Bike Blog

Biked to the pacific for the first time... 15 years ago
I have to keep adding more extreme bike rides in order ot keep myself motivated. There's so many cool spots to reach via bike and if I keep my eye on the next cool spot that's just a little bit farther than I could reach before, I'll be motivated to keep trying. I'm also fairly stubborn. This…

Why Bike To Work Day is important to me 15 years ago
I've realized that, over the past two years, I have become exceptionally passionate about biking. I wasn't always like this. I mean, I always liked bikes, and used my bike to get around school very frequently in college, but I am now actively finding new ways to drive less by biking more. It is not…

Old La Honda Road 15 years ago
Hill climbing is my nemesis. The problem is that I've got a fairly decent amount of power output, but my power-to-weight ratio is pretty poor. On the flat ground, power-to-weight doesn't matter nearly as much as going uphill. OLH is everybody's benchmark climb around here. Starting from the bridge…

New rules for telling me to get off the road 15 years ago
The bay area is better than many other parts of America in terms of stupid driver vs. bike interactions. It's not perfect, of course. If it was, Alto Velo wouldn't be offering a $11,000 reward for whoever hit one of their members in a hit-and-run . Last weekend must have been the official stupid…

Bike Hauling Problems 15 years ago
I've had some problems hauling what I want to haul on the bike lately. This culminated when my lunch ended up falling off my rack and ending up in the dirt, plus when I stopped, my bike toppled over and landed on it's side. There are two problems. First, my kickstand sucks. It turns out that…

One Year 15 years ago
On April 20, 2008, I purchased a new bike to replace my old bike, which was stolen from the secured parking garage underneath my apartment building. I didn’t want to spend too much money on it, given that the previous bike had been stolen so quickly. And I was sufficiently paranoid about the whole…

One of the biggest deterrents to cycling instead of driving 15 years ago
One of my co-workers got himself a bike and told all of us that he was going to start biking to work instead of driving. But, three days later, it was stolen from in front of his apartment. The problem is, and there's plenty of evidence on this, an equipped thief can breach just about any lock out…

Palo Alto complaining about high speed rail 15 years ago
There was a big dustup about the California High Speed Rail and Caltrain partnership. Now that voters have approved the line, now we get to see how expensive it will be after everybody realizes there will be rail running through their backyard. Bikes and trains go together like cake and frosting…

Introducing Bayonet Bars 15 years ago
Think that an "attack" that doesn't involves weapons as being too wussy for a manly road biker like yourself? Tired of beating another rider soundly in the prologue to the stage race, only to have him catch up to you later? Want to REALLY know why aerobars are banned in all mass-start event? Well…

Going clipless.. 15 years ago
I'm smack-dab in the middle of the different sort of cycling styles. I like to go off-road, but I like to go fast. I appreciate the technological progress that brought us the modern bike, but I also recognize that there are a lot of really stupid ideas out there that manufacturers try to solve…