finally got some new tires for the mountain bike. i had never ridden in traffic before or on the trail, and im much slower than everyone else. oh well! it rides really good for being really the wrong application, but i think the tires are meaty enough for an ebike kit
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love to see the foot retention 
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CAGES OVER CLIPLESS
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the sensation of sliding your foot back to flip the pedal and then forward again into the cage…sublime!
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i wonder if the 7 speed gears are good enough, i feel like theyre small enough to facilitate getting around, its the front sprocket that probably could go bigger to get more speed.
now i just need new tires for the peugeot road bike i got for free a while back.
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I like clipless a lot but I got this shimano click’r system made for babies and it’s really good for city riding. The clip strength is not super strong so it’s easy to unclip, it took basically no getting used to and the cleats in the shoes are very recessed so you can walk pretty normally. I wouldn’t go miles in them but you don’t have to duck walk. Plus the pedals are flat on one side so you’re not forced to use the clips if you don’t want to.
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ok i’ve decided i’m going to get a brompton, which will happen when i sell a bunch of these synthesizers i have
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For the last few months I’ve been using a website, wandrer.earth, to track the % of road miles I’ve biked on in various parts of town.
The site hooks up to your Strava account and analyzes all activities there for new road miles. It exists to help people complete “walking on every street in my city” type challenges and I’m having an amazing time with it. I was a big time Ingress and Pokemon Go player, I love irl map games which take me to new places and give me an excuse to loiter, and this is that plus bikes, which is perfect.
The free version processes your last 50 Strava activities when you join. The paid version is explicitly “pay to win” in that for a yearly fee of thirty bucks, it will process all your Strava activities ever and also give you access to different challenges which can earn you “points.” One mile is one point, but you also get points for hitting certain % milestones for city or region completion. The regions are taken off of Open Street Maps. I paid for the yearly fee because I was having a blast and last month I got in #3 place for the entire westside of LA. My ambitions this month are even higher.
I’m currently trying to 100% all road miles in Culver City, which is small as hell, with only 117 bikeable road miles. As of last night I am at 64.4%. It’s the smallest place with good bike lanes around here.
Cons: the UI is kind of a mess and it’s often hard to get to the page on the site you’re looking for, but a lot of the leaderboard charts are highly customizable, which is pretty interesting. The people who made this seem to be data nerds first and designers second, haha. My other complaint is that its “base” level region for doing monthly leaderboards are regions larger than an LA city–it wants to show me leaderboard data for the westside of LA but I’d rather be able to pin the regions and leaderboards for actual cities in LA, like Culver, Venice, Santa Monica, etc, or smaller neighborhoods like Mar Vista.
Yesterday I was biking in a bizarre way to clear out a neighborhood, doing a cross hatch of streets, and there were a lot of people in the neighborhood walking around in the evening. I went east to west, and along the way I crossed paths several times with a really tall pedestrian, a very distinctive guy in his ~40s with completely white hair, who was carrying a bag of groceries along an east to west cross street. We kept glancing at each other and finally the fourth time I sped by him on a north-south street he shouted “what are you doing!!” And I shouted over my shoulder “I’m trying to bike on every road mile in Culver City!!!” And he started to crack up, so I just screamed “there are only 117 miles in culver!!!” and vanished into the distance.
Highly recommend this game. Better than Ingress and Pokémon Go but fun for very similar reasons
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[person who loves cars, obsessed with cars, knows everything about cars, can’t get enough of cars, me] Fuck cars
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Apologies for the link to X… this is what the bike path I commute on looked like during the hurricane https://twitter.com/scottkecken/status/1693374464690622931
I love that our rivers get bike paths here in the city but I know that the only reason they DO get bike paths is that they are otherwise useless territory. They shut down during major rainstorms because they are covered in these cross-path flows entering from other drainage areas. To a certain extent the path itself is drainage infrastructure because the pavement around the river prevents erosion!
Additionally, these paths are often not adequately maintained because it’s not clear who really owns them. The path in this video goes through Culver City–the area shown in the video is precisely the path exit ramp leading up to downtown Culver–but Culver doesn’t maintain the path. Neither does LADOT. I believe the water board maintains it–or at least, these various agencies blame one another for maintainence and they generally go unmaintained. (They do assiduously remove visible graffiti, though. 
)
Wish we had well maintained bike paths which are useable in the rain!! But on a good day it’s pretty in a kind of videogame-environment-postapocalypse way so I don’t complain too much
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i am so excited to get a brompton!! i don’t even think i’m going to need to fold it much but the idea of being able to literally throw it in my car or throw a bike seat for ash in my backpack is so appealing to me! the dream is for me to convince nika that they’re so much fun that she wants one as well and then we go up and down the coast on amtrak with our bikes that fold into the luggage compartment
one step at a time though
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I dunno if I am going to be able to go to the meetup… but if I did go, I was thinking of renting or borrowing a brompton because you can get within 60 miles of the meetup via Amtrak. Then it’s just one very long tough day of biking on well maintained gravel paths, haha. Much easier to wedge a Brompton into a duffel than trying to get bike compartment space for a full sized bike on every leg of a cross country Amtrak trip!
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Did Critical Mass LA on Friday night. Incredible experience as always… I feel like Critical Mass and other bike events are the one time in my life where I get to be a real human and have real human encounters with the city and with other people in the world.
I met up at the train station near my office with someone who’s a close childhood friend of another gamedev person I know. This guy has just gotten into biking because we invited him along to last month’s Critical Mass, and in the intervening time he got so excited about biking that he bought a decent used aluminum road bike and started doing 30 mile rides up and down the beach bike path. So he got turned into a bike freak overnight, which is delightful.
He and I took the train to the plaza where the ride starts and we got burgers. Another friend from Glitch shows up, we are all chilling with burgers and checking out other people’s bikes. It’s great. Some people come collect signatures from us to legalize shrooms. Suddenly, our other friend, the gamedev guy who is friends with the newly converted bike freak, rolls up sweaty and shouts “DANNY IS GETTING INTO A FISTFIGHT!!”
Context: there is this guy named Danny who always walks up to the Glitch bike group at Critical Mass and hangs out with us and offers us weed, and then none of us accept a hit from his pipe, so he gets bored and leaves. This happens every month. But Friday he was getting into a fight with someone around the corner!
We are all gossiping about this and suddenly danny rolls up bleeding from the neck and informs us that he got into a fight with a guy who was anti-shrooms. The shrooms-legalization crew was walking around getting signatures from everyone, and Danny signed, and then someone near him said something to the effect of “shrooms should not be legalized,” and Danny told him “you are a prohibitionist,” and the prohibitionist got mad and they both jumped on each other and the crowd had to drag them apart! And in the fight, the shroom prohibitionist mauled Danny’s neck!!
He angrily tells us this whole story while grinding up weed to put in his pipe, which is hilarious, and I stuck a bandaid on his neck. Then the ride started and he vanished.
First half of the ride is relatively uneventful. We lost one group member at the halfway point because they were on a Metro rent-a-bike and there were some rent-a-bike shenanigans. Then another friend had to throw his bike in a car and go to pick up some family members. So at the end of the ride, me and the new bike freak were the last two left trying to get home.
We decided to avoid the train and bike all the way home on local streets. I tried out an app I used previously and didn’t like much, Pointz–it uses user submitted info to calculate rides which avoid cars as much as possible, and it has a slider where you set the amount of risk you’re willing to entertain. I liked it a lot better this time. It charted us a route which was entirely residental roads and we were able to cut across a big chunk of central LA without encountering more than a handful of cars.
Ended up being a 31 mile ride start to finish for me, and a 38 mile day in total. Maybe the most biking I’ve done in a 24 hour period in six months. And it had the added entertainment of a shroom-defense fistfight. Glad I had those bandaids!!
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we biked up the beach today and at the very far north end of the beach bike path, right before you have to get on the PCH with the cars, we saw a guy wearing an aero jersey, a tapered track helmet for extreme aero shit, JEANS, and a backpack containing a miniature POODLE. Cannot believe he combined the most aero helmet with the least aero variety of dog.
it’s also very funny to me that he was coming south, which means he was on the PCH next to all the cars with his pointy helmet and his fluffy dog fully flopped over onto his shoulder
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Heavy Breathing
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oh my
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12 miles of range is terrible, and I know all the old ladies I see riding those devices with this exact escooter-plus-seat format around in the San Gabriel valley are getting better range and speed off the machines they’re already using…
But damn this looks neato and I wanna see some painted up like cyberpunk crates haha
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This feels designed to go in the trunk of a car so you can drive someplace, park further away from your destination, and zip the last mile or two on your Motocompacto. That’s how I’d use it. Or maybe lug it onto the LIRR and go from there because it’ll fit on the overhead storage racks.
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The urb-e was a similar use case–small enough to go in a trunk, though less packably rectangular than this one. I used an urb-e for 2 years for a six mile commute here in LA and was getting 20 miles out of it… but they no longer make 'em.
I imagine the reason they went for a low range on the motocompacto was to keep the price under a thousand dollars or so. I really have no idea what the chunkier devices the old ladies ride cost though
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