Commuter bike industry is stuck in a rut
Trevor Lautens
Special To North Shore News
Friday, May 23, 2008
Disagree as you will, I consider the current bicycle industry to be a con job with willing, in fact eagerly complicit, victims.
Ponder: Would you buy a car without headlights or taillights? Without a horn or fenders? That forced you to hunch over with neck at a painful angle and restricted your vision (like an MGTF with top up, as I can testify)?
And how about if you braked fairly abruptly at a stoplight and had to start in top gear? Try that on the highest-torque motor vehicle on the road.
The above describes almost all shiny new bicycles these days. Often invisible in the dark (very few have the required lights), silent (horns or bells aren't mandatory in British Columbia) if danger looms -- like the infamous opening of a driver's-side car door -- and guaranteed to send a fine spray of muddy water on the rider from the fenderless wheels on wet days, of which this area has a plenitude.
How can the bicycle make any claim to effective transportation? How can it expect to expand its tiny but oh-so-politically-correct base?
It passeth all under-standing, and exposes (as if needed) the lie-through-their-teeth concern for taxpayers' dollars that Mayor Sweetbody and Coun. Heartychops so touchingly express at expedient moments, that Vancouver city council would consider for a nanosecond a $63-million Visigothic attack on Burrard Bridge, one of that thrown-up city's few architectural delicacies, to accommodate the 1.4 per cent of persons who use bicycles to go to work.
How that figure is arrived at -- whether, for instance, it's seasonally adjusted to take in the rain, cold, sunlight-deprived slippery seasons, or indeed summer's exhausting heat on the back -- is as much a mystery as the government's seasonally adjusted figures on unemployment.
As for "if they build it, they will come," such a ham-handed mauling of the bridge wouldn't raise the metropolitan figure by one percentage point, because my pulled-out-of-thin-air statistic is that 93.7 per cent of the populace is automatically disqualified from even considering cycling to and from work: too young, too old, too fat, too sick, too feeble, too lame, too vertically challenged -- we have "tiny" hills drivers don't even notice -- or too terrified.
But, wow, would it ever make the young professionals and the heirs of hippydom in Kitsilano, where I lived when the original cast was afoot, beam green! Take that, global warming!
If the bicycle has any chance of swelling its daily adherents to, say, anywhere near 10 per cent, its manufacturers would have to build transportation-oriented bicycles. Not the unfriendly designs that hugely dominate the market.
But then bicycle zealots -- experts in inflicting demos on pressure points like Lions Gate Bridge -- would have to put their brains in gear, drop the bicycle as a show-off vehicle for wannabe Tour de France fantasists (and as a substitute for working in the garden or painting the living room, exercise that is actually useful and accomplishes something), and demand sensible, safe bicycles designed for real-life transportation.
Let's look at the present state of bicycledom, first putting aside the mountain bike -- expressly designed to erode nature's fragile slopes.
Consider, as a prime example of the inanity, bicycle gears.
What follows will induce sleep among most mortals and is too technologically simplistic for the knowledgeable, but here it is.
Almost all adult bicycles have between 21 and 27 gears. That many gears is ridiculous -- nothing but a marketing tool.
A 27-speed has three toothed rings connected to the crank and pedals, and nine connected to the rear wheels (thus 3x9=27). Each is activated by a lever on the handlebars. Move the lever, and the chain is flipped from one ring to another. These are called derailleur gears: Essentially, three ranges (low, middle and top) of nine gears each. An unpleasant noise and sudden loss of transmission power is felt if the flipped chain falls between the toothed rings.
Now, this isn't rocket science: The difference between, for example, fifth gear in the low range and sixth gear in the middle range is infinitesimal. Some such are identical. Current high-performance sports cars are moving into six speeds, and that's plenty. So why 27 on a bicycle? How many minuscule, virtually undetectable gear gradations do you need?
But apparently the more gears, the greater the cachet, the smugger the spandex-clad rider, the more Porsche-owner-like the disdain for lesser breeds.
My bias? Briefly, I own four bicycles. Newest is a circa 1970 Peugeot nine-speed with "racing" handlebars but full fenders and factory headlight and taillight. A rare and then-innovative 1965 Moulton. Two British Raleigh types with raised handlebars providing fine vision, frictionless hub-mounted generator for lights, and three-speed Sturmey-Archer hub gears -- which, on my Humber of long ago, proved totally unbreakable in 17,000 miles (27,000 clicks) of use. That many miles? Not worth explaining.
I last cycled, six miles each way, to work aged 50. Acquiring dogs and a house in West Van ended that stimulation. That, and encroaching years. The bicycles and I age. The love remains.
Yes, advances like much-improved brakes are welcome. There is some marginal choice, such as classic Dutch imports and intriguing electric-assisted ones (check Electric Coast Urban Vehicle Co. on East Esplanade in North Vancouver). But, overwhelmingly, the bicycle status quo is in a deep, dumb rut.
© North Shore News 2008
Bike to Work Week Downer: "Commuter bike industry is stuck in a rut"
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