It ends up that, given the massive numbers of different bike makers and models, it’s very rare that you’ll ever meet somebody with exactly the same bike. Even if you get a fairly popular bike that’s selling like hotcakes. On the VTA, I get used to the other cyclists. There’s the guy who’s missing one pedal and the other pedal is hanging by a thread who I wonder how he managed to pedal his bike. There’s the contingent of full-on dual-suspension mountain bikes that are not nearly as banged up as a mountain bike ought to be… probably because they never get off road.
And there are a lot of hybrids. Both new hybrids, given that they are quite popular, and old mountain bikes that now look more like hybrids than the modern mountain bikes. So I guess I sometimes figure that my bike is nothing special in the gear department, largely because it’s neither a several-thousand-dollar carbon fiber road bike nor a fancy mountain bike.
But it turns out that there is a story… a narrative to my bike… on the train some months ago. One habit of valleyfolk that makes one of my NY-based co-workers reel back in horror is that we’re always comparing prices of stuff. Like, how much did you pay off of list price for something. Even if there’s no good reason for why you’d want to know, people still ask. So I was talking to another cyclist and he was asking about how much I paid for the bike and guessed that I paid more than I did. And then I told him the story.
See, there are a few makers of police bikes, which are generally intended for rough-duty on city streets and somewhat rough terrain, carrying a fairly large amount of hardware. The basic idea is, like a cop on a horse, you’ll be able to run down suspects on foot without needing to take a car off-road or have the best jogger in the squad handy. They are coming back. See, before 9/11, the police departments were all about this because people responded much better to a cop on a bike or a horse than a cop in his car with a shotgun and donuts. But then post 9/11, police departments competed for the best anti-terrorist gear for their little towns in the middle of nowhere that were all pretty unlikely to ever see any terrorists. Right now, with oil prices up so high, it makes sense to force the cops to bike a few miles instead of driving.
Trek is the best seller, with Fuji behind. So, I’m betting that Fuji had some excess police bikes, so they took the Police badging off them and sold them as hybrid-ish mountain bikes at a discount. And you can still see where they removed the “Police” decals and left a little bit of goo. One day I saw a real Fuji Police bike… and that totally confirmed it for me…