I have now reviewed the coverage from Sea Otter from a variety of media outlets and have come to the conclusion that gravel bikes are mind-numbingly boring:
This one’s purple! This one’s titanium! This one has a freaking Bilco door in the downtube!
And yes, I had to conduct an Internet search for “basement door outside name” to come up with “Bilco door:”
I guess Bilco is the Dumpster of…outside basement door thingies, I still don’t know what the generic name is.
But wait, this just in, here’s one painted like a Bridgestone,!
A reader was kind enough to remind me of this, and it’s part of a long and boring tradition of painting new gravel bikes like old bikes:
Though as a retrogrouch I’m deeply offended when bikes with disc brakes and suspension and carbon are painted like classic bikes. It’s cultural appropriation!
Moving on, even the New York Times has noticed that Bentonville has become Bike Town USA:
I’m old enough to remember when that distinction belonged to Portland:
But now when people think of Portland they mostly think of riots and vagrants, and so Bentonville has taken over more or less completely:
There’s a lesson there somewhere, and it appears to be that, at least when it comes to cycling, progressive governance just can’t compete with a family that has gazillions of dollars and really likes bikes. The same was briefly true of New York City, which made its largest strides towards becoming a bona-fide bike town under the administration of gazillionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg:
Not that Bloomberg liked riding bikes, but he did like the idea of bikes, or at least the idea of other people riding bikes who were not him–though maybe if he had actually liked riding bikes maybe it would be fun like it is in Bentonville, whereas here it mostly feels like people who don’t actually ride are constantly experimenting with weird bike lane configurations, like an apartment dweller with an unlimited budget who’s constantly ordering stuff from Wayfair:
There are probably thousands of acres of overgrown trash-strewn parkland in New York City that could easily be transformed into bike trails and dozens of places to build new velodromes for Star Track, if only we had an ultra-rich autocratic mayor who was also a cyclist and determined to transform the city into his own personal playground.
But hey, we are getting new bike lane traffic signals:
These will be at eye level so people will no longer have to look up in order to ignore them.
I can’t imagine how long that photographer must have stood there in order to get a shot of someone stopping for one of those lights.
Speaking of being vigilant, keep an eye out for “Whiteboy,’ who stole a bunch of porn and then rode away on a bicycle:
Ah, the irony of using a getaway vehicle for your smut heist that doesn’t require any form of registration, only to be identified by the vanity plate tattooed on your head…
