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

[fashionablyevil]

If you decide you need a new one, Joe loves his Surly Long Haul Trucker. Probably more than 500 euros though.

[green_jedi]

Wow, that's a fairly serious bike - what does he do, go on cross-country tours?

[fashionablyevil]

Not yet, although I think that's the (eventual) plan. At the moment, he enjoys zipping all over town and taking advantage of the gearing to climb some pretty nasty hills (smirking at the roadies that he overtakes) :)

Plus, he just got a Brooks saddle for it (which apparently last for at least 25,000 km), so I think of it as a long-term investment.

[half_of_monty]

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

[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.

[ext_72852]

was the hub not fixable?

[green_jedi]

No, not as I understood it. The mechanism which lets the hub freewheel in reverse but drive forward was broken, so it was freewheeling in both directions.