Any cyclists?

[Invincible Summer]

Anyone here a cyclist? Whether it be road, mountain, cyclocross, track... I'd love to know which other RevLefters mash pedals for the glory of the Soviet Union!


Okay maybe not the last part, but I used to mountain bike, and am starting to ride road/'cross.

No spandex yet, though.

[Trystan]

I used to cycle all the time. I went everywhere on my bike. Then I flipped over (at least twice) and banged my head. I never got back into it.

[jake williams]

I have a shit bike that I haven't used at all in awhile but am getting back into. The gear shifter is shot and the breaks are not fantastic. The chain is all rusted up. It may be worth fixing, but I doubt it, especially since I'm moving and it'll probably just be easier to get a new one. North America is horrendously anti-bike though. The police in my city have recently been on a big binge giving tickets out for silly "infractions" like riding on the sidewalk, improper lights, etc.

[Sarah Palin]

I have a handy bike that can be utilised on the mountain and the roads.

[which doctor]

I have an old road bike that I probably average 30-50 miles a week with. Luckily, I live in one of the more bike-friendly cities in the US where cycling is an effective transportation choice. For me, cycling is usually the quickest way to get where I want to go. With public transportation there's always waiting time and it can be unreliable. With a car there's always extra time spent parking. The only real accident I've ever been in was when I flew over my handlebars in my parents' driveway about 6 months ago. It's a long story, but let's just say a shoddy repair job was involved and physics was by no means working in my favor. I have the occasional close calls with cars on the street, but they keep me on edge so I don't mind them so much.

Biking also is the only real exercise I get on a regular occasion and it keeps my smoking habit in check, so I'm glad I've gotten into it.

[Pogue]

I cycle quite regularly.

[StalinFanboy]

Get a car you lazy hippies.

[revolution inaction]

i have a bike its quicker and more convenient than walking or getting the bus, and i dont' have a car, so i use it quite often

[ComradeOm]

Getting back into it. I only have an old beat up mountain bike atm but its still good to get out for an hour or two on it

[Kamerat]

Im cycle to work and generally everywhere else which is between 15 min and 2-3 hours away. I dont realy like anything up my ass, so i normaly stand on the pedals or sitt on one thigh. I much prefer running or walking, but it wont get me long.


Get a car you lazy hippies.
STFU i cant afford a car, cars are bouroise decadence. We know rideing your bike dont get you any closer to communism. Its not political reasons more health and/or economic reasons we're cyclists.

A car cost 3-4 times as much here in Norway as it does in the Empire. Same with gas. And then there is road fee and car insurance. A bike is free to use and dont cost much. No need to buy any fuel, no road fee and no bike insurance. In this "social democracy" everything bad is taxed higher then the rest, alcohol, tobacco, cars, gas and soon suger.

[Invincible Summer]

I have a shit bike that I haven't used at all in awhile but am getting back into. The gear shifter is shot and the breaks are not fantastic. The chain is all rusted up. It may be worth fixing, but I doubt it, especially since I'm moving and it'll probably just be easier to get a new one. North America is horrendously anti-bike though. The police in my city have recently been on a big binge giving tickets out for silly "infractions" like riding on the sidewalk, improper lights, etc.

If it's a "shit bike" as you say, you might as well just not fix it up. The repairs will probably cost as much as the initial worth of the bike.

But yeah even over on the West coast here, they're giving cyclists tickets for everything in order to "educate them" as to the proper rules of the road. Wearing a helmet is a given, but stuff like not having one red reflector and one white one is stupid.

Sidewalks have actually been proven to be more dangerous to ride on that the typical city street.. I can't be arsed to look for the article now though. What N. America needs is bike infrastructure like Copenhagen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_8dGodhGtI


I have a handy bike that can be utilised on the mountain and the roads.

Do you ride 'cross?


Im cycle to work and generally everywhere else which is between 15 min and 2-3 hours away. I dont realy like anything up my ass, so i normaly stand on the pedals or sitt on one thigh. I much prefer running or walking, but it wont get me long.
If your seat is going up your ass, I think there may be something wrong!

[An archist]

Get a car you lazy hippies.
Get a bike, you rich yup.
;)

[Kamerat]

If your seat is going up your ass, I think there may be something wrong!
No, i think im doing it right.:rolleyes:

Im just exaggerateing. Your supposed to sit on it with the seat up your butcrack right? So you have your legs free to push/step on the pedals. That can be very painfull when you cycle for a longer periode of time.

Get a bike, you rich yup.
;)
The Following User say Thank You To An archist for this Useful Post:
Kamerat

[JohannGE]

I do a lot of cycling, nothing too serious and always leisurely. Still run a banger of a car. Difference being that riding a bike usualy puts a smile on my face while driving the car usualy pisses me off, long distances with a deadline excepted.

Haven't they got expensive to maintain since they got trendy though!

[*Red*Alert]

I still cycle sometimes as its too expensive for me to learn to drive at the moment (€50 per lesson, €90 for test, €2500-€4000 per year for insurance) so I think I'll wait a little longer as insurance drops once you've got a full license and are 18-19.

I've currently got a Giant Rock (2008) which I bought last year, its a mountain bike but I usually cycle it on-road, though its got an aluminum frame and suspension, its hard to move, compared to a road bike its like having square wheels :D

[proudcomrade]

I tried the bike for a while; didn't really work out for me. I have found that it's not so feasible when you are 30 and dealing with a couple of chronic partial disabilities. That and living in the empire where car culture has made it such that you take your life into the balance every time you try and bike your tired ass down the street through back pain and the road-ragers bearing down on you in SUVs every ten feet, loose dogs chasing you, shit like that. For the most part, I have had to go back to my routine of just walking around town and doing a single set of ab exercises per night. I wish it had worked out with the bike, because I am already beginning to feel older than :marx:'s parents at this age, and a lot of it has to do with fitness problems.

[Pogue]

i cycle regularly

[Wanted Man]

I cycle quite regularly.


i cycle regularly

Okay. :lol:

I cycle a lot, but not as a sport. I always use the bicycle to go to college, and to work previously. And sometimes I do longer distances just for fun.

I guess it's not really surprising, since the city I live in has a lot of bicycles even by Dutch standards.

[bcbm]

A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel -- probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions -- finally to become useful for self-powered mobility.

Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment.

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.
The ball-bearing signaled a true crisis, a true political choice. It created an option between more freedom in equity and more speed. The bearing is an equally fundamental ingredient of two new types of locomotion, respectively symbolized by the bicycle and the car. The bicycle lifted man's auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible. In contrast, the accelerating individual capsule enabled societies to engage in a ritual of progressively paralyzing speed.

Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man's radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.

The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred.

Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim.


i love my bike

[yuon]

I have a shit bike that I haven't used at all in awhile but am getting back into. The gear shifter is shot and the breaks are not fantastic. The chain is all rusted up. It may be worth fixing, but I doubt it, especially since I'm moving and it'll probably just be easier to get a new one. North America is horrendously anti-bike though. The police in my city have recently been on a big binge giving tickets out for silly "infractions" like riding on the sidewalk, improper lights, etc.
I assume you don't need a licence to ride your push bike, and that you don't need to carry identification?

So, give them false information. Start a campaign to lie to the police if stopped on your bicycle. Then you don't have to pay the fine. (Beware this if your local filth know you, or have stopped you often before.)


i love my bike
I love that quote. And my bike.

[Magdalen]

I don't cycle as much as I used to, but I still like to take my bike out into the countryside on a nice day. I don't use it much for transport though, because of all the damn hills in Dundee.

[Pirate Utopian]

I cycle to get from A to B, not really for the fun it.

[Guerrilla22]

I have a road bike, I used to do rides of about 30 miles or 48K at a time, but I have snce reduced my rides to about 20 miles or 32K, since I dont have as much time.

[Invincible Summer]

I do a lot of cycling, nothing too serious and always leisurely. Still run a banger of a car. Difference being that riding a bike usualy puts a smile on my face while driving the car usualy pisses me off, long distances with a deadline excepted.

Haven't they got expensive to maintain since they got trendy though!

Yeah, riding my bike de-stresses me to a huge degree, even if it's mashing up a huge hill. It puts me into a much better mood for the rest of the day.

But maintaining a bike is a lot cheaper than a car!


I tried the bike for a while; didn't really work out for me. I have found that it's not so feasible when you are 30 and dealing with a couple of chronic partial disabilities. That and living in the empire where car culture has made it such that you take your life into the balance every time you try and bike your tired ass down the street through back pain and the road-ragers bearing down on you in SUVs every ten feet, loose dogs chasing you, shit like that. For the most part, I have had to go back to my routine of just walking around town and doing a single set of ab exercises per night. I wish it had worked out with the bike, because I am already beginning to feel older than :marx:'s parents at this age, and a lot of it has to do with fitness problems.
Yeah I totally understand. Lots of big cities aren't very bike-friendly. If it's problems with your back, you could look into a more upright bike - hybrids aren't really built for performance, but they're much more comfortable than a road bike, and ones like the Devinci Paris (http://www.devinci.com/bikes/browse#4_14_36) would be great. You could also look into recumbent bikes, but I don't know much about those.



I still cycle sometimes as its too expensive for me to learn to drive at the moment (€50 per lesson, €90 for test, €2500-€4000 per year for insurance) so I think I'll wait a little longer as insurance drops once you've got a full license and are 18-19.

I've currently got a Giant Rock (2008) which I bought last year, its a mountain bike but I usually cycle it on-road, though its got an aluminum frame and suspension, its hard to move, compared to a road bike its like having square wheels :D
Yeah learning to drive (as well as owning a car) is pretty costly. But I still have a full-privilege license anyway, even though I mostly bike, just in case I need to drive.

Yeah I used to have a mountain bike (Azonic Evoluton) but I didn't really take it off road much, so i got a cyclocross bike (cross between a mountain bike and a road bike sort of... it's a road bike that can handle knobby tires) and sold my mountain bike - I decided I'd never go back to riding one of those hahah


I have a road bike, I used to do rides of about 30 miles or 48K at a time, but I have snce reduced my rides to about 20 miles or 32K, since I dont have as much time.
Nice - I'm still working my way to the 25km mark, as I don't really have time to ride that much other than commuting to/from school and my gf's house (which is ~6km each way). Not to mention the west coast weather is not really conducive to road cycling.

What's your rig? Have you ever done any races, or a century?

[proudcomrade]

Yeah I totally understand. Lots of big cities aren't very bike-friendly. If it's problems with your back, you could look into a more upright bike - hybrids aren't really built for performance, but they're much more comfortable than a road bike, and ones like the Devinci Paris (http://www.devinci.com/bikes/browse#4_14_36) would be great. You could also look into recumbent bikes, but I don't know much about those.

Thanks for the ideas- too bad we can't rep Chit Chat posts. I cannot afford a new bike now; but maybe once I get it figured out with law school and going back to work, I could look into it.

I have actually been back on the bike most days, now. It still knocks the breath out of me, but the back and leg problems are gone...looks like I have finally gotten back into decent fitness for my age.

[What Would Durruti Do?]

I have a nice road bike that I race in alleycats occasionally but nothing too serious. Planning on building a track bike/fixed gear to mess around town on and get me in better shape.