This is the time of year for the "pancake ride."
You've probably been on one: You ride to someplace where pancakes (and foods that go with them) are served. And then you spend the rest of your ride burning off what you just ate.
In two of the clubs in which I rode, Pancake rides were hugely popular and, certainly, the winter rides that had the biggest turnouts.
The club to which I belonged when I was in college (Rutgers) held those rides every other Sunday in January and February, if I recall correctly. The rides took us from the urban confines of New Brunswick, New Jersey into the rural areas of western New Jersey. Actually, many of the club's rides did, but the Pancake ride had a particular destination: a firehouse that served pancake breakfasts during the winter. I think the proceeds were used to fund the volunteer fire department located in the firehouse, and that everyone who cooked, served, seated people and did all of the other work were family members or friends of the firefighters.
One of the greatest draws of that ride, apart from the complete lack of traffic outside of New Brunswick on a winter Sunday morning and the bucolic countryside, was what we called The Bottomless Plate. Yes, it was an all-you-can-eat affair. In addition to the pancakes, the house served hash browns, sausage, bacon and scrambled eggs, as well as coffee, tea and hot chocolate. It may not have been the best-quality stuff, but when you're cold and hungry, just about anything edible is delicious and hearty.
As I recall, that firehouse was very welcoming to us. That's particularly surprising given how much we ate: Those of you who are better than I am in math can calculate how much Bis-Quick it took to feed thirty to forty cyclists who'd just cycled twenty or so miles in twenty-degree weather with a wind-chill of about five or ten degrees. Also, I should add that some of us were young (i.e., college age) males, who typically had bottomless stomachs and empty wallets.
These days, of course, I'm not a young male. But all of my changes don't seem to have filled in the bottomless pit in my stomach!
Anyway, I decided, just for the heck of it, to type "pancake rides" into a Google search box. It seems that they're going on everywhere, and they're not confined to winter. Still, I'll probably always think of them as winter rides. I mean, how many other foods feel warmer and cozier after a ride on a cold day?
One of the most parodied (and most eminently parodyable) poems in the English language is Joyce Kilmer's "Trees."
Hmm...Even though I know it wouldn't have fit the meter or rhythm of the poem, it might've been better if he'd written, "I think that I shall never see/A bikestand as good as a tree."
Certainly a parking meter isn't quite as nice a stand--although it's a lot easier to loop a chain around it:
The paint job tells me someone was trying to make that bike unattractive to thieves. However, if that was the owner's/rider's intention, something else on the bike counters it:
Now, if you're going to so much trouble to make the bike unappealing, why would you announce, in screaming red letters, that it's a Colnago?
Of course, the bike is not a Colnago. (I know; I owned and raced on one and have seen many others.) Could it be that it's some kind of post-modern irony (translation: a joke)? Could this cyclist be saying, "Ha, ha, it's not a Colnago?"
Who'd've thunk it--putting the Colnago name on a bike would make it less valuable? What if people put Mercedes-Benz stars, or blue-and-white BMW shields, on their 10-year-old Hyundais? Would that make them less of a target for car thieves?
Actually, the basket almost made me wish it was a Colnago. It reminded me of the bike someone I met once in Williamsburg (where else?) about ten years ago: a vintage Cinelli track bike (not the ones sold today with the Cinelli label), with equally vintage Campagnolo Pista components and Mavic SSC rims--and a flowered basket strapped to the handlebars.
None of those bikes, though, will ever have a stand as good as that tree on which I leaned Tosca today.
When people on opposing sides of the same issue are using "stupid" as a prefix for the same word, the thing they're talking about can't be good. Right?
I'm thinking now of bike lanes. Both cyclists and the people who hate us, or merely find us a nuisance, use that same adjective in reference to the lanes.
I was reminded of this when I stumbled over a site called "Stupid Bike Lanes" and read articles like this, and the comments on them.
Of course, the velophobes--who include all sorts of (but not all) people whose way of life or business is auto-based--think we're getting in their way of getting to wherever they have to go and believe we're getting "special privileges."
As any number of other bloggers (including yours truly) and commentators have pointed out, the antipathy toward cyclists, particularly in urban areas, is often generational and based on socio-economic or ethnic issues. Here in New York, non-cyclists hold contradictory views of cyclists: the messenger, the hipster, the Whole Foods customer and the simply rich. What reinforces these stereotypes is that those who most vociferously oppose the bike lanes tend to come from what remains of the blue-collar class and groups like the Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who have large families that they transport in vans. So, they are always driving, it seems, from one available parking spot to the next and, as they see it, the bike lanes take away those spots.
The bike lane-haters who are actual cyclists don't dispute those objections, and in fact cite one basic flaw of most urban bike lanes: They run alongside parking lanes and, therefore, directly in the path of opening drivers' side doors. I've been "doored" a few times: on all except one of those occasions, I was riding in a bike lane.
Some bike lanes are badly designed in other ways. The most obvious flaw, aside from the one I just mentioned, is that many of them go nowhere, end abruptly or in the middle of busy intersections, or are so poorly marked so that only those who already know where they are can find them.
All of the problems I've mentioned actually make cycling less safe than it is in the traffic lanes of most streets. And they indicate that those who design them know as little about cycling as transportation, in an urban area, as those who hate cyclists.
