No Bike Parking, Please (Capitol Hill, LoC)

How not very friendly. At the Adams Building, Library of Congress, Washington DC (on Capitol Hill).

What they mean is that they don't want bicycles locked to the railing blocking the ramp for the disabled, but do they provide a bike rack close by? No. Do they indicate where the nearest LC bike rack is (about 100 yards away, out of sight, across the street)? No. And so on. So instead people have bikes locked to sign posts up and down the street. Could be done better.

And the sign itself actually takes up more of the relevant real estate than any bike ever did. Oh well!

Motor Scooter Parked as Bike

I find this hard to understand - in a parking garage protected by the US Capitol Police, the owner of this thing feels it is worth locking up his scooter at a bike rack??

Tires for Road Bike -> One on Front, Different on Back

If the weather is good (not wet, not below freezing, generally) I will commute the ten miles each way to Capitol Hill on my carbon fiber road bike rather than my steel road bike that has disk brakes.

One of the main issues I have had is with tire wear. I had Michelin ProRace2 tires and then after they were discontinued, the successor model ProRace3. They are a bit pricey, though, often listing for more than fifty bucks each.

More importantly, I haven't been happy that the ProRace tire on front wears well while the one on back wears quickly. In particular, the center of a new ProRace tire is raised in a pronounced way that I like to imagine reduces the rolling resistence but on the back this wears away in about 500 miles, leaving a flat spot instead. You can switch the tires front to back, but then the one that was in good shape on the front is quickly in same not-so-good state.

Performance has a tire from Vredestein, the
Fortezza SE Road Tire that for a while was often on sale for around 25 bucks (although now they are $34) and customers mostly seemed to have given them good reviews. I thought I would try a set of those and bought a pair - as it happened, I then got a slash ruining a not-very-old ProRace3 so now I have a Fortezza SE on the back and a ProRace3 on the front. This has worked very well - better, I think than having a Fortezza front and back. The Fortezza is a strange clincher that takes up to 160 PSI and says it needs a minimum of 110! (The ProRace3 has a max of 116 PSI.) I tried putting 140 in the back tire but the back end of the bike become too "lively" so I run with about 120 in back, 110 in front and it seems to work fine.

I can't say that I have a lot of confidence in the grippiness of this set up for high speed sharp turns, or even moderate speed ones in rainy weather, but I don't make high speed turns (much) and try not to ride this bike in the rain - problem solved. The road grip of the front tire, the ProRace3 is probably fine, but I'm a little suspicious of the Fortezza in back, but really I am not sure. I'm not testing it.

Michelin has a new tire that takes the same approach - the Michelin Pro Optimum has different characteristics for the front tire version and the back tire version:

Michelin has developed separate front and rear tires to take into account their specific requirements: The front tire carries 30% of the weight load and absorbs 100% of the braking effect. For this reason, Michelin engineers made it a priority to develop a tire with added grip, capable of providing maximum safety to users on cold, wet surfaces. The rear tire carries 70% of the weight load and absorbs 100% of the torque generated by the bike's forward motion, which affects its efficiency and wearlife. In order to achieve consistent performance, the rear tire now has a longer life, meaning that MICHELIN Pro Optimum Front and Rear tires now have comparable lifespans.

(Michelin Pro Optimum Front & Rear)

I suppose comparable tire life spans seems something to suggest as a "feature" since many folks buy the in pairs but as a goal it seems less important than simply having good riding characteristics. And it just seems unlikely - rear tires are going to wear faster, period. I'm figuring I'll go through two Fortezza tires on the rear to one ProRace3 on the front.

Mix and match - a good idea, it seems.

Capital Bikeshare's System - from France

The French language site for the company the provides "Le Système" for Capital Bikeshare. And here is the English version. They mention the recent launch of Capital Bikeshare with their equipment, noting "A total of 1,100 bikes will be spread through 114 stations." (Somehow I had missed that there are as many as 114 "stations.")

The information that Bixi is the provider of the technical approach is on the bikes themselves, giving their URL and the notice that "This product may be protected by intellectual property rights." By "product" they apparently mean more than just the bikes.


The bikes are made by a French company called Devinci. The Devinci web site does not feature their role as the builder/provider of these bicycles, but it is stamped on the bikes themselves.

Cycling Magazines

I now subscribe to three biking magazines, of varying quality, with different audiences and "tone."

Bicycling is an obvious choice and the one I have subscribed to the longest. One could suggest that they try to be all things for all (cycling) people, but they avoid too much discussion of technical issues. There are always articles for beginners ("5 Rookie Maintenance Mistakes" and the like) with "lifestyle" pieces (diet, complimentary exercise programs) and human interest articles of various levels of interest and perhaps even appropriatness. The biggest draw for me ends up being information about new products and bikes, much of which is in highly abbreviated form, which means if something seems interesting I generally have to do follow-on research. The reviews, particularly of bikes, take great care not to offend the manufacturers who of course are also big sponsors. One has to learn to read carefully to know when they aren't very impressed with a bike since serious direct criticism is so muted.

One aspect that I find trying in Bicycling bike reviews is the use of various shorthand that mostly includes no explanation of what they mean by these terms. It's a "you can't have it both ways" sort of problem - by avoiding highly (of even vaguely) technical explanations of most everything, they are left with buzz phrases. (One exception are quotes from the company PR people, such as "the carbon fiber in the new XYZ is extruded by robot in Germany, then blah blah blah, resulting in the stiffest yet most compliant ride we've ever produced." Gibberish, in other words.)

Bicycle Times is a relatively new publication. The web site says, "Featuring the best inspirational stories, practical advice, and intelligent discourse from everyday riders, but with a focus on the pavement side of things." Since the same outfit publishes a separate mountain biking mag, that is out of scope - mostly this is about "urban biking" with commuting and "bike culture" both featured. Road racing is not a featured subject. The bike and other reviews are generally more detailed and more inclined to make technical points in a comprehensible and useful way. Sometimes there are even links to further background information - for example, a comment about a particular bike's "trail" has a URL/link to further background on this subject. Good.

Bicycle Quarterly, according to its web site, is a "magazine for discerning cyclists, who enjoy their bikes, whether on a weekend ride, commuting, randonneuring, racing or touring the countryside." Its main focus is on randonneuring and the history of randonneuring and it works out from there to topics such as racing (and racing isn't really much of a focus). Most of the writing is by the editor/publisher, Jan Heine. There is a lot of good technical information or anyway discussion of issues, but some of the research presented seems less than rigorous. The magazine's apparent editorial view is that many assumptions about how best to achieve bicycle design objectives are incorrect; for example, that achieving high speed on a bike is best accomplished with fatter tires and lower tire pressure, not narrow and high. There is something to this, but not (I think) to the degree BQ suggests. BQ also seems to feel that it's competition doesn't do very good work, for example saying, "Our detailed evaluations are based on weeks of riding in challenging terrain, not just a spin around the neighborhood." Because of the abbreviated format used, Bicycling doesn't talk about how much the bikes are ridden when reviewed, but it is pretty obvious it is much more than "a spin around the neighborhood." One detects self-righteous indignation.

BQ does get points (with me) for being very open about criticisms of bikes reviewed where they find problems. One reason is that where there are substantive problems described, the company is asked to make a statement and these are inserted in the articles.

BQ isn't a high budget publication, so reviews are limited in number and often are driven by someone loaning the publication a bike to be reviewed. This sometimes has funny outcomes - a Civia was reviewed with much criticism; the company response was that they had stopped making the thing, rendering the review pointless for the most part, but having made the effort, this small publication could hardly throw it out, it would seem.

Another oddity is that BQ doesn't have most of its content on its web site, although they do have present their photographs in color, which is good since the publication itself is B&W. And in fact the photographs are quite nice; Heine also published coffee table books about the history of cycling that are beautiful.

In the end BQ is an acquired taste that some folks may not acquire.

Park Tool School - Cassette vs Freewheel

Last Sunday I started going to six weeks of Park Tool School (for bikes) at Spokes Etc in Belle Haven (Alexandria, VA).

I find that sometimes I think I understand something well but because I don't have to apply that understanding (or lack thereof) I can get along fine without learning that oops - I had it wrong.



In the first class, we covered the differences between cassettes and freewheels (part of the rear wheel) among other things. Of course, I could have simply looked up the subject on Sheldon Brown's site but I double that I would have as good an understanding as I do now, having been walked through the exercise with real parts by a real person.

Another Blogger's Experience with Capital Bikeshare

Here is an assessment of the DC Capital Bikeshare based on actual use of the thing.



He notes that the lighting system (two tail lights, one "blinkie" front light) go off when you stop. Well, that's a fact of life with simple hub generator systems.

He notes that the bike is heavy so one won't be able to ride terribly fast, but a "shareable" bike is going to need to be very strong (and yet not impossibly expensive) so one is kind of stuck with that. And given the flat terrain of most of DC, this isn't so bad as it might be.

I find the geometry of these bikes interesting. The axle of the front wheel is directly in a line with steering tube - this is quite unusual; usually the axle is an inch or more forward of that. Basically the bike has zero "rake" so the "trail" is greater than usual. "More trail is nice at high speeds (motorcycles usually have 80 mm of trail) but can feel sluggish at slower speeds" means this is a puzzling design decision since these are low speed rides. Hmm. Perhaps this is made up for by the head tube angle but I can't judge that by eye.

The drive system is an internal shift rear hub - and there is a thing that looks like a derailleur that is a chain tensioner. This should further insure that users don't end up messing with the chain.