I started this blog in 2007. It seems like only yesterday to me, but that’s a long time–so long ago rim brakes on road bikes were normal, gravel bikes didn’t exist, and mountain bikes still came with 26″ wheels:
Even though I called my blog “Bike Snob,” I didn’t really know much. Granted, to this day I’m constantly amazed by how little I know, but back then I really didn’t know anything. New York City may be a global financial and media titan, but as far as cycling goes it’s…well, I wouldn’t call it a “backwater” exactly, but it’s fairly staid and traditional, or at least it was back then. Certainly there’s a tremendous amount of cycling history here, and a deep heritage of bicycle racing, and of bicycle delivery, and of advocacy. Yet while there was plenty of grit and/or extravagance to be found depending on your wont, overall it lacked the exuberance of some of these other bike scenes, probably because people are just too busy for that sort of thing here. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me, a fairly staid and traditional person who would have sooner joined a minyan than a Critical Mass ride.
Of course, when it comes to local bike scenes, the most exuberant of all (at least when I started this blog) was Portland. (The one in Oregon.) And yet this was one of the many things I still didn’t know at the time. My friend had gone out there for Cyclocross Nationals (I don’t remember the year) and come back with an enthusiastic report, but I didn’t really know anything about the then-cutting-edge bicycle infrastructure, or the zany theme rides, nor did I realize that Chris King had moved there or that it was becoming the hub of the American bicycle industry. I just figured all the high-end bike companies that weren’t in Europe were in like Colorado or California or whatever.
This changed almost as soon as I started this blog, and people started sending me links to stories about everything we’ve since come to associate with Portland. (Smugness, weirdness for weirdness’s sake, etc.) It would be several years before the TV show “Portlandia” came out and Portland became a byword for that sort of thing, and the source for much of the material people forwarded me (at least insofar as it intersected with bikes) was a blog called BikePortland.org. So I immediately felt nostalgic when I learned founder Jonathan Maus is stepping away from the blog after over 20 years:
I hadn’t visited BikePortland in awhile. Part of the reason for this is that Portland is no longer the Beacon of Bike Dorkdom it once was, as Maus himself admits:
I think in Portland, there’s many, many reasons why the sort of shine came off the apple for us when it came to being this biking utopia city or having that really strong brand. I never said this before, but we got high off our own supply. We got so navel-gazey and just so into ourselves. And I’ll fully admit that I was part of that, in a sense of: I think we just got complacent.
We started to think we were so cool and we were so bikey that we just maybe stopped looking at the fundamentals and stopped working hard and stopped being grateful and really working with intention to keep moving the needle maybe. I think that was part of it.
Another reason is that, while I begrudge nobody their beliefs, the ones to which Portlanders subscribe can be difficult to take. At first it’s funny, but after awhile visiting the site felt like showing up at a party where everyone’s doing hard drugs. “Yeah, not for me,” I’d think, and realize it was best just to leave. Perhaps this too played a role in the “shine coming off the apple” of Portland, as Maus puts it above. At least for an outside observer, after awhile the news coming out of Portland was no longer endearing.
Also, as of next year I too will have been blogging for 20 years. Many of the other blogs that were popular in my heyday have long since vanished, but BikePortland has been a mainstay all this time, and now here he is “letting go of the rope:”
I have this vision in my head of like skiing behind a boat for some reason and I’m holding this rope, but I feel like that’s the kind of image I think of when I think of Bike Portland sometimes. I’m holding this rope and I just can’t let it go and it’s tugging me. I’ve never really let go of the rope. I mean, even when I took vacations, my family would be sleeping and I would wake up early, open up my laptop and have to check in and write posts. I was just so consumed by it.
This last week’s been the first time where I just dropped it all. I just said, “I’m done. I’m just not going to hold onto this anymore.” The hardest thing about doing something like this for so long and doing it the way I did was that you’re just on this treadmill and I can’t, it’s hard to do anything else unless I just get off and create space and look back at it from a distance.
It kinda makes you think. (Or at least it does if you’re the curator of another dinosaur of a bike blog.) This is either a sign that I too should let go of the rope, or else zip-tie myself to it until I can’t even stand anymore and let the speedboat drag my body around like a dummy until it runs out of gas so I can “win,” I’m not sure which. The line between dedication and stupidity is a fine one indeed, and if I’m being charitable I probably crossed from the former side of it to the latter by around 2011. But in 2010 my blog was only three, I had recently left my job to be a full-time bicycle bullshit artist, my first book was about to come out, and I went out to Portland to do a story for Outside:
I’d sold them on this idea that I’d test the concept of the bike culture by going out to Portland anonymously and seeing if it would sustain me–like I’d find a place to stay and work as a messenger or something and really live the life–but once I got there I just stayed in the Ace Hotel for a few days and then in a half-hearted attempt at authenticity I moved to a slightly cheaper, slightly less hip hotel across the street. I also met the big bike industry “influencers” (I don’t think people were using that term yet) of the era, which at that point was centered around the whole proto-gravel Rapha “epic” thing. So I really didn’t go too far out of my comfort zone, though I did go to some weird house, which was scarier than it sounds, and was like the house in “The Young Ones” if nobody was even remotely funny:
I also reached out to Jonathan Maus, who was kind enough to take a meeting with a complete stranger:
So, using my real name, I contact Jonathan Maus, editor/writer of the widely read news blog BikePortland.org, and simply tell him I’m an adrift New Yorker seeking a greater understanding of Portland’s bike culture. He not only replies but invites me to his office, next door to a coffee shop with a “bike-thru” window.
So while perhaps his hiatus will be short-lived, this nevertheless feels like the end of an era. Indeed, in the years I’ve been administering the blog I’ve send the end of many things: the fixie craze, the mechanical drivetrain, the triple, and Portland as America’s number one bicycle city, to name just a few. Sometimes I imagine myself back in Brooklyn in 2007. The front door opens, and some old hairy guy wheels a Rivendell into the apartment. Holy crap, it’s Future Me!
“You’re not gonna believe it! All bikes run on batteries now, everyone’s obsessed with this stuff called ‘gravel,’ and the wheels are enormous!”
Hey, nobody wants to start cycling, so the best you can do is sell bikes to the people who are cycling already:
Some in the cycling industry have said 32in wheels won’t bring more people into cycling, but it’s simply a tactic to get more sales from people who already cycle. When I put this to Hitchens he replied, “Well, of course”.
Of course, there are too many new bikes as it is, but they’re not “innovative” enough:
But this relates to another issue that has plagued the industry for several years: overstocking. Ever since the Covid pandemic and ensuing economic downturn, cycling companies have been trying to shift products, which Hitchens says has hindered innovation.
It really is hard to keep on holding that rope.