Toot

Written by Space Hobo on 2025-01-26 at 14:17

There is a whole genre of youtube channels I sometimes call "Martian Bike Dude". This is usually a white man in the US who is kind of more rugged than your racing bike enthusiast, who maybe does trail riding and mountain biking. He lives in a small city or rural area with decent bike trails and low density, and reviews bicycles for an audience of people who (as Peter Walker once put it) "have opinions about groupsets".

And as a result, he thinks he's kind of outside the mainstream, pushing a newer model of more practical cycling. But he doesn't realise how niche and odd he is to the majority of people who ride bikes.

So he does things like this Brompton review: https://youtu.be/TLg0NNjDBMQ where he's NEVER ENCOUNTERED A GEARED HUB BEFORE, so he has no idea that you're meant to STOP PEDALLING when you shift. He gives it a bad review because he can't work it out, but these are basically the default in parts of the world where everyone cycles.

https://youtu.be/QV88C5ZK0x0 ← Here, he calls a straight hub chain a "BMX" chain because sport and stunts are the only place he's seen a chain that isn't fragile: all he knows is wispy-thin mech gearing that needs constant maintenance. He has no framework for understanding why an upright frame wouldn't have a water bottle cage on the downtube: in his mind you're pumping and sweating and flexible and skilled enough to bend down to take a swig while riding, instead of just pootling to a café for a lemonade later. You used to see this a lot in channels that reviewed e-bikes in the early years: "WhY nO bOtTlE cAgE? Where do you put your Performance Salt Drink and Gels????"

And he wears a giant helmet even when tooling around in circles on his own driveway, because he's just part of this odd Martian idea of cycling that is still recovering from the damage that sport and motoring have done to the US #cycling world in the 20th century. #BikeTooter

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