Bike Talk v.006🚲

A Transportation Evolution

Am I falling in love with bicycles again, I should say so? The thrill hasn’t been this strong since I was six, the freedom of having a bike allotted me liberty as a child. In 1986, bicycling through your neighborhood with your “Get Along Gang” was what we did.

Remember the scene from E.T. where the kids are racing away from the authorities to save their alien friend, that was a regular thing for my neighborhood. The racing through the streets part not so much the running from authorities, that came much later.

I loved bikes as a child, I begin to wonder when did I stop loving to ride a bike? Oh yeah, when I realized how much work is involved when your bike hasn’t evolved. When I was a kid, I didn’t mind peddling for miles and trekking up and downhills. If I was sweating, I didn’t notice at age six, seven, or eight, you know?

But at age twelve, thirteen, fourteen, you become increasingly aware of your odor. You also become less and less active, at least I did. I know I no longer enjoyed having to break a sweat when riding my bike and arriving at my destination smelling like a gym locker room.

Maybe my lack of enthusiasm for riding a bike at age fourteen, fifteen, was what powered me to learn how to drive. I got a job at age fifteen just so I could pay for driver education and eventually buy a car. When I was able to get my permit at age fifteen and license a few days after my sixteenth birthday.

The 1989 Ford Probe Coupe arrived two months before my high school graduation. Today, I’m several months shy of turning forty, as I write this blog. I currently have no desire to drive in the city, I am completely tired of city life and driving especially.

I’ve driven east coast to west coast round trip twice, I have driven from the west coast to the mid-west and back to the west coast after moving away from the mid-west. The brunt of my burnout comes from always having to commute twenty miles or more to and from work in rush hour traffic for seventeen years.

Then form driving twelve to thirteen hours a day four to seven days a week for the last three years in the gig economy. Needless to say, not having a vehicle liability and a job to commute to for the last nine months has been a dream come true.

Corona Virus has really got me thinking about what’s important in my life. The thoughts were already there before the virus but, it’s got me thinking about it on 100% now. The main thing that’s important to me is to never spend another minute of my life wasted in traffic so that I can trade time for money at a job. Like, that’s my #1 priority in life.

The fact is, in the last three years I’ve spent more than 40,000 hours either in traffic or commuting. For two years of that time, I was mainly working to pay for the very car I was only using to make money. In other words, I was only working for the car.

Perspective, that’s the best thing that has come out of 2020 for me. A new perspective, I’ve lived curiously through the life of other cultures via YouTube for many years now. What I appreciate about other cultures and countries is their ability to live life simply, in y cultures the main source of transportation is in the form of two wheels.

These countries have been evolving the bicycle to not only provide more efficiency to riders but, also more appealing designs. So far advanced they are, and the US is just catching on. Just as Tesla has come along and swept past US auto manufactures with the electric vehicle. The east has brushed past the US in the electric bike world. My friends, I am indeed sad to say I am extremely disappointed in the US.

Why and how did we allow production and manufacturing to get away from our country? Because the US is years behind on electric motor technology, all of the best electric cruises and racers bicycles are made abroad. This is a bit of a bummer for me because I want to own a small collection of bikes, all cruisers, and racers. I figure I’d slowly graduate up from least expensive to most. I’ll show you what I mean,

Although there are many websites out there of custom bike builders and manufacturers, not all of these internet sites are legit. I’ve been doing my homework on companies around the world that are making the types of bicycles that I want to ride.