January 11, 2012 · 8:50 am

Patient Zero: The Specialized Hotwalk balance bike (with pirates)

What's missing from this bike?

Technically speaking, I now realize, the first bicycle to enter our household was not the Kona. It was a balance bike that was the index case in this newfound obsession. Way back in 2007, when our son was turning two, my sister and brother-in-law brought over what I now realize was a very generous birthday gift, a balance bike. We assumed, may we one day be forgiven, that this was one of those gifts that reflects the taste of the giver, a bicycle gift from a lifetime bicycle obsessive, comparable to the decorative crystal candy dishes given as wedding gifts by our great-aunts that reflected their ambition for us to lead a far less itinerant lifestyle. At the time, balance bikes were not the hot-ticket holiday must-haves that they are today, and our primary reaction was confusion.  Our son was too young for a bicycle, and this one seemed to be lacking some critical parts.

The model that my brother-in-law chose was actually an informed consumer purchase. The tires, unlike those of many balance bicycles, were filled with air rather than being solid rubber. The bicycle was light enough to be picked up easily by a toddler. And although our son was at the time too young to appreciate it, the bicycle was also covered with pictures of pirates. You can’t buy that kind of quality décor in these modern-day balance bikes.

Arrrr...

This bicycle was valued enough to survive the most recent move from our old apartment, and after five moves in as many years we had become ruthless about what we were willing to pack. I had never paid the slightest attention to this bike beyond the practical considerations of finding a place to put it and helping our son ride it. This bicycle is the only reason we owned a pump. I had to look up the brand’s history by year to realize it was the Specialized Hotwalk. Is it a real bike if it doesn’t have a serial number?

Despite our reservations at the time we got it, our son was committed to learning to ride the Hotwalk. At two he was too short to ride even with the seat lowered as far as it would go, but he found it fascinating, and thanks to a growth spurt that continues to this day, which has led pediatricians to predict his adult height at somewhere around six and a half feet, he picked it up quickly enough. He grew bored quickly with his initial efforts to crab-walk it along and started pushing off hard enough that he cruised down entire city blocks without stopping. Other parents watched with amazement as he literally rode circles around their older kids on bikes with training wheels. To this day, although he has long since outgrown it, he still feels most comfortable on this bike, and will at times rip it from his sister’s hands in an effort to ride it. He jumped directly from this bike to a pedal bike. He makes no secret of his disdain for training wheels, which he has never used. This can be embarrassing when we meet other families at the park.

With the benefit of hindsight, I realize that this bike is the reason that our determinedly cautious son, who to our joy has never needed to be rushed to the emergency room after causing himself a debilitating injury, was even willing to consider climbing aboard a rental bike during our stay in Copenhagen. Riding in a child seat and as a stoker places some basic balancing demands on kids, and although wild kicks and swings are pretty trivial for an adult rider to correct when kids are small, they get more challenging as the kids grow heavier and longer-limbed. Our son’s comfort with the balance bike translated easily to comfort climbing on and off the back of an adult bike, and has made it much easier to haul a 45 pound passenger on our commutes.

"Klaxon Velo Dinosaure" according to the package label

As our daughter grew bigger, she wanted to follow his lead, and in the last few months, has begun to move beyond walking the bike to coasting. We added a dinosaur horn to the bike to make it hers, and she has learned to honk it wildly when other bikes are approaching, or might be approaching, or are visible in the distance, or when she needs to indicate that she has a horn. When we took the kids to Golden Gate Park after Christmas, we found a dozen kids her age with balance bikes in a rainbow of colors delivered by Santa.

"We go fast!"

Unlike them, she had a few months of riding under her belt, and thus led their spontaneous little balance bike gang around the Music Concourse. Honk, honk!

Our move to bicycle commuting was driven by our kids’ delight in riding. I realize now that although their eagerness to ride was triggered by renting bikes in Copenhagen, it really grew from the years our son spent on the balance bike, learning the freedom of powering himself through the world much faster than he could walk or run.

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January 9, 2012 · 8:26 pm

Outerlands

Our trip to Angel Island was okay and all, but the next bike ride stayed a little closer to civilization, which in the mind of the littles means commerce. Views are swell, but views while you’re eating something are better. We’ve been out to the Financial District and the Mission but weren’t feeling the love for Market Street. Eventually we remembered there’s a whole other half of the city to our west, the Outer Richmond and Outer Sunset, aka the Outerlands. We rode there on the last day of winter vacation, right after New Year’s.

I am the windmill, koo koo ka choo...

A trip to the Outerlands meant biking through Golden Gate Park, a smooth slight downhill all the way to Ocean Beach, and the park is always good. It had been a long time since we headed deep into the Avenues, which feels weirdly residential until you get to the beach; long, long streets full of houses. They have driveways! And sometimes yards! And frequently people park their cars in those yards. But the commercial strips get few and far between as the Avenue numbers roll up, with a sudden perk up at the end of the N-Judah line. We hopped on our bikes in the morning and rode the 3.5 miles down to the beach and the windmills, coasting much of the way. I had no idea they were remodeling the decrepit southern windmill, but it looks awesome. Not open for visitors yet, however, and no signs saying when it would open, either.

Recently Java Beach opened a real restaurant, the Beachside Café. The last time we’d been to Java Beach was before we were married, or even engaged. Remembering our failures on the food front on our last trip, our first stop was Beachside for brunch. I never expect this in the outer Avenues, but bicycle parking was tight, and alas, there are no racks, and there certainly aren’t parking meters. We eventually found an unclaimed stop sign across the street.

Beachside and Java Beach are cleverly located at the end of the N-Judah line, and eating brunch there made it clear that their business is totally Muni-based. The café would be quiet, then a train would rumble by and stop, then 20 people would rush into the restaurant to order coffee and pastry forming a line out the door. Five minutes later the café would empty out again. Fifteen minutes later, repeat. My conclusion at the end of our meal was that their door banged really loudly every time it opened and closed, and it would be nice if they could fix that. The food was good too.

It’s fun to ride in the Outerlands. Everything is pretty flat and if you time your ride to miss the Muni stops, there’s not much competition for the streets. We made our first visit ever to Other Avenues, a really old-school coop a little east of Beachside. Their bulk section isn’t as extensive as Rainbow’s but it’s pretty impressive. And they had bike racks, and a giant ball and chain holding the driftwood bench outside the store that the kids liked rolling back and forth. No pictures, alas, our camera flashed the “recharge battery” light right when we got to the windmill. SFBC discount still applies at Other Avenues.

From there we figured as long as we were in the neighborhood, more or less (and our definition of “nearby” expands substantially when we’re rolling on two wheels), we figured we would swing by Devil’s Teeth Baking and pick up lunch. This is more eating out than we normally do, but we’d gotten lazy about grocery shopping over the holidays. Worth the trip, however, because Devil’s Teeth has one of the city’s newest parklets. It is the first parklet I’ve ever seen over angled parking, which gave the benches a thematic zig-zag feel. They had kids’ chairs on the sidewalk and chalk for drawing. When we got in there wasn’t much left to buy; they said they’d been slammed that morning. But their good reviews are well-deserved.

The weather has been amazing lately, as if there is no rainy season to come at all, and I always end up overdressing in two jackets and having to peel them off as we ride. California’s drought is our gain.

Both Beachside and Devil’s Teeth had another innovation I hadn’t seen before; they’re now partners with Green Apple, which leaves a selection of used books on a shelf in the corner of each store for $5 apiece—they’re good books, too, and if I hadn’t had two grants to write the next week at work (and every night after the kids went to bed) it would have been difficult to resist. I hadn’t seen a store with the Green Apple partnership before; I wish they did that in our neighborhood. I never thought I’d say this, but we need to get to the outer Avenues more often.

We rode home through the Park, crossing up to JFK Drive in a search for the “squishy bushes” (some kind of beach succulent? Ice plant?) that our son had talked about every day when we brought him home from nature camp. No luck, but we hit the jackpot anyway, finding two waterfalls crashing down at the northern edge of the park we’d never seen before; they were astounding, I would have been less surprised to see a live sasquatch there. We stopped with a half-dozen other bicycles whose riders were enjoying the view while our kids pointed and yelled. We were passed by over a dozen cars that never slowed or seemed to notice there was something to see. We’ve driven on the same road and never noticed the falls either. Who knew there was so much to see?

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January 7, 2012 · 9:56 pm

Angel Island

All aboard!

While our kids were out of school over winter break we took the ferry to Angel Island. This is one of those trips that never would have seemed feasible before bicycles. There are no cars allowed on the island (other than those of the staff and summer trams) and the island is too large and the stay too long for it to be reasonable to walk with the kids; they would barely have made it past the docks on foot, and then we would have had another four hours before the ferry returned.

Bathroom break ad infinitum

After going on our bicycles I’d say that it was a mixed success. Matt and I had fun but even though we did the hauling, the kids got tired and frustrated and cold. By the middle of the afternoon they were engaged in their usual protest strategy of spending a half-hour in the bathroom apiece because they didn’t want to go anywhere anymore, even though the bathroom in question was a glorified outhouse in the middle of an empty field nowhere near the ferry dock that would get us home.

Alcatraz Island

But up until lunch, we all had a good time. The kids adored the ferry ride, especially spotting the buoys decorated in Christmas colors, and they liked the first half of the bike ride and eating lunch on the top of a hill looking over the old and new Bay Bridges. We rarely get to spend extended time with them outdoors as their default expectation is that after an hour in the park it’s time to go to a café. But in the off-season on Angel Island, there are no cafés. The costs of urban living: they are not fans of the concept of “wilderness,” not even half-hearted wilderness like an island you ride to on a ferry that has flush toilets and that was once the Ellis Island of the West.

Nobody here but us bicycles

In fact, in winter on Angel Island there’s not much of anything. There were almost no visitors on the ferry with us.  Six bikes in total made it onto the island, two ridden by mountain bikers who immediately hit the unpaved fire road, and two ridden by tourists tailed by a walker who’d chosen not to rent a bike for the trip. The first couple outpaced us immediately and we outpaced the second; even with the kids aboard, we ride faster than pedestrians. Everyone else was walking. We barely saw other visitors during our entire loop around the island. It was a startling change from a normal day in the city.

Angel Island actually sports some serious hills; the whole route is paved but it’s got elevation galore. None of it exceeded what we see on a daily basis in San Francisco, but none of it was familiar either, and it’s much easier, we’ve found, to climb a hill you know than to climb a hill you don’t. Case in point:  on the way up the seriously steep hill to the old Nike missile site, Matt started weaving with the combined load of cargo bike, our son, and our gear, and three-quarters of the way up he had to get off and walk. Since he ended up crosswise in the road, I had to stop and walk as well. When we got to the top we saw a sign telling bicycles that the hill was too steep to ride down, and walking your bicycle was required. No such sign on the uphill side, however.

Two Bay Bridges

The views on Angel Island are amazing. If our kids had been older they would have appreciated them more. They preferred to stop and look at things closer to the ground and complained that we wouldn’t let them climb on the restricted access crumbling old buildings. We didn’t pack enough food and snacks, underestimating the time the trip would really take, and they were hungry and cold.

By the time we got back both kids were exhausted. Our daughter started complimenting random teenagers on their braces. “You have shiny teeth! Where did you get shiny teeth?” and trying to make snow angels on the disgusting ferry carpet. At this point in the preschooler repertoire, the decision to take off underwear and run around shrieking cannot be far behind. Our son got so frustrated with waiting to get off the ferry dock that he punched Matt in the crotch. It was a low moment.

With hindsight I’m glad we went, but I wouldn’t go again with the kids for a long, long time. But someone else going to San Francisco, with older kids or no kids at all, would probably like this ride quite a lot.

A thoughtful visitor assembles found bones into a skeleton. We try to convince our kids not to destroy it.

What I would do again is ride the ferries with them. Riding to the docks is entertaining enough to suit them, they loved riding the ferry and looking out the windows, and in a pinch, the kiosk on board is chock full of snack foods in neon packaging. We could have hopped off in Sausalito and ridden home across the Golden Gate Bridge (the western bicycle path will soon be closed until April), laughing all the way.

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January 5, 2012 · 5:20 pm

The Breezer Uptown 8 (step-through)

Nice bikes… too nice

I knew what I wanted: a bicycle with all of the bells and whistles that commuters typically have to add to bicycles, unless they buy heavy, expensive Dutch bicycles: lights that didn’t need to be charged, gears that couldn’t drop off the chain, ability to hold tons of weight. Basically a dorkcycle.

It was easier to find the child seats I wanted, thanks to our European experience. And in retrospect there is good advice out there suggesting that you pick the child seat before the bike anyway. We’d become familiar with the Bobike Maxi, but our son, nearing six, had aged out of that seat. At that point most people stuck the kid on a trailer bike or their own bike, but we had length and school drop off and pick up problems that made that idea a non-starter. The other option to haul older kids was a longtail bike (and this idea still has some appeal) but my husband was riding a sorta-kinda cargo bike that seemed to be meeting that need.

Bobike has a seat that doesn’t get much attention in the US, the Bobike Junior. It holds a kid aged 6-10 weighing up to 75 pounds. It looked like what I wanted, assuming that I could find a bike that would take the weight. This is not a cheap child seat, but we were looking at using it for not one but two kids over the next decade, and what’s more we’d bought car seats around the same price point that didn’t get as much use. (And of course, if we’d bought a second car, we probably would have had to double our car seat collection too.) It seemed insanely difficult to find reviews of this seat in English, but eventually I found someone who’d not just noticed it and thought it looked interesting and then balked at the price, but actually hauled a kid on it for years. That was the indefatigable Adrienne of Change Your Life, Ride A Bike, who not only sang the praises of the Junior, but lived in San Francisco and recommended a local bike shop that stocked it. I had previously assumed that the seat was only available in the US from the family biking Promised Land of Clever Cycles in Portland, Oregon.

Both of these were helpful recommendations. The Bobike Junior is an outstanding seat, and the only way that I could imagine hauling an older child on a normal bike. And Ocean Cyclery has been great to us, as one of the few San Francisco shops we’ve visited that has extensive familiarity with child seats (owned by an American/Dutch couple with kids of their own), welcomes kids who show up in the shop and start tearing around, and stocks an extensive selection of bikes set up for both commuters and kids themselves. The last time we visited, the bike in the front window was a commuter step through with a Bobike Mini on the front and a Bobike Maxi on the back. Other than shops with “Dutch” somewhere in the name, I’ve never seen anything similar elsewhere. And although I try to harp on price too much, reminding myself that we could buy a dozen bicycles without hitting the price point or storage problems we’d face acquiring a second car, Dutch bicycles sell at prices that made me concerned making a bad decision, especially given their weight. Maybe they’re a good value on a per pound basis. Whereas Ocean primarily carried bicycles with price tags way under $1,000.

Moreover, Ocean carried a line of commuter bicycles that I’d never seen in person, but was reading crazy-good reviews about from all over the place: Breezer. I do research for a living, and at this point have descended to the kind of intellectual tail-eating where I conduct systematic reviews and read articles about how to process too much information. As a result I no longer trust my own individual judgment much because research tells me it’s much less reliable than the experiences of lots of other people. And lots and lots of other people liked the Breezer Uptown. Big, heavy men liked it and said it hauled 300 pounds without a shudder. Almost everyone said that riding an Uptown was like riding a couch, in terms of nonexistent saddle soreness or lower back pain. It had a mountain bike pedigree and was, as a result, geared for hills. It came with every commuting accessory: fenders, dynamo lights, internal gears, a chain guard, even a rear wheel lock. And even loaded up with all of those extras, the bike weighed only 35 pounds; light enough that even after adding two child seats, I’d still only have achieved the weight of the single-speed Dutch bikes we’d rented in Europe when they were carrying nothing at all. I could imagine lifting this bike (and I do in fact lift it every time I park it at work).

There were, admittedly, comments that the Breezer Uptown was unlovely, with all the practicality and style of a vacuum cleaner. And it was not a bicycle that was setting any land speed records. These concerns struck me as aesthetic and irrelevant. I was looking for a dorkcycle, and anyone riding a bicycle in the United States is already hopelessly unfashionable anyway. I wanted to haul 75 pounds of children plus our gear up the non-trivial hill we lived on every day. I didn’t care if the bicycle looked like a cinder block if it was comfortable to ride and could climb. If anything, having a bicycle that didn’t turn heads might reduce the odds of it being stolen. Bicycle thefts in our neighborhood have progressed to the point where prevention means U-locking your bike inside a safety coffin in your bedroom.

Ocean Cyclery had a Breezer on the floor that I could try, although they warned me I was too tall for the medium frames they had in stock and it wasn’t really ready to ride. The shop is located near a weird but friendly test ride: a street converted from an old horse-racing track in the middle of the city that made a perfect 1-mile loop, with a couple of hills heading on and off. They were right that the frame was too small for me, and the front fender was loose and rattled the entire time, but even so the bike was more comfortable than anything else I’d been on in my visits to seven other bike shops in San Francisco. The owner thought my desire to put two child seats on the front and back was a nifty idea; it was something he’d wanted to do with his own kids before realizing they were too far apart in age. And unlike every other bike shop where I’d proposed this idea, he immediately understood why this meant I’d need a step-through frame. After hearing where we lived, he thought (and my brother-in-law confirmed) that the 8-speed was the best bet to get me home every evening.

I made a deposit on a Breezer Uptown 8 that afternoon. Buying a new bike in the late fall meant that the price was way below list; in the same range as the (estimated, wildly varying) price of buying a used bike of dubious provenance and trying to upgrade it to something like what I wanted, and astonishingly, cheaper than buying it online and having to assemble it myself (which I couldn’t do anyway). Bonus! The owner was sure it would arrive and be ready before my husband’s next trip to China, making it possible for me to ride my son to school while Matt was away. Of course it was late. We drove to school that entire week.

As always, my bike needs more stuff hanging off it

When the bike arrived, my daughter was ecstatic. On my first ride she insisted on climbing aboard and shrieking, “I’m riding it! I’m riding it!” until my significantly more cautious son couldn’t take the humiliation any longer and jumped aboard despite the absence of the stoker bars he’d grown accustomed to. He likes riding the Bobike Junior on my bike. I like this bike too.

I did not dip my toe slowly into bicycle commuting. My first few rides were with both kids on board up hills with double-digit grades. Because I was totally ignorant I did that with the hub dynamo lights on, which meant even more drag. Even so, I did not have to walk. For the first month I never took off either child seat, even when the kids weren’t riding along, because I didn’t know how, meaning that I was regularly hauling an extra 20 pounds no matter what. I take my son to school on this bike once a week, haul my daughter around all weekend long, and on days that they’re not on board, load up two panniers and a front basket with most of our weekly groceries. I ride this bike pretty much everywhere but the Tenderloin (where it would be covered with piss and/or vomit if I were lucky enough not to have it stolen) and the Mission (where it would simply be stolen). I have never been saddle-sore, and only rarely, after a long ride with kids and gear, have I felt any pain at all after riding. Braking on the downhills with a kid on the back can be unnerving—it takes quite a bit more preparation than it does when riding alone—and I’ve nearly popped a wheelie going up some steeper hills in the city with one of them on the back, but more informed people tell me that these things would happen on any bicycle.

Off road, on road

The Breezer, as I’d hoped when I bought a bike tricked out with every commuting accessory known to nerds, makes it easier to ride my bike most of the time than to drive our car. Thanks to the Bobike oeuvre, that’s true even when I’m going somewhere with one kid in tow. When I step onto this bike I feel like I’m ten feet tall. The lights come on with the flick of a switch. The lock is always on board, although given where we live I think that all bikes should come with a U-lock holder in lieu of the largely-decorative rear wheel lock. Even with kids on board, it glides up the endless San Francisco hills, and I can even afford to keep the lights on. I’ve only had to walk it once, when I lost momentum because Matt was weaving in front of me (and he had reason). As I’ve gotten stronger I’ve been able to reserve the first gear more and more for heavy loads. I wouldn’t call this a fast bike, but I’m just trying to get to work with my teaching clothes looking decent, and anyway I ride through Golden Gate Park most days and it’s gorgeous there, so I’m in no special hurry. And once I started taking the child seats off when the kids weren’t on board, my commute got noticeably faster. On days when I’m whizzing down the hill out of the park past a row of stopped cars, our household’s Pixar obsession has led me to yell, “Ride like the wind, Bullseye!”

I can imagine that someday when the kids are older and riding on their own I may want a prettier, faster bike. For the foreseeable future I feel like I’ve made the right decision, even though this bike, like Matt’s Kona, isn’t always everything I want it to be. I would be happier if the bike could still carry both kids at once, and if the rear rack were longer so it fit panniers when the Bobike Maxi is attached (panniers do at least fit under the Junior) or if came with a front rack. The front light could be brighter. I would happily swap the top two gears for an even lower first gear. These are not big complaints.

When I am riding around the city, my Danish helmet and our child seats draw lots of attention and compliments. No one has ever complimented me on my Breezer. I cannot bring myself to care.

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January 3, 2012 · 9:43 pm

Figuring out commuter bikes

When we got Matt’s bike (the Kona MinUte) we assumed that we would switch off riding it for a while to get used to bicycle commuting. When we realized that I couldn’t ride the MinUte and our daughter wasn’t safe on it without installing a child seat anyway, that plan went out the window. Moreover, the obvious fun that Matt was having with our son was making our daughter crazy with envy. We were ready to ride.

Still, although we were still thousands of dollars under the budget for even the used car we’d been thinking about buying earlier in the year, and thus willing to buy a second bike in relatively short order, I was nervous about making a bad decision. We knew nothing about bicycles except that riding the Kona was going pretty well for Matt. And I tend to perseverate about even the simplest decisions, an occupational hazard of years working as a researcher. Typically I can get around my own unwillingness to buy anything because it might be the wrong thing by picking up something cheap on craigslist. But my brother-in-law, the only person we knew who was really informed about bicycles, thought that that was a really bad idea because (a) used frames could be rusted or crushed and we’d never know (b) we also didn’t know what size bike I should be riding and (c) we are not handy and had no idea what a working bicycle should do.

Paper: the only material we are comfortable working with

Saying we are not handy is an understatement. Matt once electrocuted himself while changing an ancient lightbulb while we were living in Paris, right in front of the building handyman, who made him go lie down and had me check his pupils for the next several hours. In middle school I got my hair caught in a buffer in shop class, forcing the instructor to sprint for the emergency switch that shut down the building’s power, pulling a chunk of my own scalp out, and earning myself notoriety for years afterward in the form of a safety sign placed directly above that machine and a marquee mention, by name, in the “Terrifying Things That Could Happen To You In Shop Class If You Don’t Put Safety First” annual lecture. Rarely have two people been better matched to desk jobs than we are.

So I started reading reviews. I didn’t know anything about bicycles, but after a lot of reading, I finally progressed to the point that I knew very little about bicycles. My primary goal was to get to work every day with a minimum of bother and to carry my kids and happily that makes a lot of stuff that you can read about bicycles totally irrelevant. There was actually a class of bicycle for people like me: the commuter bicycle. These bicycles, at their lowest maintenance point, which was my ideal point, came with

  • gears that lived inside the rear wheel and instead of on rings that might drop a chain (hub gears)
  • lights that turned on and ran by themselves whenever the wheels of the bike turned (hub dynamo lights)
  • chain guards (even hub gears needed a chain; a guard would keep it from getting dirty and catching my dress pants)
  • fenders (to prevent the stripe of mud blown up my back by the tires after hitting a puddle, so familiar from my years of childhood biking in the Pacific Northwest)
  • step-through frames, for days I wanted to wear a skirt without embarrassment, and to make it plausible to mount a front child seat and a rear child seat at the same time and still get on the bike
  • rear racks to hold panniers and eliminate the sweaty back that would result from carrying a messenger bag
  • a kick stand to hold the bike up in the event that I wanted to ever put anything on that rear rack
  • if I was lucky, a rear wheel lock that kept the wheel from turning when I was away from the bike (in San Francisco, using a rear wheel lock as the only lock would be roughly comparable to attaching a bicycle to a chain-link fence with Scotch tape, but in combination with a U-lock and a cable lock, would presumably politely suggest to bike thieves that they might consider another bicycle)

These accessories all add weight, so I quickly passed on the kind of advice that had people removing what I’d always assumed were essential bike parts, like brakes, to ensure that they were riding something that weighed less than my children did at birth. Even so, unfortunately for me, bicycles that possessed most or all of the commuter extras seemed to come in one of two categories: beautiful slender bicycles rated to carry my weight and a laptop and not much else, meaning that they wouldn’t safely carry my kids (we heard a couple of horrifying stories from parents on campus about the spokes on their rear wheel simply snapping in two, one after the other, as they tried to wheel forward after putting the kid in the seat on bikes like these), or heavy Dutch-style steel bicycles rated to carry a few hundred pounds that were never designed to get up San Francisco hills.

A summary of a conversation repeated at seven different San Francisco bicycle shops:

“I want a bicycle with child seats that I can use to drop my kids off at school and then go to work.”

“Okay, where do you live?”

“Parnassus Heights.”

“Then that would be an aluminum bike.”

(I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that some people do in fact ride heavy steel Dutch bikes up San Francisco hills. However they never seem to have the kind of load on them that I wanted to haul, namely 75 pounds of children plus 20 pounds of child seats on the front and back, plus all of our nontrivial gear. I am immensely grateful that there are people importing practical bicycles like these to the US, and would love to ride one in another city. But although at 130 pounds I’m not outrageously heavy myself, doubling the weight on the bike without doubling my leg strength seemed like a dubious plan given that the bicycles themselves were no slouches in the weight department. I regularly portage tired kids on long walks and thus did not fear picking up a bicycle in the 30-45 pound range and putting it on a bike rack or carrying it up the stairs. That’s easy dead weight relative to a squirming kid. But figuring out the weight of Dutch bicycles was like watching a nauseating burlesque as the reviews rolled in; they weighed 45 pounds, or maybe 55 pounds, or okay, 68 pounds, and yeah, okay, their riders were walking up a lot of hills. And I had experience riding a Dutch bicycle overseas. My experience suggested that I would be walking up a lot of hills. And this was before adding 20 pounds of child seats or either kid. Maybe one day when I am stronger or when my kids are old enough to ride alone.)

(I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention that there are apparently handy people in this world who convert bicycles that can’t carry a lot of weight into bicycles that can carry a lot of weight by upgrading all of the components, ideally, it seemed, after rescuing a vintage frame preserved for decades under a bag of lawn fertilizer in a grandparent’s garage and swapping spare parts with similarly-minded aficionados through an internet-based mystery-bag-style barter economy. Sometimes this process seemed to involve tools like blowtorches. As wonderfully frugal as that sounded, I had no idea what parts were even involved in this transition, we are, as noted, totally not handy in an actively self-destructive kind of way, and we didn’t have any bicycles lying around to upgrade anyway. All our grandparents were dead and their garages had been emptied by ruthless estate sale agents. Instead we were eager to Support Our Local Bike Shops. You’re welcome.)

At least I knew what I wanted: a bicycle that could safely carry ~250 pounds, that came stock with accessories that made it possible to just wheel out the door without too much thought (hub gears, definitely hub dynamo lights, a chain guard), that was geared to handle serious hills, and that ideally didn’t weigh more than about 40 pounds, since I was planning to add 20 pounds to it before even leaving the shop. My brother-in-law said that there were bicycles all over Germany that fit this description, but they were so ugly that no one in the US would sell them. I wanted an ugly bicycle right here in these United States. Eventually I stumbled upon one.

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January 1, 2012 · 2:51 pm

Welcome to 2012

In charge at Paris Velib

Historically the highest-value benefit to membership in the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition for us was the 10% discount at Rainbow Grocery. Although I find Rainbow’s extensive array of vitamins and supplements a little disconcerting, the crowds on the weekends overwhelming, and the prices on certain items laughably outrageous, we like shopping there. The employee-owners always seem cheerful and happy to help with questions, the selection is unbelievable, and with thoughtful shopping there are deals aplenty. I also find it sort of entertaining that by making a philosophical commitment to not selling meat they’ve spared themselves losses from shoplifting, which is probably part of the reason I’m getting such great prices on rye flakes and sea salt.

I find myself increasingly unwilling to patronize stores that treat children like second-class citizens—kids are people, albeit small and incontinent people—and on this front going to Rainbow is always a pleasure. E.g.

My daughter: “I’M IN CHARGE! I’M IN CHARGE!”

Me: “This is an employee-owned cooperative.”

My daughter: “I’M IN CHARGE! I’M IN CHARGE!”

Rainbow employee-owner: “Okay, you’re in charge.”

Rainbow ended the SFBC discount on December 31, 2011, and although they had their reasons, we were disappointed. So on the last week of the year we headed over to get some soy sauce and SAF instant yeast. Although I found two other kinds of yeast I had to get help to find the SAF, which was with the dried fruit, obviously. Afterward, the guy who had found it for us spotted my daughter’s collection of temporary tattoos and they spent a few minutes comparing their ink.

At checkout the cashier reminded me that the discount was ending soon, and I said that it was a shame for us, as we’d only recently realized that we could bike in the city with our kids. “Biking in this town is too dangerous,” he exclaimed. Sigh. But this wasn’t an entrée into the usual finger-shaking about potentially killing our kids; instead, he said he’d stopped riding years ago, that it was safer in the 1980s. That was a surprise. But, but, I said, all the new bike lanes? Seemed to help? Too much traffic now, he replied.

Dorothea Lange photographed our son's school in 1942; 70 years later it looks the same

Point taken, I guess, traffic is in fact outrageous, although I’ve seen worse. I’m not sure that the solution is to suffer along with everyone else, however. One option, which we tried when our son was much younger, is to ensure that everything you need is within walking distance. That worked for a while but eventually became unfeasible; for one, we were unable to get a placement in a neighborhood elementary school (not that I am complaining, as our placement is wonderful and as recently discovered, within bicycle range). And as a pedestrian I noticed traffic as well, often in the form of cars whizzing down what were originally intended to be quiet residential streets in an effort to get off the congested major thoroughfares. Taking Muni everywhere keeps you out of a car but not out of traffic.

At this point it seems as though everyone realizes something needs to change, but change is painful. We’ve found that our bicycles opened up a world of options for us, but a year ago, if anyone had told me that, I would have said they were delusional. Short of sending everyone to Copenhagen, I have no idea how to expand people’s sense of possibility. But I see more bicycles every day. Is it something I notice because I notice bicycles now, or is it something anyone would see?

We may have lost the Rainbow discount, but we’ve made back that discount and then some. Last week I did something I would never have conceived as either possible or desirable one year ago: I turned in my coveted (and expensive) all-campus faculty parking pass. Between that and our savings on gas, our relatively extravagant bicycle and accessory purchases are actually saving us money. That wasn’t an explicit goal but it’s another way bikes have made our lives better.

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December 30, 2011 · 2:08 pm

Keeping an eye on the streets

Crosswalk, schmosswalk

I’ve become more interested in traffic the more I ride my bike. As a pedestrian the only thing I really cared about was how many cars were inching into the crosswalk. Too many, is the consistent answer. I really resent this, given that even on the day after Thanksgiving I was 30-40 times lighter than a compact car, and I am soft and squishy rather than protected by a steel exoskeleton. Would it kill you to leave me some space to cross the street when the walking man says go? By comparison, riding the bike feels at least as safe and much faster.

As an occasional driver, I primarily notice traffic; it’s always brutal. My mom, who lives in a much smaller town, won’t drive in the city at all, not even during hours that I consider sedate. Driving also involves looking for parking, an endeavor that typically makes me wish that traffic was still my biggest problem.

There is a bike light at this intersection, thank goodness, but I still hate it with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns

I never noticed until fairly recently, when I started thinking about traffic laws and noticing traffic as I rode, what total irreverent scofflaws San Francisco drivers are when it comes to red lights. They’ve never put me in any danger personally (yet?), so it’s more a point of interest, but I did for a couple of days keep a running tally of road users I observed treating traffic laws as optional.

Wednesday

  • Cars running red lights: 2
  • Bicycles running red lights: 1 (also: no helmet, riding after dark without lights, and crossing Masonic –a street notorious for probably half the “car-hits-bicycle” incidents in the entire city–this rider is unlikely to survive the winter)
  • Bicycle riding on the sidewalk: 1 (also pulling one of the few trailers I’ve ever seen outside of Golden Gate Park with kids inside; I sympathize with the problem—the trailer won’t fit in the bike lane!—but maybe better to put those kids on the bike, take an alternate route, whatever)

Thursday

  • Cars running red lights: 3
  • Bicycles running red lights: 0
  • Bicycles riding on the sidewalk: 0

Etc. While this is totally unscientific, my sense is that cyclists running red lights may not be as epidemic as advertised, although I am not exactly haunting hipster hotspots. I find it interesting that I never noticed cars running red lights as a walker and occasional driver, although I do notice it now, whatever form of transportation I’m using.

I find the San Francisco attitude toward running red lights novel, as I wasn’t counting gunning for the yellow and continuing through the intersection even after the light turned red. Short of having spikes pop up from the crosswalk when the light turns red, those seem inevitable. What I counted was stopping at a red light for a while and then, I don’t know, getting bored or something? At which point cars just headed off into the intersection, in a couple of cases into oncoming traffic. In one case the car made a left turn into cross traffic. “I’ve waited long enough, dammit!” The first time I just stared in disbelief—I was at the same light, and although I decided to wait for the green, because I am boring like that, I still caught up to this adventurous driver a block later, waiting behind someone who had apparently not yet lost patience with his own red light. After the second time I started keeping count. The other weekend while we were on our way to the North Bay, a driver started honking wildly and flipping us off as we drove through a green light, because in doing so we’d prevented him from making a left turn on the red. It’s still hard for me to think about this without breaking out into nervous laughter. Really, crazy left-turn guy? REALLY?

I’m on the road maybe an hour or two a day, yet my sense already is that traffic cameras could earn the City and County of San Francisco a non-trivial amount of cash.

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December 28, 2011 · 11:37 pm

Same planet, different worlds

At the start of winter break we headed up to Santa Rosa for brunch with some of our more distant family members, cousins by blood and marriage whose diaspora covers Northern California from San Francisco to the mountains near the Oregon border. With our youngest still in need of a midday nap and our hosting cousin’s remote mountaintop location, the forecast was definitely a trip by car.

Three-cousin pileup

An unexpected bonus of this trip was our kids’ first real connection with their near-own-age cousins, twins from Truckee that they’d orbited around during their last meeting but never really felt comfortable enough to play with. This time they made friends.

This time, we were also the sole representatives of the urban living contingent. I spent much of my childhood in small towns and as a result I don’t feel enormous curiosity about what childhood there is like. I remember it well. I tend to forget, given that we live in a city with thousands of other people who live in cities, that the prospect of raising children in a city is intimidating at best to the many American families who’ve spent their lives in a more rural locale. They envy us public schools that offer instruction in over a dozen foreign languages (and who wouldn’t; our son speaks freakin’ Japanese! And it’s free!) and the class-size reduction grant that his many impoverished classmates secured, but not the lottery that assigns those schools or the neighborhoods where they’re located (and who would).

Actually pretty light traffic on a recent morning drive-to-school day

In addition to asking us about how frequently we fear muggings, which is basically never, as most of San Francisco is simply not that dangerous compared to other cities, they wonder a lot about what it’s like to drive in the city, and to park in the city, as their visits there have been uniformly horrific on these fronts, and I can’t argue with that. Also I would not deny that car break-ins are epidemic in San Francisco and nonexistent on the tree-lined streets of Truckee. For the first time we kind of came to grips with the fact that what with the newfound commitment to riding our bikes, these aren’t often issues for us anymore. But of course instead we got the most common response we get when we mention that we bike with our kids, which is that we might as well open their veins with a straight razor and let them bleed out into the gutter.

The evidence for what is safe by any mode of transportation is difficult to parse. I know from talking to my colleagues at the General that there are intersections in this city so dangerous that they suggest, not totally in jest, that pedestrians wear helmets while crossing them. And of course near us there is the notorious intersection of Masonic with Oak/Fell, which I would prefer not to traverse by any means whatsoever but can rarely avoid. My cousin was killed when her car ran off a rural road. It’s probably safer to go anywhere in the daytime, and to stay inside altogether after the bars close.

Why I prefer the bike: Golden Gate Park bike lane at morning rush hour

I feel pretty safe biking on the separated bike/pedestrian paths through Golden Gate Park. I feel pretty safe leaving the city by car on a weekend at 7 am when our kids have been up already for two hours but no one else is on the road. Beyond these easy decisions, I start to feel like I’m back in my old game theory class with Matt Rabin, who used to insist that we justify how anyone could leave the house in the morning given what he called the 2nd Amendment problem, which is that there might be a lone gunman ready to shoot you right outside, which would be so terrible that it would justify staying at home forever no matter how remote the probability of it actually happening was, which no one does. Although I think he may have taken this particular intellectual problem out of regular rotation after the Beltway sniper attacks.

Anyway if the car v. bicycle commute were solely a question of personal safety while traveling on roads, the decision would heavily favor the car. Riding inside a padded can among other padded cans is safer than riding on a glorified paper clip among padded cans. But instead it’s entangled with questions of cost, the opportunity to leave the road entirely, avoiding traffic, skipping yet another sedentary activity, the pleasure of the experience, and the chance for our kids to spend some time outdoors. All of these considerations heavily favor the bicycle.

These discussions of safety, in any context, have grown increasingly tiresome to me after reading The Gift of Fear, which neatly summarizes many fears of violence: “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.” Similarly, drivers are afraid that cyclists (and pedestrians) will annoy them, while cyclists (and pedestrians) are afraid that drivers will kill them. I don’t respond to the threat of being killed by men, although it is quite real, by never leaving the house, choosing to live in a “no Y chromosomes allowed” commune, or having a sex-change operation. And I don’t respond to the threat of being killed by drivers by getting off my bike.

Increasingly I have begun to feel that one of the biggest issues in our lives was watching our lives slowly being strangled away, as we shuttled from one commitment to another, trapped in padded cans, without ever really figuring out where we were headed. We have found that riding our bikes is a chance to step back a little from the expectation that going somewhere is always about getting somewhere, and we find that we enjoy the ride. I don’t think this is unique to life in a city. So far this gain has felt worth the risk and then some. And of course, when our kids aren’t on our bikes they’re often riding the bus, which would win in a head-to-head bus v. car collision in the same way that a car would win in a head-to-head car v. bike collision, and that surely improves our overall transportation safety averages. Granted, it’s rare that a bus crushes a car. But that’s sort of the point.

Anyway, it was especially odd to hear this safety shakedown from someone who in fact rides a bike in a pretty committed way, although his mountain bike’s tires have never been sullied by touching pavement. Instead the bikes ride in a pickup truck (where they’re safe?) Our conversation eventually segued into the question of how to haul around older kids, since letting them ride their own bikes in the city when they got older was something no responsible parent would ever do, evidently, and I said that it was certainly possible at that point to transition to cargo bikes. But I noted that cargo bikes were a bit expensive for most people; many ran up to $2,000 (and I personally think that any price with a comma in it qualifies as expensive, although I suspect that such figures are in our future).

“$2,000 isn’t much to spend on a bike,” replied a man whose bicycles serve the same purpose in his life as a television.

Same planet, different worlds.

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December 26, 2011 · 10:55 pm

Like flying

On the roof at the California Academy of Sciences

For two weeks at the end of December our kids are off from school, and during this time we always try to stay home with them and act like tourists in San Francisco. A couple of years back we realized that millions of people vacation in San Francisco, so why not us? Instead of fighting crowds at the airport and stores, we now spend the winter break that San Francisco Unified School District offers visiting the sights of the city as defined by our kids. Sometimes that’s Crissy Field and sometimes that’s Rainbow Grocery; sometimes we watch ferries come and go at the Ferry Building and sometimes we visit the dollar stores of Japantown (where more often than not, we run into our son’s classmates and senseis, which always sends the kids into paroxysms of excitement). Our daughter likes the Academy of Sciences and the Conservatory of Flowers; our son likes the Exploratorium and Muir Woods. And everyone else is out shopping, so there are rarely serious crowds.

Swinging two weeks of full days with our kids can be tricky even during the holidays. However one of the mixed blessings of life in an academic medical center is the ability to work any 50 hours of the week I choose. Sure, I have two grants due at the beginning of 2012, but no one cares if I burn the candle at both ends by piling hours of work into the evening and wee hours after the kids are asleep. In the service of preserving a tradition we’ve come to love, that’s exactly what I’m doing. In a rare and unfortunate turn of events Matt’s end of the year schedule is crammed as well. As a result we spent last week switching off unavoidable appointments during our daughter’s naps. It is exhausting but worth the effort.

Luckily for us, our son wanted to go to half-day camp in the afternoons last week rather than stay home and play very quietly while his sister naps, which is what he did last year. A couple of years ago we sent him to afternoon acrobat camp, and that was cool, but it seemed a little over-programmed given that we prefer to put the “break” in winter break. On the suggestion of another Rosa Parks parent–and such recommendations have not failed us yet–this year we sent him to Kids OutDoor Club instead, which basically dumps kids into a field at Golden Gate Park and lets them run around outside (supervised) until they fall over.  They stay outside in any weather short of concussion-quality hail, dreaming up and following personalized nature hikes, climbing trees, and building forts out of sticks. We call it nature camp. My personal feeling is that our kids already spend too little time outside and too much time following other people’s schedules (a situation that has improved somewhat with regular bike commuting), so this all sounded fantastic. And nature camp lived up to its offbeat promise. At the end of the week my son pronounced it the best camp ever.

We’ve been working on getting over our hesitation to ride as a family after dark, so bringing him home from nature camp by bike seemed like an easy transition. Golden Gate Park is flat and has bike lanes on nearly every paved surface.  Parts of JFK Drive have both a (poorly marked) bike lane painted in the street and a (poorly marked) bike lane on the sidewalk right alongside, which I find simultaneously belt-and-suspenders amusing and vaguely annoying. Also, nature camp is close enough to home that we could walk back if necessary. It would be a really long and exhausting walk, true, but it’s feasible.

So on Day 1 of nature camp after our daughter woke up from her nap we loaded up the bikes and headed toward the park. On the way there, stopped at a light, we noticed the martial arts studio where both Matt and the kids take lessons had a class in full swing. My daughter saw her teacher and started waving wildly to her. Now the owner of the studio is an outstanding instructor and that’s why we go, but understandably she runs a pretty tight ship, given that the kids squirm like eels and have all the self-discipline of a litter of newborn puppies. I realized she must never have seen us on our bikes before, because she ran over to the window and waved back wildly at us, grinning as ridiculously as we were. It is not a side of her that we get to see very often.

It is a mystery to me that there are cyclists in this city who don’t stop at red lights. Half the fun stuff happens when we’re stopped.

Although I thought nature camp was a place we might see another family on bicycles, this was not, alas, the case. Thus far our son’s school is the only place where hauling our kids on the bike is viewed as unremarkable, probably because any mode of transit, short of maybe a hot-air balloon, is unremarkable when compared to the triple tandem that our PTA president uses to bring his kids to school.

Both complained of cold, but neither considered putting on a jacket until we suggested it

So on this first day when we rolled up to pick up our son at nature camp we got the usual skeptical looks and mutters about safety from other parents in their cars that make me say that family biking is still a ghetto. But the world is changing because there are now people who call that cutting-edge.  One of them is the director of nature camp, who came over to tell us that we were the coolest, picking up our son on our bikes. This is a man who pretty much defines hardcore as far as I’m concerned, who has spent nearly every day of the last six years outside, on the wrong side of the fog line, wrangling dozens of kids and coaches in either the after-school program or in holiday and summer camps. And he thinks WE’RE cool?

We rode home after dark that evening with our kids singing nonsense songs as we went, and it was like flying.

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December 22, 2011 · 11:36 pm

SFBC 2011 Holiday Lights Ride

Thus far we have been very reluctant to ride our bikes at night with the kids. Because we are even more outside the mainstream than the average parent carrying kids on a bicycle, who is already, let’s face it, way more than two standard deviations away from any American’s definition of mainstream, we didn’t really pick up riding at all until late fall, heading into winter. Although this is a good way to get great deals on bicycles, and we’re grateful for that, I’m sure that this transition would have been easier if it stayed light later and if we didn’t have to spend time before each ride wrapping the kids up against the wind. That doesn’t really take any longer than putting them in a car seat, but it’s unfamiliar.

My daughter manages to make this look cute

Over time we’ve gotten increasingly comfortable on solo rides, to the point that I was riding home through Golden Gate Park at 9:30pm on Wednesday evenings after my Japanese class, which given that I have good lights no longer seems particularly remarkable to me, but did raise some eyebrows at work when it came up at one point. I have many colleagues who live in the suburbs. (An unexpected bonus of my bicycle commute is that I no longer have to hear daily paeans to the environmental superiority of the Toyota Prius, the bridge-crossing commuter’s vehicle of choice. Granted, I got tired of that because I am envious; a Prius is way cooler than a minivan. For that matter a Yugo is cooler than a minivan.) However when heading out with the kids after 4pm we’ve pretty much stuck with driving. Lately we’ve been feeling ready to expand our range.

As a kick-starter to nighttime riding, and because our son loves riding on the bike and staying up late, we decided to go out on the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition’s Holiday Lights Ride. It seemed like a fun seasonal thing to do now that we’ve mostly given up presents (excepting a couple for the small, long since wrapped). Leaving the house, the kids were already hopped up, especially because they saw that I was carrying several dozen lollipops in the hopes that the unfamiliar sugar rush would keep them awake. We knew that it was going to be a windy ride so in our usual last-minute scuffle I ended up using an emergency Mylar blanket as our daughter’s wind break, which I attached to her seat with a binder clip. Classy! Of course SFBC reps took a photo of this travesty.

I was pretty sure that the ride would start late but we were nervous and thus some of the first people to arrive. And at first the crowd looked pretty scraggly, frankly, made up solely of the kind of hardcore long-time city riders who always made me think that two-wheeled commuting was the exclusive domain of single, childless bike shop mechanics with serious tattoos and dreadlocks who have spent decades carefully curating rust colonies on bicycles that are older than I am. Nice guys, but we never seemed to have much in common. But although we were the first family to show up we were by no means the last. Before we left the Panhandle we’d met a dad with a Yepp mini on the front, another dad with a Yepp maxi on the back, some kids on their own bikes, a dad riding a tandem with his teenage daughter, and a mom and dad riding a tandem with a babyseat on the top tube between them, which was unquestionably the most awesome family bicycle I’ve ever seen. (If I had any hope of being competent enough to take pictures while riding I would post the dozen photos I wanted to take of this family.) Later on we even saw the rarest and most elusive family bicycle setup ever to roam these gritty urban streets: a bicycle trailer. On this particular ride, even I would have been willing to put my kids in a trailer; when you’re riding with 100 other people, traffic and the width of the bike lanes aren’t really issues.

We loved this ride. Every time we go out like this we end up remembering that we’ve forgotten once again how much we love this city. Sure, it was weird to hit a four-way stop as a crowd and figure out how many bicycles should go through the intersection for every turn between cars, and we got spread out pretty quickly due to traffic lights; this wasn’t Critical Mass.  But in addition to being around more family bikes than I’ve ever seen before, there were at least two bicycles set up as rolling speakers blasting holiday tunes, and SFBC volunteers marked all the turns by squatting the intersections and pounding away on what sounded suspiciously like cowbells. Nobody was in much of a hurry, and it quickly became apparent that this event draws a lot of once-a-year riders, because for the first time ever Matt and I were actually passing people on the hills even with our kids on board. The first climb up to Alamo Square seemed pretty daunting, but by the time we hit Pacific Heights the company and the sights made hauling uphill mostly a non-issue. We’ve gotten to be stronger riders (we never had to walk) and the ride was so much fun we eventually stopped noticing the grades. Up, down, it’s all okay.

Of course we couldn’t stay until the end. Our daughter had been so hyped up by the prospect of going out late that she’d missed her nap, and about an hour in started protesting violently whenever anyone complimented her Mylar blanket. “I don’t WANT to have a shiny BLANKET!” she screamed, prompting tandem-dad to say, “What? I don’t see any shiny blanket.” From behind us another couple of voices piped up with, “Nope, no shiny blankets here!” “Nothing shiny at all that I can see!” She subsided with a suspicious glare but passed out a few minutes later, her head listing heavily from side to side as we rode. Pretty much everyone who passed us from then on took a photo of this and showed it to me at the next intersection, but we knew at that point we’d have to peel out early. When we got to Presidio Heights we turned back toward home. Ironically, after sleeping through most of that party on wheels, she woke up again on the dark and silent streets of Golden Gate Park.

Still pining for the wind in its needles

While we were waiting at the light at the bottom of the long hill that takes us home, a man on the sidewalk ran out to the corner. “I saw you guys going the other way a couple of hours ago when I was headed into to the restaurant and I thought you looked great!” he said. “And here you are again just as I’m leaving! How funny is that?”

Happy holidays!

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