Shek's Footprint

I remember growing up during the beginning of consumerism in India. My father owned a car that I used for errands and to transport myself to the commuter rail station. He used the company car to commute to work. Before I have been driving, I watched my friends get motorcycles and scooters. I have been drooling over motorcycles for as long as I can remember.

Mom and Dad, fearing traffic conditions of Bombay, never bought me one. After laboriously evaluating every production motorcycle in India through magazines and internet, I had zeroed in on the Enfield Bullet 350 as the object of my affection. I got to ride a 1971 Royal Enfield Bullet 350 on the closed streets of Godrej & Boyce manufacturing campus. Even though I ended up pushing the heavy kick-start bike back to its owner for a quarter mile, consumerism was taking over. I wanted to acquire motorcycles from everything like the Enfield 350 to the over powered liquid cooled V4 engined Yamaha V-Max. Frugal options like 100 cc to 150 cc commuter motorcycles legendary for their reliability, affordability and fuel efficiency were not on my radar.

Others: Get what you really want. You will grow tired of this in three months.

Me: But I don’t have $9000 for the Triumph America. I want to keep my operating costs low.

Others: Put it on your credit card. Ask for an extension on your limit. Get financing. (in other words, get deeper into debt like the rest of us)

Me: I get 90+ miles per gallon. Insurance costs only $181 annually for Liability and Comprehensive.

Others: You will grow out of it soon. Get what you really want.

Me: I just want to commute. Not really worried about speed.

Others: You’ll think your bike is too slow in 3 months.

I am in a position where only time can tell if I grow tired of this bike quickly. Till now, my top speed has been a modest 30 mph on slippery rainy conditions with slippery new tires. I plan to own this bike for two to three years till I can afford to own and maintain a bigger motorcycle without going into debt. I am not, however, excited about being pulled into the rat race of traffic and commute. Owning a motor vehicle is one step closer to being another brick in the wall.

I have updated some pictures of the Xtracycle that was loaded up for the Jazz festival. It carried two bike racks, two folding chairs, two REI camping tables, two sets of bike valet stationary and tools (the white plastic box and the orange bucket) and a cooler.

This was taken outside the City Hall valet station.

Find them here: http://www.sheksfootprint.com/my-bicycles

Walkscore.com is a fantastic way to find what shops and businesses you can comfortably walk to from your home. My apartment gets a whooping score of 20 out of 100. Needless to say, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Walkscore.com graded Jacksonville as the least walkable city in USA (news link). A bicycle effortlessly bridges the distance gap between walkable destinations to drivable ones.

So how is living car free in a part of town with an undesirable quality? Challenging would be my answer on an optimistic day. The grocery store is only a mile away. With a tiny bit of planning, grocery shopping is achieved in one trip on the weekend. The trusted Xtracycle is a fantastic grocery hauler. For that mid-week craving of Mexican food or to buy a critical grocery item I missed, I whip out the old single speed Dutch bike. Its front basket has plenty cargo capacity for a doggie bag or a case of Yuengling.

Zaxby’s, the only fried chicken restaurant worth visiting, is 5 miles away, mostly through deserted local roads. A trip there takes 30 minutes. I usually go alone as what I do with my fried chicken isn’t pretty. Riding back can be tad adventurous. Sitting on a hard saddle for half an hour after ingesting spicy buffalo sauce smothered chicken fingers isn’t ideal. The Town Center Mall with its departmental stores, pet food stores and Friday Farmer’s Market is within 3 miles away. In fact, I am hopping over there this evening for errands, all on a bike.

Dry cleaning seems challenging but easily solved if you ask the good Turkish people to fold your clothes into boxes. A trip to the movie theater dictates a longer route than one would take if driving but I chose to not ride on roads with a loosely imposed 45 mph speed limit. A trip to downtown is 12 miles long and a fairly pleasant one. A trip to the beach is 13 miles long and not so pleasant. Surprisingly, distance is not a challenging factor. I have gladly ridden 10 miles to a dentist, had her drill, scrape and clean my teeth and ridden back smiling, only this time with better teeth. On days with tighter schedules, I have hired a taxi cab.

So what is the challenging part, you ask? It is the people who meet you on the road through their protective shields of glass and metal. Living in a neighborhood with a walk score of 20 subjects you to people, who usually love their car-dependent life styles. They also have a patriotic attachment to things like big rims on their Kia and the roads they drive those low-profiles on. Most walkscore-20-dwellers will take the on-road-bicyclist-infringement without any patience. The bridged gap between walkable destinations and drivable ones is ugly.

Bajrang is up and running, smooth and nimble as ever. I brought it home Thursday night. On Friday, I bought a 40 Lb bag of dry dog food and a 12 can box of wet dog food, loaded it on Bajrang and we carried it as effortlessly as ever even with the load being unbalanced. I started off on a low gear but soon moved on to the normal gears and cruised home at 15 mph.

It feels like the free-radical was always a part of the bike and the bike was built with the free-radical in mind. The way it attaches itself to an existing bike is the most attractive feature of the xtracycle. You can go for longer rides and not feel any different than before the conversion. I rode it 10 miles to a friend’s house today and at times I forgot that I was riding an xtracycle. This is a genius invention and deserves a lot of credit.

I am Abhishek Mukherjee and on behalf of Bajrang, I approve this message.

By the way, I am looking for a name for my Dutch bike. Suggestions will be helpful. I do think it is a ‘she’!

The particularly long box marked Xtracycle sat in the leasing office of my apartment complex when I went to pick it up. With the box in the trunk of the car and my Specialized on a bike rack, I set off on six lanes of concrete clusterfuck to Downtown Jacksonville.

Brooklyn at Cycledelic-Fixity has voluntered to be the only reasonable bicycle shop owner that will put it together for a reasonable price. His cool shop is around 14 miles from my apartment in the historic Riverside area of Downtown. He came out of his shop to greet me as I had started to un-strap the bike rack. He said that he recognized my bike as I am a celebrity thanks to these guys: link.

I browsed around his shop a little drooled on the fixies in various stages of completion. Some day after the car is sold! I did pop in at Jax Ebikes (link) but it was closed, so I decided to head back home. I have never ridden my bike from Downtown to home. Since I may have to do it tomorrow, I decided to give the route a shot in the car. I went up the Acosta bridge and then on Philips all the way south to Baymeadows (see route: View Larger Map)

The section of Philips between San Marco and Emerson is pretty desolate and sad. It is one slip away form being a ghost town. I hope the road is as less crowded tomorrow as it was today. Maybe I should have Brooklyn install a Katana holder while he is at it, a custom from Hattori Hanzo none the less!

As for the name of this post, well, that is the new name of my xtracycle-attched-specialized. The god of strength in the Indian mythology is the name of this bike which is my strength to go car free. In today’s car-dependent world, this bike is my Plan B and my extra set of bollocks! Eat this Big Oil!