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By Brian, August 14, 2006 1:51 pm

Due to the recent demise of my 1968 Raleigh Grand Prix, I really haven’t been bicycle riding much. By demise, I mean that every time I took it out for a short spin something would break! It got so that I didn’t really want to risk riding it, or going through the pains of listening to it creak as I rode.

Upon hearing of my plight, a coworker mentioned that she had an old 10 speed her husband had left outside to rust after purchasing a new bicycle. She kindly brought it into work where it sat for a week while I figured the best way to move it.

First attempt involved inflating the tires – they where both flat. This resulted in the air shooting straight back out on the back wheel! The valve was missing the center-pin entirely, which I neglected to notice at first. The front tire inflated with no problem but it turned out to have a slow leak and was flat by the next morning.

No problem, grabbed an inner-tube out of my Raleigh’s front wheel and replaced the totally dead one at work. Inflated both tires, adjusted the seat and started peddling up the road a bit to my girlfriend’s house. It sat there overnight and I strapped it to a bus in the morning and hauled it home for the real work to begin.

The bike is a 1970′s (I think) model of Sekine, made in Canada. Let me tell you, this thing was in rough shape. Rust was making it’s insidious way around the bike, and more than a few parts where inhabited by dead spiders and seized. I’ve dealt with worse – you should have seen the Raleigh ten years ago, wow.

It’s been two weeks and a pretty penny spent on new tires, inner-tubes, grips and a headlight. However, the bike now rides great and has already been under my butt for a few hundred kilometers… Oh, which is where all my free time has been lately – hence the lack of posting.

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By Brian, July 16, 2006 10:34 pm

I went into a vitriolic rant a few minutes ago which my girlfriend was the unfortunate recipient of (sorry, hon!) and it occurred to me that this was something of a sore point for me lately.

Nearly everyone I meet gives me this dumb pie-eyed look when I explain that I don’t own a car, don’t have a drivers license and frankly have no interest in obtaining either. I’ve spent the majority of the past nine years living in Ottawa, Canada’s fourth largest metropolitan city.
The bus service is adequate for my needs, despite fare increases over the past years is still vastly cheaper than an automobile, besides which it’s healthier to walk or ride a bicycle.

According to this page by the US EPA, the average passenger car emits approximately 5,400 kilograms of pollutants per year. Since most of my travels would consist of my being the sole passenger this would be squarely on my shoulders. I’ve been hard pressed to find exact data regarding how much city bus emissions per passenger are, but the estimates I did find place it at 66% less. This means that I personally am contributing at most 1,600 kilograms of pollutants from transit. I’d like to think it’s less since I walk or cycle whenever I can do so.

Let’s factor in that gasoline sells for over a dollar a liter here in Ottawa, and automobile insurance (which is mandatory) is also a few hundred dollars a month. Cars, like any mechanical device have parts which wear out and break. They need maintenance and replacement parts. Eventually the entire vehicle may require replacement. Heck, they’re at least a few thousand dollars to obtain one in working condition, and most people I know have owned several in their lifetimes. How is this device saving me time? Most of my paycheck would go to operating and maintaining it! I can ride the bus for about a day’s pay per month. Now that’s saving me time, since at the absolute minimum I’d be losing over a week’s pay per month for the ‘convenience’ of a darned car.

I don’t need to go through several levels of testing to ride the bus, and the initial investment for a bus pass is about $10 for a photo ID. Drivers licenses take years, at least three tests, and several hundred dollars to obtain.

When I travel around on the bus, I glance out the window now and again to make sure I’ve not passed my stop. If I was driving a car, I’d have to be paying constant attention to not only my vehicle and it’s speed and heading, but all others around me including pedestrians. I’d have to watch the traffic lights, street signs, random debris on the roadway and various weather conditions which change quite often here in the capital.

I’ve actually dozed off on the bus. That’s death in a car! I can sit down, let someone else worry about these annoyances, listen to music on headphones, read a book, text message on my phone, daydream, whatever.

So, in reality I’m saving time, money, effort, stress and the environment all at once. Understandably if I lived in a less urban area it would be a different situation.

But I don’t – So why ruin my life for what would amount to merely caving to peer pressure spawned by industrial marketing?

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By Brian, April 7, 2006 1:15 pm

Well, I managed to get the back wheel fixed on my bicycle yesterday. There was a small pin-hole near the valve, but I replaced the whole inner-tube rather than waste time and money patching the old one. I also bent in a kink in the rim and re-calibrated the rear brake pads. It runs a lot smoother and stops just fine now.

Not too bad for a bike built in 1968.

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