We normally don’t cover international racing much at Austin on Two Wheels, but the Tour is the big one. With Austinite Lance Armstrong returning professional cycling to try for an eighth win, there is more interest than normal in the Grande Boucle. Here’s our quick intro to the Tour, where you can watch, and our handicapping of the race.

A quick Tour Primer

The Tour consists of 21 stages with two rest days starting Saturday, July 4 and ending on Sunday, July 26. The race covers 3500 miles in total and visits Monaco, Spain, and Italy this year in addition to France. Most stages are raced as mass starts but there are a few individual time trials where racers are riding by themselves against the clock and one team time trial where each team (9 riders) race as a unit against the clock. The mass start stages fall into flat, rolling or mountainous stages. The flat stages normally end with most of the field in a bunch sprint while the mountain stages normally end with a select few racing for the overall. Rolling stages fall in between with more often a small group of riders called a breakaway riding away from the field to win stages. If this is your first time watching bike racing, tune into the mountain stages (July 10-12, 15, 16-17, and 25) as these are the most interesting to watch (avoid the time trials.) The Mt. Ventoux stage the day before Paris (July 25) should be the most exciting with the overall winner likely still in doubt.

Only one rider gets the overall win for the shortest time covering the course, the yellow jersey, so the race has other prizes. In fact, at least half the teams will arrive with no riders in serious contention for the overall. In addition to the yellow jersey, there is:

• Green Jersey- Called the Points Jersey or Sprinters Jersey. Each day, the top riders to finish are give points toward this prize. The person with the most points at the end wins with sprinters from the flat stages given the best chance at winning.

• Polka Dot Jersey- The King of the Mountains Jersey. The top riders to finish each classified climb get points toward this prize. Normally, this is a climber who is not a threat to the overall lead who is allowed to go out ahead on one or two mountain stages to clean up on points.

• White Jersey-Best Young Rider. This is like the yellow jersey but for riders under the age of twenty five.

In addition to these overall prizes, any rider would give their right leg or more to win just one stage at the Tour.

Watching the Tour

If you get the Versus network, you’ll have lots of opportunities to watch the stages each day. There is live coverage usually from around 8 to 9:30 or 10 in the morning with rebroadcasts throughout the day. In the evening at 7, there is “enhanced” coverage with more interviewers, product advertising reviews, and a more novice oriented commentating. If you’ve watched racing before, you probably want to skip the evening broadcast.

In addition to the TV coverage, VeloNews does streaming posts of the race as it’s going on and video recaps each day. There is also the Tour de France Blog for fan written articles and the Peloton Post for race pictures.

Locally, Mellow Johnny’s is having a huge Tour kickoff party this Sunday with silly contests and a stage showing at the Alamo Draft House. In addition if you don’t have cable, you can always stop by Mellow Johnny’s or Bicycle Sport Shop which both have large flat screen TVs throughout the store with the race playing each day. Both shops have coffee bars, so you can get refreshments while you’re at it.

Those who watch the live coverage will quickly get used to the British voice of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin, the play by play men of pro cycling. They repeatedly use colorful catch phrases, and now you can keep the flat stages interesting with Phil and Paul bingo.

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The bicycle is the most efficient form of transportation man ever created. Add this clip to further proof that bikes can do a lot more than we think.

Received an update today from our friends at Ride the City, the bicycle route mapping site. They have been hard at work for several months now getting the service working for Austin and it’s now ready!

From their blog:

Well, we’re hopeful that bike riding in the Lone Star state is going to get even better today as we launch Ride the City – Austin: www.ridethecity.com/austin. Put your hands together!

We’d like to thank all those who helped during the tweaking and clean up of the data to improve the routes. We especially thank Nathan Wilkes and Jason Fialkoff, both of Austin’s Bicycle Program, and bike advocate Tom Wald. These guys gave excellent feedback and helped to comb through the routes to make sure the most common local routes are accurate. Thanks guys. (Some day we’ll show you one of Nate’s hand-drawn maps, really cool.)

We are really happy that we could at least point them in the right direction and make sure they knew about the recently-updated GIS layer for bike routes that the city had put together.

To test the service out, I mapped out three different scenarios and tested them. They were:

• A student living off of Hart Lane west of MOPAC that wanted to ride to the UT campus
• An Allandale resident looking for a route to work north of 183 in the Riata area
• An East Austin cyclist riding to work at a tech job in the southwest

I chose these arbitrarily, but wanted to see how well Ride the City could develop routes that crossed highways in particular, since these areas can be especially tough to navigate.

The first scenario was fairly easy, on purpose, because there has been some real attention paid to cycling infrastructure in the Far West area. Ride the City mapped this one with no problem at all and offered up a very safe route.

In the Allandale example, though, things got a little tricky. Of course, cycling along the north side of 183 is tough. I had the route stop at Riata Trace Parkway, and for the most part Ride the City gave me a safe way. However, the last mile of the route was along the Research Boulevard service road, which wouldn’t make me too happy, personally.

In the third example, the route was again quite good. There was a short segment where Ride the City suggested riding on Oltorf, but other than that it looked quite good.

Try your own routes and provide feedback to improve them, based on your own experiences at RideTheCity.com/Austin.

This week’s pretty quiet with the holiday weekend coming up, but there are still plenty of great rides on our comprehensive calendar of all cycling events. And if you get too hot, there’s always the Tour day France to watch on Versus. Thanks to Jason at ATXBS for letting us know about some events we couldn’t find elsewhere. As always, if there is an event you know about that’s not on our calendar contact us, and we’ll add your event on and possibly add it to the weekly round up.

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Reminder from Nadia Barrera at the City of Austin:

This is just a reminder of tonight’s Bicycle Theft Resolution Subcommittee Meeting. Our meeting will be held at the Austin Police Department’s Headquarters building located at 715 East 8th Street, on the 4th Floor in the CompStat Room. Please enter the police department through the east entrance (entrance facing the frontage road of IH-35). Check in at the Control Booth and they will instruct you as to where the room is located. The meeting will begin at 6:00pm and end at 7:30pm.

We will discuss the process of implementing an educational campaign to foster camaraderie between the cycling communities and to assist in safety awareness to cyclists, citizens and motorists.

Topics will include examining ways to implement a voluntary web-based program, information on a radio frequency identification chip, and information on reporting bicycle thefts, registration, and safety procedures.

Wes Williams of Willits Bicycles doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to bicycle design. The creator of the modern 29 inch wheel bike and maker of custom titanium and steel bikes let me know early on in our conversation, “I have no tolerance for people who can’t see my vision.”

His vision is of large wheel bicycles more likely than not with road bars equally capable of handling whatever you throw at it on and off road with a fast, smooth ride. This has provided William with a core legion of followers, but also quite a few detractors in the bike industry who weren’t ready for his out of the ordinary design. Still, his dogged commitment to a design he believes is best has eventually yielded results with 29ers being one of the fastest growing segments of the bike market.

The genesis of the 29er

Williams has been in the bike industry for over 25 years beginning with Ibis after he learned welding and framebuilding. He became the shop manager, one of the designers, and a master welder at Ibis helping the company to grow. A driving curiosity and unwillingness to accept the status quo lead him to experiment with larger wheel sizes when building his own frames on the side.

“I realized that we were all riding wheel sized for children’s bikes, not adult bikes,” Williams told me. He maintains that since the early safe bike frame, adult bikes have always had wheels the size of 700c or 27 inch and children’s bikes have had 26 inch wheels and smaller. The reason mountain bikers adopted smaller wheels in the 1970s had to do with the explosion of the automobile culture in the U.S. a generation earlier. After World War II, the adult bike market died with adoption of car driven suburban culture. Only children’s bikes survived and cruiser versions of these that were made for teenagers became the bikes the pioneers of the mountain bike movement adopted. Williams believes it was this lead to 26 inch wheels as the standard rather than a conscience decision.

In 1988, Williams built his first large wheel off road bike. At the time, he called them 28ers because he was very limited in the size of tires he could get.

“In those days, I was nearly impossible to get a tire larger than 700x 40mm,” he explained. “I ended up finding some 700×47mm tires Continental had that were discontinued and only sold in the European market as commuter tires. I ended up buying all their stock and those were the tires I spec’d on my bikes for quite a while.”

Williams believed he was on to something once he started riding the bikes. He sees 26 inch wheels as inferior on the trail because they require handlebars and cranks that are too long to make up for the momentum disadvantage of the smaller wheels. Since 29 inch wheels can be run at a lower pressure, you get better suspension that pneumatic tires naturally provide with air.

“I see a lot of guys really fighting the bike on 26 inch wheel bikes,” he continued. “On 29ers, the bike does more of the work for you and teaches you better to rider off road.”

‘Cross Bike on Steroids

Wanting to follow his own vision and tired of the lack of recognition he felt he was getting at Ibis, Williams moved back to Colorado in 1994 to start Willits and a bike shop, Crested Butte Bikes. As he began to churn out bikes, he ran into problems breaking through in a bike industry used to putting bikes into easy categories.

“There was one magazine I sent a bike to, and the thing sat un-ridden for over six months,” he said. “The reviewer didn’t know what to make of it. He ended up ripping the bike because he didn’t understand it.”

From early on, Williams built his 29ers with road drops because he had come from a road background and liked the versatility and comfort of the setup. When he showed me the titanium model 29er with drops that he showed off as one of the first 29ers at Interbike a decade ago, he called it a “cross bike on steroids.” While Salsa has gotten notice lately for its Fargo model of 29er with road drops, Williams earlier mixing of road, cyclocross, and mountain bike let many bike industry journalists scratching their heads.

Wes Williams has not helped is case by being impatient with those who have not seen his designs as a step forward. He’s clearly frustrated by the slowness of the industry to embrace his ideas, and he admits to sometimes being an emotional guy. Criticizing those who have held onto the established standards, he said “26 inch wheels are stupid and so are the guys riding them.” Continue reading →

Italian city bike maker, Gruppo Bici N.A, has just released their new 2010 line of high end city bikes, Umberto Dei Clodia. Similar to Dutch city bikes but with an Italian flare, these things could give Retrovelos a run for their money. I am a maker and promoter of European city bikes, but it does appear that other than a few models with traditional derailleurs, these are all equipped with single speeds and a coaster brake. They look good, but I think it would be impractical and possibly a little dangerous for our hilly city.

What I found even more Italian about this brand is the Gucci style pannier and saddle bags they sell with the bikes. They certainly aren’t my style, but I’m sure they’d go with a leather suit and square toed shoe combo. Che bella!

This may be good news or bad news depending on your point of view about such things, but yes, we’ve made another list of cities for young, hip, urban, blah blah blah, etc… this one is from Next Generation Consulting,and is their ranking of “Hotspots for Young Professionals.” We’re number 6 in the “large city” category.

1.  San Francisco, California
2.  Seattle, Washington
3.  Boston, Massachusetts
4.  Washington, District of Columbia
5.  Denver, Colorado
6.  Austin, Texas
7.  Baltimore, Maryland
8.  Portland, Oregon
9.  New York City, New York
10.  Columbus, Ohio

Yay us? Or Nay, us? I dunno, you tell me.

August came early this year. Unfortunately for those of us in Texas, that means we have a long, hot summer in store for us. With triple digit temperatures becoming the norm, I have been receiving workout reports from clients that, I can safely summarize as saying, “who turned on the furnace? I’m melting out there!”

Trouble is that when it’s hot, it’s hard to look forward to a workout, much less enjoy that actual workout. Here are some tips for beating the heat without having to leave the state:

• It’s best to train early in the morning, or late evening. If you can manage to get up extra early, that is ideal. Late evening is also better. Try having a really early dinner, 5 pm or so, and head out at 7pm for your ride. Pay attention to the weather report and know when your best windows of opportunities are.

• If you can’t ride until it’s really hot, switch the workout to an indoor workout or scuttle it entirely. If it’s too hot, you will not be able to achieve the intensity, and there is a substantial risk of overheating. Our current temperatures are classified as a very high exercise risk by the American College of Sports Medicine.  One day of not riding won’t make or break your season. Continue reading →

Those looking forward to the Downtown Crits that have been held in late June the last few years were disappointed to see the event vanish from the TXBRA calendar recently. Racing downtown then getting to watch the domestic pros go at it is a blast, and I was sorry to see it go.

Well, it turns out the race got moved to September:

The Austin International Downtown Criterium has officially changed its date to September 5, 2009 due to scheduling conflicts with the City of Austin and will run in conjunction with the Keep Austin Weird festival.

Looking like there is a Tour of Austin scheduled that weekend as well, but no details yet. Now you can schedule your training to peak (or just show up last minute like me.) More info on the Crits here.

This a happens almost every day in our city. You’re cruising along one of Austin’s bike lanes, and Bam! you’ve go to stop or quickly (and dangerously) merge into traffic because your bike lane has been taken over by construction work. Whether its road work, which seems reasonable and is often well marked with warning signs, or private construction, which often blocks bike lanes without warning, it seems those on two wheels become the first to be sacrificed in our push for urban in-fill. I’m often reminded at these times that the Empire State Building was constructed without shutting down a single street.

Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. Bike Portland recently reported on a construction firm, Hoffman Construction, that created its own bicycle only lane around construction when they recently had to do sidewalk work on a project. 

From the article:

According to project engineer Jason Haslam, who smiled and waved on bike riders this morning, they did the bike detour because they’ve been working on the project for eight months and “we’d seen all the bike traffic going by.” “We’ve been planning this,” he added, “so we didn’t just throw all the bikers into the roadway.”

Wow. A construction crew and developer proactively looking at how their project might temporarily effect a community negatively and creating a solution without anyone asking. Pinch me, am I dreaming?

Perhaps we could make a friendly amendment to the Master Bike Plan that requires some sort of action on developers to accommodate ALL forms of traffic in necessary lane closures.

From the Bureau of Ironically Titled Urban Rides, come this ride tonight to memorialize the shouting, infomercial pitchman Billy Mays of Oxy-Clean fame who died over the weekend.

I guess we are playing catch up to Portland on rides memorializing famous people.

This Saturday was the 47th incarnation of Frankenbike, Austin’s monthly bicycle and bike parts swap. I’m building a randonneuring bike for Marcus and a road bike for myself, so Marcus and I headed up to Hammerhead Bikes, this month’s host, to look for some low cost, lightly used components before we buy new. Not only did we score some great high polish aluminum drop bars and stems for less than $15 total, I also found a set of horizontal dropouts with eyelets for rack/fender mounts for $5. These are not easy to find mind you. In fact, I usually have to get mine from a frame parts place in England. You never know what you’ll find at Frankenbike!

 

Hammerhead recently moved to a lot on Burnet Lane (just east of Burnet Road) and have built a very cool pump track in the front. Back when we did the profile of True Fabrication, Cody Baron, the owner of Hammerhead and part of the trio at True Fab, invited us to come to the bike shop once they got settled in to check it out. We like what we see, and look for a profile of Hammerhead later in the summer.

New York Magazine helmet controversy is non-existent

Last week, I wrote an opinion piece in response to an interview in New York Magazine with actor and cycling advocate Matthew Modine about bicycle advocacy and the issue of bike helmets. I was critical of Modine based on some of the contradictory statements he said in the story on whether you should wear a helmet. I was also critical of the League of American Bicyclists when the story reported that they did not want to work with Modine’s advocacy group Bicycle for a Day after meeting with him because of his stance on helmets.

The New York Magazine article as well as our post generated conflict in the some parts of the cycling community with many people mad at the LAB for allegedly turning its back on an allied organization with a common goal: getting more people riding bikes. I was contacted by a local LAB member with more knowledge of the situation who explained that the statements made about the LAB weren’t an accurate description of the situation. Yesterday, I spoke with Modine and LAB staff to get to the bottom of this story.

LAB: “We think Modine and Bicycle for a Day are great”

The League of American Bicyclists, the largest bicycle advocacy organization in the U.S., works with hundreds of organizations a year. Most are local groups with affiliate memberships of LAB using the organization as a resource or simply wishing to support its work. The LAB also works with other national organization to put on the National Bike Summit each year, a meeting where bicycle advocacy organizations can interact with governmental leaders from the legislative and executive branches.

Elizabeth Kiker, the organization’s Vice President, explained that the LAB reached out to work with Modine on his Bicycle for a Day program. Not only did they support his work, they promoted and sent LAB staff to the 2008 kickoff event in New York City and currently list Bicycle for a Day in the links section of the LAB site. ”We think Modine and Bicycle for a Day are great,” Kiker said.

So the League leadership was surprised when they read Modine’s comments. LAB President Andy Clarke who was at the meeting in question with Modine put out these statements:

 . . . in the course of our conversation happen to mention that if we posted the BFAD promotional video on our website we’d catch all kinds of grief from some of our members who would only see that he wasn’t wearing a helmet. The moment passed. 

We had a good meeting, discussed loads of ways in which we could help support and promote BFAD, and we’ve stayed in touch. We had a booth at the recent BFAD event in New York City; we promoted the event to our members in the NYC area; one of our staff is in the video that was shot during the event; and we’re looking forward to promoting BFAD in September and beyond.

The Matthew Modine Video behind the “controversy”

Kiker, who did not attend the meeting, said comments were made in a light hearted manner and were not intended as an unwillingness to work together. “In the past, when we’ve done photo spreads of cyclists which included only one or two cyclists without helmets, we’ve had members complain,” Kiker continued. “We just have some members that are passionate about helmets.”

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This last week was the summer solstice which goes fairly unnoticed in our sun drenched city. However, if you live in places where winter nights go on forever, the solstice is a time to get out and celebrate the warm rays of brother sun. 

In Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood (home of the huge VI Lenin statue in the neighborhood square), they do up the solstice right with their annual Naked Bike Ride. Most of the time, the people who promote nudity aren’t people you really want to see naked, but the Fremont folks have taken the ride to a new level with very artfully done body paint.

 

I’m just bummed I’ll be heading to Seattle about one week too late to be a part of the ride!

In the last few months, I’ve written with great excitement about the introduction of the Versa Road Shifter, a STI style integrated brake/shifter for road drops with the pull ratios to be compatible with Shimano’s 8 speed Nexus and Alfine internal hubs. I’m a big fan of internal hubs for transportation bikes since they are relatively maintenance free and a lot less finicky than traditional derailleurs. These shifters plus the Jtek barend shifter allows road bike owners to get in on the internally geared action.

Dynamic Bikes is the U.S. distributor of the Versa Road Shifter and recently introduced and is shipping the Synergy, the first road bike sold built with this system. They are currently selling the shifters at a discount directly to the public until they finish establishing U.S. distribution to local bike shops. I ordered a set for myself in May which just arrived late last week. 

The look and build quality of the levels appear to be good at first glance. I had wanted the version with silver levers as I am a bit of a retro grouch when it comes to the look of components. Unfortunately, Dynamic let me know they have only been sent black lever versions so far. This is a trend I’ve run into with other components. Powder coat black must be all the rage in Taiwan and China, but I’m not big on the look. I really wanted to get a pair of these to test, so I decide not to wait for silver.

I’ll be putting these on a cyclocross frame to test out over the next few weeks (I think cyclocross might be another good use for these.) Look for an upcoming review in July and if things go well equipped on a custom randonneuring frame I’m building for Marcus.

Found via BikeFitness‘ Twitter Feed: if you leave your bike unlocked in London, it’s likely to be gone in less than twenty minutes! Seventeen, to be exact. A research study tested length of time to bike theft of an unlocked bicycle in various UK cities, where London ended up being in the lead by far. Not that it’s ever wise to leave a bicycle unlocked for any length of time unsupervised, but this study should add more fuel to the bicycle security fire.

From the story at news:lite:

Shiny new bikes were left in ten city-centres and researchers hid around the corner, timing how long they took to disappear.

All of the bikes were stolen within four hours, with the average being two hours and 22 minutes.

Read the rest here:

It’s a hot one out there, but if you can stand the 100 degree days, there’s lots to do. Just bring plenty of water where ever you go.

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The controversy over cyclists failing to stop at stop signs has been swirling around the Austin cycling community the last few days, and we have certainly entered the fray and stirred the pot a bit ourselves. Things kind of came to a head with a Monday evening story by KVUE that many thought was pretty unfair. I called KVUE out on what I saw as sensationalism over good journalism.

In response, KVUE did a followup story Tuesday evening that should have been the story to start with. Rather than inflammatory comments from a cherry picked “cyclist on the street”, this time KVUE interviewed APD about the law, quantified their survey of a Shoal Creek intersection, and interviewed someone (yours truly) about a possible solution to the problem.

So clearly we have a problem. The KVUE story reported that 61 % of the 64 riders they taped failed to stop or make a rolling stop at the intersection in question. The comments section of KVUE lit up in response to the story with 137 responses, mostly incredibly passionate and often irate statements from both sides. 

The response from the cycling community has fallen into two categories: those that feel obeying the signs isn’t necessary, essentially a harmless offense, and those who think you should just follow the law and stop giving cyclists a bad reputation. This back and forth creates kind of a conversational gridlock in the cycling community, and it appears the only solution offered is to continue doing what we are doing and expecting different results.

Background on the problem

The issue of failing to follow traffic signs and signals has been an ongoing issue on our city streets. I’ll attempt to answer “why can’t they just follow the law?”

I believe this issue stems from a couple of problems. First, bicycling law simply is not really covered in driver’s education plus since you don’t have to be licensed to ride a bike, there are people who ride who don’t have a license (yes, there really are adults in Texas who do not have a driver’s license.) In fact, City staff found ignorance of cycling law to be enough of an issue with Austin police that part of the Master Bike Plan recently passed included training for the entire APD on bicycle law. So you have people including the police ignorant of the law and people who see other cyclists treating stop signs as yields and most just follow along. This law has been inconsistently enforced in the past, and in fact I see cyclists fail to completely stop quiet frequently in front of police without ticketing. Of course, based on recent reports this may be changing. Continue reading →

From the files of form over function, we discovered the BauBike, a Bauhaus inspired bike made by Denmark’s Michael Ubbesen Jakobsen. 

Here’s Jakobsen’s explanation:

 

Image courtesy of BauBike

The BauBike is inspired by Bauhaus design. It is constructed around the geometric shape of the square and the equilateral triangle. The design is stripped down to clean lines and raw material . . . The design follows a set of formal rules, limiting the geometry to straight lines in a pattern of 60 and 90 degree angles in proportions following the principle of the golden section. 

While the Bauhaus is certainly interesting to look at one wonders about the quality of ride and strength of this frame. The repeated use of the triangle in conventional design was established 100 years ago after much experiementation in bike design. It quite simply offers the strongest frame with the least amount of material. I question a design that follows the rules of a two dimentional art form over three dimensional real world application. Still, it would be fun to watch this bike descend a staircase.

This design does appear to be a serious production model with an interesting array of accessories including a passenger seat and custom rack.

Jakobsen has set up an ordering page, but there is currently no pricing or way to order a BauBike, just a contact form.