Fixie on your 4th

Saw a hipster with a $100 haircut and recycled vintage 1970's clothes riding a fixie (or single speed aka freewheel) bicycle in downtown Roseville yesterday. Down in the flatland, Roseville is a good base if you like walking, baseball, parks, golf, motorcycling, hot rods but especially bicycles. It's really flat, so you can go long distances, looping around town with no real hills, just bridges climbing over the railroad tracks.

Brakes: freewheel bicycle

Roseville has a big railyard next to Downtown. Back in 1973, a saboteur, probably a member of the Weathermen terrorist group founded by Obama friend and Mentor Bill Ayres (guilty as hell and walking free), booby-trapped a railcar loaded with bombs heading for Vietnam. They didn't have fuses, but he wired one up enough to set off the rest. The explosion leveled the town and threw bombs half a mile into the sky, lobbing them for miles. They are STILL finding bombs in the open fields when they develop them for housing or shopping centers. There is a bomb disposal squad assigned to this project.

 

I used to live across the freeway from Roseville in Rocklin. It was hot. It is ironic, but up here in the mountains the breeze is 50 miles further but actually reaches here so you can feel it, whereas much of the time, the breeze is so faint in Roseville and Rocklin you never get to cool off. So the summer heat swelters. Up here we get serious heat too, but we're well above the inversion layer so tend to be at least 5 degrees cooler than Sacramento, and 10 degrees cooler than Auburn, and temperatures drop overnight. This morning it was in the upper 60's, but it was 99'F yesterday and again today. 

 

The inversion layer concentrates the heat (and pollution) in the summer and the foggy crap (and pollution) in the winter. The nastiness just pools down there, like in LA. We get the clean air, the breeze, and the view. But we're 25 miles further up the hill. We also have the clean water, mostly. Down there, in the winter tule fog, mornings are long and cold and grey. In the summers, they're much like here and a bicyclist who gets up at dawn can have a reasonable ride. And its flat so a 49cc Vespa works just fine. This saves a Vespa owner at least $3 grand. And stays true to the identity of a Vespa, as well. They are meant to be the smallest possible engines. I get it, they just don't work outside of flatland.

 

Up here? 12% and even 15% grades are common. That is STEEP. It would be NUTS to ride a single speed bicycle up here. It is too steep to ride a bike that can't adjust to the hills properly, and those who do ride multispeed bicycles are either serious road cyclists, on $3500 carbon fiber race bikes with really narrow tires, or mountain bikers on the way to some gravel and dirt trails on a full suspension bike with wide knobby tires. Try to keep out of the poison oak? Good luck. This is poison oak country. One does see a few folks on 8-speed cruisers struggling up the hills, which are too darn steep to climb with the included gearsets. Sorry, but they are.

 

There are also some weird locals running illegal motors on their converted bikes, jury rigged mopeds, basically. The law says they can only run 33 cc engines on a bicycle without a license or registration, here in California. We don't have the 49cc loophole that all other states enjoy. In California, if the motor is 34cc, it is a motorcycle and you need a license, registration, license plate, and helmet to be legal. Of course, the local guys were running 77 cc kits on their bikes. It would pull them up the hill faster than I could pedal, around 20 mph. This still was slow enough to make them a traffic obstacle, but they climbed the hill fast enough to not be one as long as a bicyclist gasping and wheezing up the slope of East Main Street, from Grass Valley downtown up to Burger Basin, another 600 feet higher elevation up a two-lane street with a few stoplights and a lot of traffic.

 

An electric bicycle over 20 mph is ALSO illegal and requires registration and helmet. Those cost as much as a scooter does, and the batteries must be replaced yearly, due to damage from actually using them, and the heat which changes them from batteries to a different crystal that's stable and doesn't transfer electrons anymore. This is a known issue with Lithium, and very expensive.

 

When these are you options, the smarter answer is be a good enough mechanic to fix up a used motorcycle and deal with the costs in exchange for not wheezing and going fast enough to be traffic rather than an obstacle that might be hit when they pass too close.

 

So flatlanders can enjoy single speed bicycles and feel all mellow coasting along. Up here? Its completely different. I'd still like a scooter for my commute all those warm days of summer. And fall. And a lot of spring. It would be very nice. Just be kind to my knees when you say "you just need to be in better shape because three 600 foot high hills is no big deal". Try again. I'll ride something with an engine, thanks very much.

Happy Fourth of July, and enjoy this day of remembrance for Independence Day. The opposite of the Communists in Washington DC and New York City.