It's Not A Chase! Really, They Swear It's Not!

During my formative years, I went to more than a few movies that featured car chases.  But, I swear, I was dragged to them kicking and screaming.  Really, I was!  

You see, most of my trips to the cinema (That's what I call a "movie house", now that I'm a snotty intellectual!) were made in the company of my father and three brothers.  My mother is not particularly a movie fan, let alone a cineophile, although whenever I go to visit her, we  see a movie together--albeit ones that involve more human interaction than piston-powered pursuits.

Still, I admit, I can get a thrill out of watching a chase.  Back in the day, I usually rooted for the pursued even though I knew he (Yes, he was almost always male, as was the pursuer.) would get caught.  When I watched this video, though, I was actually on the side of the chaser--and he's a police officer!




Of course, his being on a bike has something to do with it.  Also, he was chasing the driver of an ATV, which is illegal to drive on the streets of Washington DC--and most cities.  Thankfully, I haven't encountered nearly as many of them as I've seen motorized and electric bikes in the the bike/pedestrian paths!

As far as I know, that officer wasn't seriously hurt.  And I'm glad he was trying to do his job--though his employers deny that it was a chase--or, at least, that it did not follow the DC police department's "no chase" policy when it comes to ATVs.

Rather, the officer was "following" the ATV rider, according to spokeswoman Karimah Bilal.  It was "typical of what we do in this type of incident," she added.

What If Vivo Had Viva'ed--Or Tech Really Was Superbe?

Today, if you are equipping a bicycle with a derailleur, you are probably choosing from models offered by three companies:  Campagnolo, Shimano and SRAM.  

There are a few smaller makers and marketers of gear shifters, but the Big Three comprise the vast majority of today's offerings.

If you've been cycling for as long as I have, you have seen other derailleur brands come and go, and have probably heard of others that met their demise not long before you started cycling.

When I started cycling in earnest, the recently-departed names I would sometimes see included Cyclo and DNB.  I'd heard about the otherworldly engineering and quality of Sanko derailleurs but would not see one up close until many years later.  

Some derailleurs that were common at the time I became a dedicated cyclist came from Huret and Simplex, two marques that have disappeared into the mists of time. Actually, Huret was acquired by Sachs--which also acquired Maillard, a maker of hubs, freewheels and pedals, and premier chain manufacturer Sedis-- which in turn became part of SRAM.

Less common, but still visible, brands from that time that have disappeared or been absorbed into larger entities include Zeus and Galli (which made those "midnight blue" parts that looked so great on white, silver or chromed bikes!).  While they made some fine derailleurs and other parts, they aren't much more than footnotes, except to collectors.

On the other hand, I and other longtime cyclists still lament the demise of SunTour.  For about a decade and a half, they were making the most innovative and best-shifting derailleurs available.  They also were priced lower than offerings from other companies, which made SunTour derailleurs, by far, the best values available.

Those of us who followed their trajectory believe that their downfall began with their Superbe Tech derailleur. (The Trimec derailleur, which preceded it by a couple of years, wasn't a bad derailleur:  It was just in the "why did they bother?" category.)  The Superbe Tech was, arguably, a noble effort:  It was an attempt to solve a problem that had long bedeviled cyclists who ride in a lot of mud and dirt--and riders in the then-nascent discipline of mountain biking.   That problem is that paralellogram derailleurs, which are usually made up of two linkage plates and are thus "open" inside the parallelogram, sometimes clog with mud, dirt or debris.

Try to put it back together!

SunTour tried to solve that problem with a solid parallelogram, with only one linkage plate.  The problem is that, in order to make up for the loss of spring-back strength afforded by a spring against a second linkage plate, SunTour put a complicated, finicky mechanism inside the parallelogram--and used larger-than-normal upper pulleys and pivots with springs that weren't adequately shielded from the very elements that SunTour tried to keep out of the Superbe Tech's parallelogram!  

Some riders got lucky and rode their Superbe Techs for thousands of miles and several decades.  Others--especially mountain bikers and "rough-stuff" tourists--had their mechanisms fail, without warning, after only a few rides or weeks.

After SunTour ended up in the trail dust of history, a Long Islander named John Calindrelle came up with a seemingly-simple solution:  the "Grunge Guard".  Like its name, it was a simple, if inelegant solution:  basically, a rubber boot that covered the derailleur.  It was inexpensive and did the job well, at least until the material (neoprene)wore out or an edge got caught in a branch, bramble or derailleur part.

So, Mr. Calindrelle came up with another solution:  a derailleur that, technically, differed little from Shimano and SRAM units popular at the time (around the turn of the millenium) and was made like the pricey CNC mechanisms coming from the likes of Paul and other small manufacturers.  The difference was that Calindrelle's derailleur--called "Vivo"--had "lips" that allowed for precise fitting of an improved version of the "Grunge Guard."

Vivo rear derailleur

Apparently, not many of those derailleurs were made.  At least, they were made only for a couple of years. During that time, he made one change in the design: Where the first Vivo derailleurs had traditional cable routing (housing looped behind the derailleur body and into a fitment on the underside of the parallelogram), the revised versions took cables that went straight into the parallelogram from above, which eliminated other points that could clog with mud and bind.

Drawing in patent application for new improved version (V2) of Vivo derailleur

Shimano, interestingly, didn't see his rubber-boot design as a serious competitor against their derailleurs.  The Japanese behemoth, however, wanted to use that cable-routing system. So, in 2002, Shimano bought Calindrelle's patents.  As he later explained, selling his ideas made him far more money than making his derailleurs or boots ever would have.

So...SunTour and Mr. Calindrelle tried to solve the same problem.  SunTour's design seemed like a good idea and was elegant.  However, it had unanticipated flaws that would lead to the failure of the Superbe Tech and, arguably, SunTour itself.  Calindrelle's creation, on the other hand, was inelegant but worked flawlessly--and, ironically, led to the end (if by different means) of his business operation.

How might our derailleurs be different today had SunTour's Superbe Tech design worked--or if it had been more remunerative for John Calindrelle to continue manufacturing his creations?

Bicycle Safety In The City: It's About Him

I have long said that much of the opposition to bicycle infrastructure--or simply encouraging people to get out of their cars and onto a saddle--is really class-based resentment.  In other words, people who are upset when they see bike share docks taking up "their" parking spaces or a bike lane that takes "their" traffic lane away believe that liberal elites are coddling privileged young people who are indulging in a faddish pastime and simply won't grow up.

What they fail to realize is that creating awareness and infrastructure doesn't just protect trust fund kids who ride their "fixies" to trendy cafes where they down $12 craft beers.  A goal of efforts to encourage cycling and make it safer is also to protect those who, by necessity, make their livings on their bicycles.  Edwin Vicente Ajacalon was one of them.

Like most of the folks who make food deliveries on their bicycles, Ajacalon was an immigrant--in his case, from Guatemala.  He arrived in this country--specifically, to Brooklyn--a year ago.

He did not, however, live in the Brooklyn of fixed gears and craft beers:  Though he was only about eight kilometers from Hipster Hook, he lived a world away, in a single room he shared with five other men who, like him, are immigrants who delivered food by bicycle.  And the area in which he usually worked, which realtors dubbed "Park Slope South" some years back, is really still the hardscrabble working-class immigrant community it was when my mother was growing up in it.  The only differences are, of course, that the immigrants come from different places and that the neighborhood--hard by the northwestern entrance of the Greenwood Cemetery--is dirtier and shabbier, and still hasn't entirely recovered from the ravages of the 1980s Crack Epidemic.

Only one block from that entrance to the necropolis, around 5:45 pm on Saturday, Edwin Vicente Ajacalon was pedaling through the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street.  There, a BMW sedan smacked into him.



The driver, to his credit, remained at the scene (and has not been charged with any crime). Unfortunately, there probably was nothing he or anyone else could do for Edwin:  Minutes later, the police would find him lying down in a pool of blood, halfway across the block from where he was hit.  Someone checked  his vital signs and found none, which means that, although he was pronounced dead when he arrived at the hospital, he might've died as soon as the car struck him or when he struck the pavement.

All anyone could do after that was to pick up the pieces of his bicycle which, along with a sneaker and a hat, where strewn about the street.

When anyone dies so suddenly and tragically, we can lament the loved ones who will never see him again, and those whom he will never see--as well as the things he won't have the opportunity to do.  For poor Edwin, those things include celebrating his fifteenth birthday.

Yes, you read that right.  Edwin Vicente Ajacalon was 14 years old when he was struck and killed while making deliveries on his bicycle--one year after emigrating, alone, from Guatemala.  He has no family here in the US, save for an uncle with whom he briefly lived.  Like his roommates, Edwin was working other odd jobs in addition to delivering food on his bicycle--and, after paying rent, sending money to his parents in Guatemala.

So...Now we know that bicycle safety is not just a matter of protecting pampered post-pubescents.  In this case, it's about protecting the livelihood of a boy in his early teens and the parents he was trying to support.  And they can't even afford to come to the US to claim his body.