I’d Say I’ve Washed My Hands Of It, But There’s Still Glue All Over Them – Bike Snob NYC

Further to yesterday’s post, I peeled off the tires and applied another layer of glue:

This reduced the noise by perhaps a small percentage whilst roughly doubling the amount of errant glue on the sidewalls, so I will now advance to the “Just keep riding in the hopes that it will eventually go away” phase. In fact, I’m sort of happy for the noise, and here’s why:

Cyclists, as we all know, are subject to the whims and mercies of a host of fickle and petty deities. Of those, the two most powerful and persistent when it comes to tormenting us are the God of Noise, and the God of Flats. To appease the God of Noise, who manifests himself in all manner annoying creaks and clicks, one can often spend months or even years swapping parts, breaking stuff down, ritualistically anointing the bicycle with oils whilst chanting, and so forth. And to appease the God of Flats…well, there is no appeasing the God of Flats, for he is he is as capricious as he is vengeful. Yes, I realize the Tubeless Devotees think they have eternally liberated themselves from the wrath of the God of Flats, but at best they’ve only deferred punishment, which invariably comes sooner or later in the form of difficult-to-seat tires and dried clumps of latex and of course the dreaded Smiting of the Hookless:

But while mostly we have no choice but to deal with it as the Cycling Gods fuck with us, once in a great while we have an opportunity to leverage one against the other, and this noisy tubular debacle is one of those opportunities. How? By making the following declaration:

“I will not attempt to address the noise again until I get a flat:”

This means I will never get a flat, because the God of Noises will now hold off the God of Flats so that he can torment me indefinitely. Meanwhile, all I have to do is deal with the noise, which in this case is worth being able to ride with the absolute certainty that I won’t experience a puncture until the tire is worn to the cords.

Hopefully the noise doesn’t go away, because if it does then I know a flat will soon follow.

As for my gluing technique, let’s just say it was somewhere between “pro bike mechanic” and this guy:

The cycling gods are nothing if not unfair. I take my time and do everything the way I’m supposed to and wind up with an annoying noise. Meanwhile, this guy just schmears some glue straight out of the tube onto the rim like a toddler brushing his teeth for the first time and I bet he’s still riding in total silence to this day:

Actually, now that I think about it, I used to just glop it on right out of the tube like that myself and I don’t recall having any issues. so maybe the real problem is that I’m overthinking it.

Speaking of overthinking things, I am beginning to wonder if we are trying too hard to blame cars for all the ills of society:

It’s important to recognize the pitfalls of car dependence, but it’s also important to recognize the pitfalls of blaming everything on car dependence. See, it’s easy to read something like this and think, “Wow, if only everyone could keep that 20% they’d all be financially stable!”

However, this doesn’t take into account the fact that the notoriously car-dependent United States has one of the world’s greatest experiments in car-free living, and it’s called “New York City.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it, there used to be a popular show about it back in the ’90s:

New York City has a robust public transit network and is even more dense than the great bicycling city of Amsterdam, at least according to my two seconds of Internet research:

In the United States, over 90% of households own at least one car, whereas in New York City fewer than 50% of households have a car–and yet, the poverty rate here is at something like twice the national average, and the home ownership rate is roughly half the national average. In fact, far from being a pillar of financial stability, New York City is usually ranked as one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, despite being one of the least car-dependent cities in the world.

Of course the urbanist response to this is generally “We’re not density-ing hard enough,” and no doubt there’s a lot of truth to that:

Certainly it’s silly to make developers carve out space for cars in a city where people don’t need cars. It would be like some other city making developers carve out spaces for bagel places when the people don’t eat bagels:

[“Where’s a cowboy s’pposed to get an e’rything bagel with lox and cream cheese ’round these parts?”]

Still, while we could certainly benefit from enhancing our inherent carlessness here in New York, it’s hard to imagine our becoming a paradigm of financial stability by virtue of it, because we’re already orders of magnitude more car-independent than the rest of the country and we’re in the same shitty financial situation as everyone else. Not to put too much (or really any) stock in Internet rankings, but if anything it seems like the most financially stable places are unsexy (to the urbanist) places like Utah, Idaho, and South Dakota:

Again, this isn’t to say cities shouldn’t strive to be more city-like instead of figuring out ways to cram more cars into themselves, but it is to say that it’s a big-ass country, and that if people can’t afford their cars it doesn’t necessarily mean that cars are the problem. Is the car what’s keeping people from financial stability? Or is it something much more complicated, and this lack of financial stability is manifesting itself in all sorts of ways, including increased difficulty in covering car-related expenses? I mean it’s not like there are any other reasons financial instability could be increasing in America, right?

[At first glance it looks like England’s even worse than us with regard to college debt, but I think their student loan model is far less onerous than ours is…though I’ll leave all that to the College Loan Freds.]

Once again, I’m not saying we should be pushing for more cars, I’m just saying it can be easy to miss the forest for the, uh, cars.

So are we too car-dependent? Or are we just too dependent in general? Maybe we shouldn’t be taking on so much student debt in the first place, and maybe we should be driving less expensive cars, and maybe we should even learn how to do routine maintenance on those cars ourselves…though according to the Streetblog article that’s a bad thing somehow:

Yes, of all the things I’m worried about when I’m out there on my bike, the possibility a driver may have changed his own spark plugs is definitely at the top of the list.