Why do you need a cheater bike?

To clarify, my cheater bike" is a $50 eBay 2nd hand mountain bike that I use to commute to work - not something I ride dressed in lycra pretending to be faster than other people... I call it my "cheater bike", 'cause that what it _feels_ like riding it up hills... It makes me laugh everytime I ride it.

(I do _occasionally_ enjoy passing mamils on bikes that weigh less then their brekfast going uphill on my way to work.)

Nope - that was aimed at me not them - but I'm happy to let the stereotype burn stand ;-)

I will say to a first approximation, 100% of the RadioShack lycra liveried carbon fibre Trek riders I see riding through Sydney traffic on a weekday morning are _not_ Lance Armstrong class riders.

(Not any more than I'm a Carl Fogarty or Troy Bayliss class motorcycle racer when I put my racing leathers on and fire up my Ducati Monster...).

It's mostly posing and toys, with an unhealthy dose of brand snobbery and wealth signalling (and being brutally honest, I'm guilty of a little bit of both of those myself - no matter how much I protest that "My Ducati is just a fun toy! I;m not a brand conscious poser! Not like those _other_ Ducati riders...")

Well, even among serious hobbyist cyclists, very very few of them are or can be fit for world class pro cycling. Still, it's perfectly okay to use whatever clothes and bikes they enjoy, and it has nothing to do with pretending to be world class.

I imagine a nice lycra suit would actually be comfortable. I don't know, I go with jeans and a T-shirt (when the weather is warm enough for that) but proper cycling wear should help with chafing down there as well as stopping your clothes from dripping sweat while still keeping you warm enough for when you're starting to get exhausted or the weather gets chilly. These problems exist even for non-sporty people cycling to work as long as they ride fast enough for their bodies and have a long enough commute...

Toys? I guess. I would say all hobby equipment is toys.

What a weird implication that you need to be the best to use good gear.

The pro-style clothing isn't posing or brand snobbery. Jeans are way too hot, cotton clothes get uncomfortably sticky from sweat way too fast and let cold wind go through them. Proper bike clothes allow me to feel comfortable for a long time and won't get me sick.

As for a good bike, it's just a better experience. I've owned a bunch of different bikes, starting with a old soviet fixed-gear Školnik, and ending with my current Trek road bike with fancy gear. Everything about riding the Trek is better than any of my older bikes. The gears change in a smoother fashion, I can roll on without cycling for much longer, and the effort-to-speed ratio is much better, allowing me to reach way higher speeds than ever before.

Sure, but I see guys riding to work in "pro style clothing" with Rabobank and RadioShack logos all over them. My cynicism makes it hard for me to come up with justifications for that which are not super easy to make fun of...

I get the "owning nice toys" thing - I even get the guys who are 20kg overweight spending $5k+ to get a bike that's 2kg lighter than a bike that costs 20% of that. To me though, it starts seeming weird when they do that while dressed up in sponsor logos for companies that sometimes don't even exist in this country...

(And it's not just lycra wearing mamils either, I don't get the motorcycle riders who paint Repsol livery on their Honda or Aruba or Xerox logos on their Ducati...)

Ah, you're talking about sponsor logos. I didn't get that at first. The only thing I know about RadioShack is that it's a store chain. I assumed they sell some rebranded bike clothes. Having sponsor logos on you that weren't put there by the clothing store seems indeed a bit quirky. I haven't seen that myself.

Does your cynicism carry over into teamwear for all sports? Baseball hats? Logowear in general? None of these people are pretending they are linebackers and point guards.

One thing you may not know is that logowear is like 90% of available men's cycling gear. There's an element of market failure.

Yeah, it does - and hypocritically so. I'm currently wearing a tshirt with a Kees Van Der Westen Speedster logo on it (an espresso machine I covet badly, but am not prepared to spend $10k+ to own). I own and wear various motorcycle branded tshirts and coffee brand tshirts, as well as many many band and musician merch tshirts. So I;m just as guilty of "making a staement" with what I choose to wear. But, of course, _my_ choices are all rational and understandable. Those _other_ guys who dress up like Lance Armstrong while riding to work are _clearly_ worthy of my derision, right? ;-)

A little off topic, but what's cycling like there?

From what I've heard (never been there) Australia is about as close as it gets to the perfect society... except they hate cyclists like the plague?

I commute to work on an e-bike in Melbourne. My route is mostly on trails and roads with dedicated bike lanes, so its pretty easy going. The hate towards cyclists might be a bit overstated. Some of it is justified as cyclists will often break road rules, I usually see multiple cyclists run red lights every day. Ive seen more aggression coming from cyclists then I have seen from drivers aimed at cyclists, but obviously aggressive drivers are much more dangerous than aggressive cyclists.

> Australia ... the perfect society

Hahaha

Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose? Why not ride a scooter?

Not aimed at you personally, but in my commute I'm not happy with all these motorized bicycles on the bike lane nowadays. They're usually ridden by people who don't race seriously, and are now riding 30+ km/h, but doing it as though they're still going 15 km/h: not looking behind them before passing or turning, immediately ringing their bell if you're in front of them, without first looking if maybe there's a reason why you're slowing down, not keeping distance. One slammed into me when I stopped to yield for traffic. Yield? Why would one yield?

I also ride motorcycles, but the bicycle I can ride int the lobby and take up the lift to the office - it's quicker door-to-door (over 8km) than the motorcycle, which I sometimes get to park close by but if I don't come in early I end up parking a few blocks away (or _gasp_ paying for parking).

I;m with you on the dangers of people who don't have good situational awareness zooming around on electric bikes - but I think I'm pretty good there, you don't survive 25 years as a motorcyclist doing 15-20k miles a year without being pretty good at knowing what's going on around you and riding accordingly...

Another point, I know a lot of commuter bicycle riders, and some of _them_ think the skinny-wheeled-carbon-frame crowd doing 30+kmh in bike lanes should GTFO as well... (And I've got motorcycle friends who reckon the lycra-crowd should stay off the country backroads doing 50kmh when they want to zoom past at twice the speed limit... People, huh?)

(Also, my cheater bike is _way_ cheaper than a scooter, it's a $50 eBay mountain bike with ~$130 worth of Chinese hubmotor/controller/stuff, and a $70 battery. And crucially, I can ride the cheater bike home from the pub after a few beers... )

Your cheater-bike-build sounds pretty interesting. Did you describe the build-process in detail somewhere? Or would you care to write it up?

It was a pretty complex and sophisticated process.

First you need to get borderline drunk and start browsing AliExpress late one night, then forget all about it by morning. A few months later a bike wheel with a hub motor and controller unexpectedly show up by courier at work. This reminds you why you bought that lipo battery months back thats way too big for any of your quadcopters. Then you spend an hour or two the next Saturday afternoon bolting the wheel and ziptieing the wiring and controller onto the $50 eBay mountain bike you bought a few years back when you decided it was "time to get fit" - which had been sitting in the garage ever since after having been ridden only once or twice. You then notice the battery is an _almost_perfect fit into the drink holder, and you can make it into a perfect fit but putting the battery into a stubby holder! Win! A bit of work with the soldering iron having robbed connectors and heatshrink from the quadcopter parts bin, and it's ready to go. You then hop onto the bike and cruise up all the nearby hills grinning like a loon and laughing out loud.

Im pretty sure that covers all the important steps. If you need me to check my notes about exactly what you should be drinking to get the right sort of AliExpress ordering buzz going, let me know - it was _probably_ bourbon ;-)

> And crucially, I can ride the cheater bike home from the pub after a few beers...

Not in the UK, you can't. Drunk in charge of a vehicle, no matter that the vehicle is just a bicycle.

Yeah - technically it's true here as well. Practically, short of mowing down a pedestrian in front of a cop (or some other spectacularly provocative bad behaviour), the odds of getting breath tested while riding a bicycle are close enough to zero to make no difference. (Having said that, I once worked with a guy who lost his driving license after getting caught while riding a horse home from the pub - he was the kind of angry mouthy guy who was gonna end up like that somehow anyway, I suspect he worked quite vigorously at getting the cop worked up and angry enough to bother doing it...)

In Germany the same.

If you are caught drunk (over the legal limit) on a bicycle, they will remove your _car_ driving license ( if you have one) and you either the let the bike there and call a cab or you have to walk with the bike home. Of course, next day you need to pay them a visit to pick the driving license :).

It's not so much a comment on their situational awareness, it's that they're riding one vehicle with the style of another. It's behavior that would probably be harmless if they were going half the speed.

If you drive a car as though it is a motorcycle, you're also disrupting traffic and creating danger.

Surely the purpose is to get to work. The motor certainly doesn't defeat that.

A scooter's harder to park. And depending on how long your commute is, half-cycling might be the right amount of workout/time where cycling the whole way would be too much. (I sometimes take the train halfway to work and cycle the rest of the way or vice versa).