Free bicycle parts

You read that right.

Thanks to so many things:

-- The Covid pandemic

-- an aging bicycling demographic

-- too many kids who live too far from school to ride their bikes there and back

-- parents who would prefer their kids not ride anywhere beyond their own street anyway

-- the rise of e-bikes

-- the decrease in the number of adults who can or will repair their own bikes

-- the rise in not only automobile usage, but aggressive automobile usage across the country since the pandemic

... we now have a bicycle landscape where used bikes and parts are nearly worthless to the majority of bicycle riders in this country, including collectors.

Photo: Currently on eBay. These sold for nearly $150/pair as recently as 2021

Used bike and component prices were already on the way down a year into the pandemic, and with few exceptions their prices have continued to fall. A pair of Taiwanese-made friction thumb shifters that I might have paid ten dollars for in 2020 is now nearly worthless. I have a small box of 5- and 6-speed freewheels, all refurbished and ready to use on my bikes when needed. I can't get any money for them, and they will more than see me out.

There have been a few rebellious noises from the margins; a number of my bike buddies are rediscovering the joys of 26"/559 mountain bike wheels and tires and they can be found at bargain prices. Older mountain bike frames that take that wheel size can be had in good used condition for as little as five dollars on craigslist. And while e-bike sales are rising, those of us who ride older mechanical bikes are still riding them and have no immediate plans to "upgrade."

The local bicycle racing scene that I participated in nearly twenty years ago has shrunk in participation numbers and the number of local race events being promoted.

Bicycle shops are merging and closing as the market shifts underfoot. 
And while component companies are still pushing new technologies -- or reworked versions of existing technologies -- on consumers, I read every week in Bicycle Retailer News of another buyout or takeover as larger-scale bicycle companies consolidate or fold.

I am sitting on a small mountain of bicycle parts, left over from my days working in the business. I can no longer work on bikes extensively due to arthritis and other health issues, and I cannot find a buyer for all this stuff.

I tried to sell off some of my parts to local bike mechanics, but the last such interaction left a horrid taste in my mouth when the young woman who came to my house balked when I asked for forty dollars for a Brooks saddle, and glibly offered me ten.
"You'll flip it for over a hundred," I said.

"Yeah, but I'm here to make as much money as I can, and I don't do that by spending it," she replied.

I gently took my saddle back, told her it wasn't my job to make her profits for her, and wished her a nice day. She walked off in an angry huff, got in her truck and drove away. The following week, she listed a saddle very nearly like mine on her web store for $150. Whatever.

So starting next week, I'll be dropping off bags of parts and tools at bicycle nonprofits and giving them away at local bicycle events, in small batches. I no longer need them, and I cannot make money from them. So I will stop worrying about it, and just keep what I need to keep my two bikes going for a few more years.

There's an arc of existence to everything. And while I sometimes miss my stronger, healthier days in the saddle, I'm not devastated by having arrived at this point in my own arc.

Happy riding, and maybe I'll see you at a local Coffee Outside soon.

Probably gonna be my last Sunday Parkways as a volunteer

This weekend, I've signed up to volunteer at the Cully Sunday Parkways.
Since PBOT eliminated the Roving Bike Mechanic position after the 2019 Parkways, I now volunteer as an Info Booth helper.

I do this for two reasons:
1. It allows me to work while sitting in the shade and use my comfort with public engagement to my best ability. This has been a wise move since the pandemic changed my body and my stamina.
2. My only other option would be as an "Intersection Superhero," a position that means dealing with drivers trying to get through or around the designated car-free route. From past experience, this can often turn nasty.

When I volunteered as a roving mechanic (from 2008 through 2019), my job was to help bike riders with mechanical breakdowns along the route. I enjoyed being able to ride and to help bike riders get their bikes functional again.

(Photo: 2009 Parkways, a happier time.)

However, during the last three years of my 14-year stint as a roving mechanic, I was often asked to get off my bike and step up as an ad-hoc Intersection Superhero -- either because there was no one monitoring a given intersection, or more often because the assigned Intersection monitor was having difficulty with an aggressive driver who insisted on driving on the closed route, safety be damned.

In several instances, I was threatened by angry drivers; in two instances, drivers tried to scare me by accelerating their cars in my direction. The second time it happened, I didn't get out of the way fast enough and the bumper grazed my knee painfully before the driver sped off -- technically a hit-and-run.

In 2018 and 2019, the final two years before Sunday Parkways was canceled by the pandemic, there were professional flaggers at only the most major intersections along the route, and no police presence. The Portland Police Bureau backed out citing budget constraints. I suspect that the absence of law enforcement allowed the most aggressive drivers to behave with more impunity than before.

In those two years, new routes were added in outer eastside Portland, area which are more car-dependent and served less frequently by transit. They are also areas where cars are a big part of the social culture of the Latino and Black communities that were pushed out of inner eastside by rising rents.
Adding street closures in those neighborhoods aroused the ire of many living there, and to my knowledge the pushback required some rerouting in subsequent years.

Nonetheless, I went ahead and signed up to be an Info Booth heler for one Parkways event this summer. I had enjoyed it last year and figured I'd return.

Then, I got the link to the Volunteer Training Video that all volunteers are asked to watch before showing up. I understood that the primary focus of the training was intended for Intersection Superheroes, but thought I ought to watch it just so I could say that I did.
And everything seemed okay until I got to this screenshot, and the voiceover that came shortly afterwards.

Here's the screenshot.

The narrator laid out the steps to take in various situations (lost child, injury, frustrated driver trying to get through), and at the end of all that came this statement:

"Remember, your first priority is to assist neighbors in cars."

And that's when I knew that this would likely be the last summer I'd volunteer at Sunday Parkways.

Because the whole point of Parkways has been to provide Portlanders with a way to enjoy car-free streets for a few hours, three or four times a summer. That means closing off streets to motorized vehicles for that purpose. It's based on Ciclovia, the weekly car-free event that takes place along miles of streets in Bogota, Colombia. This being an American city where cars are still king, there's no way we could get away with staging a weekly event like that here.

PBOT has done outreach to neighborhoods in the communities hosting a Parkways event to let them know how it works and what it's for, and give them enough advance notice so they can make alternate arrangements for the one day of the summer when a four- or five-mile circuit of streets will be closed to cars.

In recent years, that outreach simply has not been as effective, due to a lot of practical and social reasons -- and due to the lack of a police presence at the events.
Whether it's because Covid changed peoples' brains -- and I believe it did, in some part -- or because Parkways has had a hard time connecting with communities of color and low-income folks -- which it always has, to be honest -- it's simply gotten harder to maintain the event as it has been since 2008.

We don't live in that Portland anymore, and it feels like PBOT, BikeLoud and other advocates for bike riders, pedestrians and transit users are currently fighting more of an uphill battle than ever before. Because Covid, rising homelessness, job insecurity, the fentanyl epidemic, mental health woes and nationwide polarization have made us all sadder, more afraid, angrier and less willing to find common ground with each other, and more likely to hole up in our silos.

As of today, PBOT still doesn't have enough people willing to volunteer as Intersection Superheroes for this Sunday's event in Cully neighborhood.

Still riding, just not curating much

I enjoyed a nice multi-modal ride to Laurelhurst park this morning for PDXCoffeeOutside. The weather was cool and cloudy, more like the June days I remembered from twenty years ago before Climate Change kicked into high gear.

Laurelhurst is a big, beautiful park in SE Portland that's home to many picnic areas and a pond in the center where ducks and geese like to gather. There was an organized event being set up, but nothing was happening yet. So the park was quiet and leafy-green.

We met at our favorite spot, a line of long picnic tables strung together northwest of the pond. Owing in part to the "No Kings" protest scheduled for later in the morning **, the gathering was on the smaller side, but still fun. We enjoyed one of the regulars showing off his newly-acquired vintage tandem from the late 1930s, and a couple of ducks strolled right up to the picnic tables looking for crumbs.

Since I've stopped carrying an old smartphone with me -- gave up the ghost a few months ago -- I find that I don't miss taking photos, or the expectation of posting them online later. I suppose retirement has reduced some of the expectation, but also it's a lot easier to enjoy an experience when I'm not also trying to document and curate it for others' consumption.

To be fair, though, I'm also not riding nearly as much or as far as I did before the pandemic. Long Covid altered me, and has probably changed me for the longer term. I am very glad I can still ride my bike at all, but I'm more tired than I used to be, and more reliant on public transit to shorten my rides than before. With a reduction riding, I find that I don't make as many technical demands on my bicycle. Ride, brake, shift now and then, carry a small bag of groceries and ride home.

If my bicycle life is less ambitious, it's also simpler, and that's not a bad thing.

(** I skipped the protest. I knew it would be very crowded, and I didn't want to take the risk of running into crowds of keffiyeh-clad youngsters screaming "from the river to the sea..." I just don't have the tolerance for such things anymore. Not sorry, no FOMO, no nothing. Just gratitude for being able to ride my bike along tree-lined streets on a cool June morning, peek into a few "Free" boxes along the way, laugh at the squirrels scampering out of the way as I approached, and then go home for a nap.)

The weather all this week is supposed to be partly sunny, with highs in the 70sF. That's perfect, and if I can I may try to take another ride on Monday.

(Old photo of the All-Rounder)

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Last week, I rode the Peugeot to Bike Happy Hour. On the way there, I discovered that the clamp for the right side (rear) thumb shifter had snapped. I rode there, enjoyed myself, and rode home. The next day I replaced that shifter with one from my spares box. 

I couldn’t figure out how it had broken. I didn’t remember the bike falling over catastrophically.

Today, I rode the Peugeot to Coffee Outside on a lovely morning. After I’d enjoyed coffee and chats with friends, I discovered that my Carradice saddlebag was hanging oddly on one side. While in the midst of a conversation about older bike technology still works perfectly fine and is cheap and easy to replace, I opened up the flap and discovered that the wooden dowel inside had broken. I had no memory of where or how, unless it had happened at the same time that the thumb shifter had snapped.

Perhaps my bike was knocked down and set upright again while I was at the grocery store or something. The bag dates from the late 1970s and anything could have happened.

I shrugged, rode home and replaced the dowel with a cut-down marching drum stick. I reused the original screws, taking care to start the new holes with finishing nails first. 

Works fine and should last a long while.

Roll the “Get Smart” closing credits.

It is officially and completely the absolute end of Citybikes Workers Cooperative.

The end came slowly, got really ugly, and left a bad taste in many peoples’ mouths.

Because no matter how much anyone might protest, money really can change the way people behave.

Perhaps this is why a real workers’ cooperative simply doesn’t have much of a chance working in a capitalist country like the United States. That Citybikes lasted as long as it did is somewhat amazing. That I stayed as long as I did is also somewhat amazing, but only in as much hindsight as I’ve acquired by now.

The Mother Shop, the original Citybikes location, had been home to a bicycle shop for nearly fifty years. (It had housed the Bicycle Repair Collective before that business moved to Belmont Street. One BRC member stayed behind to found Citybikes in 1986. It became a workers’ cooperative in 1990.) That building was listed for sale this week, finally closing the door on the story.

I am glad that I left when I did. 

I hope my former coworkers can all find some peace.

We aren't completely over Covid

I was tripping through the BikePortland archives this morning, and came across the articles written about Covid-19 and its impact on bicycling. Interestingly, the articles stop in late 2022. There are no meaningful references to Covid after that time at the most widely-read bicycle blog on the West Coast.

Which for anyone who is still living with the effects of Covid, is really strange and a little sad.

I rode my bicycle throughout the first year and a half of the pandemic. In Summer 2021, I got [Delta] Covid. I recovered, and then by the fall things got weird. I was experiencing shortness of breath, rapid spikes in heart rate whenever I changed positions, and a deepening fatigue and dizziness that got worse as the fall went on. By November, I was so weak I could not get out of bed some mornings.

I stopped riding my bicycle for almost a year.

Because of worker shortages absolutely everywhere, I would not be properly diagnosed until Spring 2022 with Long Covid, and brand new set of symptoms that posed a real puzzle to doctors and medical researchers around the globe. Ongoing worker shortages meant I could not begin to get treatment until the end of July 2022. My treatment was minimal, because so little was still known about Long Covid; I was issued a couple of different inhalers and advised to be careful about overexerting my heart and lungs. I received a blood transfusion, followed by weeks of iron infusions. They helped until about a month after the last infusion, when my symptoms worsened again. By mid-2023 I was doing better, and was able to ride my bike again now and then on shorter outings.

But the landscape had changed as well. There were fewer places for me to ride to. I couldn't work and I couldn't keep up with the people I used to ride with. And balance issues continued to plague me so that my rides were fewer and shorter pretty much forever after getting Long Covid.

Things slowly improved, to a point. I could play music again, and sing. I tried to book two tours, and was so exhausted after each that I knew my touring days were likely done. Then, arthritis began to make working with my hands more painful, and I had to stop playing guitar for awhile.
I was going to turn 61 later in the winter, and after months with no significant return to anything close to where my overall health had been before the pandemic, I talked things over with my partner and decided to file for SSDI (Disability).
That was a heartbreaking and frustrating process. Thankfully, I was approved after a little over a year of filing forms and waiting, and my payments began in February of this year.

I have continued to ride my bike now and then, to weekly gatherings at Bike Happy Hour or Coffee Outside; but with real limits on my stamina and a continued struggle with dizziness, my rides remained short and infrequent. Cold, wet weather became more difficult for me to ride through. All I could do was remember how young and hardy I had once been, and lament what robust health I had lost.

Long Covid accelerated my aging process a bit, and depression and grief colored my days for many, many months. With counseling and medication, I slowly transitioned from anger to grief and more recently to the beginnings of acceptance. I have a new normal, which I am still learning to identify. My heart is still okay, but Long Covid has changed the effectiveness of oxygen moving through my body. When I exert myself now, my brain gets signals that there isn't enough oxygen flowing to my other organs and extremities, and then my heart and lungs go into overdrive and make me short of breath and fatigued. This is apparently a hallmark of someone with Long Covid, and is a big reason that my disability claim was approved. I am still believed to have symptoms of Long Covid. There is no clarity around whether I will ever improve beyond what I have now, or if this will be my baseline going forward.

I have noticed some issues when I ride that did not trouble me before I got sick.

The arthritis has made braking more painful, even with exercises, gloves that I wear while sleeping, and pain medication. I am stiffer and find it more difficult to turn my neck as far as I used to to check for traffic behind me. And my IBS symptoms have grown more pronouced, with more trips to the restroom needed every day.

It's all of a piece, and there is no meaningful way to separate out specific symptoms and work on those while I learn to live with the rest. Every specific things seems to have affected every other specific thing. Since Long Covid is more likely to occur in those with autoimmune issues, I understand now that having autoimmune issues opened the door to Long Covid, and having Long Covid has affected all my other issues.

I am coming to terms with the reality that I will not have the body I had before the pandemic.
And part of that means coming to terms with the fact that I may have to stop riding my bicycle long before many other people my age do.

My sense of socialization has also changed with aging and changes in my overall health.
I simply don't go to bike-centric events as often as I used to. I still enjoy Coffee Outside, when it's located close enough to ride to. But a great deal of the rest of my bicycle life has frankly fallen off.
The Ladd's 500 was held last Sunday. I didn't go, partly because it coincided with the first day of Passover and partly because the event has grown so large that organizers had to get a permit to close the street this time. I knew that I would not be able to actually ride, and the idea of sitting on a chair and watching it all go by didn't appeal to me. It was fun, and I did it, and I don't need to anymore. I feel similarly about my racing days. They were fun, and inspired my personal growth in some wonderful ways, and I'm proud of what I accomplished. And I don't feel a strong need to go watch races anymore. It's all good, and I am at peace with it.

Covid changed everyone's life in some way. The greater the changes, the less in denial people seem to be about Covid's impact on society and the world.
It was startling to read the articles at BikePortland.org and realize that for the producers of the blog, Covid simply didn't have as great an impact.
Covid changed my life in big ways, and continues to do so even now.

It's a beautiful day today, Highs will be close to 70F. I may go for a bike ride, or just take a stroll.
We'll see.

The economy: Why we got to here

Over forty years ago, I took a high school class called Comparative Ideologies. It was the closest thing to an honors class my school offered in Social Studies -- my high school did not offer official "honors" classes -- and required instructor permission to enroll.

The class was an exploration into the history and sociology of our relationship with commerce. In a rare departure from state-supplied textbooks, we had to go to Powell's in downtown Portland to buy the sole required text for the course: Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers.

The class, and the book, helped to forever change my outlook on a great many aspects of my life.

It explained how the history of economics came to be, and how great thinkers in the discipline tried to understand humans' relationship with commerce, wealth and power over the centuries.

Through my study of these ideas, and with gentle but clear guidance from my teacher, Nadine Eisele, I came to understand that the systems in place that governed our daily lives were largely beyond my control. The best that I could do was to learn how to navigate the landscape with as much integrity as possible, and to forgive myself when I stumbled.

I learned that most of the stumbles in my economic life were not my fault, and could not be.

I also learned that because of various conditions of my birth and life, I could never work hard enough to be as comfortable as the people who ran the world.

So I decided at a young age not to work so hard, in order to have more time to live a meaningful life filled with family, friends and things I cared about.

Because of the current economic and political landscape we now live in, I decided that revisiting the book was a good idea.

The last revision of the book by Heilbroner was published in 1999, six years before his death.
It does not touch upon the world we live in now, but it definitely anticipates it and explains how and why we've come to this point in history.
I had kept my dog-eared 1981 copy for twenty years before finally donating it.
I decided to buy the latest edition available, and read it again.

Rereading it has given me a strange sense of comfort and reassurance about the choices I've made in my life, and helps me to know what may be ahead for our country and for the whole planet.

So much of what blew my mind when I was seventeen now makes more sense, and clarifies the reasons for a nearly lifelong mistrust of the "American Dream" that was sold to my generation back then. And while I admit that I feel sad at how the world has turned out since my idealistic youth, that sadness is mitigated a fair amount by the knowledge that while I could never have power over, I could -- and do -- have power to.

Understanding that difference has made all the difference.
That understanding, combined with my place on the historic timeline, have helped to soften some of the blows of how we got to here.