Credit: Jason Collins
But what about Japan? If you’re not the crazy gaijin (hi, Dad!), you’re expected to fit in and wear the suit and tie at most corporate offices. And yet you’re also expected to bike to work, or take public transportation, and Japan gets very hot, folks. So how do they do it, and how can I take lessons learned from Japan’s commuter cyclists and apply them to my life?
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Tags: bicycle, bike to work, japan
Just a year ago I went to Japan for the first time and was amazed. It was beautiful. Totally different than I had ever expected, but entirely worth the journey. I saw a lot of things I’d never seen before and attempted to take it all in with savoir-faire. One of the things I saw in Japan that weirded me out were the construction workers.
Yes, that’s right. Construction workers.
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This comes as a shock to some people, seeing as you’ll never see me biking in a US city without my helmet, but I am not an advocate of helmet laws. Part of it is my Libertarian leanings that make me desire less laws out there, but part of it is science. If I get hit by a car, helmet or not, I’m in trouble, and the odds are it’s not my head that’s the problem. More likely I’m going to break my back, my neck, or my limbs if I get hit by a car. And by the way, the helmet’s really only effective if I hit the ground at 12mph.
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Yesterday I had an experiment. REI has a promotion to Bike Your Drive, go green and so on and so forth. It also has an iPhone app that hooks you up with EveryTrail so you can record your bike routes and put them on the internet, logging your average speed, distance, calories burned, gas money saved, etc etc. Putting aside the creep factor of everyone knowing your commute, and the fact that the website interface is (and I apologize for saying this) Web 1.0, the real problem I had with the app is that it is near worthless for the short-distance commuter.
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The second most common question I’ve been asked, since getting my bike, has been ‘Why is that teeny bike so heavy!?’ At 24 pounds and change, yes, my bicycle is a little heavy for it’s size, and it’s also fatter in some weird places compared to a ‘normal’ bike. It’s best to think of my bike as a ‘hybrid’ (half road, half mountain) since it’s tires are a little fatter than a road bike, but not as knobby as a mountain. When you look at an ‘adult’ bike, it’s about 40 to 50 pounds, which always made we wonder why people think mine’s heavy. Half the size, half the weight, and yes, at 25 pounds, you don’t enjoy lugging it up three flights of stairs every day, but there it is. But what does the weight really matter?
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