The race that stops a nation has stopped us, and tomorrow I need the time off more than I need the money, so BAC Bikes will succumb to the pressure of the venality of the track and not be open. Be closed, in fact. We’ll be back on Friday arvo for bikes – that urban-friendly form of transport that doesn’t leave smelly piles of poop scattered around the street (when it’s dry it goes really well on the garden – can you see that happening in our city streets? Maybe when the oil runs out and just before we choke on 400ppm of CO2).

I’m just wondering – now that horses are consigned to the fringes of transport (sadly, maybe), why the heck is there so much attention focussed on the racing thing? There’s not much to be gained by breeding them to go faster anymore, apart from making a few corrupt men even more wealthy. What about bike racing – something that would actually help make our cycling population safer by teaching them advanced riding skills and helping to stop them from wobbling hazardously through motor traffic on poorly controlled and maintained bikes? Keirin racing in Japan is much better regulated than horse racing here.

. . . for those of us who haven’t been riding through winter (for whatever reason – just to get around, to keep on with the racing thing, et c.). There’s been Ride to Work day, Round the Bay in a Day (both BV efforts) some interesting races (Herald Sun Tour and its finale in Lygon St.) and very soon the Melbourne to Warrnambool. So no excuse – all the examples in the world to draw from, and the weather is getting better. The last two weekends have been great (ok, yesterday was a bit damp in the morning), the magpies have bred and are no longer defending their territories (which is nice, for them) and the mornings and evenings are both light enough not to feel like you are doing something slightly nefarious by going for a ride before or after your daily tasks.

There’s a bit of a shake-out going on down at BAC Bikes (even Mel Cranenbergh from The Big Issue has noticed it in her latest ‘Ointment’ piece) and we are seeing more and more bike servicing going on in the shed,  from returning customers, on either bikes we have sold them, or their own – recommended by family and friends. We get this because we are competent and accountable in what we do, and we do not hide behind the workshop door when bikes are booked in or given back (we don’t really have one – except to keep the wind and leaves out). I think there is a move towards this amongst a newer type of bike shop – Humanpowered and Commuter Cycles do the same thing. The mechanic has to be able (and most of us are) to communicate in language that is understandable to you the customer – and not just land a large, incomprehensible and poorly explained repair bill in your lap with little consultation. When you bring the bike in, we will attempt to examine, discuss and explain clearly to you the faults your bike has, and organise them in order of seriousness and necessity of fixing with you while you’re there. Our rule of thumb is that anything over $20 more than we have estimated and agreed with you on when booking it in we will call you and confirm that this is ok before proceeding. This saves hassle and embarrassment on all parts when you pick up your bike. We also offer an informal guarantee for BAC Bikes and bikes we service – if what we have done doesn’t work, we will fix it for you, or if it’s a BAC Bike, give you a new one if it’s unfixable. We can lend you a bike if we have to keep yours for longer than a day or two.

So, if your bike needs a tweak or an overhaul, we can do it for you. Our labour rates are $45 an hour, which is a little less than many shops – but we have factors in our favour that allow us to charge this. We charge on a time basis, and don’t take the rated $25 that the repair schedule states for a gear adjustment that actually takes 2 minutes. Hmm, that’d be . . . let’s see . . .  a discretionary donation to the biscuit fund. Less than 5 minutes we don’t usually charge for, especially if you are on a benefit or pension.

Pop in on Monday, Tuesday or Friday arvo and ask for an estimate on a nagging clunk or a rattle – it may be a 5 minute job that’ll save you $$$ in a month or so.

So, this Cadel Evans guy. Is he finally glad that he’s won something? Will he stop complaining about the bad luck and ‘not quite thereness’  that seems to have dogged him throughout his professional road racing career? He’s come close quite a few times, and now he can put the silverware in the case. Good on him. The monkey on his back is less of a gorilla, and more macaque-sized now. He won’t have finished his career with no big win to show for it, and may even convince himself  that there’s enough spunk in the tank for a Grand Tour GC win. Or maybe a climber’s jersey. We shall see.

Ah, Magda. No sooner than you have finished being victimised by Mr. Sandilands (is he back in his coffin with a stake through his heart yet?), you are out there advocating the car-dooring of cyclists because they get in the way of your drive to the gym. There’s something wrong with that. I’m glad that you have gone all contrite and decided that you should ride to work on Ride to Work Day to dispel the myth that you are actually an evil, murderous harpy who hates people who do something useful to lose weight and make the world a safer place to get around in. Both Robbie McEwen and Michael Rogers had a go via Twitter – all three champion roadies, including Mr. Evans, have used Beach Rd. as a training route at some stage in their careers. So

This is the only reason I can think of for the nonsensical ban on cycling in the gardens, and its current reinforcement by heavy-handed policing – Carlton, Treasury, Flagstaff and Fitzroy. Easily spooked and prone to fits of the vapours, I suspect that they may have only recently stopped referring to these naughty two-wheelers as ’scorchers’ – slang popular in the 1890s to describe and deride cyclists who spooked horses.

Consider:

Each of these gardens have diagonal paths from corner to corner, out of the traffic, and a calm spot in one’s daily commute. Why wouldn’t they be good places to ride through? The paths are at least 3 metres wide in most places – ample passing room for more than one or two bikes and pedestrians at a time. And talking of horses, that is what these paths were designed around, in imitation of Hyde Park in London and Central Park in New York – passing widths for two riders on fat mares,  whilst tipping one’s hat each to the other. Ahh, the good old days, when the hoi polloi knew their place, slaving away in t’mill, and gardens were for the aesthetic appreciation of the moneyed bourgeoisie with money for hacking about on ponies and time on their hands. Nasty upstart cyclists, it’s not the done thing y’know, to frighten the horses. Or the poodles. Good on ya, Popeye Doyle. The last bastion of the good old days (Is it only me finds amusing that the name of the spokesman for the Pedestrian Council of Australia is Harold Scruby? Sounds like a Spike Milligan invention). Who let him back in? Don’t they have an anti-throwback ruling at the AEC? But, the people may yet speak . . .

Interesting take on the problem of waste by local UK authorities . . .

We’d fare badly.

We get our scrap steel and aluminium alloy recycled;

We compost our lunch waste

We recycle our paper, plastic and cardboard

Of course, we get dead bikes from the landfill queue and put them out on the streets again, under people.

And we teach people how to do all this greenie, pinko subversive claptrap themselves.

Ooops.

Vicroads think that it is a good idea to warn road users that they may encounter one another, after doing its level best to ensure that they never meet, and that cycling gets the Cinderella portion of the deal: bad and fissured cement path, for the main. This sign was encountered at the start of the new path which is under construction, adjacent to Moreland St and Whitehall Rd. in Footscray, or ‘Footscrazy’, as the local wags have dubbed it. It’s a nice wide concrete path, but funnily enough, the sign stood astride the on-road bike lane that the path is meant to supplement (I moved it onto the grass verge, out of harm’s way).

Now, call me old-fashioned, but I’m not really rapt in riding long concrete paths on my bike. Concrete has many qualities – hardness, durability, ease of laying, relative smoothness, which make it a good choice for any horizontal surface which has to withstand a lot of wear and tear.

However, the qualities of this material mean that they are traded on by path builders, and foundations are quickly laid, in an often inadequate manner for long-term durability. Paths are often badly graded, with no crown to allow water to run off after rain.

The upshot of this is that paths deteriorate after several months, due to water runoff, bad drainage, tree roots and nearby truck traffic, and the surfaces become rough, uneven, unpleasant to ride on and even dangerous. The surface of the Federation Trail is one such example of this. I know the Fed Trail is bitumen, and it’s a bit better graded than some other tracks, but it’s still showing signs of bad foundations as it cracks as it settles. As I’ve said before, if these were roads for cars, the equivalent of highways, they would be fixed through the night and on weekends. It’s not as though it’s as hard as doing the Monash Freeway.

Consider this statement from the badly grammatised national representative body of petrolheads:

‘The National Motorists Association Australia . . . believes cyclists cannot safely integrate with fast-moving vehicles on busy roads.

“Motor vehicles and bicycles are fundamentally incompatible,” spokesman Michael Lane says.

“Cars are fast and heavy. Bikes are slow and flimsy. The two do not mix. It’s dangerous and it’s not fair to either cyclists or the motorists.”‘

So the road-building authorities listen to chumps like this one, and continue to construct our very own version of aparthied townships for bikes – off-road concrete paths. Cars get billion-dollar chunks of smooth bitumen (EastLink, CityLink) and cyclists have to subsist on rutted, pedestrianised and narrow ‘paths’.

Riding down Footscray Rd. on Sunday, I got my very own little shock of schadenfreude. The steadily deteriorating conditions of the cycle path along Footscray Rd where it runs in front of the new Co$tco mega-warehouse - more and more traffic lights and slip roads and right angled turns and pedestrianised crossings makes me ride on the road, which is probably safer than having to endure the vacant wanderings of the bloated shopping trolleys of bargain shoppers. This time out, however, I was riding with a couple of people who aren’t so keen on riding on busy roads, so we took the path. I got ignored, walked into, stopped in front of about 5 or 6 times in about half a kilometre, as these bloated bargain shoppers ferried their oversize purchases to their cars parked illegally and adjacently to the bike path. There was no other parking, you see, and police were turning people away from the carpark, which was full. So they parked almost on top of the bike path.

On the way back from our ride (the Westgate punt wasn’t running, so we rode back the boring way through Port Melbourne) we retraced our tracks along the path in front of the White Elephant, each of those stupidly parked cars had a parking ticket on the windscreen. Suddenly, that trip to Co$tco isn’t so cost-effective after all. I hope it puts them all off the whole idea of financially dubious, needless overconsumption for a while, as well as parking across bike paths. Like I said, schadenfreude – but they deserved it, every one.

Cyclists, for better and more efficient, and yes, more pleasant riding, need better graded and smoother surfaces than do motor traffic. This is due to tyre size and suspension. Paradoxically, new road projects usually have much smoother surfaces on them than the bike paths that are sometimes built alongside them. Is this a subtle attempt to turn people away from riding, giving the scraps, and poor scraps at that, to the more efficient form of transport? Road construction is a self-perpetuating activity – more roads, more cars, more cars need more roads, ad infinitum into hell. They are not necessary. And if we were a less lazy and stupid society and culture, that we have become in the last sixty years, we would see that.

I will continue to ride my bike on the road. It’s the public highway, and I am a member of the public, and that is my chosen means of transport. I chose carefully, which the brain-dead petrolhead in the Pajero Grande did not, as he drove that insurmountable kilometre to the shopping centre, and looked for a parking spot for 10 minutes,  for a packet of cigarettes. He may one day kill me. I hate him for that, and the corrupt, unacknowledged shit that bred that choice I hate also. But I’m not going to ride on those rutted, compromised concrete paths unless I’m in imminent danger, or they’re better than the alternative. They’re not, yet, usually. The Fed Trail is not a bad start.

So, that was Le Tour. Someone won, that Spanish guy, the accountant. Glad it wasn’t the arrogant Yank with the famous mates.

Seriously, now that we have much improved internet and local network access at the BAC shed, we can answer emails in a timely fashion.

So, bac.bikes@southportuniting.org.au is able to be checked and replied to regularly now. Feel free. Sorry to all of you whose emails went unanswered. We can also put up more timely piccies of bikes we have for sale as well.

Hello. Yes, I am awake, despite sitting up to watch the finish of the 2nd stage of the Tour De France, Wimbledon for cyclists. Aargh, 2am.

So that’s reason to be cheerful #1. Good on you Mr Cavendish:

Pt.2:  Laughing at the cheesy ad attempts to get ‘into the Tour groove’. The most laughable is the fake Phil Liggett/Paul Sherwin voice mashup mix that is sort of Home Counties accent as spoken by a Martian underwater through a kazoo, that GoldCross Cycles (or SuperCheap Cyclo, to their mates) have seen fit to employ as a voiceover to some cheesemonger promo.  Oooh, their website has gone all funky, but the ad is not on their YouTube channel yet. Well, not really funky, more ‘graphic designer corporate bland’ that seems to be taking over the ‘corporate’ fronts of the bike chainstore operations throughout Melbourne. Even St Kilda Cycles, once the doyen of alternative-inner-urban-retro-funk has succumbed slightly, with ther new BHP Billiton-like logo morph. I’d still trust them over any of the chainstores, and a good single outlet store in preference to a franchise. Where BikeHub sits in this schema, I’m not sure. They don’t do as cheesy ads. They are a franchise, but with much less tight control than others I have encountered.

BAC, of course, is a lot more grass roots .

Pt. 3: Liggettisms, of which there have been a couple already. They’re like seagulls at the cricket: occasionally one gets hit by a ball, and flaps away, or is knocked out, which brightens up a tedious passage of play. To wit (so far): “The dangerousness of the middle-end of the pack”.

I’ll keep my ears open. Any others gratefully received.

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.

‘”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.