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Comment by Florin_Andrei | Hacker News Reader

I just biked last evening from downtown San Jose to the southern vicinity of the Google campus. There are two main options: Central Expressway or something close and parallel to it, which I've declined. Or trails near the bay shore, which is what I chose.

Bad choice. The trails are for the most part unpaved. Riding my sleek, rigid road bike on those things was torture. Never again. If those trails were paved, that would be a pretty awesome route.

So start with paving the lesser-known trails.

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This sounds like it could be easily solved by you riding a more suitable bike for commuting. It seems people in the US fetishize road bikes with drop bars and skinny tires as the 'best and fastest' kind of bike and then complain about how uncomfortable biking is. Even in the tour de france they don't use 23mm tires anymore. Going to a wider tire won't affect your speed adversely and to an extent will actually speed you up.

https://janheine.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/tires-how-wide-is-...

"It seems people in the US fetishize road bikes with drop bars and skinny tires as the 'best and fastest' kind of bike" I don't think that true. The general opinion I've seen where I live is that bikes are toys and paying above a few hundred for one is ridiculous.

I do agree that you probably don't want a race oriented road bike if your goal is to commute to work a few miles but if you enjoy the sport and know what you are getting into then go for it get as awesome a bike as you can afford. It's better than wasting it on some huge car. Bike value should be > car value ;p

Outside the Bay Area in the US, I see a lot of hybrid and mountain bikes. In Silicon Valley, there's definitely a preference for multi-thousand $ road bikes -- and people ride them, hard.

Still, riding your carbon race bike to the office is akin to driving your Ferrari to the grocery store -- uncomfortable on rough roads, no storage space, and when you get there, where do you park?

When I bought my road bike, I tried to optimize the hell out of the performance/price ratio. You could get a pretty good road bike for less than $2k, or quite a bit less than that with some effort. Choose a store with good prices, and use all the discounts and sales you could get your hands on.

This was a few years back, but I got mine for $1200. Granted, this was in the middle of a massive sale, but still. It's even got a carbon fiber fork (but aluminum frame).

Frankly, not being Lance Armstrong, I don't care about the last few percentage points of performance. All I care is how much I get for the buck I pay, and whether I get a decent bike or not. Keep the chain lubed and the tires rock-hard, and the thing flies on most roads.

Parking can be an issue but I would hope that most large tech companies now offer interior protected bike storage. Seems like a cheap perk that keep employee healthy.

My perspective as a European is there seem to be two types. Whenever I bring up bike commutes with Americans, either the reaction is negative (with all the typical excuses), or their eyes light up and they start going on about that fixie they've had their eye on for so long. The "middle-class" of "bikes are fine tools for travel" just doesn't seem to be there - either you're dismissive or you're a "bike nut2.

Yeah that's pretty accurate from my experience too. It changes from city to city. Pacific north west cities like Portland and Seattle have a much more balanced view of cycling but on the east coast where I am now it's pretty much like you describe.

I think it is a young, hipster-ish thing. Usually people ride a mountain bike as a kid and think of road bikes as "bikes for grownups."

The width of the tyre might not affect your speed - but the fact the path is unpaved will :)

I only ride hybrids, I've ridden my hybrid on steep mountain highways and gravel roads, although mostly thousands of miles in the city. I agree that wider tires are best. However, having a durable bike with durable tires doesn't "solve" the problem of riding on gravel, it just makes it less painful. If Silicon Valley actually built a decent bike network I might consider moving there from Seattle.

As it is I'd feel like I'm paying a premium to put up with worse infrastructure.

I've commuted a few times from NE San Jose (near Milpitas) to Google MTV campus via the (mostly-gravel) Bay Trail on a hybrid bike. It's telling when the commute makes your arms are more tired than your legs... I agree w/ GP: Pave that section of the Bay Trail.

Yep get a hard tail MTB and let the suspension take the strain.

I know its not an option for everyone, but a good cyclecross bike will do wonders for that kind of commute. I picked up a hybrid bike and got a set of tires with some tread on them and I can now handle gravel fairly well, and still get good rolling resistance on the rest of my ride

I had a hybrid with fat tires, which I used to ride on trails like that. It makes the ride somewhat more bearable, yes.

But the point is - no pavement, no speed, regardless of what kind of bike your using. Pave those things, and your average speed on a bike would double at least.

Double? I doubt that. Typically, I ride ~20km/h on gravel and ~23km/h on well-paved roads at commute speeds (i.e., no sweating). Maybe the gravel roads are terrible in SV, but around here, it hardly makes a difference in speed as gravel roads are well-maintained.

The trail right along the shore is hard dirt, not quite asphalt, but passable. So that one is okay-ish.

But the connecting trail from SJ downtown along the creek towards the bay at some point changes from asphalt to literally a trough full of gravel. You'll lose a lot of speed there, no matter what kind of tires you're using.

I used to take the trails by the bay from the Googleplex to North San Jose - most is unpaved gravel, and then you pass by a smelly waste treatment plant and get on some paved trails. Even on a hybrid, it was not the most pleasant cycling.

Those were at least dedicated bike trails, which is more than I can say about a lot of other areas in South Bay. I would never attempt to take Shoreline over 101 and compete with all the drivers trying to get on the highway on-ramp.

Some lights would also be nice. Car roads get lights, why not bike roads?

I've commuted between the Google campus and Santa Clara by bike, via the Bay Trail, before. I didn't mind the unpaved nature of the trails, I was using a mountain bike. It was fast enough. On the way home after dark though, a little scary. I was quite surprised that I was not eaten by a Mountain Lion. I was more surprised by bikes going the other direction with no lights whatsoever.

Man! You guys are a bunch of complainers! I second the get-an appropriate bike line of thinking. I have a basic CX bike with a steel fork and wider tires. Riding on gravel or dirt roads isn't as fast as paved roads, but I'd hardly call it torture.

Growing up in Oregon, at a certain point I'd ridden all the roads what seemed like a million times, so my friends and I started seeking out gravel roads that were relatively smooth. We put together some epic rides on those, on our road bikes.

This was always one of my favorite climbs when going on rides from Padova:

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.4724563,11.5982143,3a,75y,18...

A bit rough to go down, though.

Why shouldn't we spend some money to pave a bike path that could be well used. When I rode on the bayshore pathway, there were parts of the path that had been partially washed out, leaving about 3 feet of 2-5 inch ruts. Elsewhere there were infrequent, but pretty much constant 1 inch ruts in hard packed dirt. Elsewhere they had filled the path with a softpacked pea-gravel. You shouldn't have to break out a mountainbike and deal with drastically changing road surfaces to commute to work.

> Man! You guys are a bunch of complainers! I second the get-an appropriate bike line of thinking.

This line of thinking got us fleets of gas guzzling SUVs and crumbling infrastructure because people didn't want to pay their road taxes after buying too much car.

you should give cyclocross bike a go

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