Get a Real Bike!

Bike traffic is one of the most dangerous parts of living on a college campus. Living here has heightened my sense of awareness of approaching vehicles that could easily collide with me and inexperienced handlers. While I fear for my life at times when walking across the main street of campus to get to my afternoon class Mondays through Thursdays, my biggest problem with the vast sea of bikes is the fact that they aren’t even real bikes. Sure they have two wheels, a metal frame, handlebars and an uncomfortable seat packaged to look like it was made especially for your ass but in reality, these beach cruisers look like inexpensive pieces of crap that create an eyesore for the admissions tours. I know, I know: this is California, Southern California; of course there will be cruiser bikes. But why can’t they have real bikes? Besides the fact that it’s hard to differentiate between male and female bicycles, these cruisers don’t have gears or brakes; they might as well throw training wheels on all the bikes. Cruiser cyclists need to pedal backwards to come to a halt, isn’t that what we had to do when we first learned to ride our bikes? The whole thrill of mountain bikes was that they were big kid bikes with brakes for the front wheel and the back wheel. In addition to the wonderful braking system, mountain bikes had gears to switch and had the occasional chain pop out of place yearning for repair, yearning for its rider to get their hands dirty. But it seems that the mountain bike has all but faded in these parts of California. Aside from their elegant style, mountain bikes were obviously worth the money, beach cruisers are not. Bicycles are often a sign of maturity and aging. As toddlers we begin with our tricycles, zooming around the backyard with nowhere to go, content to just fly around in circles for the pure thrill of adventure. Next we get our first bicycle, complete with a set of training wheels and a parent or older sibling attached to the little seat helping us as we learn the principles and develop the muscle memory involved in learning to ride a two wheeler. Soon the wrench comes out, grinding against the nuts and bolts of the training wheels, willing them to come off, so that the bike is properly a ‘bi’-cycle. From there we learn balance and control, learning to detach our parents or older siblings from the back of our two-wheeler and ride off into the sunset, or the bushes, whichever comes first. And then when we reach that final stage of bicycle maturity, which most often correlates with our first foray into double digit ages, we get the piece de resistance, the mountain bike. The mountain bike is the final stage, even if there are no mountains in your general area. The mountain bike signifies the ability to use reasoning when biking, it helps find solutions to challenges – such as gear changing to climb a hill, or when racing down one. Bicycles are a key part of development and to revert back a stage, to the time before brakes attached to the handle bars, and where pedaling backwards is your safety net, is to disregard the steps taken to become an adult. So next time you go into a bicycle shop look past the shiny new beach cruisers and pick out the 18 gear mountain bike instead.