We can't do any of that because it is forward-thinking and doesn't involve clear-cutting a rainforest to make the stacks of paperwork that are otherwise required to fill out forms in triplicate, run everything through 17 different departments, and ensure an army of bereaucrats have something to do with their day.
Where is all this love for coaster brakes coming from?! They are, IMHO, one of the worst brakes ever. They have caused me numerous spills and scraped knees (due to the rear wheel locking up and skidding out from under me) and have done the same to my kids. There is virtually no control over them, and they don't allow you to shift your weight around when standing on the pedals to go around sharp corners or off-road. (Nevermind trying to shift your weight backwards when stopping quickly)
I have hydraulic disc brakes on my bike, and they are the greatest thing ever! Yeah, they require maintenance, but totally worth it.
As the family bike maintainer in Scandinavia, hub gears and coaster brakes are a godsend: Simple, cheap, and the only wear item to replace after a winter driving in salty sludge is a cheap chain -- and this takes half the time if there are no brake cables to detach.
This might be a Nordic thing, but being able to handle rear wheel lockups is a necessary skill when driving on winter roads. Once you overlook a section of black ice, not even the nicest hydraulic disc brakes will be gentle enough.
> Once you overlook a section of black ice, not even the nicest hydraulic disc brakes will be gentle enough.
My experience with black ice and bikes, is to unexpectedly fall flat on my face because the front wheel loses all grip. Without even getting to the point of trying to brake..
That's a lowside. Turn very gently if weather invites ice (or wet autumn leaves which are about as creepy as ice), never use front brakes.
Locking and then suddenly reacquiring grip on the rear wheel causes highsides on motorbikes, it's when you fly out of the seat and into the oncoming 18-wheeler. But it's quite hard to do on bicycles.
Fronts are useful when you have to decelerate rapidly while travelling in straight line, but in turns you just don't touch them ever.
edit: and on a decent motorbike/scooter you learn to not use brakes except in emergency, 95% of all deceleration is handled by just dropping the throttle.
Braking while turning is a risky business indeed. You typically want to use both brakes at once to reduce the chance of skidding, but if you do lose grip on either wheel nonetheless, you better have quick reflexes and release both brakes.
Sheldon Brown talked about this [0]:
> Skilled cyclists use the front brake alone probably 95% of the time, but there are instances when the rear brake is preferred: slippery surfaces, bumpy surfaces, front flat, broken [front brake]
> When leaning in a turn, traction is shared between braking and turning. Using both brakes together reduces the likelihood that one wheel or the other will skid and dump you. The steeper you lean, the less you can brake, so moderate your speed before a curve. When you are leaning deeply, you need to release the brakes entirely.
> Using both brakes together can cause "fishtailing." If the rear wheel skids while braking force is also being applied to the front, the rear of the bike will tend to swing past the front, since the front is applying a greater decelerating force than the rear. Once the rear tire starts to skid, it can move sideways as easily as forward.
I broke some ribs a couple of years ago on a downhill trail due to fishtailing. I should have dismounted, but I had not realized that the surface had turned from gritty to muddy.
What he names "fishtailing" is what is known as "highside" in motorbike circles. When the rear wheel loses grip, it and the entire frame except the front fork moves sideways. When the rear wheel inevitably retains grip, the resulting force violently flips the whole. On a bicycle this is rare and survivable, on a 200+kg mc not very much so.
In a turn you either apply energy if that is at all possible (usually), or just steer. It is recommended to accelerate inside a turn, because that way you can better control grip on the rear due to not accidentally engine-braking (not applicable to bicycles), and because thrust on the rear wheel helps the bike into the turn (applicable to bicycles).
Braking in a turn is a last-effort thing, taken only if you are certain that it'll lessen damage from otherwise imminent crash.
Biking is traction/grip control at all times. Traction is always shared between steering and brake/accel. You do not want less control in a turn, and loss of traction means loss of steering.
So you do not ever brake in a turn.
You decelerate on a straight before it. If a turn goes bad for whatever reason, that means that a) you made a mistake entering it at the speed you did, and b) now you choose what to crash into, and then execute the crash while hoping that your protection holds, which might include hard front brake and a steering input so that you lowside feet (and bike) first into the obstacle. But not before.
So the first lesson of bike-riding is being aware at all times of available traction.
95% use of fronts follows: you only use them on straights, and there they are much more efficient than rears because the whole mass of you and bike enhances front wheel traction. cf. the wheelie.
I would separate cycling from riding motorbikes entirely. They are different enough in terms of mass, speed, and especially acceleration.
As an example, pedaling while turning is often a bad idea because of the risk of pedal strikes, so acceleration inside a curve is often out of the question. And braking obviously reduces the grip available for turning, so braking while turning is only done in an emergency situation. But if you are going to brake while turning, using only the rear brake is suboptimal on a bicycle.
And you don't normally need to consciously countersteer on a push bike because of some combination of 1) lower speed and 2) much higher body mass relative to the bike, but countersteering is absolutely essential on a motorbike
Countersteering is important on a bicycle too when you need to quickly dodge something, for example. But yeah, the stakes around riding are so much higher on a motorbike.
On a bicycle if you can modulate the brakes so it never loses grip and you adjust your balance you can use both brakes in corners - I’ve been doing it most of my life, sometimes at speed and have done it on extremely steep slopes to avoid trees and obstacles. It’s possible without the rear wheel being on the ground at all, just never lock up or lose traction on the front wheel but that takes (sometimes painful) practise.
It doesn’t feel as good as decelerating before, and is most definitely not as safe as you clearly explained.
Well, IF. If you have enough skill you can a do stoppie in a turn, turn around and shoot off the way you came from. But this is bordering on stunt riding, not something to be relied on for day-to-day riding where you have to have enough margin to account for being not very focused, road having various low-friction crap that fell off a truck, crazy pedestrians, car drivers asleep etc.
> edit: and on a decent motorbike/scooter you learn to not use brakes except in emergency, 95% of all deceleration is handled by just dropping the throttle.
There are 2 benefits of actually using brakes (smartly as comments say) - leaving deceleration to the motor wears it down much faster, and repairs are more complex/expensive than changing pads/disc of brakes. Second reason is more important - folks behind you know whats happening, thats why brake lights are so strong. Don't expect 100% of the folks watching you closely 100% of the time, thats incorrect and dangerous expectation. On bike you are the most fragile participant of the traffic, its in your interest to signal your behavior to others as clearly as possible.
> leaving deceleration to the motor wears it down much faster
Not in the slightest, and I have no idea where this idea even came from. Whatever amount of stress the engine and rest of the drivetrain is under even at maximum engine braking, it experiences significantly more under any hard acceleration. Even semi truck jake brakes that actually reconfigure the engine's air flow to generate even more deceleration forces than would otherwise be possible max out at a fraction of the acceleration powers that same engine is capable of producing.
The only part of a standard automotive drivetrain that has significant directional differences in strength/wear would be the differential gears, but even that difference isn't going to matter in anything close to normal use. If you're doing clutch drops in reverse that's another matter.
The biggest risk to anything drivetrain-related from engine braking would be badly shifting a manual transmission and either damaging the transmission itself or choosing the wrong gear and over-revving the engine.
The brake light thing I fully agree with you though. I love engine braking when I'm doing performance driving as much as the next guy, but I won't do it in traffic for anything more than holding speed on a downhill for that reason. Significant deceleration in traffic should always be accompanied by brake lights.
I just adjust the brake handle light switch so that lights go up before there is any brake force applied, so that you can float it just by feel. Idk, this is what 90s japanese bikes did right from the factory. Then train that "drop throttle" is equivalent to "pull front brake to ready" and light comes on.
It's also a thing in the upper Midwest of the US. One trick is a studded winter tire in the front and a regular tire in back. The front tire keeps you in control without too much of a rolling resistance penalty. We have enough space here that we can afford to have dedicated bikes for winter riding. In the spring, I hose them down, spray on some light oil, and stow them away under a makeshift awning in the backyard.
In my experience hydraulic disc brakes require less maintenance than rim brakes.
Living on a hill (like I had to go up a ~150m 23% wall to get home, and go braking down it to go places) meant I had to spend frequently on rim brake shoes and, eventually, rims. The frequent rain and mud makes it to the rim brake shoes and diminish braking power if you don't keep them clean.
That doesn't happen with hydraulics - clean them with alcohol, bleed them once each year and you're set. I agree, they're the greatest thing ever.
> The frequent rain and mud makes it to the rim brake shoes and diminish braking power
I'll never forget when I was a kid (13 or so) going for a ride in the city during a downpour, slamming on the brakes because a pedestrian stepped out in front of me (mixed pedestrian/bike zone, no cars, we both assumed no-one else was dumb enough to be out), and ... nothing happened. Damn near shat my pants. Luckily the pedestrian saw me and jumped out of the way.
In retrospect that was too much downpour. Could literally see water spraying out my brakes. The hot cocoa after was fantastic tho
I've only once in my life worn out a set of rim brake pads
I wore out the thin, small disc brake pads on my gravel bike in the first ~2000 miles. It didn't even _occur_ to me that the sound I was hearing was my brake pads being completely gone on what was a basically-new bike.
> I've only once in my life worn out a set of rim brake pads
I wore one set out... But I bought a new old stock bike that was made the same year as me... the tubes were ok and the tires are fine, but the brakes wore through very quickly. Probably 200 miles or less.
Worse, I've worn out a rim when the sidewall basically delaminated after a few thousand kms and gritty conditions. After the UCI allowed disc brakes on gravel racers and manufacturers switched it made a great style of bike just about perfect
Rim brakes last ages. I used to ride 100 miles a week easily up and down hill on my mountain bike V-brakes for 3 or 4 years and had to change the pads like maybe twice.
Maintenance of cantilever and v-brakes is changing the pads every so often and putting some oil/grease on the cable/replacing the cables. None of this is that difficult.
I don't understand why people pretend that lining up some pads, and then adjusting the cable is super difficult
> The frequent rain and mud makes it to the rim brake shoes and diminish braking power if you don't keep them clean.
People greatly exaggerate how much of an issue this is. I could lock up the wheels even in the wet and muck with V-brakes. TBH, You have to ride to the conditions anyway.
Rim brakes are even worse when you're riding a recumbent with 20" (406) wheels. Nothing like being over an hour from home and having a rim give out after hitting a bad bump. I'm very grateful that my trike has drum brakes and my MTB has mechanical discs.
> Where is all this love for coaster brakes coming from?!
Childhood nostalgia? They are indeed terrible brakes from a riding perspective. But a) no cables or pads to mess up, b) beginner friendly and c) skidding. Great for kids riding around the neighborhood, the only real purpose.
The average bike in the Netherlands has coaster brakes.
It's also great for getting on tall bikes at a standstill, since you can lock the pedal and use it to step up, you do need to quickly start cycling though.
They can also serve an aesthetic purpose. For many years my daily rider was fixed, so no need for a rear brake. I got tired of riding fixed but also wanted to maintain the clean look of less cables and other visual clutter that comes with a brake - so a coaster seemed like a good enough option. I use my front (rim) break as my stopper and the coaster is just kind of a back-up or bad weather brake and for that purpose its worked great.
I'd love a disc up front, but as far as I know, the fork on a circa-1989 bike isn’t compatible with a front disc brake setup, making the upgrade challenging without welding.
I doubt they're actually that beginner friendly. My children switch between coaster brakes and hand-actuated rim brakes regularly (different sets of bikes in different locations) and they have preferred hand-actuated rim brakes since they started cycling.
They like it when the bike doesn't suddenly stop when they accidentally pedal a little backwards, something that happened particularly frequently when they were beginners.
They also like being able to prepare for the stop by taking their feet off the pedals and hovering them over the ground while they brake.
> They have caused me numerous spills and scraped knees (due to the rear wheel locking up and skidding out from under me) and have done the same to my kids.
Skill issue ;-) My first bike I learned to ride on was a BMX with coaster brakes that was part of the fun! Rip down the street then slam the pedal back to leave skid marks. And who didn't love slowing down a bit, then slamming the coaster brake while turning the handle bars to do a sick rear sideways skid. My next bike was also a BMX with a rotor and front/rear pegs. That lead to way more spills trying to do stunts on the pegs or spin the handle bars. Never got good at the stunts part.
Might have worked better for a smaller, lighter me but I would like to give coaster brakes a go again on a proper sized BMX.
At least on the bikes I had access to growing up, rim brakes were hard to adjust so you could easily lock up the wheels, but not drag when not applied... Especially if you had safety levers. V brakes hadn't been invented yet: we just had side pull or center pull.
Coaster brakes didn't tend to noticably drag and were easy to lock up.
When I got access to v-brakes, yeah you can lock those up no problem... Lots of fun. A little tricky to learn modulation with when you're coming from older style rim brakes though.
They're legally required in a lot of countries on small kids bikes and not easy to disable. I think the argument is that kids lack the strength to operate a hand brake effectively. Experts all seem to say that coaster brakes are terrible for safety and learning though.
> Where is all this love for coaster brakes coming from?!
Nowhere. They have pretty much disappeared from bikes for adults. Even the bicycle-shaped objects. The article mentions Shimano internal gear hubs with coaster brakes, but I think the popular versions of those hubs have a cable operated hub brake mechanism, not one that is operated by backward pedaling. The principle of operation may be similar, just not of activation.
In the USA, a federal law requires them on sidewalk bikes for small kids.
I believe that the coaster brake is better than any other brake that would be found on a kids' bike that retails for $80 or less. Can you imagine such a bike with disc brakes; what garbage they would be.
As the article says, coaster brakes should be combined with a front brake.
The front wheel provides more stopping power due to weight transfer to the front, and there should be redundant brakes in case one fails.
Maintenance? Most people don't know how to do bike maintenance and don't bother. Coaster brakes don't require maintenance, unless you count rebuild with new grease after 60 years. That's pretty amazing.
Brakes that require maintenance are dangerous in the hands of consumers who are not bike nerds, and who can't afford or don't bother to have their stuff serviced at the LBS.
My -favorite- setup for Discs, at least use to be, Avid BB7s with Avid Speed Dial levers, with Flak Jacket Housings.
That combination was super simple to 'dial in' (Hydraulic brakes tend to be a lot more inconsistent on 'feel' unless you are very persistent about bleeding and know how to use a disc tuning fork) and honestly had a lot less overall drag than I've experienced with most hydraulic discs. Replacing cables is way easier than re-doing hydraulic lines, also you don't have to worry as much about overheating janking up your fluid. Only drawback is, yes, make sure your cables are set up right and clamped down good.
But yes, Coaster brakes suck, especially since 'failure' means either rebuilding the wheel or outright replacing, because nope, not gonna do that sort of hub job.
We used to call coaster brakes "torpedo" when I was a kid and, yup, they're totally horrible.
If you've got coaster brakes I don't even know if you can learn to trackstand (you need to both slightly pedal forward and brake, and adjust by slightly pedaling backward): trackstand looks like you're idle but micro-adjustments are constantly happening.
Then I take it probably could wheelie a bicycle with coaster brakes but I fear it'd be hard: same things, you do micro-adjustements and they're not only done with the rear brake. I'm pretty sure I do pedal backward a bit when I do wheelies.
And when I readjust the position of my feet on a bicycle: I do it while backpedalling.
Last time I used a bike with coaster brakes I realized how dependent I became on being able to pedal backwards.
One of the earliest 'mountain biking' trails, before real mountain bikes existed, is called Repack because they were using Coaster brakes and you'd basically have to rebiuld/repack the coaster brake hub with grease after a run due to all the heat forcing the hubs to expel.
They were not impossible to control. It wasn't easy, but you quick got used to it and got enough. Partially that was learning to plan a head so you didn't need to much control. Or you learn to enjoy drifting the back wheels.
What a weird comment. A lot of people posting their use case for them, personally never fell from them, and in the end don't get that about maintaining hydraulic disc brakes. There is literally nothing to maintain except rarely just replacing the pads or the discs.
I believe there's a strong, slowly growing cultural backlash to interrelated concepts of planned obsolescence, design that assumes maintenance burden doesn't matter, durability and simplicity, and hatred for depreciation.
Coaster brakes are an example of a simpler design, that requires less maintenance, that are cheaper, that are poor in some environments like hills but are fine in flat areas.
Some would rather walk their bike down a hill but have a bike that never needs brake maintenance than to have better brakes that are a point of failure.
The same drive that pushes people to trying to build offgrid homes is slowly growing in spaces of material goods and home goods and such. Add environmentalism to it also.
I've been using bikes with only rear brakes for years and years as city bikes, and never had a braking problem.
On the other hand, I've borrowed many bikes with conventional rim brakes and invariably had (serious) braking issues because they would be badly adjusted.
I've had cars pull out in front of me, giving me less than a second to stop. A rear brake in that scenario would just skid, and I'd be in a world of hurt. For that matter anything but a pair of high-end brakes would have put me in serious jeopardy.
I agree rim brakes are terrible and typically very hard to set up properly. Also they're really bad in the rain, and especially when the rims can freeze.
Personally I'm a disc brake guy, either hydraulic or mechanical. My road bike's mechanical disc's have only needed an adjustment every few years, and the odd set of pads. I've been a mountain biker for decades, so a preference for disc brakes is understandable. A distant second to that would be a very nice set of V brakes, with the aforementioned problems.
I agree with you, coaster brakes suck. And losing your brakes if the chains drops is really serious, especially because it tends to happen when you need brakes the most.
Cable disc brakes have come a very long way and there are some decent models that require very little maintenance and work great.
Also for every skid you get on a coaster brake I'll raise you a nose Endo with the front disc brake!
> Also for every skid you get on a coaster brake I'll raise you a nose Endo with the front disc brake!
I can slam on my front disc brakes and not endo. Step 1: shift your weight all the way to the back. (hang off the back of the seat). Step 2: have front suspension.
Weight shift is mostly enough on its own, but front suspension eats up whatever endo tendency is left.
Easy solution; design a system with backdoors, implement it in some banking or other system the people at the top use, compromise said backdoor and release all the private info of those arguing for the backdoors.
Things will very quickly turn around.
(That, or narrow exceptions will be carved out for those in power.)
I love it. A couple notes:
- This is about 10x a real defrag speed - WAAAY too fast
- IIRC the "Data that will not be moved" was typically lumped at the beginning of the drive, not spread out all over.
I'm a stickler for accuracy too. The defragged blocks in the original Win9x program weren't solid blue - they had a hatch pattern texture to them. I remember it way too vividly.
Source: Watching a disk defrag was every millenial kids equivalent of going to the laundromat and watching laundry tumble.
here is another version i found when googling these things that seems somewhat similar, but with a few more "accurate" features. also, has the source available in a single file.
That's how virtually all industries work though. The computer you are typing on right now probably costs a different amount depending on which retailer you bought it from, even though it's the same manufacturer.
The fact that it's already common doesn't mean it shouldn't be illegal.
And I'm talking more specifically about a single entity selling to multiple customers. If two different retailers want to charge two different prices of course that's fine.
Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not here, but sitting next to each other in the same room isn't the same as spending time together.
I can sit with my butt touching someone else's on the subway for an hour, but would hardly call that "spending time together", or presume to know anything about them other than their smell.
It's a response to the GP, which makes the point that time in the field would still be spent with family. Time in the field with family is different from "spending time together" in the same sense that time on the computer adjacent to family is different from "spending time together". In both cases, your attention is on a task rather than on a person, you may be performing different tasks, and you're in close physical proximity but not necessarily doing the same thing.
Also I think many extroverts misunderstand introverts in this respect. My mom (introvert) and me (introvert) would often just read in the same room, and that was enough for us: I assure you, it felt very different than sitting with my butt against a complete stranger on the subway. My younger kids (introvert and ambivert) insist on digging their toes under my back while we sleep to make sure I haven't gone anywhere; they are not even conscious, but the proximity is important to them. This particular kid is an extrovert and has made about a dozen bids for my attention in the time between my previous comment and now (most of which have been reciprocated), but that is again the huge difference between sitting next to a family member and sitting next to a stranger on the subway. With family, that bond of trust is already there, and so you feel okay interrupting the silence to ask what your next move should be in Magic Sort, or why you can't download Township, or how do you turn the phone off silent mode, or showing me how he just beat his personal best score on 1 To 100, while you would never ask those of a stranger on the subway.
TBF, a solid 50% of regulation is probably government overreach. The problem is that it's intrinsically tangled with the other 50% (crossing various specializations/laws/departments) that isn't; you can't undo one without undoing both.
love the use of "solid" when both numbers (50, and the other 50) are pure unobtanium pulled out of an orifice.
"a lot" would be less rhetorically satisfying, but probably more appropriate.
I suspect the number is in fact, far less than 50%. In mining engineering, I'd be amazed if a significant majority of the rules don't stem from a significant accident or death, or forseeable need to avoid them. In medicine, the stakes are equally high. Building codes? It depends. The cost of tunnelling in NY isn't because of government compliance.
In building codes, sometimes there's a tragedy that causes government overreach. A death with big public support often causes regulation that "does something" even if the rule itself doesn't help or make sense.
15s is enough to book it to a close stairwell in some cases. I used to work in a dodgy building in the city. Any time one of those shake alerts hit, I would sprint to the stairwell and everyone would look at me funny. Jokes on them when the big one hits!
I agree and I'm glad we have the alerts. I'm just saying we may not get any warning and that's nobody's fault.
I'm also thankful that we have at least some seismic standards and have continued to increase them.
Look at how a country like Chile fares where they don't just have standards they enforce them. You can't bribe your way out of proper seismic engineering for the most part. Then look at Columbia which technically has NSR-10 but enforcement is... not exactly stringent.
The results are obvious. Where standards are lax or just as importantly enforcement is lax structures collapse and people die. Where the standards are good and taken seriously damage is much less severe.
Even here in San Francisco things are not all perfect. Sometimes things slip through the cracks like the Millennium Tower. Others are known: the city has a special seismic hardened firefighting pipe network with big metal rods that clamp the pipes together to prevent joints from coming apart. With special seawater pumps and even ship-based seawater hookups so if all else fails they can pump vast volumes of seawater into that network... yet that network has absolutely massive gaps that have been known about for decades and still exist but there are no plans to expand it whatsoever. You'd think the city would continuously invest in this system to slowly expand it over time even if just a bit. But nope.
> A new report shows Windows 11's built-in Weather app can consume more than 1 GB of RAM. By comparison, Apple's native Weather app on macOS uses roughly five times less memory under similar conditions.
Can we also be talking about how the Mac version uses 200MB apparently!? Why is a weather app using any more than like 10-20MB or so of RAM!? Load a couple icons into memory, maybe some background image or pattern, and a tiny bit of text. Why does it need to be so big!? (I'll cut it some slack while it's syncing/downloading, but for a weather app that should be like 30s once an hour max)
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