If you are commuting by car right now for 5 miles or less, you can afford a bike to make the same trip on. The reality is that gas gotten more experience and the savings of riding a bike even for short trips adds up.

Let's look at some numbers.

The Supplement Scenario: Here we assume that a bike supplements a car that you plan to keep and drive, and that the savings of riding a bike will come purely from saved case. Using an online calculator, you can quickly estimate your annual fuel cost for a trip. If you travel 1.5 miles each way, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year (you take some vacation, right?), that's 750 miles per year, spent on that short commute. If you get 20 miles per gallon and gas cost $4.00 gallon, then your cost of gas for that commute is $150 for one year. For five years that's $750.  continue reading »

A small group of locals have returned from an unconventional vacation: riding bikes 110 miles over two days to Clifty Falls State Park, where they hiked and rested for a day...then rode back over two more days. Mark, Kurt, Derrek, Hopi and Don put together a bicycle tour journal with photos and stories featuring a home-built recumbent bike, wild parsnips, "road closed" adventures and more.

I thoroughly recommend a visit to Fountain Acre Foods, an off-the-grid Amish-run grocery story. Located in plain sight just off of 27 south of Fountain City, this full service grocery is eight miles north of Richmond.  continue reading »

Today I was looking at the differences between two soft shell rain pants I have and thought I'd write up a little comparative review.

One pair is called Cold Fusion from Beyond, aka the Stealth Commuting Rain Pants. The other is Foxwear Rain Pants.

They are both custom-made out of similar materials, but the pants from Beyond end up costing nearly twice as much.  continue reading »

There's been increasing press lately about bicycling as transportation.

The difference between riding for recreation and transportation matters a great deal for the construction of the bikes, although few bikes focused directly on transportation are seen the US.

Here's a quiz of sorts to show how recreation vs. transportation attitudes lead to different bike designs. Follow along and see which style of bike matches you!

At the end if the quiz, there are some photos and details highlighting some features available on transportation bikes.  continue reading »

Someone commented about my new bakfiets cargo bike this morning that "now I could I haul groceries on the bicycle".

I had been getting groceries fine on my "normal" bike fine for some years. But you couldn't tell that from casually looking the bike.

I never once made a trip where I couldn't bring home everything I wanted. Usually just some saddle bags were used for the hauling, but occasionally a trailer was used to fetch a large bag of dog food.

But on most trips the saddle bags and trailer are left at home, so the carrying capacity isn't visible.

The importance of the bakfiets in the US now is that it is obvious that the bakfiets is built to haul. And it does in fact haul a lot. I believe it's rated to haul about 250 lbs of cargo or kids, plus the weight of the driver. (That's 175 lbs in the bucket, and 75 more on the rear rack).  continue reading »

The name for bags that hang off the side of bikes seems to officially be "panniers" in English. "Panniers" is in-word in bike subculture that most United States folk don't know.

That makes it harder for me to talk about functional bicycling with folks. "Panniers" is a foreign word that makes carrying stuff on a bike sound, well, foreign.

Motorcyclists often call these "saddle bags". That's much more evocative. People generally know the words "saddle" and "bags". It's not a big leap to put them together and visualize what that looks like.

Cyclists who would normally refer to them as panniers would also readily understand "saddle bags", so there's not much of a need to use different terms for the subculture and the broader culture.  continue reading »

Today was our first Saturday with the bakfiets, and we kept the bike busy haulin' and transportin' from 8 am to 5 pm.

My wife took it first, riding it to Jazzercize and then to the farmer's market. She had trouble leaving with her cargo of sunflowers due to all the people asking about the cargo bike. Questions from strangers are common with the bakfiets.

Around 11am, I used the quick release to raise the seat from her riding position and started on the next trip. I loaded the bike up with over a 100 lbs of yard waste and headed to the local landfill to drop it off. Wrapping the garbage bags in a tarp kept the bucket extra clean.

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"What I'd like to know is...how can get around town by bike without going up and down so many hills?"

I stared, speechless for a moment.

I had some advice about handling hills on a bike, but this question already had an assumed answer built into it: Avoid the hills.

Now that I've had a minute to reflect and turn the question around, here's my answer.

The basic question is "How I can be comfortable riding in hilly terrain?".

Avoiding them is often not an option. Hills Happen.

For a cyclist used to driving, there may be an adjustment about what to expect. A car may (unnaturally) travel the same speed up a hill, across the ridge line and back down it.  continue reading »

I just wanted to plug the new salsa event at Charlie's coffee bar. I've been twice and enjoyed it both times. There is in fact an instructor that comes over from Indy to give lessons. He was great and the DJ was good to. Also, you can't beat the location and at $5, the price is right, too. The only thing missing is a bigger crowd. I recommend trying it out. If you are new to salsa dancing, you will be in good company... just arrive early for the lessons.

The DJ also has a website with details. I've seen conflicting posts about whether the lessons are 8 or 9. They were at 9 the night I went, but I would call to confirm.