In the middle of the journey of my life, I am--as always--a woman on a bike. Although I do not know where this road will lead, the way is not lost, for I have arrived here. And I am on my bicycle, again.
I ask this question only somewhat rhetorically: How often have you been praised for riding your bike?
If you live in the United States, your answer probably is "not often" or "never." I suspect that is true in other places where cycling is seen as something you do only because, for whatever reasons, you can't drive a car.
But a twelve-year-old boy in Mumbai, India has become something of a Twitter celebrity for traveling with his bicycle on the city's Metro system. In the photo accompanying the now-viral Tweet, he is seen seated with his bicycle next to him on his way to school.
I have never been to Mumbai but, from what I'm reading and hearing, it has a pretty extensive mass transit system. However, as in most cities public transportation, the longest and most difficult part of a Mumbai commute starts when a passenger disembarks from the train or bus and ends when that passenger arrives at the door of their school, workplace or home. Such scenarios are a major reason why people in outlying neighborhoods of New York, my hometown, drive.
Certainly, I believe the boy should be commended and other kids should be encouraged to do the same. But for some, and many adults, there are other obstacles to overcome if people are going to ride bikes to and from the subway or bus. For one, the trains, station and transit personnel have to be more accomodating to bicycles. For another, there has to be a reasonable assurance that their bikes--whether locked to an outdoor rack or in an indoor facitility--will be there at the end of their day of work, study, shopping or whatever. And, finally, for many, there need to be facilities where people can change clothes--or, in some situations, dress codes could be relaxed.
I am, ahem, a Midlife Cyclist. Still, I hope I live long enough that kids like the one in the photo are praised for riding their bikes to school and that getting to the store, office or other workplace by bike is the norm.
Ask newspaper writers what annoys or frustrates them most, and the answers will include headlines. My newspaper articles certainly weren't masterpieces of literature, but it drove me crazy when it was led off with something illiterate, clumsy or simply inaccurate.
So I felt for Nicole Rosenthal, a staff writer for Patch. Her otherwise-good article began with a title that, while it caught my eye--for a reason I'll mention in a moment--it set a very different tone than, I believe, Ms. Rosenthal intended.
"Aberdeen, Matawan Kids Are Violating Bicycle Laws, Police Say." Matawan is a village in the northern Monmouth County, New Jersey township of Aberdeen. Until 1977, the whole township was known as Matawan. Just one township--which, like Matawan, includes a few villages--stands between Aberdeen and Middletown Township, where I spent my high-school years and first became a dedicated cyclist. In fact, some of my early two-wheel treks outside Middletown took me through Matawan and Aberdeen.
(Snark alert) Li'l Lawbreakers! (Photo by Rachel Sokol)
Then, as now, the township's and village's streets, aside from Routes 34, 35 and 79, are lined with neat homes of people who commute to New York (the railroad station is one of the busiest in New Jersey) and their kids who are like suburban kids in other places--which is to say that if you take away their electronic devices, they're probably not so different from the kids I knew in Middletown.
According to the article, police have received "numerous" complaints about children "disregarding" the state's bicycle safety laws. Well, since most young people don't think very much about the laws are--if, indeed, they even have a vague idea of what they are--I don't think they "disregard" them. Perhaps "violate" is a better word: After all, people violate all sorts of laws and rules they don't realize they're violating.
So what sorts of laws do the youngsters of Matawan-Aberdeen violate? Well, from what the article says, some weren't wearing helmets, which the Garden State requires for riders under 17 years of age. (No such law existed when I was that age; in fact, people would look at you askance if you wore a helmet.) But the majority of complaints were about kids riding in the "middle" of roadways.
Indeed, the law in New Jersey, like its counterparts in most jurisdictions of the United States, says that cyclists have to right as far to the right as possible. (If that's an attempt to influence our politics, it didn't work with me! ;-)) So, I guess some people would define any other part of the road as "the middle." If that's the case, were the kids endangering themselves or holding up traffic--or popping wheelies, as kids have been doing for about as long as they've been riding bicycles?
(If they were riding in the "middle" of the road on Routes 34, 35 or 79, people wouldn't have been filing complaints; they would have been filling out hospital forms or making funeral arrangements!)
Anyway, I saw the headline and wondered whether that town where I rode past other kids like the one I was in Middletown--white, suburban and, if they were anything like me, rather docile even if they were capable of being smart-asses--was suddenly turning out menaces to society.
Sometimes I think the '90's were the end of an era: when you could care about aesthetics and still buy a high-end road racing bicycle.
Today, you can get a beautiful frame from a builder like Mercian or any number of other custom makers. But even though it can be sleek and relatively light, it's likely to be heavier and less aerodynamic than a new racing bike. Those gorgeous frames with their beautiful lugs or filet-brazed joints and lustrous paint jobs are most likely to be steel, whether from Reynolds, Columbus or some other maker, but most racers are now astride frames made of carbon fiber. Although I can appreciate the lightness and stiffness of carbon fiber frames, I know that their lifespan is nowhere near that of most good steel, titanium or aluminum frames. Also, their Darth Vader shapes and surfaces are too often plastered with cartoony or just plain creepy graphics.
But during that last "golden era" for road bikes, two seemingly-disparate groups of cyclists seemed to abandon any sense of velocepedic voluptuousness. According to Eben Weiss' latest article in Outside magazine, those riders were mountain bikers--especially of the downhill variety--and triathlon competitors. As he notes, mountain biking and triathlon racing came into their own as disciplines at roughly the same time, more or less independent of the prevailing cycling cultures (racing, touring, track, club riding). Although many mountain riders came from road riding, they tended to be younger and not as bound to the prevailing traditions and conventions of riding. Then there were those mountain riders who, like most triathloners, had little or no previous experience with cycling and were therefore even less wed to ideas about what bikes should look or ride like.
One result of that disdain for bicycle tradition was modern suspension systems. One irony is that those who developed it for mountain bikes thought they were doing something new and revolutionary when, in fact, bicycle suspension has been around for almost as long as bicycles themselves. The chief question seemed to be whether to suspend the rider or the bike itself: The former would offer more comfort and would, therefore, keep the rider in better control of the bike. The latter, on the other hand, would make the bike itself more stable at high speeds and in rough conditions: what would encounter in a downhill or on technical singletrack.
One of the earliest--and, perhaps, still most widely-used--forms of suspension is the sprung saddle, which would fall into the category of suspending the rider. Later, balloon-tired bikes from Schwinn, Columbia and other American manufacturers came with large bars and springs connected to the handlebars and front forks. How much shock they actually absorbed, I don't know. I get the feeling they were added, like the ones on the "Krate" and "Chopper" bikes of the '60's and '70's, so that kids could pretend that their bikes were scaled-down motorcycles.
Around the same time as those wannabe Harleys were made, Dan Henry's(of the Arrows fame) rigged up a Reynolds 531 fork with springs which, he said, allowed him to ride the lightest rims and tubular tires even in the roughest conditions. But the '70's and '80's saw little, if any, experimentation with, let alone manufacture of, suspended bikes or parts.
That all changed when the first Rock Shox forks and Girvin Flex Stems were introduced in 1989. The latter defied all notions of the graceful "gooseneck" in mirror-polished or milky silver, and Rock Shox looked nothing like those curved or tapered blades seen on classic road bikes. Then, it seemed, all sense of aesthetics went out the window--unless your idea of art is a sex toy or something that would render a man incapable of bringing any new cyclists into this world--with the Softride.
I must admit I never tried Softride: Even though I was leaner and lighter than I am now, I was leery of mounting anything that didn't have support from below. (Read that as you will.) Weiss rode one recently, three decades after its introduction, and found it to be "more subtle" than he expected though, he pointed out, he could have been just as, and more elegantly, cushioned from road and trail shock with a leather saddle or wide tires. Subtract the "diving board" and Girvin Flex stem, he notes, and one is left with a rigid mountain bike like the ones riders had been riding before.
If I had a couple of barns or garages, I'd probably acquire a Soft Ride to complete the collection I'd have. But even if I liked its suspension qualities, I'm not sure how much I'd ride it: I'm still too wedded to my vision of a beautiful bicycle. There are some things I just don't want to be caught dead on.
