Lan Yin Tsai gets the nod, joining Gustaf Hakansson in our cycling pantheon.

Almost every 700C bicycle designed to accommodate large tires has front end geometry designed for skinny, high-pressure tires. Forks with little offset yield high geometric trail, making the front end of the bicycle floppy  with large tires and unsuitable for a front rack. These forks are designed to replace the stock forks on such bicycles so that they’ll handle better with 28mm + tires. They have 58mm of rake, giving a trail measurement of about 40mm with a 73 degree head tube angle. This front end geometry is extremely versatile. The constructeurs used 40mm of trail on road bicycle with wider tires (around 30mm) and no front load or a light handlebar bag, as well as porteur bicycles with slightly wider tire (usually wider than 38mm) These forks have uncut, extra long (40 cm) 1 1/8″ steerer tubes. Double eyelets at the dropouts for fender and front rack attachment, mid-fork braze-ons for lowrider racks, a threaded eyelet on the bottom side of the fork crown for clean, secure fender attachment, as well as braze ons at the top of the fork crown for another rack attachment point. In other words, loaded. Powdercoated black. The fork pictured with Gran Bois Cypres tire. There is 31mm of space between the top of the tire and the bottom of the fork crown. Shipping forks is costly $12-15 usually, so I’ll be selling these for $83 shipping included. A small shipment will come in next Wednesday or Thursday. E-mail or call me if you’d like to reserve one. If there are any left over when I receive them, I’ll put them in the webstore.

A recent New York Times article about the move away from car ownership gives a typical and maddeningly narrow-minded explanation of the trend’s causes.

Whether because of cost, convenience or environmental awareness, a small but growing number of people are making individual decisions to get rid of their automobiles and rely on public transportation, car-sharing programs and rental cars.

Granted, the article is in the automotive section (bicycles are mentioned only briefly), but the list or reasons above (cost, convenience, environment) is typical in articles on the renaissance of the bicycle as well. They are all fine reasons, but don’t get at the heart of the movement away from private automobiles. People sense that something is missing in their lives, in the lives of families, and in their communities. Call it cohesion, social capital, togetherness–whatever. It isn’t something like money, time, or environmental degradation that can be measured in a lab, but its loss is acutely felt and quietly mourned. Part of the problem is the reductionism that has occurred in public discourse. Mainstream public discourse is very bad at illuminating and discussing the non-material, non-measurable goods necessary for human flourishing. And even if you’re the most radical of radical materialists (meaning that you don’t believe that anything exists which cannot be reduced to the five senses) our present understanding cannot fully explain–in purely empirical terms–human existence and our need for togetherness and belonging.

People aren’t merely moving away from private cars because they want to be lean and green–they’re moving toward walking, biking, and public transport because those forms of getting to and fro foster healthier human relationships. Family and community cohesion are not served well by the private automobile, which is our most anti-social shaper of the physical environment and the mores of a community. When automobiles are the dominant form of transport people tend to become atomized individuals with lives that are spread far too thin. Even if the desire isn’t always articulated by those who choose more humane forms of transport, their most attractive benefit is they foster a sense of belonging to the places in which and the people with which you live, rather than the interminable sense of just passing through.

This review of a few  ”Dutch-style” bicycles isn’t the most informed you’ll find, but in fairness it is written for a general audience and the author isn’t an expert. You’ll often such bicycles disparged by fairly informed bicycle people for their supposed performance disadvantages–they’re heavy, the upright riding position doesn’t allow the rider to use the largest pedaling muscles and also makes out of the saddle efforts awkward. Privileging the metrics of efficiency and speed is fine in some case but doing so in all cases doesn’t take into account the use of the bicycles. Bicycles are tools, and a performance bicycle is one perfectly suited to the particular use of the rider.

The Slate review ascribes the bias against city bikes to a different source.

Slate‘s D.C. office is full of commuting cyclists, so I lent the Batavus out to a few of them and asked their impressions. They all acknowledged the bike’s evident craftsmanship and the lushness of its ride. But there seemed to be a philosophical stumbling block that prevented them from fully enjoying their time with it.

It turns out my colleagues view urban cycling as a Darwinian contest, in which the cyclist who weaves most daringly between the delivery trucks is the glorious victor. Thus they chafe at the configuration of the Batavus, which does not encourage or enable aggressive pedaling. I, on the other hand, like to pretend I’m a European—rolling around the city at dawdling speed, occasionally dinging the bell to alert inattentive pedestrians to my presence. If you’re like me, you’ll adore the Batavus. If you approach cycling as a vicious blood sport, you likely won’t.

While a little unfair and hyperbolic, I think there’s something to this. There are other reasons for the bias toward sport and recreation class bicycles, to be sure (one being that in a typical bike shop there are no bicycles outside of the sport and recreation class), but the sport and rec bicycle has so skewed our sense of what a bike should be that even in such strongholds of self-styled practical cyclists like the I-BOB list city bikes are routinely disparaged and deemed unsuitable for the North American rider.

Depending on several particulars, the best bicycle for transportation will either be a Dutch style city bike, a randonneuring bicycle, a cargo bike, or a folding bicycle. I’ll go over those particulars and how to choose the best bicycle for transportation in a separate post. And I’ll probably need another to address the typical objections to city bikes, which I think are perfectly valid for some places and uses, but clearly wrongheaded in others. Still, the Slate rider is onto something. In the US when people talk about a practical bicycle they are largely still referring to a practicalroad bicycle in the sport and recreation class with a few practical additions (fenders, lights, racks, etc). Think something like a Rivendell, a French style porteur, or rando bike. While none of these are racing bicycles, they are still bicycles on which a fit person can show up at a club ride and keep up with the vase majority of spandex clad weekend warriors on racing bicycles. Sure you’re on a funny, heavy bike by the standards of most but whose gonna poke fun at you if you can’t be dropped? If you can keep up, you’re in the figurative club. But on a city bike you’re unlikely to keep up with anything but the slowest group on club rides–not that you’d take such a bike to a club ride, but the way that road bicycles define performance comes down to speed, and this performance metric poses a hurdle for many US riders–even those who don’t consider cycling a “vicious blood sport” when choosing a transportation bicycle.

Looking the calendar and counting the weeks I find it hard to believe that our girl was born eleven weeks ago. It seems like ages. I underestimated how much the addition to the family would cut into my usual hours, and I feel like I’m just now “caught up” and settled back into a normal routine. It didn’t help that September was the busiest month of the year here. Not that I’m complaining, but there were a few weeks that I felt like I’d never catch up. Honestly only the typical seasonal slow down as the weather has cooled has allowed me to catch up. During September in particular wheelbuilding orders didn’t always go out as quickly as I’d like, and I’m working on making everything here more efficient.  I’ll be working this week on adding new products to the webstore. There are many little bits and bobs that we have in stock that haven’t made it in, and anyone who prefers to build their own bicycles knows those little bits are important when you’re putting one together. I’ll list a summary of the new stuff in a separate post.

As I’ve been typing a shipment of Lazer infant helmets came in the door. We’ve been out of these for awhile, and they’re the best helmet for children under twelve months that I’ve found, so we’re happy to have them again. I know a few people are waiting on them.

As always, we sincerely appreciate the business, folks.