I watched the presidential debate last night, and though I
don’t feel as though I learned anything, I don’t necessarily think it did me
any harm either. Maybe a little shoulder pain from cringing, but I’m confident
I haven’t suffered any lasting damage. At first I just didn’t understand how
this exercise could be useful in any way. I mean if you don’t know who you’re
going to vote for by now, there’s nothing either of these yutzes are going to
say in this stilted, awkward forum that could possibly make any difference is
there?
Would you buy a used nation state from either of these guys?
Maybe there is. After thinking about it for a while, it
occurred to me that the real problem with the debates isn’t the more or less
complete lack of useful information, or the obnoxious, condescending tone on
these faces of our prospective leaders. It’s not that there’s too much show biz
and not enough substance.Au contraire! It’s that there’s too much substance and not
enough show biz.
Debates are a quaint, 19th century idea that just
doesn’t seem relevant in the digital age. If it wasn’t for the ability to be distracted
by tweets during the debates, I doubt anyone under 40 would even bother. Just over
half of us even rouse ourselves off the sofa long enough to vote. But it doesn’t
have to be that way. We could jazz the whole thing up - make it appeal to contemporary
sensibilities. It seems to me the electoral system ought to think about other ways
Americans make choices and follow that model. I’m thinking reality TV, of course.
You know, Survivor: Youngstown. So You Think You Don’t Suck. That sort of
thing. Let people choose their representatives by texting their vote. Let Simon Cowell have some part
in it. Could it really be much worse than it already is?
I love my Shimano brifters. I have two sets, 105ST-R600 3/9 on my old aluminum Trek2000 and Ultegra6700 2/10 on my newer Madone.
And when The Managing Partner went to buy a road bike, I strongly advised going
with Ultegra (6600 era). I love having the ability to shift without removing my
hands from the hoods. So I was really pissed when recently The Managing
Partner’s shifters starting acting up. Hard to push up to the top chain ring. It
happened on a century and the on-site mechanic did a little fiddling before
declaring there was nothing he could do.
A couple days later the bike was taken into the shop where
the tech did some more fiddling which seems to have made at least a modest
improvement. But he pointed out that Shimano shifters are basically designed to
be disposable,
unlike Campagnolo and SRAM; they basically can’t be overhauled or repaired. I
was shocked to find when asked what it would cost to replace the errant
shifter, that newer versions of Ultegra aren’t backward compatible either. The
only option is to replace the Ultegra shifters with Tiagra or Sora. Tiagra!
Either that or we have to replace the entire drive train.
1986 Suntour Friction Shifters
Newer Ultegra shifters just aren’t backward compatible. Holy
crap! Not repairable. Not interoperable. Not backward compatible. I understand Bic
pens being disposable, but shifters are something akin to a durable good. I would
think they ought to last a little longer than ten years before you are forced to
just throw them away and replace them. Unfortunately, I suspect that modern manufacturers
think of the entire bicycle in much the same way.
As Grant Says…
Grant Petersen is of the opinion that carbon forks are unsafe and that even a carbon
frame becomes unsafe after ten years of exposure to light. And he’s not alone. Hmmm… My
’86 Fuji still has all the original low-end drive train parts, including the friction shifters,
which still work just fine. And even today there are replacement parts being made
by several companies (implying intercompatibility). Why have we come to accept bikes
that cost more than cars but don’t last as long as a pair of sneakers? Grant would
say it’s because we revere racers and buy the products they use rather than choosing
sensible, practical, durable stuff that balances performance and value.
What’s weird is that I thought of Ultegra as the practical middle
ground in shifters, providing all the benefits of modern design and technology without
the likely touchiness of the elite level racing products. I guess I was wrong.
Today I want to talk about bicycle helmets. Brain
buckets. Skid lids. Cranium catchers. This Sunday past I spent a bit of time
riding around the neighborhood dialing in a newly installed pair of Gran Compe 610’s. I was basically just tooling around, stopping to adjust,
tooling some more, etc. As the point was not explicitly to go for a ride and as
my average speed was likely to be (and in fact was) not more than 10 miles per
hour, I didn’t bother with my special clickity shoes and my special stretchy
clothes and my special cranial protection.
I zigged and zagged through the neighborhood, wending my
leisurely way through the restaurant district, stopping at the art supply store
to pick up a paint pen (I’m planning on pinstriping the lugs on the Fuji) past the school where the farmers market
sets up, and out past the neighborhood where the One Percenters live. The brakes
were now perfectly adjusted, the bike was riding smoothly, the weather was
fine, and I was in a great mood. Remembering that I had promised the Managing
Partner that I’d do a few things around the house before day’s end, I decided
to take the bike path home. Not my favorite way to get around, but it draws a
straight line back to the neighborhood and provides a tunneled crossing of
Wisconsin Avenue.
So it was that I came to a stop by the Barnes & Noble,
waiting to cross at the light behind the mommy with the stroller and the
elderly ladies on their beach cruisers, when a guy on a MuurMart mountain bike crossing
in the opposite direction decided to call out to me, “you ought to be wearing a
helmet.” What a your-favorite-curse-word-here-wad.
I have ridden thousands of miles per year for over a decade. I own several
bikes and several helmets. I belong and contribute to several bicycle advocacy
organizations. I have read every book about practical cycling penned in the
last forty years. I download (and actually read!) lots of those wonky papers about transportation and actually write a blog that’s mostly
about bikes and cycling.
And this t-shirt wearing weekender is gonna tell me to wear
a helmet! Feckin’ douche. And I’m sure he congratulated himself for
conscientiously educating the guy on the “old fashioned” bike about the need to
wear a helmet. I don’t mind that he wanted me to understand the value of
bicycle safety. I mind that the dipsh*t feels comfortable playing the nanny
without actually having the first idea about bicycle safety.
And Numbnuts’ attitude is quite common. Think about the last
time you saw a headline about a cyclist getting run down by a car. Every such
article is sure to note, “the cyclist was/wasn’t wearing a helmet.” What the
hell does that have to do with the fact that a car ran down a cyclist? Does not
wearing a helmet mean I deserve to be run down by a car? No, it does not. It is
an irrelevant fact used to dismiss the rights of cyclists. Note that Nanny
didn’t tell the mommy pushing the baby stroller across the street while
juggling a cell phone and a Vanilla Frappumochaccino to wear a helmet.
Many European cities have vastly higher modal share for
bicycles, as the transportation weenies say, than anyplace in the US. And you
will almost never see a single helmet in Amsterdam or Copenhagen. I’ve personally been
to several Italian cities where the share of trips by bike hovers near 30%, and
never saw a single helmet on any of the senior citizens riding their bikes.
But
surely, given the accepted dogma that helmets save lives, the streets of Ferrara
and Lucca
must be strewn with the corpses of the bici-victims, right? No. Why? Because
Europeans are used to seeing bikes. They have invested in bicycling
infrastructure and have made a concerted effort to get people out of the cars
that destroy the quality of life in their cities
and cause the deaths of thousands of people per year. In 2010, over 30,000 people died in the U.S. because of cars. In the same year 618 cyclists died.
So who should be wearing helmets?
There is even reason to believe that forcing people to wear helmets
discourages them from riding bikes at all. Places with mandatory helmet laws have notably low ridership levels. But if you don’t believe me perhaps you will believe the New York Times. And with the massive success of Washington, DC's Capital Bike Share and hopefully others like it in cities around the country, we should expect to see a lot more helmetless heads on our streets. And when we do maybe we'll realize that bicycling is a safe, healthy way to get around, not a life threatening activity for which we need body armor. And maybe we'll start designing our communities on a human scale instead of being beholden to the mighty automobile, and then start holding cars responsible for sharing the road with cyclists and pedestrians.
Well, anyway, I’m not going to change anything here. As far
as I’m concerned, if you want to wear a helmet, great. Strap one on. I usually
do. But if you see a grown up tax-paying citizen riding his bike around town
without a helmet, why don’t you just keep your righteousness to yourself. Go ahead and feel
superior. Just keep that warm feeling inside. It might just be the case that other
people are able to make informed choices for themselves without the benefit of your superhuman concern for our well being.
