I noticed recently that wurple has discovered folding bike love:

All I can say… what a fun bike to ride and it’s soooo comfortable. That’s not just due to the Thudbuster. The natural flex of the frame inherent in a folding bike also provides some form of suspension. Sure it’s not as fast and efficient as my road bike, but I think I could ride this bike all day.

Oh yeah, fun is what these contraptions are all about, I reckon. (And everyone seems to be getting into the act and even calling them cool!)

Anyway HYG‘s observation reminded me that I have a development to report on an earlier post about buying a folding bike from a supermarket, in which I said:

Of course, critics may claim that cut-price supermarket bikes take business away from small local bike shops. Maybe. But someone who is going to fork out $199 for a supermarket bike probably isn’t ready for what most bike shops have on offer anyway. And although they probably hate working on them, some of these supermarket bikes will end up in bike shops for repair—by which time the owner is a convert and the bike shop has a new sales prospect for accessories or parts or even a whole new bike.

Well I hate to say “I told you so”, but “I told you so”. A few weeks ago, I was riding along with the same commuting cyclist who’d bought the supermarket folding bike last year. And until she mentioned it, I didn’t notice that she was riding a brand new folding bike—which she’d bought from a real local bike shop. In fact, it was her second non-supermarket bike—having bought a hybrid but found that it didn’t suit her, she went right back to her hinged-bike ways.

And why not? Those things are just so much fun!

Sure, every cyclist has been abused by people in cars but that doesn’t alter the fact that riding regularly is an overwhelmingly positive thing to do. If it were not, why would people do it?

Let me give a couple of examples from the same day that illustrate my point.

Example 1

I received this message from tom [with my comments interjected]:

I know you don’t like the Around the Bay in a Day mass craziness

Gee, have I been that obvious?

but I did the 100k from Sorrento to Melbourne and enjoyed myself thoroughly . The weather was perfect and it wasn’t even that busy.

That’s great. I’ve no doubt that the vast majority of people who rode on the day had an enjoyable day out.

I did notice a few ‘semi-professionals’ getting crapped off by the ‘tourers’, but my guess is that they are just there to show us lowly folk how good they are, whereas the really fast guys don’t even enter. Anyway that’s my $0.02

Well, once a group gets to a particular size, it’s inevitable that a few nongs will turn up.

It’s possible that tom ran into some Beach Road regular hard-nuts who were shirty about ‘their’ route being overrun by trundlers. Well, that’s tough—it’s one day of the year, and it’s not like anyone who rides a bike wouldn’t know it’s on. Or they might have been, as tom suspects, a bunch of poseurs who’d entered the event to show off (although it’s not really the right time or place).

Either way, he clearly didn’t let the minor minor irritation of a few bozos like them spoil a good day out.

Example 2

When asked if they were doing Around the Bay, almost all of the regular cyclists at the salt mine looked a bit shifty and mumbled things about going off to find some hills. But later in the week I noticed a new face at the bike rack—one of the technical guys who until recently had been on our project. It turns out that my colleague was squeezing in some last-minute preparation for ATB.

He reported back this week that he’d increased the longest distance he’d ridden by more than 50%, found his two crossings of the Westgate Bridge not too hard, and wasn’t at all sore the next day. It was obvious that he’d had fun. What a great result!

But the best bit was the line he put at the end of his message which said, “Now I’m looking for my next challenge. Maybe the 1-in-20 to Sassafras.” Sounds like we’ve got a new regular cyclist on our hands there. How cool is that?

In their General Social Survey of 2005

respondents were asked to identify, among all the activities in which they participated during the day, the one they liked best. As surprising as it may seem, some people (about 3% of all workers) said that the time they spent commuting between home and work was their favourite activity of the day. Who are these eccentric people?

Further analysis revealed that one of the only characteristics separating those who loved commuting from other workers (apart from travel time) was bicycling to work. That is, 19% of workers who rode their bicycles to work reported that their commute was the most pleasant activity of their day; in contrast, this was true of just 2% of workers who drove to work.

How true, how true: Work is just something I do while I’m out on a bike ride…

But bloody hell, Canada! Did you have to go and tell everyone?!? Now they’ll all want to get in on it!

[via Philadelphia Bicycle News]