City Bikes and Bloodsport
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.
Tags: City Bike Bias
I prefer the rando bike myself. I’m hardly a performance-oriented cyclist though. I think the reason that I’m not partial to the city bikes is more aesthetic. They just don’t appeal to me visually.
I’d love to have a Coho myself. And someday hopefully I will. I’d also love to move to the Raleigh-Durham area. Ah well, all things in due time.
I think that the reason most people still look at performance when choosing a city bike is rather obvious. They are converting from a car to a bicycle. A car is faster than a bicycle. They want to give up as little of that time as possible. Only when you’ve been cycling a while do you find out that instead of enjoying all the speed you have, you wish you had a longer commute; you add legs to your commute; you find you enjoy the ride so much that you find the prettiest route instead of the most efficient route. And one day you wish for a bike that wasn’t so *fast*, but optimized the *pleasure* of riding, because that’s really why you still ride at all. It’s not the economy. It’s not the green bragging rights. You’ve forgotten all the reasons that you _started_ and are simply embracing the beauty of the ride. That’s when you plunk down $2-4K and your friends snigger, “but I thought it was to save money!”
Sometimes I remember that until recently, man has been riding horses for thousands of years, and that my bicycle is my link to that: It’s about the same speed of motion. You soften your needs to accept a speed bump the way you would accept a fence. There are gates on a bicycle, walk, canter, trot, gallop, that each take a different amount of effort. It’s not the same; but the pleasure of riding them is similar, and I can’t imagine a horsey person defending their passion with the argument that they are saving money! So why apologize?
Phil,
I agree that the pleasure of riding is what keeps people coming back. I’d add that the pleasure doesn’t always end when you get off the bike.
And I think there’s something to your “obvious” reason but it isn’t sufficient. The lack of city bikes’ availability has much to do with their low regard in the US. Five years ago real city bikes were practically impossible to find in the US. They still aren’t in most bicycle shops. 99% of the bikes in the US market are made in Taiwan and China. These factories don’t build good city bicycles (which I define as having internal gear hubs, chaincases, proper geometry for an upright riding position, dynamo lighting, fenders, and rack as stock features, as well as the stainless steel parts needed to withstand decades of outdoor storage) . The US bicycle companies are understandably conservative and don’t want to pay to retool factories to build bicycles outside of the sport and recreation class when they aren’t positive they’re going to be able to sell. $1300 45lb bikes! No way, mister. This creates a positive feedback loop. Almost everybody is on a sport and rec bike, most customers are ignorant of bicycles outside of the US and when they need a bike, they look at what everyone else is riding, ask friends who cycle what they recommend, unsurprisingly, they recommend sport and rec bikes. More sport and rec bicycle get built, more get sold. This creates a bicycle culture in which performance is defined as speed. Even you–writing on a practical cycling website in the US, used the word synonymously with speed. It’s a one-dimensional understanding of bicycle performance and results in people using bicycles that aren’t optimal for their intended use.