As long as I’ve been dealing with 650B bicycles customers have been asking for a 650B version of the Panaracer Pasela. Courtesy of Soma, here it is. The casing is the same as the standard Pasela. Soma is also making two versions of this tire. The other has the “Hypertex” casing of Soma’s New Express tires. I am not stocking this version. The Hypertex casing is less supple than the B-Side casing (bad), which prevents the Hypertex casing from expanding to a full 38mm (bad) and a slower ride (bad).

Every year the city organizes a ride that follows the River to Sea Bikeway from downtown Wilmington to Wrightsville Beach. Its a fun social ride for people of all ages and riding abilitsie. The River to Sea bike route needs improvement near the beach, but for this ride its deficiencies are remedied with traffic cones that provide a bike lane on the nasty sections of the main arterial roads. Ride starts at the Bailey Theatre Park downtown (across the street from Port City Java on Front between Market and Princess) and heads 11 miles to Wrightsville Beach, where everyone regroups, food is served, and the local bike shops give away schwag. After about a half hour groups start riding back downtown. On the way back, the police don’t cork the intersections (which the do on the way out) but the groups are large enough that the dicey bits on roads with fast traffic (confined to the three miles in between Greenville Ave. and the beach) won’t be scary, even for families with children.

If you don’t feel up to riding back downtown, there are shuttle buses that will bring riders back, but you’ll have to lock up your bike at the beach and get it another time. Doesn’t sound like a good time to me (not the bus ride, but having to pick up my bike later), but I think the good intention is to help out those who hardly every ride and will certainly be gassed after 11 miles. I’ve assisted as a pre-ride mechanic every year since we moved to Wilmington and the ride is always a good time. There are groups going at different speeds leaving between 8:30 and 9am (leave earlier the slower you ride) and the whole thing is like big city-sponsored Critical Mass with the cops controlling the intersections. Its always fun to see so many people on bikes, and plenty of people who rarely ride on the roads participate.

I’ll be at the ride starting point at 8am with a workstand and basic repair items for last minute mechanical fixes. Usually I end up repairing a couple of flat tires and mostly stand around, drink coffee, and talk. Come out if you can. Riders are asked to register, but registration is free.

Someone called recently asking for suggestions about what to do with the Cyo tailight wiring connectors if you’re not using a tailight. Unlike other dynamo headlights the tailight connectors for the Cyo are not connected to the headlight body, but attached to a few inches of wire. If you’re not using a tailight the stray wires look a little ragged.

One fix is the take a piece of heat shrink tubing and sleeve the connectors with the main headlight wire. Apply a little heat and you’re finished. The wires are tidied up and you can cut the heat shrink off with a razor to connect a tailight in the future.

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.

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.

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.

We had a beautiful, healthy baby girl born at our home during the wee hours of Wednesday morning. After catching up on some sleep and spending time with my family yesterday I’m back in the shop today.

I’m behind on adding new products to the webstore and I will try to get caught up–the new stuff includes  some very nice grocery panniers from Axiom as well as a ton of brackets for dynamo headlights. Headset spacer bell mounts are back in stock as well.

Don’t be shy about calling or placing an order on the webstore folks, we gotta ‘nother mouth to feed.