.... I think Bikes are amazingly cool. I really do. I like mine. I was going to write about the latest addition to my stable, a medium framed aluminum MTB that I can use as a winter beater and not feel guilty about wrecking it. Then, I read one of my favorite bike blogs. The girl who writes it seems to feel that her twelve HUNDRED dollar bike is the perfect winter ride. I know that if I had a twelve hundred dollar bicycle it would winter in my living room! Heck, my FREE Peugeot PRN (not even a PX!) lives in the den. I can almost, almost wrap my head around a twelve hundered dollar three speed bike, but factor in that there are more old but pristine English Three Speed Bicycles hereabouts than there are in England any one of them can be had for two hundred bucks or less, that beautiful Princess Bike makes just a bit less sense. That bicycle was not what inspired me to write.
There is a well respected gent here in the Boston area that makes bicycles. He makes steel-tube, non-lugged (those are a thousand dollars extra) bikes that START at TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS and, based on the makers web-site and my years of reading-through marketing speak, I assume that those TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS will buy you a roadster-style single speed (perhaps three speed) bicycle. That's it. Yes, it is CUSTOM HAND MADE IN THE USA but that is a lot of money. Will it last forever? Probably. Do the bikes he makes typically speck out at FOURTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS MORE than the base model bike? According to the web site: yep. OK, just so we are clear about what we are talking about: a THREE AND A HALF THOUSAND DOLLAR peddle bike! I'm sure that it's very nice but it's not a cutting edge, top of the line racing road bike or even a motorcycle. It's a bike. a basic transportation bike at that. Oh, and I could buy another bike like the beater I got today every winter for the next 60 years (I'll be dead) for the price of the one, very, very nice bike.
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