Comments on: City Bikes and Bloodsport

By: Anthony

Anthony — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:49:08 +0000

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.

By: Phil Miller

Phil Miller — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:11:51 +0000

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?

By: ToddBS

ToddBS — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:15:36 +0000

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.