WANTED: Bikes For The Rest Of Us

Sometimes I wish Greg Lemond never won the Tour de France in 1986.

At the time, in the excitement surrounding the first American win at Le Tour, there was talk of a “renewed interest” in bicycling. As it turns out, there was a renewed interest in the sport of cycling, but not in building a real, pervasive bike culture here in the United States.

In fact, bike shops across the country began putting aside their single speeds, 3-speeds and cruisers to make room for expensive, lightweight, “high-end” racing bikes. In other words, bike shops lost interest in selling regular bikes to regular people.

Today, bike shops offer two basic flavors: road bikes and mountain bikes. The road bikes sold in the U.S. tend to have these features:

> Lightweight frames and components - expensive and irrelevant to a non-racer.

> Long-nosed, narrow, and painfully hard saddles - the kind that exert pressure where you’re most sensitive, which has led to an increase in erectile dysfunction among male riders. The painful saddles are also primarily responsible for the prevalence of special bike clothes: bibs and bike shorts that provide extra padding where it counts.

> Dropped handlebars - unnecessary if you’re not concerned about aerodynamics.

> Clipless pedals - requiring special cleats.

> Multiple gears - largely unnecessary, unless you live in San Francisco.

> Narrow, high pressure tires - great for racing, but not appropriate for an urban environment strewn with broken glass and sharp gravel.

> No built-in headlights, and no racks or baskets for carrying stuff.

Mountain bikes are a heavy version of the same thing -- the SUVs of the bike world.

I’m a big fan of the Danish bike blogs (I link to 3 great ones in the right column), but looking at the pictures on those blogs just makes me long for a real bike culture in America. And it all starts with our bikes.

We need a bike industry that pays attention to riders like Char - who has replaced her car with a bike - and less to Lance Armstrong wannabes.

We need bikes that you can hop onto at any moment without putting on spandex or special cleats.

We need bikes that can carry stuff.

We need bikes that are fun to ride.

We need bikes with function and style.

We need more bikes like this one (via cycleliciousness):



Right now, that void in the U.S. market is partly filled by small, custom builders like Rivendell and A.N.T.. They build great bikes, but they aren't cheap.

My hope is that higher gas prices will not only change the way Americans think about bicycles but also the way the bicycle industry thinks as well, so that we can finally have bike shops selling bicycles designed for regular folks who just want to ride from point A to point B and aren’t interested in paying a fortune.

Or winning the Tour de France.

UPDATE: I'm moving this series to a new blog, aptly named Bikes For The Rest Of Us.