Bicycles Make Sweden Green

The recent demonstrations in Turkey and Sweden--and the Occupy protests--got me to thinking about the roles bicycles (and cyclists) play in public demonstrations.

By chance, I stumbled over a website containing this:

From 591 Photography Blog

Now, if you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that I'd publish that photo just because of the chainguard on the bike in it!  But it has historical significance:  The bike and rider were part of a massive Stockholm demonstration in 1972.


Some argue that this demonstration is to the international "green" or environmental movement as the Stonewall Rebellion is to the LGBT rights movement.  Thousands of people--mostly young, mostly on or with bicycles--brought the city to a virtual standstill for several days in April.

Is This What The Vikings Had In Mind?

Today I am going to create a post that will get lots and lots of views for all of the wrong reasons.  I will express shock and moral indignation. (What other kind of indignation is there, really?)  I will protest some more...and more.  And, well...we all know what happens when the lady doth protest too much.




Sometimes I think a good working definition of the word "model" is "someone who is better--or, at least more attractive--than the product he or she is being employed to sell."   Such is the case with the young woman in the ad for Crescent Bicycles, which appeared in Bicycling! in 1975 or thereabouts.

The bicycles she was trying to entice young men into buying were made in Sweden and bear no relation to velocipedes bearing the same name that were made in the USA at the end of the 19th, and the beginning of the 20th, centuries.  The bikes looked cool in a funky '70's sort of way:  orange paint with checkerboard (that, I think, was supposed to represent a checkered flag) graphics.  That, actually, was fairly surprising for something that came out of the land of Queen Christina.  

Even more surprising was the workmanship--or, should I say, the lack thereof.  This was even true on the higher models made from Reynolds 531 tubing.  I worked on a few of those bikes and found, not only fairly sloppy braze works around the lugs, but globs of molten metal that cooled into unfinished edges of metal at the points where the bottom bracket shell and seat lugs met the frame tubes.  This made it difficult to fit parts such as bottom bracket cups and seat posts accurately.


Perhaps the worst problem of all, though, was the toe clip overlap.  Mind you, I don't mind some toe clip overlap.  But I think that had my shoes been any bigger, I could have flicked the quick-release lever on the front wheel with my toes.  All right, that's an exaggeration.  But I don't recall any other bike--not even the most extreme track machine--that placed a rider's lower digits so close to the front wheel spokes.  As Michael Kone and Sheldon Brown wryly noted, most of these bikes probably "met untimely deaths in commuter hell accidents."


Those young women really should have been wearing helmets and using foot retention!