05 June 2019

The Kids Aren't Riding: Why That Matters

Depending on where you live, you might think that this is a great time to be in the bicycle business.   More and more adults are pedaling to work and for fun.  And wherever you look, new bike shops are opening, the online business be damned.

At least, that is the picture you'd see in certain urban areas and, perhaps, some inner-ring suburbs.  And most of those adults you see riding are relatively young and well-educated.

It is among that demographic in areas like Boston, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle that one sees bicycle culture flourishing.  On the other hand, in areas where people are poorer, older and less educated, one sees few adult cyclists, and nearly all of them are male.  As often as not, they are riding machines "rescued" from basements and junk piles, and seem to be held together by duct tape.

Those older, poorer and less educated people aren't the ones who are driving the bike business.  They don't buy new bikes or even spend spend money to refurbish old ones, and they certainly aren't the ones buying hand-tooled leather-and-oak craft-beer bottle holders. If they go to bike shops, it's because their bikes have problems they can't fix themselves.

I am not conjecturing:  I see such riders on my way to work or any other time I venture out of Hipster Hook and into the outlying areas of my city.

Those folks are not fueling all of those bike cafes serving Marin Macciatos or Linus Lattes.  Nor is another group of people.  The reason is that the cohort I'm about to mention doesn't ride at all.  At least, fewer and fewer of them are.

I am talking about children and adolescents.  While sales of adult bicycles and accessories are on the rise, that of bikes and related items for kids is plummeting.  At least, that's what industry analysts are saying.  They are genuinely worried about the future of the children's bicycle industry.

Time was when bikes for kids were the "bread and butter" of most bike shops.  I can recall such a time:  Shops were busiest in the Spring, around the time the school year began and during the weeks leading up to Christmas.  In fact, shops often had "layaway" plans for kids' bikes, in which the buyer paid for the bike over a period of time.  It was sort of like a "Christmas Club" for bikes.  

(I remember having a Christmas Club when I was a child and adolescent.  Nearly all banks offered them.  If I recall correctly, I opened my first one for a dollar a week when I was about ten years old.  When I started delivering newspapers and other work, I increased the amount I saved.  Do banks still offer such accounts?)

Even though most shops have at least a couple of kids' bikes for sale, not many seem to be sold.  Instead, I reckon, most such bikes are sold in department stores.  In a way, I can understand the reasoning:  Most parents can only, or want to, pay as little as possible for a bike that the kid will outgrow in a couple of years, if not sooner.  And, since there are more single-kid households than there were when I was growing up (I have three siblings; we weren't seen as a large family), there's less of a chance the bike will be "passed down".  

Aside from changes in the family structure, there is another compelling reason why kid's bike sales are falling:  Fewer and fewer kids want new bikes for Christmas or other occasions.  Instead, they want electronic toys.   I would also imagine that other outdoor activities are becoming less popular with young people for this reason. 



Finally, I will offer an observation that might help to further explain the decline of the children's bicycle industry:  Today, many kids are discouraged or even forbidden from venturing outside by themselves, or even in the company of other kids.  These days, when I see kids under 14 or so on bikes, they are accompanied by adults.  The days of kids going out and exploring on two wheels seem to be over.

So why should readers of this blog care about the children's bicycle industry?  Well, we might be keeping the adult bicycle industry thriving.  But how often do we buy new bikes?  After a certain point, we don't buy a whole lot of accessories:  When we have what we need (and want), we tend to stop buying.  

Also, in a point I don't enjoy bringing up, none of us is going to be around forever.  So when we go to that great bike lane in the sky, who will take our place?  Will today's adolescents ditch their X-boxes (or whatever they play with now) and climb over two wheels?  We should hope so; so should the bike industry.

04 June 2019

Death While Training For A Memorial

For the past several years, Florida has been the state in which a cyclist has the greatest chance of being killed by a motorist.

That point was underscored, for me, by a story that came my way.  The other day, Deputy Sheriff Frank Scofield was training for a memorial ride to honor 9/11 victims when he was--you guessed it--struck from behind. 

The motorist who ended his life on a county road blew through a stop sign. But that motorist wasn't a "good ol' boy" in a pickup truck or some drunken sunburned youth.  Rather, the driver in question is 75-year-old Lajos Toth of Lake Helen.

Volusia sheriff: Deputy killed in bicycle crash died ‘doing what he loved’
Deputy Sheriff Frank Scofield

The road where Deputy Scofield took his last ride is County Road 415 in Volusia County.  You might the collision "hit home" for me because Volusia is the county directly south of the one in which my parents live.  Just about every time I visit my parents, at least one bike ride takes me into the county, which includes Daytona and Ormond Beaches and The Casements.  


Frank Scofield was training for a ride to commemorate 9/11 victims.  Now I am writing a post to remember him.

03 June 2019

From Riding Without Tires To Leaving The Competition In His Tracks

Some of us have ridden bikes with mismatched or missing parts.  We may have ridden such bikes because we didn’t know any better.  Or we may have been too poor for a “proper” machine.

Such was the case for Richard Carapaz.  His father brought home a blue BMX he found in a junkyard.  That bike was missing a seat, pedals or brakes.  He rode that bike—without tires on the dusty roads near his home.


That home was in the Ecuadorean village of Playa Alta, near the border with Colombia.  “Alta” means “high”, and that’s no exaggeration:  It’s in the Andes.


Riding in such conditions surely helped him during the past couple of weeks, when conquered climbs on the Alps and

Dolomites.  Those ascents, and strong time trials, helped  him to win the Giro d’Italia.




That victory made him the first Ecuadorean winner of one of the Grand Tours.  While racers in neighboring Colombia are among the sport’s best, cycling has been relatively unknown in Carapaz’s native country.



Whatever else happens, Carapaz is unlikely to forget his roots:  His family has saved that bike he rode without tires.

02 June 2019

Nine Years: What Writing This Blog Is Teaching Me

Nine years ago today, I started this blog in much the same way I start many of my rides:  I had a general idea of the journey I was undertaking, but I had no idea of where it would take me along the way.

About all I really knew when I published that first post was that I'd be writing about me and bicycling.  And, I supposed, anything related to them--which, of course, is open to very wide interpretation.  

Image result for cyclist looking at the road ahead


So, if you've been following this blog, you've heard me ramble or rant about any and all sorts of things:  history, art, architecture, literature, New York, Paris, food, gender and more.  If you'd told me, for instance, that I would try to explain how a certain molecule works, I might have wondered whether you were partaking of substances that have only recently become legal, and only in a few states!

The fact that I write such posts (however ineptly) might be the reason why I've kept this blog going.  While I never imagined writing a post like that one, or some of the others I wrote, I also knew that this blog could not simply be a recounting of my rides or a discussion of equipment.  

 I realize now that this blog has become a forum for my experience of bicycles and cycling.  Whatever I see when I ride, what I think about when I'm adjusting my derailleur, what I recall from rides past, and the things I've learned about everything from urban panning to music as a result of my rides, are all part of my cycling experience.  

Really, I can't think of much that doesn't relate to bicycles or bicycling.   At least, there aren't many things in my life that I can separate from my experience of cycling. So, I expect that as long as I continue to write this blog, it will take twists and turns I never expected.  

Thank you, dear reader, for taking the journey with me.  I'm not done yet!

01 June 2019

So You Didn't Marry The Girl Or Guy Next Door? Thank Your Bike!

If the love of your life is of a different race, ethnicity, national origin from your own, you have the bicycle to thank.  I might say the same if your significant other is the same gender as you, or identifies in a way you never heard of until you left home.

That's more or less what University of Arizona historian David Ortiz says.  As I've mentioned in several posts, no less than Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did more than anything to emancipate women.  Cycling would change the clothing women wore, allowing more freedom of movement.  The bicycle also allowed women to travel unchaperoned by males for the first time.

And, says Ortiz, it also allowed men to travel greater distances.  At the time the "safety" bicycle was introduced, most people never got further than about 50 kilometers from where they were born or raised.  For a young man, then, "the girl next door" wasn't a Hollywood stereotype (well, ok, Hollywood didn't exist then): If she wasn't the one he married, she didn't come from much further afield.




Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with marrying the girl (or guy) next door, if that is what you want.  I just think it's nice to know that it's not the only choice.  And, of course, having two parents of very different backgrounds can be a great thing for their kids:  What could give them a better education?

As a transgender woman, I can't help but to think that such heterogeneity, along with women's liberation, helped to bring about, however slowly, greater acceptance of LGBTQ people. It's no coincidence, really, that the first and most vibrant queer communities have been found in cosmopolitan neighborhoods and cities.

So, if I ever find myself hooking up with an Afro-Japanese Brazilian bisexual whose pronoun is "they", I know the bicycle is responsible!  

Seriously, though:  From what David Ortiz says, the bicycle made us freer.  Certainly, I feel freer when I ride!