The Bacon Strip

In order of importance.

Note: there is something above food, but it isn’t clear what it is…

-M

Episode 3 is in the bag, we need to schedule a TBS episode ASAP.

-M

Photo by forkgirl

Here’s the situation, You have a road bike and a mountain bike and you want to use one of them for your commute to work, daily coffee shop run or to do a drunken pub ride.

Problem is, those bikes have fancy clipless pedals that make it tricky and dangerous to ride with sneakers (which are great for strolling), and your clipless shoes are hard and tight and uncomfortable and crappy for walking. So what do you do? Take a pair of shoes? Deal with the clips? ride carefully with your sneakers on those tine little pedals?

What if there was a sturdy, safe, and robust product that could convert any clipless pedal to platform and solve this problem for less cost than a new set of pedals that won’t send you running for a pedal wrench and trying to remember which one is back threaded…

We may soon find out. My sister is designing just such a pedal for an engineering class @ UNR. Please help her out by taking this survey she and her team needs to gauge the marketability of the product. With our help she’ll be the first bike product development engineer on the team!!

Click Here to take survey

-M

In a crisis, people take drastic measures to correct a problem. I’m observing quite the opposite though. It seems as if people would rather accelerate towards the cliff. People are driving more aggressively than ever, and road rage is a common sight.

Many of us here in bacon land ride bikes as basic everyday transportation, not just for recreation. And if you look around, we’re not alone. The good weather and the bad gas pricing has nudged people out of the bucket seat and onto the saddle in recent months. Still, as Jeff points out on bikecarson.com, you’d be hard pressed to call this a sea change.

I’d add to the discussion that getting around without the use of your car at least once a week, or even once a month, if everyone does it, can save money for fuel, maintenence on your car, and save us all a lot of money on maintaining the roads. Check out the RTC Washoe Website for information on Public Transportation and the RTC Rideshare program, where you can use a database to connect with people with similar schedules and commuting routes EVEN ON BIKES.

Also, let’s not loose sight of larger problems when gas prices are high. Carbon emissions and air quality is still a major issue here in the Truckee Meadows. Hopefully our resident CO2 expert can elaborate on that for us. And riding some crappy moped you bought at a garage sale might save you some cash, but it’ll put out way more emissions than an H-2. In the long run that will be seen as stepping over dollars to save dimes.

And I can’t help but wonder when people will be priced out of their pickup trucks. I’m not talking about people like the GrislyBikeGeek who uses his truck for work. I’m talking about that douchenozzle in the magnum powerwagon with dubs and the NorCal sticker who floors it on the green and rides your ass only to have to hit the breaks going uphill! You have to assume that behavior will change before people get rid of their vehicles which obviously are closely tied to their self image…

-M