Let's All Stop Being Stupid About Scooters (Especially you, San Francisco)

My Spartan Sports FS-101 Electric Scooter (bought Summer 2004)

This is a bike blog but I'm going to deviate from my brand a little bit and talk about scooters. I figure IHOP is changing its name to...IHOB, which can only mean it is branching out from Pancakes to Bed, Bath or Beyond, so I can veer off the cycle path slightly.

Something you may not know about me: I am an urban electric scooter expert. Really. I had an electric scooter and used it frequently in the city of Stamford, Connecticut fourteen years ago.

You heard that right: my expertise in this "new" and "bizarre" form of urban mobility predates Twitter, Tesla, and Bitcoin.

Here's what happened: In June of 2004 I moved from rural New Hampshire to Stamford, Connecticut. It was a big adjustment going from a 800 square foot house 20 miles from the nearest movie theater - and an acre away from the nearest neighbor - to a 400 square foot apartment on the 5th floor of a crowded building on 700 Summer Street.

Part of this adjustment came in the form of me realizing cars were a pain in the butt. In the beginning my job was less than two miles away and the 3,000 pound glass and metal box that had served me so well in New Hampshire felt cumbersome, slow, and unnecessary most of the time.

So in the summer of 2004 I bought an electric scooter: A Spartan Sports FS-101 from Amazon for $199. Two lead acid batteries, small pneumatic tires, and all-steel construction It weighed as much as the Chrysler Building but it folded and was perfect for city life. I'd charge it overnight and scoot to work. Then, as I did most nights back then, I'd scoot to the Metro North station, go to Manhattan, and zip from 42nd' street to my girlfriend's apartment on 32nd between 1st and 2nd. I'd spend the night, then early the next morning I could scoot to Grand Central and, after the 45 minute train trip, could scoot back to my tiny apartment so I could shower and change before returning to work.

The top speed was an advertised 15 miles per hour. Most of the time it felt faster. The range was about ten miles or so - I never really figured it out but discovered one night that running 40 city blocks to get Thai food and bring it back to my girlfriend's apartment killed the battery. 

The scooter beat having to pay cab fare, allowed me to move quickly without dirtying my clothes, and, since it wasn't a bicycle it was permitted on Metro North (which, as you've heard me complain about many times, doesn't allow bikes on trains during peak hours). But when my girlfriend and I finally moved in together in Stamford I didn't need that part of the value-add as much, and about a year later the motor started to fail. Soon it was mothballed and was shoved in my basement for years until I gave it away before driving (with a bike) across the country to California in 2015.

So I am a scooter expert. You'll probably see me one day on CNBC or Bloomberg News talking about something happening in the urban scooter universe and you'll see my name followed by the words "Scooter Expert."

Naturally I was a little amused when, a few months ago in San Jose, electric scooters suddenly began to appear on the sidewalks. I wasn't sure what they were but saw the "$1 to start" signs on them. Then they multiplied. Then they became things that every street has that you almost don't pay attention to like plastic alt weekly newspaper boxes or pay phones that no longer have any phones in them. 

And something happened. People became stupid.  

I am referring to everybody. The scooter users too stupid to not block wheelchair access. The ones too lazy to use the kickstands. The ones who zipped too close to pedestrians for fun. The ones who threw them into San Francisco Bay. 

Lime Bike discarded by some nincompoop in San Francisco

 Not just the customers: the scooter companies who followed the man-this-is-getting-old! Silicon Valley ethos of asking for forgiveness before asking for permission and trading manners for free press. The San Francisco - and other city - government officials who moved quickly to make sure the nightmare of clean, reliable transport would end before anyone had the nerve to question car culture. 

On a dockless Lime scooter in San Francisco. Note the dockless motor vehicles trudging along beside me.

I could hardly log onto Twitter without seeing some stupid person complaining about scooters in some way, shape or form. Yuk-yuk-yuks! of dockless scooters in trees or underwater were frequent. #Scootergate began to trend. What was going on? 

Base of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, May 2018. Note the five empty cars get more safe and secure housing than the guy living in the tent. 

I felt people were losing their minds over the wrong things - as usual (I've talked about the 'disproportionality of fear' all the time). I was finally pushed past my limit last week at the news of a rally in San Francisco where Google's buses were being protested by having several dockless scooters tossed in front of them. 

I understand the anger and helplessness that comes with being displaced (or having to worry about being displaced) but that was just stupid. What exactly did they want the Google workers in San Francisco to do? Have them all buy cars so they'd have to lobby the city to tear entire city blocks down to build the garages they'd inevitably need to store them all?

I tweeted out the picture above trying to lend sense to the madness - which is something one should never try to do on Twitter.

The reply I got was just something else - and it was delivered by a "group" that seems very common in these parts: NIMBY meanness disguised as compassionate social justice.

My reply to their assertion that density "causes harm" and that "scooters kill" was made several days ago and never returned. And the this I am referring to is the it-would-be-funny-if-it-wasn't-true story of a Tesla crashing into a Starbucks on bike to work day. I reasoned that if that driver had a scooter that day - heck, if more drivers had scooters every day - this kind of crash wouldn't happen. 

You know, car crashes - those filler news stories describing the cars, SUVs and such things that kill over 40,000 of us every year? Those crashes that are a lot less interesting to talk about than a boomer who got scared when a scooter zipped close to him or her while enjoying some free parking.

And as you've probably figured out by now, I have the LimeBike app and have used it a few times (mostly trips in San Francisco where I didn't bring my own bicycle and FordGoBike - for which I have a membership - didn't have a convenient station) but I want to tell you about one trip in particular: that girlfriend I had in New York City that I visited on that Spartan Sports FS-101? She's my wife now and that ridiculous, 14 year-old scooter with a hamster lifespan is part of why we've only owned one car between us for the more than 12 years we've been married. 

A couple of weeks ago I needed to meet her in San Francisco, far from the Caltrain Station, after work one evening. It was an actual, grown-up event that had a start time and everything so I needed to figure out a way to get across the city quickly. 

OH NO! It's a dockless scooter on the move! Hide your children! Warn your neighbors!

So I took a FordGoBike to Diridon, took the Caltrain to San Francisco, unlocked a scooter at 4th and King with the app and hummed the final four miles to my destination. I passed every car on the Embarcadero like it was standing still because most of them were. 

When I got to where I wanted to go I found that my $1 start-up fee and $0.15 per minute was well spent - and it was cheaper, faster and better for the environment than a car would have been. I found a place on the sidewalk that wasn't in anyone's way and deployed the kickstand. SEE HOW HARD THAT WAS?

That's the first antidote to scooter stupidity. Behavior of the end user matters - and this is something that'll be a rude awakening as tech moves further into the Internet of Things. Silicon Valley is long used to federal rules that shield them on the Internet when people who are stupid and mean do things like create mysogynistic chat groups, or a racist Twitter account. But with app-based transportation, you're now in a place where the dolt who leaves a Bird scooter blocking a sidewalk is not protected by free speech. 

The second is to realize that car share - which was the only real alternative for me to get to that part of San Francisco by such-and-such a time - is contributing to car blindness. Ride share services like Lyft and Uber make traffic worse and the same can be said about pollution. Self-driving cars have already killed people and aren't solving the street safety or obesity or suburbia problem either. 

The third antidote to scooter stupidity is to start realizing how much valuable space is given to cars - not just in our cities but in our minds. Start erasing the need for owning your own car - and even the need for riding in others - and nothing but good things can happen in cities. Yes, LimeBike, Bird and others followed the same, tired, Always-Be-Obnoxious playbook when launching these things but if they and we stop being stupid maybe cities will let a few inches of storage space here so scooter users don't have to fight pedestrians on the sidewalk (like cyclists do with pedestrians in Tokyo). If these things were set up to take space away from cars to begin with it would be a much more welcome disruption.

Also please consider parking docks - on the street that take space away from cars! - with solar panels and windmills to give the 'gig workforce' angle a rest and to annoy the Prius Worshippers in San Francisco even further. Hey, I predicted Barnes & Noble would regret trying to split Nook from the rest of the company (correctly) and four years ago I said bike share would eventually create incentives to self-balance fleets (correctly) so maybe I'll be ahead of the curve once again. I may be. I'm a scooter expert. 

So everyone, please: stop being stupid about scooters. Blame on the rollout and aftermath is everywhere but that is no reason we shouldn't figure out a way to work this into transportation and take more space away from cars. If you're in San Jose go to the DOT meeting on June 21st and provide input (read: drown out the voices of any 'Footloose' town elders who want to use cities as car storage facilities. 

That's all I've got.  I'm going back to writing about bikes. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.  

The summary of all of the arguments I've ever hears against electric scooters.

Biking (Again!!!) In New York City

New York City, Dec. 22, 2017

"This is the year we spend Christmas alone at a Denny's in Witchita, Kansas.

This is what I tell myself every time the trip from California to Connecticut begins. There are so many interconnected stages of the journey barely holding on to one another that if just ONE thing goes wrong it can be chaotic - and if that one thing is the flight, that's it. 

In the span of 25 hours, I took one overnight cross country flight, three Lyft rides, three New York City cabs, a Metro North Railroad trip, a two-hour Amtrak trip, and two car rides from friends and family just to get from San Jose to a small house in Mystic, Connecticut where my parents live. This is where I learned how to kayak when I was a kid. 

Worth the trip. 

But as I started to tell you in my last post my relationship with Christmas has changed since I moved to the Bay Area. If you host a Christmas gathering at your house your relationship with Christmas - when does everyone arrive? Where do they sleep? What do we eat? - is the same no matter what happens to your guests before. But if you have to spend two hours in late November trying to figure out how to travel two hours of a 25 hour journey, your relationship with Christmas is going to be affected.

Mine sure was, and I was feeling it as I was groggily wandering New York City around ten in the morning on Friday, December 22nd. 

Because of the way the day was structured, about two hours after the plane landed (In New York and not Wichita! Woo-hoo!) I had about two hours to myself near the corner of 8th Avenue and 16th Street. It was cold and I was wearing a wool coat I had mashed into my carry-on and a hat with matching gloves that only sees action when I visit the East Coast. 

After a long red-eye flight all I wanted to do really was sleep. But as I wandered up 8th Avenue I soon came to a CitiBike bike share rack. 

I normally dislike biking without a helmet (like the talented writer Karen Kefauver, I believe one should bike in the world we have, not the world we wish we had) but I looked at 8th Avenue. It had a protected bike lane that stretched as far as the eye could see. 

My jet-lag addled brain hatched a plan: I'd get a bike, ride up to NYCeWheels (a bike shop I used to blog for that specializes in folding bikes and urban scooters) and do some shopping.

As you know by the white paper I wrote a few years ago about Bike Share in London, I'm well versed in how to use a bike share bike when you don't have a membership: stick in a credit card, follow a few dodgy prompts, and unlock a bike. It's easier than I remembered, and unlike London I knew where I was going. 

At least I thought I did. NYCeWheels had changed locations since I had last been there - they are now on 58th St. between 1st and 2nd. A little closer than I thought but still over three miles away. 

So I pedaled north.

It was the longest period of time I've spent on a protected bike lane, and this was a pretty good one. I've never liked bike lanes that keep me corralled in such a way I can't get back into traffic easily (like when I want to make a left turn) but this one worked pretty well.

I also enjoyed being outside in a city I still feel more at home in than I do now in San Jose. I briefly thought of the ten Five Boro Bike Tours I had done and wondered if there'd ever be an eleventh. 

Never mind. 

I made it to NYCeWheels a little after 11 in the morning. Lucky for me their new location was easy to find. And the little ramp they had outside leading into the shop seemed inviting. 

With no docking station nearby I simply rolled the bike inside where I got to see NYCeWheels' new digs. 

They had definitely moved up. Their old location was tiny and this one had the room for plenty of Bromptons and quite a few accessories. I've admired these bikes for years - and my admiration only went up when I got to tour the Brompton factory in London a few years ago. 

I bought about $200 worth of stuff that I couldn't find in the Bay Area - and I reasoned it was worth having to carry this stuff the rest of the entire Christmas journey.

First I needed to bring it back to 16th and 8th. Luckily I easily latched my complimentary plastic bag* to the front rack. I checked my watch. I could just about make it if I hurried. 

Sufficiently warmed up at this point I definitely pedaled faster to get back. Not in the relative safety of the bike lane for a chunk of the way I shared the road with cars and felt the kind of pleasant, Premium Rush-ish "I'm home" feeling I hadn't felt in a while. Almost no electric cars, no Access OK stickers. Just potholed streets, ornery drivers, mysterious vapors rising from the street. New York delivered a cycling experience that only New York can - and I was thrilled to be a part of it. 

I returned the bike to the docking station and walked briskly to the meeting point at 16th and 8th with minutes to spare, holiding my bright green plastic bag. I ended up stuffing the contents into a suitcase and later made it up to Level 5 of Luggage Tetris to make everything fit to go home. 

Now this may just sound like a nice story, or a good way to pass time, but I like to think it's more than that.

You see, The New York Post recently published a column by Steve Couzzo titled This is the Single Biggest Threat to Progress in NYC. Couzzo correctly cited traffic as a huge problem facing the city but, like so many others who defend cars, is pounding nails into his own forehead and blaming others for the headache.

Read his piece (as well as the other cringeworthy article from the Post editorial board bashing congestion pricing). 

Cities have outgrown cars. We need people to drive them less. Our lungs, bodies and financial solvency depend on it. 

Congestion is caused by car traffic and productivity is lost. Part of how to combat that is by creating safe bike lanes (like the one I enjoyed) and giving people more opportunities to use a bike in the first place (like bike share). 

Think for a moment: $200 went to a small retailer in New York City I never would have gone to since a taxi or Lyft would have been too expensive and slow. But the city provided infrastructure and means for me to stimulate the economy. 

Couzzo and those like him probably just defend cars out of habit - or because they drive one themselves and just want to get to where they are going faster. So they peer out of their windshields and make checklists of things that should go away to enable them to do that. But nature abhors a vacuum, and cars will take up any space that we give to them. So taking away bike lanes will only make car traffic worse. 

The city is moving in the right direction. Yours might be too. Some streets are being taken away from cars altogether, which is what needs to happen more often, not less often, going forward. We also can't deny congestion pricing will help NYC even more. 

So keep moving forward, New York City and other cities. Ignore the naysayers who don't understand the concept of induced demand. Take more from cars, give to cyclists and pedestrians. And I will make damn sure I'll visit more shops again even when busy travelers like me only have a narrow window of time to shop in New York. 

I have no ending for this, so I will show you a picture of where I biked on the West Coast on New Year's Day: Fort Ord.

Happy New Year, and thanks for reading and thanks for riding. 

*you can't get that so easily in California. 

Biking Nations: In Manchester, UK with the USK

I got over the jet lag from my trip to Japan about fifteen minutes before I boarded another intercontinental flight. Those Urban Sketchers - the passionate pen and paper people - were the reason my wife and I were making this trip. 

Portland, Oregon was the site of the first Urban Sketching Symposium. That was the only one my wife didn’t attend (which obviously means I didn’t attend it either). But each summer since then I got to go along with her and go biking while she’d sketch and attend helpful workshops and seminars: I basically owe the USK the Biking Nations series of posts since I got to do Portugal, Dominican Republic, Spain, Brazil and, last year, Singapore because of them - I also always learn something new each time I’d have one of these adventures. 

This year the symposium was held in Manchester, United Kingdom. I’ve biked in the UK many times but only in and around London. 

We did stop briefly in London before heading to Manchester by train. Still in the clothes I wore on the plane and functioning on 93 minutes of sleep, I went up 311 steps up The Monument to the Great Fire of London (called ’The Monument’ for short) because nothing quite diminishes the effect of jet lag like going up 311 steps to look out over London. 

We also did a side trip to Oxford where, unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to ride. But if you are a cyclist and go to Oxford, you should stop at Bike Zone and go to The Handlebar Cafe & Kitchen.

Bike shop on the first floor. Cafe on the second. It’s a beautiful thing.

No trip to London is complete with riding a bike share bike. Since I hadn’t ridden this essential, wonderful and imperfect bike share system in over a year the bikes were now labeled Santander. Well-versed in how to use the system (and already carrying my helmet with the little rearview mirror mounted on the non-U.S. side) I took a short ride - admiring a staircase with a little ramp on the side.

My warm-up, pre-Manchester ride originated in Canary Wharf - which was where my wife made a warm-up, pre-Manchester sketch.

By the time we got to Manchester, I was raring to take the Bike Friday out of the case. It had been in Japan only two weeks earlier and I only had a couple of days between trips to get it back up and running again - which I did by replacing the rear tire and giving it a brand-new tube. 

Manchester is a beautiful city even though there are still some Brexit scars visible.

As usual, the urban sketchers captured the city better than I did this trip (See my wife’s beautiful sketches as well as ones belonging to Rita, Orling, Jessie, Fernanda and Amber - and do a social media search for #USKManchester2016 and offer to buy the originals from these and other talented artists). 

I have an excuse for taking a smaller number of photos than usual: it was raining. A lot. After more than a year of living in precipitation-starved Silicon Valley, I forgot how annoying it is to bike in the rain. But if one is cycling around Manchester there are plenty of bridges you can hide under when the skies open.

We stayed at Innside Manchester, which had a comfortable room, a convenient location, a breakfast buffet made for hungry sketchers (and cyclists) and a short walk from Harry Hall Cycles - the perfect place to buy a patch kit (more on why I did so later) and admire, yet again, Bromptons.

I found that riding around Manchester was a little easier than London: not quite as dense and at a pace that wasn’t turned all the way up to eleven. Infrastructure was scattered (but to Manchester’s credit a light rail is being built and that was the cause of a lot of the construction I had to contend with).

A particularly memorable moment when infrastructure did make an appearance was the Manchester Cycleway: a protected bike lane (learned more about why these matter from the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition Bike Summit the other day) with its own traffic signals.

I’m not going to say I got bored biking around Manchester but I did want to really aim high this trip and bike to Liverpool - about 35 miles to the east. On my second day of biking in Manchester, I made a go by using the Trans Pennine Trail. 

This wasn't the ideal terrain for 115 psi road tires. 

Very quickly, I discovered that a lot of the trail wasn’t paved. That’s fine, I thought. I’ll just ride anyway like I did up the mountain roads in Paraty. 

Unlike Paraty, I got a flat almost right away. I set the bike upside-down beneath an bridge to get out of the rain and quickly realized that horses use the trail as well since I could see (and smell) horse excrement that was sitting just a few feet from me. 

In spite of the omen, I pedaled on...and got a new flat barely a mile later - just as the rain was picking up. I stopped beneath another bridge to again get out of the rain to change a tire. A few mountain bikers (who were undoubtedly smarter than me as they were all riding pedal-powered versions of the Christopher Nolan-era Batmobile) offered to help but I had all the tools I needed. 

An old man walking alone on the trail stopped under the bridge to get out of the rain himself, and he and I talked while I mended my tube. His name was Patrick and was born in Ireland. I appreciated his company but just like The Washington Post said not too long ago I ended up having to answer his concerned questions about Trump - and also about mass shootings.  I couldn’t give him a good rationale as to why the U.S. has both, and when the rain subsided he headed off on his way. I never saw him again.

Hopefully, the next time I am in the UK I will be instead asked about happier subjects like, say, for instance, Lorca. 

Soon after the tire was changed, I headed off and the rain began to pester me once again. Just as I was wishing I had fenders, I stumbled across a front fender that looked like it had fallen from a mountain bike. I picked it up, broke it in half and fastened it to the Bike Friday in the hopes it would at least keep tire water from hitting my butt. 

Soon after attaching the fender - which I’d end up taking back to San Jose with me - I  became confused at a detour sign. 

Then I became lost. 

Or at least I think I did. Despite the international phone chip I put in my iPhone that gave me access to Google Maps I wasn’t sure I was even on the trail anymore. All I did know for sure is there wasn’t a chance I’d be able to make it to Liverpool and back without my wife and her sketching friends launching a search party. So I abandoned my effort and searched for pavement. I found it by crossing (what I later discovered) was private property. 

After stopping at a random fast food restaurant for a late lunch (that was so late I was bordering on ‘early dinner’ territory) I headed back to Manchester by trying to ride along the canals. 

Again, not all of it was paved but it was nice to look at. 

When I returned to the hotel I discovered, to my dismay, that my rear tire had gone flat for a third time. It was irksome. I didn’t understand how I could ride up a mountain and back in Paraty and only get one flat for the entire trip (in the hotel room, no less) but a brand-new tire and tube in Manchester, UK already had this many punctures. 

Before meeting up with my wife and her fellow artists I headed to Harry Hall Cycles for another patch kit. I had brought two new ones with me (lesson learned from Barcelona, Spain) but at this point I was worried I’d run out. I ended up purchasing the glue-less kit from Park Tool - and hoped I wouldn’t have to use it. 

The next day it was raining again, but I decided to bike to Liverpool. This time, I was going to use the A5 and I stretched a hotel shower cap over my helmet before setting off. Soon after finding my way to the A5 in the rain something odd happened: I nearly hit a human head that was in the road. 

Well it wasn’t a real human head: it was the kind of head one would find at a hairdresser school or it was broken off of a department store mannequin. But for a quarter of a second I thought it was real. I picked it up and decided to take it with me until I found a trash can for fear another cyclist with worse eyesight would see it and lose balance. 

However, motorists along the A5 began giving me noticeably more space when overtaking. So I decided to carry the head with me for the rest of the day. 

Motorists of Great Britain: meet the woman who cut me off with her Ford Focus! Don’t let that be you!

Soon after picking up the head, I noticed a wide, paved path running alongside the A5. Almost immediately after noticing that, I got another flat tire and stopped yet again to change it. 

Even though I had once again found a dry place to mend the tire (the Park Tool patch kit worked quite well, I have to say) I was still getting annoyed at the frequency of the flats. 

“You’re not even a Beatles fan!” I growled to myself as I pumped the tire back up. “Why are you even going to Liverpool?”

The head - staring at me through the mesh of my CamelBak - declined to answer. 

I pedaled on and without even realizing it at first: the rain stopped and I had nothing but open trail ahead of me. 

Aside from negotiating the occasional traffic circle (and thus having to mingle with cars that would either gaze upon my backpack with fear or amusement) there’s not much of interest along the route to Liverpool but it was nice just to go fast. Miles dropped away one by one. 

I stopped at a convenience store for a sandwich about seven miles from the town The Beatles are from. When my odometer pushed past thirty miles I had to leave the bike path on the A5 and hop on secondary roads to get to Liverpool - passing by some unremarkable buildings to get there. Heading toward what I thought led to downtown I came to a couple of backpackers juggling at a red light; a sign was nearby explaining they were seeking tips to fund their travels. I tipped them.

A few blocks after leaving the jugglers I headed down a ramp that looked deceptively like I was about to get on a highway. But instead I was greeted by the following sight. 

I had made it to Liverpool. And the sun was finally out for real. 

I noticed my rear tire was going flat yet again so I stopped in front of The Fab Four Cafe (which is exactly what you think it is) to change it once more. 

By now I pretty much needed to do an about face and head back to Manchester, so I bought a cookie from the Fab Four Cafe, ate it, and turned around so I could return the way I came.

Before getting to the bike path that was separate from the rest of the road I had to, of course, ride in the street and thus take a photo that I have taken in just about every country and every city and every small town I had biked in: a clear path for a clumsy American cyclist with no sense of direction while cars are backed up at a near standstill.

Thankfully, the tires stayed intact and the sun stayed out. Even though there still wasn’t a lot to look at the clear skies meant I could actually see Manchester when I got to within ten miles of it. 

Not exactly tired and liking the way the sun looked this time of day I headed back to the canals, where I ran into two artists I’ve met at previous symposiums: Fernanda and Jessie. They were enthused to hear I had made it to Liverpool and back and laughed at the mannequin head that was still on my back (having been there, rain and sunshine, for about seventy miles). 

The next day I packed the bike up and headed on foot to the Museum of Science and Industry. There’s a great building there with a lot of cars and planes on the first floor…and a fun exhibit on the second. 

Shortly after, I met up my wife and the other sketchers at the closing event of the 2016 Urban Sketching Symposium. There, I learned that the 2017 Urban Sketching Symposium was going to be in Chicago. I’ll be able to ride on the right side of the road and unlike the last four out of five USK events, probably won’t have to deal with a language barrier when ordering lunch, but I’ll find a way to make another cycling adventure out of it. 

As for the head I found in Manchester: I put it in the hotel fridge and wondered if I should leave it there for my wife to discover later. 

In the end, I did as one of our sketching friends had advised me to do and put it in her side of the bed (But I ended up just showing her this photo since she had already gotten word about the head before we caught up with one another the day of the Liverpool ride). 

What I didn’t do is bring the head back with me to the U.S. - it stayed in Manchester, but I promise that whatever obscure item(s) I find on the road I will tell you about and keep. And if I find another head I’ll make either a Halloween decoration or a diamond lane buddy - not sure which. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your summer (and, if you find yourself fixing punctures frequently, check the tire to make sure there isn’t a tiny piece of glass lodged in it - and try to do it when you get the first flat and not when you get home from a fun bike trip in the UK - told you I always learn something new). Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.