Info for latest CAE class, read on . . .

Sorry this has taken a while to get here, but now you’re here, take a look at some of the links on the right, particularly Sheldon Brown’s website, hosted by Harris Cyclery, and Park Tools, for very useful and practical help on bike repair. Also, have a look at our Flickr page for scans of The Aussie Book of Bike Repair, published by Haynes, available at newsagents, if you want the whole thing.

Tim Pallas doesn’t hate cyclists. Not really.

‘”Cycling is becoming a legitimate form of transport,” Mr Pallas said.’

Well, thanks Tim Pallas for alerting us to this salient point.  The Age reports on the Victorian Government’s latest scapegoating of cyclists for the dangerous state of roads occupied in the main by overlarge, unnecessary and dangerously driven motor vehicles.

Tim Pallas is the minister that refused to contemplate installing Copenhagen lanes on St Kilda Rd. to keep cyclists safer than they had been along this busy stretch. He also regularly rails against and promotes research about the supposed heinous practices of bunch rides in the suburbs, and anything resembling a disturbance to the motoring ‘law ‘n’ order’ that he has inherited from previous incumbents. He seems to be a hangover from the Kennett years of virtually no funding for cycling, having to be shoehorned into the mindset by his leader and other members of his party.

It seems we, as cyclists, are to be hit with a big stick if we are seen to do something wrong, even if the likelihood of this is low. Cyclists kill or seriously injure very few people by colliding with them, with the exception of two recent well publicised incidents referred to in the present article. Many more cyclists are killed by motor vehicles, (including this harrowing tale) yet the penalties issued are usually nowhere near the maximum the law allows for this.  The ramping up of penalties for cyclists, including that of:

“$284 or seven days’ prison if property is damaged by a cyclist and the rider does not immediately stop and offer assistance”

could be re-interpreted by  motorists as something to use as a legal weapon against bike riders.

Consider this scenario:

A cyclist collides with a car, the blame for the collision is unclear. A verbal exchange of frustration and vituperation ensues. The rider picks up their bike, straightens the handlebars, and rides off. The car has a small dent in the bodywork. The motorist follows the cyclist, finds out where they go, and establishes their identity. They issue legal proceedings against the cyclist. The cyclist is a student, with no money and very little legal recourse. They could go to jail.

The ‘car culture’ that many transport commentators decry: the one that generates obesity and the health problems therefrom, death by impact and death by climate change and respiratory illness, is directly opposed to the idea that ‘pack’ riding by cyclists is a legitimate use of the roads. Which it is, according to Victorian Road Law. It is epitomised by Pallas’ statement regarding Copenhagen Lanes along St Kilda Rd., that :

‘”People have a right to drive their cars, and they have a right to do it without being impeded upon … for the purposes of looking after 2000 cyclists,” Pallas said . . . referring to the number of cyclists who use St Kilda Road daily’.

Do people have a right to drive their cars? It seems that The Minister for Cars, sorry, Transport thinks so. If that’s so, I have a right to ride my bike next to someone, taking up a whole lane of traffic at whatever speed I like, up to the speed limit. If it is dangerous, and here comes the controversial bit, to conform to road infrastructure designed for the control of motor traffic, and safer in my estimation to ignore it in any given single instance whilst on my bike, then I will. I do not believe in roads being designed for the sole convenience of motor traffic, as it is such an inadequate method of moving people and things around. ‘Auto Uber Alles’ should not be law, not even in this creeping form. On the water the rule ‘Steam Gives Way to Sail’ is still extant, and so it should be on land, with all intersections giving preference to pedestrians and cyclists. Then fewer people will die, from direct and indirect causes. And that’s what we all want, except for the directors (on behalf of shareholders) of automotive-related corporations, who just want it to be easy for people to make the decision to drive their shitful products. Even when they make stuff that no-one wants to buy, and they go broke.

Memo: Please stop the long lunches, Marketing dept.

There’s a significant few Australian companies that are actually doing a competent, varying to good job of making bike stuff for us down here in Australia. Some of them are even exporting to elsewhere, and getting the idea out that Australia knows how to do bike gear. Velocity springs to mind, and Avanti (well, NZ, with Oz connections), and Netti, as well. I like Netti clothing – they do a good uncomplicated, unadorned line of functional everyday bike clothes, with some standout products, for mine – their wool undershirts and their long cold-weather knicks (hmm, not in the catalogue any more).  They balance this out with a few fairly undistinguished offerings in other areas – baggy cut in the arms of some jerseys, with patterns for upper-body garments which seem to have been sourced from other sporting disciplines, that don’t really fit cyclists.

They have a good stable of brands that they act as importer for – Scott Bikes (I own a CR1 – a great handling road bike), Brooks, Fi’zi:k and Selle Royal saddles, Fox suspension (the choice of many who know what they’re doing), Camelbak hydration packs, Dahon folding bikes. So, they know good products when they see them. In all my dealings with them, working in bike shops, they have been courteous and pleasant, and prompt with orders.

It seems this wasn’t good enough for them, this competent stolidity. I think they realised that they were the choice of the average cyclist, ordinary, boring, everyday – with their fluoro yellow hi-vis (cheap) rain jacket a byword for protective cycling gear amongst average commuter and weekend cyclists. Things needed to change, things needed to get edgy.

They’ve gone all funky retro font scrapbook mashup with the website, and started to spread the advertising  out into the mainstream media. In anticipation of Le Tour, they’ve put a footer on the front page of The Age sport section for the last week or two, which is what caught my eye vis á vis this post. Yay. But it’s the message on it that concerns me.

Basing your advertising ‘push’ around the phrase: “God created hell because he hadn’t thought up cycling yet“, with the sub-head “The pain will set you free” has a few messages I don’t think they had time to unpack at the creative conference, after spurting it out in front of everyone all over the conference room table,  in between the smorgasbord vol-au-vents and the hot tub session in the evening. Sounds edgy, sounds exciting, sounds like the ‘120% committed’, ‘feel the burn’ cranially-implosive personal trainer-manual-speak that some of the 20-something creative consultants might have brushed shoulders with on their way to the solarium.

I don’t want to cast aspersions on the theological qualifications of 20-something marketing creatives to make pronouncements on the fate of the immortal souls of people who happen to ride bikes (there’s guys in white dresses in Rome, Jerusalem and Mecca who have that in their job descriptions), nor their somewhat ambivalent relationship towards the practice of sado-masochism , but how this relates to  what has been, up until now, a somewhat dowdy, functional range of cycling wear. It’s sort of like buying your elderly aunt a set of erotic lingerie, and forcing her to engage in activities more often seen in cinematic presentations with ‘R18+’ on the front cover.  I know part of the process of shifting units, in these new, fast-paced, viral marketing times, is constantly re-inventing yourself in newer, edgier forms, but the end of this process, if you take it to its logical (or absurd) conclusion, is is selling any old tat dressed up with a brand name. Prostitution, in other words. It works for several online retailers, so why not good ol’ Auntie Netti? “Give me back the crotchless knickers, Auntie, they don’t suit you – you might get a disease”. Ooops, too late. Well, I hope it’s not going to knock you up for too long.

(Nearly all) traffic engineers actually hate cyclists, Part the Third

So, after being linked to by a quite well-read blog in the US (and seeing our pageview count skyrocket – woohoo, fame!) I can see that this issue touches some important points for (American) cyclists to feel as though their chosen mode of transport has the legs (!) to move up into the big league. I have speculated in the past about an evil, clandestine cabal of  road engineers, car manufacturers, oil producers and motoring journalist spin doctors (and their attendant political poodles) conspiring in their own version of road-use Auto Uber Alles Apartheid, which I’m finding it hard to refute at the moment, from available evidence, as we all drive ourselves into one or another climate-changed, bitumen-covered and road-tolled level of hell (there are 666 to choose from, I am told – I believe the board members of GM, Ford, Ssangyong and DaimlerChrysler have the freehold on 7 or 8 of them: just above time-share consultants and dancing bear exhibitors {themselves directly above goat fondlers and product tie-in promoters}; and directly below the PussyCat Dolls Fanclub and Richard Branson’s future abode; just down the passageway from ExxonMobil, BlackWater WorldWide (and aren’t they a happy bunch of campers on their little holiday jaunt to the shooting range {below} ?) and Royal Dutch Shell, timesharing with BP, the Cheney (below left) family and British American Tobacco, or whatever the hell they are called now). I conceive of hell as a cheap 1970s Las Vegas (very tall) multi-storey hotel, hosting a convention entitled “HOmE-WreCkerS of HisTorY ENd of the WOrld Get-TOGethEr”: dreary, timeworn and dull with the effluvia and stains of a trillion bondage sessions behind fake wood veneer doors, with the gaming room as the spiritual analogue of the world financial markets – each poker chip and coin representing a soul lost to the house.

Part of my rationale:

In order to use a public (and the increasing colonisation of this by private interests) utility (roads and the public space they occupy) to generate profit (vehicle sales, toll revenue, maintenance, road construction profits, finance, fuel and consumables production, repairs, etc.) in the best capitalist technique of privatising profits whilst socialising costs (dangerously polluted air, water and land from use and manufacture; consumption of physical space for roads, carparks and advertising; time lost in pointless traffic delays; crash remediation, medical expenses {maybe this should be put into the ‘profits’ pile?}; road safety advertisements; cost of police enforcement; destruction of community and freedom of movement in public space; distortion and perversion of personal and public spending habits), it is necessary for a societally condoned, constant, fashionable boosterist , mental junk food , (or just plain weird, although the giant reptile analogy is appropriate) spin on motoring to make it palatable. After being stuck in  traffic jams ad nauseam on their way to home from work or vice versa, and having at least one friend or relative or acquaintance maimed or killed in a motoring accident, how does the cognitive dissonance the average motorist experiences – being exhorted to believe that motoring is the highest possible and most developed method of human transport (and possibly even the most worthy form of human endeavour), via every channel (maybe not every) – work its way out? By them kicking the nearest available cat (cyclists) and shutting them out of the transport house while putting them on short rations? Domestic violence? Overcompetitiveness in trivial/occupational pursuits? I may be jumping into the driver’s seat on the hyperbolic CarBusting bandwagon here, but when exactly did Top Gear stop being harmless TV and start being a televised Nuremberg rally with jokes?

I’m only being half-flippant. The pathetic and dangerous excuses for road surfaces that cyclists have to show as the prime routes they traverse bears this out.

I ride my road bike on the ROAD to avoid the rubbish that we are mostly presented with under the title of ‘bike path’. SO, instead of being Mr. Negative Sniping Sourmouth Whingey-pants, what can I say that I would like to see?

1. Surfaces smooth enough not to make steering the average 23mm width tyre sketchy, and the ride unpleasant. Cars get this on their major thoroughfares, so why can’t we?
2. Lack of right-angled corners, moronic, dangerous and suffocating pinch-points and stupid pedestrian-style crossings of roads via cranked and transverse-guttered traffic island-type structures.
3. If this were car engineering, it would be like having speed humps, cattle grids and meanders on every intersection of major roads for cars travelling at 80-100 km/h. Life threatening. It’s as though road engineers have an idea of most cyclists on major thoroughfares as retarded primary school kids (it’s OK, I’m allowed to mention them; I used to teach them) who need protecting from their own traffic mistakes.
4. Fewer ‘Shared Paths’ as solutions to cycling thoroughfares. Conflict is inevitable. Less treatment of cyclists as two-wheeled pedestrians, and more as legitimate vehicles with 50+km/h top speeds.
5. Direct and well-graded, exclusive-use and smooth paths TO destinations. NOT meandering strips of badly-foundationed, dog-walker-traversed, tree-root-fractured bitumen. NOT creekside paths doubling as major commuter routes. NOT cop-out road crossings that send cyclists on widely circumspect detours just to avoid a few seconds inconvenience to motorists.
6. Space IN the traffic flow if the road is the best route TO somewhere, not shunted via cutely signposted meandering backroad routes twice as long, just to avoid some expense in roadwork.
7. More integrated on-road space designed for bikes travelling at all speeds. Bikes treated as though they are the most blindingly-obvious and cheap solution to the current overcrowding on busy roads, which they are.*
8. 
   
9. Integrated routes, not a stop-and-start, path-of-least-resistance approach via carparks, wetlands, highways, no marked route back to ’shared path’ or dwindling to dirt byway.
10. Design to cope with both 35+ km/h fast recreational/commuter, as well as 10km/h family meanders on the weekend – two separate routes (road lane and cycle path duplicate) if necessary.
11. The concept of the ‘cycleway’ to rival the concept of ‘freeway’ for motorised traffic.
12. Bike-only ‘Give Way’and ‘Left Turn on Red Light Permitted’ signed intersections. They are useful and would work in the right situations, such as roads with bike lanes.
13. The abandonment of the incredibly stupid ‘Cyclists Dismount’ sign as a Pontius Pilate-like washing-of-the-hands solution every time it gets a bit too hard to design something adequate, and as a prophylactic against possible insurance claim, civil suit comebacks therefrom.

The State Government of Victoria wants to make Melbourne’s roads less difficult for public transport to traverse and is installing new stops and regulations to do this – why the heck not similar engineering for bikes? They relieve congestion as much as buses or trams or trains do, but don’t get the same regard from the bureaucracy. A small start has been made on Swanston St. and St. Kilda Road (and other places), with green-painted bike lanes and some bike-specific and bike-preferential traffic signals installed. This sort of initiative needs to be rolled out across the metropolis to get bikes moving more freely and safely, both in mixed traffic and on separate routes where they intersect roads. The Federation Trail is (now, after remediation) a good example of this. Get over the autocentrism, people – the dinosaurs looked like the norm until a meteorite cooked their goose. Our meteorite-equivalent is made up of quintillions of little carbon-enriched molecules hovering above us, and the goose in the oven is no clean water nor air for anything, repeated severe bushfires and storms, mass species extinction and an end to the beach holiday. Stop using the dinosaur 6 cylinder family sedan to go 500 metres to the Milk Bar (surprised that the corner store still existed -  a relic of the non-motorised bygone age) for a single icecream in winter, and stop making it easy for the idiot I once watched do this to do it.

* If this is so, and I can’t see many reasons why it shouldn’t be (just ask the Danes or the Dutch) then why are cyclists treated with the disdain, avoidance and belittling that they currently endure by the towering public policy edifice that is VicRoads (or The Ministry for Motorised Transport as it shall henceforth be known), and nearly every other road construction utility (more like imperial bureaucracy) in the Anglo developed world? Something to do with the continual profitability of pulling black sticky toxic sludge (the only valuable qualities of which is that it will burn, and form into long chain molecules) out of the ground and spreading it around up here, and the continued positions of power and influence that those responsible for this “resource extraction” enjoy? That they seek to addict us and enslave the whole economy to the level of energy consumption that they decide is appropriate? Whyfore otherwise HumVees and Ford F250s and cute and cuddly Dodge Ram?

Why do I start to think of them as evil? Is it any wonder that hell has traditionally been envisaged as being underground? See remarks on the ‘cabal’ mentioned above.

More bikes up on the “Bikes – for You!” page

That’s all. Go and take a look! (I really will have to get our studio lighting sorted . . . )

Traffic engineers are not cyclists, Pt. II

So even though I’ve established (to my own complete, utter and irrevocable satisfaction, no further correspondence will be entered into, at all. Thankyou) that a significant proportion of dog walkers don’t really think that hard about where and why and how they exercise their democratic right to let their charges behave in an annoying and hazardous way (TdF watchers might remember seeing this – Sandy Casar hits an uncontrolled dog)

- even if they are cyclists; we maybe haven’t quite clinched the truth of high-powered family sedan-variant-driving civil engineers in the employ of road construction entities having an institutionalised, progressively-engendered and eventually ingrained animus towards any vehicle powered other than by fossil-fuel derivatives.  I present my last two points for the prosecution:

The treatment of cyclists as wheeled pedestrians. The general standard of path engineering necessary for bikes at any speed they are capable of (and in some cases that’s in excess of 40 km/h for extended periods) is nowhere near realised, let alone if there’s more than 3 of you that want to ride together. It is a rare and particular case when a bike path is graded with the equivalent quality of surface afforded to car travel on main routes. One such surface is the Federation Trail, but only after much agitation by local BUGs and Bicycle Victoria. Many paths have sudden rises and falls, turns,

uncontrolled crossings, poor, rough, deteriorated and uncambered surfaces where puddles of water collect (and hang around long) after rain. If such surfaces existed on major motor traffic routes, they would be condemned as hazardous and impediments to free movement/trade/the economy, and upgraded promptly. This poor and tolerated standard of bikepath maintenance and design probably constitutes the main barrier to turning people off cycling for more than slow speed recreation, forcing those who actually want to get somewhere at reasonable speed onto roads where motor vehicles imperil them regularly, or into their car. “Hehehehe! I have you now, my pretty, and your little dog too!” says the Wicked Witch of the Western Metropolitan Road Building Corporation to Dorothy the Cyclist, and Toto the annoying ball of fluff.

The “on-again, off-again” approach to on-road cycling facilities. Bike lanes are often installed on roads, which are even widened to accomodate them, but quite often on roads that don’t really go anywhere. There’s no need of special facilities to get people to their dispersive destinations (residential streets, parks, shops, etc.) because in low-speed, low-traffic environments bikes can make their own way safely amongst motor traffic and pedestrians. The real need, and Bicycle Victoria has been starting to push this line quite persistently (not too soon), is to accomodate cyclists on roads that actually carry  through-traffic movements, which have suffered decades of (s)carification, a situation taken by most road engineers to be the legitimate status quo. To alter them is seen as a major chore and inconvenience by road planners, and is not seen as necessary when cyclists can go along another route, even though this may take them a much longer, badly/sketchily-constructed, time-consuming and more inconvenient way around. So cycling routes are often disconnected, peter out when it gets a bit too hard, and follow seemingly arbitrary detours drawn on maps wherever they seem to fit with little reference to on-road conditions, nor fit the desires of cyclists to get from place to place – which roads were originally built to handle for all users. “That’s yer bloomin’ lot, if you don’t like it, lump it”, but said with a lot less goodwill than Peter Cundall ever does. There is even an insidious and creeping roll-back of facilities, which, after planning and inception, have chance of being used, but seem often to be isolated into segments, and then have individual segments erased by subsequent road-oriented planning. Ride the on-road Docklands Boulevard lanes (or what remains of them that haven’t been turned into taxi-stands and impromptu car parks), or look for the scrubbed-out bike symbols on Latrobe St. for examples of this.

So, what seems an obvious point – surely, seeing that bikes are a more difficult (in terms of effort required) method of transport to accelerate and keep moving, and take longer to cover a given distance (if congestion is not taken into account) that roads and paths should be built to make this as easy and rapid as possible, so that cycling becomes 1) easy to get good at, 2) pleasant to do regularly and 3) efficient in terms of time and effort expended for distance travelled.  How much effort is required to put a little more pressure on a car’s accelerator to gain speed, vs. how much effort is required to accelerate from a standstill at a traffic light on a bike? Tell me why we have an obesity epidemic, again? Why do we have climate change? Road surfaces for motor traffic are often much smoother than those built for bikes, even though bikes have much greater need of smooth surfaces to maintain a good average speed efficiently and comfortably than cars do. “To those that have (quality surfaces and expenditure on facilitating movement) much, more shall be given, to those that have little, it shall be taken away”.

Road planners have argued this, in my hearing, by saying “There’s not enough bike traffic to justify better design or more investment”, to which I replied, after choking down the words “Smug, s&%$headed chump, you self-satisfied, chubby-arsed apologist for the status quo”, “There never will be unless you get out of your two-tonne hobbyhorse and actually look where your little motoring obsession is driving us”, or at least wished I had, or maybe that was his point. He didn’t ever want there to be enough bike traffic to require any more than his cursory atttention. Chickens, eggs, chickens, eggs . . . new roads generate new motor traffic, so why not bike lanes . . . ? But why? What was/is he/they scared of? Getting their flabby arses laughed at? Actually expending some of that excess energy they consume?

I think I ended up spiking his drink, waiting ’til he was leaning comatose against the potted palm, leading him out the back and chucking him in the kitchen dumpster with the smelly, bulk tubs of old pasta sauce and 3 day old fish heads. That’d be some hangover.

All these small areas of neglect, the disconnected and discontinous nature of specific bike infrastructure, the designing of roads away from general transport use and specifically toward private vehicle use – the token attempts to ameliorate this that underline cyclists as second-class transport users, all these serve to discourage novice cyclists, and annoy, anger and endanger more experienced ones. It seems, from a more dispassionate viewpoint, that roads are built primarily for the enrichment of those in the car industry, which entraps the general population into a viewpoint and a contingent way of life that treats cars as the norm, the best possible of all possible means of transport, and that the world should be designed around them.

Well, BullShit. WIth a capital B. Capital S.

Private motor vehicles are the product of a coalescence of opinion centred around a particular world view. By their nature, they reflect values that are selfish, greedy, inconsiderate, brutal, shallow and destructive. Robber baronetcy writ large and modern, if you like. They appear to represent power without responsibility, travel(close to the French travail: ‘work’) without effort, style and wisdom by the possession of a high-priced, disposable and entropically-vulnerable artefact, and foster the perverted idea of distance measured in time taken to traverse it at maximum motorised speed, rather than units of distance. They have the erroneous and much propagandized idea of personal freedom attached to them. Costing on average $120/wk to buy, own and run, not counting the time spent idling in traffic – how free does that make you? They punish inattention suddenly, swiftly and catastrophically, they maim and murder indiscriminately, they shackle financially, they poison slowly and irritate and eventually enrage with their inefficiency. I’m sure being stuck repeatedly in traffic does bad things to your brain, and rewires your neurons to favour aggression and one-upmanship. Andre Gorz had a lot to say about this in his essay: The Social Ideology of the Motor Car. Whilst our society is held hostage by the dictates of the motor industry and its siren song, other forms of transport are held in necessary subjugation to it. Trams and trains struggle to gain the funding they need to remain viable solutions to transportation needs (after being bought up and destroyed in the 1940s and 50s in many major cities – by, you guessed it, front organisations for oil companies and the motor industry), and us cyclists are literally in a losing battle to the death (how many times has a motorist been killed by a cyclist? Do I need more than one hand to count?) with it. Economists (apologists for right-wing attitudes, in the main) will argue that motor transport is absolutely vital to welfare of modern societies – ecologists would argue that modern societies will not know true welfare, in an integrated, broad , significant manner, until we stop designing our built environment for cars first, people an ill-thought-out and distant second, and everything else back round the last corner third.

And that’s not even getting into the machinations of multinational companies involved in this gigantic ball and chain around our collective ankles. Nor the toxic residues it leaves, indirectly, and directly.

Before you jump down my throat for being an anti-motoring, tyre-spiking, duco-scratching, Critical Mass attending hemp-wearing eco-fascist,  I own a car. I drive it on average twice a week for about 70km, the remainder of my trips being by bike. I cart tools and parts and supplies in my little 13 year old station wagon – I often joke that if I didn’t fix and race bikes,  I wouldn’t need it. I’ve been without a car for big chunks of time – the only pressure I felt was that I couldn’t cart heavy things easily, and that friends more than 25km away were a bit harder to get to. I hate driving in rush hour – seeing millions of dollars worth of vehicle and billions of dollars worth of road choked to an angry standstill by the stupid and irrational desire to pretend everyone else isn’t there, or their journey isn’t important (hello the average car commercial – do you ever see those pristine examples of motoring nirvana in a traffic jam?), and that we can get where we want, when we want, in complete and insulated comfort. I know many kind, intelligent and lovely people who own cars, but I don’t know any such who think that it is God’s gift to man, unlike the average 20-odd year old male. This demographic has always been the ripest fodder for any propagandistic campaign to co-opt them to the greater glory, the young male has the arrogance and temerity (and the flipside, deep doubt about his life course and self-worth) enough to champion any cause, this time it’s a cool motorised suit of armour and the glamour game surrounding it – thankyou, you overgrown schoolboys Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. 700 years ago you would be comparing suits of armour. Oh, you think you’re amusing? About as amusing as pulling the wings of butterflies, which I suppose you started off doing, and still do, remotely, and by proxy.

Assorted Weirdnesses of the Week

This . . .

So it’s absolutely true that the Chinese media is not censored during the games

and this:

German police seize teens’ motorized office chair

3 hours ago

BERLIN (AP) — German police have confiscated what may be the world’s fastest office chair. Police say officers happened on the contraption — the work of two inventive 17-year-olds — in the western town of Gross-Zimmern on Saturday.

The pair had added a lawnmower engine, bicycle brakes and a metal frame to the revolving chair — making into a go-kart-like vehicle.

Police said in a statement Monday the inventors insisted they had only tested it over a few meters, but witnesses reported seeing it on several streets.

They are being investigated over a variety of possible offenses, including defying insurance regulations, driving without a license and violating registration requirements.

Police did not say what top speed the chair could reach.

Maybe that’s why Germany is the home of Porsche and BMW and Mercedes-Benz – you’ve got all these frustrated teenage engineers starting out by hotting up office chairs. Or maybe they go on to work for Storck, or Kettler, making uber-precision fahrrad

Traffic Engineers are not cyclists – prove me wrong!

As I cycle around this city in my daily round, attempting not to be hit by cars and trucks, other cyclists and not run over dog-walkers’ erratic dogs, I wonder about the flat surfaces we have at our disposal for our bikes to roll on (unless, of course, we go actively seeking muddy, bumpy tracks to bash our mountain/cyclocross bikes along), and people and vehicles we share them with, and how these people choose or are forced to think and behave by what they are doing when I encounter them.  A lot of the time I am on roads with cars and trucks and buses and 4WDs (the last, in the city, should be banned and forced to be garaged in the very outer suburbs – sez me):

Oh yes, bogan utes as well.

As well as having to dodge people with malicious intent (well, at least uncaring enough to make it look as though they’re malicious) including the brain-dead, vicious, unthinking morons who drive vehicles such as those above, you have to deal with people who really aren’t aware enough of their surroundings to be entrusted with a tonne and a bit of metal moving at 60+ km/h, and that’s most of us drivers, some of the time -  a small, dangerous minority: some of us, most of the time.  At the same time, the average driver is having to deal with road situations that are not easy to decipher, which are under the constant stress of having to take more and more traffic, and each individual in the traffic mix having to deal with greater levels of conflicting stimuli than the human brain can safely and comfortably handle for 100% of the time they are behind the wheel. Then cyclists are thrown in the mix, and quite honestly, for them, it’s like them swimming near schools of predatory fish. Most of the time you are watchfully co-existent with them, then CHOMP, suddenly one will take a bite out of you. It’s just what they do, they can’t help it, it’s in their nature.

So, in order for us slow-swimming minnows to not have to be on edge and constant, mentally-draining alert for being chomped all the time, under prompting from concerned cyclists and their representative bodies making representation to local and state governments, traffic engineering takes place. Perhaps a lane demarked alongside a lane of motor traffic with a bike symbol in it, perhaps a development of this (’Copenhagen’ lanes). Perhaps more emphatic – the provision of a completely separate track – the average shared path or bike path to one side of a road or, less effectively, a watercourse.  Or the conversion of a rail bed to a rail trail for a different sort of, but still direct, point-to-point route.

The problem (or the linked series of problems) is that those who research, design and implement solutions for the vulnerability of cyclists within increasingly frenetic ordinary road situations, are not themselves cyclists, in the main, or if they are, their voices are drowned out by those of their colleagues who see road transport as legitimately being of the motorised variety. So instead of a “different but equal” approach to constructing specific road surfaces for bikes, as you often have in the more bike-friendly European cities, or making spaces that acknowledge bikes are actually going to be in there with the rest  of the vehicles, it is a view of “odd, difficult but vociferous (so we’d better do something just to shut them up)”, the “something” often approaching ‘token/barely adequate (under sufferance)’ in its ability to address the problems that cyclists encounter in what road planners are touting as ‘normal’ traffic conditions. Whilst creekside paths are pleasant meanders on fine days with the kids, as commuter routes they are largely tedious and stupid. These winding byways are seriously seen as major arteries in the “Principal Bicycle Network” (PBN) that is meant to be the framework of a serious bike commuter strategy for Melbourne. It’s a little risible, when you compare it to other cycling cities around the globe.

Organisations such as Bicycle Victoria attempt to advocate solutions for bike travel amongst and besides motor traffic, and certain segments of local government can also be seen advocating the (political, environmental, social) wisdom of cycling. The state and national governments seem largely to be beholden to more powerful interests, with the grudging exception of VicRoads, or the Ministry for Motor Transport, as they are known to non-car users. Status quo is a powerful thing, and there is evidence of decades of bikes being seen (at the incitement of VicRoads, motoring organisations, multinational car companies and petrol-head culture in general) as Aboriginies once were: an anachronism that should be allowed to die out (or be scared or killed off) under the superior force and morality of Modern Fossil Fuel-Powered Western Industrial Society, or maybe just suffered to exist, cringingly, at the margins. It changes slowly, and haltingly – even when the increasing evidence for contrary action is slapping the status quo sharply in the face.

“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim” is a useful maxim to apply to motor transport. In the quest to move people and goods around efficiently and effectively (or maybe just to keep them occupied? Perhaps Magnus Mills in The Scheme for Full Employment had it right), massive, expensive, polluting and space-hungry road projects are imagined as being needed to increase transport capacity every 10 years or so, but traffic and the congestion attendant on it continue to grow in parallel with increased car sales. You get supposedly liberal and city-savvy (and inner-suburb dwelling!) commentators such as Shaun Carney coming up with a “Like it or Lump it” apologia (and the justified replies that it generated) that they should know better than to advocate.  It is now estimated that 40% or Melbourne’s land area is devoted to motor traffic, and the city spreads to the reach of the motorised commute across valuable farm land and creates ‘car-sized suburbs’ with little opportunity for fostering ad hoc, ‘over the back fence’ social connection, which has glued together social groups for millenia. Bike traffic engineering sits here, in small gaps allowed it by the free/tollway-building impetus, a path alongside a major road project engineered for the different demands of motorised transport – not direct between place and place (if there are actually any places besides shopping centre and each person’s home any more, in the outer suburbs), not even pleasant, with the roar and backwash of truck traffic removing any sense of safety.

So, in my little backyard, is a whacking great big road project, with a bike lane tacked to the side: the Dynon Port Rail Link Project.

This is a double road bridge over a projected rail line realignment and duplication into the dock area alongside Footscray Rd, with an elevated T junction carrying B-Double trucks thrown in for good measure. “Tacked on” is how the path feels – it is built on the outbound bridge, and separated by a dividing wall from the road traffic, not integrated into both inbound and outbound lanes. The majority of it is sensible engineering, but there are some significant bits (pictured above – thanks to BV for pics) that show that the road engineers still don’t get cycling, or the fact that one day it will need to be a lot more than a small afterthought in transport policy (”if you build it, they will come”), and it’s these unthought-about and unrealised bits that cause chaos and concern by those who expect a straightforward ride from a brand-new, purpose-designed path.

The relevant person from Bicycle Victoria sent me this link to their relevant web page on which there are some pretty good points illustrating the above. They’re right, I just don’t get it. A sharp right angle turn at the bottom of the bridge ramp, and a potentially homicidal crossing of a busy slip lane are glaring faults in what is ostensibly a model project. Which begs the question – which is more important: the well-being of 700-and-something cyclists travelling each day to and from the city along the major artery available, or trucks having to slow down a fraction, delaying ever so slightly their monumental quest to fill yet more corners of the world with plastic Chinese junk packed in big metal boxes? I sympathise with the Blue Wedges campaigners regarding the Port Phillip Bay Channel deepening project – pushing a doctrinaire pro-trade/business line via ‘business at all costs’ really is just about an ultimately trivial GNP/Balance of Payments paperchase flying in the face of encroaching reality and trumping the liveability of where we actually live. The opportunity is there to create something really good – for us, for the planet, but it is stymied/crippled at the last moment in the details by careless, bureaucratic malevolence/incompetence (at a distance, they’re impossible to separate). I don’t deny the necessity of trade, nor that the port is an important part of Melbourne, but the almost fascist zeal that is being applied to its operation is not thinking at all far into the future. In 50 years, there will be a whole lot more bikes, and a whole lot fewer (and a whole lot slower, and smaller) diesel-powered ships (a lot more with sails, I’ll guess) and trucks making use of these billions of dollars of infrastructure. But not if the current pack of road designers have their way – they’ll hold out ’til the last litre of petroleum has been burnt before they admit that they’re barking up an overstressed and dying tree. Why do I, once in a while, get the feeling I’m a character in Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax? (I liked the book better). Maybe (and I’m going off into my own private little hyperbole here, a little) the irritation we feel in being literally marginalized and pooh-poohed, in instances such as this and many more, is a result of some frustrated road engineer’s petty professional Parthian shot. Bitter and twisted that fossil fuel did in fact not have the power to transport us to Nirvana, he rues the fact that his long-desired SS Commodore will, in fact, lie rusting in perpetuity next to his Subaru Tribeca in his double garage in Narre Warren. Alternatively, he could go out in a blaze of glory, like  John Osborne’s rivals in Nevil Shute’s On The Beach (or Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men )  – with climate change, water resources literally drying up, storm surges filling up beachfront underground garages, and ongoing environmental and social displacement of refugees fleeing to stable democracies, making our times feel eerily like this great book and/or film  – and leave us to ourselves with the job of actually getting on with moving ourselves round effectively.

More CAE notes are up

There are some more notes on Flickr for all you CAEers. Read, Learn and Inwardly Digest, as my High School Science teacher used to say.

B.S.O.s – fear and loathing in the chain store . . .

I’m sure I’ve vociferated about this in the past, but I’m impelled to do so again by the task we set ourselves yesterday – to rid our little BAC corner of the universe of B.S.O.s.

No, there are not multiple Symphony Orchestras from Baltimore, Berlin, Brussels and Balmain encamped on our back step, cadging the odd biscuit and seat bolt from passing BACcers. Would that we had such culture on tap. We have to make do with the radio  – which, it must be said, only accepts waves from the (sniff!) better class of station: 3RRR, 3PBS, 3ABC, Radio 621 KHz (Radio National) and, in extremis, JJJ. It turns out that I am the original radio fascist, and will not allow the corruption of decadent capitalism via their running-dog emissaries, the advertising agencies, to harsh our bike-mending mellow. Thus spake Bikeathustra.

Anyhoo, B.S.O.s – Bicycle Shaped Objects. We have a steady trickle of these things (the ones that have survived rust and teenage enthusiasm) being donated, so we hold our nose, control the gag reflex, say thankyou as politely as possible, then hurl (over) them violently on the pile out the back. At appropriate junctures, as we did yesterday, such as when we get a critical mass (ooze?) of them and they threaten to contaminate the rest of our bike stockpile with their stupidness, we pull them apart and strip them (a small, gratuituous frisson of creative and perverse defilement sometimes results) for the 20% of re-usable parts on them, then consign the rest to the outer darkness – the SimsMetal recycling pile (If they have only lightly-worn Shimano SIS shifters, derailleurs and cluster, we save these to make hybrids out of old gents 10 speeds).  But what is it about the remainder of them that excites my ire? Surely they all conform to AS/NZS 1927:1998 – the relevant Australian Standard for bicycles? Yes, an initial test sample does, but what of the loosely policed (you’d better believe it – it’s almost non-existent) quality of the remainder, as standards and tolerances of production and assembly steadily slip over the model’s lifecycle?

First, they are sold by chain stores. Most reputable bike shops refuse to stock them. You don’t buy a reliable watch or (usually) a camera from a supermarket, so why buy a similar high-tech item which may need repair from a mass marketeer? (Mass marketers have no bike service worthy of the name – no interested, competent bike mechanic wants anything to do with them because no matter how competent a job you do on them, they will boomering back with yet another material failure problem);

Surprise surprise! I do a Google search for an image of one of them, the Huffy Gila (Monster), and, at the top of the search ranking, this pops up. Go figure. It’s not the first: the first edition of the BV free bikes also suffered from this, amongst several others.

This is a Huffy Ignite. One of a slew of such bikes from the likes of Dunlop, Kent, Repco, Malvern Star (how times have changed for this marque, although they maybe, just might have got their mojo back), Progear, Northern Star, Royce Union, Mosban, Random 4 Digit Number Followed (And/Or Preceded) By A Letter, e.g. F8270A (”R4DNF(A/OP)BAL” ! – why didn’t I think of that as a bike name?), and notorious others. It’s a low-res image, granted, but you wouldn’t want to get any closer, due to the toxic fumes outgassing from the cheap plastic and rubber it is equipped with, giving it a particular, unique, and very noticeable smell. Thousands of Chinese bike industry workers get respiratory illnesses because of this, and countless others like it. Ironic ‘Hooray’.

It’s (ostensibly) a dual suspension bike. The front and back wheels are meant to go up and down in response to changes in terrain. This technology is under constant and revolutionary development at the leading edge of the racing development part of the competition bit of our chosen means of transport. However, the only product development that has occured to bring this particular model (and many, many others like it) of bike about is for an underpaid (and presumably completely career-constipated and mentally undestimulated) engineer to stare at a similarly low-res image of a 10 year old version of, for example, a Specialized Dual Suspension bike, such as this one:

. . . for approximately 5 minutes and copy it, with the overriding imperative of lowest-cost production. The price differential is in the order of $5350 between the real, and the copy. It’s sort of like buying a Rolex from Thailand. Why not buy a Swatch?  Swatchs work, are reliable, and have a certain dag style.

We have quite a few (metaphorical) reconditioned Swatches in stock. The reasons we do not try to repair the Thai Rolexes are these:

1. They weigh in excess of 15kg, and sometimes 20kg each. This is usable when you are an over-excited 13 y.o. with lots of calories to burn and prone to jumping flights of steps and picnic tables (however, see 3 below), but pathetic, slow and sad when you just want to get from A to B in a reasonable timeframe and with a fair degree of non-sweaty composure.
2. The accurate description of the  ’suspension’ that these bikes are equipped with should be: ’significant-weight-penalty-adding, durability-countering and massive-reduction-of-pedalling-efficiency mechanism’. The bike it is copied from is made for one thing only: pedalling downhill and over jumps at speed by fit, rich teen/twentysomethings.
3. The durability of the materials they are made from is low, when subject to such sudden shocks. Sudden failure of bars, fork, stem, cranks, rear shock, spokes and rims are not at all unknown. This may put the ongoing well-being of the said over-excited teenager in jeopardy, and in need of paid-up health insurance.
4. They mainly have steel rims and flimsy brakes (flexy, plastic levers and pressed-steel brake caliper arms) – a recipe for disaster in the wet, with very low stopping power. Or, increasingly, ever so slightly better disc brakes on the front wheel, which, frustratingly, are impossible to adjust so that they don’t rub on the disc, adding watts to the total needed to keep them moving. Steel rims, paradoxically, are weaker than aluminium rims, and once bent are bent, much more often, for ever.
5. As such, they are hard to keep in good repair. Wheel bearings fail sooner rather than later, necessitating the replacement of an axle, or the whole wheel. Unless you keep an eye on the bottom bracket bearings, they come loose, and wear out quickly, or the cranks come loose and fall off, destroying themselves in the process. Cheap gears and brakes are constantly coming out of adjustment, cheap brake pads wear quickly and refuse to stay put, and control cables rust, fray and stick, stopping things working.
6. They run hard up against the Bontrager Dictum: “Cheap, Light, Durable – Choose any two”. They are cheap. They are not light. But neither are they very durable, except under ideal circumstances.
7. ‘Ideal circumstances’ for these bikes are: a meticulous, detailed and remedial-of-the-mediocre-factory-build-quality assembly by a (understandably highly disgruntled) skilled bike mechanic – rarely, if ever encountered; 15km/h average or lower sedate, controlled riding; along smooth, flat bike paths on sunny days, by experienced riders of 70kg or less. The combination of the above qualities is never encountered in the real world, so in actuality, such bikes are destined to fail in less than 18 months under anything approaching normal usage for things real bikes are designed for, such as riding to work or school, or for a fun blast on the weekend.
8. They hint at being able to perform feats that they actually can’t, not even if Cadel Evans nor Nathan Rennie were riding them. They might look like a bike that can get 6′ of air off NorthShore ramps and berms, but like they say, it’s not the fall that kills, it’s the landing. So effectively, the bike designers and makers are lying to those that might be looking to do so, or even aforementioned teenagers that vaguely aspire to such feats of derring-do, and their distracted parents who just want to get them out of their hair for a little while, by buying them something, anything they might want.
9. As such, they are seen and justified as a ‘good first bike’. A taster, to see if the person will like riding. No big loss if they don’t. No big loss? Are you sure? What about one more person lost to cycling, as . . .
10. . . . disillusionment ensues in the majority of cases – the rider gradually realising that such an item fails to live up to something . . . better? More pleasant? Easier? Faster, like the people zooming past them with smiles on their faces? Inklings start that the ‘bicycle’ they thought they were riding is actually a bike placebo, or cycling-Spakfilla for the place a real bike should go, but with no therapeutic and very little practical use. It takes/takes up the place in their lives where a functional bike could be, fails to perform and/or satisfy, and then tends to prejudice them against bikes thereafter: “Tried it once – it was hard and hurt! Don’t like it!”. It lies rusting in the garage (and man, does that cheap chrome and black paint rust right up super-quick in the bayside suburbs!) until it goes to the tip, or to us.
11. They are prevented from buying another bike by the knowledge that they have a ‘bike’ already, even though they don’t ride it.
12. Consequently, you may even call them an Anti-Bike. An object that actually stops people from cycling. Much like the Anti-Christ is told of stopping people living happy and fulfilled and good lives.
13. Thus, they are actually evil. Q.E.D.

I think, and have said so, ad nauseum almost, that the bike industry in Australia, and also North America, suffers from (and allows to happen!) this phenomenon of disposable fashion-bikes (25-30 years ago it was the 10 speed racer – marginally more functional) somewhat disproportionately, when compared with, say Europe. Europe has a greater appreciation of bikes as an everyday artefact that most people use, for many different purposes, whereas in their erstwhile colonies, bikes have, over the last 40 years, become an inconsequential plaything to most people. They are, despite the rise of the hybrid,  still either a high-priced novelty, such as the carbon-fibre road or lightweight XC mountain bike, the 6″ travel dual-suspension bike (the real one, not the Thai Rolex), or this low-priced ghetto, where kids and those with no money cringe and grovel for a small slice of the transport cake. This end of the market is filled with (low-quality) steel bikes that are actually nowhere near as functional and reliable as the trusty old Malvern Star that grandad rode – handed down and ridden into eventual, hard-fought-against decrepitude by successive generations – by being nowhere near as simple, nor nowhere near as robust in its materials, design nor manufacture, despite its design aping something more advanced.

So, I’d rather send these to be made into tin cans, and concentrate on something lighter, daggier, more functional and more pleasant to ride than these dim and turgid gestures towards style over substance.

BTW, this doesn’t get the hard-tailed cheapo MTBs that chain stores sell, nor their hybrid-knockoff cousins, completely off the hook either. They are slightly more functional, but only marginally more reliable. Second-hand from us will always be better than anything from K-(deleted) or Big (deleted) or (deleted), no bullseye there. Most of the above applies to them as well. On the rare occasions I venture into K-(deleted) for some seeds for the garden, for instance, I drift past the bike rack, in a sort of car-crash attentive horror, and am saddened by people seriously weighing up the relative merits of one such pile of (deleted) over the other. Unfortunately, they make up a large proportion of the people who buy the million-plus bikes sold in Australia each year. They’re being seriously duped by colourful paint jobs and lookalike cheap pricing, and I don’t want them to be.

I’ll give a prize to the person who comes up with the best idea to knock this stupid trend of B.S. pretend bikes on the head. Free bike service, anyone?