two wheels good

The Quay to the City

2006-08-16T16:55:26Z

Interesting public space project in Toronto

Bicycle mpg

2006-08-09T03:39:25Z

If you look at fuel costs alone, cycling is actually more expensive per mile than driving a typical car: Bicycle mpg with various choices of fuel. Of course, this ignores the maintenance and purchase costs of cars vs bikes....

Seattle transport surveys

2006-08-08T17:36:51Z

Two surveys worth filling out if you live in Seattle:

Sound Transit are looking for feedback on long-term public transport plans

The City of Seattle is looking for detailed feedback on bike infrastructure

My impression is that the city is quite serious about improving bike infrastructure, but really needs feedback from people who use it.

[update: the Sound Transit survey includes some really dodgy charts. Pay attention to the scales before using them to decide on anything.]

Revised poll

2006-07-19T17:52:16Z

View Poll: Road use and signals, version 2

I had set up the last question on the previous poll in the wrong way - this one allows you to choose more than one option. Just to make it clear, because the previous version failed to: I'm interested in all the modes you use routinely, not just the one you use the most. For instance my answer would be tick all of "Own car", "Public Transit" and "Bicycle".

A quick poll

2006-07-19T16:32:04Z

Update: I made a mistake on this poll, so please use the updated version instead. Sorry.

I'll explain why I'm doing this in a week or two, when I either have enough responses to say something interesting or get tired of waiting for that to happen.

More brilliance

2006-07-15T16:30:14Z

The Greater Lyon Velo'v project - a public bicycle network with 3000 bikes and stations every 300 metres through the central city, and prices set such that using one is by far the cheapest way of making short trips (free for half an hour or an hour, just expensive enough after that to encourage people to return them to the stations). London would do well to imitate.

Brilliant

2006-07-15T15:52:31Z

I've just found out about a wonderful invention: the dynamo light-up pedals. They are of course no substitute for constant lights, but additional light while moving can never be a bad thing, plus it's a fail-safe for those annoying days when the battery dies because you forgot to turn the light off in the morning....

Apparently SPD- and toeclip- compatible versions are in the pipeline; now I just wish they'd do ones that don't flash.

Crazy cyclists + bad puns == teh win

2006-02-12T19:36:05Z

Maybe I'll start using this journal properly again some day. Until then:

La Coupe Des Glaces.

[yeah, it's an annoying Flash site, but just look at the photo gallery.

Terrifying

2006-01-26T07:21:29Z

The rocket powered bicycle.

I wouldn't worry about getting up Queen Anne Hill with one of those.

Equipment

2006-01-23T06:56:45Z

I was asked to detail my biking equipment, so I will. I'm not as much of a gearhead as I used to be though, so this is going to be pretty vague.

First of all, a sad note. That bike in my user icon was the best one I've ever owned, and I took the trouble to cart it back from New Zealand to the UK, but it was stolen before I could bring it out to America. It was a bit of a mongrel, as I bought it second-hand from a shop that had replaced many parts on it over a few years of using it for races, but it was a Cannondale frame, and what impressed me most was its reliability, so it left me with a lasting good impression of Cannondale's kit.

As for what I ride now, well I run two bikes, one of which I'm much more impressed with than the other.

The good one is a Giant OCR road bike. It's a road bike, so weighs very little, has drop handlebars and skinny tyres, and is a little more maintenance-intensive than most things you'd want to commute on. Unlike most road bikes it has 3 front chain rings (they often only have 2 to save weight) and a full range of gears, which I find myself using in Seattle. It has very small LED lights on it and no rack, because I really only use this one for fun rides by day (see previous comment about commuting bikes). It also has a fairly hard riding feel, so I tend to avoid poor quality roads. The upshot of all this is that I can go very, very fast on this bike. When I used to commute on this or a mountain bike, there was about a 20% difference in commute time, even though traffic and lights slowed me down a lot.

The less good one is my commuting bike, and I ride this more often. It's not that there's anything wrong with it now, but I'm unimpressed with it because since purchase it's needed significantly more maintenance than it should have done, and as a result it now has quite a few non-original parts on it. It's a Specialized hybrid bike (big wheels like a road bike but wider, frame shape and weight in between road and mountain bikes, straight handlebars because drops make me nervous in traffic), only it now has a third part rear wheel, as well as various smaller parts. The number of parts I've replaced in a little over 2 years of riding this bike has left me feeling disinclined to buy from Specialized again; I should get myself another Cannondale when it's time to replace this machine.

As for accessories, this is the one I use to carry stuff, to ride at night and to ride in the rain, so it has a lot more stuff on it. There's a rear rack, of nondescript manufacture (I've never encountered a bad rear rack, probably because it's such a simple part), and to which I attach Ortlieb roll packs, which I strongly recommend because they're the only bags I've ever used that do a really good job of keeping water out. There's a computer, the brand of which I can't remember, but which I mainly use as a clock to remind myself how late I am. There are multiple reflectors both in the wheels and at the front and rear, because they're light and cheap and it makes a big difference to visibility. And the most important things are the lights: I have two sets of horizontal-bar rear lights, because the bigger an area of a driver's retina you stimulate, and especially the wider a horizontal range, the quicker that driver will respond to your presence. I use both on steady, because I believe this is better for safety than blinking lights that draw a driver's eye too effectively, distracting them from the road and causing them to drift across. In front I have two lights, one of which is a Cat-Eye (another brand I've been happy with) multiple-LED type and casts a moderately powerful beam (enough for Seattle night riding; wouldn't have been enough in Cleveland where the streets are less well lit), and the other is a baby 1-LED thing that goes on the other side of the handlebars to give that horizontally-extended area of light.

Also, both of my bikes have toe clips. It might be time for me to upgrade the road bike to proper clipless pedals, but certainly for the commuting bike I find toe clips to be a good compromise. They give me a lot more power (especially from a standing start - I can do 0-10 as fast as most cars, and while that may sound silly it is actually important for safety because it makes drivers less desperate to squeeze past me), without requiring that I wear special shoes.

And then there's the matter of clothes. For general advice, REI is a good resource, though they do tend to over-emphasise the importance of having specialised everything, down to the socks. I'm about to list a lot of gear; I don't think it's necessary to get these all before starting to ride. A suggested order would be: helmet -> gloves -> shorts ->

I almost never ride the road bike in ordinary clothes, because it has a hard seat and a hard ride. The seat is great, provided I wear padded shorts, so I always do so. I commute in ordinary trousers, though never the white pair I own (impossible not to get them stained), and preferably jeans because flimsier trousers get a hole worn in a suspicious crotchish location by the seat. To wear trousers on a bike, trouser clips are essential; these simply stop the clothing from getting caught up in the chain and gears. I agree with dagoski about the unimportance of upper body wear, except in the rain, so I generally wear yesterday's shirt, intending to get changed as soon as I'm done. Because I don't have special cycling shoes, I tend to wear old, stiff-soled pairs. Old because toe clips are really bad for shoes that you want to keep looking nice. Stiff-soled because that increases pedalling efficiency and prevents foot cramps (and proper bike shoes are stiffer-soled than anything intended for walking in). I never get on the bike without a helmet, and rarely without gloves. The gloves aren't a safety issue, but they make a big difference to comfort. Then there are glasses. Sunglasses are obvious, but it's also useful to have some yellow lenses (increased contrast at dusk and in grey weather) and clear ones to keep the wind out of my eyes when it's dark, but this can end up being very silly, so I got myself a pair of glasses with interchangeable lenses.

And finally, rain. There is no way to cycle while completely insulated from the effects of rain, so my preferred solution is to have a change of clothes for when I get to my destination. Because this isn't always possible, I do have some waterproofs. dagoski is right that waterproofs cause sweating, so they are less than ideal, but fancy ones cause somewhat less sweating, and there are days when this makes the difference between me biking or not biking. I recently shelled out for a better jacket than I used to use, and it makes me very conspicuous (they're not joking about the "shock yellow") while also leaving me a lot drier than its predecessor did. I also have some waterproof trousers, though they are of lower quality and it's about time I replaced them.

eldan_bike @ 2005-08-25T21:06:00

2005-08-26T04:07:39Z

What's a better show of real patriotism -- cutting foreign oil consumption by occasionally riding a bike or slapping a flag sticker on your SUV that gets 11 miles to the gallon? - from ESPN.com by way of Northwest Environment Watch

Ghost bikes

2005-08-24T21:49:51Z

I'm settling in, and after a trip to London (which will take up the next two weeks) I'll start setting myself regular targets again. For the moment I'll just say that I'm really enjoying cycling in Seattle, but it is very hard work, and I'm doing much shorter rides than I was in Cleveland. Whereas in Cleveland I would go on a ride with a single significant climb in it (typically the way home from the Cuyahoga or Chagrin river valleys), here I do that climb on the way to the farmers market or back from downtown or the UW. And then another, and another, because there's not many places I can get to without a hill. It's doing my fitness some good, and certain hills that I keep repeating are already feeling less daunting.

Anyway, I mainly wanted to go online today to post a couple of links:

Last post from Cleveland!

2005-06-22T23:01:13Z

I'll run the past 10 days together, since there's an enforced break about to kick in:

Miles biked: 50
Lengths swum: 64 (~= 1 mile)
Targets: 60 miles and 30 lengths. Fate giveth, and fate taketh away - I just ended up spending more time on campus than expected, and having less time on the road, so I went swimming 3 times. I guess the extra swimming counterbalances the 10 mile shortfall on the bike....

Since Spring Break I've exercised more consistently that any time since I used to be seriously into kung fu. Annoyingly I don't seem to have lost any fat (time to think more seriously about my diet I guess...), but I definitely feel a difference in fitness. I'm significantly faster up Edgehill, 30 lengths in the pool tire me less than 20 did in March, and it takes a third flight of stairs to get me out of breath. This is all very pleasing, and I hope I don't lose too much of that in 10 days of sitting in a car and not moving a great deal.

Tomorrow nein09 and I set off for Seattle tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to it a lot. I just hope my expectations aren't unrealistic.

The Race Across America

2005-06-20T21:33:12Z

There's hardcore. And then there's completely insane. I take my hat off to them.

Link from nein09

1% extra free!

2005-06-12T02:42:39Z

I'm highly unlikely to get on the bike tomorrow (other plans), so I'll post the weekly numbers now.

Miles biked: 55.55
Lengths swum: 28
Targets: 55 miles and 28 lengths

Mostly a good week. North Park - Shaker Blvd is definitely better in terms of road quality than anything involving South Park or Fairmount, and I've been more consistent about going for 5-10 mile rides on days when I wouldn't otherwise get any exercise. Having said that, Green Road south of Cedar is possibly the most bone-shaking street I've found to date, and I am still tired of getting in from a ride with aching arms.

Today I went for my longer ride, though it was half the length of last Sunday's. It was an unremarkable one, except for a couple of incidents with other road users.

First there were a few dickheads honking me and rushing to get past when they didn't have the space on Euclid Avenue. I took great pleasure in catching up with the same cars at one red light after another - in fact it's proven something I had idly assumed to be true: that once traffic reaches a certain not-that-high level cycling is just as fast as driving.

Then there was the big event. Coming up Harvard on the steep but short hill going West from Richmond, I realised that the right hand lane was about to turn into a right-turn-only lane. I looked back, and there was a truck coming, but it was a couple of minutes away from me, so I changed lanes. I wasn't going very fast because this was up a hill, but anyway I was approaching a red light. As I was almost there, the truck was bearing down on me, showing no sign of wanting to avoid me (even though there was an empty lane to my left), and honking. My desire not to die being stronger than my pride, I let the fuckers intimidate me, but I couldn't resist shouting at them while I pulled into the right turn lane, let them pass, and pulled back into the correct lane to wait for the light to change. The light changed and they didn't move. When I got tired of waiting for them, I started to pass them, at which they point they started matching my speed, making it impossible for me to get into the correct lane (and there's no way I was going fast enough to be anywhere but the inside lane on a road that size). Eventually I hit the brakes and they carried on, too fast for me to note their licence plate details. I did notice that they were drivng a Value City Furniture delivery truck, so I shall email that company, but I doubt anything will come of it. For one thing, no non-cyclist seems to give a toss about cyclists' welfare, seeing us as an irritant who probably deserve such treatment, and for another it's just going to be easier for the customer service department to say "sorry sir, you haven't given us enough information to identify the driver" rather than do anything about it.

And finally... just as I was calming down from that, I had a near miss with an SUV at Van Aken. Of all the near misses I've ever had as a pedestrian, driver or cyclist, this is the one I am most convinced was not my fault, because I was in the middle of a long green phase, and this car just shot out going across me. So leaving aside that they didn't bother to look where they were going, they also jumped a red light, and did so in the middle of the red phase. They're lucky I wasn't in/on a motorised vehicle, because if I had been going any faster I wouldn't have been able to stop in time. Oh, and when I shouted at them, they gave me this dirty look like I was doing something wrong.

I'm tired of being treated like scum who doesn't belong on the road. I have a shiny new copy of the Digest of Ohio Motor Vehicle Laws (which I used to confirm that both times I've had encounters with police on the streets here, I knew the law better than the cops did), and it makes perfectly clear that I do. Not to mention that my road use as a cyclist doesn't have any knock-on cost to those around me, unlike everybody in a car, whose fumes I have to breathe.

Actually I think it's symptomatic of a more general thing about this part of the world. People just can't bring themselves to care about their fellow human beings. It shows up in all manner of ways, from urban design to the crazy municipal authority structure to the extreme racial segregation of Cleveland to the behaviour of indvidual drivers, and I've had enough of living with the consequences.

I'm counting the days (13) till I get the hell out, and over the coming year or so I'll get the chance to discover if Seattle is different enough that I actually like living there, or if this is in fact a disease of the entire United States.

Next week's targets: 60 miles and 30 lengths. It will be my last week of doing this in Cleveland, and I imagine I'll want to change the system once I'm settled in Seattle given that the ground is so much hillier there, access to a swimming pool may be more or less convenient depending on exactly where we live, and I'm pretty determined to get back into kung fu, having even been given a referral for a good teacher there.

The week just gone

2005-06-06T05:24:24Z

Miles biked: 60½
Lengths swum: 28 (odd-numbered targets don't work all that well because I feel like such an idiot walking the length of the pool to get back to where I started, when I could just swim it)
Maximum speed: 41 mph
Targets: 50 miles and 27 lengths. This is why I won't get too hung up on the odd bad week, as long as there aren't consecutive bad weeks.

>50 of the miles were travelled in one day on a mammoth bike ride, because I hadn't done very much travelling anywhere at all during the week, and was car-bound on Saturday.

Over the past few weeks I've been trying to get in the habit of doing a short (half hour or so without breaks that aren't imposed by red lights) circuit before I start work in the morning, on days when I don't expect to get on the bike for practical transport purposes. In theory North Park -> South Park should be ideal, as they're full of trees, have little traffic, have many connecting streets so I can choose how far to go, and the route avoids all left turns (long traffic-imposed breaks...). Oh, and it's gently uphill on the way out, so I get some exercise and then have a fun fast ride home. The trouble is that the road surface of North Park is poor, and South Park is a complete disgrace. I think that maybe North Park -> Shaker Blvd would be better, because Shaker doesn't seem to have much traffic at the time I go (usually leaving at about 9, so after the morning rush hour), and it's in much better shape.

Anyway, this week I only did this once, for various reasons, so I had only racked up 9½ miles up to this morning. So I decided to get ambitious. Here is the route I took, which was fairly close to the one I planned:

Shaker -> Gates Mills -> Cedar -> Chagrin River Road -> pointless climb on Old Mill because I misread the map -> fantastic descent of Mayfield (where I hit 41 and could have gone faster if I had the guts) -> Chagrin River -> lunch stop in Willoughby town centre (maybe it's just because I'd worked up such an appetite, but the food and juice at Johnny Mango was wonderful) -> Lakeshore Blvd -> E. 222^nd -> Tracy -> E. 185^th -> Nottingham -> Euclid Creek Reservation -> Mayfield -> S. Taylor -> Cedar -> Coventry -> home

Up to the lunch break, this was the best day of riding I've done since New Zealand. The roads were quiet and pretty, Gates Mills is a really fun road to race down, and the Chagrin River valley gets quite spectacular in places. I've been unfair to Cleveland in talking like there are no hills or scenery around - you only have to get to the Eastern or Southern edges of its sprawl to get some nice rolling hills.

After lunch, not so good. Partly because I was just on much more urban roads (though the Euclid Creek Reservation is lovely), but mainly because I was getting too tired. I'm evidently not yet fit enough to enjoy a 50-mile day at this point. I'm no more upset than I am surprised by this, but I am going to have to take it into account. I need to make sure I actually do the short weekday rides I was talking about above, every day. That way I'll have a reasonable amount to do on the weekend's big ride, and be able to enjoy the whole thing.

Next week's targets: 55 miles and 28 lengths.

Last week's progress

2005-06-01T01:08:29Z

Miles biked: 46
Lengths swam: 26
My targets for the week: 45 miles and 26 lengths

In case you're wondering, it's not a coincidence that I only just surpassed the cycling target. This was the first week in which I did an extra circuit (just adding a loop in South Park to a grocery run) in order to meet the target. In other words: this system is working for me.

Targets for this week: 50 miles and 27 lengths.

On Saturday I went on a fairly long ride, out to the towpath, then up to Garfield Heights (I think that road from the river up to Garfield Heights is the longest climb I've found in the area, and I made it without stopping, but my speed did get as low as 3 mph so I need to improve on that), and then home via an absurd detour because I kept getting lost.

I've discovered that I'm deeply uncomfortable on the residential streets of the ghetto. I'm not pleased about this, and I'm trying to figure out to what it extent it's rational and to what extent it's pure prejudice. I mean, the district between where I live and the northern trailhead of the Towpath is definitely edgier, more run-down and objectively more dangerous than the 'yuppie funnel', but I felt safer as soon as I was into Slavic Village, and I don't believe that's really any safer.

The one rational part of my discomfort comes from the tendency of ghetto households to have big beefy dogs that they don't chain up. They turned out to all be perfectly well behaved, and mostly just ignore my passing, but I'm still easily scared by strange dogs (as in, dogs I haven't just been introduced to by their owner) and enough successive instances of will it run for me? Can I outsprint it? will start to build into a generalised nervousness.

The really creepy parts of town though are the dead industrial estates. Not the stuff by the river—that area is very much alive so even though it's empty on the weekend it's doesn't feel edgy—but the decripit parts where most windows are broken and the roads feel even more like they've been cluster-bombed than the rest of Cleveland. There's one between Harvard, Union E.93 and E.78 (just looks like a mess of train tracks on the map), and one stretching SE from the bottom of the Garfield Park Reservation (just looks like a VOID on the map). If anyone wants to come with me for moral support (and perhaps with a car) I would like to go back to these places and take depressing photos (à la Worksongs), but I am not going back there alone if I can possibly help it.

Last week's progress

2005-05-26T22:03:25Z

A little late due to an uncooperative hard drive....

Miles biked: 36½
Lengths swum: 0
My targets: 40 miles and 25 lengths

For some reason my energy level crashed for a few days, hence the no swimming. I also didn't get around to going on any rides for the sake of riding, and evidently this is the limit of where commute cycling will take me. I'm not terribly impressed with myself, but sometimes you have to know when not to push yourself too hard....

Targets for this week: 45 miles and 26 lengths. I did the swimming today, but I'll need to do quite a long ride for pleasure over the weekend to make that one. It's about time I started going on longer rides again, and the weather looks promising, so here's hoping.

Weekly progress

2005-05-17T04:07:13Z

Miles ridden last week (up to and including Sunday): 41¾ (of course, the ¾ is the most important part)
Lengths swum: 24
Target for last week: 30 miles

I've already done 11 miles today, so I think I'm going to jump to a 40-mile target this week, missing out the 35. If this gets out of hand before I leave Cleveland I can always stop increasing the targets at 60 or so, but then I used to cover 70 miles a week just commuting to work when I lived in Bristol, so maybe it's not that unrealistic. And man was I noticeably fitter at the end of that 4 month internship than at the beginning....

I think I'm also going to start escalating targets for the swimming, but slowly because 24 lengths was pushing myself last week. So I'll go for 25 this week, and so on.

Road observations:

North Park has deteriorated significantly since last summer.

Legacy Village is evil, and their lamp-posts are apparently too good to have a prole like me chain my bike to one, so security came along to order me to move it, seeing as this is the most serious misbehaving they have to deal with on the mean streets of Beachwood.

In their defence, at least Legacy Fortress do provide some bike parking, which however out of the way and non-obvious it is already makes them better for cyclists than the other malls in the area.

Riding in the middle of the lane like I'm supposed to doesn't get me more shit from impatient drivers than pulling meekly to the right. However, it does keep me away from the worst parts of most roads, and make drivers actually overtake me properly instead of trying to squeeze past frighteningly. I wish I had listened to this advice sooner.

A bike does have enough metal to trigger an actuated traffic light, provided I ride directly over the cut in the road where they buried the sensor.

Being seen by drivers

2005-05-12T19:51:53Z

Being seen by drivers is obviously one of the most important issues in cycling safely on streets. I had started writing some visibility advice in response to ibm's post looking for bike-buying advice, but I moved it here because I realised it's relevant to all cyclists.

A few pieces of advice on accessories, based on cognitive psychology research I was involved in a few years ago:

Get a high-visibility jacket, even though it makes you look really stupid, and wear it whenever drivers are using headlights. Drivers' perception is very finely tuned to only notice things that look big, and the little point of light from bike's lights gets filtered out too easily, so the more of you that shines in headlights the better. I've also found that drivers actually give me more space when I wear the stuff, for reasons that are not clear to me.

Don't skimp on lights. If your lights are brigher, it makes you look closer to a driver, which makes them more likely to give you space.

The more horizontal distance between your leftmost and rightmost point of light, the more you look like a car to the primary visual cortex, so the higher a priority your signal gets in a driver's visual processing. If possible, separate lights with some space between them are idea (I do this on my handlebars), but this isn't always practical (especially at the back), so failing that just go for the widest light you can find. It gets a measurably faster reaction from drivers.

Use your lights if it's overcast, raining or just dusky. Cyclists often overestimate how visible we are to drivers, and the more we do to help drivers, the safer we are.

Don't use lights in bright daylight; especially not beam-casting headlights. There is a situation (basically if you are between the sun and a driver) in which this actually makes you less visible, because your overall brightness is closer to that of the sky.

Do get a beam-casting front light, and point it slightly downwards. In theory LED lights are sufficient if you live in an area with street lighting, but in practice street lighting is seldom good enough to see all features of the road far enough ahead to anticipate them. The more you can see, the less likely you are to end up swerving to avoid a branch or grating or [this is a big issue in Cleveland during mating season] a small mammal corpse.

For a combination of reasons I've mentioned above, get multiple reflective things. Reflective trouser clips are good, reflectors on wheels and pedals are good, and so on. They're all secondary to lights, because reflectors are only bright if light hits them at exactly the right angle, but it still adds up to more points of light for a driver to see you by, and understand how far away you are from.

Please please please pleeeeeeease don't use those silly flashing settings that most bike lights have. They are worse than useless. Though the flashing does attract more attention, it has the unfortunate side-effect of drawing drivers' eyes so much that they drift towards you, and are less likely to see what's going on on the rest of the road. That latter thing may not sound like such a problem, but if a driver suddenly notices a car they are in danger of hitting, they'll swerve abruptly to avoid it, even at the risk of hitting you. It sounds evil, but it's rational really: a car-on-car collision is a lot more likely to hurt the driver than a car-on-bike collision, and unconsciously we do prioritise threats in that selfish a way.

OK, I think that's it for now, so I'll stop lecturing. I'll probably make more safety posts over the summer though; it's one of the things I had always been meaning to do with this journal.

No more winter

2005-05-10T03:17:08Z

Well, winter's over, and the rain has almost washed the salt out of the roads, so it's time I returned to posting regularly.

I've decided to prepare for Seattle [in case you weren't aware, I'll be in a place that has real geography in less than two months!] by putting myself on a gradually increasing training regime. Last week I did 25 miles (including day-to-day commute riding, because I'm mainly working at home now), so I'll use that as my baseline, and try to increase it by 5 miles per week. The past week's included a fun ride to the lake and downtown (the same route that I've been using pictures from on my photoblog for a while) organised by trygve, and from today onwards I'm going to try and go on shorter rides every couple of days.

Over the weekend I also spent some time cleaning up and overhauling my bike, to get rid of the aforementioned salt. I have to say, the decrease in pedalling resistance is enough that it makes me feel fitter, and it also shifts gears more smoothly. In the process I also noticed that both wheels are slightly buckled—not dramatically so, but it's noticeable when adjusting the brakes—and the spokes on both are noticeably not smooth, thanks to corrosion through the winter. I don't think the spokes are in too bad shape, so this calls for getting the wheels trued rather than replaced, but I think I'll leave that till I get to Seattle. It's a job I've never been able to get quite right myself, and I'm loth to pay money for it only to ride the thing on Cleveland's terrible roads again straight after.

Shipping bicycles

2005-04-17T16:53:21Z

Does anyone have any experience of shipping a road bike or carrying one on a plane?

I know from my return from NZ that airlines are generally willing to carry bikes for a fee (~$50, often per connection which is a bummer), but the bike that I was bringing home then wasn't terribly delicate, so I was happy to just pack it into a cardboard box. It got home in one piece, in spite of someone along the way inspecting it and repacking it badly, only to get stolen shortly afterwards. Now I want to bring a rather less robust road bike back from the UK to Cleveland, and I'm worried about it. So does anyone know the answers to the following:

Is there such a thing as a rigid bike case that protects the thing like a flight case for a guitar? And if so, how much do they cost and how much hassle are they to get hold of?

Do American Eagle carry bikes on their dinky Canadair fleet? I know they can, but I wouldn't be surprised if they refuse to, citing the smallness of the plane as a fake reason.

Assuming I have the choice, how much does it cost to ship a bike across the Atlantic? I don't need to do it the fastest way, but it would need to reach me within about 6 weeks, because it seems like too big an item to send to friends in Seattle ahead of myself, so it will need to reach Cleveland before I leave here.

And most importantly: what is the chance that a spindly road bike will actually arrive intact?

Kryptonite U/D-locks

2004-09-24T13:36:57Z

If you haven't already seen information about the serious flaw in several models of Kryptonite locks, look now.

The good news is that the publicity has had a positive impact: Kryptonite have offered to replace any affected lock with a model that isn't compromised in this way. Evidently public pressure does sometimes work.

request for tools

2004-07-23T15:47:38Z

I've broken 3 spokes on my rear wheel in the space of a month or two, so I decided to replace the entire wheel. I have the wheel, and I know what to do (the only tricky part is transferring the gears, and you can read more than you could possibly want to know about that here), but I'm lacking one tool to finish the job. Does anyone have a large (1 inch) wrench or socket I could borrow?

Bike shops

2004-06-14T19:58:49Z

Can anyone recommend a good bike shop in the Cleveland area? I don't want to name names, but the two I know have both dicked me around in the past month or so, and someone has complained about every other one I know of.

'good' is defined as finishing the job when I leave them a repair to do, rather than leaving parts dangerously loose, and accepting that as a bike shop some of their customers will not have ready access to a car, rather than refusing to store a wheel—a wheel for pete's sake—overnight till the person who can sort it out for me will be in.