Roadside Repairs
My first car was a white 1962 Morris Minor. Actually, that’s not strictly true - before that I drove my mum’s 1966 one, and her 1972 van, which we took to the Reading Festival one year. All had ‘A Series’ engines, and I could strip them down to the con-rods & rebuild them with my eyes shut - even now, I could probably fit a new set of valves in under two hours, including grinding them in, torquing the head down & setting up the tappets.
These were the kind of vehicles that had ‘character’ - they had endemic rust, rattled and squeaked, and broke down a lot. But that didn’t matter, because you could always fix them yourself, and ended up loving their idiosyncrasies. You couldn’t help becoming an enthusiast, who just couldn’t understand why anyone would want any other type of vehicle.
Modern cars aren’t like that though. I lift the bonnet (hood), and struggle to recognise the engine. And I’ve completely lost my enthusiasm for them. When I drive, I just want to get from A to B, so that I can get on with my life. A bit like most people, I guess. We live in a ridiculously car-centric country, but most people aren’t really ‘Petrol Heads’ made in the image of Jeremy Clarkson - they just want to get on with their lives, and we’ve been sold the myth that the way you do this is in a car.
So what’s this all got to do with riding a bike?
Well, there was a post about Marc in Amsterdam getting a flat on the way to the office the other day. Did he do what your average British cycling enthusiast would do, and whip out his tool roll to effect a repair (and along the way service the bottom bracket, re-lace the back wheel, and re-cable the entire bike)?
No. He did what most motorists in the UK would actually do when faced with a flat - make it as far as the nearest of many local repair shops, and let the professionals take care of it. Like getting a car serviced here, he also got a courtesy vehicle to use while his was being repaired. Though in his case, it was a bike rather than a car that he borrowed.
The funny thing is that this experience isn’t uniquely Dutch. Copenhagenize reported a pretty much identical experience this time last year.
So maybe this is a clue about the difference between the UK, and places where lots of people ride bikes for their regular daily trips. Their bikes, even though they enjoy riding them, are just a means of getting about - not something you have to be an enthusiast for. When you ride a bike there, you don’t stand out as different, special or greener than everyone else, just someone who’s going about their everyday business. And you’re doing it on a utensil that makes sense for the kind of journeys most people make.
The funny thing is, those journeys are remarkably similar to those we make in the UK.
Hmmmm . . .
Until we get there though, you might want to learn how to fix a flat:
I usually do not remove the tyre from the bike - almost all flats can be fixed without doing this.
Ever since I got my Pashley with Schwalbe Marathon Plus flat-resistant tyres, I have never got a flat.
I have a lot of sympathy with this blog, I remember lovingly maintaining elderly cars when I started to drive, and I learned a great deal about practical engineering by swapping and repairing engines, welding up chassis, and scouring scrap yards for spare parts. Modern items (not just cars) are designed to be difficult to repair, when they fail the whole thing gets replaced. Its not really that surprising in a market driven expansionist economy that there is a huge motivation to encourage replacement rather than repair. The US brand of cycle I use will not supply spare parts except to LBSs…
Cyclists are often castigated as the road users who need no training or license, but cycling (in the UK) is one of the few areas of modern life where its still and advantage to have mechanical DIY skills. Most of the people I know who cycle do so because they like it, i.e. its an active decision to use a form of transport other than the ‘default’ which is clearly a privately owned car. In countries where cycling is used as a core form of transport LBSs are extremely common and I observe most people don’t do their own repairs, and don;t much value their cycles. I noticed this in China, where for many people cycling is the default form of transport. Many of the bikes I see have obviously not seen a drop of oil for a decade, and there are cycle repair shops and dealers on most streets. People used to stop and watch me if I did minor roadside repairs on my bike. The other characteristic of China is that most bicycles are cheaply made for utility, cheap to buy and the quality of locks used (despite high levels of cycle theft) are laughably poor. Another indication of a ‘mature’ cycling culture in a country may be fairly low levels of cycle ’security’…?
So I guess you are right that we won’t know that cycling has ‘arrived’ in the UK until we also see cycle repair shops everywhere (as opposed to dealers selling expensive cycle ’sports’ items). When I moved to Portsmouth 12 years ago, one of the nice things about the area was that there were four cycle shops within walking distance, over the next few years most disappeared, but recently several new LBSs have opened. Just as its now often difficult to find a ‘parking’ space for a bike outside our local supermarkets now (despite an increase in the number of Sheffield stands), it does seem cycling as utility transport is becoming increasingly attractive. Maybe a good side effect of the recession?