Last fall I and other representatives from Community Cycles participated in a discussion with the city and various stakeholders regarding upcoming redevelopment along Pearl Parkway. I wrote about the experience and the Transit Village Area Plan (TVAP) more generally from the perspective of a human-powered urbanist. Mostly, we looked at different possible streetscapes for Pearl Parkway between 30th and the railroad tracks. The property at 3100 Pearl Parkway is slated to be developed in the near future, as a 320 unit rental apartment complex, and as one of the first major developments in the area plan. The city is interested in experimenting with novel street treatments in order to try and make the place special and attractive. Community Cycles got involved largely because the TVAP “Connections Plan” had, with minimal fanfare, superseded the Transportation Master Plan (TMP) and removed the bike lanes which had long been planned along Pearl Parkway in favor of off-street only infrastructure. We felt that this change was not necessarily in the best interest of cyclists, and wanted to ensure that whatever did end up getting built would be safe and efficient.
Over the last two years or so, I’ve fallen in love with dirt road riding. In the Sierra Madre and Barrancas del Cobre of Chihuahua, the fire roads of the San Gabriels in SoCal, and now criss-crossing the continental divide here in Colorado and Wyoming. I’ve pushed my trusty Long Haul Trucker further into the dirt than it really wanted to go. I love the quiet, the near total lack of motorized traffic. The long, rhythmic heavy breathing of going up up and away, focused on staying in motion, focused on staying upright. And so I’m building a new bike, more dedicated to vanishing into the hills, and crawling along the vast majority of the world’s ways and roads, which are unpaved. I’m calling it a Trohlloff (a Surly Troll frame fitted with a Rohloff hub) inspired by Cass Gilbert’s most recent steed (Bryan and I just happened to ride part of his route through Mexico last spring, and I’ve been following him, mesmerized, ever since).
I’m fascinated by supply chains and the globalization of nearly everything, and I have all but sworn off non-German bike parts, as they seem to be of consistently excellent functional design and build quality (vastly better than their US competitors), and I think Germany does a much better job than most countries with their labor and environmental practices (again, including the US). So it’s interesting to me to learn more about where some of these bits that I buy on the interwebs actually come from. Two examples, in the YouTube format.
The Rohloff Speedhub is an archetypal Made in Germany product: fabulously expensive (it costs considerably more than an entire brand new Long Haul Trucker!) and even more fabulously well made. To celebrate the manufacture of the 100,000th Speedhub, the company recently threw a party and invited anybody who had ridden their hub more than 60,000 km. A number of participants had ridden theirs more than 100,000 km. Even some of their first batch of 20 prototype hubs had clocked up this many kms, and were still running strong! To date, they have never had a hub fail in the field. This is a testament to the power of good design. Heirloom design. Barring loss or theft, I won’t be surprised if the hub outlasts my legs, and this makes the up-front investment worthwhile. It only makes sense to use highly paid manual labor when the value of the labor embodied in the product isn’t swamped by the value of the energy and materials that make it up. When relatively low-skilled factory workers have good healthcare and lots of vacation time products have to be extremely well designed, and/or made from intrinsically expensive materials.
Schwalbe is another German company, and is the only tire manufacturer in the developed world that only makes bicycle tires. Their tires are very well designed, durable, and unsurprisingly, expensive (a set of two will cost you $100 or so). Interestingly, only the design of the tires takes place in Germany. They’re actually manufactured in long time rubber producer Indonesia… by a Korean company!
I wonder what Rohloff’s thinking is behind keeping their entire operation in Germany. Do they believe it’s impossible to train a foreign workforce to be as exacting as their German one, even with strict quality control measures? Or is it more of a craftsman style operation, kept at home for aesthetic reasons? I suspect the latter.
Cass Gilbert’s Surly Troll review based on the ride from Nicaragua to Ecuador on dirt roads and singletrack. He’s got it set up with a Rohloff speedhub drivetrain. I’m such a fanboy. I think I’d basically buy anything he recommended.
The NY Times points out that bicycles and the European penchant for fresh bread are more closely related than you might at first imagine. A writer in Amsterdam talks about how a slightly different conception of daily life enables cities without cars, and how that life is really more free than our slavish commitment to the car.
The Wolfpack Hustle is going to race against a Jet Blue flight across Los Angeles. Jet Blue is promoting itself with flights from Burbank to Long Beach for $4, during the so-called Carmageddon closing of the 405 freeway for renovations. The idea for a bike vs. jet race was hatched on Twitter. The total distance is about 40 miles. Will be interesting to see who wins!
WalMart is selling cheap dutch-style bikes. If you’re gonna sell cheap bikes, it makes a lot more sense to me for them to be simple and utilitarian (like the Flying Pigeon bikes of Tianjin), instead of double suspension 27 speed pieces of crap with lots of junk parts to break. If the bike is simple, for the same price point it can be more reliable. I hate WalMart, but I gotta say, I’m glad to see they’ve gotten on this particular bandwagon.
After I got done moving all my stuff into Masala, I had to return the trailer to Community Cycles. Tim needed to work on his bike (and renew his membership…) so I gave him a lift out to the shop. The Bikes at Work trailers aren’t really meant for hauling people… but with a capacity of 300lbs, they’re certainly capable of it. I’d really like to have a decent setup for moving another bike around without the trailer. A way to just hook the front end of the rear bike up to my rear rack, allowing it to roll on its own. More photos below.
The New York Times almost seems upset that in Europe the mobility of people, not motor vehicles, is the measure of an urban transportation system. With finite funding and urban space constraints, you sometimes have to choose which mode to prioritize. Pedestrians, bicycles, and mass transit all move more people in less space, with less GHG emissions, noise and pollution, more safely than cars. De-prioritizing automobiles also makes streets into vastly more livable public spaces. It’s not about making life bad for cars, it’s about making it good for people!
My friend Bryan, with whom I’ve been living for the last year, is heading off on a round-the-world bike ride for an indeterminate amount of time. So I had to find a new place to live. The Masala Co-op had a summer sublet opening, and I jumped at it. I used to be on the board of the Boulder Housing Coalition, which owns Masala (and Chrysalis, another co-op downtown), and I lived here for the summer of 2004, before heading to Baja to kayak that fall. And of course… I was determined to do the move by bike.
