After Sunday's ire-inducing Face the Nation interview with John Boehner and the ire still smoldering with Will's post yesterday, I thought it'd be nice to post a link to an article in today's Times about Earl Blumenauer. It's repleat with such feel good quotes as this one from former Republican Rep. Sherwood Boehlert: "Bicycling unites people regardless of party affiliation". It's nice to think that Rep. Blumenauer is in the majority at this point while we're at the brink of a giant pork-barrel spending bill.
ed. note: Why do all these bike proponents and opponents have e's place in funny spots all over their last names?
2nd ed. note: I'm sure we're all also sad that Rep. Blumenauer didn't become Secretary of Transportation.
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Also, how come bike tires wear out after 3,000-5,000 miles while car tires go for 30,000-50,000? Bike tires are not 1/10 the price of car tires. This seems unfair.
5 comments:
Good question Brendan. Off the cuff hypotheses:
1. Economies of scale and a more competitive market for car tires?
2. Bicycle tires are more expensive because weight must be kept low?
3. The bicycle tire industry is price gouging and we need to get Chuck Schumer to waste our time and money on a probe of a different set of bad guys: Big Bicycle.
Probably 1&2.
Not that many get sold. There's like an 1/8" of rubber on your average road tire. Anything past a walmart tire is something of a luxury anyway, so price gouging isn't that inconceivable. Maybe I should start gluing rubber onto my tires as they square off.
e's indeed!
i like this guy and his bowtie stylee!
Boehner and Blumenauer should have a footdown face off for bicycle infrastructure spending!
sooo....about all that old rubber; should we save all of our old tires for some sort of public art project? some kind of guerilla art? ideas?
Must be the packaging--ever seen a car tire that came in a box?
And to be slightly more serious, the issue is probably contact patch vs. weight loading. The loading per square inch of rubber on a car is a lot less than on a bike--that's why we can ride slicks in the rain.
will- You don't burn them when they're worn out?
salem- I would assume it's a softer rubber compound than car tires, too. Cars get a lot of surface area on the ground to grip, so the rubber in contact with the ground doesn't need to deform as much. With our 2 sq inches of contact, we need as much deformation as possible.
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