Well, it finally happened. That’s right, it’s the Gravel/Road Inversion. For years now, we’ve been hearing that the gravel bike is the answer to the limitations of the road bike, so it was only a matter of time until someone went the other way and converted a gravel bike into a road bike:
So, basically a bike…like the ones we had for years before they decided everyone needed a gravel bike.
Anyway, I attempted to watch the video, but the hair-splitting quickly broke my brain:
[“A skinny gravel bike tire is a fat road bike tire and a gravel bike on the road is a road bike on the gravel and if you put fat road tires on a gravel bike and skinny gravel tires on a road bike the effect is inverse to the pressure you’re running multiplied by tire width and divided by the diameter of your front rotor squared…”]
These are truly the questions that keep me up at night:
He also says you an even use a gravel bike as a road bike and WHO WOULD HAVE IMAGINED IT?
Of course he’s not the first YouTuber to attempt to put a road tire on a gravel bike:
I couldn’t make myself watch it but I’m just going to assume his bicycle imploded and he was never heard from again.
Just make sure if you do attempt to use a road tire on your gravel bike or a gravel tire on your road bike, or you wear gravel socks with your road shoes or gravel shoes with your road socks, you adjust your handlebar width accordingly:
So being able to quickly change your bar height has been largely confined to history, but now you can adjust the width?
Go figure.
And if that wasn’t enough, now bicycles are turning into SUVs:
Goodbye bicycles, hello electric motorcycles:
Hell hath no fury like an indignant Frenchman:
I put “visibly annoyed and now equipped with a rear-view mirror” into the AI and here’s what I got:
That cockpit looks like something Canyon would come up with for its city bike line.
But yes, it’s strangely comforting to know that things are just as bad in Paris as they are here in New York, where they’re now pushing an e-bike registration bill:
This bill would require every bicycle with electric assist, electric scooter, and other legal motorized vehicle that is not otherwise required to be registered with the DMV, to be registered with DOT and receive an identifying number which would be displayed on a visible plate affixed to the vehicle.
As usual, I’m torn. On one hand, this is probably too far-reaching, and is almost certainly way too much of a stretch for a city and state that can’t even deal with all its fraudulently registered cars. On the other hand, there are some seriously fast and annoying electric vehicles out there that defy easy categorization and run amok on the sidewalks and in the bike paths, and it can be extremely frustrating–almost as frustrating as advocates’ constant attempts to deflect:
No, it’s really not. It’s about these things being really fucking annoying to absolutely everybody except the people actually riding them.
So what’s the solution? Well, a law almost certainly won’t help (you can bust someone for breaking traffic laws whether they have a plate or not, as I know all too well), but neither will the advocates’ counter-proposal:
If absolutely none of these things are happening now–to the extent that we’re about to activate congestion pricing–why would they happen with even more of them? Wouldn’t you expect to have already seen reduced car use and congestion in light of this?
They don’t break it down, but anyone who rides in New York knows a large chunk of that traffic is e-bikes, e-scooters, and motor scooters both gas and electric. I’d even wager it constitutes almost the entirety of the increase.
Meanwhile, oddly it’s hard to find a comparable chart from the DOT for car traffic on the East River bridges, but it’s clear from second-hand sources that it’s not going down:
I realize we’re not supposed to engage in New York exceptionalism here, but you can’t really logic your way out of traffic in a city governed entirely by the Laws of Excess. Here, more scooters and e-bikes doesn’t mean fewer cars. It just means more of everything:
This is why, as the landscape of private surface transportation continues to evolve, I’m just gonna stick to my Bike Lane of the Mind and let everyone else keep duking it out.
May the best (and hopefully least deadly and annoying) conveyance win.