Bicycle. . .

[ihcoyc]

I gave up my bicycle back in the late 1970s. Getting a drivers license had a lot to do with it. The fact that my bike — an old orange chopper bike, with monkey bars, a banana seat, a sissy bar, and a small front wheel — was getting quite worn out had something to do with it. I replaced it for a while with a green racing style bike, which I hated to ride. Those were the kinds of bikes that were being sold in the early 1980s.

Bicycles went downhill during those years: they ceased to be conveyances, and turned into sporting goods. There was no place to put a basket on those 1980s bikes. They had complicated and fragile derailer gears. They had anal probes where the seat was supposed to be. Worse, they had straight handlebars, or bars that curved down, forcing the rider to ride in a hunched over position. They were ridden by people wearing lycra and Devo helmets. You couldn't ride one of these things to work.

I got a bicycle at a yard sale: an aluminum Chinese model, with upright handlebars and a wide seat, coaster brakes and no gears. Started riding it again. It amazes me how many places are uphill, and i never noticed. ut this bicycle seems practical enough to actually be useful; the Chinese of all people ought to know how to build a practical bicycle for use as a conveyance rather than as part of some sort of competitive health regimen.

Comments

Re: rant

[ihcoyc.livejournal.com]

The "Pashley Princess" looks a lot like the Volvo bicycles they had in Sweden back in the mid 1970s when I was there over the summer. Those bikes were heavy as anvils, but had almost zero friction internally; once you got them started you had to make an effort to stop them. Lots of people rode them everywhere. Of course, being the "Old Country," people tended to build up rather than out, and the range of places you could get to on a bicycle was larger there than here. It was practical there for many people to go everywhere they needed to go by bicycle or by train.

That fortunately is going to change here. This, I guarantee. No more of the classic NIMBY suburban planning and zoning, designed to "preserve property values" by keeping stuff AWAY from our huge lawns and yards. People are going to have to get used to the convenience of retail businesses on the same streets as residences, rather than segregated on development strips.