I could totally ride a 12 mile motocompo to work on days where I’m at the office that’s right down the street.
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i mean honestly 12 mile range is the kind of thing that a regular pedal bike can do pretty easily without too much impact on when you’ll get there (barring any big hills or anything) so it’s not exactly an amazing value but also i love it it’s tiny and cute and i love it
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I feel like if I cycled to work I would show up drenched in sweat if the temperature was higher than like 60°F
But for pure recreational riding yeah I’m still looking at a regular old bike.
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Ever since I got that free Puch Maxi frame I’ve been trying to hunt down a rear wheel hub, which is the only missing piece I can’t buy online that I would need to gather for a functioning moped. However, I had been talking for a while about slapping an ebike together, and most of the good ones use a 17 inch 2000w rear hub motor, which you can get on Amazon for, like, $$$. I might do a parts tally and see what’s cheaper, another 2 stroke or an emoped.
those monowheel chaps all have big group rides with other ebikes, would be fun to tag along on those too.
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I love both cycling and hot weather but I also sweat a lot and I’m shirtless about as often as randy from trailer park boys when I can get away with it
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you know you guys have a bit of an ozone hole up there too right
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Lots of bike doings
I have biked every day for the last 13 days and I have done 100 miles both this week and last week. 315 this month so far, the most biking I’ve ever done in a concentrated time like this before. I am really feeling my capacity and speed and most notably my climbing strength growing in a way I really never expected. Shit that used to lay me flat is easy now. It’s very thrilling to realize that your old limitations are gone and that there are places you can go and things you can do that you couldn’t before.
Took the game dev community space folks on a trip to Spoke Cafe again, a bike cafe on the LA River bike path. Charming stuff! The whole bike path was covered in extremely high quality anti-cop graffiti. We did some group photos in front of elaborate illustrations of nasty pig cops and giant slogans about destroying the LAPD’s “robot dogs”. Great stuff.
I have begun biking cross-city to get to the community space, which is often like 15-17 miles total from my house. Been using the Pointz app for this… it very reliably chooses safe routes for me through residential neighborhoods. Pointz prioritizes roads NOT based solely on whether there is bike infrastructure but actually mostly based on how little traffic there is total. Genius. In a city with shitty infrastructure it is absolutely true that I would rather bike in the middle of the lane on a street with no cars than in a bike lane on a street with cars. It also prioritizes fully separated paths, and paths that are protected by bollards or parked cars. It’s a great app.
My friend’s bike broke about a year ago and they have had no resources to fix it. But now that my husband has a new bike, we will be loaning my friend the old bike and I’ll be rebuilding the broken drive train on their bike. I have been doing more bike repairs but drive train stuff still defeats me sometimes and this is the most significant bike repair I’ve ever done. The friction shifters are not set up correctly and the two chainring gears broke apart from one another. I am going to have to learn how to set up friction shifting and I may have to re-bolt the crankset together or buy them a whole new one. The bike is a 1972 Japanese-manufactured Sekine so that will be harder than it probably sounds. I hope I can just bolt these two gears back together and call it a day?? I have a lot to learn but luckily this city is packed with bike co-ops
Leaving you with this Strava screenshot of my recent accomplishments
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so the Bosozoku build now has some leads on a tail fairing. I found a source for a windscreen and tracked down the original maker of the fairing so I can find the exact windscreen I need. I think I’m going to get a bunch of aluminum stock and a vice, and bend my own bracket system. All that’s left is the seat. This model of moped, the Tomos Revival, had a 2nd trim level that had a longer seat meant for 2 people. If I track one of those down I can cut it up and add the ridiculous backrest and it should bolt on. Wondering if I’ll do my own upholstery or if I can find someone to do it for me. A game dev friend of mine got a seat made for their own custom bike, so I might hit them up to ask if they’re available. This upholsterer refuses to do custom work but relented when they saw my friend’s bike project, so perhaps they’ll also relent in my case.
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Today the 110 freeway in Los Angeles was shut down between the Lincoln and South Pasadena metro stations, and tens of thousands of people showed up to bike and walk on the highway.
The Arroyo Seco parkway was not originally designed to be a freeway–it was designed to be a 40 MPH max ride and and is notorious for having been deliberately designed with extra curves to make it “fun to ride”. It has no shoulders and the pull-out sections it does have are very short. The exits are dangerously abrupt and driving on this road always feels extremely risky to me. I know loads of people who hate driving on it or even refuse to drive on it.
20 years ago the first “Arroyofest” was championed by some environmental activists. The 2003 iteration of the event had approx 8000 attendees who walked and biked on the freeway along the same course we rode today. But today’s revival of the event saw probably four times that number minimum, likely more. It was outrageously crowded and the ends of the route had huge packed community hubs with live music and tents of shit and merch booths and stuff. Huge event. Like a Ciclavia on steroids.
I took a bunch of riders from the game dev community space there on bikes and it was a very easy ride physically–we did only 10 miles total and didn’t quite get to go end to end because we stayed between the metro station hubs rather than going to the far ends of the route. Seeing so many people reclaiming a car oriented space was really very inspiring and the weather was perfect. If I’d gotten there earlier I think it would have been a perfectly idyllic ride!!
However we did the second half of the four hour event. By that time the route was so horrifically crowded and packed with so many dangerous or slow bikers (largely kids and young teens who were swerving or slowing down abruptly, sometimes because they were like, four years old) that it felt very dangerous a lot of the time. I saw three crashes, two involving children, and heard about several more from friends. There were very few volunteers providing guidance on the route itself, only at the exits. Leaving the route required cyclists to cross one another’s traffic and because the road has no shoulders there were very few safe places to pull over.
A mom directly in front of me wiped out after she ran over her son and I almost hit her, lmao. Slammed on the brakes and came within four inches of turning her hand into paste. The whole ride I was absolutely running my skull gears a thousand miles and hour trying to stay safe!!! It was exhausting! The safest speed to go if you wanted to keep up with traffic was about 6-7 MPH but a lot of folks were going much slower and much faster and both were risky, haha. I honestly felt incredibly endangered each time I got near a young child… mostly because the parents were riding very closely behind their children and there was not enough room for them to react if the kid did anything weird. All in all I heard about maybe six total crashes and most involved children.
I hope they do this event again because it really was inspiring! But it’s a great reminder that bike infrastructure needs as much traffic design as car infrastructure does, and dumping many tens of thousands of people onto a car road without any real planning does not result in idyllic utopian circumstances, haha. It brought me SO much respect for Ciclavia as an event and how it’s run. Ciclavia is the main “open streets” event in LA and it has massive volunteer presence, teams that react immediately to crashes and injuries, loads of signage and traffic cones indicating how participants should share the road with one another… it’s a really well-designed event!
I hope this new one is successful enough that they’ll get another chance to run it, next time with some infrastructural improvements!!
Another thought I’ve had after attending is that there really is a huge and meaningful movement in this city to get safer streets, pedestrianized areas, bike infrastructure, etc into LA’s various communities. Loads and loads of people really do want to reduce car commuting and reclaim these spaces for human use. I think maybe a lot of these folks don’t yet fully understand that trains and buses are not gonna get us to this utopia all by themselves… they see the dream of people powered transport and don’t quite realize that this would mean ending a lot of cut-through travel, building more and denser housing everywhere, and reducing the number of people in this city forced to commute such obscenely long distances. This could be achieved by bringing affordable housing to every part of the city so people can live closer to work… or by bringing better jobs and pay to many parts of the city so that people can thrive where they already are… and I’m not sure yet that people understand the scale of housing, reparations for the many local harms of the freeway building era, labor regulation, etc that would need to occur to make this city a place where everyone can bike to work, haha. But I’m heartened that people want a world like the world they see at Ciclavia and Arroyofest. It’s possible!! A better world is possible!!!
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In other news I completed fixing and cleaning my friend’s bicycle. I learned so much. I really, really enjoyed myself, I loved hanging out at the bike co-op over the last month, and it was so satisfying to resurrect this 50 year old machine and make it functional again.
Friction shifters and crankset totally replaced, cables and housing replaced, rust cleaned off, multiple minor improvements
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love the detailing and paint, such a vibrant color!
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put on my ski goggles and bike commuted in the snow today. with a base layer and a face mask or muffler, this should work for as long as the roads are clear.
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yeah the blue/orange looks good here. are those the old analog lever shifters curving in from the brakes?
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those are “death grips”/“turkey wings”/“suicide levers” which operate the brake. They allow the rider to activate the brakes from the flat center of the drops and were common during the 70s bike boom. Many people at that time were buying bikes with drops but were unfamiliar with that riding style and were just trying to use them as just low key get-around-town bikes. The manufacturers started including these brake extenders to accomodate folks who wanted to ride drop bars in a flat bar position.
Many folks consider them less safe because they don’t always offer the same force of braking and encourage riders to keep their hands too close together in the middle of the bars.
So long as my friend keeps the brakes well adjusted I don’t think it will be an issue for them. They’ve been using these for a while now. I personally would not choose to use them.
The shifters here are on the downtube! They were originally all-silver aluminum suntour v friction shifters but had been repaired with substitute parts over the years and were not working correctly. The bolt keeping the friction in the titular friction shifters, for example, was too long, so they couldn’t be properly tightened and wouldn’t hold a gear. I replaced them with a pair out of the co-op parts bin which had all the original bolts still included. It’s wild how many of these absolutely indestructible 50 year old shifting lever pairs you can find in co-ops for like, three bucks, or on ebay for 20-30 USD.
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at the bike swap meet at the velodrome! trying to sell some of my bike stuff before we move
i should have been coming here way more often lol
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Pray for me… biking from downtown LA to Newport Beach one day next week as a test of skill and a feat of strength. This is also to test our setup for biking to San Diego next year
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We did it–72 miles in two days.
Biked from my house to the train, took Expo line to Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights, then biked south down to Vernon, that outrageously corrupt fully industrial town you may have heard of before. (It’s the one season two of True Detective is based on.) Fully half the traffic there was giant full sized shipping trucks lol but the lanes were wide as hell so it worked out for us. Top end of the LA River Bike Path is there so we hopped on it and went south all the way to Long Beach.
There are two LA River paths–downtown and a chunk of East LA separate them. The south part of the path, the one we were on, is not anywhere near as beautiful as the north one. But there was something very serene about biking 20+ miles down the side of that giant concrete trench, which I’d seen in many movies but never been so close to before. It’s often quiet, and the land next to the river is sometimes industrial or suburban… but just as often it’s been turned into public parks or in some cases even turned into nature preserves. And we saw two different horse stables!
Long Beach was about what I expected. Never been there on a bike before but we stuck close to the shore and mainly saw it from the perspective of the strand paths. South of LB we had to cross a couple islands via the PCH. Seal Beach/Huntington Beach/Sunset Beach etc etc etc was all kind of a blur.
The PCH has absolutely gigantic bike lanes just south of Long Beach in Orange County, which is I’m guessing is because the place is crawling with thousands of retired old guys in Lycra, they’re scrambling up and down the coast like ants, and the PCH the only way through that section of the shoreline and the bikers are gonna take it no matter what. We were constantly being passed by dudes on carbon road bikes who sometimes slowed to comment on our setups… one guy told my husband, who was carrying all his touring gear in big open top grocery panniers, that he had a “sweet setup.” We still do not know if this was sincere, haha.
There was definitely a difference in vibe between LA County and OC. The form of the residential architecture I could see was almost instantly completely different. I have no special knowledge but I assume I was seeing some of the same kind of vast planned development I’ve heard about in Irvine.
The whole time we were drinking a sports drink concoction a friend told me to try… 50% oj, 50% water, half a tsp of salt. The orange juice gets you potassium, but I also made snack baggies for us with raisins, candied pineapple, and banana chips. It worked well! By the time we hit Newport Beach my legs basically did not hurt. I had some odd knee sensations up on the river path but my the time we were in Newport I felt amazing (though fairly mentally fatigued, haha). Turns out electrolytes are real, unfortunately…
We did 47 miles on day one and stayed in a cheap hotel on the PCH. In the morning I found that my tire lost a lot of air overnight, so I pumped it up… but this was merely foreshadowing…
The plan day 2 was to head north approx. 20 miles to the Long Beach metro station and ride the train home. It was much easier to bike the PCH on the second day because we were more familiar with it. In Sunset Beach we stopped to take a photo of a famous water tower that has been turned into an expensive rental home (you stay in the big tank lmao) and while we were looking at it a cyclist in his 70s rolled up and almost immediately began telling us his entire life story, starting with the fact that he had had a heart attack last year in almost the exact spot we were standing, lmao.
Anyway we got back to Long Beach eventually and then my front tire went flat two blocks from the metro station. I tried pumping it back up on the train and sealant just started spraying everywhere (I had a tube with a little bit of sealant in there). We took the train all the way home, found a bike repair stand under our local train station, and replaced the tire because there was way too much sealant slipping around in there to properly patch it. Then we rolled almost 5 miles back to our house. The end!! 25 miles only and my bike couldn’t take much more than that, haha.
Here are our setups!!!
We each were carrying about 3 liters of water and OJ mix, six small dried fruit snack baggies, a bag of peanuts, and a packet of beef jerky. We got the dried fruit and peanuts in bulk so our supplies were pretty dang cheap.
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i’ve achieved peak bike dork and successfully used my brompton as a shopping cart inside a store
it’s a setup very similar to this one (picture taken from one of the many youtube videos i’ve been inspired by)
turns out if you put a bag on the front and then fold down the bike you still have access to the bag, and if you fit a rack and some wheels that make the bike easier to roll when it’s in its folded state you basically have a shopping cart
our nearest grocery store that has everything we usually need in one trip is about half a mile away so if i walk there the trip usually takes like 45 minutes-1hr depending on how long i spend in the store, and i have to go pretty often because ash is capable of eating literally a pound of strawberries in a day
this setup reduces that trip down to like 20-30 minutes which is fantastic
it is by far the dorkiest thing i’ve ever done but it solves so many different problems (don’t need to worry about getting it stolen since it’s my cart, makes the trip to the store faster, i can carry way more stuff than in my backpack) that i have absolutely fallen in love after my first time doing it, i even got a compliment from an old person saying it was really cool
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