I wasn’t ever going back to the new LBS but on Thursday morning when I found my rear tire completely flat, I knew it was their fault. I pulled the tire back to find the tube had been folded over itself by four inches so it would fit.
I waited for them to open. I wasn’t going to spend any more money to get this tire fixed, but not if the guy who made this mess was there because he wouldn’t know how. He was of course the only one working that morning.
I showed him my receipt and told him when he fixed my bike, he put a 700c tube in my 26″ wheels and now I had a giant pinch flat. He told me a tube was a tube and asked was I sure my wheels were 26″? I said yes. He said, “really? They look bigger than that.” If you’re not even willing to read the answer printed on my tire, I don’t want you working on my bike.
I left. That was the last time I will go into Caster’s in Providence. If you live here you take your chances there. Fine people work in that shop but if you get this guy you’ll get sloppy work at best and you may even leave with your bike worse off.
Go to Legend. They’re fantastic. Jack has a great shop and does good work. He’s even carrying Bromptons and the Schmidt SON hubs, stuff you had to go to Harris or Peter White to find before. Also try Providence Bicycle on Branch. They have good service and a lot of stock.
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Here’s a good example of why multi-use paths don’t work. I took this photo in Frankfurt last spring. This asphalt path runs along the river Main, stretching out from the city center through some lovely wooded land. I’d guess most use is recreational but people do commute on it. It’s wide by American standards, plenty of room for two-way cycling traffic, but it fails because it’s multi-use. It doesn’t delineate between pedestrians and cyclists and so even with all that asphalt, people have carved out this dirt rut to one side. That’s where the runners go when the cyclists come in both directions or where the cyclists go to get around strolling pedestrians.
Why do we build paths like this? It’s clearly not a space issue and it’s clearly not working for its users—they’ve gone and trod out the separation they need. I don’t have any idea how well it works in Germany, but on paths like this here the mixing only encourages conflict. I see it all the time on our rails-to-trails paths, pedestrians and cyclists yelling at each other, playing chicken—our state paths mandate pedestrians walk against on-coming cycling traffic, so this chicken game happens at nearly every interaction. Paths are supposed to be the place cyclists go to get away from the dangers of road traffic, places of high subjective safety. But when pedestrians aren’t separate those same dangers are present, they just move a lot more slowly.
Filed under: cycling infrastructure | 6 Comments
Tags: bike paths, frankfurt, germany, main
The worst bike rack in the world
Anybody who writes about cycling outside of northern Europe could do a weekly column on the worst bike racks. They’re everywhere. Most of them look like this one, but even the newer designs regularly fail on enough clearance for fenders and lights. I always have to lock up at the end of a rack because of my light.
So here it is, the ubiquitous US bike rack. Slats so short and narrow they only accommodate thin tires and even then not enough for the wheel to come far enough through to lock the frame to the rack.
What makes this one the winner in worst rack is the stone wall. The rack is bolted into the asphalt a few inches back from the wall so that approximately zero people can lock their bikes to it. Bonus points for wedging it in a tiny triangle between the entrance—where people tear into the lot—and the first parking space, which starts on the other side of the line.
Filed under: commute | 2 Comments
Tags: bike racks
I had nothing to do with this
Filed under: balance bikes, Kids | Leave a Comment
Tags: balance bike
The mothership
When we showed up at the farmer’s market with bikes in the bike, a friend said the bakfiets was like a mothership now. If it were a star destroyer, that would make our kids storm troopers, which sounds about right. They have poor aim and fire indiscriminately. The balance bikes at the market were the first time they actually wanted to ride them outside, after taking them out a dozen times over the past few months. The irony here is we’d take them to the cemetery, with miles of empty paved roads and they wouldn’t ride. Instead, they took the grass in the middle of a crowded market.
It was brilliant because they were slowed enough that I could walk normally and they were right along with me. The people didn’t faze them. They weaved around like they’d always been doing it. Which was a surprise to me—I didn’t expect that the two months of tooling around the house in our tiny rooms had trained them enough to take to a crowd like that.
Filed under: balance bikes, Dutch, Kids | 1 Comment
Cycling in heels
The kids have been riding balance bikes since May. Took them a few months to want to try them and some time after that to get past frustration, but now they tear around the house with their feet in the air. G’s been walking in her mother’s heels. A few days later she got on the bike with them. The carpet hardly slows her down. She may be Dutch.
Filed under: Dutch, Kids | 2 Comments
Tags: balance bikes, Dutch, heels, Kids, shoes
The new LBS
Oh. Hello. I nearly forgot this was here.
Today I’d finally had enough of the slow leak. I had a flat twice a day. I would usually have patched it myself but time for that sort of thing is in short supply with 3-year-olds in the house. So I took my Raleigh to the new LBS.
There are two local bike stores near me. One is fantastic—great service, good stuff to browse, Surly frames. It’s a small shop and I’m there enough that they know me. I would go there for everything but it’s a 45-minute walk back home when I have to leave my bike for repairs. Again, the old days: a lovely walk! Maybe I’d stop for dinner. Now: I’d have to schedule that time two weeks in advance.
The new store, however, is a five-minute walk away. They’re a major brand dealer, much bigger space—they’re friendly and they stock a bunch of odd and unmainstream things you could previously only find here online, like Basil bags. But: not great service. The first time I went in I had them order me a part but they never called about it. The second time they told me my hub was dead when it was instead a problem with the bottom bracket (thank you, other shop!) The third time was tonight.
I’ve had my Raleigh for ten years and it’s now nearly 40-years-old itself. I’ve taken it—and other bikes—to a lot of shops in that time and I’ve discovered the Sturmey Archer hub is simplest test of whether they’re any good or not.
I brought in my slow leak, which was in the rear tire. Nobody here patches a tube with the wheel on, so the guy who took my bike set to work decoupling the indicator spindle from the shifter cable. He couldn’t get it apart, so he asked the other mechanic how to do it. Right then I knew. I knew I was going to leave that shop with my shit all misaligned. One of them was a mechanic and the other was not—maybe he was a salesman helping out, I don’t know.
Now I’m not the kind of smart guy who brings a bike in for work and then proceeds to offer helpful commentary on everything they’re doing wrong. I’m sure they love that. Instead, when he pulled out a 700C tube for my 26″ wheel, I went off to browse.
When I rode away, my rear brakes had gone completely soft and the shifter cable was so taut that I had to lean against the lever to push it down. When I came back, luckily for me the guy who worked on my bike was on the phone. The other mechanic—who clearly knew what he was doing—put my bike on the stand and set everything back to where it should have been when I left.
But what if I didn’t know what I was talking about? I would have gone home and spent months on a bike with a bad brake and an impossible shifter. And nothing turns people off to bikes more quickly than bikes that don’t fit or work properly. A car with iffy brakes and a soft clutch—not the safest thing in the world, but perfectly fine to drive because the hydraulics in the machine are between you and the road. It’s different with bikes because you’re physically connected to those systems. It’s uncomfortable to ride when that’s not aligned.
Also: sloppy work! I could hardly believe my bike came out worse than it went in. At least the leaky tube was staying inflated for half the day. So that’s the end of repairs at new LBS. Sorry, fantastic shop! I should never have opted for convenience over you, a place I know will always get it right.
Filed under: commute | 5 Comments
Tags: bicycle, bike, lbs, Raleigh, repairs
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