That’s it, no more calling Justice Stephen Breyer a bicyclist, Atlantic Cities

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust et al. v. United States that could affect a good portion of the rails-to-trails movement.

Given that dissenting opinions have historically been as interesting the majority opinions, here’s what lone dissenter Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote about the decision: “The court undermines the legality of thousands of miles of former rights of way that the public now enjoys as means of transportation and recreation. And lawsuits challenging the conversion of former rails to recreational trails alone may well cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.” (Atlantic Cities)

The court’s decision isn’t all bad news (though, say, outside of the Cato Institute it’s pretty awful). An official statement from the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy says, “Those rail-trails that have been built on rail-banked corridors or fee simple land purchases will remain safe.” However, the decision does threaten “existing rail-trails, mainly in the West, that utilize federally granted rights-of-way and are not railbanked.” (Rails-to-Trails Conservancy)

Indianapolis looks ready to build on the success of its downtown Cultural Trail, and it’s getting some help. “The PeopleForBikes Green Lane Project has selected six new U.S. cities to join its intensive two-year program to build better bike lanes. Atlanta, GA, Boston, MA, Denver, CO, Indianapolis, IN, Pittsburgh, PA and Seattle, WA will receive financial, strategic and technical assistance to create low-stress streets and increase vitality in urban centers through the installation of protected bike lanes.” (PeopleForBikes)

Protected bicycle lanes—lanes separated from motorized traffic—aren’t anything new. Here’s an article on the “forgotten U.S. protected bike lane boom of 1905.” Have to say, that image of Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway in 1894 is really appealing. (PeopleForBikes)

Mike Honnold just took the wraps off an online collection of Peoria-area Illinois Valley Wheelm’n newsletters that goes back to the 1970s. He’s still working on links for the 2000s and 2010s, but says “it is an awesome historical record of our club and goes to show that while many things have changed through the years, a lot has stayed the same.”
(IVW Newsletter Archive)

Interesting article on how Buenos Aires reimagined Avenida 9 de Julio, its “monument to cars.” Cutting the number of travel lanes and adding dedicated bus lanes reduced travel times for all street users. The article also mentions that the city has added 130km of bike lanes, somewhere. (Atlantic Cities)

It’s a Brompton and a recumbent. It’s the Neuss-B, a “not completely ideal but an interesting bike.” (Seven League Boots)

Nice little gear calculator for the Brompton. Select your chainring, rear sprocket, tire and hub, and it spits out your choice of gear inches, development in meters, or speed at 70 crank revolutions per minute in both miles and kilometers per hour. (Brompton Gear Calculator)

The bicycle from the movie “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” just sold for $36,000. (The previous owner paid $10,000.) I know, I know—you could buy some really nice bikes for that kind of money. That’s what everybody says. But you could also buy 4,235 copies of the DVD, and if you’re an Amazon Prime customer, enjoy free shipping. What say you about that? (USA Today)

This cycling capital may be even more interesting than you thought it was

In the City of Bikes, the Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist
by Pete Jordan
Harper Perennial, copyright 2013, 438 pgs., $15.99

In the City of Bikes is two histories: the story of an urban-planning student and his bicycling family intertwined with the larger story of bicycling within Amsterdam.

The author is an American transplant. Once, having moved to Portland, Oregon, he grew increasingly excited as he counted 19 bicycles rolling past his location every 30 minutes.

In Amsterdam he counts 19 bicycles every 30 seconds.

(Jordan is quite the observer. He counts how many city dwellers ride with an open umbrella and calculates that 61 percent of the total are women. He looks for people riding with an arm in a sling and determines 86 percent of them are male and 70 percent of the arms are the left.)

Recreational riders have to adjust their thinking to read this book. The bikes described aren’t new or glamorous or lightweight. They’re generic single-speeds and three-speeds with high upright handlebars, little changed from their counterparts of the 1920s. Lance Armstrong may have been a cheat and a liar, but as far as this book is concerned, he was right about one thing: it really isn’t about the bike.

It’s about how bikes get used, abused, stolen, abandoned, drowned,  repaired, promoted and redeemed. And about how one northern European city seems to be a perfect host to all those activities.

City centers on the history, infrastructure and politics of Amsterdam. That’s not to say there aren’t discussions of technology. Here’s Jordan writing about the dredges used to pull stolen and abandoned bikes from the murky canals of the city.

“Though the claw hoisted up other junk–three car tires, two scooters, a no-parking sign, a long metal pipe, a chair–the vast majority of the time, when a catch was made, it was a bicycle. In less than 90 minutes, I watched the fishermen land 47 bikes.”

And while discussions of the physical challenges of bicycling are limited, they are illuminating. I remember when I lived in Champaign, Illinois, the biggest climb involved a highway overpass, which left me unable to surmount the “real” hills of southern Indiana during October’s Hilly Hundred ride. Amsterdam is even flatter, and its residents are just as unequipped to climb. Here’s Jordan on an automotive tunnel opened to Dutch cyclists during a transportation strike.

“…I stopped at the northern end of the tunnel and watched the cyclists. Of the 1,000 that I noted exiting, 342 of them–one in three!–were walking their bikes. A great many of the remaining two-thirds were panting heavily as they wobbled back and forth, struggling up the incline as if they were nearing a peak in the French Alps.”

In other words, this is not a book for someone who believes that the Tour de France is the summit of the bicycle experience. It’s a book for someone who wants to know how one of the world’s greatest cities for bicycling came to be.

If you’re unfamiliar with Amsterdam, this book reads almost as alternative history: an explosion of cycling in the 1920s, the emergence of the cycle garage in the 1930s, generations of a royal family’s love of bicycling, an art museum bisected by a bike path, and the challenge of cycling anarchy to the German sense of motorized order during World War II.

The stories I find most familiar–politicians determined to push bicycles off the street and the universal problem of theft–are easily the most depressing sections of the book. But even those stories are interesting. Take for instance, the story about a single drug addict responsible for an estimated 9,000 bicycle thefts over eight years. You may not appreciate his vocation or avocation, but you have to be amazed at his industry.

If you’re interested in the bicycle as transportation, you must have this book. If you’re like me, with a news feed that constantly generates photographs of people on bicycles, In the City of Bikes will help you understand why so many of those images come from the capital of the Netherlands.

Bike mechanics redefine income. Plus, documenting bicycle dimensions

Looks like someone at Specialized has been thinking about the income of bicycle mechanics. How bad is the situation? Let’s just say that if you want to give mechanics more money, you need to replace their wrenches with brooms. Want to talk kids out of the profession? Show them this presentation. (Slideshare)

I’m comfortable with the idea of treating some bicycle parts as “consumables.” Frayed brake cable? Replace it for safety’s sake. Chain with a few thousand miles on it? Throw on a new one and you might save your chainrings from unnecessary wear. But every once in a while I’m reminded that bicycle parts endure, too. My latest reminder came from Jim Langley, who tweeted about a New Hampshire company dedicated to the restoration of Regina, Sachs, Shimano and Suntour freewheels. Nobody has to do this, but it’s nice to know that somebody is. (Freewheel Spa)

If winter finds you mostly off the bike, good news: spring isn’t far away. And if you think you may be replacing major components or an entire bike in 2014, now’s a great time to capture your current bicycle’s dimensions–then, when you’re swapping bars and saddle, you’ll have baseline data to match or maybe even improve upon. Park Tool walks you through the process and provides PDFs you can use to capture your information. Good stuff. (Park Tool)

Last fall, Graeme Obree traveled to Battle Mountain to show what he could do with the human-powered machine he built for speed. He ended up with the new record for a prone streamliner, 56.62 mph, and probably a new respect for the abilities of the designers and riders who return to Nevada year after year in hopes of improving personal and absolute speed records. (Rider Sebastiaan Bowier moved the absolute record to 83.13 mph.)

The fastest bikes these days have a lot in common: recumbent positions, front-wheel drive, and turning circles you need a surveyor’s wheel to measure. So Obree’s bike ends up being interesting simply because it was so different from the rest of the pack. I know it’s ancient history now, but I was pleased to find this excellent picture of Obree’s bike in flight without its aerodynamic shell. (Discovery)

I’m going to guess that too many people are comfortable with the hollowed-out towns of the Midwest. They love their parking lot deserts, dead-end addresses and big-box stores. They embrace lengthy commutes. Some of them are big fans of dumping money into downtown Big Idea projects, and the ones that are elected have been dumping for years.

But if you meet somebody who sincerely wonders what happened to the old town and its small businesses–any old town, any small business–point them toward the Strong Towns blog. Every post comes with great explanatory power and respect for the lessons of history. I imagine that if more towns were Strong Towns, we’d all have more places to ride bicycles and walk in comfort–and more small businesses to visit. (Strong Towns)

Think about a bicycle ride you really enjoyed. Did it include a high-speed descent? Time with a friend you haven’t ridden with in years? Racing ahead of a thunderstorm? Maybe. Or maybe it felt a lot like this video. Go ahead and click. It’ll take 10 seconds to watch. Then tell me whether you’ve ever had a ride like that. (Vimeo)

The fat bike in winter. And, Stokemonkey powers cargo bikes again

Fat bikes have tires wider than you’d see on your average mountain bike. Given the amount of snow covering roads around my house, I’ve been paying more attention to them and marveling that the audience for such bicycles isn’t especially weight conscious or poor, given that the average fat bike weighs 32.7 pounds and costs $2,200. (Singletracks)

Small-wheeled bicycles are nothing new. Here’s the best picture I’ve ever seen of Mr. C.H. Clark’s bicycle, which was featured in a 1919 issue of Scientific American. Just guessing, but I’d say the short wheelbase would make it difficult to keep this design traveling in a straight line. Turning the front wheel would also be challenging given the sideways arc of the long handlebar stem between the rider’s legs. Still, wouldn’t it be cool to find this bike in somebody’s attic? Here’s a bit more information. (Scientific American)

One of the challenges of a folding bicycle is moving it around after it’s been folded. The Bike Friday tikit rolls on its front wheel. Brompton provides additional skateboard-sized wheels—four of them if your bike has a rear rack. Tern also has a rear rack-and-wheels solution, one that allows the owner to trail the bike behind like a suitcase on rollers.

And now Tern’s Trolley Rack–and the bicycle attached to it–is an award winner. “Urban transport specialist Tern, together with bike accessory sister brand BioLogic, today announced that the Swoop Duo bicycle, Link with Trolley Rack and BioLogic FixKit have all been awarded 2014 Taipei Cycle Design & Innovation (d&i) Awards.” (International News)

Electric bicycles are getting plenty of press, but they’re still pretty thin on the ground in central Illinois. I mean, it’s not like I live in China. Still, I like reading about them. I enjoyed my brief time with the Trek Transport+, I’d love to have an electric Brompton from NYCeWheels, and I’m still interested in whether Faraday–with one of the most attractive full-size electric bike designs–ends up being a viable company.

I’m also a sucker for this year’s electric comeback story: a cargo bike-dedicated motor that deserves to succeed simply because of its name: Stokemonkey. According to Clever Cycles in Portland, Oregon, “We are again selling Stokemonkey installed on complete bikes that we sell locally or ship. These include Xtracycle’s Edgerunner and now Yuba’s Mundo, together with Surly’s Big Dummy.”

Interested in electric-powered cargo bikes? Give the Stokemonkey story a read. I especially like the philosophy behind the product: “We don’t believe in replacing human power with electricity; we believe in replacing cars for work that even the strongest cyclists seldom if ever choose to handle without a car.”

Tandem tuneup: Thudbuster ST seatpost rebuild kit

Last year, the tandem began making a really annoying noise: a click, or a series of clicks, or a groan interspersed by clicks. I knew the drivetrain was responsible. So I pulled both bottom brackets, changed the bearings, checked the torque on the arms, on the chainring bolts–nothing.

After I replaced the front and rear cranks, I realized the culprit was the stoker’s suspension seatpost, a Cane Creek Thudbuster ST. The issue: normal bushing wear.

That’s a lot of money involved in misdiagnosis, though it did get me 165mm crank arms front and back and good old-fashioned square-tapered bottom-bracket spindles. (Thank you, da Vinci Designs.)

I got on Cane Creek’s website and ordered a rebuild kit–eight washers, eight bushings, four bolts–and a bushing replacement tool. I also ordered a new elastomer. The parts were shipped promptly, and the instructions were clear.

The Thudbuster is a simple and strong design. Just like a derailleur, it’s based on a parallelogram, and it’s been on our tandem eight years.

(In years past, we’ve had two sliding-post seatposts break while we were on the road–luckily without injury to the rider. Unless today’s sliding-post designs are completely different, I say if you have one, don’t mess around with your safety: replace it with either a non-suspension seatpost or a Thudbuster.)

I followed the instructions, removing four bolts with a 3mm Allen wrench, and pulling off four linking arms and eight thin brass washers by hand. Instead of a spring, the Thudbuster uses a chunk of elastomer to absorb shock.

The inside edges of the four arms form a pocket that holds the elastomer in place. Once the arms are removed, the elastomer falls away.

Cane Creek’s bushing replacement tool uses the new bushing to push the old bushing out of place. There’s no fiddly alignment necessary–just load the new bushing, install the tool and tighten it until you can’t. The old bushing drops into the tool’s base. I replaced eight bushings in less than five minutes.

Then I lubricated the pivots, installed new washers, slid the arms and elastomer into place, and secured the assembly with four new bolts.

And there you go–new seatpost performance at a fraction of the new seatpost cost.

As long as you don’t count the price of a new tandem crankset.

What this country needs is a good right-hand-drive tricycle

Four to six inches of snow overnight. Don’t remember hearing the snow plow, but it must have come by early in the morning. So let’s try out that new studded tire on the tricycle. I never have any problems staying upright–the problem has always been traction.

See those little circular things? Tire studs. Well, this ought to change everything, right?

Maybe it changes things a bit, but the driven wheel–that’s it, on the left, in keeping with the best traditions of British triking–is still unweighted on any road with camber. So there’s still quite a bit of wheel spin. The other two tires, by the way, have normal tread without studs.

Still, once you get the trike to a flat piece of road or, even better, a downhill, there’s not much else on wheels that’s quite as fun. Oh, and the neighbor says the pond behind his house has 15 inches of ice. Hmm. Bet that ice is pretty smooth…

The two Italians in my basement are working again

When I think about computers, I don’t find myself longing for the good old days. The Mac SE, the Quadra 605, the blue bubble gum iMac (still in the basement), heck, the flat screen iMac I’m working on right now–they’re all obsolete.

Each one was invaluable to me at one time, but when I’m done with them, I’m done. I wouldn’t call it planned obsolescence, but even if unplanned, Apple has gone beyond the wildest fantasies of the 1950s automotive industry in making last year’s model ancient history.

Which is yet another fine reason to love the world of bicycles and today, specifically, the Italians who made Silca bicycle pumps beginning in 1917 and the American entrepreneur who’s making it possible for the rest of us to celebrate the company’s centenary in three years.

If you value things that are built to last, you have to value a Silca pump, even if you don’t own one.

I’ve had the pump on the right since at least 1977, when I bought it used. When I got it, I had a bicycle the same color, a Motobecane Team Champion, I wore a leather-strap helmet and wool jersey and shorts, and I nailed thin steel cleats onto the bottom of leather shoes to keep my feet pointed ahead, ever so slightly pigeon-toed, within Christophe toe clips bolted to steel Campy quill pedals.

So yes, the pump is rather old.

I think I bought the pump on the left to replace the other one, but here they both are, still, and now they both work, thanks to replacement parts from the new American incarnation of the old Italian Silca company.

I replaced the inner valve assembly, plunger cup and presta chuck gasket on both pumps. I also replaced the gauge on the orange pump, though true to form, I’m not throwing out the old gauge with its smashed bezel.

The parts for these fine old pumps were shipped from just one state over: Indiana. Josh Poertner, former Zipp wheels engineer, seems to be taking a thoughtful approach to reviving the Silca brand, maintaining some supply chain connections to Italy even as he introduces an entirely reformulated presta chuck gasket and gets ready to launch a new pump.

Bicycle Retailer wrote a great summary on Silca and Poertner. It’s definitely worth your time.

The end of the plunger is on the left. The leather cup on the right has since replaced whatever that black rubbery thing was.

Guess I didn’t realize how long ago I last used the orange pump. Note “USA” on the new presta chuck gasket.

The finish of the orange pump is what Rivendell’s Grant Petersen would call “beausage,” a portmanteau of usage and beauty.

Beats calling it what it is: the blasted surface of a top-heavy pump that fell over just about every time it was used. After several years of consistently failing to anticipate the next swoon, I began laying the pump down after every use to formally acknowledge its special relationship with gravity.

The inner valve assembly now comprises American and Italian parts—and still fits Silca pumps that are decades old, even older than mine.

Here’s the proper orientation of the gasket within the chuck at the end of the hose. The chuck is like the rest of the pump: simple. Push the assembly onto an open presta valve and get pumping. When you’re done pumping, pull the chuck off the valve.

There’s no clamp or quick-release lever to keep air pressure from blowing the chuck off the valve prematurely. The gasket was designed to retain the valve of the inner tube by itself.

Of course design and reality often parted ways. In the old days, I’d only get through so many inflation cycles before I’d be holding the chuck in place with one hand and pumping with the other.

I have high hopes that the gasket’s new elastomer formulation will let me use both sides of the pump’s handle for a long time to come.

Hard to say what computer I’ll be using to make my long-term usage report, though.

Have a Silca pump? If your shop doesn’t have new parts in stock, you can probably get what you need straight from the company. Hey, anybody speak Indianapolese?