bicycle Archives - Joe Flood

Specialized Sirrus: The Perfect City Bike (for Me)

I fell in love with my new bike on a rainy day in Georgetown.

After playing soccer with friends, I went for coffee, watching the drizzle turn into a downpour as I sat in the window. Locked up to a parking sign outside, my Specialized Sirrus was marinated in rain.

By the time I left, it was a cold monsoon. 38 degrees and pouring. The weather was so bad that I contemplated putting my bike on a bus for the ride home.

But that seemed complicated. I could be home in ten minutes if I biked. It was all downhill from Georgetown back to my Logan Circle apartment.

I wiped the water off my seat and pedaled away.

After going over the little rise near Book Hill, I rolled down steep R St, approaching a stop sign. Would my bike stop on the slippery street?

The Sirrus stopped with aplomb, its disc brakes working effortlessly. A gentle squeeze on the levers was all it took. On my old bike, with its v-brakes, there would’ve been some sliding and squeaking.

That’s the moment I fell in love with the Sirrus. I was cold and wet but felt secure on two wheels.

Bike manufacturers like to talk features. The bike has Shimano shift levers, an aluminum frame, rack mounts.

But what matters to buyers are benefits. Will this bike get me home on a miserable day?

Yes. Flat bars with disc brakes make it easy to stop and start on busy city streets. Lots of gears make quick work of hills. Wide tires roll over DC’s potholes.

Buying a bike is personal. What’s right for me may not be right for you. For my style of riding (recreational, urban), it’s perfect. As I wrote earlier, as soon as I got on the Sirrus, it felt right.

Additional Observations

The bike might be slightly too big for me. It’s a medium, while my old Sirrus was a small. The old Sirrus was more of a road bike; this is closer to a mountain bike. Also, I could cram my old bike into the backseat of a sedan while the new bike definitely does not fit.
After buying the bike, I realized I basically bought the same bike as my friend Mr. T in DC! After long admiring his immaculate black Cannondale Bad Boy to the point where he joked that he was going to leave it me in his will, I pretty much purchased the Specialized version of his bike.
I put front and rear lights on the bike so that I could be more easily seen. I also purchased a cheap frame bag for my Kryptonite lock and other essentials.
Living downtown without a car, I’m on a bike just about every day. On the weekdays, I use Capital Bikeshare. I use my Sirrus for longer rides and on the weekends.
Once you have one new bike, you want more! While in Florida over Xmas break, I got my Dahon folding bike fixed. My bike friends think two bikes is not enough. One day, I’d love to have a better foldy (like a Brompton) and I wish I had stuff to haul around so I could get a Tern GSD. I tested and loved this compact utility e-bike.

The unremarkable rise of dockless bikesharing

LimeBike outside Tonic — Dockless bikes, like this one from Lime, have become a familiar part of the Washington, DC streetscape.

What’s remarkable about the rise of dockless bikesharing is how unremarkable it has become. An apocalypse was anticipated. Washington Post readers gleefully predicted failure, with the bikes stolen and destroyed (like in Baltimore) or begriming the streets in vast piles (as in China).

But what if a revolution occurred and no one noticed it? The bikes, first green ones from Lime, and then a rainbow of other colors, appeared on the streets of DC, lined up and ready for use, part of a pilot program. Photos were snapped – by me, and others – entranced by the novelty of these seemingly unsecured bikes in a city where anything left outside gets stolen.

Mobike comes to DC — Mobike mo problems?

The bikes then dispersed, taken by riders young and old (I saw kids in school uniforms on them) to surprising places in and out of the city. A couple were left by National Airport. Others made their way deep into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, despite the fact that they were supposed to be kept in DC. Without the requirement to dock the bikes, people left them in alleys, Metro stations and on top of cars.

Checking the Lime app to see where the bikes had gone became a popular activity on Twitter. I wondered about the cyclist near Seven Corners, navigating suburban highways on a small, rickety bike.

For the bikes are subpar. Biking a couple miles on a Lime required an inordinate amount of work – the geometry is off. Ofo is better though its airless tires (a feature of all the dockless bikes) make the ride a rough one on the mottled streets of DC. You can’t be tall on any of these bikes, for the seat doesn’t go up high enough to accommodate long legs.

There is one major exception to my dockless critique: JUMP. Dockless with a difference, JUMP is a pedal-assist electric bike. And it rocks! Get on this sizable steed, pedal a couple times and the electric motor kicks in, rocketing you down the street at a speed that’s actually a little scary. The more you pedal, the faster the ride gets, ferrying you to your destination without breaking a sweat.

The advantage of dockless, whether it’s Lime, Mobike, ofo or JUMP, is that you can pick up and leave the bike anywhere you want. It works through an app on your phone. Check the map to find a bike, scan the code on the back of it and ride off. When you’re done, leave it and slide the rear-wheel lock into place (every bike should have one of these).

15th St needs to be widened — More bikes than cars on 15th St during rush hour.

DC needs more bikes. We have a great bikesharing service – Capital Bikeshare – but in many neighborhoods, the docks are empty by 8 AM. And while CaBi has saturated Northwest DC, there are many neighborhoods, particularly east of the Anacostia, where bikes are few and far between. Dockless offers the potential to change that, to address issues of equity that are present in any DC debate.

Also, more bikes means safer cycling for everyone. The advent of Capital Bikeshare slowed down the crazed commuters that fill this city every morning, by making drivers aware of cyclists. They’re more cautious around me when I’m on a big red CaBi, than on my regular bike, because they assume I’m a lost tourist. Adding more bikes might make MD Driver in DC hesitate before running that red light. Maybe.

According to Wired, dockless bike sharing is the next Uber. There’s big money in cheap bikes, with the Chinese startup Mobike valued at $3 billion. That’s an astonishing valuation for $1 an hour bike rides. Investors believe that dockless bike sharing is a new kind of business that can operate on scale, offering a service that urbanites will eagerly adopt.

Seems so easy. Create an app, flood a city with bikes and profit. For users, the experience is seamless – no humans required. Find a bike with your phone, scan it, and go.

But if investors think that bike sharing is a new people-free business model, they are mistaken. An unseen army is busy at night fixing bikes, moving them around and retrieving lost ones.

Ofo had a launch party recently near Dupont Circle with free lemonade and swag. Started by a Chinese college student, they’re the original dockless bikesharing service, with 400 bikes in DC now. An ofo rep said that someone rides every bike every day to make sure it works.

Dockless also depends on the goodwill of a city and its residents, for the bikes occupy public space such as sidewalks. The ofo rep I talked to recognized that they had to be good corporate citizens. It’s a business, like much of the new economy, that uses the commons for corporate profit, with no requirement to benefit society, unless we demand it.

While talking at the launch party, we saw JUMP and Spin bikes cruise down R Street. A couple biked by, one on a CaBi, the other on a Lime. A Mobike was parked on the sidewalk. The ofo reps offered free rides on their bikes to people coming up from the Metro. It seemed so unremarkable, as if these brightly colored bikes had always been with us.

Critics claimed that it would never work. Yet, in just a few short days, dockless bike sharing has gone from novelty to just another part of the busy urban landscape, the city and its residents rapidly adapting to the latest advance in transportation.

An Evening of Bike Touring at The Bike Rack

Do I want to bike across the United States? I’m fascinated by stories of people who have done it. I bike nearly every day. Sleet, snow, rain, polar vortex – I’ve been out in every kind of weather, either on my Specialized Sirrus or Capital Bikeshare. I’ve done a metric century. I’m reasonably healthy. Why not?

Colin O’Laughlin shared his experience biking across the country in a recent talk at The Bike Rack. His blog is fascinating, a day-by-day account of his epic trip from DC to the West Coast. It goes into a tremendous amount of detail and honestly includes the ups and downs of the trip. Plus, it’s got a detailed map and equipment list.

What I found inspiring was how little training he did for the ride. A biking newbie, he did fewer miles than I do in a week before setting off on the C&O Canal trail in April of last year. His approach was to learn along the way. He ditched gear he didn’t need (like front panniers) and learned to listen to his body – when it’s 115 degrees, you need to get inside or die.

In contrast, Natalie Chwalisz is a planner. A veteran of several bike tours, she trained extensively on group rides with The Bike Rack before her cycling expedition. She did miles and miles around the DC area on the bike she would take to Europe. She had a serious purpose for her trip – investigating the plight of migrants from the Middle East – but most of her trip looked like heaven as she biked on trails along the Elbe and Danube.

The lesson from these two talks is that there’s no one way to conduct a bike tour. You can set off, like Colin did, on a friendly trail like the C&O and see how far you get. Or you can train for hard miles ahead of time. You can power through the endless plains of Kansas or leisurely cruise between European capitals.

The USA is a big country. I’ve driven across the vast and unforgiving spaces of Kansas. That was enough. Instead, I’ll take the biking between storybook towns on the Danube, with time for leisurely lunches and photo opportunities. That’s the bike tour for me.