Cycles of History: On Jody Rosen’s “Two Wheels Good”

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31 points·samclemens··7 comments

If this interested you, there's an episode of "The War on Cars" that features Jody Rosen, the author of the reviewed book.

https://thewaroncars.org/2022/05/31/two-wheels-good-with-jod...

As an Ohioan, I always laugh when someone thinks the Wright brothers were from North Carolina.

edit It’s never someone from North Carolina.

I love bicycles but I can not understand a man who likes a slow MTB with toothed wheels more than a road bicycle with hard and smooth wheels.

It’s the first paragraph of the article.

> slim tires that routinely got banged up on New York City streets, turning the wheels into dead weights riding on thin scalps of rubber.

It invokes the reaction of "you must be doing something wrong," but at the same time, wider, lower pressure tires are a widespread preference, even for quite experienced riders.

I'll have to find the reference (J "Bicycling Science" maybe?) but I believe the evidence is that wider, lower pressure tyres have less rolling resistance on real world roads. If you're going fast then there's an air resistance trade off to make, but even for something like the Tour de France I'm told the modern preference is for 28mm tyres & for us ordinary riders wider than that would be the optimum width.

You don't want knobbly MTB tyres on road though obviously.

The title reminds me of Animal farm: "four wheels good, two wheels bad". I suppose that's pretty much what car-centric design is.

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