"I am just going outside and may be some time"

The last and only time Oates said those words he didn't return. Don't worry - I'm coming back. I'm just taking a short break for family vacation. More updates soon.

Meanwhile, please make sure you're having fun on your bike.

School's out for summer

I've been busy at work during the last few weeks and I didn't even realize that school year is about to end. This is good. This means that my quiet residential street will remain quiet even around 8am, which is when hordes of drivers rush to work after dropping their kids off at nearby school.
 
In July, not only my street is quieter in the morning but also much safer. We have no sidewalks in our neighborhood (since sidewalks are so non-American), so we walk to school in the street, risking to be flattened by an inattentive driver. I mentioned here earlier that I would gladly see a state-wide rule that no private cars can enter a perimeter of 500ft radius around school, which means kids would actually have to walk to get there, but that's wishful thinking. It will never happen.

I would think that replacing private cars with school buses could solve the problem, but if bus drivers are like this one from New Jersey, I'm much less enthusiastic about the idea. The 77-year-old driver (who shouldn't be even driving in his age, especially not children), had 14 (!) license suspensions and multiple speeding tickets, which was discovered only after he crashed with a truck on NJ highway, killing a student and a teacher in the process. This brings so many questions out of which the most important one is - how come we allow anyone to have 14 license suspensions and still drive a car, not to mention a frigging school bus?!

NJ highway school bus crash. I'm surprised there were only two fatalities. (Source: News 4 NY)

The answer is simple - we designed the entire transportation system in this country around cars, basically shooting everyone who's unable to drive (elderly, kids, etc.) in the foot. As such, anyone who can't or shouldn't drive, would be unable to get to work and provide to his family, which normalizes driving with suspended license as a relatively "minor" violation.

It turns out that it might actually be easier to lose your license not by driving like a maniac, but by simply not paying traffic tickets.

The only way to turn this around is to provide an efficient alternative to driving, predominantly in form of public transport - both short (street cars, buses) and long-distance (commuter rail, high-speed trains). Examples from other countries shows that it's still the best solution. Unfortunately, many Americans can't grasp this concept because they never had a chance to experience it. People who take MBTA trains every morning here in Boston think probably that inefficiency is inherent to public transportation and major delays must be  naturally occurring everywhere in the world.

S-Bahn (commuter rail) connects suburbs with Berlin Mitte (center).

But it doesn't need to be that way. For me, spending two years in Berlin was eye-opening - bus schedules at every stop, electronic displays showing time to next train at every station, dense network of connections from, to and within the city. Then, there were also bicycles, serving short distances well. All that meant I never really needed a car living there and that's because Germans know that there are better ways of getting around town than by car. 

Coming to Boston was quite a shock...

But some of you may say - why invest in expensive public transport that's so XX-century, when soon a XXI-century solution will arrive - the driverless cars! Unfortunately, I have bad news for you. Autonomous vehicles won't be here for quite a while and until then, XX-century public transport combined with XIX-century two-wheeled invention are still our best options.

Still the best way to move around city...

Bicycles for the unpaved - the "third way"?

Warning: This post contains a large amount of technical information, which means it can be digested only by real bike tech nerds.

I remember my teenage years in mid 90's when world of bicycles was very black and white. On one side we had mountain bikes with their slacker (at that time) head tube angles of 67-71 deg and on the other - road bikes with head tube angles of 73-74 deg and a classic "square" road bike geometry.

But with the arrival of gravel and adventure bikes and many more wheel and tire options, this bipolar world got a lot more complicated. Now it seems that should we be interested in riding on unpaved roads, the bicycle industry offers mainly two types of drop bar bicycles.

One is a gravel bike that is essentially a modification of a road or cyclocross bicycle with 71-72 deg head tube angle and more clearance for fatter tires. These very sporty bikes are typically chosen by folks interested in racing in events such as Trans Iowa or Dirty Kanza.

The other type comes from the old 50's French school of cycling and is embraced more by the adventurous people who are interested in randonneuring and touring. They firmly believe that a steep head tube angle of 73 deg combined with lots of fork rake, which results in low-trail geometry is superior to anything else.

But all this made me wonder - is there a third way? Can a bicycle be designed differently than either an agile gravel rig or a low-trail two-wheeler and still remain comfortable and stable over rough terrain?

This third way approach has been embraced by many small American custom frame builders. One of them, 44 Bikes, ran by Kris Henry, is located nearby in New Hampshire. Since my new bike came directly from his shop, I will use it as an example to describe what this third design option is.

If modern gravel bikes are still racing road bikes and modern low-trail bikes are in fact retro road bikes, my 44 Huntsman is somewhat a "mountain road bike". It borrows heavily from MTB world when it's required. This bike has a very slack head tube angle (By road bike standards!) of 70 deg, which combined with 45mm fork rake results in a high trail geometry and puts it almost in MTB category. Similarly, stem remains short at 80mm to keep steering more responsive. To compensate, top tube is slightly lengthened, in order to maintain proper distance between handlebars and saddle.

The rear triangle is perhaps more traditional, but still MTB-like with lower seat tube for increased standover and short-ish chainstays of 435mm. These allow for quicker turning without the long, "waggy" tail feeling but still provide ample clearance for 2.25" tires.

So is it maybe a mountain bike dressed up as a road bike? Well, not exactly. It's a pretty clever mix of both. Borrowing from it's road bike heritage, Huntsman has a larger bottom bracket drop of 70mm, meaning more stability and lower center of gravity. Also, bottom bracket shell is 68mm wide - another road standard.

This thing rolls on 650B (or 27.5") wheels and 2.20" tires. It's a good compromise between wheel diameter, weight and required space in frame and fork for fatter tires. As an added benefit, the wheel diameter is exactly the same as 700C wheels with 35-38mm tires, which means that theoretically I could swap my current wheels with more road-like ones in a few seconds, should I plan to ride on pavement only.

In terms of comfort and handling I have no complains. Thanks to lots of trail and wide tires it feels very stable over rough terrain. Because it handles a bit like a mountain bike, my Huntsman needs more steering input to guide front wheel. That's a good thing. The last thing you want on rough downhill at high speed is a floppy front wheel. This is also where the 46cm wide Salsa Cowchipper bars come handy.

As you can probably tell by now, the whole thing was designed more for comfort than speed. This is why the head tube is tall enough to place handlebars higher than on a regular road or cyclocross bike. With frame stack of 605mm I can keep my back a bit more upright and don't have to look at the front wheel all the time. And thanks to the slack head tube angle I can avoid annoying toe overlap even with very wide tires (and fenders) - something that many cyclocross and gravel bikes may struggle with.

There are also some minor details I'd like to mention, since many of them are non-standard in mass-produced bikes. The frame has provisions for 3 bottle cages but I requested the one on seat tube to be placed as low as possible. This is to make as much space under the top tube as possible, should I use a half frame bag at some point in the future.

There are full fender mounts on frame and fork but the one on seat stays has the screw hole aligned towards the wheel axle. Similarly, there is a hidden threaded hole under the fork crown. All this means that fenders can be bolted directly to the frame and fork without using any L-shaped brackets.

The fork comes with "everything but the kitchen sink" as Kris called it once. There are fender mounts, rack mounts, internal and external dynamo wiring guides.

I won't get into details about my component choices here, but one thing worth mentioning is the drivetrain. I debated whether I should build it as 1x11 speed, but ultimately decided to go 2x11 simply because it was cheaper (I could reuse a lot of parts from my old bike). As such, I'm running a wild mix of components: Shimano 105 (5800-series) shifters and rear derailleur, SRAM 11-32T cassette, Sugino OX601D crankset with 42/26T chainrings and Shimano Metrea front derailleur. You may scratch your head asking - "why?", but it's actually quite simple:

• I wanted to use Shimano STI shifters, not SRAM.
• I wanted to use 2x11 system with low gears that would work well with those shifters.
• Sugino crankset lets me run chainring combo I find most useful: 44/28T, 42/26T or anything similar.
• Metrea is the only front derailleur that works with 11-speed Shimano shifters and is designed for smaller size chainrings (that is, much smaller than 50T - the road "Compact").

It was fun putting it all together, although, certainly the most challenging part was... avoiding black color. Maybe that sounded a bit weird, but I simply had this particular color scheme on mind - rusted-looking frame and fork with most components in polished silver. The problem is - many modern components come only in black or dark grey. Those classic, high-polished parts are now quite rare and while I could find brakes, seatpost or stem in this finish, handlebars, cranks or derailleurs were pretty difficult to get. This is the reason why I had the handlebars powder-coated to match frame (Cowchipper bars are only available in black) and I ended up customizing many components by hand-polishing them: crank arms, brake adapters, derailleur cage and light mount - all of which weren't available in the finish I wanted.

Finally, to be completely honest, this bike is not without flaws. Well, maybe not flaws, but some minor drawbacks. First of all, it's noisy on pavement, which is clearly due to MTB tread pattern on Maxxis tires. And speaking about tires, I noticed that they pick up all dirt from road with ease and my bike ends up being sprayed with mud every time I ride (fenders, anyone?).

It's also not exactly lightweight. It carries lots of extras that many "regular" bikes lack - rack, basket, dynamo hub, lights, etc. With all that added junk my Huntsman reaches 12.7kg (28lbs) but if you want to compare it with other, similar bikes you would need to remove all these parts. Then you get a more manageable 11.6kg (25.5lbs), which is about the same as Salsa Fargo or Journeyman. These "issues" don't bother me much since it was never my intention to make this bike a fast, racing machine.

Unfortunately, if you want a bicycle designed and built this way, you would need to go custom and rely on small frame builders (Such as 44 Bikes from NH, Matter Cycles from CO or Sklar Bikes from MT). So far, none of the large bike manufacturers has embraced this design concept. Maybe they will. Soon?