Alden Seats in stock at Orange 20 Bikes. Also check it out at Kickstarter!

Bicycles are enduring as well as efficient, at least steel bikes are; and the other popular materials can be too. Titanium, certainly; aluminum, if done well; sometimes carbon fiber, as in Calfee’s handmade carbon bikes with their 25-year guarantee. But any of them would be hard-pressed to keep up with steel–not on the racetrack, but on the cycle of time.

The bike in this photo, for example:

That’s the bottom half of a fellow named Dennis, whom I met at the bicycle bridge in Playa del Rey, one of my favorite hangouts. He’s astride the bike he rides fifteen or twenty miles every day, as he has done for years. The bike’s seen a lot of miles, and Dennis isn’t its first owner by any means. Because that bike was made in 1927.

At eighty-five years old, it makes my daily rider, a 45-year-old Bottecchia, look brand-new by comparison.

It’s a “President,” out of Tacoma, Washington, with the classic old-school double top tube design, and a little gas-tank-like fitting in between the top tubes–I think it may have originally housed a tool kit.

Dennis took off the stock wheels, which have wooden rims, and has them stashed away. Aside from that and tires and chains, the bike is pretty much original. It’s entirely coated in rust, and the bearings are pretty much open to the sea air and windblown sand of the bike path.

Yet it keeps going, day in and day out, and it keeps Dennis going as well. He wears through a set of tires every year, and they are thick, old-fashioned roadster tires too. It also brings him together with other bike path users, folks like me who hang out at the bridge and always have a few minutes to talk about bikes and whatever a bit of casual chat will lead to. I’ve made good friends there. That’s part of the beauty of bikes, they give you a talking point and let you get to know people. I met one of my best buddies at the bridge, a fellow whose political views are almost exactly the opposite of mine and who worked in a completely different industry. We would not likely have met otherwise.

A bike is much more than just metal, then…but of course without the metal (or the epoxy), you wouldn’t have a bike.

So when you come in to Orange 20 looking for a new ride, steel or otherwise, choose carefully–because you’ll be making a lifelong friend. And one that will take you to meet friends you never knew you had.
 

Florent Soulas – Foundation 2012 from adrien delaforcade on Vimeo.

The future of BMX street riding. We need to see some of this Flatland/Street madness in LA!

For a long time, bike routes, lanes, and paths in LA seemed not to be designed for actual travel. Routes were nothing more than signs on back streets–often very pretty, quiet routes through residential neighborhoods, but leading from nowhere to nowhere. Lanes clung to the door zone (as they generally still do), and started or stopped seemingly at random. Paths usually followed the river channels, and were (and are) useful for getting across town–if you know where to find them. But there was no comprehensive network of linked routes that cyclists could follow to an actual destination–especially new or casual cyclists intimidated by sharing the road with fast car traffic.

They were laid out mostly as recreational routes–whether for neighborhood matrons out on their cruisers with the kids, or spandex superheroes getting in some training before climbing into the car to drive to work. Even when two routes did cross, there was no indication that either of them led anywhere–as in fact they often didn’t.

But car routes aren’t bike routes; drivers want fast, wide roads that get them the hell out of Dodge–which isn’t good for local businesses, but it’s what the suburb and mall developers have taught us is the “right way.” But cyclists want to be able to ride out of the madness, take the scenic route, end up at the homey shopping street where the clerks all learn your name. And when non-enthusiast types (the great 60% of “interested but concerned” potential cyclists) did try to use a bike Euro-style, to make commuting and shopping a pleasure rather than a penance, why they would end up lost on roads that were unfamiliar to them because they were “too slow” for driving on, and so they had never been there in their previous car-bound life.

As you know from my earlier complaining, the Los Angeles River bike path through Frogtown has no signs on it to let you know where you will be if you leave the path. And other crossings again simply tell you that you’re at an intersection of two bikeways, but say nothing about where you’ll end up if you go left, right, or straight ahead.

Now, though, Los Angeles has run out of excuses: the brand-new 2012 edition of the California Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices henceforth gives the city explicit permisson to use the kind of wayfinding signage that Portland, San Francisco, Berkely, Oakland, and Emeryville (among others in the US) have been using for years. (LA is overall a timid civic entity.)

Here they are in all their glory:

Let’s look forward to seeing a few of these on our ever-expanding (though far from complete) bikeways network soon.