Okay I own a car BUT fuel is so expensive that now I also have a motorbike as well so I don’t spend $100 a week on commuting to work. Am I allowed in this thread? I got a NAVI because I don’t want to go fast and get into a 80mph head on collision with a Ford Ranger.
They shoulda used that Blue Hearts song “Navigator” for marketing this bike. Honda, DM me.
define people
americans
i do wish that car share was more of a thing here in brooklyn, like i know it exists but it doesn’t seem super prevalent and nowhere near as prevalent as the one they have in vancouver which seemed really cool when we visited there for like a week
i spend most of my ride back from dropping ash off at school muttering about how i don’t trust nunyall where in this equation nunyall = anyone driving a car in new york
we used to have 2 competing ones and the other folded but yeah this city was extremely ahead of the curve on this stuff 10-15 years ago and has mostly stagnated since, though a lot of places are only just catching up to a stagnant Vancouver in terms of urban amenities, they used to compensate much better for the housing/career situation here
Seattle had two as well and they did make it viable for my household to have one less car but then one acquired the other and within a few months they gave up and that was that. Now that zirp isn’t funneling vc cash into making uber et al cheap my choices are bike infrastructure the city refuses to meaningfully improve at the expense of street parking, a transit system actively hostile to the idea that people might want to move east-west and not just north-south, and a second car.
I’ve had to go to west Seattle twice in the past year and it was real weird both times
anyway it’s nice that Measure M just passed in LA where they have built 3 new transit lines in the past decade
I kinda get it, the way the glaciers carved out Seattle’s hills they almost all run north-south but uhh so what. That’s not a reason to just give up.
Long Island has the opposite problem, East/West trains abound, moving north south without a car gets annoying
a fascinating thing I have realized in the past couple years is that whenever I am looking to rent a car in another country it almost always makes financial sense to get an electric one just considering the price of fuel, whereas in the US gas is still cheap enough that there’s all these news articles about hertz having to dump half the electric fleet they overinvested in
speaking as someone who is having to pay an annoying amount of money to a guy in Phoenix to legally bring my prius with me back to the US (this story is much less triumphant than that of my wife’s green card) it feels like a lot of car companies are trying to overgeneralize internationally and meanwhile no one has made a better car for the US market than Toyota
Finally borrowed a friend’s ebike to try the commute, he’s selling it for $800, it’s a Rad ebike which seem to dominate the trails. It uses the same bafang rear hub and battery kit that all the ebikes seem to use. It needs some wheel fairings and a rear rack to be useable but I’ll have to see how it works.
One other logistical snag: grabbing lunch. There’s no place within walking distance and the bike trail by work is up several flights of stairs.
finally rode to work. felt very healthy. burke gilman trail is full of bike commuters so i was stuck behind a mom with her child on a bike for a while. theres no good place to pass. once i got on the 520 bridge it was empty so i could go full speed.
the bike im loaned is the rad rover, which has massive 26 X 4 tires, so it feels big and unwieldy. if i do this with any regularity i will need fairings for the wheels and a rack
I have no doubt the newer ones are better but my radcity was a bad combo of a heavy heavy bike with cheap parts, which makes them especially bad for a heavy bike. The brakes were a little warped and drove me nuts, the wheels were constantly going out of true, it was geared super super low to make it possible to ride with a dead battery but it made pedaling feel like shit
It was a good commuter though, which is why I put up with it for so long. Once covid hit and I wasn’t commuting anymore I sold it asap
Rad seems to use Bafang motors and I assume the same battery packs they use, at least mine is old enough to have them. When I was shopping for ebike kits that was the brand that kept coming up.
The Rover is geared super low to deal with the tires and heft of the bike and I find the whine of the huge tires to be a little obnoxious. It’s also just huge so whipping it around foot traffic is not as agile as I’m used to. Mopeds have like 17 x 2.5 tires which are smaller.
I did feel like a real cheater using that ebike, especially up the longer and steeper hills and passing people on real bikes. The Burke Gilman is absolutely full of people after 5pm, but on the plus side I’ve arrived home and don’t need to zonk out on the bed and nap to recover from…driving
i finally handed over cash for the bike, which I took to work today.
lotta wind out there, I think there was another cyclist on the bridge that was drafting behind me. It’s nice to be useful
ive timed my bike commute to be about 32 minutes. i thought they were like 45. maybe it just feels that way. that is faster than a commute by car on a normal traffic day.
so i ended up getting a pair of these: https://www.cat-ears.com/
it’s actually kind of amazing how much it improves the ride experience? being able to hear things around you (like my kid just belting a song out in the back) and not hearing a ton of wind noise makes riding around a lot less stressful
they do look pretty dorky though so i might see if i can get their slim version
After sick sideburns, doubling up to sick sidebike burns … 
… that slogan can be improved, sorryyyy
