a hard chiseler who doesn't know the value, but is determined to hold down the price, or a knowledgeable enthusiast who is also determined to hold down the price. Or the generic scavenger might have an inflated idea of the price, aided by a time in which used bike prices are running high, like in the demand surge of 2020.

The overhead paradox affects modern stuff as well. We had a jammed 11-speed pod shifter that I might have unjammed, given enough time, but a new pod cost less than my time. New shifter pods for seven speeds and up cost about as much as we charge to open up an old pod and clean out the congealed grease, which is usually all that is wrong with them. But the procedure takes longer than yanking the old pod off and slapping in a new one, so when the shop is buried it's a better option if we have the part in stock. The unfortunate consequence is that a fixable shifter pod goes to the landfill. The small businesses at the bottom of the economy end up bearing the major responsibility for stemming the avalanche of waste getting dumped into the environment. The bicycle industry doesn't support the activity of bicycling, it supports itself. Bicycling is just a side effect.

For the moment, we're too dumb to quit trying to fix things that people want fixed, but upper management can no longer ignore the mounting costs. We have no handy off-site magician like my friend in Orlando, but we can't afford to be that magician as much as we used to. I have a lot of tools at my own secret headquarters, but the shop still has a few more tricks that I haven't invested in, and I don't want to burn too many of my days off doing what I do on my days on. I would much rather teach skills (and a jaundiced attitude toward tech-weenie bullshit) than be a servant to the willfully ignorant. The owner of the bike should make at least part of the journey with me. At the end of it, they should come out more independent than when they started. If I can learn this crap, anyone can, but knowing it does make you more valuable. No, any idiot can't just do it, but any regular person can learn it if they can bring themselves to focus on it. The citizen rider becomes the citizen mechanic and a freer person as a result.

Bikes are everywhere. Bike parts aren’t.

Ever have one of those days where you’re occupied for hours getting nothing done? That’s most days in bike repair.

Diagnosing a bike repair requires multiple steps. What system is malfunctioning? Can it be adjusted, or is something outright broken? If something is broken, can it be fixed? If not, can it be replaced exactly? If not, can some other part fit? Is the exact part or the substitute part actually available? How long will it take to get here? What will it cost? Can I fake it with salvaged parts or widgets in the various boxes and bins we've accumulated?

Multiply the process by the number of broken parts on the bike. Add one more repetition for every additional part that turns up while you’re working on what you already identified.

A large shop, perhaps part of a chain of shops, in a heavily populated market area might manage to have a phenomenally well-stocked parts department. If a rider never leaves such an area, or only does so briefly -- and is ridiculously lucky -- they might not run into a problem with parts availability. But lots of riders live in smaller population centers or travel outside of the zone that Big Bicycle considers worthy of their attention. There are no parts stores, like NAPA, O'Reilly, VIP, for bicycles.

Mountain bikes often show up encased in dried mud. Their riders tend to delay maintenance and repair until the bike is completely unrideable. I had one this week that looked like it had been buried in a salt marsh for a couple of years. These modern marvels of trail mastery have lots more moving parts than their ancestors did in the 1990s, mostly so that their riders can propel them with less caution at higher speeds under the influence of gravity.

Road riders don't tend to bash their bikes as hard and frequently. Their bikes show up with overuse injuries because they don't take hard hits that show dramatic symptoms instantly. Shift cables quietly fray under housings and bar tape. Chains wear. A broken shift cable can jam an entire shifter. Worn chains wear rear cogs too badly to accept a new chain. Gravel bikes borrow from both road and mountain categories.

Even casual recreational bikes can be disasters. People bring in a bike they bought in 1998 and say that it's only 15 years old, and that we just worked on it recently. A check of our extensive records might show that "recently" was three years ago, and the problem it had then was completely unrelated to the one it has now. Bikes are taken for granted until they fail too completely to ignore. Sort of like cars, only without the built-in weather protection of body work.

Bicycles have always challenged mechanics with different dimensions and standards applied to overall mechanisms that operated the same way. Into the beginning of the 1980s, these were mostly nationalistic variations in thread pitch and some tubing diameters. From the late 1980s onward, these differences were mostly corporate-driven, related to indexed shifting systems. These affected whole drive trains, as companies messed with cog spacing to match proprietary click shifters.

Initially, the click systems used modified progressive levers. The lever would stop in a different, distinct position for each gear. This meant that the rider usually had the option to switch to friction shifting if the synchronization went out. So the companies had to mess with cog spacing to make the stops adapt only to their patented parts. By the time SRAM beat Shimano in an unfair trade practices lawsuit, Shimano's unfair trade practices had already given it market dominance, so cog spacing became more or less standardized on their pattern. The other format was Campagnolo's, but Campy has always been a luxury brand.

Index-only shifters make perfect adjustment and synchronization essential. A bike that was high end when new from the late 1990s through today might have eight, nine, ten, eleven, or twelve (sometimes 13) cogs on the rear hub. Drive trains have to match all the way through by brand on the more recent bikes, as SRAM and Shimano have kept the Shifter Wars raging. As with every war, the civilian population suffers much more than the actual combatants. Do you have three, two, or one chainring? By extension, front derailleur or no front derailleur? Well into the 21st Century, the sheer number of speeds was a selling point. Three in the front and nine in the rear makes 27. Three in the front and ten in the rear makes 30. But as chains got skinnier and shifting systems had to handle more chain angle, the industry singled out the front derailleur as the source of all evil. Your high end bike now will have only 12 speeds and damn proud of it. In other words, we're back to the same gear range we had in 1980 with two in the front and six in the back, only it all costs at least three times as much and is far more failure prone. Progress!

Riders mostly don't pay attention to any of this. They buy a new bike and treat it they way they have always treated a bike, expecting the same longevity and reliability. A younger rider who has only ever known finicky index-only shifting will have worse "good old days" to look back on compared to an old geezer who remembers friction shifting and well crafted simplicity, but they both can share the realization that things have gotten steadily more costly and fall apart sooner.

We haven't even talked about suspension, disc brakes, or tubeless tires yet. A guy came in with a sheared off alloy spoke nipple on his mountain bike wheel. With a tube-type tire, it's a quick and simple fix. With a tubeless tire, its a time-consuming, messy, costly process that involves completely redoing the rim tape. An air-tight seal is absolutely essential to tubeless tires. You can't maintain that if you peel back a section of rim tape to drop in a replacement spoke nipple. The guy bought a handful of brass nipples and went off to try his own luck with it. He is free to try cutting a hole and patching it afterward, and then dealing with the almost inevitable failure of that patch, leading him eventually to redo the tape completely. That requires completely cleaning and drying the rim before meticulously applying your tape of choice and remounting the old tire or replacing it because you discover that the sidewalls are too broken down to reseal. Even applying a patch won't work unless the work area is perfectly clean and dry. 

An inner tube will press a rim tape repair into place, while also not depending on it. A tubeless tire does not have that advantage. Air pressure alone will not press the patch more firmly where you want it. Air pressure alone will work its way into any area of weakness and turn it into a leak.

Every customer who comes in interrupts the flow of work already in progress -- or the treasure hunt for needed parts so that work can continue. It's not their fault, it's just how things go. Their questions need answers. Their bike or bike part needs preliminary diagnosis. It's important to share information and knowledge, but in the meantime the bike on the stand is just sitting there. And the new work probably triggers more treasure hunting for some part we either hadn't bothered to stock or just ran out of.

Unapologetically Utopian

 If you look up terms like "effective altruism" and study the many characteristics derided as "woke," you will find, in addition to ominous interpretations that project a future in no way pleasant to the majority of people who would find themselves living in it -- however briefly and uncomfortably -- common threads of utopian fantasy. These go back well into the 20th Century. The principles in some of them stretch back as far as recorded language, but by the 20th Century a lot of technological developments were well established and evolving to support many of the practical underpinnings of a society based on the greatest good for the greatest number.

Because greatest good and greatest number are elastic terms with no universally agreed definitions, the uses of these technologies diverge into the various earthly paradises and hellscapes explored in futurist academic and fictional narratives and analysis. They also underlie the current privileged areas and existing hellscapes that we have already established.

I have said for years and will repeat with tiresome persistence that human-powered transportation, most notably using bicycles, has always been a game that any number could play. The more people using bikes and their own muscles to get around, the better the world becomes. It is unapologetically utopian.

More than 40 years ago I set out to demonstrate how much easier it was to negotiate the crowded streets of Annapolis on a bicycle than in a car. What the other road users saw instead was just some idiot exposed to weather and traffic hazards, not a thought leader and influencer. They put up with the few transportation cyclists in town with varying levels of tolerance depending somewhat on the neighborhood. The further you got from older residential neighborhoods and the center of town, the more likely you were to have friction with an irate motorist. But no place was safe. A skirmish could break out anywhere. Still, the struggle seemed winnable.

By the time I left Annapolis, the local cycling group could put 15 or 20 riders onto the road in a group ride on a summer afternoon, but their consensus was that the traffic was so hostile that they would meet at the mall parking lot on the west edge of town rather than start somewhere downtown, as we had done when it was four or five plucky road racers from 1979 to 1982. Of those four or five racers, three of us also rode our bikes for transportation, because none of us owned a car. We would have to borrow one to drive to a race. By 1987, I was the last one who was living without a car.

Racing was always secondary to transportation for me. Transportation cycling provided a baseline of mileage and saddle time on which to build whatever recreational riding I had time for. Meanwhile, one of the other car-free riders invested his spare cash in carpentry tools to prepare for when he eventually started his own highly regarded contracting business, and the other one saved up enough money to make a down payment on his first home in Annapolis. He didn't buy in the most expensive neighborhood, but in Annapolis there were no cheap ones. Transportation cycling improved their lives to the point where they could give it up and never look back. The fact that they gave it up is unfortunate, but it does underscore how not everyone can use a bike to get around. Although one of them started out as a naval architect, they both ended up working as carpenters, and that requires a truck and tools.

We need people who build things. What they build depends on their vision of the present and future that they want to create, or the lack of any sorting criteria. The trap is that someone might stake their savings on tools and training to build things, and have to take jobs building things that are ultimately harmful, just to get the money to live. Principles are a luxury. To make that happy future, the human species needs more than infrastructure and tools. We need to agree on where we're headed, informed by all kinds of investigative thinkers who study the interactions of all life and environment. We need someone to design and build the transportation network that can accommodate all vehicles, including thousands of bike riders who will eventually be taking advantage of the vast benefits of simple, human-powered transportation.

I guarantee that if the human species had chosen back in the 1970s to focus its efforts on making a long term plan instead of knowingly forcing crisis after crisis in order to generate profits and duel for global dominance we would have fewer young people scornfully dismissing Boomers. Not trusting my own generation's better judgment as I saw how they were progressing I didn't add my own cannon fodder to the future that looks increasingly likely. Meanwhile, my 30-mile commuting days on rural roads and highways here in New Hampshire look less like proof of concept and more like proof of insanity. My system is stretched to its limit to try to maintain all of the things I've come to like a lot -- not to say love -- in my life. But this rickety economy depends on the considerable savings of even a half year of bike commuting compared to uninterrupted motor vehicle use. So it does demonstrate that one can still stretch a dollar a long way using pedal power where possible. It's worth expending my waning strength on it.

Throwing our bodies in front of the machines...

 Two women ran side by side along the edge of Mill Street on this sunny morning in meteorological spring. They were facing traffic, as they should when no other infrastructure is provided, but there is a sidewalk on the other side of that street. I expected them to divert into a parking lot entrance a few yards ahead of them, because that's what pedestrians on that side of Mill Street usually do. Instead, they continued to run up the traffic lane itself, toward the intersection with Main Street, a corner that motorists regularly round as if they're being filmed in a chase scene. It may be a driver yanking a quick left from Main Street southbound or snapping a quick right just past the last parked car on Main Street northbound.

Most motorists are unaware of how fast they're actually going in their machines designed to isolate them from the wind of their passage and the roughness of the pavement. Locked into the flow, we all have a tendency to focus on stopping only where we had already planned to, or wherever circumstances force us to. Drivers scan constantly for objects the same size as their vehicles, or larger.

The runners would have had to pass a retaining wall that gives them nowhere to go except right up the lane past a small building to get to the little section of parking lot beyond. And that section of parking lot is used as the entry to the bigger parking lot behind that small building, by drivers careening off of Main Street. With piles of snow crowding the roadway at that corner, the runners would not be able to walk across the worn dirt and trampled grass for a few yards to get to the sidewalk along Main Street, as they could do in the summer. This would bring them right up to the corner of Main Street itself. I couldn't see them once they passed the lower end of the little building, but I knew what their options were.

Their trajectory didn't end with a screech and a thump. One reason that people continue to do risky things is that they usually get away with it. In my observation, most drivers are aware enough to avoid hitting anyone. But are they happy about it?

Whether drivers are happy to see us doesn't matter unless you encounter the one who is finally having a bad enough day to engage in assault. You can't know who that is. So, if you want to use the roads you have to put yourself out there.

My first thought was that these women were idiots to place themselves at risk like that. But then I considered the challenge of creating traffic systems that accommodate all users. Unless a jurisdiction has the space and the budget to separate all users, we're going to mix. In Wolfeboro, not every street has a sidewalk. People walk where they can, because otherwise they would have to deal with congestion and parking for short hops in the village, which is already crowded with vehicular traffic. And, especially in the summer, the dinky sidewalks are so crowded that pedestrians spill over into the streets, or cross wherever they happen to be.

Pedestrians and bike riders are mobile traffic calmers. We aren't made of concrete. We aren't crash-absorbing barrels, although we will burst on impact, splattering liquid all over the place, if an inattentive motorist plows into us. Drivers know this, too. Most of them don't want to be grossed out like that. So our mere presence serves to remind them to be more alert. Our presence in larger numbers creates friction in their flow, automatically slowing them. Our bodies in front of them confront them with humanity.

The women did not get hit, but they did remind drivers that we exist. Every non-motorized road user reminds drivers and transportation planners that people do something besides drive. I would not have taken the route that they did, nor would I have advised them to do it. And I don't think they did it to make a statement. I think they were pretty oblivious. That makes it an even more powerful demonstration that walkers and pedalers need to figure in planning and in the perceptions of drivers. If no one is seen out there, the people who make the plans don't perceive a need. Drivers happily forget how to act around us. If you hang back and wait for the perfect facility, you will wait a long time. So we throw our bodies in front of the machines.

With Daylight Relocating Time starting this weekend, all I will need is some base miles and halfway decent weather to start the bike commuting season. This used to involve a distinct period of retraining motorists. For some reason, for about the past decade, drivers have seemed to adapt more readily, with less hostility than they used to. That can change at any time, though. No rider on the road can ever assume that the troubles are over. Just be grateful for times when they seem to be suspended. No doubt around here the transition is eased by people like those two women, who just go for it, and by the handful of riders who take every opportunity throughout the winter to grab a quick spin. We owe them reinforcements, these defenders of the people's right to self-propulsion. Not every struggle for freedom fills the news with flames and mass casualties, mobilizing national governments. Your own world is right here for you to shape.

People you don't want trickling on you

 Specialty retail is hard, but specialty retail in a small town is even harder. In a small town where the median income jumps by six figures in the summer, the machinery of trickle-down economics operates in plain sight.

 Back in the 1990s, slopping over a bit into the 21st Century, we operated under the philosophy, "Charge what you're worth, and be worth what you charge." Since then, the cost of tooling and the complexity of the systems we have to master has made it harder and harder to stand out and turn a profit. As each subcategory of bicycle becomes more narrowly focused and intricate, a few specialists emerge to cater to the dwindling number of addicts who can afford -- or think they can afford -- to pay whatever it costs to keep their chosen machines running. A town this small can't support all of those specialists, nor will it fund a generalist shop with well-equipped departments for every possible need. When the machines were simpler, we could do an excellent job, charge what was a decent price at the time, and only go broke very gradually. It was so gradual, we didn't even notice it. We were still having too much fun.

Summer is the busy season. It is nowhere near as busy as it was in the 1990s, but it's still more bustling than winter. Winter brings its own type of business, but without the second home crowd that swells the population by tens of thousands and raises the median income by hundreds of thousands for a couple of months.

In our year-round customer base, the income range covers everything from SNAP and Medicaid to stock portfolios and bragworthy adventure vacations. So we have some indigenous tricklers as well as the seasonal ones. Ideally, we wouldn't burn any of them off. In real life, however, some go away mad when things go sideways, and others turn out to cost more than they trickle.

The high-cost tricklers divide roughly into two categories: accident prone and abusive of their equipment, and outright deceitful. The deceitful may also be accident prone or abusive of their equipment, but they are the ones who make a stink afterwards and try to strong-arm you for warranty, or cover the tracks of their abuse before presenting an item for evaluation.

In a small town, you often have to maintain a working relationship with people in life outside of the shop. You may even be friends, or at least friendly. That makes the diplomacy more delicate when they want to support a local business and you know that whatever they buy is going to come back in pieces within a few days to a couple of months.

Some of these human booby traps manage to bugger up their bikes in ways that tie up a work stand for days, and/or call for parts that are very hard to get or very annoying to install. Given the way the latest bikes are designed, just about anything is very annoying to install.

It extends to ski season as well, especially when the misfortune magnet has a taste for higher-end equipment. That stuff is built for speed, not for durability.

In the animal world, insects that are toxic often have distinctive color patterns so that predators know to avoid them. In the retail world, we have to learn to identify the specimens that will end up forcing us to regurgitate the money that they put into our coffers. A refund may have costs attached that take more out of us than just the purchase price. Even if it just zeroes out, in all likelihood we didn't have the money long enough to make the tiny bit of interest that you might get from a sufficiently colossal bank balance. And credit card transactions in either direction have bank fees.

Both the merely jinxed and the outright duplicitous usually end up shopping elsewhere, relieving us of the diplomatic issue as they search for either the perfect place that sells things that never malfunction, or new suckers who haven't figured them out yet. But occasionally they return, forced by momentary need, or seized with nostalgia, or perhaps just hoping that we've forgotten the last time.

Bike Zoos

 Once again, the chat filtering in from the sales floor is about abandoning the road and only riding in car-free spaces.

How does one get to these car-free spaces? Mostly by driving, but partly by scurrying anxiously along the shortest possible route on public streets before diving into the perceived safety of the bike preserve. These habitat parks will be the last home of the vanishing cyclist.

It tolls ominously for me, one of the last remaining free-range riders looking forward -- somewhat -- to the return of transportation cycling season. I say somewhat, because I acknowledge, as I always have, that interacting with motorists exposes a rider to a certain amount of danger. Today's visitors, chatting with upper management while I did my best to be unnoticed, recounted how their son had gotten peened twice in Boston. 

Statistics may favor the survival of the vast majority of riders on the road, but that does not make any specific individual invulnerable. Someone is getting hit out there to keep our average from being 100 percent good. It could be any of us on any ride. Good habits, training, and experience improve your odds, but someone else is driving the bigger, more dangerous vehicles. 

I still wonder how much these refugees from road riding think about how bloody it would be if all of the other drivers out there jousting with them on the two-lane, and flying in formation with them on multi-lane roads were really as bad as they describe. There are places I wouldn't like to ride, and places I would consciously avoid, but the choice is guided by a lot of factors, not simply the number of drivers or an untested hypothesis about their collective lack of skill. Neither overestimate nor underestimate your counterparts on the road. I have been extremely impressed by the reflexes and alertness of many drivers over the years. Generally, if someone encroached on me it was because I had neglected to control the space properly. My major reason to suspend the commute when I can't do it in daylight is because I can't control the space when drivers have trouble discerning me in the glary environment created by multiple floodlit vehicles converging in an area we're all trying to fit through.

Because humans have not abandoned the concept of ubiquitous personal motor vehicle ownership, we can look forward to a future of continued sprawl, traffic, and parking problems, even when the vehicles are powered by electric motors instead of dead dinosaurs prehistoric oceanic plant life. If you look at the evolution of the bicycle itself, the most popular form is the one that has mutated into a motor vehicle: the smokeless moped. Simplicity and durability are so last century.

You make your own choices. Having done so, you then try to figure out if you can even operate in proximity to the choices that others have made. If not, you have to devise a path through the landscape and the shifting contours of popular culture to go where you want to go and avoid encountering the incompatible rhythms and speeds of other users. I refer not so much to the age-old problem of mixing human powered vehicles with motorized ones on public rights-of-way, but to navigating among the other purely muscle powered and hybrid cyborgs in the car-free spaces as well as in the general public traffic mix.

Nosehair Update

Since my post on January 10, nosehair-freezing cold finally did put in a brief but dramatic appearance on February 3-4. It even spawned breathless news broadcasts and articles because the Mount Washington Weather Observatory recorded a record-setting wind chill factor.

Wind chill is not temperature. Block the wind and it goes away. If you are wearing sufficient insulating layers and a windproof shell, the effect nearly vanishes. I say nearly, because most of the time our bodies and our buildings are losing a little heat even when snugged up adequately for average conditions. Outside of the enclosure, a little thermal gradient fades out from us, reducing the rate of heat loss from where we want it. Wind whipping over this strips it away, removing the invisible insulation we gained from it.

Winter cyclists have to deal with wind chill all the time, because of how we generate our own, rolling along at whatever speed we're doing. Cold-weather cycling is one of the hardest activities to dress for, because the rider is generating heat through exertion while flying along through the cold atmosphere, cranking up hills and coasting down them, with an actual wind that may come from any angle, interacting with the apparent wind created by forward motion.

I don't know anyone who tried to go for a ride on Saturday, when the temperature started out around 12 to 15 degrees below zero F, with a wind gusting over 30 most of the time. In our shop, with the furnace cranked, we spent most of the day with an indoor temperature from 52 to 54 degrees F. We finally got almost to 60 by closing time. The building was constructed in the 1860s, I believe. The walls were thin, and insulation nonexistent. In a Nor'easter, we can feel the wind actually blowing through the back wall. On Saturday, the wind was westerly enough that it didn't come through directly, but it still stripped escaping heat away from the outside. Some insulation has been added in modern times, but the thin walls mean that there's not enough space for much.

The next day, the temperature climbed steadily to the upper 30s and only dropped to the 20s. Today it got even warmer, with a bit of sunshine. Winter reverted to the temperature range it had stayed in since the season began.

The cold stab did get Lake Winnipesaukee to freeze all the way over, but I would not recommend going out on the new ice. "Ice in" is merely a technicality.

The series of storms that finally brought enough snow to open the cross-country ski trails also brought rain and wet snow in a diabolical combination that produced a thick crust on top of loose snow underneath. The crust can't support a person on skis or snowshoes. It varies in thickness so that the way it breaks from one step to the next makes snowshoeing a laborious series of stumbles as the edges of the shoes catch on the crust. On skis, the crust still breaks, and neither the crust nor the loose snow offer any grip. In bare boots, a post-holer discovers that the snow is deeper than you might expect, with the meager accumulations and long warm spells. On the groomed trails, the cover is barely adequate. Grooming reduces the snow depth and steadily wears it away, while the thinned surface is more vulnerable to the sun heating the dark earth.

The roads don't exactly beckon, but they do offer a passable option for a pedaler who has not invested in a fat bike with studded tires. Some snow machine trails are probably firm enough for a regular mountain bike with studded tires. I prefer and recommend changing to weight-bearing exercise for part of the year, but even the less helpful exercise of pedaling is better than none at all.

I don't have time on a workday to fit a ride in at either end of it until commuting season, and my days off seem to get eaten up with all the things that I don't have time to do in the margins of a workday, so I'm just deteriorating steadily until the daylight gets long enough to start getting base mile rides. I salute all you people with the strength of character to ride a trainer on a regular basis. I do not envy you in the least, but I respect your gumption. That's a lot of sweat and bike abuse.