Sunk costs and high speed human powered transport

[green_jedi]

Late last year, soon after my move to the (glorious :) ) city of Hamburg, my bicycle started having... issues. This bike (nicknamed the Tankmobile by a friend who shall remain nameless *grin*) has been with me since before university, and has clocked over seven thousand kilometres. It's a tough little thing (mmmh German engineering :) ), and I've

Comments

[half_of_monty]

To be fair, you shouldn't really include upgrade costs.

I had a similar sort of experience, around 2 years ago. I replaced every moving part on my bike, one after the other, as they broke. This cost considerably more than the bike had done new (though that was 10 years earlier) (I am less adept at fitting own new bottom brackets etc).

The chap in the bike shop reckoned that, though it had seen 10 winters happily, it wouldn't see another and I should move on. So I bought a new bike Of Awesome which I love. And kept the old for sentimental / occasional use value.

Shortly after, the last of Duncan's pile of odd cycling devices ceased to be functional, and he moved onto my old bike.

Not only is it still going strong, but he's spent less on it in repairs in the last two years, than I have on the new one!! Despite having carefully got a new one with durable parts! (Though a bit of the damage was my fault, and another bit was due to the fact that my new college is in a sea of broken glass and I have to have top top quality tyres).

Not sure what my point was, other than spotting this as an opportunity to have a bit of a rant. Except that, just after replacing *every* *single* moving part on a bike, is a rather stupid moment to chuck it in. Which is probably what I did.

[green_jedi]

I have nothing against rants :) The fact that you and Duncan can share bikes must make things a lot easier (Meike, unfortunately, would be utterly incapable of riding one of my bikes unless she was using stilts).

At least the Bike of Awesome is still going strong! And look at it this way, the maintenance costs may not be zero, but at least they're much lower than for a car!

I agree about broken glass, I want to take people who decide to shatter their empty beer bottles in the middle of a cycle lane and throttle them. In Toulouse I got a set of kevlar-reinforced tyres which held up remarkably well until two days ago, I can certainly recommend them.

(out of curiosity, what kind of bike is the Bike of Awesome? I'm curious what other people ride...)

[half_of_monty]

Yes, I think my new tyres are kevlar-reinforced.

I have a souped up Trek. I like the shape of hybrids, more upright than road bikes, with bar ends for when you want to zoom. I've never liked the feeling of drop handlebars.

You can't get very shiny hybrids in a women's frame (insert another rant; it's not just the step-through, it's a different geometry: I don't want a man's frame!) but I found a lovely shop prepared to upgrade a lot of the components and then only charge me the difference. So it's light and (mostly) very durable. Derailier rather than hub, though. Hub gears are rather uncommon in the UK and I was warned I could find myself living in a town with absolutely no bikes shops knowing how to fix them. Pity.