Can We Make Bicycles Sustainable Again? | Hacker News Reader

Can We Make Bicycles Sustainable Again?

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

17 pointscrusom41 comments

> Disc brakes, which are now on almost every new bicycle, all have different axle designs, meaning that every vehicle now requires proprietary spare parts

There are so many errors in this article. This isn’t even close to the truth and this is just outright ignorance.

Disc brakes are highly highly standardized. Shimano for instance made public its Microspline standard and there are dozens of aftermarket choices. Shimano actually does an incredible job, making sure all of their parts between entire groupsets are cross compatible.

SRAM has their official parts, but also has myriad of aftermarket parts available.

The only issue are Walmart bikes. These are generally one off production runs that are designed not to be repairable. They will include everything from odd size tires to welded bottom brackets.

And disk breaks are almost impossible to maintain for 'regular' people. Having these integrated brakes, shifters adds too much complexity. Many people would need to have the bicycle shop maintain the bicycle and a rather decent cost.

Older bikes with separate sifters, breaks handles and brake pads can be maintained by almost anyone. When commuting, you are not in a race, but just poke along around 10mph (~16kph). Plus if you have issues on your commute, you can quickly fix (or jury rig) it yourself with only a minimal set of tools.

>> And disk breaks are almost impossible to maintain for 'regular' people

This may be true for hydraulic disc brakes but cable actuated are by far the easiest to maintain.

I guess I grew up in a different time when people weren't completely helpless with mechanical stuff, but bleeding the disc brakes on a car is not a difficult job for a backyard mechanic, and people have been doing this for decades. The hydraulic brakes on newer bikes aren't much different, and aren't that hard to do with a $20 bleed kit from Amazon. They are a bit more finicky in my experience than car brakes, but it's not something you have to do very often; I just replaced the fluid on my road bike after 4 years and it still looks like new.

How exactly are they impossible to maintain? You literally remove one cotter pin, take old pads out, put new ones in and you’re done. They self align. They wear themselves in.

Clincher brakes are nearly impossible to get aligned and to pull straight. They stretch over time and as the brakes wear they have to be adjusted to maintain what little power they have.

Mountain bikes still use separate pieces. It’s the road bikes that are highly integrated (and more costly). If you can put mtb components on your bike you’ll save a lot of money.

Spoiler: on my dropbar tourism bike I was lucky enough to have post mount brake connectors, so I bought mtb (deore) calipers, saving considerable money over almost identical road calipers.

Brifters are not anymore complex than separate brake/shifters and quite robust, you need no special tools or skills. These are not disc centric. Cable pull discs are no different than rim brakes when it comes the maintenance.

It is incredibly easy to screw up cantilever brakes as well. Braking, yes. But doing it safely and efficiently? no.

> And disk breaks are almost impossible to maintain for 'regular' people.

Can you expand on what you perceive as difficult? Sure, some people don't want to maintain anything themselves (that's fine, that's why bike shops exist), but assuming one wants to do it, bike disk brakes are easy.

Swapping pads is super easy and if the use case is "poke along around 10mph" they will last thousands of miles. If they are hydraulic you'll need to bleed them once every few years but again that's pretty easy.

If the primary focus is reliability and ease of maintenance, cable actuated disc brakes are by far the best. It is very easy to change pads and they just work. Hydraulic disc brakes have far better performance (important for mountain bikes) but eventually require bleeding, cable changes, etc. Caliper breaks can be lighter weight (good for high end road bikes). For a commuter bike however, cable actuated disc brakes are inexpensive and best.

I'd argue hydraulic disk brakes are easier to maintain. They automatically adjust as your pads wear down and won't have any potential problems with the cables corroding, wearing, sticking, etc.

I have hydraulic brakes on my mountain bike and cable actuated disc brakes on my commuter. The commuter bike requires no maintenance outside of changing pads. Every mountain bike I’ve ever owned has required semi-regular brake bleeds. This is a clear performance / reliability trade off.

Agreed. And you don't have "mystery" issues with mechanical discs, like when the piston gets gunked up and doesn't return properly when releasing the lever.

Isn't microspline for cassettes?

Disc brakes are either 6-bolt or centerlock, AFAIK.

One point it misses is that the worst bicycle (shared usage, so less care taken, aluminium so less durable, dockless so more often dumped in rivers etc.) has a lifetime emissions per km 1/3 of a car. A typical aluminium bike with the typical lifecycle of a personal bike on the other hand manages 1/20 of the emissions of a car.

If by making bikes 100% more disposable and doubling their lifetime emissions per km, but the trade off is the increased usage takes away 10% of what would otherwise be someone's driving, then you've come out ahead. (also it's not clear what the car is measuring? Is it just manufacturing emissions/km? Just fuel emissions/km? Both? I suspect it's the first option, which would make it even less comparable).

And these features that do make them less durable (lighter frames, nicer brakes) are an important part of enabling cycling for more people at various levels of fitness. To get that share they need to be seen as a frictionless transport option and not a puritan exercise toy. I have my own (aluminium) bike and I always sometimes use my city's ride share bikes. The ride share bikes are noticeably more effort, being steel, thicker than you'd make a bike for individual sale to cope with the abuse, and having giant chunks of plastic for instructions and advertising.

Lastly it misses steel bikes are still around and made by most major brands? Most of the lower end models in your bike store are still fully steel for example. With V brakes, standard mechanisms, etc. I guess the casettes are probably still a single unit or two parter rather than a bunch of individual sprockets like old bikes, but it's not like those are the high failure rate components.

> Reynolds, a British manufacturer known for its bicycle tubing, found that making a steel frame costs 17.5 kg CO2, while a titanium or stainless steel frame costs around 55 kg CO2 per frame – three times as much. 4 Starling Cycles, a rare producer of steel mountain bikes, concluded that a typical carbon frame uses 16 times more energy than a steel frame. (That would be 280 kg CO2).

These are small numbers, probably not worth stressing over. Even if we count the cost of carbon at a very conservative level like what it would cost to remove it from the air (~$160/T: https://www.jefftk.com/keith2018.pdf), these are just:

* Steel: 17.5kg -> $2.80

* Titanium or Stainless: 55kg -> $8.80

* Carbon fiber: 280kg -> $45

Of course we can, by simply restoring older bikes. My family doesn't own a car (urban environment). We own several used children's bikes and 6 Peugeot bikes (3 for my wife, 3 for myself) from the 70ies and early 80ies. Most of them I restored myself, 2 are left in a working, but dismal-looking state to prevent theft at the train station (called a "Bahnhofsrad" in Germany). Personally I find these bikes to be extremely elegant and beautiful [0]. Each cost between 30 and 200 EUR. They are quite robust and very easy to maintain (usually they have Simplex derailleurs and Mafac or Weinmann brakes, which seem to be indestructable). Some of them have served us under heavy duty (daily use with a trailer) for nearly 10 years now, easily reaching 30,000 - 40,000 km although they were already 40 years old when we bought them. Maintaining them is a nice distraction from my normal job sitting in front of screens. Original spare parts are still quite easy to get.

We actually have a large bike shop here that has specialized in restoring old bikes collected by the city.

[0] https://m1.secondhandapp.at/2.0/5c7582137ebd7b2117fe5a55?hei...

The proprietary parts of e-bikes are a real problem. I ride an Urban Arrow Family, and I love it, but I'm dreading the thought of trying to replace parts on it 5+ years from now. Nobody but Bosch can make batteries for it, along with several of the electronic components. If they won't sell me a replacement, what then? It's a far cry from older non-electric bicycles, which don't have nearly the compatibility issues as what we get nowadays.

"What then?"

Like everything with integrated electronics, it's junk.

I agree with the article that bikes are becoming increasingly proprietary, but they are still a marvel of interchangeability, even despite the myriad standards and models.

A also agree that the problem, ultimately, is capitalism. Do we really need 10's of thousands of different bike models released every year? I'm not advocating a communist-style one-model system, but we've surely gone beyond the point of 'adequate choice'. The incentive is to get us to buy a new bike as often as possible, and while that drives some of the innovation, it also drives the instinct to make parts proprietary, and all kinds of other stuff that is wasteful, anti-consumer, etc.

an embarrassing article for the author.

could have left it as

>> the bicycle itself has managed to elude environmental critique ... "because" >> Cycling is one of the most sustainable modes of transportation.

hard for me to avoid wondering whether this is astro-turfing from the auto industry.

I do not like to down vote (and I did not). But in Cities bicycles are a far better mode of transport than autos.

I almost wish there was some kind of permitting system where to drive autos in a City, in good weather, you need to prove your health and age requires an auto or you pay extra to drive. But that would be very difficult to enforce. Just look at how handicap plates are handed out.

No, I don't think so. Th author agrees it's friendlier than most other modes of transportation but that changes in the industry catering to people with disposable money is introducing less friendly aspects into this mode of transportation.

Instead of a pedal powered vehicle to take you from place A to place B with little in the form of status affirmation and other personal projections, people are moving this aspect of their psyche to cycling and adding unnecessary baggage that is realized in the form of more energy demanding manufacturing (more expensive alloys and shapes), electrification which adds to environmental issues in the mining of needed elements and faster refresh cycles (can't keep on riding a 10 year old ten-speed, no, I need this year's cargo Riese & Muller so my friends can see it)

I guess to me I'm (1) surprised that you think the social status affirmation dynamic is more at play for people buying new bikes than people riding 40 year "steel is real" bikes. (it occurs to me to ask, "what is the dif in carbon footprint between buying a complete bike and buying each cool little vintage component individually?")

and (2) that we aren't interested in _encouraging_ conspicuous consumption in bicycles. This is certainly a big factor in cars. To encourage more riding, it seems like a very positive thing for people to be splurging on bikes and proud of what they're riding. This would draw more people in compared to if they only see the Sheldon Brown types out, who they don't identify with or aspire to. it's a good thing for people to envy the secure healthy life of the average wealthy urban elite on a fancy ebike or whatever.

A lot of environmentalism has unfortunately degraded into opposition to civilisation. In the absence of a viable Christianity, the innate feeling of guilt and sin caused by consumption must be atoned for. The way to do this is to sacrifice prosperity (evil transportation, evil food, evil power plants) at the altar of The Environment. In the form of Extinction Rebellion this takes on the character of a death cult - check their founder's manifests.

Note that this is not climate change denialism or something similar - the problem is that technical progress, increased prosperity and consumption aren't seen as good and welcome, but inherently evil by a certain vocal minority. Otherwise you'd see a lot more effort into making prosperity compatible with environmental regards (like nuclear plants).

what?

The raw point is valid. Sure this a poorly edited article and lacks the best research - can we agree that like almost everything, we've engineered these things to be commercially short in terms of life-span, let alone not super-sustainable in terms of manufacture or maintenance? Aside from the continuously performance-oriented standardization shifts, the specialization of bicycle types is doing a disservice to sustainability. Also, the "electrification" of bicycles is a completely separate argument - from all angles: manufacture, maintenance and longevity; one that is no different that all EVs. TBH, this article reads like a ChatGPT dialog.

Unfortunate that we've missed another opportunity for healthy dialog around the benefits of the bicycle.

Interesting take, and some otherwise hard-to-find data on the environmental cost of bicycles.

I think the problem is tangential, in that anything that is produced primarily as a means to generate profit will be wasteful and turn into garbage as soon as possible.

I commute via bike and I've had a range of different cycles -- on balance, a custom build on a mid-80's frame is the winner. Reliable, low-maintenance, efficient.

We could easily go back to making things that work, "just" have to align priorities.

It's true that the market has a glaring gap at the low features / high quality quadrant if you plot simple vs performance ("features") on one axis and cheap throwaway vs built to last ("quality") on the other axis. But that gap isn't just some failure of the industry, it's also a gap on the demands side.

A similar gap exists in the car world, where more generous interior features are almost impossible to find with modest size and power. And manufacturers who try their luck with a small/weak car that tries to be a little more upmarket than usual in other aspects inevitably get punished by lacking demand (e.g. that short-lived Audi A2)

I think the article makes a lot of sense.

>In comparison, the average lifetime of a personal bike in France, based on a 2020 survey, is around 20,000 km – almost 50% higher than for shared bicycles.

Well, I am proud to say I got 38,000 miles (~60000 km) on my commuter/touring bike. It failed when the steel frame cracked, and the manufacture replaced the frame for free because it was due to a defect. I had kept the original receipt and brought it to the shop were I originally bought it.

Also the crack did was not a failure and I was able to ride the last 5 miles (~8km) of my commute without issue.

The writing is on the wall for bicycles and no, they will not be sustainable again but e-bikes will. In 2021 the Dutch, for the first time, bought more e-bikes than regular bikes. It won't be too long before anything ICE will be banned from city centres, the roads can be covered (because of no poisonous exhausts) and e-bikes will reign supreme.

I havent read the article, but they have stopped manufacturing unpuncturable tires, as tubes are the main income source of bike shops. It is possible to make tires that will not get punctured in 10000km.

Bike shops make like $0.25 on a tube, there is little profit in them and you are conflating tires and tubes. Any proper touring tire will be very puncture resistant if you don't mind the increased rolling resistance, I have only gotten one flat with Marathon Mondial's and that was an installation failure, my fault.

I am passing on what the bike shop owner said, when I went looking for unpuncturable tires. They sell a ton of inner tubes.

This article is all over the place and is ultimately the author attempting to validate his opinion, he is just saying "old is better because I like old better than new." Nothing wrong with an old frame but a great deal of the hardware has undeniably improved and much of that new hardware will not mount on an old frame. The real problem with the modern bike market is people following fads and counting grams but they are also the sort of people who keep bike co-ops in operation so I can not really call it a problem, if they want to strip their brand new bike of their 105 or Tiagra groupset and donate it to the co-op than I am all for that, Tiagra and 105 are great and take far better to abuse and neglect than the fancier options. The FSA Mega-Exo crank is another one that people love to donate brand new, they complain about the the BB being expensive and there being no alternatives for its odd spindle size but the only external BBs which I have found that hold up as well are twice the price. The offerings from Wheels Mfg are the only ones which I can call comparable, twice the price up front but the bearings are replaceable and cheap so costs balance out after a decade, but they do not take as well to salty winter streets as the FSA does.

I outfitted a 1982 steel bike frame with 2016 brand new components. No issues then other than bending the rear to take a 130mm axle rather than 126mm. Are 68mm english-threaded bottom brackets and cranks becoming unobtainium in new groups?

68mm is still common but there are plenty of old frames which used oddball BBs. 68mm will probably be around for a good while yet, there is a push for something else, only time will tell if something sticks but I don't see 68mm going away anytime soon. The old brakes are starting to thin out and the selection of side pulls and the like are not what they once were, which could become an issue but we still have some good options there. Derailers are generally not a huge deal even if you have a frame that wants something weird.

Then we have the various headsets, some of those can be troublesome.

Single piece cranks and BBs are just about dead, as are cottered. We still have some options there but the quality is getting terrible and I suspect the only reason they are still made is because the machines still work but once they die that will be the end.

They’re somewhat less common indeed. A lot of manufacturers now like some proprietary variation of various pressfit standards.

You can still find bsa frames. Surly, as an example.

I don't know if I agree with the author on all their points, but your description of the article doesn't match what I read.

The author compares the estimated CO2 emissions in the manufacturing of several types of frames to consider their environmental impact, and points out other changes that can make it harder to repair bikes (such as by using custom components which the manufacturer could stop making replacement parts for with no notice).

We read the same thing. Problem he does far more that just the C02 emissions, he goes on and on throwing out false information that supports his old is good view.

> This article is all over the place…

…and a mishmash of studies.

Shared bikes get bike lanes computed into their carbon cost but private bikes don’t?

That’s just the most egregious example I saw but there are plenty more. Scratch that, using public transportation is more sustainable than riding a bicycle for the exact same trip, how does that math work out?

How many carbon units does it take to pedal around a heavier bike 30,000 kms?

And I’m a pretty big pro-bicycle transportation person.

Grotesque. We get it, it is never enough, and indeed, as long as you don't stay on the spot, you are indeed probably consuming something that has a CO2 footprint.

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