Prolific list-master Jim G generously volunteered to start a discussion group for those interested in the 650B framesets and future Longleaf products. I think this will be a better medium for discussion than blog comments, which are limited to topics generated by me. The home page for the group can be found here.
Happy Thanksgiving.
We now have VO porteur racks in stock. They’re stainless steel and impressive in just about every way. It isn’t often that you can be astonished that a $160 rack is only $160, but that’s the case with these. More details here.
On a related note, I received news last week that VO Imports, the distribution arm of Velo-Orange, will be selling their Polyvalent 650B frames through dealers. I had a long talk with Tom at VO Imports about the frames and they sound like they’ll ride very much like the G2 Kogswell P/R’s, except they’ll have proportionally longer top tubes for swept back bars and threaded headsets. I don’t think these framesets will work well with drop bars because of the long top tubes. Frames should be in around the first week of December, and I’ll put them on the site then. They be $450 and as with all frames I sell I’m happy to build them up not only with parts that I regularly stock, but also special order parts or parts you send me as well. Being small has some advantages.
I would recommend choosing a frame with as little standover clearance as possible when picking a Polyvalent. The top tubes are level, so if you like your bars roughly level with your saddle keep the toptube high and tight or you’ll need a very, very long stem.
Matthew at Kogswell and I have agreed that I will take over the Kogswell 650B P/R production and design. Kogswell has decided to concentrate on 26″ framesets and when Matthew told me he didn’t plan to continue production of the 650B P/R it seemed like a natural fit. As was the process with the P/R, I’ll be soliciting feedback from owners and prospective buyers about fine tuning the G2 P/R’s before producing the Longleaf 650B frames. The broad strokes of the design will remain the same, a steel TIG welded 650B bicycle with low-trail geometry designed for 35-42mm tires. For now I’ll keep discussion of the frameset on the blog, but I think in the future a google or yahoo group will be a better medium for discussing this and future framesets. For starters, I’d like to solicit feedback about the following:
As for the inevitable “When?” questions I’m shooting for prototypes in early spring and hope to have the the first production run by the end of the summer.
We’re switching domain name registrars and everything hasn’t gone smoothly. . . website was down for a little while this morning. There shouldn’t be any more interruptions.
Update: While there shouldn’t have been any more interruptions, there have been. Obviously if you’re reading this, the site is up, but it has been spotty today and may remain so over the weekend. So if you come back and the site isn’t there, I apologize. I’m the tech department here and the problem is above my head, so I’ll have to talk to an expert Monday.
Typically lucid article from Tom Vanderbilt at Slate examining jaywalking. There have recently been a few shrill articles in big-city newspapers about the “scourge” of jaywalking. The term has always struck me as loaded. Anecdotes of course aren’t hard data, but I’ve never seen pedestrians behave without regard to their lives or those of others, and all the pedestrian/motorist near misses I’ve seen were the result of people starting across a clear street and encountering a automobile travelling well about the speed limit. What about you? Excerpt from the article.
[T]he word jaywalking is often used as a sort of blanket justification for the dominating presence of cars on city streets. It also reflects a social bias against those people not in cars. (Note this comment in a Federal Highway Administration report: “Still, almost no one can avoid occasional pedestrian status,” as if they were discussing exposure to a venereal disease.) It’s also used to shift blame entirely to the pedestrian when drivers may have had what’s called, in legal parlance, “contributory negligence.” Consider, for example, this case of a driver who killed a pedestrian said to have been crossing outside the crosswalk. The driver was drunk and traveling at least 60 mph on a street whose limit was 30 mph. Statistically (and more-or-less legally), this enters the book as a “jaywalking” fatality, but it was predicated not merely on an illegal crossing but the active contribution of a driver whose reaction time was compromised—and who was traveling at a speed that made the pedestrian’s death much more likely.
None of this is to say there aren’t pedestrians who make bone-headed decisions, but it smacks of worrying about a butterfly when there’s a bull in the china closet. I practice benign civil disobedience while walking on on my bicycle. I realize that our cultural norms and road laws push those who aren’t in a motor vehicle to the margin, but streets are for people. They were for people long before they were made for machines, and the humanization of our streets isn’t served by deferential begging for scraps at the table of car culture. As Mr. Vanderbilt puts it “[I] frankly find the notion of waiting for a signal when no cars are in sight to be faintly ridiculous and anti-urban.”
If you haven’t looked at Mr. Vanderbilt’s How We Drive blog, which is a companion to his book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What it Says About Us), I suggest you do so.
I’m not sure that this guy is a serious contender but I need to put anyone who thinks they should be able to walk or bike anywhere in this town on notice. He has some good ideas about whipping the local government into fiscal shape and making sure city contracts are fulfilled with local businesses, unfortunately he not only believes that any money spent on bicycle facilities is a waste, but has a creepy rabid antipathy toward cyclists. Here’s some choice drivel:
The city of Wilmingwood [a local nickname for the city because of the relatively large size of our film industry--Anthony] is not supposed to be a Berkely California or some other hippie paradise. People in Wilmingwood drive cars and the bikes need to look out for the cars. If you want a bike paradise move to Cuba or China, They love bicycles there!
Dana Page, infantile bike hater for City Council. I don’t have time to point out all the flawed reasoning in the passage above–it doesn’t rise above name calling to the level of an argument. Please don’t give this man your vote, we don’t want him sitting on the council for four years. The planning department in this city is doing good work to make this city more bicycle and pedestrian friendly, don’t put this obstacle into office.
