Rich Mintz  

As you’ve noticed if you follow me on Twitter, after seeing one on the street and arranging to test-ride one around the block, I ordered a FlyKly electric bike, and it arrived last week.

What it is, in essence, is an electric scooter, with a top speed under 25mph and a claimed range of 40 miles, that you can recharge in the house off normal electrical current. (The battery is removable.) It weighs only about 100 pounds (less than half what a gas-powered scooter weighs). While that’s too heavy to carry it up the stairs, it’s light enough that you can easily maneuver it through hallways and in and out of elevators to keep it in, say, an apartment building’s bike room, and (since there’s nothing to drip or leak) there’s no reason not to park it in the living room.

The FlyKly does have functional pedals, like a bicycle, and in fact under federal law it’s classified as a consumer product (like a bicycle), rather than a motor vehicle. In fact, the relevant statute states that electric bikes must be treated by states as consumer products rather than motor vehicles. New York State, however, has ignored this, and all electric bicycles are illegal here and subject to confiscation as unregistered motor vehicles. (You may have noticed the 20,000 electric bicycles on the streets of NYC, piloted by deliverymen and hobbyists; yes, under NYS law they are all illegal to operate, and subject to a $500 fine and impoundment.) However, NYS DMV will not register them. So you may legally buy and own them, but not actually use them.

This is, of course, legal nonsense, and it will be straightened out eventually. (It seems to me that what is needed is the proper kind of plaintiff to sue NYS in federal court — someone who has the time and flexibility to put up with the timetable of litigation, the sense to make the right arguments, and the maturity to present well in front of a judge. If I get a $500 citation that isn’t dismissed, I’ll see whether I have the stomach for it.)

In the meantime, what seems to happen in NYC is that if you are riding responsibly, the police ignore you. When you are at speed, you look like just another Vespa (which are legal if registered), and when you aren’t moving, nobody cares anyway. I had one encounter with a parks cop (who treated me as though I were a Vespa rider, and simply said pleasantly that I had to walk the bike in a crowded pedestrian area), but I don’t think I’ve been noticed otherwise. Last night I (cautiously) rode through the pedestrian shortcut alongside police headquarters (connecting from Madison and St. James through to Frankfort and Gold, under the Brooklyn Bridge), past three NYPD guardhouses, and nobody cared.

I was careful, though, to walk the bike whenever I was passing through an area I might expect to be hassled for riding through on a normal bicycle. And without exception I’ve stopped at every red light, and stayed in traffic in congested areas rather than trying to find a way around. This means that for trips of more than a block or two, traveling by FlyKly is actually marginally slower than riding a normal bicycle in the typical amount of city traffic.

But who cares? In nice weather it’s so much fun to get out and just ride. I’ve been all up and down the lower half of the island, and tomorrow have a couple of errands on the Upper West Side, so I’ll have a chance for a longer ride.

The handling is fine; the 25mph governor is not a problem in the city. (I rarely find myself wanting to go any faster than that.) The bike seems well designed and I keep finding things I like about it. There’s a bag loop, so you can carry one bag of groceries, along with whatever is on your back. (There’s an optional cargo box, but to install it you have to remove the rear rail, and I use that rail to lift the bike when I’m flipping the kickstand, so I’m reluctant.)

The only problem was that I tripped the electric fuse on one of my first rides, and had to let the battery cool down before I could reset it and it would “stick.” (It actually wasn’t a clean test, because during the cooldown I had the bike plugged in, so I’m not absolutely sure that overheating was the issue.)

I investigated motorcycle licensing in NYS, because it seems prudent to have evidence of training in the event that a police officer claims I am “riding unsafely.” It’s actually pretty easy — you pass a written test and get a permit, and then if you take a 3-day riding course, you waive out of the driver’s test. So expect to hear about that in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, zoom zoom! Bike porn below.

Just got caught in a sudden storm while riding my bike near Times Square at night, and was soaked through my clothes in about 60 seconds. The last time I got this wet was during the Great Yeovil Downpour of 1987. I was backpack-hosteling around England and had to get from Yeovil to (some adjacent town, probably Exeter), and I went to wait for a bus that never came, because (as I later realized) it was Sunday. I asked around, and learned that to reach my destination that day I would have to walk a number of miles to an intervening town and catch a different bus.

So I walked and walked, and the road got hilly, and I saw no one, and it started to rain, and it rained and rained, and I put on my poncho, and I still got soaked, and my shoes squeaked and got stuck in mud, and I got wetter and wetter and madder and madder and listened to my Walkman with the one mixtape over and over, the one that was mostly U2 and James Taylor.

But I made it to Exeter. And that is the story of the Great Yeovil Downpour of 1987.

Please take a moment to contemplate Momentum, a new cycling magazine that’s meant for people who use bikes the way you likely do — as stylish and functional accessories to their daily lives, probably in a city.

It was a free-distribution mag for a while and they recently upgraded it to more pages and started charging. It’s really cheap ($20 a year) and I heartily encourage you to subscribe. The copy and ads are more useful than those in Bicycling magazine (which I also read, don’t you worry), and it’s a lot more fun.

That’s what this dude on a fixie said who plowed his bike at about 10 miles an hour into a fat guy in a suit getting into a taxi on 6th Avenue yesterday afternoon. (I was standing about 10 feet away, on the sidewalk, holding my bike handlebars, with a helmet on.) He basically bounced off (fat guy, remember), and nobody was hurt, but everyone involved was embarrassed and pissed off at everyone else.

Not to be uncharitable, but “I don’t have any brakes” isn’t much of an excuse, and neither is “I was going too fast.” The poor cabbie had done his job and stopped in traffic with the bike lane clear; the suit just took a little long to get into the cab, and bike guy wasn’t looking far enough up the road. (LESSON ONE. Enough said.)

Ten points for honesty, there, but hey, watch out! And if you can’t stop in 50 feet at the speed you’re going with the equipment you have, you either need to get some goddam brakes or, I dunno, maybe not ride so fast in the curb lane on congested 6th Avenue? And before you lay into me (I don’t know what “you” I think I’m talking to, this doesn’t apply to anyone I know personally to be reading this blog, but anyway), yeah, I know the fixie “riding experience” is more authentic, and brakes “are no guarantee of stopping” and so forth, sure. I’ll even buy a fixie eventually (I predict it’ll be my eighth bike). But the whole point of riding in the city is not to plow into things, so, you know, TAKE NOTE.

It’s hard to believe that as of two or three years ago I hadn’t ridden a bicycle in ages and ages. Oh, I owned one — when I moved to Atlanta in 1999, I bought a new one with grand plans — but I almost never rode it anywhere, had no riding stamina, and certainly wouldn’t have taken it out in the rain. (What, me get wet?)

All that, as you know, has changed. Not only am I now a cyclist, willing to ride in bad weather and eager to get back on a bike when I’ve been away for a few days; I am also a Cyclist, someone whom my friends and colleagues look to for bike advice, with whom they share bike jokes and videos, of whom they’re a little afraid lest I show up at an important meeting or, say, a wedding in a funny outfit riding my latest two-wheeled acquisition.

This is all a bit baffling, not least to me, because I think of myself as, number one, a completely unathletic person, and number two, not an insider or a joiner at all. Yet I’m now, number one, on a bicycle almost every day for somewhere between two and ten miles, and, number two, incontrovertibly, a member of the NYC cycling “community,” a group that has no membership test or dues or requirements but that nonetheless obviously does exist, in the eyes both of those who are in it and of those who are outside it shaking their fists at it for taking away their precious parking spaces or whatever.

How did this happen?

As with most fortuitous yet unplanned things that happen to us, my taking up of bicycling was the outcome of a virtuous cycle. Approaching my mid-forties, I found my doctor yelling at me for sitting on my ass all day. I felt the need to lose some weight. (That didn’t happen, but my weight distribution got much healthier and my stamina increased markedly, so I don’t care.) I discovered that I didn’t hate being on a bicycle. I learned that I enjoyed the sense of freedom and mastery of the city that it bestowed. I learned that being on a bicycle could be stylish and playful and colorful, instead of serious and dudish and douchey, while still conferring all the same health benefits.

At the end of the day, though, what happened is that I got off my ass and onto a bike, I liked it, and I got back onto it again the next day. I repeated this about 30 times, enough to realize that there were things I could do to make the riding experience better (get proper lights, a messenger bag, adjust my wardrobe), and I did them. This made me more inclined to get on the bike again, and I did it about fifty more times.

At this point, since I was on the bike so much I started paying attention to other people’s bikes, and this led me to do research, and this led me to buy a better bike, which led me to buy another better bike (and so on), which in turn led me to ride more.

Once I’d gotten on the bike another fifty times or so, I started noticing that not only was I participating in bike-related conversations (including #bikenyc on Twitter), but other people in those conversations were acting like I had the right and the standing to be in them.

Fast forward about another year, and nobody disputes that I’m a Cyclist, not even me. But, I repeat, the single most important thing I did to become the expert, the aficionado, the frequent rider that I am was to just get on the bike, and then get on again. After a certain point you just stop giving a shit whether the “insiders” think you’re one of them, because you know as much as they do and certainly have enough experience to act like one.

It was exciting when I first realized that I was riding fast enough that I overtook a lot of perfectly competent-looking cyclists in the course of my ordinary ride to work. But the real turning point for me, probably, was the moment when I realized that I would rather ride to work in the left lane up Church Street and Sixth Avenue, even with all the traffic, than go out of my way to take one of the separated bike paths. I’d reached the point where I was a competent street rider, not particularly anxious about traffic, capable of taking the lane, not afraid of the occasional honk. I had arrived.

All this was easier for me, I grant, because I have nothing to prove. I literally do not give a crap how some 23-year-old with an 11-pound fixie and a 20-pound bike chain around his waist thinks I look on my upright BMX with the big basket in front. I don’t even care what he thinks as he swerves around me (into oncoming traffic, without looking) as I stop for a red light. I don’t care if I’m the fastest, I don’t care if I’m the coolest-looking (and with that blinking red light on my helmet, I certainly am not). I just have fun, and (knock wood) try not to get hit by a car while doing it.

I’ve done a bit of riding on my Strida now, and my conclusion is that I’m a bit too tall for it — but it’s still a good travel bike, even for someone my size. (That size, for the record, is 6 foot 2 inches, with a 34-inch trouser inseam.) The next time I take a trip somewhere of more than one or two days, I’m going to pack it in a golf bag and check it as luggage — it would have been nice to have in LA when I was there at the end of February.

The size problem, basically, results from the fact that the frame is too vertical — there’s not quite enough front-to-back tube length to accommodate my long legs. I’ve slid the seat back on its rails as far as it goes, and also lowered the seat a couple inches, and now my knees just clear the handlebars on the upstroke. However, this is only sustainable if my backside is hanging off the back of the seat platform and I’m pulling back on the handlebars to steady myself. I showed it to the experts at Metro Bicycles, and they told me that if I put on a seat with longer rails, given my weight, I’d probably torque the bike apart.

So it’s not comfortable for long distances, but it is rideable. I can do the 2 1/2 miles to and from work on it, and it’ll be nice for trips.

I rode the Strida this morning to Kaffe 1668 on Greenwich Street, and I have to confess that I looked ridiculous, with my body leaned as far back as possible and my feet turned out like a pigeon’s in a vain attempt to keep my knees from knocking the handlebars. I need to move the seat back another centimeter (if it’ll go), and slide it either down or up another centimeter (the geometry is not intuitive, since the desire to straighten my legs by a centimeter does battle with the desire to lower the highest knee cycle point by a centimeter). Or, as I suggested on Twitter, maybe I should just chop off my feet.

In any case, 1668 (my neighborhood’s faux-Swedish-country coffeehouse) is full of tedious wealthy people in their 20s and I’m now full of espresso, so the trip wasn’t a total loss.

It’s Friday evening (well, late afternoon, really, but it’s already getting dark), so even though I’m still in the office I don’t feel too guilty dashing off a few overdue lines here.

I bought another bike, as I noted on Twitter — a Strida LT as you see above. I’d been coveting one of these, and I got a deal. I mostly wanted it because it’s the smallest bike that it’s practical for a 6-foot-2, 240-pound person to ride, and because it folds up into a size that (theoretically) fits in a golf bag and can be airline-checked. At least in theory, that will make it possible for me to take a bike with me when I go on a multi-day trip to a place where I’d like to have one but may not be able to put my hands on one locally.

It’s belt-driven (so no grease or mess), and it rides very nicely for a one-speed, although I’m almost too big for it — in order to ride it without knocking my knees against the handlebars, I have to lower the seat a bit more than I would prefer and slide the seat itself all the way back on its track to the very last millimeter. But it’s doable, certainly for short distances or occasional use, so it amounts to another option.

For various reasons, I brought the Gary Fisher hybrid (my “original” bike) out of storage this week, pumped up the tires, and rode it for two days. And after several months in which the heaviest bike I rode was the large-but-light Public, and I spent more than half my riding time on BMX wheels, getting back on the Gary Fisher (which, remember, was my main bike until less than a year ago) felt like getting behind the wheel of a Ford Explorer after a year of driving a Civic.

It’s heavy (which is good and bad — heavy means sturdy), the frame is really stiff in potholes (which means, hold on tight or you’ll bounce yourself off the handlebars), and so forth. This means that when you load up the rack, it really drags — you’ll ride steadily, but maybe not so fast. I can imagine situations where I’d want to have that kind of ride — if I’m pulling a trailer full of furniture, for instance, or crossing Donner Pass. And I like it in wet weather. But not for everyday riding.

In other bike news, I still hate the Presta valves on my Public, which require special handling (yeah, I carry the adapter on my keychain but it’s still a pain in the ass).

Okay, so that’s taking it a bit far. Nobody was hit, nobody was hurt. Still, I fell off my bike, on a New York street! On top of a Chinese man!

Here’s what happened: I was on a ride I do often from the Upper West Side downtown, stopped at a light on the far left side of 9th Avenue, in the mid-forties, where the Lincoln Tunnel traffic bunches up. It’s congested along here, but I still prefer it to going anywhere near 7th Avenue in the forties, and if you’re heading south, you’ve got to go somewhere.

I was in the left parking lane, next to a parked car, with a stopped taxi on my right. An apparently-Chinese man on a bike came up on my left, heading into the intersection, apparently thinking he’d clear? Not concerned about why I might be stopped? Oblivious to all the pedestrians? Who knows. In any case, he didn’t clear, and he got wedged in a drainage plate in the corner dip. He fell over to his left onto a bunch of people waiting to cross the street; he reached out to grab onto me (because I was there); I, and my bike, fell over on top of him.

Nobody was hurt, no pedestrians complained, everyone just helped each other up, Chinese guy and I checked to make sure we were both okay, and we all went on our way. But now I can say I’ve been in an accident!

I’ve been wanting to put on some extra miles, so this afternoon I decided to do a Brooklyn loop over two bridges, the Brooklyn and the Williamsburg. You can see my route here:

View Two Bridges Brooklyn Bike Loop in a larger map

This is almost exactly ten miles — long enough to get some real cardio exercise, but short enough to do in about an hour. (Plus there’s excellent coffee at the 3-mile and the 7-mile marks.)