The difference between us and them

Lately, I have been reminded in a very acute manner of something that all cyclists come to know intuitively: there is a cultural chasm between cyclists and noncyclists, and there are aspects of cycling that drivers and pedestrians just don't understand.

As a bike commuter, I experience this on the streets of New York City every day. The first thing you realize is that you are the outcast. Sure, there are conflicts between pedestrians and cars, and in this battle I certainly favor the pedestrians. But the pedestrians have sidewalks, and their main concern is crossing roads. Cars have these roads, and rule because whether they are in the right or not their potential to kill in an instant gives them the upper hand. Where to cyclists fit in? Well, by law we are a vehicle, so the road belongs to us as much as cars.

This is all good in theory, but the reality is that the power imbalance between bikes and cars puts bikes at a terrible disadvantage. The consequence for a bicyclist of asserting his or her rights could be death: if you get run over, it does not matter if you had the right of way. Drivers just don't get this, and you can tell from the way that they drive. I often compare the car-bike interface with two dogs playing, a Bull Mastiff and a Pekinese. Obviously the Bull Mastiff could swallow the Pekinese whole in about five seconds, but it does not. Instead, it realizes its superior killing potential and treats the smaller dog appropriately, deferring to it in play. Most drivers lack the social intelligence of big dogs, failing to defer to cyclists at all, acting instead as if the bike were an equal competitor for the same space.

Kudos to the New York City Department of Transportation for realizing this imbalance. All over the city they are recognizing what drivers and pedestrians often don't: bikes need dedicated street space protected from cars. Near my house there's a big traffic circle that joins Parkside Avenue, Fort Hamilton Parkway, Prospect Park Southwest, and Coney Island Avenue. This circle was a menace for cyclists, but is now in the process of being converted in a way that puts the safety of cyclists and pedestrians ahead of the efficiency of cars. Similarly, new protected bike lanes on Kent Avenue in Brooklyn and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan acknowledge that the best place for cyclists is their own place. Ironically, pedestrians and cars alike have a hard time respecting the small amount of space carved out for the bicyclists.

It still surprises me that non-cyclists don't support dedicated space for cyclists. It's strange, but often pedestrians and drivers find affinity in not wanting to allow cyclists into their respective clubs. Why this is true is hard to figure out. Sometimes pedestrians have negative experiences with cyclists, and so perhaps they don't see the common interest in reclaiming space from cars. Maybe it's that the default state of mind in our society is that cars are entitled to priority treatment, and pedestrians want to make sure they keep their number two status. But whatever it is that causes non-cyclists to not get it, they don't get it.

Strap on your helmet and start using your bike as your primary means of transportation and you will get it. You will realize why so many people ride as you discover the freedom associated with not relying on a car or public transportation. But you will also realize that bicyclists are not treated well, and using a bike every day takes dedication. This dedication is altruistic, as every cyclist reduces the amount of traffic experienced by car drivers and the pedestrians who use public transportation. This dedication is altruistic, because it is the only truly zero-carbon-emission form of transportation.

We cyclists are out there doing it for everyone. Come on, give us a little love.

Ringwood, finally

My poor Titus Racer-X 29er. I put it together last winter and it has been out to proper mountain bike trails maybe six times. This is the worst part of living in New York City. In so many other ways, I can embrace city living. I don't own a car. I ride my bike everywhere, to the point that it is weird to find myself on the subway or on a bus or in a car. I like that. I love my bikes that spend most of their time on the pavement. I love my little street bike -- chances are I would not own such a bike if it weren't for the city and its many opportunities to ride street and parks.

But mountain biking was the thing that really turned me into a bicyclist, and the kind of landscape that appeals to me when I think about really riding is this:


Give it to me rocky, rooty, and in the backwoods.

All my years living on Long Island really did spoil me. Growing up in Huntington, I could ride my mountain bike to the Stillwell Loop in less than twenty minutes. When I moved to Stony Brook there were the clandestine trails of Belle Meade Road inviting me to wake up early and get a ride in before heading off to school. I took for granted that I could ride mountain bike trails anytime.

And then I moved back to New York City. And shortly thereafter I jettisoned my car. And that spelled the end of my modern mountain biking life. Since then I have been to Mountain Creek once and haven't been to Plattekill. I have been on maybe three serious rides on the new Titus. It's a sad state of affairs, really.

I have one person to thank for these rides, and that's my buddy Jeff:


Jeff lives in Jersey City, has a car, and most importantly loves to ride difficult mountain bike trails at a reasonable pace. He and I are very well-suited to riding together, and we've made it a tradition for me to take the PATH train over to his place so we can escape out to one of New Jersey's wonderful trails.

Folks, stop dissing Jersey. That ugly part by Manhattan is New York City's fault, and once you get out beyond the boundary lands it is absolutely gorgeous. For mountain bikers, the glaciers did New Jersey right. Whereas Long Island got all the sand, Northern New Jersey got the rocks and boulders:


The crown jewel of this mess is Ringwood State Park. Jeff and I got out there once this summer but that was way too little. This place has every manner of riding, and so much challenging terrain that one could ride there every day and never get bored. A new line that recently opens makes the most of all the rocks at this place, and it is truly an all-mountain kind of trail.

Jeff and I often do pretty well on our cross-country bikes, but on this day it was wet and muddy and leafy. Combine these uncertain conditions with lack of real mountain biking either of us has done in recent time, and we did a lot of walking. No matter, this place still rules.

Thanks, Jeff, for keeping me from completely losing my mind in New York City...

Take what you can get...

Sometimes, after days of not being able to ride, the only time you have to ride is a time when it is threatening rain. And you still go out there.

Sometimes when you get to the park the gate is closed because the hours have changed due to the impending winter. And you still throw your bike over the fence.


Sometimes the rain starts to fall oh-so-slowly just as you arrive.


And you still ride, because all we have is now.

Sunny Day Pedal-O-State

I still haven't fully profiled my Tonic Fabrications 24" Fall Guy on these pages, but I figured I would give an update on the pedals. I recently took the plunge and bought a pair of trendy polycarbonate (i.e. plastic) pedals. They are Odyssey Twisted Chameleon's:


Pretty boring looking pedals, huh? Well, that's because you don't know the secret of the Chameleons. When the sun hits them, they turn bright yellow:


When I first was looking at the bike shop for a pair of PC pedals, my biggest concern was grip. I have ridden plastic flats before and previous versions of these sorts of pedals were super-slippery, so I was concerned about changing over from convention metal petals with bolt-in pins. Of course my shins have certainly developed a distaste for the metal pins of my old pedals, which like to draw blood. Given that the PC pedals are relatively inexpensive and much lighter, I figured I would take the plunge.

The kid at the shop told me that the Odyssey Twisted had the best grip of those found in his cabinet of pedals, and that was my initial draw. He was all excited about them changing color and at first I balked at the extra $5 pricetag for such a goofy feature. But these were the best-gripping pedals in the shop, so I went with the color-changing feature.

The most important finding on my first few rides is that the grip on these pedals is probably better than those on my aging Eastern metal pedals. That might be because the old pedals are missing a few pins, but I think it actually has more to do with the difference in materials. Whereas the medal pedals are slippery everywhere except for where the pins dig into my shoes, the plastic pedals are more grippy overall, with the abundant plastic "pins" providing the extra holding power. We will see how this grip is maintained as the pedals wear, but so far so good.

And I have come to really love the "yellow in the sun" feature of these pedals. They sort of remind me to get out there when the weather is good and ride. And with the sky-blue paint on my bike the pedals evoke the sunny clear skies that should always beckon me to ride.

Prenuptial Greenport Session

After scoping it out on our ride out in Montauk last June, I had to actually get to the Greenport Skate Park on my Tonic. The earlier ride out to this area was to do some wedding planning, so it was fitting that I would get to ride right before my wedding on August 21st.

Teresa and I were staying with her sister Lisa and brother-in-law Kahlil on Shelter Island. Kahlil and I both own Tonic Fall Guys. So when the right moment presented itself, we headed over on the North Ferry to rip Greenport.

Greenport is a pretty interesting park. It is very large for a park located in such a small and remote community. There is a huge metal-surfaced vert ramp that seems not to get a lot of attention except as a platform for ollieing off of, a big spined mini ramp that's also surfaced with metal, and a series of concrete and wood surfaces. It is simultaneously really awesome for its ambition and disappointing for its execution. Don't get me wrong: a free, public skate park is a free public skate park. It is just that there was so much investment in the construction of this park and not a whole lot of design sense. Like many older parks it really lacks flow, and that lack of flow negates some of its magnitude.

To be honest, Kahlil did most of the ripping:


I am still very much in my "early stages" of learning to ride parks, and was extra careful (and extra padded up) as I did not want to come home injured two days before Teresa and I were to get married.

One feature of this park that makes it funny is that it is pretty much deserted. Maybe it gets more intense periodically, but both times that I have visited it has been desolate. No worries about snake sessions here! On this day there were three brothers there, the oldest riding a bike, the second riding a skateboard, and the youngest riding a scooter. The kid on the bike was pretty sick:


I would take pretty much any park if it were down the block from me, but my local park (Owl's Head in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn) is a lot better than this one. Still, it's nice to know that each summer when Lisa and Kahlil vacation in Shelter Island that we can visit this park.

Not on the Bike

I just returned from a trip to Nova Scotia. My mom owns a house in North West Harbor, a tiny little shoreline village in Shelburne County. It's a pretty isolated area by my urban standards, quiet and still very wild. You would think that this would be a perfect place for biking, but I have found that it is not.

About five years ago I went full bore with the idea of mountain biking in Nova Scotia. I had been watching a lot of freeride videos featuring Canadian locales (I know, wrong coast) and my parents owned a back lot of woods covering almost forty acres that I was determined to turn into a trail. So I brought my Kona Stinky and took to cutting out a trail. I labored in a bugshirt, trading sweat for protection from the thousands of mosquitos surrounding me with a feast in mind. I even made a little freeride feature, a bridge crossing over a massive fallen tree.

So you would think that my construction would have seeded a regular mountain biking pursuit in Nova Scotia, but it did not. After spending a full week clearing the trail, I had little time to ride it, so it was not burned in. When I returned the following summer, it was pretty much gone. I am used to bemoaning the over-riding of trails located around New York City, but in Nova Scotia I learned an important lesson: if there are not enough people riding a trail, it won't be a trail. In addition, the ecology of Nova Scotia really does not encourage mountain biking. I have heard that there is a good riding scene near Halifax, but down where my mom lives it is flat and the bugs are voracious. There are great rocks, but with no one riding over them, most are covered in moss and aren't all that rideable.

I should say that a lot of people travel around Nova Scotia as bike tourists, and I can see where it would be fun to pack up the panniers and cover the long winding roads that cover the coastline. But just riding around is pretty boring, and I have not gotten a lot of pleasure out of road riding in Shelburne County. I am not a big fan of just riding around on the roads, so perhaps my own lack of interest is my problem.

So what's a dedicated biker to do when visiting a place without good biking?

For me, it means a shift of frame. What do I like about biking? It's getting out and exploring the outdoors, it is discovering new places under my own power. In Nova Scotia, the best outdoors looks like this:

The best explorable terrain in Nova Scotia is the shoreline.

I have to admit it, a bike is not of much use in this terrain. The best human-powered vehicle for exploring the shoreline looks like this:

The ocean ride? My mom's sea kayak.

So I have learned to go with the flow and use my arms for a change. Really, although I am pretty much using the wrong half of my body, kayaking is a lot like riding. You have to set a pace and get into a rhythm, and once you get into that rhythm paddling can be really relaxing. Like a mountain bike, a kayak can really extend the range of places that you explore. A good ocean kayak can ride in about 6" of water, so almost nowhere is beyond range On the ocean there's also the potential for some "freeriding", as wind and wave conditions can create significant challenges. Is it mountain biking? No, but it is a fun alternative.

Although the kayak is pretty versatile, it does suffer from one characteristic that I really don't like: weather dependence. If there's significant fog it can be dangerous; my partner Teresa and I once got caught in between two coasts as the fog rolled in and for a few minutes we couldn't get any bearing on where we were or whether we were drifting out into the open ocean. Kayaking in the rain is possible, but with enough wind it is really not that pleasant.

Snow is the weather enemy of my mountain biking explorations. In a kayak, it is fog.

I will ride my mountain bike in pretty much any weather, with snow being the only thing that really slows me down. Coastal conditions unfortunately create "good days" and "bad days" for kayaking.

Bicycle Film Festival NYC 2009

I have been going to the Bicycle Film Festival (BFF) for the last four years. It's always a great place to reconnect with my passion for riding and meet other people in the New York City bike scene. I am about as far from being a "scenester" as is possible when it comes to bikes, but I like to sit back and check out other people's scenes. For most of the year I just live in my little riding cocoon, riding with a few friends, so it is good to get out and see what the rest of the biking community is up to.

The last couple of years, this is what the festival looked like...

This year was particularly bad, with a constant rain dogging all the outside activities that usually keeping Second Street in Manhattan jumping. There were plenty of people, it was just really wet...

Pedicabs were out in full effect, as was the pedibillboard above...

A new thing this year was free bike repair. Nice! I think that helping other people keep their bikes on the road (and even better teaching them to do it themselves) is a major mission for those of us with veteran status in the biking community.

Of course our good friends Transportation Alternatives were on hand. Having ridden in New York City on and off for the last twelve years, I cannot thank TransAlt enough for all they have done to make biking better in New York City. They were launching their "Biking Rules" campaign with spoke cards and a new handbook at this event. Aimed at getting bikers to know not only their rights but also their responsibilities, this campaign is probably well overdue. What will be interesting to see is how it goes over with the "hardcore biker" contingent that usually turns out at an event like the BFF. The campaign is good for me because there are definitely some things I do that I should be more mindful of, such as riding on the sidewalk. It's not something I do often, but when I do I know it rightly pisses off pedestrians which is not great for the cause. I guess the one thing about this campaign that will be hard for me to get with is the idea that bikes ought to follow all traffic rules. I will elaborate on this more in the future, but I just don't believe that bikes should have to stop at every single light that's red.

A big part of being at the BFF is showing off your bicycle. Notice how the ubiquitous guy with the penny farthing and the lady with the matching rainbow bike and outfit get so much attention.

I got to check out Freeman Transport bicycles for the first time. They had several single-speed and fixed models including this pretty retro fixie, all with S-and-S couplers. Now my only question is how do you lock said gorgeous handmade bike that can be broken in two in a matter of seconds.

The Brooklyn Machine Works table was a fun place to check out. I covet a lot of their designs, including the SR6 with a Hammerschimdt crankset and green Gangsta Track bikes above. I learned that they even sell the Gangsta Track with a canti-mount equipped fork. I wish I had more reason to own both of these bikes, but right now they remain fantasies.

If you are looking for really tight street fixie, the bikes from Geekhouse were looking pretty sweet.

And of course there was a variety of other goodies for sale. Apparently rainbow anodized is still cool.


I love the small-scale sewing operations that have emerged from the biking community...

Including Long Island's own Vaya. Trust me when I give Vaya the DIY seal of approval. Check out all their stuff made from reclaimed tubes...

Of course the BFF is about films, and Teresa and I saw quite a few of them. Friday night we saw a variety of shorts followed by the film Where Are You Go. Shorts at the BFF can be pretty hit or miss, with a lot of them feeling like someone's film class project that happened to involve a bicycle that went looking to get into a festival and scored the BFF because, well, the film involved a bicycle in some way. The other kind of film that can be sort of tedious is the "celebration of the beauty of the bicycle" short. These are awesome in a way but start to feel like the same film trotting out the same themes with different rider profiles. I love my bike, it gives me time to think, it is better than a car, I live for my bike. I have now provided you with the narrative themes, now go get some footage and make a short for next year's festivals.

In contrast, Made in Queens was an amazingly tight short that brought something new. Profiling a group of immigrant kids whose families came from Trinidad and Tobago, this film was tight in its narrative and cinematography. Teresa and I were arguing about whether these were the same kids we saw at last year's BFF street party, but at any rate their claim to fame is that they turn old beater BMX bikes into five hundred pound rolling sound systems. Definitely DIY and definitely some thing to check out.

I also liked the imagery of Paris Vision, which was an artsy piece capturing the flavor of Paris' fixed gear and bike polo scene.

The Friday feature, Where Are You Go, was definitely worth watching. It was sort of a video montage chronicling the 2008 Tour D'Afrique, a grueling 12,000 km ride from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa. At times this film was not sure about whether it wanted to tell a story about this ride: we do get little profiles of the riders, but there wasn't a coherent picture of anyone other than the three guys who made the film. It was really neat to see how everyday Africans from such a huge geographical range reacted to these strange affluent westerners on bikes, but after awhile the novelty of watching another kid gawk at the hipster tall bike the filmmakers decided to make mid-ride wore off. I guess I would say that this film was good in spite of the filmmaking, simply because the event was so interesting.

We also went to see two programs on Saturday. The first was the "Mountain Bike" program with a few other things thrown in. There was a very small crowd for this program and the BFF folks did not seem to care enough to even have someone in the projecting booth who would notice the painfully out of sync sound that plagued the first few shorts. A short called Bike Trials: Regaining Balance was pretty neat, showing the exploits of a few trials riders in British Columbia. Trials is amazing, but it is a seriously obscure sport here in North America. According to this short, that might be due to an over-abundance of girlfriends. To decide for yourself, track this film down.

Comic relief was provided by Le Tour Rider, a sort of spoof allusion to Breaking Away, culminating in a collision between bike and automotive food delivery services. Silly, but awesome.

I might be getting a little burnt of freeride mountain bike films. That, or my standards are getting higher after seeing quite a few. Either way I was not all that impressed with an edited short of the full-length movie Latitudes. Although I must say that it is cool to see Cam McCaul pull off back flip after back flip on an eight pack.

I was pretty excited to see Freeride: The Aaron Chase Story. I wasn't disappointed, but I wasn't blown away either. It is a great profile piece, giving you a flavor of Aaron's life early in his career and now that he is older, married, and a father. Although it was painful to watch, the best part of this film is the frank manner in which it deals with an accident Aaron had on some skinny at a demo. I have always felt that high skinnies are pretty stupid and pointless, and the story of his fall from ten-plus feet up to a hard concrete parking lot only reinforced that sense. The story turns out okay, and it almost makes one feel that you can come back from any injury, but for me the whole thing underscored a concern that I have had for a long time: pro bikers are being pushed to do things that are more and more likely to cause serious permanent injury. At the end of this film I did not find myself totally convinced that all the perks and adventure of being a pro biker are really worth it. That's easy for me to say from my midlife, relatively careful riding stance, but I don't think I would encourage on of my children to pursue a life like Aaron's.

The last program we saw was the BMX features. Of course that had to be preceded by a long jump contest:

BMX is kind of a gap for me. I never was a BMX kid, but I have always appreciated it. I skated, then I freerided, and in a couple of places in there I played around on twenty-inch bikes. Now, what with living in south Brooklyn and owning a Tonic Fall Guy, I am as close as I have ever been to BMX. So the curiosity grows...

These were the best films we saw. The first film I'm Good On That One, which was basically a promo for Lotek Shoes, was mind-blowing. This is the way I like my skate/BMX/freeride videos: fast, intense, and unrelenting. I know that it is much easier to make a video with filler because valuable footage is hard to come by, but I would much rather watch 15 minutes of amazing stuff than half an hour of slowly-revealed lukewarm action. All I can say is this: how the hell does anyone ride brakeless in San Francisco?

The second film, Train Trip, was also pretty amazing. It was slower in pace but the footage of veterans Joe Rich and Ruben Alcantara was well worth it. The stuff these guys still pull is just amazing: big long and burly.

The feature film was I Love My Bike: The Story of FBM Bikes. It seemed like every person from the local area with any connection to this DIY American-made company was out in force, and the place was pretty rowdy. But when the film came on, everyone settled down. What followed was a very well-crafted story about a very unlikely bike company. As a person who needs a primer on BMX history, this film really filled in a lot of gaps for me. Pretty much every important rider from the last fifteen years played some part in this film, which chronicled the slow rise and tribulations of FBM, an upstate company that has ridden out several boom-and-bust cycles of the BMX industry. Great film, great story. I think what interested me most was the maturation process of the major players in the company, a group of friends who went from reject upstarts to tastemakers over the last decade-plus. If I ever get my own twenty-incher, it will be an FBM custom.

After the film the BMX crowd was so pumped that they tried to get a makeshift ramp going:

This unfortunately highlighted some of the more "dumb ass" sides of the BMX scene, of which there are plenty. Ah, reminds me of the hardcore scene!

Besides watching films, we also got to hang out with Carl and Curtis...