Front fork was aging fast on the old bike, my brother said his Big Dummy was great, I didn’t get laid off this spring, and the stock is up on solid acquisition rumors. So I bought myself a Big Dummy.
Or rather, I bought a frame and some parts, and reused some from the old bike. The tires, front wheel, handlebars, seat, seatpost, seat lanyard, lights, fender, water bottle cage, front rack, wide loader, and snap deck are from the old bike. Rear wheel, shifters, pedals, botom bracket, crank, chain, brakes, and stem(s) are new. The “chain tensioner” is recycled from another bike. KickBack, I bought from my brother, he notices the weight more than I do. I like it.

Here it is loaded:

Here is the (revised) cockpit. Since the new bike has a threadless fork, I decided to mount all the crap on a second stem. From left to right, bell, lights (hi/lo beams), odometer, coffee, shifter. The circuit-board with blue tape thing is on the rack; it is the power controller for the LEDs, and needs to find a better home eventually.

And yes, that is a fancy headset. The guys down at the LBS did a great job on the hard sell, and the clincher was the multi-year guarantee; given that longtails put double the weight on the front fork, this seemed like an excellent idea. Plus, it’s very pretty.

Chain tensioner. I decided to go with internal gears, eventually I am getting a chain guard or partial chain case (I would love to keep the chain clean in the winer), but the Big Dummy has vertical dropouts so the chain might not always fit right. Plus, with the long chain run, it doesn’t hurt to be sure it stays aligned going onto the rear cog. Using a single chainring and sprocket also meant that I could use a track bottom bracket and crank, and get my feet a little closer together (about 20mm closer together), which I had noticed, riding on a 3-speed, felt better.

Here is most of it, unloaded:

No problems with the internal gears yet; I’m monitoring the adjustment in the beginning (it’s EASY), and once I got the second stem located right, shifting was convenient, and I am not noticing any particular lack of speed. I could well be putting more power (no shock fork, stiffer bike, better Q factor) into a less-efficient drive train, but as long as the net is unchanged, I am happy.

I’m not yet as comfortable no-hands as I was on the old bike, but I expect I will get there. Lightly loaded, it’s fine.

Also: Xtracycle conversion kit (FreeRadical, parts, sideloaders, rear brake and cassette-ready 26″ wheel, plus NEW SnapDeck), one owner, rather used, looking for a good home. Installation help is available.

Useful websites for figuring stuff out

State bicycle laws (includes many state vehicle code pointers): http://www.massbike.org/bikelaw/statelaws.htm

Massachusetts Education Reform Laws: http://www.doe.mass.edu/lawsregs/603cmr10.html?section=06

Massachusetts Municpal Actual Revenues and Expenditures

Many statistics comparing countries: http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php

and states: http://www.statemaster.com/index.php

Demographic data by zipcode: http://www.zipskinny.com/

MCAS results: http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/mcas/

Mass.gov Belmont page: http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=mg2localgovccpage&L=1&L0=home&L1=Resident&sid=massgov2&selectCity=Belmont

Educational profiles (Mass): http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/

Inflation data: http://www.minneapolisfed.org/community_education/teacher/calc/hist1800.cfm

Income dispersion:
Income Inequality (1947-1998)
Historical Income Inequality Tables

Constraints include: black, no stupid name/decorations, fat (2.3″) tire clearance, fenders, rack, chain guard, dropped top tube (“ladies” bike), enough gears.
Nothing works out of the box, but bike work is easy enough. Painting the frame is hard, finding an aftermarket chain guard is tricky, fitting a tire where there is no room is impossible. The candidates (all decent commuter bikes) include:

• Breezer Uptown 8 U frame, steel fork. ($660)
  

  A complete package, but no room for the fat tires. Also not black.

• Biria Easy Boarding 7 ($570)
  

  A complete package, not clear the fat tires would fit. The excessively practical step-through might be a fashion issue.

• Electra Amsterdam Balloon 8 ($650)
  

  This was almost a winner, but for the pedal-forward position. I’ve tried it, it’s not bad, but it’s not great. Also needs fender, chaincase, perhaps a rack.

• Kona AfricaBike ($300)
  

  

  A nice choice, we might even have gone with it, but it wasn’t available in too many shops (2 carry Kona within 25 miles of our home, and the one we visited did not have it in stock. We saw one on the street in NYC, my better half did not allow me to give it a full exam.

  It needs fenders, chainguard, and rack, and it is black, and it is even steel. It’s probably very heavy (so we hear) and comes with at most 3 speeds, which might be ok, but we have a few icky hills.

• Jamis Commuter 3.0 ($550)
  

  A very nice-looking bike, needs a rack and chainguard, but lacked adequate tire clearance.

• Retrovelo Paula ($2000)
  

  Lacked only rack, chainguard, and affordability. Not black, but very stylish.

• Gary Fisher Simple City ($550 3-spd/$880 8-spd w/ rack)
  

  Another nice-looking bike, needing only a rack (in 3-speed model). 8 speeds includes rack, but neither has adequate tire clearance.

• Novara Flirt ($399)
  

  Needed fenders, rack, and chainguard, but had tire clearance. Was decorated with icky flowers and a great big “Flirt” logo. Yuck.

• Giant Simple ($300)
  
  

  We ended up getting this bike. It needs fenders and a rack (rack already purchased) but it has tire clearance, it’s black, it’s easy to work on. It has 7 exceedingly cheap speeds that I expect I will be replacing if the bike gets any serious use at all.

This just in

(too late for purchase):
Biria Classic Dutch

If you ever wondered why things look “wrong” under fluorescent light, this is why.
Carpooling to Vermont with a physicist, he explained what I had already once seen with my own eyes, which is that fluorescent lights dump all their energy into a handful of colors. Not around a handful of colors, but exactly on a handful of colors. You can see this yourself with a diffraction grating (one can be found in the Klutz Exploratorium book). White LEDs, in contrast, emit a smear of colors closer to what we expect from a traditional light bulb (but with much less infrared, also known as “heat”).

Compare these two lights. The first is a halogen light in a ceiling flood.
Notice how the colors (the spectrum) are a continuous smear.

The second is a compact fluorescent in a ceiling flood.
Notice how the colors appear as distinct, separated images of the flood light.
The light is only producing exactly those six or seven colors that you can see there,
and nothing in betweeen. When you illuminate something with that light, it’s no wonder
that it looks a little peculiar.

Here’s the spectrum from a (bright white, I think) LED strip light.
Notice how the colors are more or less continuous; not quite as good as the halogen,
but close:

By combining white LEDs of different color temperatures, you can get a good distribution of colors.

People have studied how much energy it takes to produce food. It’s interesting. You should read about this, too.The definitive book to read seems to be Food, Energy and Society, edited by D. Pimentel and M. Pimentel, published in 1996. They studied the energy cost of obtaining food in many, many different ways. The main result is that high-productivity farming (like the kind we practice in the US) uses a boatload of energy. Converting grain into meat by feeding it to mammals (cattle, pigs, sheep) uses many calories of grain to create one calorie of meat, so meat is even less energy-efficient. There’s a huge amount of information in this book, much of it interesting, some of it depressing. It will make you want to tear your hair out every time you hear someone talking about farming fuels; odds are, it just won’t work. Besides the fertilizer inputs, there’s also water, and the fertility of the soil. (People need to get serious about driving less, and driving much smaller cars, and they need to do this as soon as possible.)

This paper (which is more quickly accessed) builds on this to demonstrate just how much energy this is, and also studies the greenhouse gas effects (which are not 100% correlated with energy). Animals, and their manure, produce both methane and nitrous oxides. The difference in greenhouse gas emissions between a meat-heavy diet (generally, a typical US diet), and either a vegetarian, or poultry-light diet, can be as large as the difference between driving an SUV and driving a Prius.

It’s also interesting, and depressing, to study the behavior of what I can only call energy-gluttony-apologists. If we cannot get more people to understand what is (probably) going on, we are so screwed. Even one meter of sea level rise will do a lot of damage to coastal cities all around the country, never mind other countries. It’ll mess up drainage and mess up water tables, even if it doesn’t directly flood property.

What I find most incredible is the notion that we simply cannot cut back; that no car can have fewer than 100 horsepower (I learned to drive in a 45 HP car, a Saab 96 with a filthy 2-stroke engine); that our cars must be gigantic; that bicycling is not an option; that every meal must have meat. The stories that people construct in their head to justify not changing their behavior are ludicrous — somehow, amoral, profit-seeking corporations (the oil industry, the coal industry, the big ag business, and the auto industry) are giving us the straight talk, but people who spent years in school learning how to study experiments, data, and phenomena to figure out what’s going on — we’re all Bond villains, or something, intent on imposing our diabolical will on the world. Is it perhaps possible that these profit-seeking corporations are being every bit as deceptive and mendacious as the tobacco industry was? It sure seems that way to me. Seems to me that the Bond villains were on the good side of that issue, at least all the ones that weren’t in the employ of the tobacco industry.

And sure, energy gluttony is fun, but given how we produce energy now, it’s got costs. We’ve got to move our asses, right now, and cut back on some of our most-ridiculous overconsumption. Freezing in the dark is no fun, but driving a Civic instead of a HumVee, that is not much of a sacrifice. Chicken, instead of beef, is not much of a sacrifice. Cutting meat portions in half, is not much of a sacrifice. If you can afford to replace your old crappy leaky windows with new ones, that’s costly, but new windows are actually nicer. LED under-cabinet lighting is expensive, but you get a good light, it takes up no space, lasts a dozen or so years in ordinary use (7+ years if run continuously) you get your choice of (and can mix and match) color temperatures, and it doesn’t get fire-starting hot like halogens and incandescents. That’s not a sacrifice. Places where there’s lots of sun and not much freezing weather, should move to install solar hot water heaters, right now. In southern states that is low-hanging fruit.

Riding your bike a few dozen miles per week may sound like a sacrifice to people who have never done it, but it will help you live longer, and live healthier. I’ve tried dieting to keep weight off, and THAT is a sacrifice. Biking, I lost 20 pounds, and it stayed off. If I don’t bike, something goes wrong with one of my knees, and the doctors I discussed this with suggested that if I didn’t like surgery, perhaps I should keep on biking. Surgery, that’s a sacrifice.

More on this.

And from the National Corn Growers Association.

Two more from Pimental, including the alarming/surprising estimate that we consume more energy than plants create from sunlight.

80 minutes of major bicycle infrastructure advocacy (and the slides). Everyone should watch this.

Cars, mopeds, motorcycles, and busses, behaving badly

Angles morts A day in the life of a Parisian cyclist

Bicyclists behaving badly

Bike messengers are on crack.
(Lucas Brunelle video) Kids, don’t ride like this.

Mexican highway on a bicycle
(Lucas Brunelle, with intolerable music)

Riding on the Charles
(Lucas Brunelle, better music) Looks like fun to me, if you can avoid the thin ice.

London Calling – Bike Messengers Race (Lucas Brunelle). These guys are somewhat less restrained and careful than the New York messengers. Once again, not an instructional video.

Boston Bike Messenger
(more Lucas Brunelle, apparently his first)

Amazing grace

Fixed Gear Bike Tricks by Ines Brunn
I need to work on my balance a little bit.

Synchronized!

Iron chef? No, iron bike

I can’t do THIS on my bike. I think I would break my neck if I tried. More by the same guy: “Love your job”, indeed.

Amazing race

A great race

Track stand at a sprint.
After you. No, after you. No, really, I insist.

Nice skidding

Excerpts from Eddy Merckx hour record ride, 1972

Team pursuit, England vs Australia, 2004

Going really, really fast on a bicycle.
DeciMach!

Art, such as it is.

The finest set of rollers I’ve ever seen

Giant stuffed animals doing bike tricks in a music video!

Rotary flash mob

Recreation

Cycleball, a sport I had never heard of.

Bike Descent of Tajumulco Volcano
Kinda like those truck commercials where they photoshop it or helicoptor it onto the top of a mountain, only for real, on bikes just like the one I ride to work. More of the same.

Big bikes for carrying lots of stuff
This is a one-shot arrangement, to demonstrate the feasibility of carrying small wiggly kids behind an xtracycle. A woman in Jamaica Plain was interested in doing this, maybe, though she had some pretty terrible storage constraints. The xtra can easily carry 100 lbs (I have hauled over 150 in the form of a teenage child), and the trailer is good for about 70. I’ve hauled two kids simultaneously in that very trailer, and with the xtra a third could ride on the back. It would be quite a workout; perhaps it would better to attach the trailer to a tandem. On the other hand, my xtra’s got a third small chainring I haven’t used in about a year, so arguably, I am not hauling enough.

I saw this in a park in Palo Alto, and was totally impressed. A quite-small woman (a little over 5 feet, and plenty slim) pilots the recumbent trike, towing one child in the pedal-alonng behind, and another in the trailer behind that. The trike is just beautiful; it’s a GreenSpeed, Crank Candy pedals, what looks like an AirZound horn, and a rear-view mirror.

Another great design is the Bakfiets. I saw one of these in town this summer, and immediately started taking pictures (the only importer seems to be located in St. Augustine, but I’ve heard thhat they are moving to the Boston area). The low load, centrally located in the bicycle, means that these can carry an enormous amount of weight without the handling getting too squirrelly. Because the rider (usually the largest load) is located to the rear, they are unlikely to flip. I don’t know if this really qualifies as a big rig, seeing as how there is no trailer.

It didn’t turn out the way I expected. “More research needed”, say researchers.

I switched from 700c x 28-32 tires (100-120psi), to 26 x 2.3 tires (60 psi) because I was tired of denting rims and breaking spokes on Our Town’s lovely streets. Unexpectedly, the time needed for my commute to work seemed to go down, and the little odometer reported a higher average speed (yes, I corrected for wheel size, and cross-checked the mileage against Google/Bikely). Didn’t feel any harder, either. I had always been told, and believed, that the high pressure tires had lower rolling resistance.

So, I had some time to kill, and I still had my old wheels, so I decided to do a rolling test. We live on a cul-de-sac that T’s into a street part-way down a gentle hill. I decided to just start the bike rolling, and see how far it went. I also made a video of my first two trials (all told, I did seven runs) both for timing and methodology checking (I did not do the first two runs exactly alike). The two tires were Bontrager Race Lite (700c x 28, 120psi) and Schwalbe Big Apple (26 x 2.3, 60 psi). I only changed the front wheel, to make it easy.

The executive, surprising, summary is that the fat tires with lower pressure had a longer roll-out. They were also slightly faster in the one section that I measured (you can check this yourself on the video). Three of the four Schwalbe runs made it past a fire hydrant near the end, and none of the Bontrager runs made it to the fire hydrant, and none of them made it as far as the shortest Schwalbe run. I did an eyeball timing on the video that was consistent with this; for a fixed distance, the Schwalbe tire got me there slightly faster.

0:11-0:50 (schwalbe, first-stripe to past last drain) (39 seconds)

5:34-6:14 (bontrager, first-stripe to past last drain) (40 seconds)

It is perhaps possible that the greater rotational inertia of the Big Apples reduced my maximum speed (and hence, wind losses) and then carried me further on the flats. However I am plenty heavy (220 lbs) and the bike itself is not light, and I also carried the off wheel with me to keep the total weight the same. Measuring maximum speed is tricky because the wheels are not quite the same size and my odometer would need to be recalibrated.

I timed my last (Schwalbe) roll to get a rough idea of times and speeds. That run took 57 seconds, covered 0.13 mile, average speed of 8.2 mph, maximum speed of 12.5 mph.

Here’s the movie, if you want to review it yourself.
6:50, 19.7MB, Streaming QuickTime. I did the Schwalbe and Bontrager runs that you see here, then I did two more Bontrager runs, and three more Schwalbe runs, and the results were consistent with these two.

And yes, the methodology is not super-fancy, but I think it is an adequate model for everyday use of the tires. We ride on roads, not in labs.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to educate car drivers, so they might understand why I don’t always ride inches from the curb. I attached a camera to my bike and filmed the road on a ride to work. The movie is taking a looooong time to export, but I have some highlights. The uncut movie’s a little dull, anyway.

Here’s a stick-in-the-road. I’m climbing slowly here, so it’s unlikely that I would flip if it caught in my spokes, but it could still trash my spokes.

Here’s a lovely pothole in Lexington, complete with water in the bottom. There’s another one like it further up the photo.

A little further down the road, there’s some substantial debris at the edge of the road.

Lexington has some (four that I know) deadly drains, designed and oriented as if they were intended to trap bicycle wheels (this is one of the reasons I now use very large tires).

There’s a stretch of road in Burlington with big piles of sand. Less of a problem now with fat tires, but skinny tires get all squirrelly in this stuff.

Sometimes, sand with hubcaps.

Here, the road seems to contain a blinding white light. That’s what daylight looks like, emerging from underneath Route 128. Human eyes do a little better than this, and it’s only for a fraction of a second, but if there’s an obstacle here, nobody will see it. There is, in fact, a car hidden in that blinding white blob. And of course, to cars, I am equally invisible.

Returning from work, someone has dribbled a stream of gravel down the edge of the road. I don’t want to ride on this because it could cut my tires. If car drivers knew about the rocks spitting sideways from my tires, they wouldn’t want me riding in it either (the big tires do that less — high pressure tires fling them pretty hard, and I have heard them hitting cars once or twice).

Here, in Burlington, is a nice storm drain, nicely filled with wood scraps. It’s been like this for weeks.

Blocks, bolts.

Bunnies (poor bunny — just to the right of the front wheel, you can see his fluffy cottony tail).

Beavers.

Do note, this is just the impressive-looking big stuff.

My xtracycle -enhanced bike (towing another bike), and some groceries. Tired driver of little bike not shown, but she rode on the deck in front of her bike.

Spencer Wright’s Chupacabra. I think the crazy interim chain wheel is supposed to cut the chain flop, and keep it out of the underbrush, but I don’t really know. Turns out it also allows a normal-width bottom bracket with those fat tires; otherwise, to keep the chain out of the tire, you’d need an uncomfortably wide bottom bracket.

Surly’s Big Dummy . Quien es mas macho?

A longtail “Vanilla ” (via CleverChimp). This bike is just plain beautful.

Clever Chimp’s Xtravois

Here’s a couple of pretty bikes from Fraser Cycles . These are custom, non-Xtracycle beasts. Notice the chain guide below; this is a good thing, because otherwise the long bouncing chain can (sometimes) shift gears for you.

And this is one heck of a rack.

Clever Chimp deserves all the credit for finding most of these or pointing them out, but he’s got them scattered all over his blog. I wanted a bunch of photos so I could point to them and say “these are longtails, aren’t they cool?”

And now there’s more!
The Yuba Mundo:

and the Kona Ute:

and the Madsen (this is their contest button):

and another picture, of the bucketless version.

The Burrows Freight 8 looks like a lot of fun but it is hard to find pictures of it. You can read about it

The Big Dumb Pug, a custom bike made by Banjo Cycles:

The Coffee Bike at Project Rwanda