Nice Infrastructure, But Bike Lanes Are For "Woosies"

(Those two glasses of wine are totally going to "do it!")

Happy Valentine's Day!  I love the fuck out of you!  I also just got an email from Transportation Alternatives with advice on "How To Score A Bike Lover," and here's method #4:

You Love Yielding, Too?

If you're single on this love-laden holiday, look to your commute. There's common ground in a shared love of polite bicycling, and bicycling buddies can meet while stopped at the traffic light. If you prefer flirting indoors, visit a bike shop with social space, like Red Lantern Bicycles' café.

In other words, they're suggesting that stopping at red lights will get you laid, though the sad truth is that if you're a woman it's only going to get you a very scuzzy "missed connection" on Craigslist.

Speaking of cycling in the city, yesterday I mentioned how pretty much every candidate for mayor of New York City refuses to support bike lanes, which inevitably elicited a comment from the hardened urban cyclist who needs you to know that bike lanes are for "woosies:"

Anonymous said...

Who rides in these silly bike lanes besides clueless suburban transplants and rent-a-tourists?

Rip 'em out. I'll keep riding in the street where bikes belong. Fuck JSK and her little boss.

FEBRUARY 13, 2013 AT 8:23 PM  

Actually, the clueless transplants and rent-a-tourists don't ride in the bike lanes.  They just sort of salmon about randomly, or else retreat to the sidewalk where they cluster around a smartphone looking for directions to some stupid ferry landing in Brooklyn.  As for the bike lanes, they're quite useful to actual New York City cyclists.  Firstly, they make it a lot easier to carry crap on your bike beyond what will fit in a dainty little messenger bag, such as children, groceries, or shitloads of watermelon to drop from the bridge onto passing ferries.  Secondly, there's this thing that happens when you start getting older, where you no longer feel the need to prove your mettle in New York City traffic on every single ride.  You know how when you're young you just want to get really drunk, but when you're older you learn how to appreciate a fine Scotch and get really drunk expensively and slowly?  Well, the same thing happens with bikes, and sometimes you just want to get somewhere without making a big fucking sweaty countercultural deal about it.  Sure, it's lame, but it happens to everybody--unless you get hit by a car because there aren't enough bike lanes, or unless you're this guy:

Do you really want to spend your middle age with a pair of cameras strapped to your helmet chasing a bunch of people half your age because you made a boring career choice?  Really, it's not that much different from those people in Japan who go around making videos of teenage girls using the toilet.  (I'm pretty sure I read about something like that somewhere, I've never actually seen it, really I havent.)  Or else, if you don't become like Lucas Brunelle, you just stop riding altogether, yet you still go on about how there shouldn't be bike lanes now because you didn't need them 25 years ago, like that putz John Cassidy.

So yes, we need more bike lanes, because eventually almost everybody grows up--though having said that, if they do in fact start removing bike lanes then my little deal with the city is off and I'm running every single red light I see.  I've been a wanton scofflaw before, and I can do it again.  If you take someone's toilet away then eventually he's going to have to piss on the floor, and if you take our bike infrastructure away eventually we're going to have to piss on your stupid motor vehicle-centric traffic laws.

Worst of all, if New York City loses its bicycle infrastructure and all the media attention that comes with it then we're only going to hear more about Portland, and I don't think there's a cyclist in America who wouldn't rather ride a bicycle without a seat then hear another word about Portland.  (Portland cyclists don't count, because Portland is not in America.)

Speaking of tired subjects, the IOC can't give Lance Armstrong's bronze medal to anybody else, probably because--surprise!--they were all just as dirty as he was:

It's pretty pathetic when you can't even give away a bronze medal.  At a certain point you'd think someone would realize that the only reasonable thing to do is invalidate every single competitive cycling result ever logged since the invention of the safety bicycle, and going forward to reclassify professional cycling as a form of outré entertainment, like professional wrestling or kabuki theatre.

In other news, the designers of the Bent Basket want me to let you know about the Bent Basket:



Basically, the Bent Basket is a bent basket, and while I was incredibly disappointed that it's not a basket for recumbents, I do think it is going to change the way you think about serving trays with integrated suspenders forever.  Also, it has an impressive pedigree:

"Bent Basket was designed in San Francisco, and refined here in New York City."

Hey, just like the Brooklyn hipster culture!

Lastly, that sickening "Wilderness Collective" website led me to another website called The Art of Manliness, and apparently if you want to be a man you should use wax seals on your correspondence:

Wear an anachronistic winter hat:

And grow a handlebar mustache:

I always knew I wasn't a real man, but I had no idea it was because I don't dress like a confirmed bachelor from the Victorian era.  I guess we've gone past "steampunk" and are now in the age of the "steamyuppie."

I'd better curate myself a more manly wardrobe.